The Replicas: Efficiency is Overrated

If you've encountered data on the Magnate War, you know about the Magnate supersoldiers. Whether it's the small, almost childlike forms of the Syntha soldier-types, or the heavily built Eternal Dawn Combat Replicas, you know the propaganda. They're fast, tough, born with the skills that a Royal Marine needs years to hone, and know nothing else but war. They follow orders to a fault, they feel no remorse, they engage without hesitation, and they never suffer from the problems that more human soldiers do. One starts wondering why the Magnates lost several critical ground battles-it is difficult to comprehend, even with the information unclassified and freely available. The answer is, as normal, that systems designed for pure efficiency oftentimes find that they sacrifice flexibility, and end up far better on paper than on the battlefield. The Magnate War proved this, for both sides.

There are those who don't believe that the Series VIIs could actually have been that foolish, blundering into obvious traps and falling prey to the same ambushes over and over again. They rail against fiction for poor realism, while not realizing that if the VIIs had not been that foolish, they would have easily overpowered the League and possibly even ZOCU ground forces. Their design was built entirely to bias them for war-machines which would not need to be trained, which self-organized into command units and had a command chain that failed very gracefully. It also made them stupid. They were nonsentient, barely capable of learning, incapable of adaptation, and far too expensive. They were efficient soldiers, but to do this they sacrificed everything short of their narrow focus. It was, in fact, this obsession with perfection that created many of their weaknesses. The Eternal Dawn wished for a soldier who could not question orders, who could not feel compassion, which would never balk at a suicidal holding order or a high-risk operation. And in those areas, they were good at it. In defensive operations where the enemy had to attack them, they did beautifully, defeating numbers many times their size. Their extremely high morale made League attempts at psychological warfare questionable at best, against soldiers who never asked questions.

On the other hand, it was this focus on the failings of human or transhuman soldiers which led the Dawn to create a program so flawed. The primary benefit of the League's soldiery was that they were far cheaper-certainly frontline units with battle armor and extensive training could approach the cost of the VIIs, but never exceed it, and the militia that they often fought were far cheaper-and more importantly perfectly willing and capable to fight the very war they were worst at. The Eternal Dawn spent so much time correcting weaknesses in the baseline ideal that they created new ones, too blind to realize that these weaknesses in fact were the direct result of the strengths of a questioning, intelligent soldier.

It's interesting how the very same attitudes which created the Series VII have often created flawed programs, such as Haraway's transgenic upgrades, the Antioch Project, and numerous other projects which can be easily found with a simple search. On the other hand, far more flexible designs have succeeded, become popular, and thrived, such as ZOCU's mobile suit program, which has greatly influenced the nature of war.

But you don't just want to know the history and why they're failures, do you? You also want to know more about them, right?

All right. The Series I were just people. Flash-grown people with language and combat tactics burned into their brain, fed steroids in the womb, and exercised while they grew at an accelerated pace. They took a few years to mature, during which they learned at a prodigious rate, and ended up being cranked out with a head full of theory and an inability to "walk the walk". They didn't react as fast as a trained soldier with such a high-grade body should, even though they in theory should have been just as skilled. It was probably a side effect of the neural induction education systems used-they were intended to be a supplement to regular practice, not a full replacement for the entire thing, and it shows. If you're fighting a Series I, just fight them like any other incompetent with a high-grade body. Go for headshots, since their physiology is pretty hardcore, use a decent weapon-a hunting weapon won't cut it but any military-grade one will, and remember that in general, if you see them do something obviously blundering, that they really are that stupid. On the other hand, since the Is are identical to people like me, except without 60% of their body replaced with cyberware, they can learn. Half of the Dawn today were originally Series Is. Sure the neural induction creates some learning disabilities but when you come down to it they're still smart and learn fast.

The Series IIs, on the other hand, were a bit more specialized. They were actually less physically and mentally capable than the Is, since they were intended to be grown rapidly on-site with lower-quality systems. Series IIs were supposed to be grown in exowombs not designed to support high-grade genetic templates. On the other hand, improved neural induction meant that they were a lot better at fighting than the old Is, which roughly evened their quality out. A good Atlas could probably outwrestle a II, and without some of the more complex trauma tolerance mods they didn't take much killing, especially not from milspec weapons. Oh yeah, IIs were the start of the path that led to the VII, too. Their neural structures were heavily fixed, which gave them their skill but meant they weren't all that creative. They were still smart enough and could think laterally enough that they were pretty dangerous, but they rarely got old enough to start doing that, so in practice they were often just as dumb as Sevens.

IIIs to Vs were really just the same thing. They were heavily cybernetically augmented, genetically and pharmaceutically boosted, and needed specialized systems in their battle armor medical because of their differing biologies. They were pretty damn good-could wrestle an Atlas and win, faster-reacting than the old Is, could think just as well as the IIs, and most importantly the Dawn hadn't gotten stupid enough to try excising consciousness yet. Sure they started off uncreative and very straight-line in how they planned and achieved objectives, but give them a few years and they'd learn how to do better. Given their physical ability, they generally could last those few years. Honestly the Series V was probably the best replica design in the Magnate War, and it's pretty fortunate for all of us that the Magnates stopped building them because they wanted "efficiency" instead of an inefficient sentient mind which might defect or second-guess orders, even though that doesn't happen much in a disciplined military. To correct a flaw using biology instead of psychology, they created even larger, more glaring flaws. If you're dealing with one of them, bring buddies. They're good marksmen, and carry big guns-but they have to think and consciously react, so you'll want to hit them simultaneously from multiple directions to keep them from analyzing the situation, then get back into cover as fast as possible before they put a 18-mil exploding slug through your armor. Wear them down.

VIIs were when the Dawn were trying to deal with the minor problem that creating sentient beings bred for war was against our religion, and started trying to deal with it by making nonsentient beings bred for war. Everyone knows enough about that to tell you how much of a failure it was. They backpedaled when they made the Officer-types, which were actually capable of thinking and generally used a copied mindstate from a Dawnie veteran. You put two of them per Level II-that's 2 officers commanding 34 Sevens, and suddenly you got a unit that was a lot more flexible. On the other hand, if the officer wasn't good at disguising its position in the Level II, you could spot them pretty easily, and then it just took two sniper shots to take care of that problem. If they were, though, you suddenly had 36 VIIs who no longer had any problems with making absolutely stupid decisions because their programmers were too busy trying to build God than a better soldier.

The IX model, the latest one, is a piece of work though. Fully sentient, combat reflexes burned into its chipped brainstem, even better physically than the VII although not by much-if you're fighting one of those, just remember that they're not exactly cheap and you probably outnumber them. They've got good aim and don't suppress easy, but as long as you hit them from multiple directions and use heavier weaponry, you'll do fine, although expect to take losses unless you've got very good position.

-The author, Gunnery Sergeant (ret.) Eric Marcion, is a retired member of the Adharan Expeditionary Forces now serving with the League Joint Operations Command.