Easy Company Takes a Breath

The worst though is when you've taken a mortar round or a laser cuts into your armor. The armor seals itself up -- by injecting you with a twilighting morphine substitute and chopping off the offending limb where the breach is. So now you're a paraplegic and lying on your back in some kind of bio slop the suit juices up for you -- settled deep in a pile of armor that's the other guys in your unit, some better off, some worse than you -- in the cargo hold of a landing craft on its way back to a medical ship.
But this won't be your ride home. No. Even if the phosphorus cracked through your helmet and took away half your brain: your armor sealed you up good and stiff and "you're in the Army now boy - we just need you breathin'" and you know that's not even true.
So the robot docs back on the medvac ship patch you up and they make sure your skin tone is the same on your new arms and legs because if it ain't that just freaks guys out. And they put a couple organic chips in your brain complete with solid organic armor plating and tell you you're better than new and because of that -- because of how you suddenly know how to work your Advanced Weapons Systems and can even do a rudimentary job of piloting one of these little drop boats -- they give you a promotion and now you got fresh meat under your command. Fresh kids who haven't been in zero gee for more than a week and bumping off walls and throwing up their lunch 'till they learn to take their greenies before chow time and they don't know anything about AWS or how to get out of a drop ship in less than 12 seconds but now you do so you gotta explain all the stuff the robots back at the hospital just injected into your mind. Teach it.
They got you. There's only two ways you're getting home, boy, and that's either by winning or getting blown into such small pieces even the 'droids can't put you back together again. You wonder which is worse.
You don't need shark anymore. The biomech in your brain will do that for you. You crawlin' up the walls, so amped up on fear and adrenaline that you wanna open that hatch -- just blow open the bolts and say "sayonara" to the idiot robot they'd send after you in cold, dead, space? You just make a selection on your new HUD. Just roll back your nerves so you're smooth.
Then you start to like it. No black-market mack for you anymore, boy. You want to get high? It's right there -- just roll up the HUD, sit back and relax. You gotta be awake and tight and ready for whatever the jimmies want to throw at you, just hit the button and you're ready to go.
Now they really do own you. Because if you go back home you won't have this. How could you go home when you could live like this?