Note from the Editor:
Extracted from the unit… right in time; after homecoming, and right before my battalion got ordered off to yet another middle-of-nowhere base to do some more intensive training, I got different orders; I’d be going off on my own (yet again; always alone), this time to train with Force Recon and other elites, doing things like night-firing, dynamic-entry, and other ‘flashier’, ‘higher-speed’ ‘evolutions’. Who knows why? It’s just how it happened. All I can tell you is that it was fun, relieving, and kept my more-developed and creative mind stable in just the right way.
I’d always wanted to leave that awful first unit. Later, I’d see news stories about how it was the most damning one in the entire military; worse missions and more suicides than most of the others combined. I guess I really had been toughest of the tough, sent to the hardest missions, and just left thinking otherwise for a while. In retrospect, this restores a little pride to my being.
Once partially separated from those hundreds of other Marines I’d done so much work with, I stayed separated, and continued on a trajectory of further separation and distinction like never before. Even when briefly back in the same barracks that old battalion kept using, I was never seen as one of them again, and was able to skate out of things like no one else. I felt like ‘an operator’ at times, but of course was just an oddity in their system, somehow having more respect and tasking flexibility now than most of our staff-NCOs and officers.
I wonder if any of them really knew how much I’d extracted from them. Based on the things they’ve said in reunions since, they still don’t seem to know. I think they never will.
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- by-mind interface: originally developed by the U.S. Air Force to decrease the time it took pilots to give a command to their aircraft, this technology has since been advanced to the point that all Inisfreeans are essentially a group-consciousness collective with all of the parts of their city and fleets
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‘The Machine’ Miniaturized Supercomputer: just like how the first computers were reduced in size from that of barns and warehouses to what can fit in the palm of our hands, so too have the supercomputers been, and now they are compact enough to be easily man-portable, too
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NPR is paraded around as if it’s “the people’s radio”, full of “real” personalities and firsthand accounts. It promotes nonsense, filth, and boldfaced lies. It caters to the lowest common denominator, as much as a slave to funding and ‘majority rule’ as all the rest.
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