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Reality

Switch?

By Justin “Jud” HaywoodPublished 3 years ago Updated 3 years ago 7 min read
14
RAF Merlin Helicopter, Iran-Iraq Border, Desert Patrols, 2009, Telic 13, A Coy, 1 PWRR, 2 Pl, Alpha Multiple

In the Real; The Apocalypse?

I hesitate to use the word love, so often misused and quoted and if I’m honest with you that would be a far lesser description to use for how I felt about my experiential reality now.

To an average person, whatever the hell that is since the Switch, my chosen profession is the mark of insanity; a person who has lost their grip on the shared reality that we’re all currently experiencing as one disparate tribal unit.

Whatever, my reality is mine and mine alone and whilst I live my existence in whatever we’re calling our larger shared reality alongside many, my mind is my own; a palace of real and barely there imaginings which sometimes vividly come to life by immersing my soul in the sheer unadulterated pleasure of existing at this time, at this place, to be able to ply my violent trade.

There’s an old saying that expresses rough sympathy and utter disregard in one paradoxical form; “you can search for sympathy between shit and syphilis in the dictionary”.

This is what I am as you see, whether by natural genome or from the wetware, I am what I am now in this violent but necessary community, who’s expertise in life and death mark us out as “other” and something to be feared and misunderstood.

There’s a primal urge that’s encoded into every one of us.

Some know, some understand, some live the chaotic wonders of the here and now.

I believe that enough time has passed that I can put into practice what so many skilled craftsmen in many different guises over time have actively participated in teaching, instructing, demonstrating and then, the most fundamental rule of my line of work…….

……..you get distracted for an instant, b’bye dudes, good knowing you and maybe we’ll see each other in the reorg eh?

Better have an orders group and go over the lessons learned from my screw up; because the fight needs every one of us in all our flawed wonder.

The scenes of war, conflict, police actions and dictatorships; every petty, power hungry and terrified people who have understood the true horrors that coexist alongside the absolute knowledge that all is right if viewed at 1000 times faster than the real.

Easy to get lost down there, easy to let the Maelstrom take you to the precipice and demand of you your acquiescence in return for what we can do, which makes the normals just another fucking species trying to get to the top of their little cesspit of biological incubators.

Harsh?

Yeah it is but you know what?

The universe, whether this is Nirvana or Heaven, whether we’re all stuck in a loop of compressed space-time or if we really are coexisting in a multitude of different universes, doesn’t care one bit about your opinion or mine for that matter.

The situation exists; whatever this is we’re living it and that means that all forms of conflict are being played out on a strata of levels, from simple domestic arguments up to the next door neighbour tribe getting obliterated into component molecules, quarks and gluons by some sort of legacy hardware that had appeared from its lair and had unleashed every one of its 50 integrated hunter-killers.

Fuck knows where it came from and to be honest it’s my role in the section to pay attention to that sort of shit and if it hadn’t been for the K-9 unit’s upgraded sensors it could have had serious repercussions for me and the Patrol.

Mistakes happen, they just do.

You can’t control variables of the real world down to cubits of quantum biological processing time, but you can install enough BioWare to give you fair to even odds against a vastly superior force.

The automated weapons system had crept out of its lair and as the semi-autonomous munitions started their high arc I questioned for the umpteenth time why I always desired this thing that we all lived for?

The calm but definite tones of the patrol commander can be heard through the net and the pre-programmed/trained responses kick in and once more I’m back to the control suite that isn’t just added to my original biological form, but has become a symbiotic relationship based on mutual benefit and mutual defence.

Half the Patrol’s individual weapons are brought to bear on the crablike automaton and without any vocal orders a concentrated barrage of seeker rounds sought the incoming rounds and destroyed them mid-flight in front of us.

The armour soaked up the worst of it but fuuuuuck it stung, as molecular sized pieces of smartware attempted to burrow through my hardened carapace and into my biosystem’s control code.

They won’t make it of course but hey, welcome to the Apocalypse right?

The angry wasps of death are done, everyone’s smoking slightly from the heat transfer and associated damage and every other operator is changing mags with their usual deftness and lack of attention, their minds still in Tac-Time and their implanted glands boosted to Contact Awareness speeds.

The damage taken, seeing the pureness in life and death and what comes next, intertwined in a way that becomes what some call religion, their numbers dwindling but always present, just one of the tribes who were strewn to the solar winds and told to get on with it because no-one was coming to save us.

They’re angry: the species who had previously shared our area of operations were angry.

And us?

We’re staying alive as long as we’re able to, it’s what we do, and we’ve had far longer to learn our craft within Tac-Time and out in the Zones, running through the drills until the pattern recognition bio-software embeds correctly.

The Patrol’s second in command, the 2 I/C, goes the rounds over the net and checks off the alerts that his battle-space monitor has flagged up, tagged and then dismissed or put aside for later study and absorption into the hyper awareness of consciousness that Tac-Time is.

We found it long ago now and somewhere that we don’t really talk about that much anymore.

What once destroyed our regiment is now a distant memory, to be viewed and dissected, analysed for lessons learned and then woven into the updated “Tactics, Techniques and Protocols” immediate action drills that our forebears had once had to remember with just their own fallible genome.

The original event or series of catastrophic events that caused the Apocalypse just doesn’t matter anymore.

We exist to seek down the knowledge of why we came to be the beings that we have become whilst perpetually coming across others who just don’t want us to exist in their corner of the now healed biosphere.

Even we didn’t truly understand what had come to pass.

We knew that we were soldiers once, part of a regiment that in turn was part of a multi-layered system of hierarchical control and then…...we’re not sure.

We have access to those parts of our system but it’s encrypted in a long dead bio-code because when has it ever been that easy eh?

The fragments are the equivalent of clues or breadcrumbs or whatever you prefer to call the trails that we now trace across this much changed land.

We are the Tigers and we have become very good at not being dead and if you’d like, you can come try out for an upgraded form of existence, one that our forebears would have lusted after within the battle-spaces of this long changed reality.

We welcome any who also look for the knowledge we seek and ask only for respect and information, for which we will trade our long guarded data and induct you into the ways of our tribe, which as a collective will teach you our ways and then leave you to your Universal Choices.

Your Choices are to fight through the contacts of this version of reality, or to succumb to an uncaring universe.

“Contact, contact, contact”

What used to take the speed of sound now happens as fast as our supplemented systems can arrange.

“Two section, one hundred, top floor east corner, multi launcher type, rapiiiddd FIRE”

The pathways that meld with our old selves literally glow as the heat transfer units spin up and start operating in Contact time.

Laters, see you on the Re-Org.

Justin Haywood 2021 (Edited August 2021)

fact or fiction
14

About the Creator

Justin “Jud” Haywood

Justin “Jud” Haywood is creating Stories about BPD/EUPD, the Military and life.

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