Angel of Death

[stardust47]

Battleship Essex, Dublin System
September 1st, 819 A.S.

James Barett was reading a book. It was about the concept of transhumanism- humans becoming, as it were, more than human. Whether it be living longer, extending one's own abilities or something else entirely, it had been happening for a long time. It had started with clothes, the book had said. Early humans had more body hair than a modern man, but as they lost hair, winters became harder to deal with. Clothes were, the book said, an extension of the way a human body naturally keeps warm. There was a long history following the same pattern- swords, telephones, computers, starships- all extensions of natural abilities.
The next chapter was about increased longevity. Humans, read James, have always been living longer. The steadily increasing life expectancies had started to steady around the early 21st century AD, eventually stagnating. The reason for this, the author reasoned, was the resources involved in caring for the elderly. It quoted statistics, saying that, on average, it costs seven and a half thousand Sirius Credits (818 estimate) per year to care for an elderly man from retirement at 65 to death at an average of 90. There was a picture of an old man's medicine cabinet- many different kinds of drugs, increasing as the patient got older. If an average man in Liberty decided he wanted to live longer than the usual 80-90 years, not only would he have to take too many drugs for his faltering sight to distinguish, but also his insurance premium (or, in some cases, direct medical bills) would get higher and higher, until he and his family could not afford. Bretonia's National Health Service had gotten around problems such as these by simply refusing to keep people alive past a certain age, leading them to the same financial problems as the man in Liberty. In the end, the author had written, it was simply too difficult to achive immortality by biological means.
The next chapter invoked a common staple of badly-written popular fiction; using technology to outsmart Death. However, the book used most of the same fiction as a warning against using technology- replacing human emotion with cold machine logic would eat away at the things that made humans what they are. And anyway, it was illegal in most of Sirius and even where there wasn't much of a 'law' to speak of, people were still superstitious and would band together to destroy anything they deemed to be 'evil', even by their standards.
The following chapter saw the other side of the 'man meets machine' argument- technology is a vital part of the lives of nearly everyone in Sirius. In fact, an alien visitor to a typical city, using Planet Manhattan as an example, would remark that rather than having their own free will, human beings are controlled either by black polymer boxes attached to the side of the head or by two wires that connect into the brain through the ears and control them via audio. There was also a snide remark about starships being mistaken for the dominant species in Sirius, but it was a joke that had stopped being funny before it was even about starships.
There was a point to this long rambling, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler's mind.

Junction Base, Kansas System

What Catherine Herstal was about to do was illegal nearly everywhere, but that didn't matter. (Oh, I remember now! But if I told you, that would spoil the whole thing.)
'Angel of Death' was the codename for a highly secret experiment by the Liberty Government (Who else?) that involved creating a fusion of man and machine. It had started by adding cyborg elements to a human test subject- enhanced reflexes, eyesight and connecting the brain directly to a ship. The tests up to this point had been huge successes- the subject performed well in combat training, outclassing LNSEALS and Delta Force veterans in the process. But when the subject's brain had been linked directly to the Neural Net, the subject had difficulty adapting to the limitless knowledge that was stored there. Difficulty meaning going insane.
At first, the subject (different retellings vary on whether it was a man or a woman) had been simply distracted, going off on long journeys along the information highways, displaying typical behaviour for people who regurlarly used the Neural Net, whether for recreation, academic research or research for work. But when the subject had been given complete control of a battleship (against the will of the scientists- the high command had pushed for a 'mass-produced' version in time for a potential war against Rheinland, just before the Nomad Wars had kicked into full swing) and performed better than a crew of thousands, the Navy had started to worry. They ordered the project cancelled in case the research fell into enemy hands, which meant killing the subject. Needless to say, they were faced with an impossible task.
The subject escaped into Zone-21, where they were faced with an opposing force too massive for even a battleship. The subject had activated the self-destruct systems, killing themselves and several other personnel.
Officially, the explosion was blamed on the Order.
Catherine had uncovered much of the story from some old drunk on Yanagi Depot who claimed to have been part of the project. After making some calls, she had found substantial evidence that the subject's consciousness had survived the explosion, detached from its original body and looking for a new one.
What Catherine Herstal was about to do was repeat the experiment.

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