“Your man Blades is a total wipe.” This was old news to Brazier. Designate Cestus’s recruitment into Project Hardwired had been a rocky one and the man’s base personality had been erased. Whoever Captain Malcolm Weir of the Third Battalion, Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment had been in his life before Project Hardwired, he was gone now, replaced by a personality construct created by A.I. mainframe in charge of maintaining and managing all the Prime Designates of the ultra classified governmental branch.
And the Abraxas-1 system had done an amazing job at creating one of the coldest, most efficient killing machines Scott Brazier had ever seen in action. Designate Cestus was the golden boy of Project Hardwired and Gordon Kiesling’s star. Whenever Congress came snooping around to see how the billions of taxpayer dollars had been spent, Director Kiesling rolled out footage of Designate Cestus in action: breaking up riots, assassinating heads of foreign states, destroying terror cells, and taking on all the dirty wet work the politicians in DC wanted done quickly, quietly, and discreetly. With a hundred percent success rating, the cyborg had killed more people than small pox.
Designate Cestus was unique…his mind a product of binary brain-surgery and computer calculations.
The other eleven Prime Designates were an entirely different story. Each of them still retained their original personalities and memories—they were all essentially the same men they had been before they joined Project Hardwired. Of course, all of them had been hard-line connected to the Abraxas Array and could be taken over by the system at any point, but for the most part, they acted on their own.
Height continued, “Magnet Boy there and the others aren’t fans of his. I think he reminds them that they’re all just one step away from being glorified robots. I know I wouldn’t like it one bit.”
“And what can you tell me about Gauss?”
“Magnet Boy?” Height chuckled, firing a conspiratorial wink back at the smaller civilian. “He’s just an asshole.”
*****
Uncomfortable seats and ever-present, mind-numbing heat aside, the remaining hour long ride turned out to be rather illuminating for Scott Brazier. Surprisingly, Sergeant Height revealed himself to be a vast source of knowledge when it came to not only being on a mission in exceedingly hostile territory, but also in the practical side of working in close proximity with the Prime Designate Units from Project Hardwired. The blustery marine and his battalion had been on loan to Hardwired since the program’s inception, and they had been part of nearly every large-scale operation assigned to the cyborgs throughout Europe, Asia and Africa. All told, Brazier wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the soldier had logged more combat time with the Designates than all the current engineers combined.
Hell, the man had even been around for the early missions with the earliest Primes…he’d been there to help clean-up the devastation caused during Designate Siege’s first, and only, assignment. They’d been able to blame the Fukushima Daiichi incident on a tsunami caused by the Tōhohu Earthquake, but it was the worst disaster in the newly formed super soldier project’s history, and one that almost resulted in it being mothballed by the bigwigs up on Capitol Hill.
It was also the main reason why civilian techs like Brazier and Talborg were sent out on what had otherwise been military operations. Having a couple of eggheads in the field with the ability to shut down one of the temperamental human killing machines was a very small concession for Executive Director Kiesling to agree to.
Swatting at what seemed to have been the millionth mosquito to feast upon his tender flesh, Brazier wasn’t quite as convinced as to just how small that concession had been. He much preferred the first few months of his time at Hardwired when the only danger he faced was carpal-tunnel syndrome.
Spending a weekend in ‘beautiful’ Afghanistan was not high on the mid-Westerner’s list of preferred vacation spots. If anything, Kabul fell somewhere under the ice planet of Hoth and only one position higher than San Diego during ComiCon.
A sigh of relief summoned from somewhere very deep inside Brazier’s being burst free in response to the mission’s military head, Lieutenant Arias, announcing their arrival at Camp Eggers. The LT’s brusque Yonkers accent barked out a series of orders over the radio headsets every member of the strike force wore over their left ears. Although the assignment was a joint operation between Project Hardwired and the US Marine Corps, and had been signed off by every level of the government up to and including the President of the United States himself, the details were top secret and not to be shared with anyone at the base not already in the ‘know.’ As far as the base’s soldiers checking the team in through the heavily fortified security checkpoint were concerned, the twenty-man unit had been assigned to help set-up a new communications relay for the new Afghan government.