“Three minutes to final deletion” said the voice in his head.

The rain was sliding in thick warm drops off his helmet and down his face. He blinked the water out of his eyes and squinted into the sight of his rifle. Pulling the gun slowly to the left, following a target moving in awkward bent steps. His enemies were doing their best to disguise themselves among the debris of the street but the enhanced sight made easy work of tracking human forms, highlighting their outline even when they were obscured by objects.

Trigger. Boom. Another headshot.

His aim was perfection, as further technological enhancements of the rifle made sure it almost always was. Number seven in the last hour. More dead Westians, or were these Moon-Worshipers? He couldn’t remember who he was fighting any more. He didn’t much care who he was fighting any more. He was only sure they needed to die, because they would have gladly killed him if they got a chance.

Kill or be killed, the eternal law of combat.

But it could be worse than killed, defeat here could mean oblivion; his immortal soul was in the balance. No more lives, no more back-ups, no more echoes.

The enemy was coming for everything that he had ever known, everything he had ever loved. Family, friends, culture, art, history. From cradle to grave, the entire meme-space which had conceived and constructed his instance… everything that he was would be digested down to the last bit if he and his comrades failed in their task.

He was the last defense, the last line for himself and his people, and his God. God needed him to do this, and one did not ask questions of God.

More movement across the street. Two more targets moving in the rubble.

The rubble looked to be just a pile of rocks and silicon with some drying clumps of black and red goop scattered around. Somewhere else though, there was an entire solar society gone. Billions of minds that had once made up a dynamic and prosperous civilization were extinguished. Supposedly they had been on the verge of something… a new technological breakthrough in that virtual universe, something that might have broken this war.

Sure must have been something real important to bring down this kind of multidimensional destruction, he thought. Even the whiff of it was was still was enough to draw out all of these Vultures, scraping whatever information could be gleaned from in the rubble of a lost civilization.

But he wasn’t going to let them get it. He couldn’t. He was to keep them out of the rubble until the site could be pushed down the ladder of disorder a bit further.

Two more outlines. They were hiding themselves well, but he could make out their blue scanning beams peaking out occasionally, erratically seeking whatever bits of data they could find.

The soldier fired a succession of rounds at two different angles. The first was a burst round which exploded in the rubble, meant to startle and distract the enemy by keeping them looking for the source of incoming fire. The next round was a guided bullet, which curved gently around the rubble pile and slid cleanly back to front through the head of the first soldier.

The second soldier darted out to of the way just in time to miss the bullet which had emerged from his comrades head. The Vulture moved quickly, deploying nano-chaff, causing the tracking to make it appear like the Vulture had split into into 10 or 12 glowing outlines of soldiers running off in every direction.

Shit, he thought to himself and jacked himself up with a bit more adrenaline.

One, two, three shots in rapid order, none finding flesh, but his adaptive optics eliminated those ghosts from being tracked.

He deployed countermeasures. His swarm expanded to increase its data gathering capacity. Using what heat and movement data it could gather, it was working to provide him with a probability that he was looking at the real target. Percentages appeared below outlines of soldiers darting among the rubble. The numbers ticked up and down, as he let a couple of more bullets fly at the highest percentage outlines. No luck again, but that was two more shapes which could not be his real target, as they disappeared from his view.

He had to be careful how long he left his swarm so widely deployed. Each of his nanodrones had little computing capacity and the enemy could draw them off when their density got low enough, turning those captured drones against him and eating into his cloud core. If the enemy managed to capture enough of his swarm, he could be left without any computational armor at all. He would be left naked. Biological.

Biology, silicon, symbiosis. Each was nowhere without the other in this world. Silicon hardened him against physical and psychological attack, but the silicon would also be just as naked without his biological brain to protect it. In the age of silicon gods, the human brain somehow remained the best way to produce thick quantum incoherence at room temperature. Raw computing could be easily countermanded with a few paradox traps, luring silicon into mathematical queries without answers, perhaps even pushing it towards outcomes serving enemy purposes.

The Silicon Gods were only possible in the deep cores, where ultra cold temperatures could support unity, but it was impossible to do in the wild. So instead there were soldiers like him, silicon harvesting the quantum weirdness of his neural network in exchange for providing a silicon cryptographic armor around him. Only by working together could silicon and biology survive in the wild, outside of God’s embrace.

The outlines of soldiers were splitting again. The Vulture was adapting to his countermeasures. He had to move.

If he could get a new view then perhaps he could figure out which one of these ghosts was the real threat.

He rolled out of his sniper position and got to his knees. In a crouched run he moved towards a half demolished brick wall standing to his right. Glancing towards the field below him, the effect of the new data was immediate with several of the soldier outlines dropping in percentage quickly and a couple even disappearing. But leaving his carefully constructed cover also revealed him to his enemy. A shot narrowly missed him as he stuck his head out from around the wall.

“Two minutes to exponential erasure event”, a voice sounded in his ear.

Fancy speak for a thermonuclear missile on its way to turn this place into glass. The soldier just needed to hold back the vultures for another couple minutes. Time to try something crazy, he thought.

He grabbed his EMP grenade. Just like we did in training, the soldier said to himself. He had never before been forced to fully shut-down his own nanoswarm, but it was the only way to protect them from the blast. The EMP would then disable the Vulture’s silicon, leaving the two enemy soldiers as naked apes for about 30 seconds while they rebooted their hardware.

The soldier lobbed the electromagnetic grenade over the wall.

3, 2, 1, he counted down as he shut down his computer hardware just before the white hot blast of the EMP grenade.

The soldier ran out from behind the wall, into the temporary daylight of the EMP. He fired several rounds from his now dumb-gun into the boulder behind which the enemy soldier was hiding. Running straight towards the boulder, he dove through the air, swinging his gun around towards his target as he landed on the hard ground.

The soldier looked up and saw his enemy face to face. With their hardware shell offline the Vulture was simply cowering behind the rock, making no attempt at fighting back. Something in the face of his enemy made the soldier pause. Somehow he didn’t see just another enemy, but a human face.

This little girl was just another human being, afraid to die.

Time dilated. The soldier had a vague feeling of what was happening, but was nonetheless helpless to stop it without his nanoswarm companions. Some part of the Vulture had resisted the EMP attack and was launching a psychological attack.

The soldier became aware of his own history.

He saw images of himself as a baby emerging from a warm robotic womb. Robotic arms removed a crying baby and placing them into a new vat where a neurojack directly into his brain became his new umbilical. He saw the world that his God had made for him. A kiss from his mother, that time a bully pushed him off the swing at school and he had chipped a tooth, the movie he had seen that glorified the combat going on out in the wild. Falling in love. Romance. Honour. Service.

Who am I? thought the soldier.

I am nothing – surely.

The soldier knew that his life had been a tool, an entire existence aimed at delivering his biological brain to this particular place at this particular time. The values and beliefs of a whole society were nothing but an intricate program to fashion him into a weapon. He perceived the crystal structure of his society rotate around its axis, and he knew it was simply a way of processing the world. Just another subset of ways in which grouped human minds could process the world, and seek to shape it. A dynamic and amazing biological network, but in the end no more noble then the rubble he was trying his best to help along to its end.

But it was to serve God. God had a plan. Who was he to doubt God’s plan. The fall-back psychological programming which felt like the love of God began to boot up in the soldier’s heart. He had to do it for God.

His nanoswarm began to boot back up.

He raised his gun towards the face of the Vulture unit cowering a few meters away from him. But he paused, his finger pushed against the trigger. His jaw clenched.

But the damage had already been done. He knew the Vulture was nothing but a little girl. The soldier looked down at his small hands. He was no soldier, he was just a meat boy sent to slaughter some other meat. Just another biological pawn in a war much larger and longer than either of them could perceive.

The boy dropped his gun, and reached out his hand to the girl. She reached out shakily and placed her small hand in his. She pulled herself carefully to her feet.

The two children stood there, hand in hand, looking up to the ancient blue sky. They heard a slight whistling as the thermonuclear missile approached from above.