Machine Learning (Captain Allen and DPD SWAT POV)

Arabian Nights

"Without me, my rifle is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will..."

Breathe in...breathe out. Drown out the humming of the engines, the rattling of the hooks, the shaking of the cargo nets, the bounce of the cabin with each bump of turbulence.

Breathe in...breathe out...the 100% pure oxygen being pumped into my lungs through the mask I held to my face.

It's no wonder the military wanted to replace us. There we all sat, 25 minutes into our pre-breathing exercise in a plane, with a cabin purposefully outfitted to house us. How much cheaper would it be if they didn't have to worry about hypoxia after every jump? How much more efficient would I be if the tools I needed were embedded in my body instead of being strapped to it? How much equipment could they save without the need for extra hoses, oxygen masks, and visors?

The prospect of getting replaced by technology was bothering me more than I gave it credit for. I hadn't spent much time thinking about the repercussions, but more so trying to get through the red tape. When the reality started to settle, things caught up to me no matter how far I tried to get away from them. Quiet time was dangerous. Luckily, the alarm sounded, which meant we were approaching our drop zone. Not much time for quiet after all.

Standing on the edge of an open hatch 6 miles in the sky is enough to make your stomach turn upside down.

It was cold. It was loud. Everything was dark. But fear didn't have time to settle, either, because we were given the signal to jump...so we did.

The sweet release of free fall...there's nothing quite like it.

It will remind you how small and insignificant you are quicker than most things you do in your free time. They call it a HALO jump. An abbreviation...an ironic one.

When we jump, we are the matches dropped into tanks of gasoline. The Swift, Silent, and Deadly. Second to None.

We were far from angels.

As I made my descent from our metal-bird-Heaven, and fell from 30,000 feet under night's cover into enemy territory, I headed into my personal Hell. The absence of artificial lighting had a ghastly effect of blending itself in with the dark-blue of the sky. The only thing reminding me I was still in the air was gravity itself.

At 30,000 feet everything looked small. Rays of a hidden sun burned on the horizon, blazing behind our dark orb planet and illuminating clouds underneath us. Wind slipped through every crack on my gear, battering my visor and mask. I was the puppet, and atmospheric physics were holding the strings. We were subjected to the Earth's pull while having to track where we were landing, how fast we were going, and far we'd dropped.

Humans weren't meant to be this high, in this border between inner space and the stars. But here we were...at the mercy of technology, because of technology. Was that the spin? The tactic? Get everyone hooked on it so that they can't survive without it, and force trust because of that? Keep the truth under lock and key because its irrelevant to the public, and they'll sign those terms of conditions anyway because they can't live without it. At that moment, I would've never imagined my lectures with Tali involving getting the latest and greatest iPhone every year would be applicable to robots replacing men.

Truth was, we'd been at the mercy of technology for a long time, and it took me diving off a plane to realize it. Whether it was the parachute on my back, or the two altimeters I had. One old and considered irrelevant, and one new that was still in the "test phase." It beeped in my helmet every so many thousand feet. I didn't trust it, though. I didn't trust technology itself much less something tasked with making sure I didn't end up a splattered shit stain in the middle of Afghanistan. I requested to keep the relic strapped to my wrist when requisition came through. So I checked it again, and again, and again.