[QT!] Abraham Lincoln quote
[Slightly meta.]
“Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”
[Locked]
Lydecker’s logic (also probably his sale’s pitch):
You have a battalion. Train them in the usual fashion-from the time they’re eighteen on, no genetic modification. Give them the latest updates in warfare, train them on the latest battle styles groom them to be the perfect soldier. Your average, everyday human can have all the training in the world, and the odds still won’t be in his favor that he’ll make it out of a truly dangerous war zone alive. There are things he doesn’t have, emotions that get in the way, and well, he’s human. He’s not a weapon. He doesn’t have the instincts. Odds are more in favor half the battalion ending up dead than there is of all of them making it out alive, and those aren’t exactly comforting odds to be dealing with.
Not-so-great odds are the price of being a soldier. Or at least it used to be. Before there was Manticore.
Now say you have a group of maybe ten soldiers. They were genetically engineered to be at the top of their game. Splice a little big predator into their DNA, give them hyperfast reflexes, better balance, superspeed, whatever other superhuman potential your little heart desires. Have them raised in a military setting, trained from birth to be a soldier so that that’s all they ever know. Instead of being the human holding the weapon, they are the weapon. No messy emotions, no fear, no terror. Just calculations of how exactly they’re going to complete the objective and get out of there alive, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you turn a situation where fifty percent of your people end up dead to a situation where your people just slaughter everyone else.
Sounds great on paper. Sounds almost humanitarian. And the really sad thing is (or, at least, I feel it’s sad) that I get it. I understand his logic. The mission statement sounds absolutely fantastic on paper, as it was a way to cut down on the casualty of war and still get the same job done. As oppose to losing fifty lives? They lose two. Who wouldn’t want those kinds of odds?
Again. This is all on paper.
Then comes the nightmarish horrible reality that was my childhood, and that’s where what was appearing on paper wasn’t exactly measuring up to the finished results. We were children. We were taught how to handle a gun before we were even teenagers. And I’m not talking about the glock your father keeps in his closet, I mean a gun. Your standard military issue automatic weapon. We were raised to be soldiers from the get go.
We got no childhood, no innocence. No sense of good and evil beyond the lines of the military code we were supposed to follow. We were trained to stalk, hunt, and kill without thought of morality or remorse.
Maybe they made it easier by adding that extra kick to our DNA. Maybe by making us not entirely human it was easier not to see us as children. Maybe then it made it easier for them to drag us away and perform medical experiments on us, and treat us more like caged predators than actual human beings. And with that being the case, they really shouldn’t have been all that shocked that we couldn’t handle it when we were let lose on the world.
But apparently, we’re still just full of surprises.
573 words
“Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”
[Locked]
Lydecker’s logic (also probably his sale’s pitch):
You have a battalion. Train them in the usual fashion-from the time they’re eighteen on, no genetic modification. Give them the latest updates in warfare, train them on the latest battle styles groom them to be the perfect soldier. Your average, everyday human can have all the training in the world, and the odds still won’t be in his favor that he’ll make it out of a truly dangerous war zone alive. There are things he doesn’t have, emotions that get in the way, and well, he’s human. He’s not a weapon. He doesn’t have the instincts. Odds are more in favor half the battalion ending up dead than there is of all of them making it out alive, and those aren’t exactly comforting odds to be dealing with.
Not-so-great odds are the price of being a soldier. Or at least it used to be. Before there was Manticore.
Now say you have a group of maybe ten soldiers. They were genetically engineered to be at the top of their game. Splice a little big predator into their DNA, give them hyperfast reflexes, better balance, superspeed, whatever other superhuman potential your little heart desires. Have them raised in a military setting, trained from birth to be a soldier so that that’s all they ever know. Instead of being the human holding the weapon, they are the weapon. No messy emotions, no fear, no terror. Just calculations of how exactly they’re going to complete the objective and get out of there alive, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you turn a situation where fifty percent of your people end up dead to a situation where your people just slaughter everyone else.
Sounds great on paper. Sounds almost humanitarian. And the really sad thing is (or, at least, I feel it’s sad) that I get it. I understand his logic. The mission statement sounds absolutely fantastic on paper, as it was a way to cut down on the casualty of war and still get the same job done. As oppose to losing fifty lives? They lose two. Who wouldn’t want those kinds of odds?
Again. This is all on paper.
Then comes the nightmarish horrible reality that was my childhood, and that’s where what was appearing on paper wasn’t exactly measuring up to the finished results. We were children. We were taught how to handle a gun before we were even teenagers. And I’m not talking about the glock your father keeps in his closet, I mean a gun. Your standard military issue automatic weapon. We were raised to be soldiers from the get go.
We got no childhood, no innocence. No sense of good and evil beyond the lines of the military code we were supposed to follow. We were trained to stalk, hunt, and kill without thought of morality or remorse.
Maybe they made it easier by adding that extra kick to our DNA. Maybe by making us not entirely human it was easier not to see us as children. Maybe then it made it easier for them to drag us away and perform medical experiments on us, and treat us more like caged predators than actual human beings. And with that being the case, they really shouldn’t have been all that shocked that we couldn’t handle it when we were let lose on the world.
But apparently, we’re still just full of surprises.
573 words