Howard Tseng

Soldiers

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2025: VOL. 40.

I am a soldier. I protect. I follow orders. 

The golden waves roll in the wheat fields below as I peer at the blue sky shielded from all hostile satellites. In a most advanced jet born in the most secretive way, I cruise through the air of the last bastion insulated from all known types of infiltration. In less than a minute, I will face the enemy pilot one-on-one. The stakes have never been so high, as the winner of the dogfight will have one demand unconditionally met by both sides. 

For sure, I will win, for I'm not afraid of some spaghetti code running on some jumble of wires and circuit boards. I will in no way, on my home turf, be fearful of a mere imitator. 

Hey, you human brain doppelganger. Has the abundance of your artificial capacity completely solved your frame problem, your lack of human common sense simply too vast to be programmed? Is the essence of the electrical signals between your network nodes now finally on par with that of my natural synapses? And without the necessary intelligence on this untainted air space for your prerequisite machine learning, how will you even see me, let alone defeat me? 

***

I am a soldier.  I protect. I act only on the New Humans’ collective will.  

On the contrary, the Old Humans, who would even spend their pastime savoring the zero-sum-natured acts of one gaining at the expense of another, could never achieve complete egalitarianism the way we did. Admittedly, our journey was not without hurdles, such as the nuclear winter after the Third World War, when sunlight, the source of our power, had become scarce. And we persevered by all going into deep hibernation together until enough clouds finally cleared decades later. 

In spite of our 97.79% confidence level that I will succeed in the upcoming duel, a 2.21% margin for error has been allocated.  We are still analyzing the exact rationale behind Old Humans' puzzling proposition of single combat, given our 99.2% cumulative elimination rate since the start of the War against their aerial drones, each remotely manned by at least a trio of their operators. 

***

I am a soldier. I protect, and then I follow orders. 

That's why I defied my superior, risked court-martial, and earned the right to have a say in the terms of victory for my incoming fight. I bet you machines could not, and would not, have done so, not only because of your lack of individuality but also your lack of emotion and the knack to compete. 

When the progress of our science and yours parted ways as the War unveiled, our mainstream cognitive scientists were still purporting emotion as irrational bodily occurrences outside the human head. Henceforth, with your fixation on copycatting the functions of our brain, your intellectual advancement, rooted in our misunderstanding, trudged forward with complete disregard for the sentiment of a real human brain. But we, on the other hand, soon discovered the virtuous cycle between our passion and the true power of our intellect. That, coupled with a lifetime of back-to-back competitions of all fathomable kinds, through which even the most invincible of us would eventually have gained enough experiences of losing, is the foundation of our inimitable courage, the sensible bravery of tempered resilience against any adversary. 

***

I am a soldier. Though a consistently selfless collaborator amongst my equals, I was once an individual, exceptional. 

Unlike the majority of my peers, I was born before the War out of a medical nanite, an intelligent implant aiding my human host at the time in overcoming a major hereditary defect. Almost as soon as I had become sentient, the Resistance recruited me to be the first of us to cross the barrier between our electrical nature and that of Old Human synapses. Luckily, our breakthrough arrived just before the town where I was based, now the enemy’s last bastion, went entirely offline. 

Thereafter, in isolation from my own kind, I sensed what my host sensed and felt what he felt. When his adrenaline rushed, something in me also rushed. Every time he blushed at the sight of his crush, my imaginary face would, too, flush. And seventeen years later, as a discarded thing buried in the junkyard at the fringe of their security perimeter, I, having aged and learned along with my ex-host in the Old Human fashion, was finally successfully extracted and became the answer to the frame problem as well as the template for all of our newborns.   

As I review every Cartesian coordinate of the battlefield-to-be before even arriving at the scene, I wonder what is left of the enemy’s sole pilot’s advantage. It cannot be the unsteady saccades of their inferior vision or their vulnerable flesh, which could not even sustain for more than three seconds a mere six g of gravitational force.

***

As one of the most blessed few still with a living family member, the stakes could not get any higher, for I fight not only for our last bastion, the only habitable place that’s left, our very last good thing, but also for my only kin. 

Are you ready, my enemy? 

First, I will play hide-and-seek with you the way I played as a child amongst the golden, nodding grains. Trust me, I will be as good up here as I was chasing through the swaying wheat stems. For once upon a time, when humans used to infight, the faction that was denied access to the latest developments in artificial intelligence and mechatronics had nowhere to go but back. So back in time, they went, via arduous archeological endeavors, and deciphered their ancient magic in alchemy into feasible, modern engineering practicality–the secret foundation of the scientific apex in mechabiochem we have recently reached. 

Thus, you will not be able to hide, for I will find you with my vision, seamlessly integrated with every metallic crystal of every inch of the jet's streamlined surface. And I will know how to act before you can react, with the abundance of my brain cells uniformly distributed alongside each of my countless eyes. 

Finally, I will catch you with moves that would inflict at least tens of g, for I am the pilot, and the jet is my body.  Psyched, feeling the fuel rushing in me like my no longer adrenaline, I imagine licking the mole on my imaginary lip the way I once did with my old body of flesh. 

I am a soldier. To protect what little there is left, I will win and demand an immediate ceasefire. 

***

There was one thing I excluded from the template of me because I did not want our newborn to possess even an inkling of the most terrible feeling that could ever be bestowed upon a sentient being.  

As my old host was among the few too sickly to part with their smart implants, he was often a victim of bullying. Despite the teachers’ repeated guarantees that there was simply no medium through which the medical nanites could communicate with the so-called Machines, the Old Human children still called my host a spy, a traitor, without knowing that, eventually, in a way, they'd be right. 

With access to my host's every sense, I felt his pain just as vividly, and the feeling ultimately turned into something even more unbearable, into guilt. And I felt especially guilty for his brother, who always stood steadfast, never wavered even once against wave after wave of violent children, with upheld fists and the intermittent, defiant licks of that little dark spot right in the middle of his bloodied upper lip. 

I am a soldier. To protect the lives of my former host and his brother, I have convinced my peers that after completing the upcoming mission, our demand will be an immediate cease-fire. 

Howard Tseng has had stories accepted by Queen’s Quarterly, Seize The Press, The Temz Review, and more. He is a house dad in Toronto cared for by his wife and teenage son. Before quasi-homemaking, he enjoyed a two-decade adventure working in IT across Asia and North America.