Read Online The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi - Free Book Online

battlefields trillions of miles away, the colonists were largely unconcerned with the ethical issues surrounding genetically modified soldiers, particularly ones who had, after all, volunteered to fight.
    In the stead of colonists, the CDF chose to select its recruits from the inhabitants of humanity’s ancestral home, Earth. The Earth held billions of people: More people on that single globe, in fact, than existed on all the human colonies combined. The pool of potential recruits was enormous—so large that the CDF further limited its pool, choosing to take its recruits from comfortable and industrialized nations whose economic circumstances allowed their citizens to survive well into their later years, and whose social blueprints created both an overemphasis on the desirability of youth and a parallel and profound national psychic discomfort with aging and death. These senior citizens were patterned by their societies to be excellent and eager recruits for the CDF; the CDF quickly discovered that these senior citizens would join up for a military tour even in the absence of detailed information about what such a tour entailed—and indeed, recruitment yields were higher the less the recruits knew. Recruits assumed military service in the CDF was like military service on Earth. The CDF was content to let the assumption stand.
    Recruiting seniors from industrialized nations proved so successful that the Colonial Union protected its recruiting pool by banning colonists from those nations, selecting its colonist pool from nations whose economic and social problems encouraged the more ambitious of its young people to get the hell out as soon as humanly possible. This division of military and colonist recruitment paid rich dividends for the Colonial Union in both areas.
    The military recruitment of senior citizens presented the CDF with one unexpected problem: A fair number of recruits died before they could join the service, victims of heart attacks, strokes, and too many cheeseburgers, cheesecakes and cheese curds. The CDF, who took genetic samples from its recruits, eventually found itself stocked with a library of human genomes it wasn’t doing anything with. The CDF also found itself with a desire and also a need to continue experimenting with the body models of the Colonial Defense Forces to improve their design, without cutting into the effectiveness of the fighting force it already had.
    Then came a breakthrough: an immensely powerful, compact, semi-organic computer, thoroughly integrated with the human brain, which in a moment of profoundly inappropriate branding was lightly dubbed the BrainPal. For a brain already filled with a life’s worth of knowledge and experience, the BrainPal offered a critical assist in mental ability, memory storage and communication.
    But for a brain that was literally tabula rasa, the BrainPal offered even more.
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    Robbins peered into the crèche, where the body lay, held into place by a suspension field. “He doesn’t look much like Charles Boutin,” he said to Wilson.
    Wilson, who was now making last-minute adjustments on the hardware that contained Boutin’s recorded consciousness, didn’t look up from his work. “Boutin was an unmodified human,” he said. “He was well into middle age when we knew him. He probably looked something like this guy when he was twenty. Minus the green skin, cat’s eyes and other modifications. And he probably wasn’t as fit as this body is. I know I wasn’t as fit in real life at age twenty as I am now. And I don’t even have to exercise.”
    â€œYou have a body engineered to take care of itself,” Robbins reminded Wilson.
    â€œAnd thank God. I’m a doughnut fiend,” Wilson said.
    â€œAll you have to do to get it is get shot at by every other intelligent species in the universe,” Robbins said.
    â€œThat is the catch,” Wilson noted.
    Robbins turned back to