[WP] WW3 breaks out, but Science has basically 'cured death' and this war is just for fun.

      “Hit the fucking deck, private!” Staff Sergeant MacBrady’s call ran across the trench air and burst into Private Tully’s consciousness just quick enough for him to duck the incoming shrapnel. MacBrady darted hurriedly over in a hunched crouch. “You alright?”

      “Yeah, I think so.” He was shaking, along with the familiar-faced private he had just met three weeks ago. MacBrady had made the acquaintance of many ‘fresh’ recruits, too many for his liking. The Irish military was sending them in as quickly as the Spanish were grinding them up. The Reals, as the Irish dispassionately referred to them, had for years now been pushing north through the Irish mainland, resisted but not prevented from making it as far as Kildare, Meath, and now the Hill of Tara - just west of Dublin -  where MacBrady had been encamped for half a year. Irish forces had, by the third month of encampment, bored holes into the mound, constructing a labyrinthine tunnel system that was as confusing to navigate as it was hastily constructed. With the constant pound of Spanish artillery bounding across the smoke-scarred fields, careful construction had been abandoned in favor of brisk enterprise, which found the Irish in a constant state of implacable frustration. Cave-ins and faults in electrical wiring undid any sense of fortitude the Hill provided, the notion of which, were any national historical scholar to have been thrust into the ranks of Staff Sergeant MacBrady, should have been thoroughly uprooted from the get go. Yet MacBrady did not have historians in his midst. In fact, it had become impossible to say what, indeed, MacBrady had in his midst.

     It had all begun in the year 2100, the year that Science dominated and united the entire world under the transnational banner of Knowledge. Through a series of concurrent and precisely timed cyber attacks, The Committee had usurped the ruling classes of every country. National borders burst open and upon every post Science hung their flags, crosses of iron and bronze, dotted silver and gold-flecked, bearing the Crest of the Sun, a hardly subtle allusion to Plato and his tutor. 

It had taken thousands of years of searching and waiting, but the Philosopher King had finally emerged from the dregs of humanity: Malik, a boy of only eight years. The Committee had found him in the ancient Somali port, Qandala, superimposing constellations upon a maritime map of the ocean. He had through some celestial phenomena discovered a formula by which to predict the size, speed, and location of rogue waves, accurate to within a kilometer. Almost instantaneously, The Committee had ushered him in to rule over Science as Philosopher King in 2078. In his first year of rule, afforded the best equipment, facilities, and academic minds, he had cured every major disease and rid the world of food allergies. In the following three years, he focused on tissue regeneration, which culminated in the first ever successful growth of an entire human body from only ten cells. By the time he was eighteen, he had successfully collaborated with the world’s greatest computational minds to achieve digital immortality, a computer with enough processing power to emulate every single neural synapse of the human brain. He had, in every regard, cured death.

     The Great Rationalization began in 2101. In schools everywhere religion was slowly phased out as fantasy, an impedance to true knowledge. It was said in those times that “Philosophy is Theology without the safety net of God.” Hence within a generation, long after Malik’s fated date of death, which he bluntly and successfully overturned with ease, religion went extinct, and with it the romanticizing power of superstition. As those who could afford it increased their longevity indefinitely, the world pulsed on, every blip muffled by the nihilistic roar of infinity.

     Malik felt the pain the worst, as he was the first to become, for all intents and purposes, immortal. He stalked the courtyard of his arabesque Moroccan riad. He had everything, and it meant nothing to him. In a molten flare of temper, he threw his phone at the funerary urn he had purchased on his visit Tzu, once called China. It’s cerulean shards rattled on the floor, echoing hollowly through the halls. He kicked at the broken pieces, and let out a dry laugh, the emptiness of which matched the senselessness of his purchase. It was approaching twilight, and the faint outline of stars seeped through the open sky and chequered the courtyard. Luminous dots arrayed his broken urn and struck him to recall his youth, the times he spent on the Somali sands playing with old maps and stars. He only stumbled upon the formula by chance. What had really intrigued him was the map, the oceans, the terrestrial outlines, and the sense of ownership it instilled. He was no longer a spiritual youth filled with wonder, he was a bored and powerful man. God was dead, and he felt more than ever a directive that emanated from his apathetic heart: he would break the Peace, start a war, and why not? No one would have to die.


     An explosion erupted overhead. “Staff Sergeant MacBrady,” called the young recruit. He had a deep gash running from the top of his throat to the bottom of his left shoulder. It looked as though he had been torn open and sewn back together. MacBrady gathered that that is exactly what had happened. “Yes, what?” MacBrady replied, eyeing the scar. 

     “What’s our next move?”

     “Our next move is that I stay alive as long as possible, and you try to do the same.” 

     Tully was taken aback. 

     Immediately after the words left his mouth, the Staff Sergeant felt a pang of guilt for being so unnecessarily curt, but it wore on a man, seeing the same set of damned eyes in the same body as all the others, month after month. There were probably only a few hundred of them, the other corpses too thoroughly obliterated to make any sort of genetic recovery. 

     MacBrady saw firsthand the rotating door of facial features and body parts, the limited iterations the army was becoming restricted to. Why, he had seen Tully’s crooked nose twenty times by now, each time filled with a new soul, whoever was up for deployment. Even despite the tissue regeneration, the scars somehow grew back with them. Though innocent his countenance was, Tully bore the marks of a lifetime of war all over his body, including the physical memory of the blade that had split him open at the throat two months ago. 

     What truly disturbed MacBrady, though, was not the bodies, but the souls that inhabited them, for they never seemed to repeat, or, if they did, had no personal remembrance of ever being alive. Only three days into the battle, a recruit by the name of Finn had swapped stories with him while they kept vigil overnight. Finn had been orphaned as a teenager and had left for (what was previously called) America to wander until finally making his way back to his birthplace to fight for his Celtic nation that once was. 

     Finn had died in a mortar blast, but that was nearly six months ago, and not since had MacBrady seen any hint of Finn in the physiognomy of his recruits.

     Where were the souls going, MacBrady asked himself. With each repetition, the recruits seemed increasingly bland - bereft of idiosyncrasy, as though “Default” was becoming the more prevalent option for soldiers. Was God or his pagan likenesses, though dead on Earth, living elsewhere, plucking the souls from the dead once their mortal bodies expired? Whatever was happening, MacBrady was sure of one thing: Malik had not cured death, not beyond the physical. For all of the RAM, memory, and regeneration, the soul, MacBrady concluded, was becoming lost in translation.
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