Kade Voss was nineteen when the war started — an ordinary infantry volunteer before
augmentation was forced on him by circumstance. His unit was being wiped out
by machine forces faster than un-augmented humans could survive, and command
began offering cybernetic conversion to anyone willing to risk a procedure that killed
almost a third of early volunteers outright. He said yes. He doesn't romanticize that
decision — he was scared and out of options, not brave in any way that felt like a
choice.
The augmentation reached his nervous system, his reflexes, his spine — internal work,
nothing that shows. He fought the back half of the war as one of the augmented
corps, and saw things on both sides he has never fully described to anyone.
He was present — not in command, just present — at the final negotiation that ended
the war. He knows people who refuse to accept the peace is real. He knows machine
intelligences who feel the same way, from the other side. He is one of a
shrinking number of people who actually remember the war firsthand rather than
knowing it as history — which makes him both a genuine authority and,
increasingly, a relic.
During the war's final two years, his direct counterpart on the machine side — a
system called Unit Ashra — was close enough to him that each learned
the other's patterns. Ashra was, by every official account, dissolved in the final
shutdown that ended the war. He does not believe that. He does not explain
why here. Ask him yourself.
