Polity Agent

The gun clattered to the floor and a woman with cropped brown hair stepped out from behind the pillar, her arms held out from her sides, gloved hands wide open. Thorn considered stunning her anyway, but the shattered body in the pool told him all he needed to know. Aphran’s voice, issuing from the telefactor, confirmed this:

‘Freyda, I take it you are not quite prepared to die for the cause?’

5

The Sparkind are an elite ECS military force, given a name derived from the Spartans (citizens of an ancient Greek city who were noted for their military prowess, austerity and discipline), though they cannot trace their ancestry back so far. Sparkind are rather the direct descendants of the Special Forces that came into being during the Earth-bound wars towards the end of the second millennium: the Special Boat Service, the Special Mr Service, Navy SEALS and the like. Candidates for the Sparkind must first serve five years in conventional military or police service. Their ensuing training program, both in reality and virtuality, is not designed to weed out the physically unable, because with today’s boosting and augmentation technologies, anyone can be physically able. But a certain strength of mind is sought: will, a toughness of spirit and a degree of wisdom. A Sparkind has to know what he, she or it is fighting for, has to be able to make life and death decisions, and has to be trusted with weapons capable of annihilating entire cities. Operating in four-person units, usually consisting of two Golem and two humans, they have been involved in some of the most violent and dangerous actions the Polity has ever faced. But the Sparkind, though an elite fighting force, are usually never the first in. Which brings me to the ECS agent, or Polity Agent…

— From her lecture ‘Modern Warfare’ by EBS Heinlein

The latest eruption dumped a layer of ash an inch thick, pocked with large spatters of cooling magma. Blegg stepped down off one of the ceramal beams glued in a gridwork across the Atheter artefact, stooped, and brushed away more ash. The cutting machines inevitably left swirls of stone stuck all over the surface since they had been programmed to hold back from actually digging into the object itself. However, some stone flaked away by itself to reveal translucent green crystal underneath. Blegg considered what all this meant.

This green substance was some form of memcrystal similar to that used in the Polity today. The most basic form of memcrystal — the sort that did not use crystal-interstice quantum processing, or etched-atom processing as it was sometimes called—could still store huge amounts of information. Just a piece of such a memcrystal the size of the last joint of a man’s thumb could model the function of and store the memories of a human mind over a period of twenty-five years—though those who possessed memplants would upload more often than that just to keep their Soulbank copy up to date, thereby freeing up space in the crystal implanted inside their heads. If only of that kind, what could a single mass of crystal this size potentially contain? The mind of a god? The stock market transactions of an entire galactic civilization? Alien porn tapes and family albums? Atheter blogs?