Chapter 32 Part 1

File #564498 Sigma --Ministry of Defense

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The Shapers, their names be praised, have formulated a system by which we know conflict shall never happen. If everyone revered the Shapers and their vision as they should, we would never have to worry about matters such as being attacked. It is the rejection of the Shaper's system we must be vigilant concerning. Such people are dangerous. Such people are our enemies.

Our enemies do not approve of our way of life. They wish to destroy both us and the Shapers themselves. For this reason, we must consider carefully the proposition of having and maintaining a standing military.

In times past, we did not have the advantage of the holonosphere as we do today. It is possible to have military strategies never before dreamed of. One such thing that is now possible that never has been before is to make and produce a standing army of perfect soldiers.

It has been shown through history that normal flesh and blood officers are fallible. They become nervous; they make mistakes in judgment. It is true that there are some who seem to be naturally gifted. Of these people, we say that they are "good soldiers." Good soldiers are, it seems, often in short supply and hard to come by. In a normal flesh-and-blood army, good soldiers are a vast minority. Most of those who serve in the military are of average ability and therefore use.

We have considered a proposal of an entirely holographic force, but we find the prospect of relying totally on the holonosphere to be strategically unsound. As Inner Sanctum has proven, it is possible to disrupt the holonosphere relatively easily. We do not wish to have a single point of failure when it comes to our defenses and offenses.

Yet, it is undeniable that the holonosphere has certain advantages over normal people. For one thing, it is possible to make an army there that epitomizes the above "good soldier" for every member.

Chimeras are good at performing tasks that require flesh and blood, but they are not good in the sense that there is not enough granular control of their personalities and characteristics to form them into good soldiers. At best, chimeras might be good cannon fodder or a diversionary force. They do not make for a good fighting force.

We therefore face an impasse. It seems we cannot have all of what we want in a standing army without accepting much of what amounts to human frailty. However, if we choose to alter our thesis into something radical, we might be able to have our arrow strike the mark--we might be able to have an army of "good soldiers" after all.

If it were possible to take a holonospheric personality and impose it into flesh and blood form, we could have the best of both worlds. When we use the terms "Flesh and blood" we are of course speaking loosely. We have all seen the results of the experiments early on where humans who wished to live forever downloaded their consciousness into the holonosphere with the expectation of being able to impose it on a chimera later. Even the chimeras, void of consciousness as they are, violently resisted the imposition such that the outcome was always death. Promising studies on the substance Qulom have yet to be fully conducted, but it may offer some answers that we can now only imagine.