©2022 Liam Keith

FRONT MATTER

1. This work is protected under copyright law.
2. The characters and scenarios depicted in this work are fictional, any resemblances to actual people or events are purely coincidental.
3. This work contains language and descriptions not suitable for children, including profanity and graphic violence. Sensitive readers be advised.

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Dossier# 58-0923187

Field Journal of Cpt. Ethan Nielson, US Army

Alpha Company 1-13 “Arrowheads”

Camp Kangwon Joint Operations Base, North Korea

January 17th, 2058

If I ordered my Arrowheads to storm into the neighboring village and neutralize anything that walks on two legs, how much resistance would I encounter? If they indeed followed through, how much dissonance would each of them feel in the marrow of their bones? What price would they pay psychologically for carrying out my orders, long after they’ve returned home?

They’re all good soldiers, but not perfect soldiers.

They question the moral integrity of certain directives, they feel terrific fear when a firefight breaks out, and they can become completely forsaken by logic in the desperation of a battle. But this is normal and to be expected—it’s human.

Like I said, they are all good soldiers, but not perfect soldiers.

The perfect soldier has no knowledge of fear. He does not cling desperately to self-preservation. He is never slowed by fatigue, hunger, injury, or illness. He does not hesitate to execute orders, and he is able to calculate the outcomes of complex scenarios with pure indifference even under the most extreme stress. These characteristics could never be cultivated in even the most talented, disciplined, and highly trained combatant, but they are easily realized by a machine.

Such thoughts swirled through my mind earlier this morning as I watched the silhouette of a Chinook hovering, backlit by the sunrise and dangling a large black cube from its sling. Inside that container was the culmination of tireless research at the US Army’s Robotics Core Lab—inside was the perfect soldier, the SCOUT-G2.

The name stands for “Search and Combat Operations Unmanned Technology”. It’s a semi-autonomous, robotic soldier, second generation. 

“SCOUT” is a friendly enough name, isn’t it? Makes me think of the Cub Scouts, with their little scarves, assorted badges, and pinewood derbies.

Perfectly disarming.

However, when G2 was unveiled at the drop-off in Chorwon this morning, all of us Arrowheads shared a moment of subdued horror. I have no doubt that we all envisioned ourselves in the platoon two years back that on-boarded the first-gen model, the SCOUT-G1. While my soldiers were privy to only secondhand fragments of the lurid tale, I had the distinct privilege of reading the thirty-six-page root cause report ahead of G2’s arrival.

To summarize the document, each of the soldiers in G1’s company were killed by the mechanical marvel so gruesomely that they were only accounted for by the microchips in their dog tags. Even though I’ve built up a stomach against the sight of maimed and mutilated bodies, the high-res photos of tangled human anatomy and shredded combat fatigues challenged my tolerance.

What exactly went wrong with G1? From what I gathered by reading the subsections authored by our engineers in Robotics, somewhere in the unfathomable lines of code ticking through G1’s CPU there was a little bug that caused a logical convulsion in its object recognition, leading to a determination that the nine men and three women carrying guns in its own platoon were all enemy hostiles. It attacked the soldiers without restraint, and as long as the shape it detected through its optical system was still classifiable as human, it kept shooting, kept ripping until that shape was unrecognizable. The authors of the report were thorough enough to include several minutes of helmet cam footage capturing the rampage, and I imagine it’ll be quite some time before those horrific images weather away in my mind.

To put the carnage into perspective, imagine an eight-foot-tall, bipedal machine equipped with a pair of belt-fed guns at the shoulders, twin retractable tungsten-carbide saw-blades that spring from its torso, and large claw-like appendages easily capable of lifting a slab of rubble. Now, picture this thing meeting flesh and bone entirely unthrottled, and bullets bouncing off it like ping-pong balls.

During its frenzy, G1 had even killed its own techie; Private Bradley Vinnes was something like the robot’s handler. The report displayed a photograph of a baby-faced engineer fresh out of university, described in the accompanying block of text as a robotics prodigy with poor marksmanship grades. His only practical skill appeared to have been using a tablet that was loaded with an application for interfacing with the SCOUT. I can recall a press release where some Robotics egghead boasted about how clever the software was, that guiding G1 was like “playing a video game.” Obviously, whatever control they thought they had of the machine was tragically overestimated.

When the recovery team found G1 a day later, it was still awaiting its next command while it stood motionless among the remains of the platoon. It sprang back to life as the convoy closed in, blasting everything within range until the guns ran dry. G1 then stalked after the vehicles, tearing and sawing at them as the troops unloaded on the robot. A couple of precise rocket launcher strikes finally took the machine out.

The brains back at Robotics made sure the corrupted CPU was recovered from G1’s black box. A direct derivative of that same faulty unit was implemented in the G2 that was deployed here this morning, with everything patched up, presumably.

When Colonel Briggs back at base said the SCOUT was coming to join our ranks, I objected strongly, reminding him of G1’s instability. He brushed it off with the usual reassurances—G2 is superior in every measurable way, the engineers have solved the “incident,” and only a SCOUT can push deeper into the irradiated regions of the North.

He then revealed to me that this operation is just one of many testing out the so‑called Dark Glass Protocol—a mission profile designed specifically for environments too lethal for human recon. Brass believes G2 will prove indispensable, and if our objectives this month are met without catastrophe, the Department of Defense is prepared to greenlight twenty more units for deployment by August 2059.

At any rate, I’m updating this journal point-forward so that there is no confusion surrounding the events to come, whatever God or the brilliant engineers he placed on Earth decide they be. 

January 18th, 2058

We’ve had a chance to get up close and personal with G2 yesterday, and while some of the soldiers watch its unnaturally smooth movements and lethal design with a certain awe, the sheer uncanniness of the thing makes me incredibly uneasy.

I must admit, G2 is certainly a technological wonder, all lurking terror aside. Its angular pair of armored legs—making up seventy percent or more of its staggering height—are surprisingly agile. Although the machine could draw attention from a mile off, the engineers wrapped the bot with a white and grey pixel camouflage, helping it blend into the backdrop of North Korea’s snow-dusted mountains. Its head consists of an obsidian-like dome, made from some sort of new, fracture-resistant polymer. Through this dark, glassy material you can see the ghosts of colored lights flicker and twinkle as it processes the sights and sounds in the environment.

The arms of this model are noticeably more anthropomorphic than the mantis-like appendages of G1, with fully dexterous fingers, and plates of smooth, molded steel giving the illusion of muscularity. The engineers who designed this model no doubt took inspiration from the superheroes and mech robots of the cartoons and video games they grew up with, even if subconsciously. The G2 has a certain intimidation factor that might prove useful in situations where we may wish to simply deter combat rather than engage. Only time will tell.

 If the fur does start flying, the spec sheet I was sent by Robotics explained that the rate of fire of its guns has been upgraded from around five thousand rounds per minute to eight thousand. Milliseconds certainly matter in a firefight, given that any one of us is just a single shot away from living or dying. In the event one of us is injured in action, there is now a hollow space inside G2’s bulletproof and blast-shielded torso which can hold a wounded soldier or other precious cargo.

Finally, in lieu of the gruesome twin saws of the first-gen model, the engineers installed a slim, flexible multi-tool with a laser cutter and plasma torch, among other gadgets. The spec sheet claims the robot is loaded with operational programs for procedures as diverse as welding and small-scale demolition.

Last night, the robot’s techie, Private Rupesh Singh, was showing off G2’s enhanced MAP system (this stands for, I believe, Mobility, Agility, and Proprioception). He had the damned thing kicking a soccer ball back and forth with Lance Corporal Brian Jennings. The kid has a keen bond with the machine, and he demonstrates a high level of fluency with the SCOUT’s software, able to instruct the bot to execute some pretty impressive maneuvers.

One of the doggy tricks Singh had G2 perform was running and leaping over a concrete traffic barrier. It cleared the slab by more than three feet before landing with a monstrous thump. The troops cheered the robot on despite any apprehension they may have felt previously, and even I had a bit of a grin creeping up on me. As I said before, however, its movements are altogether uncanny; the fluidity it exhibits in all ranges of motion is so perfect that it plays a funny and eerie trick on the mind, as if it were hyper-real. It leaves me with a sense of fear and awe that’s difficult to describe, or perhaps it’s just my little mammalian brain subconsciously aware of being edged closer to obsolescence.

January 19^th, 2058

Most of today was spent preparing for the mission.

After sundown, Singh walked me through some of the special detectors G2 has integrated into its optical system. Using the tablet, we could see through G2’s various eyes with exceptional clarity. We engaged a thermal sensor that allowed us to peer into our company’s tents, and we nearly died laughing as we caught the red and orange silhouette of Private Dustin Marcotte jerking off furiously beneath his blankets. I can foresee much more pragmatic and potentially lifesaving uses for this thermal vision mode, however, particularly as we explore the North’s many ghost zones.

When the United States conducted nuclear attacks on three critical NK military targets last year, the official press releases made the offensive seem like a series of clean, surgical strikes. Although a global conflict was circumvented, we made one hell of a mess over here.

What the public doesn’t realize is that our missiles had an explosive yield of about 8 megatons a piece. Each of them achieved a blast radius of over 20 kilometers, and irradiated huge tracts of the rural North, with some windswept fallout reaching as far as Vladivostok. The radiation forced any survivors out of the major cities en masse, some of them defecting to the South, others cramming into already overpopulated industrial towns and villages, like here in Chorwon. Scattered across the country are a great number of ghost zones where the situation is unclear regarding radiation levels or the condition of displaced civilians.

For the past six months, we’ve been working with the South Koreans and a few allies—Japan and Australia, primarily—to probe into the ghost zones in the North Hwanghae province. My suspicion is that we’re not only on some sort of humanitarian mission but are being used to sniff out any evidence of a military resurgence, to see what might be left of the old regime’s infrastructure.

Tomorrow at 0600 hours, I’ll be leading a detachment of our company out to a plateau on one of the northern ridges where there is an old village called Munan. Intel estimates a straggling population of no more than fifty to sixty people. However, this info was probably collected from a half-assed, ten-second flyover. If we do have enough breathing room in Munan, we’ll most likely set up camp there, and Singh could send G2 out into the ghost zone ahead of us to gather some radiation data using its dosimeters.

January 20th, 2058

The trek out of Chorwon was eventful, to say the least, and we find ourselves now on uneasy terms with the very many residents of Munan.

I absolutely do not trust G2, and I write this with the nuanced perspective that comes from many years of service. There are subtle transmissions that pass between human beings that transcend language and culture, that are beyond mathematics and machine-learning. There is a delicacy to interacting with people who are weary, distrusting, and desperate, that can’t be programmed into technology designed for war.

Around 0900 hours we approached Munan, where a single road led into the cement-walled village. Although in serious disrepair, we sensed immediately that Munan was well inhabited. Dozens of ramshackle hanoks were puffing smoke from their roofs, with lanterns lighted in a few of the windows. These more traditional style Korean houses huddled in the shadows of looming utilitarian buildings which were forced upon the village’s older and more rustic substrate. The new structures seemed to serve ambiguous or forgotten purposes, although one with a crown of smokestacks and corroded cooling towers appeared to have once been a fabrication plant of some sort.

We cruised through a couple of miles of dereliction, seeing furtive figures dart in and out of the hanoks. Dilapidated buildings, mounds of trash, gutted military vehicles, and deteriorating propaganda posters were the only artifacts left from whatever operations the regime conducted there.

The main road opened into a village square, then bifurcated around a stately building which I assume served as an administrative office. Taking up hundreds of square feet of real estate on the broad, brick edifice of this structure was an impressive mural; a square-jawed Korean super-soldier was tearing Old Glory in two against the backdrop of a red-on-white star. It was a skilled work of art, if I’m honest.

At some point, an elderly man on a janky bicycle had begun to ride alongside my window. We stopped and Private Jin Rhee—a Korean American from Houston and our de facto translator—asked the old-timer some questions. Rhee reported to me that the gentleman said there were at least two-hundred people in the village, only a few of them native to Munan. Most of them had come from regions around Pyongyang, with many of them very sick from radiation or other maladies.

I considered an alternate route, but satellite had captured a smooth roadway from Munan’s northern perimeter that snaked down into the valley, right through to the adjacent ghost zone. Spatial analysis showed it to be large enough for our convoy of two AMPVs, a flatbed, a cargo truck, and a pair of Humvees.

When we reached the town square, a throng of people gathered from the ramshackle hanoks and alleyways, many of them not bothering to throw on their coats before rushing out into the cold. Soon, a mob flanked our convoy on either side, end to end. They came up to the vehicles, shouting, cupping their hands in front of them. Although I didn’t understand their words, I could tell they were begging for food, fresh water, or perhaps medicine to help dull the pain of radiation poisoning. 

Our progress was completely halted by the human blockade. Outside my window was a sea of desperate, sallow faces, big and small. We handed out some bottled water, food rations, bandages, acetaminophen, peroxide—whatever we could afford to spare. However, the hands kept reaching and the eyes kept imploring.

G2 was transported inside of a docking station on the back of the flatbed. Singh rode shotgun in the cab, his neck craned over his tablet, his focus intense. The robot looked like some sort of deadly Jack-in-the-Box protruding out of the grey-paneled chassis. The lights in its dome were yellow, fading and reappearing at regular intervals in a dreamless machine sleep.

A gang of children had climbed onto the sides of the flatbed to get a closer look at G2. I immediately sent Rhee down the line to disperse them. He began shouting at them to clear away, but they protested, all of them spellbound by the robot. The rest of the crowd had taken notice of the machine by that point and packed in around the trailer.

After a few rounds of Rhee snapping at the children in Korean, along with my angry gesturing, Singh ran to me with an idea; he wanted to let the SCOUT do a quick demonstration—a simple walk around—to hopefully lead the children and the mob out of the way. Although I certainly favored not using threats and intimidation against civilians, I frowned on Singh’s idea at first. However, as I looked out at the crowd choking off the convoy and impeding our mission, I thought it might be worth a shot.

I thought it might be safe.

As Singh worked his tablet, G2 stood with a nearly imperceptible, pneumatic whine. The children screeched in amusement and allowed the machine to step down from the truck.

G2 extended to its full height, and the people clapped and cried out in chorus. The robot marched into the center of the main road, and the crowd shifted and wrapped around the machine with a great deal of caution. Singh walked ahead of G2 and guided it towards the big building with the grand propaganda mural, the civilians jogging and bicycling after. Our convoy eased forward as the spectators hurried over to watch G2.

We cleared the crowd easily enough, and Singh ushered the SCOUT back towards the rear. As G2 approached the flatbed, Singh held out a forbidding hand to the people as they tried to close back in on us.

Then, something struck G2’s dome with a clunk—a mischievous little sprat had pitched a rock at the machine.

The robot whirled around to face the direction along which the stone had hit it. Singh and Rhee shouted as four or five little boys, wide-eyed and giggling, had started launching handfuls of rocks, pelting the SCOUT. One of them picked up a piece of rebar, held it like a rifle, and shouted “BOM! BOM! BOM!”

The robot’s guns perked up on its shoulders, and a ring of red lights seared in its black dome.

I rushed over to Singh, who was already stabbing at his tablet with his fingers. His face was slackened, darting from the SCOUT to the boy, back to the tablet, and then finally to me. I ran to the brat in the crowd and snatched the rebar from his hand. I pushed the kids along, and a few of the adults, likely their parents, accosted me, screaming in words I couldn’t understand but knew were quite nasty. Jennings and Marcotte jumped out of their vehicles, posturing with their assault rifles in an attempt to shepherd the crowd back.

From somewhere inside the robot, I heard an electric whine that was tightening slowly in pitch.

“Singh, what’s it doing?” I asked. “What’s that sound?”

“It’s the ammo feeders, sir,” he said. “They prime the guns with a few cartridges and compress some gases so that G2 is battle-ready.”

“Unacceptable. Disengage it, now.”

“No worries, Captain. It won’t fire without me giving the command.”

“Don’t be so sure,” I said. “Reign your bot in, immediately, Private.”

“Yes, sir!”

As Singh was operating the tablet, I saw the guns swivel as if they were somehow considering the many faces in the crowd before finally targeting the boys. The little heathens let out a cry in unison and tore away screaming. The civilians began to seethe, shouting what I presumed were various obscenities at us and backing away nervously into packed clumps.

The ringing of the robot’s ammo feeders topped out and held steady on a piercingly high note, seeming to indicate that G2 was now fully cocked and battle-ready.

“Get it under control, now, Singh!” I shouted.

“Just a second longer, sir!” he cried back. “I got this, Captain, sir!”

Singh looked up from the tablet as the high-pitched charging sound fell in a brisk glissando, and the red, glowing traces in G2’s dome became benign blue twinkles once again. A pneumatic hiss sounded, followed by the clicking and shuffling of unseen components within G2’s frame. Singh inhaled with a shudder as if he had just surfaced from a long dive under cold water. The machine turned back towards its docking station, climbed up in precise steps, and seated itself inside.

We hurried back into our vehicles as the crowd screamed, flung debris, and chased after us. The stampede of angry citizens fell off person by person as we finally exited Munan down the mountain road.

I spoke to Singh later on about this incident, and he said that the override commands were executed perfectly, that it was only his latency to act under sheer surprise that allowed G2 to come as close as it had to firing on non-combatants. He doubled down on his faith that the machine wouldn’t have let off a single round without his say, and he promised to investigate a way to raise the robot’s threshold for sensing an attack. Regardless, I sent in a report to Kangwon about the near miss and made sure to express my displeasure at the poor intelligence pertaining to Munan. I’ve received no reply. 

The little show Singh put on today should have never happened, and I’m at fault for allowing it. I would have held myself accountable for any tragedy that came of it, the blood of children and all.

January 21st, 2058

The events of today have us Arrowheads rattled.

About twenty miles down the mountain road exiting Munan we found an abandoned foundry to make camp in. Corporal Caiden Fields took charge of analyzing the soil at the site and found only sporadic traces of radiation—max value was about 35 becquerels of Uranium per kilogram—which in layman’s terms means that we were safe to kick off our boots for the night.

Another ten miles ahead of us was the anterior of the ghost zone, a valley stretch preceding the Rimjin River. Satellite imagery showed a cordoned-off district on the eastern edge of the valley, with two large warehouses enclosed by thick walls and flanked by a collection of ragged hanoks. There hadn’t been any reports of significant activity there, so brass wasn’t concerned about hostiles.

At sunup, Singh and I mapped out a trek for G2 to take on, to survey the valley as far as the warehouses, and send dosimetry data back. It took the SCOUT about an hour to reach the ghost zone. Singh queued up a video feed from G2’s optical system of dead mountain slopes, sparse underbrush, and the winter-beaten facades of the hanoks. G2 ambled near a razor-wired security fence that stretched the interval between segments of concrete wall and showed us the two warehouses; one was a smaller grey building, the other larger and painted light blue.

The robot scanned the structures and we saw nothing immediately suspicious, although Singh did mention that the thermal sensors were incapable of detecting heat signatures through certain types of building materials. We’d need to stay on our toes, at any rate.

Dosimetry levels from the area were averaging less than 100 millisieverts, so we proceeded to rendezvous with G2. When we arrived, the robot was standing sentry off to the side of the road. We moved along, G2 walking beside the lead Humvee which I rode in with Marcotte. As the rear of our convoy crossed in front of the security fence, a cracking shot rang out from the direction of the warehouses and a bullet ricocheted off G2’s armor.

We disembarked and grabbed cover, putting the vehicles between ourselves and the warehouses as more bullets sought their targets. We were being sniped at, but Singh had already located the hostiles using G2’s impact triangulation ability. The robot fired a burst from its guns at the highest window of the blue warehouse, where I glimpsed the barrel of a Dragunov being yanked back into the darkness. Suddenly, the rolling shutter of the larger warehouse’s bay was thrown open, and there were around twenty hostiles emerging from the building.

Our vehicles absorbed a barrage of bullets, and only by sheer luck did none of them go up like fireworks from a round to the gas tank, though a few windows were destroyed. We took out a large fraction of the combatants as they crowded into the front gate, and G2 picked off the handfuls of soldiers that had perched on the walls to shoot at us. When a dozen or so of the enemy remained, they fell back into the larger warehouse, and we immediately hemmed them in, with G2 leading us.

I kept six of my soldiers with me at the entry point to the enclosure and had the others disperse around the perimeter. Singh and I huddled over the tablet as he guided the SCOUT towards the security fence that stood between us and the NKs inside. The techie chained together a few commands, and we watched G2’s laser cutter slip out of its body and go to work slicing a large, squarish portal into the cut-resistant lattice. When it was finished, the SCOUT gripped the segment of fencing, tore it loose, and hurled it to the ground. 

G2 slipped through the gap and stomped towards the warehouse. As it neared the bay, the NKs tried to lower the rolling shutter back down. Singh did something on the tablet and I saw the machine raise its arms and catch the door overhead. The shutter crumpled upon itself, and the sounds of many moving parts screeching and grinding to a stop smeared together with the bewildered cries of the enemy soldiers.

With the low visibility sensors engaged, we saw through G2’s optical system in real time as it moved inside the warehouse. The lighting in the video feed was cold and the shapes in its field of view varying tints of blue. We could make out large weapons stores and walls lined with crates. The feed glitched and stuttered as G2 was fired upon from all sides, yet within a matter of seconds its pair of guns had swept the interior of the warehouse, bodies falling fast before the machine.

Singh stopped the attack, the whine of G2’s guns drawling to a hush. As a curtain of dust lifted, the warehouse was quiet. In the video feed, enemies littered the floor or were slung over little tables where card games, smartphones, and beer bottles waited to be picked back up. Nearly every surface in the field of view was splattered with blood which was rendered indigo in the tint of the low visibility sensors. Several lights were blown out, crates were splintered, and a few boxes of ammunition had exploded and caught fire.

The robot emerged and marched indifferently back to us. I looked up at its tall frame, soiled with the enemy’s blood but unscathed by their bullets. In the glint of the cold winter sun, G2 looked almost heroic.

“Fuckin’ badass, Singh,” Marcotte gushed.

The techie grinned as he walked around G2, inspecting it, admiring it.

“Not a scratch,” he mused. “How about that, Captain?”

I called my soldiers to regroup, and when they made their way back to the convoy, another unit of NKs appeared, descending the western ridge on the other side of our vehicles. Private Amanda Hollins was the first to be hit, and she screamed as two shots to the body rocked her. Her weapon went flying from her hands and she fell face down in the dirt. I felt my heart clench inside my chest, thinking she was dead, but I heard her curse and whimper while she lay there, pawing at her hip for her sidearm. Our medic, Corporal Philip Gordon, tried to recover her, but his beeline was cut off by a series of rounds that pocked and spalled the concrete wall near his head. 

The enemy rushed down the slopes, firing as they went, hitting Rhee in the leg and Jennings in his Kevlar vest. Around fifty in all, the NKs began to drop here and there as we fought back, but we were under enormous pressure. I ordered my troops to take cover behind the walls and hold ground.

Jennings cursed as he saw the enemy walk over to Hollins, who was crawling towards the trucks. A soldier jammed his boot in the back of her neck and hovered the end of his rifle over her head. With just a nano-second to spare, G2 unloaded a burst, with perfect accuracy, and the head of the enemy soldier became a tattered, red mess before he hit the ground.

G2 charged into the wave of hostiles and mowed them down in an intense blitz, every stride and every shot rocksteady and optimized for the kill. The robot’s blazing guns were locked on the targets as it zigzagged into them, moving much faster than a thing its size should be able to. Having seen the machine rush them, the enemy’s offense deteriorated into a disorganized backpedal of random, spasmodic gunfire and fumbling terror.

Only one of the NKs escaped. I spied him scrambling back up the ridge with his left arm flapping behind him, held only by a few swatches of his jacket, his fear so intense that he was scarcely aware of his mutilated limb. G2 was a monstrous, alien force that the enemy never would have dreamed they would face in the backcountry of their homeland, or anywhere else on Earth.

Gordon had wasted no time getting over to Hollins and going to work. He had her vest removed, her jacket cut open, and he was cleaning two weeping holes between her breasts. Hollins winced and bit her lip as Gordon then pressed hemostatic gauze into both wounds simultaneously.

“How bad is she?” I asked Gordon, kneeling beside him.

“I got both bullets out easy enough,” Gordon said. “The Kevlar slowed them down enough that they stopped at the sternum.”

“We need to get her inside one of the Humvees in case there’s more of these sons of bitches coming over the hill,” I said.

Seeming to read the situation, Singh cleared his throat and worked his tablet.

The SCOUT loped its way over to Hollins. It stood above her, scanning her for a moment, and then its torso hatch yawned opened like a hungry, mechanical mouth.

“Can we try it, sir?” Singh asked.

I looked inside the cavity, seeing an interior lined with cushioned pads and several arrays of lens-like sensors.

“Has she stopped bleeding, Gordon?” I asked.

“It seems so, sir,” he replied, now gawking at G2’s opened hatch. “Just a sec.”

Gordon helped Hollins to sit up and then skillfully wrapped her torso in several feet of bandages. When he was done, he held her by the shoulders, then turned to me and nodded.

“Go ahead, Singh,” I said.

The robot gently scooped the tough young woman from Minnesota up, encouraged her into reclination, and tucked her inside of itself, handling her as careful as a mother would her newborn baby. An interior light came on to illuminate Hollins’s bewildered face before the hatch closed down on her. G2 turned back towards us, awaiting its next command.

“Are you sure she’s alright in there, Singh?” I asked.

“How’s this thing work, anyway?” interjected Gordon, running his hand over G2’s armored torso.

“I can explain, sir,” he said, the look in his eyes like that of a child with some wild elaboration itching to escape. “Gases get bled into the belly, a kind of modified nitrous oxide like you’d get during a root canal. The cushions inside vibrate at a specific frequency and a lower temperature is held to slow any hemorrhaging. What’s really cool about the vibration pads is that they—”

“We need to make sure she doesn’t hyperventilate from shock,” Gordon said. “What about her oxygen?”

“Don’t worry, the belly monitors oxygen levels and will cycle with a couple of scroll pumps periodically. She’ll be calm in there real soon from the gas. It’s all totally safe and buys us some time to get her to evac. Plus, G2 is bulletproof, so she’s safer than any of us, all things considered.”

I stared at the machine, trying to picture Hollins inside like a bloodied fetus in a synthetic womb. Singh had gone back to his tablet, and when I glanced at the readout, I saw he was monitoring Hollins’s vitals while she was tucked inside what he called the belly.

“Captain, sir!” Marcotte shouted, crouching beside the lead Humvee he had been driving. “Got a tire out on this one.”

“No problem,” Singh said. “G2 can help.”

I watched as G2 lumbered over to the drooping front end of the vehicle, slid its powerful arms beneath it, and deadlifted the entire weight without the slightest hitch. The whole scene looked like some exaggerated, sci-fi caricature of one of those strongman competitions, but it had the welcome effect of pumping up the morale of the men in my company.

“Holy shit,” Marcotte said as he grinned. “I’m starting to get a real hard-on for this thing.”

The tire was changed out in just three minutes, and we were ready to move. G2 placed the Humvee back down soundlessly.

I decided to turn our convoy back towards the mountain road—to the foundry where we camped the night before—and call in an air lift to meet us enroute. Gordon had a mobile clinic in the back of our cargo truck, and patched Rhee and Jennings up on the way. When he had Hollins plucked from G2’s safe hatch, I half expected to see her lifeless body extracted from that space-age sepulcher, but Gordon remarked on how well she had stabilized from both his and the machine’s interventions. He had to do very little else to treat her, and she indeed looked uncharacteristically relaxed for someone who had just taken a few shots to the chest.

I hate to admit it, but without the SCOUT the NKs would have killed every last one of us today.

Back at camp, the bird from Kangwon was already waiting to take the wounded to infirmary. We watched Hollins, Rhee, and Jennings get strapped down to gurneys and loaded into the helicopter. Hollins gave a feeble thumbs-up to Gordon as she was put inside the Chinook, or it might have been as easily intended for the SCOUT which loomed just behind the medic.

I’ll call in with Kangwon in the morning and decide what to do next. My instincts tell me to go back to Chorwon.

January 26th, 2058

This entry comes from my bed in the infirmary at Kangwon.

Against my better judgement, I took us deeper into the ghost zone near the Rimjin River. What happened there caused me to regret ever trusting intel, and that goddamned machine.

After we had gotten back to camp at the foundry outside of Munan, I sent a memorandum to brass about the ambush in the valley and had an interesting conversation with Briggs by video call the next morning.

My superior’s image stared back at me from the browser window of my laptop, his squarish face unreadable.

“Good morning, sir,” I said, and saluted him.

“Captain,” he said, returning the salute. “I read over your memos about Munan and the dust-up in the valley. I’m going to nail someone’s ass in intel, don’t you worry.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said. “Intel is usually very good. I can’t understand why we keep getting such unreliable imaging when we have the most advanced system ever designed floating around up there in orbit.”

“Data have been spotty because the NKs are using some sort of novel tech to stop nosy neighbors,” Briggs answered. “We don’t know exactly how they’re doing it, but they’re jamming our satellites and our drones when we try to image.”

“If they can do that, what about radio? Maybe they’re listening to us right now.”

Briggs was silent for a moment, then cleared his throat.

“You’re sounding a little paranoid there, Nielson,” he chortled. “We’re supposed to be encrypted, if the geeks in comms are worth their salt.”

“And what about this bot? Private Singh uses a tablet for remote control.”

“Whatever frequency it’s operating on, I can assure you it’s iron clad.”

“Feels like we’re playing a game of Marco Polo in shark infested waters,” I said wryly. “Tell me something, Colonel, this operation isn’t just about radiation and sick villagers, is it? We can’t monitor what they’re doing at all. We’re deaf, blind, and dumb out here.”

“That’s all correct, Nielson,” Briggs said, unapologetically. “We certainly don’t anticipate any large-scale operations. Hell, the core of their whole damned infrastructure was blown to bits when we dropped the nukes—but they’ve been busy little bees. If we can’t get a handle on what’s going on in the ghost zones, we might all be caught with our pants down when they come looking for payback.”

“What about using drones to watch them?”

“We tried. They hacked one and stole it. It’s too risky.”

I felt something begin to gnaw in the pit of my stomach; Briggs was inconsistent, and I weighed the consequence of calling him out on this or keeping my mouth shut. He wriggled in his chair for a moment, then looked at his screen, poker-faced.

“Flyovers won’t do it?” I asked. “Can’t we send a few Kiowas ahead of our detachments?”

“Not enough detail,” Briggs said. “Plus, one of the Japanese choppers that snooped around the province three months ago got scrapped. No one wants to be in the air out here without remote sensing backing them up. We have to do this the old-fashioned way. We need eyes peeping into every pop-hole and boots kicking down doors. Like how you found the weapons stocked in the valley—that was invaluable information. For all we know, they still have underground nukes somewhere, and they’ll lob them at the South the first chance they get. It’s imperative that we know what they’re up to on the other side of the Rimjin.”

“I understand, but you’re essentially asking me to just blindly walk my people into another trap,” I argued. “And we’re wading through God knows how many nasty little isotopes. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get back home and have kids with three eyeballs.”

“Do you object to this mission, Captain?” Briggs asked caustically.

“I strongly object, sir.”

“But you’ve got the goddamn G2, Nielson!” Briggs shouted and threw his hands up. “The most powerful foot soldier on the planet! Now listen, between us and the Aussies we have six Chinooks on stand-by in Chorwon, ready to fly. The birds could be there to pull you out in less than a half hour if things go pear-shaped.”

“Things could go to Hell in only seconds, sir,” I said. “I’ll have the SCOUT collect as much data as possible from the ground, and then we move out if so much as a mouse farts in our direction.”

“That’s fair enough, Nielson,” he said. “I’ll expect you to be ready for a full debriefing once you get camped near the river.”

“Understood, sir,” I said, and saluted.

I killed the video call and stepped out of my tent. A light snow was starting to fall, and the sky was one unbroken sea of bruised clouds. My troops were ready to mobilize, to move deeper and cross the Rimjin River. I saw Singh sitting on the back of the flatbed, next to G2’s docking station, flicking at his tablet with a puzzled look on his face.

“Singh,” I said, and he fumbled a salute to me. “Is something wrong?”

“I’m just running some diagnostics on G2, sir,” he said, his eyes flitting back and forth from me to the screen. “Everything seems ok, for the most part. I wanted to make sure nothing was damaged in the fight the other day.”

“You said ‘for the most part’—what do you mean?”

“Oh, yeah …” he said with a nervous laugh. “There was just a small error in the sat nav. I think it’s probably from this cloud coverage, sir.”

I stared at G2, watching snowflakes fall on its black dome, the lights inside a slow, throbbing blue. I thought about what Briggs said, about the NKs jamming our remote sensing capabilities, about them hacking a drone.

“I want you monitoring that thing as closely as possible, Singh, especially as we head further in.”

“Yes, sir,” Singh said. “I take this very seriously, sir!”

“Good to hear it,” I said, rapping him on the back. “Our lives may be in your hands.”

He nodded furtively and sunk his attention back into the glass of his tablet, rifling through readouts, spectra, and graphical interfaces.

By 1200 hours we were back in motion and pushing towards the river. There were satellite images sent by intel—certainly outdated—of a sizeable bridge that traversed the Rimjin River. On the other side, there was supposed to be an old town with a small school, a gymnasium, and a couple of factories. We wouldn’t know for sure what, or who, was actually there until we crossed over.

Along the way we passed a few clusters of ruined hanoks. They stared at us from the hillsides with glassless windows like sad eyes, their grimy, grey roofs dusted with the snow that was beginning to dump down.

Our convoy pulled up to the Rimjin River around 1400 hours, and I tore into a cynical laugh seeing the collapsed bridge sunken into the water. In the satellite images sent by intel, it had been a two-lane, beam-type bridge made of concrete and steel. Now, it was a heap of rubble and gnarled, rusted bones with black rapids rushing over it.

Marcotte showed me another image of the region where we were, this one taken at much lower zoom. We spotted a second bridge, three kilometers northwest of where our vehicles sat idling. I made the decision to head there, and if we found nothing, we’d haul it back towards Chorwon immediately.

About a kilometer and a half further, driving along a cratered and muddied drag of road that moved in tandem with the river, I had a grave intuition. I started studying the surroundings; out of my window was the Rimjin flowing like liquid slate, and beyond that there were acres of dead trees, brambly thickets, and the distant, concrete husks of derelict buildings.

Our Humvee was fired upon suddenly from the other side of the river, the lone bullet hitting the door frame six inches above my head.

I screamed for Marcotte to divert the convoy.

On the opposite side, there was what appeared to be an empty field. Marcotte started turning us around, driving off road attempting to make a U-turn. More shots hit the vehicle, and as the tires left the pavement, we lost traction in a boggy mess. The plot might have once been a communal rice paddy, but in that moment, it was nothing short of a death trap.

Marcotte stomped on the accelerator, the Humvee growling as it tried to climb out of the mud. Just as the tires started to gain purchase, Marcotte’s head rocked sideways, and a red mist sprayed all over his driver’s side window. Looking at the hole in Marcotte’s helmet, I knew there was a sniper loaded up with high caliber rounds across the river. Marcotte’s hands fell from the steering wheel and the Humvee settled back into the mire.

I radioed for help and within seconds saw Gordon hop from the vehicle behind us. He threw open Marcotte’s door, and when he saw the blood and brain matter, he recoiled.

“Oh, fuck!” Gordon shouted. He staggered back a little with his face in the crook of his arm, his eyes narrowed.

I had known Gordon and Marcotte to be very close, both of them fathers to young children back home. Sensing the justifiably intense emotion that was rising in my soldier, I began to unbuckle Marcotte’s seatbelt.

“Come on, Gordon,” I said. “We’re getting him out of here.”

Gordon nodded, then positioned himself beside Marcotte and pulled the body down over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. He grimaced and sprinted back to his truck with the fallen soldier. I slipped out the same way and followed, nearly struck by a bullet that turned the windshield into a fine craquelure pattern.

I motioned for the convoy to reverse straight along the road the way we came. Bullets kept biting at us from the side parallel to the river, and as the vehicles backed slowly, I ran up to the cab of the flatbed, hopping up on the step rail.

“Private Berkley,” I said to the truck’s driver. “Keep it rolling back. We need to find somewhere to turn around.”

“Yes, sir!” he said, and then flinched as a series of bullets popped the opposite side of the cab and shattered the mirror next to Singh.

“Singh!” I shouted through the cab. “Get thermal vision on the woods across the way.”

“Sir!” he yelled, his fingers dancing across the tablet in an instant.

The SCOUT rose inside of the docking station, whirled its torso towards the river, and scanned, its ghost lights a marquee of green dots racing around within its dome.

“Sir!” Singh said. “Look at this!”

He showed me what the SCOUT was seeing via the tablet. In the thermal video feed, the freezing river was a brilliant cyan and the trees dark purple, but there were dozens of orange-red forms glowing in the distance. One set of these warm blobs was darting in procession around a couple of the buildings—the organized movement of a small squadron.

“There!” I shouted. “Fire on ‘em!”

“Right away, sir,” Singh said, his face hardening with focus.

He entered some commands, and G2’s guns shot twin streams of lead into the sparse foliage and the buildings that were situated there.

Fire was returned, and our vehicles were dinging like a tin roof in a hailstorm.

“We need G2 to keep the pressure on while we withdraw,” I said. “Can you handle that, Singh?”

“No problem, sir!” he said, and went to work jabbing and swiping on the surface of the tablet screen again.

The SCOUT swept its fire from left to right, causing large bursts of debris to kick up in the woods across the river. As the robot reset itself and began to attack again, it stopped abruptly, and the lights in its dome glitched.

“What the hell?” Singh said, his face screwed up. “What’s happening? What is all this shit?”

I glanced at the tablet and hundreds of error messages were popping up, littering the screen. To my amazement, I saw the SCOUT step out of its docking station and bound off the side of the moving flatbed. It landed on its feet with a crunch then strutted away from us.

I got on the radio and ordered the convoy to stop.

“What in God’s name are you doing, Singh?” I shouted at the techie.

“Sir, it’s not … I mean, I …” Singh stuttered. “I didn’t mean to—”

“We have to withdraw! You got about three seconds to recover your toy, or we leave without it.”

Singh nodded without another word, and he swiped at the screen frantically before looking up at the SCOUT several yards away. He shook his head and returned to working the tablet.

G2 raised its arms, then lowered them, almost as if it was waving to us. The lights in its dome blinked green for a few seconds, then solid red.

“I’m not doing that, sir!” Singh cried, looking at me wide-eyed. “The software is crashing, and I can’t—”

There was a sudden, deafening bang. In the same instance, a surge of light and a swell of heat exploded in front of me, and I was thrown off the side of the truck and onto the cold asphalt—the bastards on the other side of the river had launched a rocket-propelled grenade.

“Pull out!” I screamed to my troops with all the breath I could draw. Something was lodged in my abdomen, and I struggled to lift myself from the ground. The flatbed was ablaze, along with Berkley and the only man in my company who could possibly regain control of the SCOUT. The blast had killed both in an instant, and they leaned forward without protest as the fire inside the cab consumed them. The docking station on the truck bed was destroyed, issuing black smoke and aberrant flares of electricity.

Gordon ran to me, lifting me from the slush on the road. I could feel the heat of blood collecting in my jacket, and I groped around under my body armor to find a vicious spearhead of shrapnel that had slipped between the plates. The medic ushered me towards the cargo truck, and each step sent eviscerating pain through my gut.

“G2 is out of control,” I told Gordon. “Singh’s dead. He—”

I hacked up a mouthful of blood as Gordon rolled me into the back of the truck, next to Marcotte’s body.

“Listen,” I said, sputtering out crimson. “Something is wrong with the damned robot. We’re not in control anymore—someone else is.”

Gordon was cutting off my vest and looking bewildered.

“Sir, could someone from base be controlling it remotely?” he asked.

“No, the NKs have some kind of tech out here—” I nearly bit my own lip off as Gordon pried the shrapnel out. “They have a way to jam radio signals.”

“You mean—” Gordon started, but a flurry of bullets began to rip apart the truck’s makeshift infirmary.

When the barrage suddenly stopped, I dragged myself along the bed of the truck and threw open the back sash. I saw G2 marching beside the convoy, its uncanny fluidity surreal, its steps like the beating of a war drum, and the red lights inside its dome swirling in a wild dance. Its guns were swiveling disjointedly and seemed to not be targeting anything in particular, but they fired off in ferocious bursts all the same.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, my spine slackening as I remembered the ease with which G2 destroyed the NKs outside of Munan, and those horrifying photos of the soldiers killed by G1.

The robot began to spray the vehicles at random again but stopped only a moment later. The multi-tool sprung from its body, whirled, and drilled in the air before collapsing back into its compartment. It walked an erratic path, halted, lifted one of its legs, raised both of its arms, and then squatted down; whoever was controlling it now was trying things out, seeing what it could do.

“We need to move, goddammit!” I shouted. “Get on the radio and tell everyone to double back. We can pull out while the NKs are fucking around with the robot.”

“There’s one problem, Captain,” he said. “We’re boxed in by the flatbed.”

“We’re going to have to drive forward, then,” I said. “Just go now and go fast!”

“Understood,” Gordon said, and got back on the radio to give my orders to the rest of our unit.

I heard the engine of the cargo truck growling and felt the transmission kick into gear, and soon the entire makeshift clinic was bobbing and rocking as we raced forward. Out of the back, I could see that the foremost vehicles of our convoy had given way, letting us slip into the lead via precious little spare roadway.

The SCOUT seemed to have noticed and began jogging behind.

“It’s tailing us,” I said to Gordon. “Tell everyone to gun it!”

As we fled certain death, I happened to remember the comment in that press release I’d seen on G1, where that egghead said piloting the machine was like playing a video game. I pictured some baby-faced NK techie with a controller in his hands, grinning while he watched us run for our lives via G2’s optical system.

The robot’s guns began to flash again, and streams of bullets drilled at the rearmost vehicle driven by Sergeant Shawn Clayton. The Humvee swerved, threw up mud, but found traction again on the road. Dozens more shots ripped in, and then Clayton’s Humvee was in flames. The vehicle slowed and we watched as Clayton and his passenger, Private First Class Antonio DaSilva, leapt out and scrambled away from the blaze.

“Jesus!” Gordon yelled. “We gotta go get them, sir!”

“We’re all dead if we stop now!” I shouted. “I’m sorry, Corporal.”

“Sir!” Gordon growled, and bit down on what he wanted to say. He went back to compressing my wound.

The figures of DaSilva and Clayton shrunk with distance, and the Humvee exploded in a horrific burst that caused a rain of shrapnel and flaming slag. G2 came running through the fireball like some demon emerging from the gates of Hell. I heard the faintest cries come up from the two men as the machine drew upon them. I dropped my head to the floor of the truck bed and clenched my eyes shut, growling to drown out the sounds of their screams.

After my nerve came back, I grabbed Gordon’s radio and called Kangwon.

“We need air evac immediately!” I shouted, hearing bullets begin to hammer at the frame of the cargo truck. “We’re under heavy fire! Hurry it up!”

“Roger that, sir,” the voice said. “I have your coordinates and will dispatch now.”

“Do me a favor and get a call into Colonel Briggs. Tell him his goddamn robot is out of control! It’s killing us out here! The enemy hacked it!”

“Affirmative, sir,” the voice answered with the slightest, confused inflection.

I let the radio fall from my hand; the racing vehicles and the machine running us down all began to blur, and I had the feeling of being dropped from a great height.

Gordon was monitoring my pulse one moment, and then the next he was staring into my eyes intently, having spread my lids open with his fingers. Although he had packed my wound with kaolin gauze to accelerate clotting, I was losing quite a volume of blood and had begun to nod off.

“Captain, sir!” he shouted, his voice starting to sound like it was coming from inside a small box. “Hang on!”

He tore through the scattered medical supplies, rifled through a pack of syringes, and finally stuck a needle into my neck.

I got a sudden jolt of energy which ripped me like a bungee back from the ether. It must have been adrenaline he jabbed me with because my heart was slamming in my chest and every blood vessel in my body pumped fire.

We were rumbling and rattling along, and out of the back of the cargo truck I saw our two AMPVs—the only other vehicles in our convoy that remained. A gunner emerged from the interior of each of the armored vehicles and readied the turrets on the topsides. The fragile human bodies and their little weapons looked painfully inconsequential compared to the mechanical menace that stormed after.

Rearmost was Specialist Steven Quillian, called “Squirrel” by his fellow Arrowheads. He was a wiry, diminutive kid from rural Alabama with a thick drawl who had probably been able to shoot before he even learned to read. As a recruit, he was bullied quite a bit for his small size, yet here he was, going head-to-head with the perfect soldier and making his last stand—however futile it was.

Squirrel hollered out in a rebel yell as he let the chain gun sing. Sparks flew off G2’s metal frame, but one or two of the rounds hit the obsidian dome, a fine powder of resin spraying out as they connected. The colossus kept sprinting after us, unperturbed, but I had already seen its weakness.

“Shoot the dome!” I screamed into my radio. “Go for the head!”

The robot returned fire, and I could see Squirrel’s body jerking from every shot. His helmet blew apart in confetti of bone and blood, and the upper half of his body hung backwards out of the turret’s porthole.

I pulled myself up and gripped a rail at the opening of the cargo truck’s rear. I drew my Desert Eagle sidearm and took aim at the robot’s dome.

“You need to sit back, Captain!” Gordon pleaded, grabbing my arm. “You could go into cardiac—”

“We die anyway if we don’t fight, Gordon,” I growled. “Pick up your weapon and shoot that motherfucker—now!”

Gordon looked to the machine that was dashing forward, at Squirrel’s slumped and headless body, and back to me. He picked up his rifle.

As I readied my weapon, I thought about Sergeant Reichert, my combatives instructor way back when I was a recruit. He used to say, “It doesn’t matter how strong your opponent is, if he can’t see, he can’t fight.” Would this axiom hold true for the world’s most powerful robotic super soldier?

I threaded my arm through the rail and steadied my aim with both hands. The SCOUT seemed focused on the armored vehicles, allowing me time to line up a shot dead center in that black orb.

I squeezed the trigger, and a head-splitting boom filled the cargo truck. I saw at once a blossom of white on the dome—a strain pattern in the polymeric material, which meant a sure vulnerability.

“Nice shot!” Gordon cried.

I took aim again, but the recoil from the first shot seemed to have infuriated the wound in my abdomen, and the pain nearly blinded me. Looking down the sights of my gun through a veil of tears, I fired and grazed the dome at a tangent.

Whatever Gordon had jabbed into me was also wearing off, fast.

I collapsed backwards onto Marcotte’s body, rolled off to my side, and began to feel like I was sinking into the floor of the truck bed. I heard Gordon’s assault rifle popping in triplets, and the turret of the other AMPV directly behind us going off. My weapon had fallen somewhere unknown to me, and with what little strength I had left, I raised myself and saw G2 running off the road.

The SCOUT’s tinted dome was whitened with strain so badly that its optical sensors were surely clouded; whoever was controlling it behind enemy lines was likely fumbling to steer the machine through that giant cataract. I smiled as I imagined the hacker punk throwing down his little game controller, boiling with rage.

A tired proverb, but even Achilles had his heel.

In a stroke of dumb luck, the G2 had run off into the mire that claimed Marcotte’s Humvee, sinking halfway to its knees in the bog. It wrenched a leg free only to have it sucked back in with the following step. It fired shots at random, and its thick, articulated fingers grasped at the air as if it were groping for a lifeline. I had the impression of a man drowning but had to remind myself this was not a sentient being desperate for help, but a killing machine gone off the rails.

The last thing I remember is Gordon shining a light in my eyes. When I woke up, I was here in Kangwon, in our infirmary.

I’m being sent home soon, as I’m going to need a few CT scans and ongoing care; the grenade blast gave me a mild concussion, and that bit of shrapnel perforated my small intestine.

In addition to this journal, I’ve filed a formal complaint and a strongly worded recommendation to abstain from anymore research into our robotics initiative, which I’m sure will have no real effect. This entire catastrophe should provide a useful data point for the eggheads and their Dark Glass Protocol—just like the nightmare that unfolded with G1—the death and destruction mere hiccups along the way to realizing the perfect soldier.

I heard from Briggs just this morning; because of the NKs hunkered down on the other side of the river, the evac team was unable to collect the bodies from the vehicles that were left behind. I’m terribly disappointed that some of my soldiers won’t be laid to rest at home.

Another piece of info given to me by Briggs was that the team failed to recover G2, unable to locate it anywhere along the riverside road. The Robotics lab is trying like hell to trace their toy, hoping that it might just be wandering around somewhere. I think it’s more likely, however, that the SCOUT has been whisked away to an underground lab somewhere by the enemy and is being backwards engineered at this very moment.

END