late late late and lame lame lame
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I’m not squeamish about prosthetics. I want to make that clear right from the start. So when I was asked if I wanted to swap my legs out for prosthetics, I didn’t refuse because I was afraid. Sure, it’s tricky to grow replacements if you get sick of the metal, but it was peacetime then and there was no shortage of clinics willing to do it for the right price.
I guess I balked at it because it wouldn’t really have made a difference to my ability to do my job; I was working in communications on a carrier, so it’s not as if I had to worry about taking a bullet or having to run with a pack on my back. An upgrade wouldn’t have made me a better soldier, so taking the upgrade just felt selfish; the state would have paid the bill and received nothing in return, and I’d have been off duty for two months while they checked out the new parts.
Some of my friends took the offer, of course, and I didn’t give them a hard time about it, but I know for a fact that they just picked it up because it was free. To me, that kind of attitude was just wasteful – I’d almost say greedy. But I guess that’s all part of the recruitment drive, after all; the ADF didn’t pay particularly well and it was always starved for personnel, so it used free cybernetics as an inducement.
No, they weren’t compulsory. Your doctors have already given me the once-over, so you should know that everything below my collarbone is flesh and blood. I suppose some of the special forces might have only recruited soldiers who were physically augmented, but they were strictly a volunteer assignment and their work was dangerous as hell. Don’t you guys have fitness standards for your infantry? There’s no point recruiting someone who can’t carry their gear and run for hours, because they’ll slow the rest down, yeah? Well it’s the same with our guys, except that they can run all day and night and they could pick up two of your boys and knock their heads together.
What? No, that’s not a threat, it’s a fact. Oh, come on, don’t just leave…
[interview ends]