Arimestes was with me. The Automatic has been a dear friend through the ages. Arimestes understands how it feels to stand outside of human time. Like me, he will not age. He may wear down, he may be killed, but he will not die. “The 9th is waiting for the command,” Arimestes said. “Send them,” I said. The hoplites were well-suited to this, they had trained since nine-years-old to move about without gravity. They are anxious to engage in battle. Their paradigm had been one of servitude, honor and grace. Careful social development crafted a group willing to care passionately for a cause but not feel grief at the loss of a comrade. Humans are social animals and as such, easy to manipulate. There was a time that people believed robots would make the best soldiers. History has proven that to be incorrect. Robots are expensive to produce and repair, robots find it difficult to adapt beyond their environment. Intelligent machines can easily calculate the waste of conflict. People, by contrast, are cheap to produce and easy to program. Social engineering and population management can establish a nearly limitless wealth of warriors with almost no oversight required. Arimestes is an Automatic: a robot with self-awareness. His intellect and unlimited knowledge, as well as his immortality and perspective, made him worth a million men and women on the battlefield.
My hoplites swam across void. The Gravity Well of Illium pulling them slowly toward an arbitrary “down”.