Hello, SFIA audio listeners. In this month's Nebula exclusive, Big Alien Theory,

we're asked at the reason alien civilizations might be rare is because most aliens are huge.

To hear it and every episode early and add free, plus hours of bonus content,

check out go.nebola.t.v.t.v. And use my code, Isaac Arthur.

In the future, we may deploy armies of cybernetic superhumans to fight all battles,

people so augmented they could tear through walls or dodge bullets.

But would these invincible warriors be willing to fight for mundane humans,

or merely fight each other to rule us?

Hamza was born on the planet of New Damascus. He doesn't remember the city of his birth

because it was vaporized in an atomic blast when he was two. He grew up in a refugee camp

with half a dozen different cultures mish-mashed together, but his grandmother told him his name meant

powerful. He certainly never felt powerful, not with half a dozen defects and illnesses that left

him both a cripple as a boy and a social reject, one picked on by everyone else and valued by no one.

The doctor who visits their camp every week told him he would have been easily cured

if he lived back in civilized space. But to Hamza, that's little consolation. When

Hamza turned 18-year standard, he joined the Martian-Forn legion. They didn't have to talk him

into cybernetic augmentation. Indeed, he spent most of his salary on extra components, upgrades,

and bootlegs. That club foot he had is gone. So those worthless lungs he had that always

coughed up blood and phlegm from the harsh radioactive dust storms of New Damascus, where the

regalith is like ground-up glass. Hamza can see a hummingbird's wings flap a thousand meters away now, seeing frequencies

his old eyes couldn't, and hear a pin drop in a crowded room.

He's as tough as steel now, tougher, he can bend steel rods in his hands.

...