Day 286 - The War Corp. - Chapter 2 (1341 Words)

 ©Wayne Webb and constantwriting.blogspot.com, 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Wayne Webb and constantwriting.blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

THE WAR CORP.

By Wayne Webb

Chapter 2

The drop ship planet fall was much more controlled and far less traumatic than the first one they had endured as a team. It was more disconcerting because now, in the field of real engagement they no longer had the Pods to back them up. This was beyond training, there were no back ups and they were now playing in the League.

The War League.

The concept had been around for centuries, the practices had been refined and revised with treaties and accords over decades and decades of conflict. The communities that spawned the wars in the days gone past were long gone. Companies had grown, corporations had formed and they left traditional boundaries behind, still conforming to laws and rules, but there was no longer a nation or a world behind each army, but a Corporation.

The bodies they sent to War were all Team Members, cloned from the best of the best when it came to warfare, skills, reflexes and obedience. The genetic material they were based on was over a century old, recopied and reprogrammed for each new engagement. The War was a crucial part of the ongoing economy, and it featured a ladder and rankings like a real league, but there were no seasons and no end in sight, just a constant jockeying for position with the eight corporations that were left in business.

They all had the same genetic material to play with, there were a hundred soldiers on whom the Teams were made up. The histories of each body and the track record of their clones through the decades of being selected and reprogrammed through advanced metrics and analysis, these were the things that made the difference, win or lose.

Each Corporation was named for a colour, to reduce the personalization of each faction and army, since too much nationalistic pride would lead to actual conflict, and the War League was a way of avoiding that. The conflicts, that were now long forgotten, would be settled on the field of battle using copies only of real people who had since lost their actual lives.

The core principle of the War League was that not one new soul was to lose their lives, not one new soul.  The years of data collected meant that they could exercise their rights in corporate warfare and then battle it out in the League to resolve conflicts that could not be easily negotiated.

It was an industry on it’s own and it employed a significant number of the inhabitants of the colonized worlds, either directly or indirectly contributing to the League and the support structure around it. As each generation of Teams were created there were new weapons, new strategies were made for them. These would then unsettle the balance between the corporations and juggle the standings in the league. This in turn led to new research and development, which then fed the War League and so on in an ongoing, and very profitable economic loop.

The League matches were broadcast and followed by the employees of the Corporations, which comprised the bulk of the population in most company planets. There were planets that did not subscribe to the War League philosophy, but they were isolated and alone. They were not allowed to trade with any League planets, they could not do business with the corporation and were not allowed armies or defenses. They were outsiders and most of the time they wanted it that way, they were not interested in the endless loop of profit and decay.

The Outsiders lived rustic lives and stagnated without the research and improvements that the other colony planets had. Corporation membership had advantages, they had more to consume and had much less risk than the Outsider planets. They could not trade for resources so space flight was beyond the bulk of the Outsider planets, as was an independent trade authority. They were just left alone.

Free Men were not employees of the Corporations but they were customers of them. They signed contracts and ran companies that did business with the mega corporations, and were independently wealthy. They paid into the scheme or they leased technology or services to their parent companies in some cases. Free Men, Employees and Outsiders; these were the core groups of humanity in the stars. They no longer killed each other, with the exception of murder on the Outsider Worlds, where such things were ignored by the rest and left to their own devices. They no longer killed each other en masse.

The War League was everything to everyone, the battles had taken on a life of their own, and they kept the Corporations running. They were the most popular form of entertainment and pride for the employees and the Free Men. You followed a team, most of the time it was the Corporation you worked for, after all your bonus scheme was likely attached to your Corporations success in the League. Though Employees and Free Men were free to bet on the outcome of any match any way they wanted.

If your team was doing badly, bet on the likely winner in another corporation. It was part of the game, it was fair play to bet on who you thought the winner would be. If you were a Team Manager or a Board Member you had to be a bit more circumspect, the bookies were run as an independent guild serviced by all the corporations and they were impartial in the face of everything. If a Manager bet against his team? The odds would change, it was a risk to bring the odds down, and if your Corporation found out that your indiscretion made them less money? Then liability would follow.

The Alpha Charlie Echo Team was a team that had gone through a one hundred percent replacement; the previous one had been decimated with no survivors in a battle with the Yellow Corp, a vicious engagement on a particularly harsh environment. The team had no survivors and due to the way the other rosters fell, there were no veterans to seed the new team.

Now they had come through CBT, the initiation phase, which was generally where Veterans would school rookies on the way things would be, with flying colours and a maverick attitude towards the War League Matches.

The board had seen fit to adopt an untested leader and an untested strategy to get an edge in a flagging leaderboard. Blue was not bottom rung, but at three paces of the lowest mark and a team full of Pod Babies, they were willing to take risks.

The gamble had paid off, even though the Manager had serious reservations about the mental stability of the Liam Designation Team Leader. Though the body had been reused a thousand times or more, the psyche was fresh in each cloned instance. Clones were referred to as activated, recycled, deployed, deactivated and programmed(among many other states).

Officially though they were never alive.

So Liam was never ‘dead’ for three minutes, never really in excruciating pain, hovering between life and death. He was momentarily offline on the cusp of being deactivated and the sheer luck of timing gave him a chance at recycling. It was the one split second timing stroke of luck that gave the A.C.E. Team it’s firs real record and one that they would never ever see as a mistake.

The Manager Carter Simmons saw a huge risk and the impact of being dead, tortured to the edge of his sanity and then reset like an electronic device being salvaged and reconditioned.

He was not electronic, he was not a device, but he was a man with thoughts and feelings. That emotional core was designed to be set up and given instructions from boot cycle, not to be dropped to the edge and brought back. They were never designed to take the psychological impact of near death; they were either online/activated or offline/deactivated. Especially if the latter was in technically a bloody mess of body parts and shredded organs.