When the Wyzhñyñy arrived at distant Tagus, few people on Terra had heard of Doctor Eric Padilla, humanity's pioneer in cyborg engineering. There weren't many experts. A one-handed man could count them on his fingers. But the technology had survived in old training cubes, and tangentially in the fields of neurosurgery and pseudo-organic engineering. In fact, given a two-week training intensive, numerous neurosurgeons and roboticists, working together, could function as cyborg engineers.
Unfortunately there were no such training intensives. Cyborg engineering had been proscribed by law, and abandoned by universities, and by science in general. Such thorough abandonment would have been impossible before the Troubles, but the drive to innovate, to search deeply and build daringly, had faded during that period. The Troubles: nearly a century of martial law, chaos, terrorism, and intermittent, cautiously tailored warfare. A period during which distrust of government, of corporate greed, of innovation and activism had all intensified. The result had been a combination of technological and business conservativism, and social liberalism. Over subsequent centuries these persisted, though somewhat changed in their expression.
There had also been growth toward a spirituality relatively free of boundaries and mostly of creeds. A growth abetted by the emigration of many unhappy sectarians to the stars. In the new spiritualism, the main approach to dogma lay in pacifism and human rights doctrines. And even these were mostly not zealous. Zeal was suspect. Combative idealism had become much less common. It had served its purpose. The public cynicism it helped sire had largely dissolved political, racial, and ethnic chauvinism in the Sol System, leaving occasional dull scums of prejudice and scattered, hard and bitter nodes of hatred, like social gallstones, to dissolve gradually, one by one, without surgery.
In the process, the cynicism too had faded.
Meanwhile, pacifism and the long peace had minimized and marginalized the military. Even military fiction had become socially disrespectable: a ghetto genre with a low profile. The child Eric Padilla had grown up in Denver, in the Colorado Prefecture. He'd been part of that ghetto. By age ten, his favorite reading had been regimental histories, novels set in historical wars, and especially yarns in which aliens invaded the human worlds. He rented them from private libraries, or bought them on the Ether, or borrowed them from friends, hiding them in his pocket reader.
His mother would have been prostrated, had she known. But she didn't snoop into his activities; unconsciously she feared what she might find. His father knew, and had reluctantly supported young Eric's habit, while trying to keep his wife from learning of it, and hoping his son would outgrow it.
Which in a sense Eric did. At age thirteen he announced to his parents an interest in neurosurgery. At the same time his grades surged from decent to excellent, allowing his selection into prep school, which was quite demanding. Three years later he qualified for university, and begged his parents to send him. University educations were expensive, but with loans and a scholarship, they'd managed.
They hadn't known his motive. His reading had stimulated the belief that aliens would in fact invade Terra someday. To his young mind it seemed inevitable; occasionally he even dreamt of it. And from this and playing war games, he'd developed a powerful interest in the concept of the military cyborg.
In fact, he intended to build one! In an era of peace and technological stagnation, he was a century and a half ahead of his time.
When he left for university, he knew that to be a neurosurgeon, one must first be an MD. But he hadn't realized how little latitude his scholarship left for courses outside premedicine. Over three years he managed to schedule only two courses in pseudo-organic engineering—courses focused on industrial applications and information technology. And having no interest in an actual medical career, he found himself impatient, and in danger of losing his scholarship.
All of that was to change. At a war-game "convention," in an old warehouse in Cheyenne, he met an officer from the small, low-profile Bureau of Commonwealth Defense. Colonel Roger Kaytennae sometimes visited such conventions, where he might quietly talk an especially promising youth into a military career.
Kaytennae had himself grown up in North America, in the Arizona Prefecture. Eventually he became director of the Defense Bureau's War Games Section, where the army prepared in virtual reality for what they believed was inevitable alien contact, quite possibly hostile. Impressed by young Padilla's intelligence, vision and dedication, Kaytennae hired him as a civilian intern, where he could observe his talent, adaptability, and judgement. Within a few weeks the colonel had decided, and contrived a scholarship for his young, fellow American, dipping into the Bureau's discretionary funds.
He then enrolled Eric in Kunming University. There, with Kaytennae's participation, a professor of neurological physiology, and another in pseudo-organics, tailored a curriculum for the young man. This put him close to his military sponsor, and far from his parents, who were relieved if uneasy about their son's education being financed by the government.
His scholastic performance proved exemplary, and the colonel was soon satisfied that the young man's potential was as good as he'd hoped. Kaytennae then approached a wealthy manufacturer he'd cultivated, and got him to finance several scholarships. From the ranks of games enthusiasts, he'd already recruited several youths to fill those scholarships. Because Eric Padilla would need skilled collaborators and assistants.
At age thirty-seven, Doctor Eric Padilla personally and successfully removed the living central nervous system—the CNS—of one Carlos O'Brien. O'Brien was a thirty-year-old ex-construction worker who'd lost both arms and his eyesight in an explosion. Removed and transferred his CNS live, into a bioelectronic interface unit (BEIU, or "bottle") where it underwent hormonal detraumatization. Then he successfully installed the "activated" bottle into a newly designed prototype infantry combat servo. When fitted with the activated bottle, the servo provided a ruggedly formidable, prototype fighting machine.
This epochal operation was carried out with great care for secrecy. For the human rights movement had gone full circle, and begun to eat its own tail: to protect human rights, it undertook to deny them.
Normally Padilla was calm, unflappable, but he found the operation nerve-wracking. Not because of any possible leak and criminal prosecution; he gave that scenario almost no attention. But because neither he nor anyone else had ever performed such an operation on a live human being, and no one knew with certainty what the result would be. Of necessity, the servo's inputs to the overall sensorium were extremely complex, and though analogous, were quite unlike any a human CNS had experienced before. And especially troublesome, the procedure was not reversible. The human core of the cyborg could not be put back in its original body.
To function effectively for an extended period, the CNS requires an integrated set of inputs from its new body. Inputs producing a broad spectrum of information and responses that include, among other things, esthetics, orientation, discomfort, even a modified sense of pain. In fact, pretty much the same spectrum provided by human bodies. Padilla and his collaborators had spent a great deal of time and care in designing, testing, and fine-tuning the servo's quasi-organic nervous system, along with the manifold neural connections of the bioelectronic interface.
But the tests had used devices, not the human brain. There was no way Padilla could know, really know, how Carlos O'Brien would find life as a cyborg.
That had been 157 years before the capture of Tagus Cove. Carlos O'Brien had wakened to life as a cyborg and found it mainly interesting, not traumatic. Certainly it was far better than his brief experience without arms or vision. Also it gave him a job—helping test the prototype. And the series of prototypes that followed, for if O'Brien could never wear a human body again, the bottle that held his CNS could be removed and installed in other servos. The more sensitive procedure had been installing the CNS into the bioelectronic interface unit, attaching pseudo-organic neuroconnectors to biological nerves.
Then someone blew the whistle. The Respect Movement was outraged, and bottling was made illegal. And of course, careers were ruined, among them Eric Padilla's.
Eventually the Wyzhñyñy arrived in the fringe of Commonwealth space, Henry Morgan's savanted message reached Kunming, and the news galvanized the Commonwealth. (Changing it forever, though just then no one gave "forever" much attention.) At that time, five manned servos existed, all secret. Five actual manned servos, but many virtual, generated in the computers that drove the Commonwealth military's virtual reality trainers.
Five manned servos, none of them military. That would quickly change. The Office of Industrial Mobilization would see to it.