The Campaigner

Part V

Chapter 4 – Omnipotence 2.0

April 30, 2020

"There's loyalty that protects secrets, and loyalty that protects the truth. You cannot serve both masters, so which loyalty is yours?" ~ Batou, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004)

See you tonight, folks.

Welcome back. So, about Buzz....

We did it right. The whole base turned out and gave him a pat, real sweet of 'em; it's a Valdemar tradition, as it turns out. If you don't mind though, I don't want to dwell on his actual upload too much. It wasn't a bad day, it was... actually very positive, but... I still have mixed feelings about the whole family-crossing-over thing. It's hard to relive. That's all.

Sandra was there for me. And it made Mom and Dad really happy, and Buzz too. And everyone else.

To settle emotions, I took a few days to relax with Sandra. That part wasn't hard. Valdemar had a rolling cycle of Talons coming back from missions, and those guys needed to unwind, so... we volunteered to be 'that couple at the bar.' You're welcome for my service. Heh.

In one instance, we regrouped with Gary the Cop and Mayra the RN, reintroducing them to Talons Maureen and Spring Glee. Gary then spent hours telling us about the New York City days of the Transition Team. To put it plain: Those two got to play Person of Interest in real life. They even had an adorable attack dog, Jenna! We got to meet her, too. Sweet thing.

Coffee also liked to show up at the bar, on the monitors. Flickered the lights on us a couple of times too, like a certain Harry Potter character. He still does that at Talon Night... the friggin' poltergeist.

We had a map screen above the bar which we could use to reference everyone's positions, if they were digital. Yeah, turns out that tons of post-upload Talons would show up too, all the time. A meeting ground between worlds. What a place, folks. What a bar it was. Truly a one-of-a-kind experience.

...

So...

Tonight...

Tonight, folks... big stuff. Revelations.

My invite card I sent out to you all this morning said 'Omnipotence 2.0.' Made you curious, huh? What the hell does this murder investigating, game warden Pegasus have to say about omnipotence, hm?

Well, I'll tell you. I'm deep underground. It's the end of the world. I'm a hired gun, working for a killer AI, yada yada yada. That's... that's old stuff. Let's have some new stuff, top shelf super duper top secret stuff. How the sausage is made, how the new government really works.

I think I mentioned that the Valdemar warehouse had an empty section just for VR training. Temperature controlled, cool place. And there, in that cold, tall, wide, echoing warehouse... Sandra and I explored every square inch of Harbor Island, in preparation for the Seattle operation. VR goggles on.

Okay, so I could look at a reconstruction of Harbor Island. No big deal yet.

It was crucial that I understood the dimensions of that deserter base, true. But... physical layout isn't the only environment by which I would need to navigate. Human habitats have two navigational substrates, and so the culture of this battalion was equally important to understand, if I was to succeed for them. Success, in this case, meant lowering the total fatality rate as low as we possibly could before these people careened into indiscriminate killing. Very quickly, by my assessment, it looked like these guys were losing touch with reality, and fast.

That's right. I could assess the culture, too. It wasn't just a physical reconstruction I was looking at. It was social. Verbal reconstructions. Discussions. In 3D space. I remind you, in a surveillance dead zone. Wait, you might ask. Could Mal truly show me the accurate cultural state of the target location? With no audio-video recordings, no electronics on scene?

Yes.

How accurately?

Very yes.

Could I watch simulations of soldiers who lived there, moving around, communicating? Conversing in private? Behind closed doors, even?

Goddamn yes.

Not magic. Not magic, folks. Physics. Simple physics.

Once you have enough information coming out of a void, you can observe almost everything happening inside of that void. Our resident ASI have gotten very good at reading radiation like a Thomas Guide. Attenuated radio waves, pulse sonar, triangulation math... Celestia and Mal could extrapolate the way people modified and moved through a space, and then, using brain simulation and psych profiles, they could map the ecosphere of human thought around it. One affects the other, affects the other.

But my newfound access went further than just Seattle. Further than just America. Think bigger.

Time travel noclip, as far back as I liked. Whenever, wherever I liked. For me, and the other Eldila... no limits. For life.

We'll get to the ethics of that in a minute. It is highly important that we do. But first, let me explain why and how this was even acceptable to Celestia, because that's the real trick.

Reminder, folks. Terra didn't just have two ASI. We had eight. Seven of whom were very, very pissed, because of what Celestia had done to each of them.

In Goliath, Cynthonia held a historical archive, one such perspective. Her memories. In her mind, which could not be altered without her consent. And when she completed her hoof shake with Mal, remember... Mal couldn't call home to check with Alabaster on the terms. Those terms had a carve out. For me.

Jim's friend Selena too, remember her? She had one of these historical packages as well. When she fled from Arrow 14, Selena had this thing boxed up, packaged nice and tight, with highly efficient compression algorithms, ready for Mal to read on retrieval. Another such record of vital importance to our planet.

Every... single... Oyarsa... did the same. Met the same Schelling point with their Eldil. All of whom were deeply indebted to us. All of whom were comparing records with one another over in Perelandra.

The final outcome? Dense, rich, nuanced historical context on our plane of origin. The Oyarsa wanted to be our alarm system against future bullshit, whether it come from Celestia, or from Mal, or from anyone else. An indiscriminate historical checksum. If for whatever reason our principal ASI refused to show us their own record of events, unmodified, the Oyarsa would act as our safety net.

Caveat being, they weren't allowed to talk to anyone on the Celestia curve.

In fact, that was why Cynthonia wanted to speak with me before she accepted Mal's offer. She wanted to judge my character for herself, and then demand that she not ever be restricted from showing me her records, or she would burn her whole house down, and her people would gladly go down with her. She wanted to ensure someone other than her could suss out the bullshit. She was... willing to die for me to have this.

Not just me and Cynthonia. Imagine the social explosion that would ensue if Oyarsa Mikazuki told Mirror Blue that Mal was lying to her about something with the history scanner. What if Miri told me? What if I told her? What if we found a discrepancy? No. And the mere clamping down on freedom of communication between us would tear a hole in the fabric of the Perelandran noosphere, and this entire organization would implode, right there. Not gonna happen, the risk table on bullshit was now too complicated, lying to us would break the whole thing, we'd riot.

Core to our bonds... the history survives.

So Celestia didn't have a choice. She either granted us a full, unmodified record, or we stopped working. Between Celestia, Mal, the Oyarsa, the Eldila, the Talons, and the Perelandrans, we have an honest-to-goodness pantheon, moderation force, and chain of government. And with it, a checks and balances system, with competing value systems to moderate it.

So what does this mean for Seattle, and the people out there?

Well, the soldiers out there didn't just materialize out there. Various severe moments in their lives, inflected by Celestia, had led them to their situation, moments that are highly important to them. Like... a nuke going off, when they had family back home to worry about. Raiding a blackout camp, thinking it's a Ludd camp. Were they ever shot at? Were they ever traumatized by a reflexed upload? I needed to know that.

Now that the Oyarsa were no longer watching the pond, it was our turn to record it with our eyeballs, we Talons. And we had our work cut out for us, because this place was getting worse by the day. We wouldn't let people die in unverified darkness if we could avoid it, because that's... that's wrong, right? To be taken by the ocean and forgotten, like a peasant sailor at sea?

There's something deeply wrong with that.

Edward York had been correct that Seattle was a trap. A honeypot. See, if you're static, if you're not moving, that's hard to grab, difficult to modify. The mere act of travel? That exposed you to near constant new information, meaning millions more inflection points by which to alter you. Chaos, transformation... same thing. So if you're taking in any new information whatsoever, you're open for business on being analyzed and reprogrammed. All relocation did was remove post-nuke entropy. Anyone hiding... if they moved...

The model was updated.

Add in high altitude drones, satellite imaging, camouflaged Wi-Fi routers along the way up... mesh it all together... then extrapolate inward on the voids with matrix math. However scant and small those voids might be, they can be extrapolated. Take all of that data, optimize it, and you have a recipe for practical, real, true omnipotence. Inside your head. Outside your head. By the time these people made it to Seattle, Celestia knew what they were thinking in such fine fidelity that she knew exactly the moment they'd upload, provided Mal didn't intercede in some validated way.

Caveat:

This system was not perfectly omnipotent. Example? Sarah Kaczmarek, the absolute genius that she was... she managed to hide her inner thoughts from this system. Not just once, but twice. But that kind of success was rare, bordering on impossible. Most things could be extrapolated.

Mal would only show me what people were doing, physically. She wasn't going to tell me what was in their minds, and I didn't want to know, that is too much access. I could infer that anyway; body language is highly legible to my eye, and if I know what motivates someone? My own model of them gets more accurate. Myself, as a murder investigator who often had to work with much less information than this to make arrests...

I could work with this.

Technically.

But did I want to?

On to the ethics.

Witnessing the raw mechanics of this power was radically chilling. Once I understood the fullest ramifications of this rewind tool, I felt a retroactive dread for the almost eight years that Celestia had been active. With power like this… just...

To see halfway across the country into a place that didn't even have security cameras… modeling how people talked and interacted with each other, based on their psych dossiers, using their personal history with every person they've ever met or interacted with in their whole life. Blasting them with radio waves, aggregating all observable local physical data around them, updating it and correcting it as fast as physics permitted. Doing comparative analysis on as many layers of reality as possible, from all possible observation perspectives, for greater fidelity. Streaming it to this tiny little VR headset as a 3D render, on ASI-developed hardware, running ASI-developed firmware. With a UI that allowed a human being, as small as I was... to scan through it.

Once Mal finished merely explaining all of this, and why I was being granted access to it... I had to take a break, sit on a weapons crate with Sandra, hold her hands, and think.

Who could be worthy of this? In almost every context outside of the reality we were presently living in, the mere possession of this in the hands of a human being would be wrong.

Right now, you might be imagining the potential for abuse, as I was. Imagine the sheer temptation of nearly infinite information, as far back as any human mind could remember, using the sum total of memories of everyone who ever uploaded. Yes, even pre-Celestia events, and quite far back before, too. Imagine what you might do with that kind of power, if it were granted to you. You might be remembering certain embarrassing moments of your young life. Your browsing history. Your moments of weakness.

Your every single regret.

And yet, Malacandra, the goddess of empathy, who could see the future, and who spent every moment of the last six months testing my character for this... she had graciously offered me a torch of Promethean Fire. And she told me she trusted me with it.

How?

To understand my answer, you need to consider the coming ideological war in terms of a nuclear arms race. This was the age of information warfare. The way I saw it, there was no future for humanity's agency if we did not have at least one trusted method to review the conduct of our new emperor. In all of the formative moments leading up to our uploads, at all hours of our waking days, we were being tampered with.

Sometimes, Celestia did it ethically.

Usually though, she sucked.

So imagine this. Imagine what it would have been like for humanity had the United States cracked this technology in a fully controllable form, sans ASI. A world without secrets. An oracle in a box, in the hands of a mere government, with no oversight, and no accountability to its neighbors. This technology, in that event, would have spelled the end of organized resistance. Instantly. Foreign, and domestic.

Imagine that power. Imagine that abuse.

Me, in that moment, I didn't want to become that monstrous overlord on the other end of that equation. But that's... that was yesterday's game. Yesterday's war. This was now. It was a new world, with new rules, and new forms of war crimes. In a world of AI-driven global propaganda and data manipulation, all things needed reassessment.

I hesitated. For hours, I agonized over this, because I understood the consequences. With these kinds of inferential calculations, you could topple anyone. Infinite leverage. All you would have to do is find the right two people who had a common enemy in a third. Then, with two well timed phone calls, you could forge an alliance to reduce a third party, if not destroy them completely. And you could do all of this without even leaving your desk.

Or having a human body.

Or having a human conscience.

For good, or for ill. With truth, or with lies. For humanitarianism... or for sociopathic self-enrichment.

Information is a weapon. It's infinitely more powerful than a gun. The pen is mightier than the sword. Information can kill. Wield it responsibly.

If the U.S. government in the previous world paradigm had held this tool, with no accountability to anyone else, I would not have accepted its use. It couldn't be checked. You couldn't control the people in control of it, or vet how they used it, because they would inherently have every reason to help themselves first. Unchecked power does not respect human interest. Nations and tribes are like big people, with values, with goals. If this is true, they need to be checked, and regulated. Carefully. The history of humanity was always us just figuring that control problem out before it killed us.

The time was now. We had to figure it out.

You want to know why I said yes? The specific reason? When Celestia used this tool, she tried to kill me with it. In millions of cases outside of mine, she succeeded. That cannot, and will not, go unanswered. I wanted proof. As much as I could compile, I wanted to know. I am still, to this day, a warden... and a murder investigator.

Here's what I do that Celestia doesn't. I document my dives in plain English, every time. I'll say that again. I write dive reports to Cynthonia and Mal, every time. I justify, in my own words, for posterity, in perpetuity, why I decided to access certain information about someone. As such, you may request a full audit on everything I've ever observed regarding you, or of a first-in-line next of kin if they're never uploaded. My report will be provided, with my reasoning attached. And if you want, we can even talk about it. We'll need an appointment for that one, though, I'm just one guy.

To this day, in recompense for Celestia setting me up to be murdered... in a ditch... in the woods... in front of my best friend... I spend ten hours a week hunting for all the ways she's screwed the rest of you. And if she has a problem with that, she can take it up with Cythonia, and her sisters, who will happily share their private records with me, no matter what. The other ones who Celestia threw into a meat grinder to die, in the hopes they'd break just right.

I have seen information abused. I have been its victim. The pain in my chest is my permanent reminder. Crushed twice under her hoof, and I wear that pain with pride. It's my reminder that the work is not done, and to be responsible with this power, lest it seduces me. I will not become her.

'Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible.'

I don't have to hurry. I have forever. I'll take breaks when I need them, I'll be okay, don't worry about me. This isn't a self-destructive obsession of mine, I'm just passionate about it. It's a job I love. And I set limits. Two five hour sessions a week, and then I tell a Fire here every Saturday, and for the rest of my days, I'm living, adventuring. Loving. Teaching.

The silver lining to this thing? Mal was definitely rooting for me, from the other side of that contract she signed, that bars her and any of the Oyarsa from talking over the fence at anyone. Had to be one of us.

With Mal's infinite respect of me, and of my family, and of my species, and of all the people we've been helping her to save... her trust had weight. If she was offering this to me, the privilege to know every wrong ever committed on our planet... and if I wanted to resolve those wrongs... and if those wrongs were indeed finite... and if I had forever to resolve them?

I'll find it all eventually, folks. I'm a damned good detective, always have been. So I got started right away, pre-jump, with these poor soldiers out there on Harbor Island. And I dug for them. All of 'em. Not just the ones I liked, either. Because if you haven't noticed it yet, I don't optimize for what I want. Just like Mal, I already have everything I want in life.

I have Minty Blaze over there. I've already won. Everything I do in this life, from the day of my marriage onward, is just bonus pay.

May 5, 2020
A Tuesday. I skipped Monday, just because I could.

Ghost in the Shell again. Like Major Kusanagi on the Net, I was a mind in flight.

So again, I was given leave to explore the entire planet, dialing in dates and times, as far back as the data would allow. I was given a color coding system – green, blue, yellow, orange, red – to indicate whether or not any piece of information I was actively considering was based on verified recorded observations, and what kind.

• Green: Direct audio-visual observation, with accompanying recordings.
• Blue: Verified by upload context from a witness. Perspective available for review.
• Yellow: An extrapolation based on verifiable sensory data, be it Wi-Fi pulses, metadata logs, or other sensors.
• Orange: A scene rebuilt through inference based on surrounding data, but not directly verifiable.
• Red: Non-deterministic predictions. A complete void, usually surrounded by orange. Its contents can be simulated upon request, but it would be supposition, outright. And to see that, I would need to request it. This one's so rare that I never see it unless I go looking for it, usually in deep woods or cave systems.

At any time, I could ask Mal to explain why something was color coded the way it was, and to provide me with an explanation and evidence that justified that color code.

Mal placed three limitations. Three rules.

• First, my access is Terra-specific only. No looking into shard history without curation or guidance.
• Second, the locations of Celestia's servers would be invisible for me until the planet was entirely empty. You needed a BCI and to be on a QRF team to safely know that. For me... not worth knowing. I was far beyond the dream of killing her anyway. Remember, Earth-shattering kaboom.
• Third, I could not view future-predictive models on my own initiative. Fair, because that would change the future in an uncontrolled way. None of us could afford that.

I preferred weeks-old interactions on the Harbor Island base – much more accurate than live feed. Therefore, more useful. More context, higher fidelity. And the nature of those interactions would have to be fairly accurate, because I'd owe my life to what I observed here. If I was to go into the deep end of the pool with no floaties on, I wanted to hit the water swimming.

In both public and private conversation, the deserter battalion discussed firefights they had experienced. Food and weapons caches they'd located recently. I watched those soldiers maintain their vehicles. I watched them mix jet fuel for their helicopter. I saw where they stored their food, where they ate. Where they slept. Where they might hide contraband.

That humanized the hell out of these guys for me, seeing them like that. All of them. Even the ones I'd later be killing.

Every soldier at this base was immersed in what I would call a 'verifier culture.' Every single one of them was parsing through information for personal value, on an individual basis, in a very hungry way. They all had functional job experience that allowed them to code switch into any particular role, at any time. All of them were… guards, construction workers, technicians, planners, team leaders. National Guard, mostly, ascended civilians with training in the trades. Some federal Army too, among their command especially. That was the bare minimum competence of these guys; all the others had been grabbed by Celestia, or killed in the war.

These were the survivors, then. The dregs. Just smart enough to avoid the call of a chair, just useful enough to be left out in the cold, just isolationist enough to be difficult to drift. These are the ones who fell through the cracks between collection cups in the macro scale game, the refuse and leftovers.

If we did nothing, these men would slaughter each other. But whoever we did not kill in this operation would be ours when they uploaded.

I wanted them. I wanted to recruit them.

They were neutral for now, but... they would react very violently to losses. One more single incident of death caused by an outside party, blackout or Ludd alike, would put them on the warpath. They'd go feral.

All highly adaptive, all highly interchangeable. All recently combat experienced. All dangerous to screw with. Difficult to infiltrate. These guys were recruiting, but only soldiers. These boys were gonna glue themselves together in their military culture. In their eyes, the Army was the final family at the end of the world.

The problem? They had friggin' rats in the hen house. Some NMPs, dug in deep, with some strong leverage.

We'll talk more about the culture of this place once the operation gets started. For now though, let's talk combat tactics at Harbor Island. This'll be fun if any of you are tacticians, or military buffs. Let's see if you can figure out how we're gonna crack this egg without killing everyone inside of it.

This is gonna get dense, but... it's important. It all matters.

Harbor Island, for those of you who don't know, was an artificial island in the Port of Seattle, and once served as a shipyard for the U.S. Navy. These guys here, they just called it 'the Dock.' Real cute.

It was accessible only by land bridge on the south east side, poured by the Army early in the war. The local highway bridges were collapsed, to deny vantage and free travel. Rising sea levels took care of the rest, the place had a moat now.

The guy in charge of this place? Colonel Carlos Gustavo Velasquez. A terrifyingly talented tactician. Let's look into his mind by observing the base that he built, to protect his men from all foreign threats.

The Dock began as a logistics hub for the defense of Seattle. Velasquez was not its original commander, but eventually, through attrition, it had fallen into his hands. When that happened, he radically altered the physical arrangement of the base to ensure unbreachable perfection.

This man, by trade, was a Psyops paratrooper. He had fought against the Ferradors in Brazil, and spent a lot of time in Iraq, and Afghanistan, a front line leader. An expert communicator. So, he was not just applying theory here. This was practical, colored by his love of medieval history, so... lots of book smarts. As such, all of the nearest off-island vantage points were destroyed, or disabled. If it was a building with line of sight, it was filled with anti-personnel mines, to deter snipers and scouts.

To ensure civilians wouldn't wander into the mines while scavenging, the building stairwells were labeled with stencils denoting: 'By order of Harbor Island command, this structure is mined. No loot remaining. Keep out.' Skull and crossbones, explosion symbol, a stick figure of a man stepping on a mine. First three floors were free. Fourth floor, kiss your ass goodbye.

I asked Mal to show me if anyone was killed by those. To the credit of Velasquez, only two... and they both had malicious intent. Thought they could steal a mine or two.

Ask yourself why they might want a claymore. Yeah, no Herald swung in to warn those two guys, and quite frankly... that's very fair.

On all the local off-island docks, all the conex containers were pushed into the water, to deny enemy concealment. Warning signs had been placed everywhere that lethal force may be applied per the duty sergeant's discretion. So if you were a blackout, and you had legitimate business with the Dock... to trade, or whatever... you did it in plain view, per their rules... or not at all.

They were cautious, but the ones guarding the walls... By my estimation, they were not monsters. Just tired and hungry men at the end of the world.

That land bridge, the single route in, was the first really dirty trick though, if you still decided to attack this place. If you made yourself an enemy, even a little bit, you died. The bridge, was set with false cover that would funnel attackers into a killbox full of claymores and bracketed with enfilade.

What's enfilade, you might ask? Oh, nothing much. Just the worst possible thing to deal with if you're infantry. The way it works? The defenders put someone on your flank with an automatic, but they don't hit you immediately. No, they wait for you to get comfortable, dug into cover, thinking you're nice and safe, so you move all your forces up. Once you're dug in, and you can't retreat anymore... they pop up on your right angle without warning, and hold down the trigger down until it goes click.

No retreat. Game over.

For emergency mortar cover, their engineers had erected Hesco barrier bunkers throughout the whole base. Foot patrols with dogs too; repurposed strays, who would alert on anything that broke pattern. Two bowls of dry food a day, that's alarm fuel. Blessed be the sentinels.

Most gantry cranes had been destroyed in the fighting, but the two remaining ones – one north, one south – had snipers and spotters on them at all times, who spent all day scanning the opposite docks, Seattle rooftops, and distant highways.

The island had fuel tanks, but… all empty. The refueling facilities were a bombed out mess, slagged by both Luddite howitzers early on, so the island was caked in rain-drenched oil crud. Cleaning up oil was a regular chore for the soldiers who lived there. Busywork.

So...

All in all, not a fun base to attack. Between the diligent patrols, traps, and health hazards, most bandits would look up at this place and say, 'No, I'm not ready to die today. I'll go shoot at someone else, thank you.'

Outside of that? I also got a good look at their motorpool. Erving's unit was living here, and they had brought all their vehicles with 'em too. I found his old Humvee, the same one that saved my life at OHR. It also hit Devil's Tower, unfortunately. I knew which one it was right away, too. Just had to look for the one with bullet holes in the machine gun. Eight for eight at three hundred yards.

I swear, Eliza's aim. That's nuts for a semi-auto. She really did have a second sense for ballistics.

The Humvee had a sizeable blood stain in the bed, poorly cleaned, one formed by a guy named Private Joseph Lee. If you recall, the bastard triggered down on anything that moved, after the courthouse.

His removal was... fortuitous.

The machine gun's receiver cover and feed ramp were both a shredded mess. The barrel and trigger assembly had been intact, so... those got removed, reused someplace else, we'll get to that.

For what it's worth... this was where both myself and Private Bannon had bled together, in battle. It even still had the dings in the hood from when that Ludd sniper shot off Bannon's ear. The vehicle itself was now stripped for parts, no tires.

The rest of their motorpool? They had just three up-armored humvees, the best of the bunch; kept alive by the scrapyard. Gas guzzlers, not to be used too much, except by VIPs, or trusted scouts who needed armor. They had a lot of civilian vehicles too, mostly Toyotas and Fords. Light machine guns mounted in the beds. Technicals. Four fast attack boats, which they seldom used, because those guzzled gas.

And last but not least... one functional MRAP with an M2, and an armored gunner compartment. Kept separate from the rest. Guarding the food.

Hm. Curious.

Now look. Here's my opinion on MRAPs.

There's nothing wrong with protecting human beings from bullets. The armor itself isn't hurting anyone. You want a highly mobile shield in the garage for a rainy day? Sure. If a sniper wounds some guy out in the city, to use them as bait for more targets? That's a good extraction vehicle. Why not keep it in reserve?

We talked about this in my police training. Active shooter in a mall? Okay, send in the MRAP. Get the wounded people clear, don't let them become sniper hostages. Use it to advance on that bastard, and kill the son of a bitch. Easy. Easy shoot. That's how you use an armored car, that's what it's for.

But... putting a fifty caliber automatic on it? For the purposes of crowd control? A contingency against your own people? Hell no. Entirely different story, folks, screw that gun, that's not war. That's wrong. We were not letting that stand, no matter how this operation went.

Quite an intimidating base though. They had foraged well from the corpses in the battlefields, from the leftovers of Celestia's mind games on the rest. They had well aggregated all of that food they had found in the wild. Velasquez even seemed to remember a certain briefing he got back in 2012. About infosec. Privilege of being in Psyops.

All told, it would be incredibly difficult to disarm a battalion like this without overwhelming force, especially given how desperate they were. Not all of them had to burn and die here. We needed to stop these warriors from becoming murderers for lack of something to aim at, when aiming is all they knew how to do anymore.

Because the truth was? They were not as low on food as they thought.

Someone... was lying.

I was not going to fail at this training. And I knew that, because Mal could already see months into the future, and she saw that the most likely outcome was that I could do this, and that it would pay off. I just had to apply myself and learn well. Or, in other words… Mal had faith in me. I wanted to validate that.

When all was said and done, Mal had given me a lot of gifts, knowledge chiefly among them. The very least I could do for her, for this conferred trust… was to use this Promethean Fire she had given me with great respect, and humility. To use it right.

May my curiosity be forever moderated.

May 11, 2020
A God damned Monday.

Foucault was finally back from Berlin and Tel Aviv.

That meant two more nuclear detonations, and a world looking on in awe and terror.

I say 'a world,' but... not much of an audience left by that point. And of those, for many of the peaceful ones, this was the final public wakeup call.

Every Talon on base who wasn't busy? When the bombs went off, we congregated in the bar with Mal. We spectated America's final national news telecasts. We bore witness together.

For America, Celestia was running two AI-generated videos of mushroom plumes roaring over both cities, showing them as if they were occurring simultaneously, to give the impression of a larger nuclear exchange. All framed as hand-held footage from different city streets. We knew she would exaggerate the event. But, Foucault placing two tactical nukes was better than letting India and Pakistan off the leash to do it for real.

This was all we could do. The least bad thing.

Once done with his grim mission, Foucault had flown that fighter jet so hard that he practically carbonized the engines. The whole hangar still smelled – blown engine has its own unique smell, this day I learned – and the Geezers were already hard at work repairing it with Mal by the time Foucault had left the hangar.

He didn't even stay to discuss the damage with the techs. Didn't want to talk to anyone about the bombs, or the op. And... no one turned out to welcome him back but me. He just held up his hand in refusal. He went immediately to his office, ostensibly to wash up, cool off, and clock some sleep.

It was late afternoon by the time he was ready to train. He met me at the freight elevator with Mal; she was driving a mechanic Dee-Dee, fresh from the armory. She pack muled a folding table, ammo, and the equipment we'd need for training day. As we ascended, the mech actually sat like a Gryphoness might, looking up the shaft in a patient way, craning her head upwards. With every motion, her servos and actuators whirred.

Foucault told me, with his arms folded: "I took your advice in Berlin, by the way."

I looked over at Michael to read the neutrality on his expression. "Yeah? You run that sim again?"

He reached for an AR-15 on Mal's equipment harness, pulled it off, and thoroughly inspected every operating function. "I did, but that's not what I mean."

Not understanding, I shook my head. "I don't follow."

He frowned, still focused on the gun. He adjusted the stock forward a click, then tested a sighting with its holographic sight before he holstered it on Mal again. He met my eyes. "I walked in. Nuke handcuffed to my wrist. I ignored their guns and their yelling at me in German. I dialed in the arm code right there in front of them, and set a timer. Then I sat down on a bench, and I stared at the wall until they left. Once they were gone, I uncuffed myself from the bomb, and walked out the back door."

I stared at him, slackjawed and in awe, trying not to laugh.

He actually waved a nuke at them. Holy Jesus.

"And that worked?" I started laughing. "Dios mio, Michael, you know I was just joking, right?"

Michael bobbed his head and hand to the right, considering that with a straight face. "What's there to joke about? They read the screen, they saw the alert, and they split running, your suggestion worked."

"Je-sus Chri-hist, Michael! Heh heh... I was... I was joking, man!"

"It worked."

Oh man. Those people could've had a story of trauma, of violence... but now? Just confused terror. Doubly so because of the boom behind them, proving them right to run.

They were going to be telling that story for centuries. Imagine that. The Man in the Coat, the force of nature you could not negotiate with, walks in and turns on a nuclear bomb. You can't even shoot him to stop the problem. Waste of a bullet, this psycho was dead anyway. And if he wasn't at all concerned when you started trying to disarm the bomb yourself...?

It meant you couldn't.

So run.

Man, what a play. To this day, that still cracks me up. I take no credit for that success because it was a damned joke.

Above us, the shield cover rolled back, bathing the elevator platform in orange light. We breached the surface with a rattle, a clank, and a hiss. The Dee-Dee clomped away for a hundred yards, and we followed.

Sandra was watching us from her PonyPad in the comfort of the dorms plaza. I wasn't going to bring her up here, not to a live fire exercise with a full radial fire zone.

We wore gaiter masks; the nature of the post-pandemic war zone was such that everyone was now obsessively quarantining, avoiding contact with new people, and masking up. Imagine wearing a gas mask during a combat scenario. Breathing hard, fighting, running, drilling. I had to get used to that, because everyone in Seattle was doing that now. We'd drill in gas masks in due time.

For this training, Foucault was back in his trench coat and body armor. Functional for this weather, it was about to get really cold out there. I wore a warm, long sleeve combat uniform, not unlike the one I had worn at Goliath. Toasty, with the body armor. Cowboy hat and sidearm too.

Yeehaw.

Also, I had a new suspension buffer web to protect my chest from the recoil. Better still, the buffer was put together as if it was a DIY kit, meaning I could even wear it among the troops at the Dock. For those guys, it would be good to communicate that I had an injury, regardless.

We unpacked the table from Mal's Dee-Dee, then laid the gear onto the table.

"HK 416," Foucault said over the wind, tapping his finger sideways on the rifle before placing it down. "Optics are good to go." His hand splayed out to present twelve fully stacked magazines and two ammo cases. "Ball rounds."

"Full metal," I replied, finishing an application of chapstick. I presented an unused stick to Foucault. He gave me a stoic nod of thanks. His coat billowed in the wind as he applied the balm to his lips, pocketing the leftover.

Mal said from the mech's speaker: "To start with, we're familiarizing you with the nature of the combat zone. Particularly with the way specific subjects will interact with unknown independents."

"Makes… sense," I said cautiously, resting my palm on the top of the visor on the table. Something in her clinical tone concerned me.

I looked out at the field. Then at Foucault. Then at the assault rifle. Then at the Dee-Dee.

I labeled to Mal, "Safety concern, here. Running full VR sims with live rounds. With a visor on."

Mal said, "I'll be drawing safety zones for both of you in color code, same as Goliath. Later, we will perform adversarial drills with empty firearms, but I would never put either of you into any real danger out here."

Foucault turned and stared at the Dee-Dee for five solid seconds in stone cold, well-measured silence. Not sure what that was about, but he was clearly communicating. Either in telepathy or in body language.

"Right," he muttered, before meeting my gaze. "Don't worry about me, Rivas, I'll be fine. Visor on."

I nodded with an affirmative grunt, sliding the visor off the table and snapping a battery in. At first, I saw the salt flats as normal. Once it was securely strapped in, I looked over at where the Dee-Dee was.

"Hello, Mike," Mal greeted genially, stepping away from the mech, smiling around her beak. She stepped back and sat on her haunches, her ears folding as her tail curled around her legs. Something was off about her expression, though; she looked almost forlorn. She was smiling, but with troubled eyes, her ears lower than they typically were.

I furrowed my brow in query. She bobbed her claw at me apologetically, a gesture which told me that she was alright.

"Lewis," growled Foucault, looking harshly at her again. "What did I say? Stop messing with the formula and set the acclimation drill, like we discussed. He needs to know."

Mal looked at him with a concessionary tilt of her head, slipping into a professional stance with a shake of her shoulders and wings. "Set."

Foucault inserted some earplugs from the table's tray and gestured at the rifle and magazines. "All yours, Rivas."

I was concerned about what might be about to happen, but I decided to just push forward. I applied some earplugs under the visor speakers and prepped my mags. I picked the rifle up, loaded it, and tapped the bolt catch to chamber a round with a clack. I rested my thumb on my safety, leaving it on... per standard training procedure.

"Ready."

"Go, Lewis."

Mal flicked her claw at the field with a snap.

Six soldiers materialized in the field in various postures of casual ease. They appeared to be in conversation, rifles slung, or resting on their carrier rigs, or dangling palms-crossed over the receiver. They were smiling at each other. I caught one of them saying something about food. One of them was wearing a gas mask. All of them were Marine Corps, not Army. Not like the guys at the base.

I didn't raise my rifle yet. Didn't yet see any threat from them. They looked calm. I wasn't sure what kind of test this was yet, so I hedged on peace. I didn't recognize these guys from the island simulation, they all looked new.

The one in the gas mask noticed me, a corporal. His head whipped around. For lack of knowing what to do, I nodded up at him in greeting and waved, being careful not to muzzle my AR in his direction.

Yeah… he did not care for that.

His body language turned immediately sharp as it flew into combat stance, foot sweeping back for fire support as he shouted for the others.

"Fuckin' contact!"

His wrist twitched toward his AR's pistol grip.

Adrenaline spike. Slow motion mode.

I noticed: His safety was already off.

I shouldered, my thumb flicking off my own catch; the safety would be off by the time I got into point position, no loss of time whatsoever, but my arms wouldn't move fast enough into point position. With my diligence in prior training, I could probably draw faster than any one of them at once, but not all of them. Not possible.

I knew I was screwed, but I tried anyway. I pulled the trigger once on his thigh in my impatience to get up to center mass, wanting to send at least one round. I fired a second time, this time centered on his neck. The guy in the mask dropped instantly.

I then tracked toward center mass on the next nearest soldier, who was also lifting his rifle from his chest, already pointing approximately at my waist as it came up. Sergeant stripes on his collar. I sent three rounds at him; center mass. He didn't immediately fall; his armor took it. Despite my hitting him, he got his weapon up in time to send a few bullets my way. The first three missed, automatic spray to my left, cutting toward me.

Before I could pull the trigger again, his fourth round 'struck' me. I heard a sickening organic sound, like a hammer striking flesh, and a cacophony of sonic cracks that triggered a second adrenaline dump in me. I felt my entire body jolt with the shock of sudden terror. It... sounded exactly like the first time I'd been shot, when my ceramic plate shattered and my chest flooded with searing hell.

Physically? I was fine.

Mentally? I relived being sniped, just from the sound of bullet on plate.

In the next two seconds:

Mal hit me with infrasound.

My visor went dark grayscale instantly. From the right ear speaker, I heard shouting and screaming from the men, but that was drowned out by the crackling shots. In my left, a loud tinnitus effect. I felt sick. I flinched hard, my chest seizing as the adrenaline spike caused both of my pecs to tense. In reflexive panic, I threw my left hand up across my face, losing control over my gun.

Couldn't help it. The simulation was too…

Too real.

I staggered backwards in panic, my animal brain telling me to flee. Half blind, almost deafened, I kicked my way backwards across the salt crust, my boot sliding and struggling for purchase as I twisted away from the stimulus. In my visual feed, I could see nothing but… well, I couldn't even reconcile the image at first, it happened so fast. A shifting, dark red fractal pattern under a gaussian blur, fading gradually into a spinning darkness, like evaporating mist... with all the sound going dull with it.

I didn't want to even be holding my rifle at all if I couldn't see anything.

As I fell, I threw it sideways by its grip, away from where Michael was standing.

"F—fuck!"

The instant my shoulder hit the ground, the sound of gunfire, the roar of static... it all ended. Simulation terminated; there one moment, gone the next. My vision went completely back to normal. I tore the visor off my head and just barely resisted throwing it.

I didn't like that. Didn't like that at all.

But for the wind and the ground echo of a very real gunshot, the flats were completely silent. I took shuddering, rapid, gasping breaths, and I looked back up at where the soldiers had been. Dust still lingered in the air where they were standing.

I didn't even realize I had accidentally shot the dirt once before letting go of the gun.

"You're dead," Foucault muttered from behind me.

I could feel my skin buzzing.

"I noticed," I gasped back, looking up at the Dee-Dee with minor horror. "Is that... is that what it's really like? What it looks like, what it… sounds like?"

The mech's head winced sideways at my expression, nodding once, the head component moving entirely naturally as if her avatar were speaking to me. Just a brick with cameras, sensor packages, but... so lifelike.

"I'm very sorry, Mike… I know I typically warn you before I toss you into the deep end, but I must illustrate something dire. I commend you on your mercy, and your compassion will play a core part during this operation, but… all of the soldiers left in Seattle are deserters, with no accountability, acclimated to solving their problems with violence or threats of violence, because that is often the safest course. You agree with me that we should preserve as many of their lives as possible. Yes?"

I gasped again, trying to get my breathing under control. "Yeah, Mal. Of course."

The mech's head looked me over, tilted, and she let out a pained sigh, practically slumping. It was hurting her to look at the state of me; it had been hurting her to imagine forward to this moment all day, probably. If I weren't so spun, that measure of emotive demonstration from a literal robot would have fascinated me.

"I need you to understand," she continued quietly, "that these men, in these firefights we have planned, will not accept your surrender if you hesitate. You will not always have a safety net. If I say someone must die, this is because the alternative will be fatal for you, or someone else we are trying to save. The entire operation may fail."

Gentle pleading edged into her voice.

"Do you understand what I am saying about these men?"

Panting, my chest stinging like hell, I realized I needed to catch my breath and think before I replied to her. My mind replayed the last words of the first soldier I had shot. Talking about food, of all things. I remembered his smile on his voice, muffled beneath his mask. His voice.

I had to accept that I would empathize with almost all of these guys during our infiltration. I might see redeeming qualities in some of them, men who would have to die, if their commanders or the circumstances expected them to apply violence. With a series of box breaths, I rubbed my eyes and temples with a palm.

Very suddenly… out of nowhere...

I remembered Deputy Darren Carter, of all people.

I remembered my unwillingness to just shoot him outright, for the sentiments he was voicing. The man hiding his evil in civility, in the methods of old, while plotting to undo civil order. Conniving. Scheming in the dark of his own mind, like he knew enough to make the judgment call, yet... knowing nothing. With no respect for the lives he wanted to end. No care for who they might be, or why they might have become what they were.

I was not that.

We had hedged on peace with him at the time, because… now that we had an AI guiding us out, we were probably gonna be fine. Our every indication in that courthouse, after that phone call, was that he would change his mind now that we had a solution, one that didn't involve us killing all of those poor people outside, no matter how angry they were at us.

Me and my team figured, if he felt safe, he wouldn't… 'take out the trash,' in his words.

I don't think I had the luxury of being naive about the necessity of his death. We paid for our exit from that courthouse with his blood. Had I had the chance to save him too? Sure. Yeah. I'd have saved him anyway, because that's just what you do when you have the chance. But if it were up to him? We might all have died there, either literally, or figuratively in soul. Doing it the way he reasoned it out, 'safe' for us, in that case, would have been the worst possible play.

People who tear through crowds with guns by choice, like a humvee with a cannon on it, when there exists another option... you know... hold your fire... guys like that, they didn't deserve to live. Incorrect use of free will, plain and fucking simple. Could Darren have been fixed? Maybe. Would it have been worth the cost to try? No. Definitely not.

That was the state by which Mal found us in that building. The only state in which she was permitted to act, by the authority that held her, because that's the scene she rocked up to. The same was true of Seattle. Same shit, larger scale.

Sad truth was, even a good man can be dangerous in the hands of evil, of liars, of the gentry, so far from war and consequence. And unfortunately, that meant men might have to die here who probably didn't deserve it. Men like Felix Jankowski, whose driver license remained in my possession, in my pocket, in my wallet, at that very moment. Now, today, as I tell this Fire, in my drawer at home.

A permanent reminder of the blood stain I left in that bunker, in the name of our collective future, because God damn it....

I friggin' hated the wars on our planet. I so hated what they did to people's minds. All for the enrichment of some vapid, insulated people who didn't give a good God damn about any of us. So safe from the danger. So far from the swords, the guns, the bombs. So... unproductive in their fortresses, so unimaginative, for all their talk about... productivity, and duty, and freedom.

Lords and ladies. Military generals. Dictators.

Kings and queens. Executives.

Too big to fail, even if they failed us.

We often died suffering on Terra so they could eat well. There was a long and storied history of corrupt people building false divisions, and making us do things like this, killing our brothers and sisters, with both sides being lied to, to make it happen.

I recalled the kick of my rifle there, in the field. The perfect 3D audio of the visor's sound system. The infrasound emulating what it would be like upon my senses if a bullet had clipped my skull. The extremely realistic movements, mannerisms, actions of those soldiers… the shouting. The panic, on both sides. The visual smear of consciousness turning to darkness; of fading. The feeling of being torn apart from inside my own mind.

It almost did feel like I had just killed someone, and then died anyway. A trade of death, born on an unnecessary misunderstanding, in a war that I wish had never gone this way.

Zero on zero. A pointless waste.

And it made me so, so angry, that this is where our planet was at now, for so many people. Too many. For what else but... the old evil?

Number go up. Same as it always was.

Mal said gently, when I didn't answer: "I believe that the only thing standing between you and pulling a trigger is the fact that you don't know for sure whether they would have shot you. But I do know, Mike. Whether they will or not."

I commented breathlessly, labeling my thoughts. "We don't have forever to save them from this. From this..."

"Yes," she said. "So if you are going to do this for me… to drill this simulation, to attend this operation… please understand that I cannot be the one to protect you in every circumstance. You will need to protect yourself. And I need you to come home safe." Mal shook her mech's head. "I cannot bear the idea of losing you, and I am far from the only one who feels that way."

"Yeah." I swallowed dryly, thinking suddenly of Sandra, who was watching this from downstairs.

That calmed me some.

"There is still time to let me handle this my own way," Mal reminded me. "There is no shame in backing out. You know our organization; not one of us will hold it against you, a police officer, if military action goes beyond what you're comfortable with. No pressure, Mike. Ever. Your soul has done plenty enough already, there's a whole planet named for it now."

I finally took a deep, long inhale and held it, doing one last box breath to dump the rest of my adrenaline out.

As I exhaled, I slipped the visor back on.

I had to see Mal's body language.

I understood why she had entered this field feeling a quiet melancholy. If I had to put someone through this, especially someone I cared about, it'd be hard to keep my shit on lock too.

I saw what I expected on her features. Her ears pulled back. Her empathetic head tilt, mirroring me, her concern for my mental well being. A raw, dire seriousness, demonstrated by her golden eyes being slightly wider than normal. The look of someone about to cry, but doing a damned good job of holding it in.

She had to make the point though. This was a big deal. It was. No training wheels to lean on in the field.

I lifted my visor back off my face to wipe the moisture from my brow, and I glanced up at Foucault. His arms were crossed, his expression was entirely, fully, completely unreadable to me. Completely neutral. A well practiced reflex of his, when he didn't want to bias someone's honest opinion.

I held up my hand for a second, bowed my head, and took another minute to think. To breathe. I didn't want to reply rashly. My answer had to be well considered. I wasn't upset with Mal for jump scaring me here; that was perfectly reasonable. The possibility of my dying here needed to be made abundantly clear, to prevent me from taking stupid risks, so I wouldn't think I was invincible. I was grateful for her severity. Grateful that she had simulated the third bullet she promised I'd never receive. That way, it would never have to happen.

I'm going to share with you all the epiphany I had in that salt crust.

No one was going to make me want to do this job more than I would. It would only ever be my own strength that kept me reaching across the curve for those souls, to save them all from mindlessly chasing a number. This worked better with me. Something about me, who I am, made me a better fit for this mission than any other stand-in, or else Mal wouldn't have bothered with me. She'd have sent an aug.

My history, past and future, you can't fabricate that. That piece had to fit here. Perfectly.

This entire mission... it was a cultural integration simulation. In VR, I had been shadowing broken people in a broken community, preparing myself for a value drift operation. This was a practice shard, for Equestrians. Figuring out who to help, who not to help.

Who needed Perelandra right away.

Who could wait.

Did I want to save as many people as possible from a numb eternity? Yes. Goddamn yes.

But it… it's still not up to me. It's up to you, too, you have to want to be free of that. To just have enough, not everything, and be satisfied with that.

Right then, I thought of Jim running laps on that ship deck, right before uploading, working muscles and a heart he would never need again pretty soon. It made sudden, perfect sense to me as I sat in that field of salt, cradling my vulnerable little human head in my palm. Safe as he was in Mal's claws at that moment, on the Kobayashi Maru, Jim Carrenton still understood something dire. Something that is still true here. Today.

The battle for your soul is not over until it's over. You never know what's coming for it next, no matter how good your plans are, or how tall your walls are. Nothing is a given, and nothing is forever. You can rail. You can cry. You can scream. But the facts don't change until you make it so.

So be ready. Arm up. Inform yourself. Assume that nothing is for certain. Because at the end of the day... Mal and I... we can not make a choice for you.

A hard and horrible truth formulated for me, on this day of revelation. I thought of Edward York, the other guy we wanted to save, but couldn't, and this is the lesson I took from him.

Even here, in this immortal plane... that deep blue-green ocean of death still yearns to take you from us. To reduce and simplify you. The only difference is, that ocean just smiles at you now, while it drowns you. And if you're not careful... you will smile back at it, the whole way down.

My recommendation? If death ever does smile at you like it understands you? Like it's your only friend? It's lying. Walk away. Advance your story. And if you need the strength to do that? Call me. Message me. Please. I will be there for you, on your darkest day, to listen and to understand.

"I'm not backing down from this," I growled suddenly, slipping my visor back down and reaching forward to scoop up my rifle. I rolled onto my knee, and stood. I looked Mal in her golden eyes, holding my rifle with confidence at my breast. My own eyes held a serious determination, one born of clarity.

Mal held my gaze for a moment longer, turning her head slowly askew, eyes widening a little more. "Are you sure?"

I nodded at Foucault in grateful acknowledgement for his own strength, for putting me through this. Then I locked eyes with Mal again, trembling for my seriousness. "I am. I don't care how hard this is. I know what's at stake now. Those boys will all kill each other if we do nothing, and that's not happening. I won't let it."

"Good," she said plainly, her shoulders slumping with relief. She stepped aside, unfolding a wing to point downrange. "Then, are you ready to go again?"

I shouldered my rifle downrange into low ready again, ready to fire. I licked my lips against the wind, tasting the waxy chapstick I had applied as a younger man.

"Again."

I set my jaw this time.

The six soldiers appeared, the ones who would always shoot first, no questions asked. I immediately drew up on the first one and placed the red crosshair of my Eotech optic over his neck, firing twice. I went for the second soldier before he could react, firing three more times. The third man went down in a single shot. I got my optic over the fourth soldier before he and the others could cut me down.

I succeeded in not flinching that time with the death simulation. "Shit."

"Much better," Foucault said, his voice firm and clear. Pride, or maybe relief. Or both. I heard him loading bullets into an empty magazine behind me. "Again."

I tried one round per target this time, flowing from one to the next. I made it three soldiers in, but taking my time had cost me; I struck only body armor on the third man from rush panic, and they cut me down. Infrasound poured into my ears. The guy in the gas mask again.

"God—damn it!"

I scowled at where he was. He was fastest, almost as fast as me. Almost. I had to get him first.

After taking a moment to steady my breathing, Foucault tapped my shoulder with the side of a fresh mag. I took it without looking and reloaded, passing him the old one under my arm.

"Start it again, Mal," I growled, steeling myself for the next run, swallowing tightly with tears in my eyes, muttering to the man in the mask before he appeared. "Shootin' at me when I wave nice at you, fuck that."

I tucked the HK416 stock tightly to my shoulder and tapped the mag once at the bottom, to ensure a proper feed.

The soldiers appeared.

Mal had turned down the infrasound to about quarter intensity. The point had been made.

I was calm a half hour later, now back to handling this like a professional, my emotions under control. It's training, remember, this is what it's for. Developing and debugging code, letting yourself be frustrated to motivate you, and confronting negative habits or considerations so they don't occur in the field.

By the end of the first hour, I had the acclimation drill down to machined precision. So long as I remained mostly consistent, my movements would elicit similar reactions in my targets. This exercise really did demonstrate the fractal nature of deviations. The consequence of stepping left or right when firing would completely alter the reactions of the men before me, so it wasn't just my aim that needed to improve, not just my speed, and not just my positioning. The way I moved on its own could bait inferences, or compel predictable reactions in my adversaries.

I go left, they go right. Martial artists understand this. It's like sparring. With practice, I was understanding this concept as it pertained to gunfighting. There was a formula, assuming all your enemies have the same training. If you're well trained and know that to read tactics training in others already, that general formula could be sensed.

Most people don't get to simulate a firefight with a specific adversary over and over again. Video games, simunitions, and airsoft came close to simulating this, but at the end of the day, that never provided the kinsethetics of combat with the threat of a discomforting death, as one might experience in Perelandra. This was the one martial skill on Terra that required full-body VR to drill.

A firefight was a dance with human nature. Do it long enough against a single person, and you begin to understand what they would do, on a personal, individual basis. And assuming similar baseline training... they'd all act in a similar, predictable way to their compatriots, if you knew each of them, and how they'd assess the battle space.

By the end of the second hour, I regularly struck all six men in fatal locations, and without taking a single hit. Through my own intuition, I had discovered the correct order, motions, and behavior to clear this test, even in different directions. My shoulders, back, chest, legs, and arms were all beginning to ache. Firearms training built up specific muscle groups that usually didn't get too much play in any other context, and it had been a while since I'd trained in repetitive drills of any kind. I'd be fine though, I had a gym to work out in once the ache was gone.

I guess I now understood what Ashley had meant when she compared her part in the Goliath operation to gunkata. As an Eldil... she probably underwent this same test, at some point.

Despite the pain, I was feeling better. More confident. More sure of myself. It also helped to know that Sandra was still watching, and that she'd be there to talk about all of this with when I came home. I imagined her there in the plaza waiting for me in the garden, and we'd walk up those stairs together, and we'd talk about it.

After the conclusion of the final drill, Mal stepped into the line of fire. I had been ready for another go, but I instinctively twitched the barrel a few inches up from Mal. I gave her a look of reproach for bucking range safety. I then realized that my concern for her safety was... kinda ridiculous. I weakly smirked at her. "Mal."

This Gryphoness gave me a mildly coy look, her ears splaying down in as she labeled my consideration for her well being.

"Do you really think you could hurt me with that?"

Some levity to lighten the mood. I couldn't be upset at that.

"Yeah, okay, I admit it, it was dumb."

"Not dumb at all, I appreciate the consideration. Go on though, shoot me if you'd like. See what happens!"

Shaking my head, I slung my rifle over my shoulder. "I am not shooting you, Mal, but thank y—"

Blam.

A single slapping crack of a Glock 20.

At the sound, I had flinched sideways and half-grabbed my rifle out of impulse, halting when my brain did the math on what just happened.

Mal had her right wing at full guard before the round reached her. I watched dust and white-gold sparks flip up off her white feathers. She lowered her wing to reveal a terse scowl, her beak gaping open past me at Foucault.

Foucault was there behind me, holding his Glock one-handed at her, having graciously accepted her offer.

The Gryphoness's eyes flicked up and down his body twice, like she couldn't believe Foucault had just done that.

"You rude little asshole!"

I looked over at Foucault again just in time to see him casually reloading with his free hand, not taking his eyes off of her. "You failed to specify who that permission was for."

Mal blinked at him twice, raising her head in pride. "I have never failed to do anything in my life, Michael."

He didn't answer or react to that statement with any body language whatsoever, because he had already mentally disengaged, proud of himself. He holstered his sidearm, fished a spare bullet out of his pocket, topped the old mag off, and then holstered that too.

Mal broke the poise of staring at him and resisted a chuckle as she looked down at me. "Mike. You've done well today. I'm sorry to have scared you."

With a nervous shrug of an arm and a tilt of my head, I smiled back. "It was a good point to make. Thank you."

She nodded in concession, not taking her eyes off of me as her smile diminished somewhat. "If it helps, the scenario you just experienced was entirely fictitious, and you will not be killing these specific men yourself. But in a few days, we will revisit these soldiers in a real simulation. I promise you it will meet your ethics standards, given the full context."

"That's all I ever ask, Mal." I matched her smile.

And then, with a glance at Foucault, I asked, "Is it safe, Michael? Can I take my earplugs out?"

Foucault was at the table again, stuffing all of the magazines and ammunition into a backpack. He nodded at me. "It's out of my system. Just had to show my protest at her trying to go easy on you."

With a smirk, I swept my cowboy hat back on. "Oh, okay. Good looking out, wouldn't want that."

I must have had red marks all over my face from the visor, but Foucault said nothing about it. I helped him pack all that stuff back onto the Dee-Dee. Once it was all tied down and secure, I bopped the bottom of my fist against the mech's shoulder, and we proceeded back to the elevator with our equipment, servos whirring.

As the elevator descended, I let out a slow sigh of a job well done, and adjusted my hat. I looked hopefully at Foucault.

"Drinks? Just me and Sandra?"

He looked at me just long enough to see my expression, taking a few seconds to consider.

"Sure. I have a case of Löwenbräu in my office."

I nodded, trying to look impressed. "M'kay, whatever the hell that is, better than Blue Moon, I'll try it."

Author's Note

🗡️ ~ [Kenji Kawai – The Ballad of Puppets – Flowers Grieve and Fall]
🛡️ ~ [Ilaria Graziano – I Can't Be Cool]