Chapter 32 Part 2
What is immediately possible, however, is to make a standing army of cyborgs. The part of these units that is half human will be generated by genetic engineering, such as the chimeras. The part of these units which are machines will be installed into these units and will house critical elements from the holonosphere that will bend these beings into the very definition of "good soldiers". Many expenses associated with a standing army will be nullified. For one, none of these units will ever need to train as they will already be trained from their birth. For two, none of them will need to retire or need medical help after a conflict because it will be possible to simply deactivate the machine part of them and hence "retire" them.
As a collective, they should naturally cohere, and individually they should fight as well as if they were a unit. There should be no mistakes in orders, and their perception of the battlefield will be enhanced by holonospheric technology. Their loyalty will be without question. In essence, they will be the perfect servants of the Shapers.
We realize that there may be some difficulties at first with overriding the human parts of these cyborgs such that it does not interfere. For example, we can imagine scenarios where the moral part of a person disobeys a direct order. It will be imperative then that this force spend the necessary time on genetic engineering and programming so the resulting soldier is not hindered by such things. The human part is to be merely the "encasing" for the machine part.
Why not go fully mechanical? For the same reason that we opted against going fully holonosphereic. Even though it is possible to make mechanical things impervious to some kinds of attack, it is impossible to make them impervious to all kinds of attack. If, by chance, one of our enemies finds a way to bypass and therefore render useless our mechanical army, we would be faced with another single point of failure. If, on the other hand, the cyborg part of our army were completely and totally obliterated, we would still have the human part operational. It would be true that the human part would likely be barely operational compared to the cyborg solution in its entirety, but so long as what is left is better, on average, than a normal human soldier, the net gain is still immense.
Of course, as we cited above, in the event of retirement, we will have to be sure we also shut down the human side. We do not think this is an issue considering that the chimeras have tattoos that do something like what we have in mind.
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