Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

We Marines of today are not your soft youth of so long ago, who charged from seas to land at the beginning of the Age of War, but technology incarnate. And today I woke up and had a revelation. I don't have a body. I do, in that I control it. But it's not the one I was born with.

I had always known this before, but I awoke from a dream that made it all too clear, that shattered the conditioning they give you when they put you back together, that keeps you sane and... useful.

Sure, I can do things that are physically impossible for most people. I can see like a cat in the dark, and I can crush a brick to powder in my hands, but I miss the body that was mine. And it brought me back. Most of my kind... we can remember what it was like to truly live, but only as a dull and faded intellectual memory, as though we were looking at dusty and crumbling photographs. But now, I remember.

I had a family, and a career. I had served my ten years in uniform with distinction, I had found a job that paid me well to do technical research I enjoyed, I had married a smart and sweet-hearted woman; we had been unable to conceive, and so we adopted two children. And I don't know why, but something seemed terribly and irreparably wrong. I knew then that I would never be happy, though I truly was unable to see that my life was better than many others'. And so, when in the fullness of time, I had returned to my paid job and my family and my reservist number, life was good but unsatisfying until the Day. My home was immolated, along with hundreds of thousands of others. I survived, by a freak accident, badly burned and with broken bones, unaware of what had happened or where I was. When they told me in the field hospital, and they said my arm was gone, it was sad but merely another trial; this too would pass. And they told me of my family, that they were... gone. I took it remarkably calmly for someone who had lost everything worthwhile, but it was good old-fashioned military discipline that kept me moving. Through recovery, physical therapy, retraining, I knew there was no point, but I did things anyway.

And then they released me, and I found a place to stay and work, and there was nothing for it but to escape. I did what any military man would do: I placed an ornamental but functional shotgun (for all weapons must be functional, says the law) over my heart, and I pulled the trigger. Even now, when I write it some twelve years later, the control lines try to stop me. I cannot die without permission.

They told me when I woke up in Unit 23 that the gun had exploded, that my body was ruined, but I was more than half insane then; I had watched myself die, and then to live again was just too much. It didn't mean anything. But over time, they cut away my body piece by piece, and replaced the pieces. That, too, is the law. The technology is fairly new; but even if the body is destroyed, if the mind can be saved, why let it be wasted? And so it was.

All that's me, in this body, is a lump of cauterised synapses in its head. You're reconditioned, and as I mentioned earlier, control lines are wired into your brain that drive or inhibit your behavior according to their programming. They run off body heat. And the body is synthetic flesh and bone, aerated and bathed from the inside by synthetic blood, controlled by silver-lined synthetic nerves, all grown to specs in a tank. The only thing that's real is the brain - me - and even that is constrained in freedom.

And so, today, I am Josef again, and no longer 23A3-422056. But I am still a Marine.