A Country Life

CHAPTER 11 - DARIEN

Major Darien Searle XXIV, commanding officer of Bravo Company, 3rd Expeditionary Taskforce (Virtual), was an unhappy man. He sat behind his collapsible desk inside a draughty tent, the door of which flapped noisily in the wind that blew constantly from the wrong direction. Despite reassurance from his technical staff that it would drop in strength and blow offshore any day now, Darien had no faith in the forecast. Bending over the papers spread out before him, he read again the words his predecessor had left him. Again, Darien cursed the crippling restrictions this virtual construction placed on the taskforce, before picking up where he left off and trying to piece together a coherent picture of the moments leading up to Major Darien Searle XXIII's death, and whatever had gone so terribly wrong to cause it. Unfortunately, the notes he had to refer to only lasted up until the point the frigate had departed. Anything else he might have deemed worthy of recording had been onboard the frigate when disaster had overtaken it and the seven other vessels in the squadron when they reached the fastness - assuming it had even got that far. No-one really knew.

The construction in which they were operating was not wholly one of their making. It had taken five years, real time, just to gain access to the processing substrate, and then another three to appropriate enough of the interface and memory handling units to inject low-point AI Pathfinders, whose task was to begin building the environment in which they would work. Unfortunately, their efforts had been resisted, subverted, corrupted and altered almost every step of the way, and now the war that should have lasted only one year subjective time, and ten days real, had so far lasted twenty years in the real, and countless generations subjective. When the first soldier mind-prints had been uploaded, instead of fighting an equivalent technology war in an environment of their choosing, they found themselves emerging from the insertion point wearing leather and chainmail, with hand-and-a-half swords, maces and shields their only weapons. Medieval was the highest developmental age the AIs had managed to reach with any measure of stability. From there on in, the new inhabitants of the virtual construct, referred to as v-con in technical parlance, had to force technological development with nothing but the tools and resources available to them in the v-con, and the knowledge and skills gained from many subjective years of trial and error.

It didn't help that one of the peculiarities of this particular v-con, enforced by the architecture of the substrate itself, was that once a mind-print was terminated, either through old age (each was limited to 50 years from time of activation) or death (physical injury was just as debilitating, painful or terminal in the v-con as in the real), then the re-activated mind-print started from the point of original upload. This meant each and every soldier mind-print that had been uploaded had to read through the notes, histories and technical works of their own predecessors and those of their peers to get back up to speed on where they were at the point they died. This task alone was now taking as much as three subjective years, before the subject even began to re-learn practical skills and gain enough experience to become competent at a crafts such as metalwork or shipbuilding. Never mind the mundane tasks that also required doing - the farming, clothes making, building and thousands of other tasks that needed time and effort to achieve, just to provide basic materials and provisions for the mind-prints inhabiting the v-con.

Of the thirty thousand soldier and support staff mind-prints that were uploaded at the start of operations, 95% were committed to support functions, and in what was known as 'developmental stage attainment'. It was fortunate that some of those mind-prints uploaded had been made up of historians and technical experts in case such a scenario was encountered, no matter how vanishingly a remote a possibility that was thought to be. Darien only wished there had been more than just the three hundred or so that Command deemed sufficient.

Right now, according to the information Darien was reading, the taskforce offensive had reached an equivalent technological level of the western civilization between 1820 and 1840. The most powerful weapons that the force could muster were muzzle loading cannon that could throw a metal ball weighing around 15kg almost half a mile with some degree of accuracy - explosive types too if you dared to try it - and muskets that worked by flintlock, although progression on percussion cap and rifled barrels had managed to pick up pace of late. That was another of the restrictions this v-con forced on them. You couldn't jump a technological level - the environment wouldn't let you. You had to demonstrate a particular level had been reached before the materials and skills necessary for their correct processing became available or worked. Not for the first time Darien considered how very much it felt like they were all playing some long drawn out virtual reality game, and that somewhere in the still inaccessible areas of the substrate processing material, the enemy v-con designer's own mind-prints were having a good laugh at their expense. It was a testament to their own v-con architects that they had managed to tease even the slightest concessions out of the substrate protection and defence systems. What made the whole thing really galling, was that his own side had built the damn hardware in the first place - they were on home territory!