The Five

By Matthew Cooper

Military android Masahiro Saito is reawakened for a mission of the utmost importance to the Japanese Imperial Army. In the devastation of fierce nuclear war, his allegiances will be tested, and the survival of mankind hangs in the balance. "The Five" is a novella packed with action and philosophy inspired by the futuristic technologies of Artificial Intelligence and the political factions that threaten to tear the world apart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Matthew Cooper
• Release date: Apr 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463055724

Matthew Cooper

Matthew Cooper is an author, editor, and publisher. He writes both gay and straight erotica and edits anthologies. He lives in Florida.

Book preview

The Five

by

Matthew Cooper

Copyright © Matthew Cooper 2015

All Rights Reserved

Second Edition 2019

Chapter One

一

It’s like being born again. Like waking from a half-forgotten dream. I open my eyes. Lenses adjust to the near total dark of the room. Text jerks upwards on a small screen. Line after line of boot code, status reports, data logs. Wires trail across the table. Tendril-like cables pulse with data. Backup files transfer from Central Command. Noise like a thousand bees in a jar. Audio drivers online. Adjust sensitivity. The low hum of CPU fans. Crimson clouds. Memory restore in progress. Motor-functions operative. The screech of fighter jets overhead. Dim reflections from the ceaseless screed of text. Command-lines, updates, error reports, scrolling past unread.

A plastic figure enters. A technician. Moulded-polymer prosthetics factory green with black decals across the chest. Halogen lamps burst to white life. Photo-sensitive lenses darken to compensate. Voice drivers up.

‘How long?’ The sound is a low static crackle. ‘How long?’ I repeat. Sharper. Better.

‘4 days,’ replies the technician. His eyes are fixed on the monitor. Orange flames, bloodied faces, the sound of screaming. The audio distorts. I watch my dying moments flash before my eyes. Again. Updates mass before me, sharp and clear beyond the transparent visor. I watch as hazy footage of the battle reels backwards in peripheral. Memories are reinstated one by one. 4 days. A roar of noise and flame over the shouted orders. The street vanishes in a flash of light. 4 days. So soon.

‘We’re almost done here,’ says the robot technician. ‘Just running the final diagnostics. These new units are much more robust than the old models.’

Nothing had been recovered from the battlefield. Once they had verified the destruction of the hardware, they had brought up my backup files from Central Command and re-assigned them. Re-assignment. A sort of re-birth. This was immortality. This was forever. The text on the screen stops scrolling. The technician passes in front of me. Lenses shift out of and then into focus again.

‘What’s the mission?’ I ask. Only four days out and I was being reassigned already.

‘You ship out tomorrow,’ says the technician. ‘That’s all I know.’ He examines the pristine carbon-fibre shell as I tilt my head to look at him.

In the mirror I can see my new carbon-fibre exoskeleton reflected, cables trailing from the chest; intelligence charging into the heart of the machine. The wires twine around titanium bones, sending packets of data to sensors at the extremities of metal limbs. I search through the memory as it is uploaded. Dated files of neural records, battlefield reports, and maintenance readouts. All uncorrupted files are labelled chronologically. Duplicates are stored at Central Command in vast data fields. Everything is recorded. Everything is government property.

Saito, Masahiro. Born: Oita. K.I.A.. The details of my birth, my life and death are compiled in a neat file. I have no more than a vague recollection of the events before my reassignment. Human memories can only be partially digitally reconstructed. This expressionistic rendering of their former lives is the closest thing androids experience to the fragile memories of humans. There is a black and white photo attached to the records. Sharp eyes, broad nose, lightly furrowed brow, dark hair cut short. This man is almost a stranger to me now. This face that must have greeted me each morning. This face that others had once recognized as Masahiro Saito. This man whose dreams and memories I now share.

The neuro-processor is bracketed into the breast of the new frame. The internal circuitry is manufactured on the mainland, on the outskirts of Seoul; the shells, right here in Japan. Bio-engineered to look human, designed in the image of their creators. If it looks human and sounds human it’s Takashima Corp. - that's how the slogan ran. The only difference being that the brain sits in a metal case inside the chest, where the heart of a human would be. Like the black box in an aircraft. These are rarely recovered. Status reports and visual recordings are stored at Central Command and backed up hourly. Everything is government property. A central nervous system of wires and diodes connects the cerebral cortex to the peripherals. Sensory input creates a digital map of the world outside, allowing us to distinguish real from illusory.

Data streams through. Directives from command. Boot messages. The news feed starts up, cycling through reports from the front-lines. I don’t know how but I know I will find it somewhere. The image is a small file. Lost amongst reams of heavily redacted battlefield reports. Over-exposed. Wallpaper of neon-green butterflies on azure blue. A girl is smiling in the picture. Her eternal grin a cold record of forgotten joy. Long hair. Fading peroxide orange on raven black. Clear complexion. Young. Early Twenties. Across the picture is scrawled a heart in pink iridescent glitter. There is a young man beside her. A couple. His features are those of Masahiro Saito. Human. Me. I look down at two prosthetic hands, flexing the fingers a few times, turning them over. They have shaved several milliseconds off the processing speed for basic motor functions. I close the photo and file it away.

‘Done,’ says the technician, reaching over to unplug the largest of the cables. He slides the plate across the exposed sockets and solders it shut.

I step towards the mirror. I place a hand on the reflective surface. I am looking at myself. I am looking at a carbon-fibre shell through precision manufactured lenses. The digital feedback is transferred to the neural cortex. All the same, I know I am looking at myself. A series of processors feed this image back to the unit and comprehend it. In the same way that optic nerves connect eyes to brain. Across the breast,