The SUB Missives had proven their value on the battlefield as disposable messengers of war. With the UN and ICRC pushing forward with Protocol IV, an amendment to the Geneva Conventions that would outlaw the use of single-use bodies in warfare, the US military rapidly commissioned companies to develop new applications in an attempt to make their use ubiquitous and thereby slow the ratification of the Protocol.

Within a year, Genadyne Industries released their 'handheld field medic', consisting of a mass-gestated, humanesque microSUB with neural architecture preloaded with an instinctive understanding of basic battlefield medicine. It was small enough to fit inside a first aid kit, where it could remain in stasis for up to a year, and had an operational lifespan of several months upon activation.

Each kit came with a flexible, 3-metre neural bridge cable. If a soldier was wounded, they would insert the cable into their spine, splitting their consciousness along the bridge so that they could tend to their own wounds externally. The model came spliced with a set of dove-derived wings to allow the patient to flit around their incapacitated body, tending it from all angles, and had a visual design intended to set soldier's minds at ease, although many injured, on the precipice of death, were reportedly terrified by their angelic appearance.

The SUB had mixed success as a field medic. Its ability to stem large bleeds or splint bones was limited by its diminutive size. It could at least distribute medicines with its two-handed syringe and was beloved among the infantry, being fondly named 'the opium fairy'. Often the intended medical purpose was ignored - the syringe would be refilled with more lethal drugs and the SUB flown into enemy lines as a poisonous sabotour.

An expensive and entirely foreseeable outcome of its use was the creation of a large number of soldiers divorced from their original bodies, their minds trapped within the microSUB upon the death of their human selves. Many of these soldiers suffered severe emotional and nerve damage due to the active neural bridge, effectively experiencing their own deaths. These disembodied soldiers required onward transferal into permanent, full-sized vessels, a slow, ongoing process at vast expense to the US tax-payer.

But the medical SUB succeeded in its true purpose, delaying the amendments of the Geneva Protocols. After all, the US military argued, their newly disembodied soldiers still needed jobs. Who was the UN to deny them their livelihoods; to label sentients as illegal weapons of war?

It wouldn't be long before the formation of the first SUB division, squads of combat-designed disposable bodies. Ultimately this was the beginning of the biological-drone warfare that would define the mid-21st century.