Hidden Empire (Empire 2)

"Wrong sci-fi story," said Mingo. "This one turns it into beer."

"What if you step wrong?" asked Cole. "Does it keep you from breaking a leg?"

"It offers some protection when you walk at normal speeds," said Mingo. "When you run and jump and leap, then you have to be as careful as you normally would doing that stuff. Only you're leaping four times as far, mile after mile. So yeah, it's protecting you some."

Cole looked around from one to another. "So whose baby is this?"

Mingo grinned.

"You invented it yourself?"

"I'm on the team. Combat consultant. I got them to make these three prototypes and let me field-test them with the best soldiers that I knew."

"I'm hurt that I wasn't in the A-team," said Cole.

"Well, see, you are—for the new stuff," said Mingo. "What you just saw, we've been doing that for a year now. It takes a long time to get through the learning curve—when you first start out doing anything other than trudging along, you tend to fall over a lot. Now we've added something new that makes it even harder to learn. Only now it's brains, not skills, so we thought of you."

"I'm flattered," said Cole. "I think."

"There's your problem," said Mingo. "Second-guessing everything." He led Cole over to one of the other cars—a Honda Accord, which was probably Arty's, since he always talked about how you couldn't kill one with a tornado. The trunk popped open and there were a bunch of helmets.

"I get it," said Cole. "You do all the same stuff, only now you do it on your head."

Mingo handed out helmets to all of them.

"One size fits all?" asked Cole.

"It sizes itself. If you feel a slight tingle as it adjusts, don't mind it. It's synching to your brain waves."

Cole laughed.

"He laughs, but it's no joke," said Arty. "It's calibrating your eye movements and then finding what part of your brain is controlling them. It learns to recognize your eye movements from the brain waves alone."

"So train it," said Mingo. "When you've got it on. Like this." Mingo stood close to Cole, so he could see, in the darkness, everything Mingo did.

"Mode. Adapt," he said. "Command. Go." And then he clicked his tongue. "Okay, what I just did was put it into the mode to learn a new soldier's pattern. Then I told it that the 'go' command—like pressing enter on a keyboard—was that click. So watch my eyes now."

Mingo clicked his tongue twice, then a pause, then twice again. He looked up and to the right, then down to the right, then up to the left, down to the right, down to the left, down to the right.

"See, you don't use straight up or straight down for commands, or straight left or right," said Arty, "because you've got to do that all the time in combat. And if you do look up to the right

, for instance, but you do it slowly, with your head following the movement, it knows not to obey it as a command, because you're just looking up and to the right. See?"

"No," said Cole, "but I have a feeling that I will."

With his own helmet on, Cole got the training pattern right the first try. Then, with the helmet active, he began to see what these commands did.

Up right brought up a display in front of his eyes showing vital statistics on eight different soldiers. "The first one is yourself," Mingo explained.

"I'm happy to report that I have full health. If it ever falls too low, can I replenish it by inserting another couple of quarters?"

"In combat," said Mingo, "it also monitors the number of shots you've fired and tells you when you're going to need to reload soon."

"Does it tell me when I need to pee?" asked Cole.

"Only if you're wearing a catheter," said Mingo.

"Or a condom," said Load.