Forever Peace

In the mid 21st century, two inventions have changed the way mankind lives. Or most of mankind, anyway. First of those is the nanoforge, capable of manufacturing virtually anything given the right blueprints and enough raw material. Second is the neural interface, dubbed jack, through which people can link their minds to machines or with each other.

As is always the case, however, the two technologies are not available universally. All the nanoforges are owned solely by the governments of the Alliance, who provide their citizens with all they need, and only require a four year Service that is mostly spent caring for the elderly people. Same goes with the jacks, only owned by a fraction of the Alliance population because of the small catch of 10% death rate of the jack installation surgery.

This, of course, splits the world pretty much in two halves. One is the Alliance and its supporters, some of them tagging along out of genuine sharing of the Alliance principles, but many just hungry after the lease of nanoforge processing time that the Alliance dispenses. The other half of the world knows the Alliance for the evil it is, greedy spineless capitalists that will take your soul and more if you just give them the tiniest of chances. Naturally, the evil is to be battled with zeal until the final victory, except it is kinda difficult to score against an enemy whose soldiers are robots produced by nanoforges and controlled remotely by jacked mechanics.

One of those mechanics is Julian Class. As one of those lucky draftees who get to see the military side of the Service, he spends one third of his weeks jacked into a soldierboy robot, alternating between combat and his academic career. The trouble is, the strain on the soldierboy mechanics is very high, and Julian is on the verge of breaking down. And as if the stress of the military service was not enough, Julian and two of his colleagues discover a serious problem within the largest scientific project of the Alliance, a problem that will mean an end of the world if not resolved quickly ...