Perfect Enemy

“Every culture around the world, throughout history, cultivated an art of fighting. Hand to hand combat gave way to swordplay, gave way to gunslinging, gave way to small unit tactics and so on up through large scale strategic warfare. There were small disruptive developments along the way; Swords, armor, cavalry, firearms, gas canisters and so on. Each of which made an enemy’s skill with whatever the state of the art had been up until that point meaningless, requiring them to upgrade in turn. But it was always human beings doing the fighting. Nothing, conventional wisdom held, would ever replace man versus man. “

Professor Warwick’s spindly frame jostled about in his full body paper garment as he rounded the desk and stood before his class. The portion of the room just behind him abruptly opened up into daylight, a grassy hill and spectacular view of some archaic city in the distance appearing beyond where the wall had been as billions of microscopic lumaprisms coating the walls came to life. The seam between featureless white wall/ceiling and active display area was gradual, a smooth transition from the here and now into the then and there.

“Who can tell me what the first military technology to break this trend was?” Constructs were the elephant in the room. The eight hundred pound gorilla, impossible to ignore. The feeling of paranoid hesitation was palpable. Everyone knew Warwick delighted in posing trick questions, so going straight for the textbook answer meant guaranteed humiliation. Warwick’s eyes locked with Jeremy’s, and then narrowed. He wasn’t hard to pick out, being the only one in the room who didn’t look as though he was struggling to hold a brick in. Jeremy knew every trick in Warwick’s repetoire, and vice versa, as he’d been using most of them himself well before landing in Warwick’s homeroom. Similarity breeds contempt, or in milder cases, passive-aggressive rivalry.

Jeremy’s hand shot up and as if the fish had just tugged on his line, Warwick excitedly called his name. “YES Jeremy, yes please answer once again, share your timeless wisdom and nudge all of us that much closer to enlightenment!” Though soaked with corrosive sarcasm, this spoken missile seemed to pass straight through the intended target, who’d already begun to speak before Warwick had completed its delivery. The rest of the students looked on, their pupils following the exchange like a tennis match. It was a lot more entertaining than the material, and every second wasted on this spectacle brought them slightly closer to the bell.

“The atom bomb.” A moment later the modest town in the distance erupted into a blinding, radiant blossom of extinguished life. Everyone shielded their eyes waiting for the fireball to dim. Except Jeremy. He knew well enough that the wall displays couldn’t achieve the brightness necessary to damage his vision. His gaze remained fixed on Warwick’s face, now silhouetted against the explosion, looking for signs of reaction. Suddenly he grinned. Shit!

“Close, but no.” Warwick spun around, the display fading from a slow-rising mushroom cloud to an interior shot of the pre-Construct United Nations. “The bomb proved too powerful to use. In the hands of separate nations, mutually assured destruction. In the hands of a unified world government, an irresistible tool of oppression. We’d gone too far, gotten too good at killing each other. Like a venomous animal runs into an evolutionary roadblock where it can no longer survive an increase in its own venom’s toxicity, we became so efficiently lethal that if we continued down that path we would inevitably annihilate ourselves.”

Jeremy’s ears turned bright red. The familiar warmth in his cheeks followed. He felt dozens of eyes on him, muted snickers wafting into his ears just above the auditory threshold. They loved it when he put Warwick in his place. They loved it even more when Warwick put Jeremy in his. Throwing the curve and crowing about it has that effect. Jeremy knew it’d pass quickly if he didn’t react. For a moment, he focused instead on how goddamn cold the chair was. plastiglass was a poor choice. Paper garments too, no insulation. Efficiency above all, everything for the war effort, heard it all before, but it’s not as if sparing the materials for warmer clothing would turn the tides.

“You shouldn’t antagonize him. He’s as bad as you. In fact you deserve each other”. Mike was ambling alongside Jeremy as he strode down the hall, an unwelcome elbow resting on his shoulder. Nat came to his defense for the usual transparent reasons. “Warwick set Jerm up. The background visual was misleading. You show Hiroshima, we’re going to think atom bomb.” Mike laughed. “Yeah but nothing says everything he brings up on the walls has to be part of the lesson. No foul. Pretty clever even.” Mike’s allegiances seemed to gravitate towards whomever had recently impressed him and away from whoever he was most annoyed with lately, which was usually Jeremy. “Jerm’s cornered him just as much. Clever maybe, but only as clever as a student.” She gasped and turned towards Jeremy, gripping his arm. “Not that you’re just some regular student, I didn’t mean that.” He was still red in the face but she was blushing at least as hard. He pulled away and continued down the sterile, dimly lit corridor.

Lunch was algae shit with a side of yeast shit topped with regular shit. Some kind of dull orange goo with a spongy texture filled out the largest section of the tray, accompanied by a smaller blue maybe-pudding to the lower right and a thick brown sludge in the section above that. The tray was edible, and usually his favorite part of the meal. The colors changed from day to day but after a while the same few flavors all blurred together. Everything for the war effort. Perhaps the Constructs’ master plan was to reduce us to wearing paper clown suits and eating recycled garbage, Jeremy thought. Wearing us down to living like this without our realization, like a frog in a pan of water brought slowly to a boil. The thought made him smile, which provoked alarmed looks as some thought he might be enjoying his meal.

Mike collapsed into the opposite seat, and Nat pushed a chair up next to Jeremy’s. Just like every day for the past three years, and as usual before long she was trying to slide into the unused portion of his own seat. He could sense her staring at him but couldn’t take his eyes off of what he was eating. He had a relationship with this thing, one built on morbid fascination but a relationship nonetheless. He was determined to eat it against his better judgement, and it was determined to resist all attempts at digestion. A worthy adversary. Suddenly he felt Nat’s dangling red curls tickling his ear and, glancing to one side, noticed her face hovering just a few inches from his. “Attention unauthorized haircraft. You are intruding into sovereign chairspace. Leave at once or you will be fired upon.” Mike got a laugh out of it, but Nat wore a grim perma-pout for the rest of lunch period.

“Everyone should have received a simulator assignment in their preparatory packet last week. Make your way to the sim sphere with your number on it, ensure your neck and hands are bare, and position yourself in the seat as shown on the display.” Jeremy thought back to the packet. Lucky number 8. The seat was a curvilinear recliner fixed to a round pedestal beneath an enormous hollow spherical display suspended above it. Through the hole in the bottom he could see the very edges of what looked to be a step by step guide to interfacing with the sim. Although he knew to expect it, he was still startled when, with a loud hiss, the sphere began to descend. Moments later it surrounded him, locking firmly into the base of the pedestal.

The seat was cold, but the gel brainstem interface pad felt mercifully warm as it conformed to the contours of his neck. No telling exactly what it was made of, but he resolved to avoid giving it too much thought. Slipping his hands into the goo-filled pockets at the end of each armrest, Jeremy focused his attention fully on the instructional animation in front of him. Predictably stylized. The user was depicted as a matte white unisex figure with a thick black outline, shown getting into the recliner in a repeating loop. A second later the screen went dark as the system detected and began adapting to his nervous system. It was exactly as he was told by seniors; Jeremy felt suddenly as though he had not four limbs but a hundred, with complete feeling and motor control for each. What shape was his avatar meant to be? The starfield that surrounded him offered no clues, as the sim appeared to be exclusively first person.

“Flex a little”. A disembodied voice boomed at him from all directions, recognizably that of his instructor. Jeremy cautiously wiggled what he thought must be his index finger. He felt a sudden recoil, and saw a cylindrical metal canister rocket off into the distance, then erupt in a small fireball. “Those confuse chasers. The heat signature is more intense than yours and until it explodes it emits an identical radio signature. Try moving something else.” Jeremy bent his knee. His view suddenly began to spin. “I see you’ve discovered one of your thrusters. Now find the others.” Left elbow? His view began to spin on an additional axis. No dice. Right elbow? That seemed to slow rotation on one axis, but his view was still spinning madly on another. Right knee. No effect. Motion sickness began to set in. “What’s wrong? It isn’t working.” He waited a few moments, wondering if he was speaking to anyone at all. “Sorry, was assisting another student. Try to relax. System failures are part of the sim. Your starboard attitude control thruster isn’t responding. Experiment with the interface and see if you can initiate repairs.”

Jeremy understood about half of that. His stomach churned, and all of a sudden panic set in. He began to thrash and flail, trying more than anything to free himself from the recliner. Instead, every system aboard whatever craft he was supposed to be in activated at once. Explosive rounds shot out in front of him, what looked to be guided missiles spiraled off into confused oblivion, semi-transparent shielding slid down to cover the cockpit, and a stilted female voice informed him that he just armed a thermonuclear warhead.

“Oh wow. I think that’s enough for today. Hang on a second, I’m closing down the sim.” The starfield disappeared and Jeremy found himself back in the recliner, surrounded by the familiar dull white display sphere. It seemed to be spinning around him but that did nothing to diminish his relief. “Fascinating strategy”. Jeremy tried but failed to get past Mike without being spotted. Today wasn’t his day. “Were you hoping to confuse the enemy, or incapacitate them with laughter?”

The sim room had a surreal look about it even during the day, but at night the effect was greatly magnified; Light from the continuous looping instructions on each spherical screen poured down through the opening in the bottom, fluctuating in color and intensity as the images changed. That is, except for the one firmly locked in place over pedestal 5, faint noises from the sim penetrating the bulbous white shell and carrying down the hall just far enough to catch Jeremy’s notice. There was no mechanism that would alert sim pilots to any activity outside their sphere, yet with conspicuously perfect timing the sim terminated and the screen rose with a loud hydraulic hiss as Jeremy approached it.

A pair of striking blue eyes shot out from beneath the sphere’s rim as it cleared Marissa’s head, eventually lurching to a halt. “Jeremy? What are you doing here? Don’t you know the sims are off limits after hours?” He barely knew her. In all his time at the academy they spoke perhaps two or three times and never for anything other than academic reasons. “Spare me. You’re in violation as much as I am, and I’d wager anything you came here with the same idea.” Strangers no more, the two smirked at one another with a mixture of contempt and admiration. “It figures you’d do something like this. With those stunts you’re always pulling in class, trying to get one over on Warwick. Is it because of what Mike said?” He shuddered. She heard that? Everyone must’ve. What did the other students think? Panicked visions of Friendspace threads about his fuckup earlier that day flashed before his eyes. He’d check when he got home, although he knew better than to attempt damage control.

“I think we understand each other. You could say you were out for a walk and stumbled across me but we both know they wouldn’t buy it. They’d heap on the demerits just for being out of your bed this late, regardless of what it’s for. Maybe it’s better this way.” He studied her face. “How’s that?” Stepping down from the pedestal she flipped her long, glossy black hair over one shoulder. Marissa suddenly went from a nearly featureless blue eyed silhouette backlit by the sim sphere to a fully resolved but confusing figure; he could now clearly make out the strange garment she wore and it was like nothing he’d ever seen.

“The way I see it, if just one of us is heads and shoulders better than the rest, it’s suspicious. Even two of us showing sudden improvement would be sketchy, but less so than one. You don’t tell anyone and neither will I.” Seemed agreeable. The entire conversation had a conspiratorial tone to it and the more he saw of this side of her, the more it intrigued him. “What’s with the swimsuit?” She grimaced. It did sort of look like a swimsuit, but he knew full well it wasn’t. Not only was the material seemingly a firmer, stretchy derivative of the interface gel from each sim chair but it was slightly translucent and tight fitting to the point of being obscene. “You can stop staring. These are sim-suits, not swimsuits. They improve our linkup to the chair. They aren’t going to introduce us to them until tomorrow, and we’re really supposed to get changed while the sphere is locked. “Aha”, he thought, and the familiar thrill of seeing something he now knew he shouldn’t ran down his spine. “Don’t flatter yourself, I was checking out the suit.” Her eyebrow raised to what was very likely its physical limit. “Sure you were. The suits are over there in those storage sleeves, numbered according to your sim. You’re 8 if I recall, suit up and we can do some sparring.”

Once sealed within the comforting isolation of the sim, Jeremy reflected on the exchange. In his estimation he could take her at her word when she said she wouldn’t bust him, although having the same leverage on her didn’t hurt. All in all, he concluded, it was the most constructive interaction he’d ever had with a girl. It was just then, as he dwelled on the mental image of her slim figure barely concealed by the gel simsuit, that her missile struck. The match had begun without his realization. Typical. God damnit. Although he couldn’t properly feel it, his cheeks grew flush as he frantically experimented with the controls. She had several hours worth of practice on him, but he was determined to catch up quickly.

Not five minutes later, Jeremy soared effortlessly through the debris which constitutes the ring of Saturn. The practice round earlier that day took place in a wide open starfield; having the huge gas giant as a backdrop aided immensely in orienting himself. It also helped that the malfunctions deliberately inflicted on him by the instructor were absent; Although he’d not yet mastered the weapons systems or countermeasures, Jeremy felt completely confident in both complex movement and navigation. It was obvious Marissa underestimated his grasp of the mid range sensors at least, since he’d been watching her signal for some time now as she carefully snuck up on him by darting behind the mountains of the large asteroid chosen as their battleground. With a shrill warcry, Marissa blasted forth from her cover and unleashed a volley of missiles. “Do you think I’m an idiot?” Jeremy spat through the comms system. “Yes”, came the reply, a little too quickly for his liking. It wasn’t clear what she was getting at until he saw the missiles, which split off seconds earlier to pursue his decoys, suddenly turning back towards his position. Not an idiot maybe, but careless; his radio transmission gave them something to lock onto.

It soon became a game of improvised defense, as both ran out of decoys within minutes but the caves, valleys and other geological features of the asteroid afforded no shortage of ways to confuse missiles. The animosity was also gone, replaced by a strange elation. The thought that he was growing to understand her more moment to moment simply by studying her tactics initially repulsed him, but as the match wore on it became thrilling. “I wonder”, he thought, “if she’s feeling the same thing.”

His obsessive habit of searching for glitches in the games he played at home on his own time led to the discovery that, if carefully herded about and managed right, a seeker missile’s turn radius was such that it would loop helplessly around his vessel. The trick was to dodge out of the way each time it got too close for comfort, then move to a new position and repeat. It should have run out of fuel long ago, but obviously the sim’s designers hadn’t foreseen anyone playing matador with missiles. Marissa’s signal on the sensor screen was his cue to send his new pet careening on a long orbit around the asteroid. “There you are. I think you’re just running from me now. No sense in putting off the inevitable.” Cocky little brat, he thought. Even if his far-fetched gambit didn’t work, it’d be worth the loss just to genuinely surprise her.

The dance of destruction that followed demanded the application of everything learned over the past hour; It seemed clear by now that he’d ‘maxed out’ the sim, i.e. learned everything there was to know about it, so the edge she enjoyed early on was now minor to nonexistent. Slow, dumb seekers were out and cluster seekers were in; Each warhead split upon firing into six smaller, faster, more nimble miniature missiles that shared the inexplicably never-ending fuel supply of their bigger brothers. It would’ve still been a chore to evade or deflect them all even if he hadn’t already used up his decoys, chasers and emp charges; complicating matters, she’d coaxed him into a relatively barren stretch of terrain punctuated only by volcanos.

Jeremy spiralled down towards the surface, all six missiles close behind as he began to hug close to the outer edge of the volcano. “What are you doing?” She sounded equal parts annoyed and confused. It took another few seconds until his target came into sight; a bulging pustule of dimly glowing rock protruded from the volcano’s skin, a sign that magma was struggling there to find some alternate path to relief. “Quit fucking around!” He spotted the sun glinting off of her fighter as she swooped in to ensure the kill. With that he unleashed a fast, but unguided torpedo normally intended for stationary gun emplacements against the bulging rock formation.

It exploded with a ferocity that exceeded his wildest hopes; The blast threw up a cloud of debris that exploded all six of the missiles behind him and sent Marissa’s fighter spinning off into the abyss. Her comms were off but she was no doubt swearing up a storm three spheres over. “That’ll only work once”, she growled as soon as she regained control of her ship. He just kept laughing while using her anger to lure her into a particular spot. Naturally, his laughter only intensified when the lone straggler missile he sent on a long voyage around the asteroid ten minutes earlier connected with her ship.

“I can’t stand you. You’re shit, I hope you know that.” He kept chuckling softly to himself as if to fan the flames of her anger. “You shouldn’t have won, logically, since we were tied up until that point and I was killed by my own missile. Why does that even subtract a point? It’s arbitrary.” She continued to rant, fume and gesture as the two walked side by side back to the dormitories. “He he he he”. At this point it wasn’t even genuine laughter, he was just rubbing her nose in it. “He he he he he he he he.” Her face transitioned gradually from bright red to a more moderate magenta during their walk, but she wasn’t done lecturing him, not by a long shot.

“You know that wouldn’t have worked in real life. The missile would’ve run out of fuel.” He turned and grinned obnoxiously at her. “He he he HE HE HE HE HE!” An elbow to the ribs put an end to that. “Well, you’re right technically. But that wasn’t real life, it was the sim. Think of it as a unique battle environment. I just studied its properties and found a way to use them to my advantage.” They came to a stop in front of the boy’s dorm. “Wow, that was total bullshit but it sounded halfway convincing. You should use that on the instructor tomorrow and see if he buys it.” He vanished around the opened door then peered at her through the gap, still wearing that maddening grin. “You’re cute when you’re mad.” The door slammed, and Marissa shrieked in frustration. Some ways down the hall their RA briefly awoke, scratched himself, then rolled over and fell back to sleep.

First period was tense; He felt her eyes lock onto him the moment he entered the room. Nat noticed too, for her own reasons, but Marissa simply wasn’t interested in acknowledging Nat’s territorial death-glare. “Marissa’s checking you out!” Mike nudged Jeremy, probably assuming he was oblivious rather than making a determined effort not to look back at her. “Trust me Mike, she isn’t. Your seat’s over there, Nat and I will be at the same table as usual for lunch.” That was enough to satisfy, and soon after everyone found their seats,  the lesson began.

“What, for combat purposes, distinguishes a living organism from a machine?” Another one of those loaded questions; There were many correct answers but as usual he was looking for one in particular. Predictably even before he’d finished posing the question, his eyes came to rest on Jeremy. This time, though, he had no interest in his usual back and forth with Warwick; Jerm’s mind was racing with maneuvers, tactics, and visions of the magnificent battle from the night before. He just wanted this class to end so he could face Marissa again in the simulator. As yet he had no plan for how to repeat last night’s result, but then neither did he know what the conditions of today’s exercise would be. The uncertainty was difficult to bear; if only he’d thought to peek at lesson 2 while he had the chance....

“Really Jeremy? No witty one liner? Speechless, for once?” He looked at Warwick with the most potent expression of apathy he could muster. “Or maybe you’re finally going to give someone else the chance to answer. Very well, Kevin?” A fuzzy blonde mane of hair with big brown eyes, two or possibly three years younger than the rest of the students sat up and belted out “Emotion. Constructs might or might not be sentient, nobody really knows, but what little we’ve recovered suggests their own neural architecture is set up to compute in a very rigid deterministic fashion. They are more like the servers that run the sims than they are like us.” Several older students around him turned and nodded approvingly. He was a popular one with girls, smaller and cuter than the gangly pimple faced teenagers that surrounded him, but also with most of the guys on account of all the grades he’d skipped to wind up in their class.

“Insightful, Kevin. But that’s outdated information.” Kevin looked unphased. Girls on either side reached out and needlessly consoled him. “Actually from fragments of recovered software we’ve determined that their consciousness does not run natively as it were, but as an abstraction; Very probably a per-neuron emulation of a living brain, which may indicate that they were once organic.” This was news to a few, who looked startled and began paying more earnest attention.

“It’s likely that they feel emotions much like ours. Hatred, certainly. A few of the targets they chose over the past few years were of dubious military value, but had a demoralizing effect on the insufficiently patriotic.” Jeremy rolled his eyes. Somehow, however he always did it, Warwick noticed and brought the full bear of his wrath down on Jeremy. “Forgive me if I’m mistaken, young master Jeremy, but I get the distinct impression you have something to add! Perhaps a derisive remark intended for those of us who are more completely devoted to a swift victory against the Constructs?”

This time Warwick had it wrong. Jeremy didn’t even look up as he replied. “It’s efficiency”. The room fell silent. For a minute or two nobody was sure whether Warwick was speechlessly furious and preparing to lay into Jeremy or simply stunned. “That’s an interesting answer, actually. Please expand on it.” Warwick employed a much softer tone this time. A good sign, although he was no doubt still ready to spring the trap should Jeremy say anything other than precisely the correct sequence of words going forward. To even his own astonishment, he did.

“A fighter jet is dramatically faster and more capable than even the largest known species of bird or any other organism which flies.” All eyes were on him. He was actually still thinking about the night before, the words spilling out of him now seemed to arrange themselves without conscious effort. “And yet, it makes far less efficient use of fuel. Machines, generally speaking, and especially those designed for combat, are engineered for performance at the expense of efficiency. There were periods in history where this trend does not hold true, during resource shortages typically personal automobiles and other consumer devices would shift in their design towards energy efficiency at the expense of horsepower, but even then they fell far short of the efficiency of nature.”

So far so good; Warwick’s jaw hung slightly agape, no poisonous retort readied for deployment, only legitimate surprise. “The human eye has an image quality that took us several centuries from the invention of photography to match with machines, and even now in some regards they remain superior. Our bones were, for a very long time, unparalleled by any known material in their light weight and resistance to fracture. We can operate for days on a belly full of biomass that is equivalent in electrical energy to what would run a humanoid robot for perhaps two hours. And every aspect of the human machine becomes even more incredible when you realize that it self-assembles, from a tiny cluster of cells, using less energy than it requires to fart.”

Scattered giggles followed, silenced a moment later as Warwick’s stern gaze swept the room. “I am prepared to tentatively agree with you. But while you’ve laid the groundwork, your answer is not yet complete.” Jeremy shrugged. “I wasn’t finished. We design war machines around performance because we can afford to; Their design assumes a reliable supply line to deliver the fuel, munitions and other consumables to meet their voracious appetites. Nothing like that could exist in nature, because everything on Earth evolved in a comparatively energy scarce environment, and the relentless cycle of death and mutation selected very strongly for energy efficiency. We’re all, even today, survival machines optimized for long periods of starvation separated by occasional successful hunts. In the wild we’d eat perhaps a fist sized quantity of meat weekly and the rest of our diet would consist of nuts, berries and whatever else we could scavenge. We are very obviously not geared for performance. Myself excluded, of course.” It was Marissa’s turn to roll her eyes.

“Well, mark your calendars everyone. I’m giving this one to Jeremy. Don’t ever expect to see such a thing happen again, but yes, that’s more or less a satisfactory answer.” It took a few moments to settle in. There was impulsive cheering that even Warwick’s carefully perfected death gaze couldn’t suppress. After things settled down, he made his best effort to continue the lesson, although now the students previously focused on what he had to say were beaming at Jeremy with unqualified admiration. Marissa could not conceal her disgust, though Jeremy did not look smug as he would have under normal circumstances; in fact, there was no change in his demeanor throughout the argument. He was still staring down at his desk, still lost in thought, considering possible strategies for the evening’s sim lesson.

“Eyes up front. Come on, really. You’re here to learn.” Very gradually, attention returned to Warwick. “Now, the specialization for energy efficiency makes sense for a species living in a primitive state such that they can never be certain where their next meal will come from. But of course, we’ve come a long way since then.” Mike chimed in; “Actually I’m still not sure where our food comes from”.

Jeremy normally would have been one of the handful who laughed at Mike’s terrible joke but he was still paralyzed with thoughts of facing Marissa that evening in the simulator. Every attack, counter attack, every clever little deceit replayed over and over for his review. There was no realistic possibility of paying any attention to Warwick, even to savor the petty victory over him that was rare even when Jeremy could afford to devote his full attention to it. She was right, exploiting glitches wouldn’t fly with the instructor. At least, not doing so overtly. But a splinter in his mind nagged at him in words he couldn’t quite make out, something he noticed in passing during the previous night’s battle yet couldn’t fully recall.

“No more from you, Mike. Now as I was saying, as relatively unmodified products of evolution, we are very much geared towards energy efficiency. Machines, at least those designed for combat which of course includes the Constructs, have no such limitation. A modern, robust technological civilization can during times of war reorder itself into a powerfully efficient engine of production which fuels the war machine. It provides for the tremendous consumption needed to sustain the kind of raw performance seen in the most advanced tools of war presently known, but even under ideal conditions we could not beat the Constructs this way. Why is that?”

Kevin, hungry for another helping of adulation, waved his hand about. “No not you Kevin, you’ve had yours. Someone who hasn’t spoken yet. Marissa!” Jeremy bolted upright in his seat, pulled violently back to reality by the mention of his new adversary’s name. She spoke in a cold, clinical tone, obviously putting on a show not just for Jeremy but anyone who had taken satisfaction in his small victory earlier. “What my classmate Jeremy failed to mention earlier is that in spite of the fundamental differences between biologicals and Constructs, we keep trying to beat them at their own game. We send pilots against them in fighter craft based on their own technology, deployed from carriers very similar to their own, as if we’re trying to replicate their victories through imitation. But that can’t work; We can’t be better machines than actual machines. No matter how similarly our fighters perform, they still carry additional weight and must devote space onboard for life support systems to sustain the pilot. In order to match their maneuverability he must be immersed in oxygenated fluorocarbon, which only adds to the bulk and complexity of a system whose Construct equivalent is a chip the size of my thumbnail that runs on about six watts.”

Jeremy made every effort to hide his astonishment. Warwick didn’t. Obviously pleased to see a student joining in his vendetta, he lavished praise on her and did his best to drive home for everyone else how correct she was, how clever she was, all but saying outright that she was a more deserving recipient of their respect. It was, in fairness, an impressive answer. He knew her to be an ace pilot firsthand, but this was the first he’d seen of her academic talents. The more Jeremy dredged up vague recollections of every instance in the past three years where they’d interacted, the more he came to recall that in fact she’d always been at or near the top in test results. He just never had a reason to care about it until now.

This changed the equation, didn’t it? Once again he became lost in thought, struggling to fit this new data into his tactical considerations. For her part, Marissa interpreted his sullen downward glance as shame and implicit concession. “That’s right, a wonderful answer Marissa! Could you be my new star pupil?” Nobody shared his enthusiasm, most were visibly restless as the period was almost over and hunger made it difficult to care about classroom politics.

“Of course, nothing says that this difference is written in stone. Machines aren’t inherently superior to biologicals, regardless of what seditious defeatists might have you believe. This war is winnable, provided we stop trying to imitate the enemy and instead focus on our own strengths. Who is to say that you cannot engineer life for performance in the same way you would a machine? We’ve not yet seen how such a hypothetical organism would stack up to the best the Constructs have sent against us, but it does offer hope that we’ll soon have something even nastier to send back.”

The bell rang, and before Warwick could even reach for the handouts everyone had cleared the doorway. Everyone except for Jeremy and Marissa. Warwick started for Jeremy’s desk, intending to grudgingly thank him for answering gracefully rather than taking on his usual combative attitude. However as he snaked through the abandoned chairs he began to pick up on the powerful tension between the two remaining students and elected instead to duck out of the room.

“You’re going down today.” He knew she’d fire the first shot. It was, as he’d learned the night before, in her nature to do so. “Yeah, alright.” Silence followed, but it was short lived. “Last night was a fluke. If you did that during a lesson, you’d be failed for cheating.” So quick with the low blows, Jeremy thought, but he decided early on not to respond to provocation. If what little he knew about her so far was correct, that would infuriate her more than anything else he could do. “Probably. Maybe we should bring it up with the instructor, and ask him what he thinks.” It was an obvious bluff, but she reacted as if it weren’t.

“Just like you! You know you can’t beat me in a fair fight, so you’d rather sacrifice your own grade just to drag me down with you. I’m surprised you didn’t try something like that during the battle, like a kamikaze attack or some shit.” There was only time for a brief retort before they reached the cafeteria, so Jerm made it count. “Naw, I’d never destroy my own ship. That’s your thing.” He smiled only after rounding the corner. Marissa hung back in the hallway for a moment, struggling to calm herself. “You’re dead, Jeremy. Dead.” Of course he couldn’t hear her, but it was more for her own sake than his.

By the time the display sphere fell into position around his chair, Jeremy’s anxiety was gone. The last few hours of obsessive strategizing had worked it completely out of his body, all he felt now was intense anticipation for his battle with Marissa. This would be the real deal;
although his victory last night was decisive so far as the software was concerned, he’d glimpsed her expression just before his sphere descended and she obviously didn’t accept that outcome. It was her conviction that she was owed a do-over, and she didn’t especially need his agreement on that point. But this time, come what may, the outcome would be binding. Jeremy versus Marissa, round two.

So, try to imagine their surprise when the sim initialized and both found themselves surrounded by a starless blue expanse. A nebula? Jeremy scanned the blue void for irregularities in density he expected to see in a cloud of interstellar gas. Then as his craft turned to follow his gaze, he heard whirring. Whirring? “Oh wonderful”, he thought, “the instructor gimped my thruster again”. Not so, it was definitely causing his craft to rotate, whatever passed for a gyroscope in this thing was responding to the movement. It was a strange sensation, having a nerve ending that terminated in a gyroscope. Felt very much like his inner ear, but more precise. He continued exploring his central nervous system and found several instruments that didn’t seem to belong. Pressure sensor? Salinity sensor? Thermometer?

He turned a bit more, and again heard that muffled whirring. Familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it. His HUD indicated an approaching enemy signature, which soon came back as Marissa’s. Jeremy’s tranquility faltered. Here he was still getting his bearings, and she’d almost certainly come out swinging. Her craft loomed into view, gradually increasing in detail as it emerged from the strange blue fog, then suddenly it all made sense. Before him was a submersible. Not like any he knew of, but definitely designed to move through water. It was long and phallic with a frighteningly sharp nose cone and diving planes that resembled the fins of a missile. Embedded deep near the tip with a transparent acrylic cover to guide water hydrodynamically around it was a small transparent dome. Marissa’s avatar peered out from inside, flashing a menacing grin almost certainly reflected on her real face at that moment.

Jeremy took it upon himself to break the ice. “Uh, hi there. Any reason you haven’t attacked yet?” Signatures of the other students’ subs flickered into and out of existence in his peripheral vision. They were thoroughly occupied with one another some distance away, giving Jeremy and Marissa an opportunity to negotiate the terms of their duel. “Oh don’t worry, Jerm.” It was the first time she’d called him that. “When I attack, you’ll know it. I just didn’t want you to claim that you were ambushed before you could-” it was all the opening he needed. A moment later, without even realizing he was capable of it, Jeremy was supercavitating.

The nose cone of his sub emitted some fraction of the exhaust redirected from the rocket engine behind him, creating a bubble within which he could fly at high speed despite being deep underwater. It also created the most profoundly grating noise he’d been exposed to up to that point, the indignant howl of sea water being torn apart at three hundred miles per hour. Marissa hadn’t yet wished death upon him over radio for exploiting the opening, which seemed suspicious until his attempts to raise her on comms revealed that radio wouldn’t travel further than a hundred yards down here. Gloating would have to wait until after the match.

Diving for a few seconds left Jeremy surrounded by impenetrable inky darkness, and ascending just as suddenly confronted him with what looked like an upside down mountain range. Closer inspection revealed that it was the underside of an ice shell floating atop this planet’s ocean, and in a moment of reflection Jeremy recalled snippets of a documentary about ice moons of Jupiter depicted almost exactly like this. Except at the time it was made the ice shell was believed to be at least a mile thick. This one couldn’t possibly be, as enough light penetrated from the surface to illuminate the uppermost layer of ocean. The confusing radiant blue surrounding him at the outset of the sim he now understood to be seawater as seen close to the surface of an alien sea.

Jeremy sent a note to the instructor asking if he was a high concept comedian or just a common sadist. The note he got back read “Logs showed two students in a networked sparring session last night. Wouldn’t be fair if some of you went into today’s lesson with a sneak preview the night before, so I threw you a curveball. Roll with it, and I’ll forget about last night. I reviewed your match with Marissa and it was a riot, I’m mainly just interested to see how today’s rematch plays out. Speaking of which by the time you get this she’ll be about zero point three nautical miles from your position, closing at 260 knots. If I were you I’d stop reading and evade.” It took him a moment to register the connection between that last sentence and his immediate situation but when he did, his first reflex was to dive at a severe angle and begin swearing. She was just close enough to pick it up over comms. “I was wondering when you’d wake up. I’ve been trailing you for miles. Got anything new in your bag of tricks or are you just going to run away from me until you’re out of fuel?”

Fuel? He searched his peripheral vision and sure enough this new craft had a finite fuel supply. So the sim wasn’t amateurish, just arranged with a gradual learning curve that introduced real world constraints one at a time. His brain throbbed like a combustion engine firing on every cylinder, rapidly restructuring his strategy to account for the new info. When computation completed, it called for a course of action that surprised even the mind that devised it. Jeremy laughed to himself. “She’ll think I’m schizo.” The whole sub shuddered as he suddenly pulled up, compressing his avatar under multiple Gs and heading for the surface at a 45 degree angle. “In a minute I’ll find out if she’s right.”

“He’s figured something out. What is it? Looks like a suicide run from here.” Marissa’s avatar grimaced, its polygonal face contorting to express frustration and alarm. Her cockpit was flooded with the same oxygenated pink fluid as the spacecraft from the prior lesson, in this case roughly the same density as the outside seawater. The acrylic dome through which she tracked Jeremy’s engine plume was the exact refractive index as seawater also, preventing optical distortion. So she could be fairly certain that the absolute madness playing out before her eyes really was happening. Not far ahead Jeremy’s glowing cavitation bubble and his sub within it plowed through salt water at 258 knots, heading straight for the ice shell overhead.

Marissa’s confusion gave way to amusement. “I get it”, she thought. “If he suicides, at the very least it denies me the kill. Must be the best outcome he thinks he can achieve in a fair fight.” Just as quickly as she’d gone from confusion to smugness, Marissa’s face now exploded into a mixture of outrage and disbelief. Just ahead, Jeremy’s sub crashed straight through the ice and up into vacuum, carried by it’s own momentum. “Nope. I don’t fucking believe it. I refuse.” Her wits returned and she veered off at the last second to avoid striking the ice shell. “God damnit, Jeremy. God damnit. I am infinitely tired of your shit.”

Far overhead, Jeremy’s sub-turned-spacecraft gracefully soared above the surface of the moon, which he’d successfully gambled would possess only a small fraction the gravity of Earth. But not so little that his sub could escape into space, so very soon he found himself staring back down at the ice shelf from above as it rapidly approached. If his luck held, he’d strike another thin patch. If not, this sim session was about to prematurely terminate.

He didn’t realize how much he was taking the brief silence for granted until the piercing roar of supercavitation returned. All of a sudden he was back in the water, and back in danger. Marissa wasn’t far behind, mad as a hornet and closing fast. While out of the water he had no ability to change his trajectory so it was a simple matter for Marissa to estimate where he’d come crashing through the ice. Only she was about twenty meters off, so her torpedo exploded harmlessly against the rugged belly of a glacier instead of the laughing, whooping jackass now rocketing his way into the benthic depths of an alien ocean.

Her faces, both real and virtual, were now beet red with fury but the last message she could transmit to Jeremy’s sub before it moved out of range was completely monotone. “Jeremy. So help me, if you don’t stop fucking around and fight me in-sim then you’ll have to fight me in person when the spheres lift. You don’t want that.” She was beyond anger. So murderously frustrated that all of her bloodlust came across with perfect clarity even though any overt emotion was absent in her voice. It was the intonation of someone preparing to strangle. Jeremy looped back around just so she’d be in range to hear him hoot like a merry gibbon before plunging back into the sunless void below.

It was obvious he was luring her in. She didn’t care, berzerker mode was in full effect. Projecting his route, she approached the anticipated end point at a gentler angle and throttled up her engine so as to arrive slightly sooner. She slowed, collapsed her cavitation bubble and went dark. All exterior lights died, as did cabin illumination. For a strange, serene moment her sub seemed to melt away and she felt as though there was no barrier between herself and the surrounding water. It was an opportunity, she decided, to get her emotions under control and prepare for Jeremy. Deep breaths. Her cheeks slowly disarmed, from bright red back down to their natural pallor. More deep breaths. Then growing confusion. Shouldn’t he be here by now?

She probed sonar but came back with nothing in the way of enemy signatures. However it did return the outline of a monstrous hole in the seafloor, what Marissa concluded was the mouth of a hadal cavern at the precise moment that Jeremy plummeted into it. She gasped, sputtered, and then shrieked in renewed anger. Her cheeks returned to defcon one as she gave chase, and although Jeremy’s uninterrupted supercavitation left her with a huge gap to close, she soon found herself careening through the serpentine sea cave with Jeremy no more than five hundred feet ahead.

Marissa let loose with a torpedo. Then another. Eventually, having spent all but two torps with nothing to show for it but craters in the cave wall, she began to consider alternative strategies. In her moment of distraction, Jeremy vanished from sonar. The disappearance of his signature yanked her attention back to the HUD. “That’s impossible. There’s nowhere to escape to.” She slowed, and collapsed her cavitation bubble. The only possibility she could fathom was that the cave had some narrow offshoot her sonar didn’t pick up. “He’s gone dark and he’s waiting there now. When I backtrack, he’ll appear behind me and let fly with the torps. That’s what I’d do.”

Now on electric thrusters only, Marissa’s sub crept gingerly along the tunnel. From within she scrutinized every neon vector of the cavern wall as visualized by her sonar display. Her own fuel gauge was at sixteen percent. Oxygen was at twelve. Given his acrobatics earlier in the match she estimated he was on emergency reserves right now, and would have to emerge from hiding some time within the next four minutes. It dawned on her that his plan might be to run down the timer for the session itself, but a quick note to the instructor confirmed that everyone else had a generous fifteen minutes left on the clock. “If that’s his game,” she muttered to herself as beads of sweat dissolved into the liquid fluorocarbon, “he must realize by now that-”

A loud splintering sound roused her from deep thought. She strained her ears and guessed frantically at the source of it. She wasn’t guessing for long. A second, louder snap drew her attention to the viewing dome. Her sub’s lights played across the uneven wall of the cavern just outside, providing the contrast she needed to notice a hairline fracture in the viewing dome. A creeping realization came over her that Jeremy’s plan was never to wait her out, but to draw her into the deep. For the first time since following him into the cave she took notice of a blinking depth warning in the lower right of her HUD. Another loud crack sounded as the fracture spread across the dome. Jeremy’s signature appeared behind her and the last thing she heard before the shockwave from his cavitation bubble imploded her sub as he passed was the foul, maddening sound of his laughter.

“Ahahaha! Hoo hoo hooooo!” Again and again, her slender pale hand formed a fist and struck Jeremy’s increasingly bloody nose. She just kept punching, but he wouldn’t stop laughing. All around the other students cheered. Some fetched phones to record the spectacle, others placed bets. But Jeremy showed no intention of striking back, his body continued convulsing with laughter no matter how savagely Marissa laid into him. He already won back there in the sim and she knew it. Worse than that, she knew that he knew it. The decisive match between them was over, and the question as to which was the superior pilot was now and forever answered.

Tears began to tumble down her cheeks which once again glowed redder than molten iron. Marissa could no more stop crying than she could stop pummeling Jeremy, and wanting to kiss him. She raised a fist again as if to strike, then her arm fell impotently to one side. Her slender body, now straddling Jeremy’s stomach, quivered as she finally surrendered to the tears. That’s what it took for him to stop laughing. For a moment he wondered if he’d gone too far this time. She leaned in close to whisper in his ear. “You’re amazing,I hate you.”

“Questions?” Every hand in the room shot up in perfect synch. The instructor chuckled. “Let me save us all some time. Does anyone have a question that isn’t about why the sim took place underwater?” One by one the hands wavered, then withdrew. “Not all tactically important targets are in space. There exist resources vital to the war machine in extreme environments of all kinds, including ocean worlds. This is total war, kiddos. There are no limits to the theater of conflict. You may fight the Constructs underwater, you may fight them among the clouds of a gas giant. If we keep losing ground, you may soon be fighting them on our doorstep. Be flexible. Your mind should be prepared for anything ahead of time, because you won’t get even one hot minute to adjust to your surroundings before a Construct craters you. They don’t wait to see the whites of your eyes, every nanosecond that passes they’ve executed a trillion new instructions with the singular goal of silencing your heartbeat. Constructs are at the top of their game right out of the gate, so you need to be too.”

Jeremy rolled his eyes while the rest of the students gaped in reverent awe at the instructor’s obviously rehearsed speech. It was all they talked about on the trek back to class. Everyone earnestly assured someone nearby that they would never again be surprised by the content of a sim, then paired off to argue over the legitimacy of specific kills. Jeremy searched the hallway for Marissa, but she was long gone. He dwelled on memories, still fresh in his mind, of how flush her face was back in the sim room. Then, memories of her warm body shaking against his as she cried. “Amazing”, she said. But also “I hate you”. Talk about mixed messages.

“So are you gonna explain what happened with Marissa back there or do I have to download the video from Friendspace after class?” Mike displayed his usual lack of concern for Warwick’s scolding, not just leaning out of his chair but literally flopped out across Jeremy’s desk. He was making his most determined effort not to acknowledge Mike, and in turn Mike was doing his damndest to make that impossible. “Remember? You let a girl beat you up, then you kissed her.” A ploy to provoke him, but he fell for it. “We didn’t kiss! She was whispering to me!” He regretted the outburst immediately when he noticed all eyes except Marissa’s were drilling into him. She had her face buried in a book. Not one she had any real interest in other than as a means of concealing her embarrassment. “Oh ho! She whispered something? If you don’t tell me what it was, I’ll start to guess. Out loud.”

Everything in him wanted to haul off and hit Mike. But that was the line he couldn’t cross without Warwick going from mildly annoyed to ballistic. He was dimly aware of Warwick shouting threats in the background as it was, best not to push him any further. All around him phones were being pulled out, used to share recordings of the fight through near field networking. By the end of the day every interested party had high def 3D footage of the fight from twelve different angles. It was compiled into a montage and set to music by 4pm, then remixed an hour later.  By 10, Jeremy gave up on trying to set the record straight. Rumors spiraled out of control and by the time students two grades below were debating whether she’d frenched him or put her tongue in his ear, Jeremy had long since given up on dispelling any of it. Denial just added fuel to the fire, so he slept.

He awoke to a very flustered Marissa. Although his eyes were open and he’d already begun forming the words “what the fuck are you doing in my room” she saw no special need to stop shaking him by the hair. “Have you even seen what they’re saying about us on Friendspace!?” Her face was now inches from his and in the process of covering it with frantic spittle. He considered threatening her before deciding it would be difficult to intimidate anyone in his jammies, much less the wild beast who flattened his nose yesterday.

“Marissa.” She stopped, still visibly frantic but attentive. “Yes?” Jeremy sat up, smoothed his hair, then made eye contact. “That sure does sound like it’s not my problem. Get out of my room.” The resulting shriek split his eardrums in half. Jeremy dragged her from his bed to the bathroom, as determined to brush his teeth and get dressed as she was to claw his face off. “They’re saying we’re a couple! They’re saying I kissed you!” Jeremy shrugged. “So why don’t you?” He was still half asleep so it took him several seconds to realize the gravity of his words. Marissa just stood motionless, sporting an anatomically improbable full body blush. A few seconds later she was gone. Jeremy weighed the extent of the damage he might’ve done, decided he didn’t care, then began to undress.

To his surprise Marissa was seated immediately to the left of his usual spot when he arrived at homeroom. Nat was to his right. He almost turned around and left right then. The fireworks began the moment his paper clad buns contacted the painfully cold plastiglass seat. “Jeremy, get your phone out.” Her whisper was harsh and distinctly dictatorial. He pretended not to hear it. Opposite Marissa, Nat perched sideways in her seat with the scowl on her face more commonly seen on a pitbull guarding its food dish. She had yet to say anything but looked a lot like she was trying to kill Marissa via psychokinesis. Marissa punched Jeremy in the shoulder, hard. “Fuck, stop it already I’ve got my phone out.” She immediately shifted focus to her own device and began hammering out a text. “What did you mean this morning”.

He struggled to remember. Dim memories of a wild eyed and messy haired Marissa looming over him, shaking him like a ragdoll slowly returned. “Not sure what you mean. Just woke up when you barged in. Still wondering if I dreamt it.” She grunted. Wrong answer apparently. “You know what I mean. Right before you went to brush your teeth.” Jeremy shoved Mike off his desk and turned away to prevent him from reading the convo. “Oh, that? I take oral hygiene very seriously”. Another frustrated grunt. Warwick chose that inopportune moment to call on Jeremy.

“No doubt you know the answer to this one, Jeremy. Everyone, be sure to listen as it may be on Friday’s test.” Everyone stared, on each face a knowing smile. Marissa retreated into her book and whimpered. “I, uh....Eli whitney and the cotton gin?” The room erupted in laughter. “An intriguing answer, but as it turns out, not the name of the device used to decrypt intercepted Nazi messages towards the end of World War II. The Enigma Machine, that’s what I was looking for.” When the giggling subsided Warwick moved on with the material, satisfied that Jeremy’s embarrassment would ensure he paid closer attention going forward.

Mercifully, only Marissa joined him at lunch. A quick scan of the room revealed Nat observing from a distance. She was bitterly beginning to accept something about Marissa and Jeremy that he wasn’t quite ready to admit to himself. Marissa slid closer when she thought he wasn’t paying attention, just barely to the point that their elbows touched. “You’re really not gonna talk about this morning, are you.” He mumbled, his mouth full of blue protein jelly. “Fine. What about the match? There’s something I have to know.” He shrugged and mumbled, all the encouragement Marissa needed to continue. “Did you plan that? I mean, without my cavitation bubble holding back the water pressure, at that depth it’s a miracle my hull held up as long as it did. Never even occurred to me. Every step of the way I should’ve picked up on what you were making me do, but all of it seemed like my own decisions, right up until...you know.” She made an implosion gesture with her hands.

Jeremy swallowed, and fidgeted as he spoke, giving very careful consideration to the next words out of his mouth. “I knew everything you’d do before you did it. By fighting you that night we both snuck into the sim room, I got to know you. Maybe better than you know yourself.” Her eyes lit up. “Or at least, I thought I did. Maybe you haven’t noticed but we have some difficulty just talking openly with each other like normal people.” She reached up to punch him, then realized that was exactly the sort of thing he meant and put her fist down. “When you reacted to those rumors with embarrassment, like the idea of.... you know, with me....like that was a mortifying prospect...” She put both hands on his face, pulled it close to hers and laid one on him.

The reaction of other students spread outward like a shockwave, with Jeremy and Marissa’s embrace at ground zero. It didn’t matter. Marissa wasn’t bothered by it anymore. Even as absolute pandemonium erupted around them the room seemed to become quiet. Everything outside of Jeremy’s lips faded to black, and all the pent up feelings she’d been denying until now overwhelmed her. Jeremy found that the sensation of her soft, warm lips against his prevented him from forming even the simplest thoughts. Jumbled fragments of everything he ever wanted to say to her fought with one another for access to the vanishingly small percentage of his brain that was still receiving blood. Ultimately they all lost. For once in his life he had nothing to say. So he relaxed, let his mind go blank and savored the moment.

“...And if either of you or any of the other crude little apes in your class ever bothered to read the student handbook you’d know pawing at each other like that, in full view of freshmen no less, violates at least six of the interpersonal conduct statutes. Do either of you have anything to say in atonement?” Jeremy and Marissa just grinned stupidly at each other as whoever this random jackoff the principal had asked to speak with them was continued ranting. “During school hours, you’re expected to maintain a certain....a certain....Am I talking to myself here? Eyes on me! This is serious business, I could delay your graduation for this!” Marissa casually leaned over and kissed Jeremy again. The counselor discharged an exasperated sigh and stormed out of the room.

Warwick soon relieved him, and asked Marissa to step out for a moment. She obliged, and as soon as the door shut behind her Warwick burst into laughter. It was the most surreal thing Jeremy had ever seen. “I’ve never known Travis to become that furious with anybody. Absolutely delicious, I owe you one.” His tone was sincerely jovial. “This day, man. This fucking day” Jeremy thought, balancing on the very edge of the seat and preparing to escape into the hallway unless Warwick returned to normal sometime in the next thirty seconds. Instead, he took a seat next to Jeremy and began to speak with startling honesty.

“I don’t hate you. I don’t even dislike you. Your potential intrigues me, that’s why I’m always riding your ass. If I stopped pushing I’m afraid you’d slow down.” It was the first time Warwick had shown Jeremy anything other than adversarial contempt and it was weirding him out. “You know, before I taught here I was a student. Very much like you in fact. An indomitable, know it all twit. In my defense, I actually did know it all.” Warwick waited for Jeremy to laugh but found he was staring at the wiry old man like he’d peeled away his face to reveal a complete stranger’s underneath it.

“I was also helplessly in love with a freckled blonde named Harriet. I went to all this trouble to ace some placement tests and fail others, just to wind up in the same classes with her every year. Stole and decrypted the placement criteria, pulled a 72 hour cram session before each test, I did basically anything and everything short of actually talking to her.” Jeremy’s curiosity got the better of him. “How’d it turn out?”

Warwick, who seemed unusually spirited until then, began to deflate. “Well....Every day I told myself, tomorrow’s when I’ll do it. I had this pile of gifts and notes, things I meant to give her but never did. The pile kept growing, and ‘tomorrow’ never happened. Before I knew it I was graduating next to her, then she was gone. Went off to fight the Constructs. Not me though, couldn’t leave this place without closure that I know I’ll never have. You’re in your last year, soon you’ll head off to fight Constructs above some godforsaken airless rock on the other side of the galaxy and I’ll still be here, waiting for the freckled little blonde girl to come back.”

It was difficult to tell in profile but the way the light struck him made this already decrepit man seem a hundred years older. The single salty tear his crusty ducts could muster conformed to every bump, scar and contour on the way down his weathered face before disappearing into his collar.  “You know, Jeremy, one of these days I was going to level with you. Just like this. Now’s as good a time as any. All I really had to say, was “don’t make the same mistake I did.” But I guess now I don’t have to. Do me a favor, though?” Jeremy was wide eyed by this point, not knowing what to think. “S...sure, I guess.” Warwick stood up and brushed himself off. “Don’t let this change anything. I’ll talk to Travis and smooth things out. But when I next see you in class, I hope you’ll say something you think is terribly witty, and I can fire back that you’re a pain in my ass and a bad influence on everyone around you. Be the same Jeremy I’ve been pushing with all of my remaining strength these last three years. And I’ll be the same Professor Warwick. I’m too old to change, anyway.” His smile exuded warmth. Jeremy probed it for any hint of sarcasm but found only humility, and a depth of being absent from anyone else in this school save for Marissa. It’s a bittersweet feeling, to sit down with someone you thought would always be your enemy, only to find a human behind the curtain.


“So, what was all that with Warwick?” The sun was by this point nearing the horizon, and the long thin clouds nearest it seemed to be on fire. A minute later the whole sky matched. “You’re awfully curious about it. Any special reason?” She handed over her phone. “They’re not gossiping about us anymore. I guess when we confirmed it, they lost interest. Now they’re saying it’s you and Warwick. An illicit affair in the principal’s office.”

Jeremy doubled over laughing. “Really? Jesus, I’m an animal aren’t I.” Marissa smirked. “You have to understand, men have certain unusual appetites.” She tripped him up and as soon as he was on his back, began peppering his face will small, sweet kisses. “You two better not run off together. I’d be jealous.” That’s when Jeremy noticed something was wrong with the sky. For a split second it was black, speckled with stars and half filled with a brilliant teal nebula. He blinked and it was gone. Replaced by the sunset, now in the late stages and almost painfully beautiful to look at. “Hey, isn’t that Warwick?” Marissa propped herself up on her elbows to get a better look. Sure enough there he was at the top of the hill, sitting on the hood of his car and smoking.

It was a beat up convertible that had obviously not been effective as a status symbol for several decades now. “This is exactly what I imagined him driving”, Jeremy mused on his way over. Warwick looked equally beat up, but also serene. He searched the Professor’s face for any sign of lingering sadness but if he was dwelling on their conversation from earlier he didn’t show it. “Mind if I join you?” Warwick looked up, recognized Jeremy and smiled. “You know, the fact that you’re even out here means it’ll happen soon. When you step outside the school, it’s supposed to symbolize readiness to leave.”

Jeremy puzzled over that for a moment and then responded, “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.” Stepping outside the school? The more he thought about it the more he realized that in the three years he’d attended this academy, this was the first time he’d been outside. Jeremy searched his memory for instances where he’d at least looked out a window or wondered about the landscape surrounding the school but drew a blank. He shrugged it off as unimportant, then sat cross-legged next to Warwick on the rusting hood. “When all this is over, I want you to keep her close. She’ll be there with you when it happens, and your job is to protect one another. I know how cryptic this must sound, but it’ll all come together soon.” Jeremy gave up on trying to make sense of the old man’s ramblings and just leaned back, sucking in the fresh air and admiring the sunset’s final flourish. In the distance, Marissa stood up and began heading for the front doors.

“I want to thank you. I didn’t know how to feel about it at first but I’m glad we came to an understanding. I won’t lie, I never really liked you, but in retrospect I don’t think I’ve ever had a more dedicated teacher.” A long silence followed. “Better head inside, they’re preparing the sim for you right about now.” Jeremy stood up and began trudging down the hill towards the angular white structure of the school below. He thought of some appropriate parting words after a few steps and turned back, but Warwick was nowhere to be seen.

As usual during sim the rest of the school was eerily dark and empty. Everyone from every grade was packed into the sim room, so lights in the various unused classroom shut off to save energy. Something about this session would be different...he could feel it. When Jeremy arrived, the other students were being paired off and given callsigns. Secretly he panicked and wondered if arriving late would mean that Marissa was paired with someone else. “Fashionably late. I don’t know why it surprises me anymore. Rambozo, you’re with Hellcat.” Rambozo? “You know, as in ‘the clown’. We reviewed your antics during the last match on the display wall and everyone voted for Rambozo. Like it or lump it, that’s your callsign. Now go stand over there with Hellcat.”

Another quizzical pause. “Marissa. Go stand with Marissa.” He turned until his eyes met, electrically, with the familiar luminous blue pair across the room. “Eeeee!” She was every bit as bad when it came to concealing happiness as she was at concealing anger. “Hellcat, huh? Should’ve guessed, it suits you.” She laughed and jabbed him in the ribs. “You should talk, Rambozo.” Mike ran over despite the instructor’s protestations and congratulated Jeremy. “You ranked second in your grade!” he looked excited but also as though hiding something. “...And who ranked first?” Still panting, Mike began to beam. “No fucking way. What’s your K/D ratio?” Turning towards the big lumaprism wall he pointed out his score, 17 kills and 1 death. Next to it, his callsign: ‘John Henry’. Hard to argue with that.

“John Henry. Lucky, you got such a cool callsign.” They reminisced about day one orientation and the John Henry story read to every freshman class. Classic tale of human determination overcoming the brute force of a mechanized enemy. “Of course it’s not all sunshine and lollipops, he dies in the end.” Mike shrugged. “So did I. 17 kills, one death. Must’ve been why they chose it. We all die in the end, right? It’s about how many Constructs you take with you.”

Nat joined them soon after and got in her digs against Jeremy for his callsign. “Rambozo. Zamboro. Mombarzo. Zamrabozombzaro.” Marissa giggled and added “Murzambo?” Nat immediately went from silly to severe. “I am speaking to Jeremy only.” Delivered with the subtlety of a cluster missile and received with the same devastating impact. Marissa gave the two some space. “Yenno, Jerm. I always kinda thought...you know, that you and I would...” She was standing close now, tracing invisible patterns in his chest with her index finger. He gripped her by the shoulders. She looked up at him, eyes red and moist, then buried her face in his chest. “You’ve been wonderful, Nat. I haven’t ignored your feelings, I just never knew what to do with them. You’ve been so good to me, I wish I could be right for you.” She pulled away, gently, and met his gaze. “But if you were, they would’ve paired us together. Right?” She felt it too. An unspoken sense of finality about these proceedings. A quick survey of the other faces in the room revealed that they all detected the same energy in the air, that although the instructor was carrying on as if this was any other session, there would never be any others after it.

Nat looked back at Mike, dried her eyes and smiled. Handsomely built in his form fitting sim-suit, highest K/D ratio in his grade, and as devoted to her as she’d always been to Jeremy. It was like seeing him for the first time. “Figures they’d pair you two. Good luck in the sim, I know you’ll clean up. By the way, what callsign did they choose for you?” A wry smile spread across her face. “Echo. As in, the nymph.” Jeremy recalled their brief section in history class about Greek myths. “So I guess that make me Narcissus?” The comparison was unflattering, but difficult to refute.

“Pilots, to your spheres”. The spherical displays lowered in a wave, the motion of each successive sphere delayed a fraction of second behind the last. Jeremy stole one last smile at Marissa, seated on the pedestal next to his and fully immersed in the gel. In turn, she shot back her own conspiratorial grin, the two transmitting their newfound warmth to one another over the twenty two empty feet between their pods. “I’ll see you on the other side.” And, just before her sphere locked into place, the faint reply; “I’ll be waiting.”

Darkness enveloped Jeremy. Did the sim initialize? As yet, he felt only heat. No stars were visible, nor sea water, only a rhythmic thumping sound. And then, light. Painfully radiant light that burned his eyes. Before him the darkness split open and admitted light, sound and commotion to pour through. It was frightening, but Jeremy found himself moving towards it and couldn’t reverse direction. “Notocord interface disengaging. Nutrient flow disengaged. He looks healthy, let’s bring him out.” Whoever was speaking seemed to be transmitting their words directly into his head. It didn’t feel like sound, it felt like his own internal monologue, only coming from somewhere else. As he emerged from the rift and struggled to focus on his surroundings, Jeremy discovered he had not two but sixteen eyes. Looking ahead brought the far wall of the pink, undulating chamber into focus. Looking in reverse without so much as turning his head focused instead on the moist, dilated orifice he’d just slid out of.

In a panic he tried to pivot his head to take in the strange new environment only to discover that he either no longer had a head, or that there was not much left of him apart from it. His next inclination was to flex every muscle now at his command which quickly sent him into an uncontrolled spin. The thruster felt bizarre. Was that flame green? A trail of gas followed, as well as droplets of some thick green fluid. The voice in his head returned. “Don’t be afraid. This is normal. Take some time to feel out your new body. Judging by your sim performance it shouldn’t take you long to master it.” Jeremy tried to speak, only of course he found no mouth with which to vocalize. So he experimented with thinking, very loudly and deliberately.

“Where am I? Where are the other students? This is frightening, stop the sim.” Gentle laughter. “It’s no sim. The school? Classes, the lunchroom, dormitories? That was the sim. I know right now you’re frightened and feeling deceived. But nothing’s been taken from you. On the contrary, you were given a normal life, or at least as much of one as we can afford. Three years was the bare minimum needed to prepare you.” Jeremy now had enough of a handle on propulsion to navigate around the outer wall of the chamber. Thick, ropey veins spiderwebbed across the surface and visibly pulsated.

Finally he found the only apparent entry or exit, a large muscular sphincter drawn tight to deny passage. “Looks like you’ve got your space legs. I’ll pressurize the airlock and let you out. Someone’s waiting for you.” Jeremy flashed back to Marissa’s parting words, and for a moment his excitement to see her again drowned out the feelings of disgust and fear. Ahead, the sphincter dilated and he wasted no time in accelerating through it. Only to face another identical sphincter. He turned around, but the passage opened for him a moment earlier was now sealed.

“Shut down the sim. This is bullshit. What am I supposed to be learning from this?” His brain tickled each time the voice replied. “The time for learning is over. I’m depressurizing the lock. When the outer door opens, you’ll put into practice everything I taught you over the last three years.” Jeremy froze. “W...Warwick?” The voice was unmistakable, but in the confusion of waking up in this alien environment in a body not his own, Jeremy had up to this point not made the connection between the disembodied voice and his homeroom teacher.

The puckered membrane to his right dilated and a gentle gust of residual atmosphere carried Jeremy free of the lock. The sight that now met his eyes was, for several seconds, incomprehensible. Well beyond anything his brain had ever been asked to cope with. He now floated in open space, moving very slowly away from the hulking mass he’d been inside of until just now. It was not a spaceship but a living thing, bound in segmented carapace to maintain comfortable interior pressure against the outside vacuum.

Openings all along its side spewed forth creatures he quickly intuited were human minds inhabiting bodies just like his. A bit of straining revealed that his new eyes could telescopically zoom, and for a moment he just drank in the stupefying otherness of their form. Each wore the same brown carapace as the much larger creature releasing them, but trailing behind were ten lengthy, slender tentacles. All around their body bulbous black eyes shielded from vacuum by transparent keratin surveyed the battlefield.

And it was a battlefield. Just then a squadron of Construct fighters screamed overhead and let loose with a volley of chasers, some of which exploded creatures like Jeremy into a grisly red mist of gore while others were intercepted by what looked like jets of flaming gel sprayed forth by the impossibly huge living spaceship still filling up most of his view. “Jeremy?” Instantly he recognized Marissa’s voice, and spun in place trying to identify the source. One of the other creatures slowly approached, blasting gentle puffs of green exhaust from biothrusters on all sides to correct her course. And it was her, somehow he knew. His tentacles reached out to caress hers. “By now you’ve figured it out. Can’t imagine what you were feeling. It was weird for me too.” Her grapefruit sized jet black eyeballs teared up, but the fluid then boiled away into space. “I’m...I’m happy though.”

He blasted back with thought alone, “We’re hideous space squids. What all is there to be happy about?” Laughter came back. “Well, I guess I’m happy that you’re real. That you weren’t just part of the sim. You know what Warwick told me on the way out, as I was born?” He shrugged, or approximated a shrug as closely as he could with tentacles for arms. “He said my answer was only partially correct. What really makes us different from the Constructs is our sim. They have a program too, it simulates a lifetime of brutal training for each Construct, teaches them to hate and then sends them off alone to fight and die for their empire.”

All around Jeremy and Marissa, angular metal Constructs darted after flesh and blood biofighters, only to be blasted into charred metallic fragments by carefully aimed jets of bioplasma. “Our sim’s different. It teaches us to love, then sends us off together. Humans fight hardest when defending what they love.” It was his turn to tear up. The tentacles were replete with nerve endings and the sensation of clutching her warm, strangely familiar tendrils was a satisfactory substitute for holding hands.

Below them, a Construct carrier exploded into a blinding conflagration of fire and debris, then began to deorbit. The planet it fell into revealed itself as a beautiful blue marble, flecked with spotty white clouds and sprawling green continents. The instructor wasn’t kidding, Constructs really had come to their doorstep. On those continents slowly rotating past as they orbited, human variants in a dizzying array of forms labored tirelessly to support the war machine. It dawned on Jeremy that he was privileged, in that he’d enjoyed at least those three years of normal human life, doubtless more than anyone on the homeworld could hope for.

It enlightened him to the purpose of this war. To assert life over non-life. Creativity, warmth and feeling over cold steel skeletons of perfectly efficient hatred. He resolved to drive the Constructs back, one planet at a time, all the way to their homeworld. There he would extinguish them forever. Not because he hated them, not in the way that they hated humanity. But to create the safety and security his race needed to return to their ancestral forms. “Take care when fighting monsters that you do not become a monster yourself”, he recalled.

Undoubtedly they had become monsters, out of life or death necessity. But at the exact moment when humanity stopped trying to be better machines than machines and instead explored the fullest potential of biology, the tide of the war violently turned. As if to reinforce this, another Construct carrier erupted in a nuclear fireball above them, reduced to smoldering wreckage by Mike and Nat. The two transmitted euphoric laughter to their delighted classmates, spiraling around them in a sort of zero-G victory dance. Marissa and Jeremy followed suit, blasting through the heavens in a pair of spirals, their glowing green plumes forming a double helix of exhaust behind them.



END