atonal440

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@atonal440

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posts from @atonal440 tagged #scifi

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atonal440
@atonal440

🎶spacers have only got one ball🎶

The classic rude children's rhyme is only half right. Many of us don't have any balls (or ovaries) at all! Why leave your precious germline cells where they can be mutated into uselessness by the solar wind when you can store them safely in a lead freezer on the station? Out in the dark any number of disasters can befall you, and with asteroid populations at the lower end of long term viability, there's no room for a freak shuttle accident to cut into the available gene pool.

You only have to save one, but plenty of people just get both removed when they come of age and are ready for outside work; the vagaries of an endocrine system are another uncontrolled variable no one wants. Hormones are easy enough for any ship to make.

atonal440
@atonal440

Kill Chain

Since the New Delhi Accords prohibit fully autonomous weapons systems, combat dolls are, technically speaking, human. Don't try telling one that, though, they don't like it. They just want to be called by their rank and serial number.

In the training manuals it says that during their rotations out of combat you should use their real name and the pronouns they used before they joined the unit. It never sticks, though. They just look right through you and say “and who is that, sir?”

A mess hall full of dolls who won’t even acknowledge that you exist gets to you pretty quickly: they may not be human but you are. This is what they’re like even when they’re not pumped full of neoamphatamines and hooked into Battlespace Awareness; we don’t stand a chance.

They were supposed to disconnect from all that: one month up on the tibetan frontlines fighting the PLA drone swarms, networked to every air and space asset we have, one month down here to rest and debrief and reindividualize.

They dont, though. The biting cold, and the blue-black sky, and seeing with the compound eye of hundreds of SBIRS sats down to the tiny warmth of your squad in the eternal snow… it does something to you. You don't feel comfortable with just two eyes anymore.

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