My first real issue with the novella has cropped up, and I'm trying to figure out how to fix it going forward.
The basic premise is, our main characters are basically downloaded streams of consciousness. They are soldiers, their human consciousness downloaded from datastores aboard warships to armored hardware, advanced weapon platforms on the planetary surface. These soldiers, and the AI empire they fight for, are reclaiming worlds stolen years ago by an alien menace they call Spanners. Human instinct and the ability to think outside the box means these human streams still trump AI combat drones, so they are used for critical missions during the invasion.
The combat scenes seems to be working, and I'm enjoying those. But I have also realized that these soldiers basically have no downtime. After their missions are completed, their warships initiate kill-switches in the armored suits, which shuts down the streams on the suits (for reasons I'm not ready to give away just yet).
And this is my quandary. There is no downtime (there will be later on in the novella, possibly, but not for some time). What do they do when they're not on missions? They have no bodies. Are they just shut off until needed? I hadn't considered this, and now I may need to go back to the worldbuilding and dig deeper to find out how this 'society' works.
What I don't want to happen is this to turn into combat scene after combat scene, because that might be tiring for readers. I had planned this for the earliest scenes, but not for the whole thing.
