Free Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 7: March 2014 by Mike Resnick;C. J. Cherryh;Steve Cameron;Robert Sheckley;Martin L. Shoemaker;Mercedes Lackey;Lou J. Berger;Elizabeth Bear;Brad R. Torgersen;Robert T. Jeschonek;Alexei Panshin;Gregory Benford;Barry Malzberg;Paul Cook;L. Sprague de Camp Page A

mostly on neural control, so I could change the display with a thought. I switched it to tactical map mode, and I watched as the green dots all slowed to a stop. The tally showed twenty-eight suits: twenty-seven PBM, one CMM. The other fourteen suits tallied as not responding.
    My whole platoon gone! Over half could be recovered so their families would have something to bury, but only if the Duke somehow survived.
    What to do now? I could single out one suit and bring it to me; but one might not do the job. A suit is pretty tough against another suit. I might need four or five to finish me off right. Controlling that many individual suits could take a lot of effort and time, so I took the easy way out. “All suits, accept new re n dezvous coordinates as follows.” I took my own coordinates from the suit’s comp, projected forward from my rate of travel, and sent the result. “All suits, resume program.” And the green dots started converging on my course. When they reached me, I could isolate the few I needed, and then reset the rendezvous coo r dinates back to the Duke . It would delay pickup; but my belief in pickup was dropping to the same level as my belief in my own chances: damn near zero.
    Damn the suit! It was supposed to serve me. Now I was its prisoner. It was marching to the Duke , and I would have to stop it. I would use other suits to arrest it, and then finish me. So to warm up, I practiced neural control. We had drilled this plenty of times, but not under circumstances like this: a damaged body in a damaged suit on a hostile planet. So a little practice was called for.
    I thought back on my training: neural control is all about tricking your brain … Complex selection and virtual control loops were too much for eighty percent of the troops: they could manage the suit they were in, but not hop to other suits. But I was ranked higher than that eighty percent. What had qualified me for Armor Officer were my high aptitude scores in virtual control. So it wasn’t hard for me to “reach” out and “feel” another suit. I “pushed,” and my brain was in the suit.
    Identifying information flashed before my eyes: EIA-5372967, PFC Gutierrez, Estefan . A queasy feeling came over me: Goody was one of my best friends in the platoon. I checked his post mortem: Internal i n juries, critical overheating. Goody had been fifty meters closer to the explosion than me. His brain had … boiled …
    I shoved that thought away. I had work to do. I “blinked my eyes”—not physically, but mentally, the neural signal for changing my point of view. When I “opened” them, I was “looking” through Goody’s suit cam. The neural control circuits fed the camera image straight to my visual cortex, and my brain interpreted it as if the camera were my eyes.
    I lifted my arm—and nothing . The suit arm didn’t move. I felt a twinge of pain from my neck through my arm, but that was impossible. My spine was severed, I couldn’t actually feel anything. That was phantom pain, I knew that. But it didn’t explain why neural control wouldn’t work. And it made me pull back in shock if I even tried. Phantom or not, that pain was a bitch!
    As the suits marched, I reviewed our neural control drills. I remembered Neurologist Hill’s standard spiel: “You don’t coopt six million years of evolution by pretending, unless you’re really good at it. Then pretending is the way to go. You have to make yourself believe: you are in that suit, or you are that spacecraft or that microprobe or whatever you’re controlling. When you believe that, your brain will know how to control it.”
    And there was my problem: I had stopped believing. Oh, part of me believed I was in EIA-5372967 with Goody; but a much bigger part of me believed my arm couldn’t move, it was never going to move again, and so I had no business trying to move it. The phantom pain was my brain, screaming at me: Stay away! Don’t look! This is too ugly to bear! I’d