Sunday, October 13, 2019

The Scrapyard, by Tomas Furby

[Clarkesworld]
★★★☆☆

(SF Drama) When cyborg soldiers retire and get old, they don’t go to a regular nursing home. They go to a place they call the scrapyard. (4,442 words; Time: 14m)


"," by (edited by Neil Clarke), appeared in issue 157, published on .

Mini-Review (click to view--possible spoilers)

Review: 2019.579 (A Word for Authors)

Pro: It’s a sad account of the last days of a 90-year-old soldier who, as a youth, sacrificed a normal life when he accepted the augments that were needed to defeat the alien invaders.

Con: He callous lack of remorse for the friendly orderly he killed makes it hard to have much sympathy for him.

Why didn’t they just remove all the special tech at the end of the war and make the former solders as normal as possible? It doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to keep them in a state where they could do a lot of harm—especially the ones with PTSD.

The idea that someone with technology that’s at least 50 years out of date would still be able to connect to the satellite network—much less hack into it—is ludicrous.

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