About ten meters ahead, a horse-drawn cart piled with scrap metal had broken a wheel and was stopped diagonally in his path. Two men in traditional Afghan garb were squatting next to it, examining the damage with a stream of animated commentary.

Smith’s Merge failed to recognize the face of either man, but was able to determine that they were Middle Eastern males between sixteen and forty-five years old and therefore gave them the reddish aura of potential threats. A woman standing next to them was also unidentified—not surprising based on the fact that virtually nothing of her was visible behind her burqa—but was given more of a neutral threat rating due to her gender.

The members of his team ahead glowed dark green despite their desert camo and a local coming toward them rated a much paler green—one of the rare locals who had been identified by the Merge’s sophisticated facial recognition software and was deemed friendly.

The man spoke as he passed by but Smith didn’t hear him in the literal sense of the word. He was wearing earplugs and all sound was being transmitted directly to his auditory cortex via five separate microphones attached to his uniform.

“My horse greets a goat for your life,” the mechanical voice said and Smith allowed himself a thin smile. One day the system would accurately translate real-time but for now its interpretation of Dari was for entertainment value only.

In their success column, though, they’d hijacked existing technology to cancel out wind noise, and an app that muted all voices except the one from the person you were looking at was starting to show real promise. On the downside, the directional aspect of the sound coming at him was still almost completely nonexistent. Despite almost two months of work, everything sounded like it came from just ahead and slightly to the right.

Smith scanned left, letting the cameras mounted on his helmet pan over a group of men paying a little too much attention to the American team in their midst. It was broad daylight under a blue sky so most visual enhancement was shut down. The two exceptions—facial recognition and weapon outline enhancement—were coming up empty.

His vision shook when he faced forward again and he gave his chin strap another tug. He’d commandeered the helmet from a Recon Ranger and it had been custom-molded for the Ranger’s larger head. Still, it was an amazing piece of gear. If Smith had any say in the matter—and he did—the bicycle mechanic who’d fabricated it would soon be a very wealthy man.

“Right or left, Colonel?” his point man said as they approached a cross street.

Smith expanded a satellite photo hovering in his peripheral vision and checked the layout of the village before responding. “Right.”