This was what the doctor had been driving at. “Consciousness,” “I,” “self”—all became a matter of semantics. How many modules needed to be alive before you could describe someone as being the person you knew and loved? How many modules needed to be functioning before you could decide whether they were “conscious”? Society had yet to come up with satisfactory answers.
Take my mother. Was enough of her “alive” in a meaningful sense that I could still call her my mother?
That was the judgment call that I was being asked to make. How on earth was I supposed to give an answer?
So we had our emotions masked along with our senses.
BEAR was about anesthetizing part of yourself. Deliberately diluting your own essence. The domain of conscience was essentially an emotional function of the brain, not a logical one.
“Emotional judgments play a large role in the act of eliminating your battlefield targets,” the counselor said. The screen in front of me was displaying an array of the world’s horrors: natural catastrophes, towns turned into battlefields, hordes of starving children.
“For example, the act of rescuing bloodied victims with your own hands has an overwhelmingly larger impact on your conscience and emotion modules than a more abstract act, such as sending a donation to hurricane victims. It’s stating the obvious to say that people respond more emotionally to what is happening right in front of their eyes. In contrast, the act of donation is essentially a rational one. But even then, emotion is ultimately responsible for many so-called rational decisions, because emotions form the basis of human value judgments. Most logic is really no more than a posteriori rationalization.”
“So you’re saying that when I kill children on the battlefield it’s not the hammer of cold logic but rather my own emotions that are blasting their brains out?” I decided to try and push the counselor’s arguments through to their violent conclusion.
The counselor just nodded as if this were the most natural question in the world. “Emotion has the ability to shortcut logic and deliver a swift, accurate response to stimuli. Even though people are reluctant to admit it, conscience can be just as powerful a driving force as the intent to kill. It might be fashionable to take the view that humans are fundamentally weak and prone to violence. But the fact is that even soldiers such as yourself are in thrall to the driving—and potentially limiting—force of conscience. It doesn’t sit easily alongside your watchwords of ruthlessness and thoroughness. That’s why it becomes imperative to use the technology at our disposal to temporarily subdue this powerful force, particularly with people such as us who were raised in America with its strong moral values. It goes against the grain, but our lives depend on it.”
“So we’re being brainwashed, basically,” I said.
Again the counselor had an answer—well, this was a question he was used to answering, I was sure. His answer began with a nod. “I can see why you think that, but there’s an important difference. With medicines, they say the poison is in the dose, don’t they? You don’t even need to overdose as such in order to abuse medications. Think of people who use tranquilizers as recreational drugs.”
“So it’s not brainwashing because we’re voluntarily submitting to it?”
“Exactly.”
When you entered a battlefield, you needed to be able to kill people with a light heart. If counseling helped in that then surely it was okay? If that was your intention then it should be fine? Were there no ethical problems about subjugating yourself to a process that suppressed your ethical compunctions, even temporarily? I just didn’t know anymore.
There were actually plenty of my teammates who saw the whole counseling process as a farce from the get-go. What right did scientists have to appropriate tactical decision-making from officers who had earned their stripes the hard way? Soldiers signed up for Special Forces with eyes wide open. Why would they need all this girly counseling to firm up their resolve? If they weren’t prepared for what was ahead, they shouldn’t have signed up in the first place. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
The flip side of the coin was, of course, that Forces provided these counselors for us at great expense because they valued us as soldiers. Or rather they had to value us—public opinion in an advanced capitalist society such as ours had, in the space of a single generation, grown astonishingly intolerant of the idea of any of “our troops” being left to die in foreign climes. It was as if the general public had forgotten the simple fact that, in war, people tend to die. The result of this was that in our military system a soldier became a valuable—and expensive—commodity. Salary, training, the latest technology. Which in turn meant that no standing army could afford to support too many soldiers. So an industry sprang up trying to supply artificial substitutes for human fighters. Most such robotic entities ended up on an ever-growing scrap heap, but a small handful of inventions were granted the honor of a place on the battlefield alongside us human soldiers so that they could help us kill other human soldiers.
Ironically though, the further the field of human neuroscience was explored, the fewer resources there were available for research into artificial intelligence, which as a discipline had become pauperized. Once scientists had established that strong AI—computers that could replicate the more complex functions of the brain—and relative redundancy in particular were not on the horizon, interest in the field of AI for military purposes had waned. There were still simply too many roles on the battlefield that could only be carried out by humans.
Given the ever-escalating cost of training and maintaining soldiers to full combat effectiveness, governments were understandably loath to lose their prime military workforce to the civilian companies that sought to hire us away, so they began taking measures to prevent a general hemorrhage. One by one, countries enacted “gardening leave” legislation preventing discharged soldiers from joining PMCs before a fixed period of time had passed since their retirement. This, in turn, made it harder for the PMCs to cherry-pick candidates speculatively, so the stock of well-qualified mercenaries had soared.
As a result, no matter where you were in the developed world, a trained soldier was not something that you could afford to have break down on you. Maintenance became a top priority. America had already had some experience of mental health care for its troops, stretching back to the previous century. Veterans of the Vietnam War and the Gulf Wars would return home and be troubled by recurring nightmares. Post-traumatic stress disorder began to eat away at the heart of America’s military, and something needed to be done about it. A cure was needed.