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."

I tuned out the humming of engines, rattling of hooks, shaking of cargo nets, and ignored the bounce that accompanied each bump of turbulence. I breathed in, and breathed out, the pure oxygen being pumped into my lungs through the mask I held to my face.

It was no wonder the military wanted to replace us. There we all sat, 25 minutes into our pre-breathing exercises in a plane purposefully outfitted for us. How much cheaper would it have been if the Department of Defense didn't have to worry about hypoxia? How much more efficient would I be if the tools I needed were embedded inside my body rather than being strapped on top of it?

The idea of getting replaced by technology was bothering me more than I'd realized. I hadn't spent much time thinking about the repercussions; just trying to get through the red tape of it all. Reality started to set in during those quiet moments - the most dangerous kind. Luckily, the alarm sounded, which meant we were approaching our drop zone. Standing on the edge of an open hatch 6 miles in the sky was enough to make my stomach churn without the existential crisis.

It was cold. It was loud. Everything was dark. But just like the intrusive thoughts, fear didn't have time to take root, either, because we were given the signal to jump...so we did.

And there's nothing that'll clear your head faster than the sweet release of freefall.

It reminded me of how small and insignificant I was quicker than most things I did in my free time. They call it a HALO jump - high altitude, low opening, and anything but holy - like lit matches being dropped into tanks of gasoline. The Swift, Silent, and Deadly. Second to None.

We were far from angels, but we fell like them.

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

Rays of a hidden sun bent on the horizon, blazing behind our dark orb planet and illuminating the 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 that high, in the border between inner space and the stars. But there we were...at the mercy of technology, because of technology. Was that the spin tactic? Get everyone hooked on tech so no one could survive without it, and force us to trust it because of that dependency? It'd become too easy to keep the truth under lock and key because the public deemed it irrelevant, blindly signing terms of conditions so long as it meant feeding that addiction. Guess my service contract wasn't too different.

But the hard truth was, we'd been at the mercy of technology long before androids showed up; 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 thousand feet. I didn't trust technology at all, much less the stupid "experimental" thing on my wrist tasked with making sure I didn't end up a splattered shit stain in the middle of Afghanistan. I requested to keep the relic when the requisition came through. So I checked it again, and again, and again.