Tomato Project, 4/21, please don't lose this

They went to class many, many times. Then they graduated, and it was mutually understood that they would likely die forever before their next meeting, as the enemy grew in strength, approached closer and closer to Fomalhaut Beta. It was a touching parting, from what Paza understood, far more tender even than the time they had opted into the reproductive urge on a lark together. And then Sun Khvostovskaya was out of her life, and she had a meeting with Braith Terra.
	Braith Terra did not have an office. Braith Terra had other people's offices, as when she was traveling in that avatar of pure white she endeavored to be as unobtrusive as humanly possible.
	It said a great deal about the society she had constructed for herself that an avatar of pure white was not noticeably more obtrusive than a regularly colored human.
	Braith Terra's office du jour, then, belonged to the administrator of Waterloo. She said, “hello” and Paza said “hello” and then pleasantries were dispensed with.
	“Paza McNeil. You've succeeded fairly well, no?
[Insert conversation about, uh, the objective, and introduce the secretary, who as it turns out is going to be a character, just not Sun and certainly not forever. After this battle we're going to convert to the standard Paza and Sun model and figure out what the fuck to do next
((I think I want a cold open here so let's do that))
Chapter One: The Dutch Literary Tradition, a History
Dirkje Antoniessen, born October 21, 2032, was a Dutch author and futurist. Her books were scattered, hack-brained, almost entirely inscrutable, featured motifs with no symbolic function, and were believed to have saved the human race. The day she froze herself in a cryogenic slumber, declaring that she would “skip the shitty worldbuilding and get onto the good stuff,” in April of 2102, a rocket called the Exodus took a handful of people, and a much more appreciable amount of human knowledge and genetic material, on a course that would leave the domain of Sol forever. The last key technology of the project had recently matured- human brain emulation, the quest for immortality finally fulfilled, and this meant that human minds could be carried where no threat from Earth could reach, even as the increasingly expansionist French and highly alarmed Embratel Corporation looked to microwave their rapidly defrosting cold war. The ship carried them light-years away, for thousands of years spent in a reduced-time simulation, to one of the nearer exoplanets- Fomalhaut Beta, a massive brownish ball surrounded by a beautiful set of rings rich in the raw materials it would take to build more human civilization. And so they did, building great O'Neil cylinders in the orbit of the dark world. Society prospered, under less conventional social norms, and eventually a leader emerged. One of the original colonists, she was well-read, well-respected, and almost impossibly talented, like every other colonist. But she has charisma, and social acumen on top of that, and so she was elected leader by her fellows. Her name was Braith, and she took the surname Terra after her abandoned home. She became President. She would remain president through a golden age of fragile wonder, subsistence replaced with regular existence. One of her three doctorates was in Education, and with her redesigned philosophies she allowed the society's technological advancement to barrel further forward. All newborn babies were soon scanned, with a resilient computer replacing their brain and a copy of their consciousness stored in secure servers throughout the Fomalhaut. Nobody ever died of old age in Fomalhaut, not once.
	The fact that they needed to do any of the research they did in the first place was a gross injustice, however, because they should have been receiving new advances from Earth. There was no signal. Earth sent nothing, not once. So once the issue of free immortality was fixed, Braith directed the Fomalhautine scientists to the question of how to talk to Earth once more. They sent a probe. It came close to earth, showed a grayer-than-usual image of the blue marble, and then suddenly stopped transmitting. Braith would not give up, and so one day, a discovery was made by a particularly unusual scientist, inspired by transient memes regarding nonstandard human cognitive models. They had figured out a way to exploit the fluctuations in the quantum foam to produce macro-scale changes. It was magic, it seemed, but they could, using the same principles that had previously allowed for quantum-entanglement faster-than-light communication, make mass-energy disappear in one point and reappear in another. The tyranny of the rocket equation and of the speed of light vanished in the face of this new technology. It was called the Gate, because it was a fairly apt comparison. Once two points in the universe were connected, they could be stabilized by needle-armed gate apparatuses, and regions of contiguous space opened up larger and larger until a regular human could walk in one gate and leave the other. Even if one gate was moved, the connection persisted, but the more precise the linking must be, the longer it took to make that first connection, because the equations involved were ludicrously time-consuming. It was enough, and so within a year they opened a gate to Earth, brave explorers stepped through, and then ten seconds later they detonated the fail-safe nuclear bomb on the Fomalhaut side of the gate, severing the connection with nothing more than the word “NO!” screamed back through. Braith Terra decided to re-prioritize, expanding the Democracy of Fomalhaut from the Fomalhaut system to myriad strange and alien stars, near strange and alien worlds, with completely mundane resources to build new homes with. A network of worlds emerged, and all Gates led to Fomalhaut Beta.
	On a medium-sized station called Ethics, which floated around a dull and glassy planet orbiting main-sequence star in Andromeda, a girl named Paza McNeil opened her eyes for the first time. She was decanted by robotic servitors, alongside her sixty-three siblings, in what had become the norm. Parents were in short supply, especially after the human reproductive instinct was rendered an opt-in by Fomalhautine bio-engineers. She was a tiny, rosy infant, and even if she was smarter, healthier, and in many other ways markedly different from the infant Dirkje Antoniessen, including the fact that the computer behind her eyes was silicon and copper wire instead of fat and carbohydrates. But looking at the two baby girls, you could hardly tell them apart.
	Education began at three, charitably, and Paza McNeil remembered little of the asinine play that had sufficed for learning back then. It was at six that she actually came into her own, and stopped suffering infantile amnesia. Paza McNeil was smart. Extremely smart. She focused this intelligence on reading, just reading, everything that crossed her eyes, in Fomalhautine Esperanto as well as English, French, Russian, Dutch- she picked up a language to read a book the same way someone might read the back cover to understand what they were getting in. On a lark she read the entire works of Shakespeare and Moliere in an afternoon, comprehending as fast as she could scroll the text over the entopic displays on her eyelids. She excelled at everything else, too, of course, and the fact that there were courses offered in her primary school that weren't Literature eventually intrigued her, and so within three or four days she had learned differential calculus, macroeconomics, and biophysics. Then she slowed down like her mind was a stomach and it needed time to digest, and she never quite comprehended so fast as when she was about eight. She remained head-and-shoulders above the rest of the class, however, and continued studying everything she could lay her hands upon. One morning a human that wasn't a school administrator or a child physiologist or a servitor technician or any of the other people with a valid reason to be in the child section of the station showed up, and briefly conversed with the head administrator. And then she walked inside the school grounds, into the tiny room Paza shared with three other children, ushered them outside, and then spoke with Paza, unusually, like Paza was a fully-grown adult too. It was short and dizzying, the woman was the first person Paza had ever encountered that seemed to know things Paza couldn't even comprehend. It was on trivialities- her studies; her friends, insofar that she had any; her favorite food, of all things. As the remarkable woman turned to leave, she told Paza of a certain book. That book was The Eponymous Marshall, by Dirkje Antoniessen, commonly considered her easiest to enter with. It told of a jubilant future, where Death had died and humanity strove among the stars, and met with aliens. But Dirkje knew how aliens worked, and these aliens were awful, they violated every ethical code of every human being who had ever drawn breath, not simply content with reprising old human horrors. They loved Death, they worshiped it, they destroyed their own biosphere to send all non-them life into the glory of non-existence. They destroyed, with kinetic orbital bombardment, all life on Earth, as their way of thanking humanity for showing them that they were not alone in the universe. And so humanity had gotten together on a ship, made a terrible plan, and killed all the aliens, who with their dying breath thanked them, the children giggling as they choked on their own broken lungs.
	It was horrible. Paza was distraught, and so she had read it again- it had taken her all of fifteen minutes the first time, so what was another.
	Twenty-six and a half hours later, a full one-hundred and seven total repetitions, it clicked. What Paza understood was the fact that she did not understand. She lacked the background to understand, and so she had acquainted herself with the background material- psychology, game theory, even Earth history. She knew the story forwards and backwards, of course, but she read it just one more time to test her hypothesis.
	That was the superficial meaning of the story, that horrifying feeling that had plagued her, the dying children. Of course it would be more than introduction to how aliens worked. The true meaning was hidden in the meeting of the humans. It was the way they thought- how they conducted themselves, the stupid mistakes they failed to make, in order to destroy a foe who couldn't be reasoned with and who couldn't be cowed by fear. And this lightened her spirit, and she read another one. The Velvet Sackcloth was about a horrifyingly fascist government in the future. Rebels met in coffeehouses, but it was a ruse, a distraction, a sacrifice, because the real rebels met in grocery stores while their coffeehouse fellows died horribly, and then they undermined the government by pointing out administrative inefficiencies to the dictator, and offering to optimize the world government, which involved occasionally being nice enough to quell dissent. And after that, she read another, The Four Hundred and Eighty Nine Postulations of A Particular Scottish Child, which was about a man so smart that it took the efforts of the entire rest of the planet, even the smartest ones, hundreds of years to finally defeat him, and even then they had needed extraterrestrial help, from aliens significantly less reprehensible than those from The Eponymous Marshall, of course.
	She read another, and another, and another, and it wasn't until she had finished all forty nine of them that realized how long it had been since she had eaten and what, exactly, she had done to herself. Begrudgingly, she got up and ate some sort of algae slop that would be unappealing if only the bioengineers hadn't fixed that too.
	Paza wanted to be a scientist, after that. Before she had wanted to write, but if she understood the books correctly, she was supposed to be a scientist. That would be what would give her everything she could want- and she wasn't sure what that was yet, but rare is the name in the history book who was good at lifting weights. She continued her schooling, mostly through more books, because at this point her peers still struggled with algebra. And then she was almost-twelve and it was time to chose what school she wanted. Based on the assessments of the servitor AI, who were standardized across the Democracy, she qualified to go to any one of the secondary schools, including the Somatic schools of physicality but largely excluding the Social schools of leadership. But she didn't care, because she needed to go into Science.
	Just as she was about to submit her application to the greatest of the Science secondary school, which would have her with her first doctorate at fifteen, she received a message. Opening it, it demanded that she speak with the head administrator at once, and though she tried to dismiss it, she found her entopic display simply would not, and so she groaned and did as it said.
	The head administrator was a tall, slight man, balding by choice, which was the same reason for his wire-frame eyeglasses. He did not sit in his office. The woman who had told Paza of Dirkje Antoniessen was, instead, relaxing in the chair,  brilliantly white- white of hair, of skin, of clothing, even of eyes. She smiled gently at Paza, her teeth dazzlingly bright, like a pile of snow in a field of chalk.
	“Please, Miss McNeil, take a seat. I must speak to you,” she said. Her voice denoted urgency, but there was no forcefulness as she beckoned to the seat opposite her own, separated by a desk of hard, gray plastic. Obligingly, Paza did so, sinking low into the cushions in reassignment.
	“Miss McNeil, I understand it that you're going to be applying to a school of Science, is that correct?” asked the woman. Paza swallowed hard.
	“That is correct. Is there an issue? I was told that I would be accepted into any of them, which is obviously a rare occurrence,” she explained. The worry was real, but it was not the entire explanation. She was apprehensive about something, she couldn't quite tell. She took note of it, entering the information to her personal computer through long-practiced deliberative eye motions recorded by her retinal cameras. Antoniessen had advised her students (because she considered anyone who actually understood her books a student) to note everything they thought, and while that was moderately unfeasible for Paza, who tended to think at a mile a minute, the least she could do is note when she had strange or unusual thoughts, as they could be suggestive of any number of things. Of course, part of the training was noticing that one's thoughts were unusual.
	“I had hoped to prolong the period before we had this conversation,” the woman began. It dawned on Paza why she may have had apprehensions- the woman would not meet her eyes. “,but my hand has been forced. You have read Antoniessen, correct?”
	“Of course- just like you told me to,” Paza responded. Typically, stall tactics, like asking questions who's answer you already knew, were just that- stall tactics. It was possible that the woman was simply mirroring social norms of communication, but she had read Antoniessen, presumably with some level of comprehension, and so Paza could only assume it was deliberate.
	“As I advised you to, yes. You read The Eponymous Marshall, no? Do you remember what the conflict was- the Deathists, and how awful they were?”
	“Yes, of course, how couldn't I?”Paza asked in slight annoyance. She had a life to get to, or at least several books, and her entopics were being remarkably uncooperative.
	“Did you ever find out what they were supposed to represent?” the woman asked. Paza considered that that statement could be some sort of Socratic Method teaching, and that, as the conversation was fairly likely to involve teaching her about Antoniessen a priori anyway, that was most likely what was happening to her.
	“They don't represent anything. They represent reprehensible aliens, only that Antoniessen took the threat of alien intelligences with nonhuman goalsets way more seriously than did most of her contemporaries, hence the similarities to the usual first-contact story, so she could screen out the people who weren't smart enough to understand what she was teaching,” Paza said. She then cursed herself for not thinking about it for five minutes first. The woman chuckled, probably noticing the contractions of Paza's facial muscles.
	“Don't worry- your analytical skills are not on trial here, and your answer was exactly right, suggesting that you've thought about it before, at least. That's right, but, obviously, there's more to the conversation than that. In The Four Hundred and Eighty Nine Postulations of A Particular Scottish Child,”the woman recited, seeming to take great pride in knowing the convoluted Antoniessen titles that only talked about what would most certainly not be in the book at all- for in The Eponymous Marshall, there is no Marshall, and in The Velvet Sackcloth there is no velvet sackcloth, “you remember Steven Black, the antagonist, the one that they plotted against? He does represent something- because, surely, Antoniessen didn't think that that particular story could come about- no man is born as smart as Steven is, and magic is not real.”
	Wheels turned in Paza's head. She thought about it as hard as she could. She knew what he represented, of course, but she would know why the woman wanted to know why she knew, and what this had to do with-
	Four minutes and forty nine seconds later, Paza made a small choking noise, and began to cry, long streams of tears painting her checks a damp, cold gray. The woman look Paza's hand in hers, and held it gently while the young girl regained her composure.
	“You've guessed it, then?” she said gently, “I'm pleased but not surprised,” because appealing to Paza's ego might make her feel better about the horrible thing.
	“Stephen represents an Unfriendly Seed AI,” Paza spat, the words like caustic acid on her tongue, “and the only reason you're asking me all this and trying to keep me from signing up to a Science school is because we're going to have to fight the one on Earth, or am I at all wrong?”
	There was a short gasp, and then a moment of silence.
	“Now that,” the woman said, “that surprised me. It shouldn't have, and I should stop underestimating you. You know that the cause of the Terran Anomaly is likely a Seed AI?”
	“How couldn't I? It's obvious that it's either that or an alien invasion, and my priors for aliens are very low,” Paza explained, still clutching at the woman's hand to keep her tattered emotions in check.
	“Because you're not-quite-twelve, and your friends don't even know what a Seed AI is, and it never occurred to them to ask why their servitors don't use all that smarts to make themselves smarter, or why Braith Terra is in charge instead of a super-servitor of some sort,” the woman said in gentle reminder.
	“My friends are dense and that's why I don't have any,” Paza said, “and so will you please explain to me how you expect me to help fight this thing- I'm guessing it involves being whisked away to work on a superweapon of some sort.”
	“It doesn't involve a superweapon, Miss McNeil, and it's not a Seed AI. Not quite. As nearly as we can tell, it's merely extremely intelligent- matchable by the concentrated efforts of a vast sum of extremely intelligent humans. Obviously it could be faking it, but priors are against it, and the solution is too complex to be considered- and because, reasonably, we will lose against a Seed AI, the characters in Scottish Child only succeeded because the Anniversaries were there, and because they managed to evolve a coherent anti-Stephen conspiracy without ever speaking out loud. But, of course it involves military school. You were selected, when you were young, for potential commander status. You're very bright, and you understand Antoniessen, which is good because that's what most of the modern military dogma is based on, and so I would like to ask you nicely to join the Waterloo School of Command and Tactics, where we will hopefully allow you to become someone that will help us not become corkscrews, so long as you agree,” the woman said.
	“How... how long until it arrives?” Paza whispered, as though it could hear her.
	“Yesterday. We have good commanders. We can use stall tactics, but it is going to be up against the wire, certainly,” the woman confided.
	“Then I should have signed up then. Send me the paperwork,” Paza demanded. The paperwork flickered into her vision, scrolling white-and-black text beset by lines. It was already filled out, and the supervisor line read Terra, Braith. Paza looked at the woman questioningly. Braith Terra put a single finger to her lips, and smiled. Paza indicated her name on the line immediately below, and that was that.
	To save humanity, or die trying, against an opponent that could not be matched by any human, the shadow of a chance. An unwinnable game. But Paza would win it, because the alternative was too horrifying to contemplate.
Chapter 2:Reconsidering Traditional Educational Norms
	Waterloo was brutal. Waterloo was almost certainly the sort of place that twelve year olds should be warned off from. All the kids there, excluding Paza, felt that this was their destiny- even though they likely understood the odds and consequences of failing the horribly stringent exams of Waterloo, they suspect that the statistics did not apply to them. Paza had no such presumptions, but she could only watch helplessly as her classmates made stupid, unbelievably terrible mistakes. A girl named Alex had punched their drill instructor on the first day. He had said something to her that offended her delicate sensibilities, as she was from Fomalhaut Beta, the cosmopolitan land of the social conscious. The drill instructor was locked into a physically reduced body, to compensate for the fact that he was trying to train preteens. He looked old, infirm, and like an obvious target. Without blinking, he grabbed the girl's wrist in his hand, and squeezed, although Paza was sure she only heard the cracking of bone in her imagination. Alex was a consummate fighter, and assumed that she knew what to do in this situation. She launched a kick towards his face, in hopes that that would cause him to drop his grip and move to defend himself. Instead, she kicked his face- he took it in that same, unblinking manner. Then he, quite quickly, and with surgical precision, gouged out her eye. The flesh-and-wire solution that was the eyes of most people detached with little less than a crack and a wet pop, and then the girl was howling, pawing at her bloody and ravaged socket.
	“I would take pains to remind you,” the instructor said as the girl was escorted to a medical facility for treatment, “that we do not raise idiots here. When the enemy insults you, you do not strike without restraint. You bide your time. You must be an analytical fighting machine. Even physical combat is math, to the adequately trained- the question of which technique has the greatest chance for success and the least potential cost, the balancing of costs and benefits. Your classmate's decision was sub-optimal. If she wanted to hurt me, she should not have tried engaging me in combat, as she should have understood that I am a better fighter than any twelve year old. She saw me as weak, because of my form- but, and this is obvious, why would she take that risk? Because there is no conceivable reason you would put the instructor in physical combat in a chassis that cripples their combat skill- this is obvious, this is common sense. Those of you not entirely stupid will soon learn how to think, and then not a one of you will make such an unbelievably stupid mistake.
	“But your classmate- and I call her your classmate, but unless the medical examiners find that she was unintentionally drugged at the time, she is your former classmate, and you will one day see her working the algae vats- made a more important conceptual mistake. The mandated educational policies of Waterloo encourage me to use the Socratic method- but I can see the blank looks of idiocy on your faces, so there is no possible reason to ask you what went- oh?” the instructor concluded.
	He was looking at Paza. Paza found this incredibly unpleasant, and thought desperately of a way around it. Exceptional behavior might provoke resentment from her peers, but at the same time she had to provide the correct answer for an accurate assessment of her war capabilities. When she thought about it that way, it wasn't much of a challenge. Hyperintelligent AI trumps social discomfort any day.
	“Paza McNeil! You think you know what the flaw in her reasoning was- don't lie, I can read your face like a book- tell me! Tell the whole class!” The instructor said, dull eyes burning a hole in Paza's. She looked around briefly. She was on small model of an icy field, designed to replicate the conditions of some of Fomalhaut's partially terraformed worlds while also being extremely unpleasant to be in. The other students, ten or so, stared back at her, lined up in the field in some sort of ironic demonstration of the Napoleonic tactics that resulted in the battle that named the school.
	“She shouldn't have tried to hurt you,” Paza said, faltering ever so slightly.
	“We've been over that- unless you mean to say that violence is wrong, which is not an issue up for debate at a military academy. Anyone else care to take a swing at the problem?”the instructor said, turning to face the rest of the class, glassy eyes on theirs.
	“No,” Paza interjected, prompting him to turn around so fast she could feel the wind against her face, “that's not what I meant. It's... even if she was guaranteed for success, it was an awful, awful idea. Because, punching you- what does it accomplish? Did she expect you to roll back with a chuckle and compliment her spunk? No, obviously she wasn't actually thinking, but- punching you doesn't really weaken you, much. Best case scenario, you like her less, and then she gets passed over for educational opportunities, worst case scenario you expel her- no, no, worst case scenario you decide that, for making you responsible for losing to a child, she had to die, and then you kill her in her sleep in a way that suggests accident.”
	“You think I would murder a student for punching me?” The instructor chuckled.
	“Obviously not, but it's a possibility, and there's nothing good that comes from doing so.”
	“And what would you recommend be done instead, Miss Paza McNeil? How do you deal with your enemies?
	“I wouldn't-”
	“Assume that I had said something that actually offended you, not simply pointing out your awful accent. That girl had a temper the size of Mons Olympus, but surely I could do something to you that would make me your enemy?”
	“You have to destroy them- the enemy, I mean. Utterly. All the literature says so. Punching you, that was, like, the weakest possible countervalue strike, and all strikes really ought to be counterforce, and overwhelming besides, so then they can't attack back. Maybe if they're weaker than you, you can get away with sloppiness, secure in your power- but if they're stronger than you, then you have to make sure you win, and that's how,” Paza explained. Beads of sweat pooled at her brow, for even as smart as she was, she was not immune to a fear of public speaking.
	“General principle's good, but any idiot can sit around and quote books. How would you destroy me utterly, if you're a twelve year old, and I'm a highly trained veteran with a taste for blood?”
	“In order from least to most horrible, uh. Get you fired and your assets frozen by lying to your bosses, kill you in your sleep through a sedative injection and then pouring molten metal on your brain, kill you through blood embolism and then arrange to have someone else take your place on reinstantiating, kill you through blood embolism and then fork your mind and torture the copies when you don't do as I say, kill you through blood embolism, take your mind, have it reformatted to something I agree with better, kill you through blood em-” Paza rattled off like she wasn't twelve and had thought about the issue before. She was twelve, but she certainly had thought about how to best destroy a human enemy. Not through a directed mediation of any sort, but through the consequence of her regular thoughts. If she'd taken a few seconds to think about that fact, as well advised by Dirkje Antoniessen, it might have unnerved her.
	“That is quite enough, McNeil,” the instructor said. He was grinning, though, which Paza took as a good sign. “Now, the lesson here is-”
	“Sir, forgive my interruption, but I think you've missed something here,” said a dark girl three people down from Paza. She was so impossibly nondescript that her very existence seemed up to opinion.
	“And that might be, Miss Sun Khvostovskaya?”The instructor said, whirling to face her, and again buffeting Paza with wind she was convinced was psychosomatic and she really ought to get that checked out.
	“Miss, uh, McNeil, isn't the only one who knows what that girl did wrong. We're not idiots, we're really not,” she explained calmly, “and just because some of us are a little better at not giving away that fact to anyone who glances at us  doesn't make Miss McNeil a better student, or smarter, or in any way better than us.”
	“Oh? You posit that you are, in fact, smarter than Miss Paza McNeil, who was consistently rated much higher than you were?”
	“I don't, you're trying to goad me. All I'm saying is that Miss McNeil may have neglected some avenues of approach, and if you're so dead set on making this lesson about being intelligent instead of hitting things, you might as well go whole-hog,”said Sun, her voice smooth and clear, well articulated, like liquid mercury inching over a plate.
	“What?” Paza cried. It wasn't fair at all, she had been cut off, there wasn't anything she was neglecting.
	“What is it, then, Miss Sun Khvostovskaya?” the instructor said. He was smiling quite broadly at this point.
	“Interestingly, she considered this solution set, in the beginning, but she assumed that the torments it could inflict were... less, than what she could do with your brain. But she neglected the whole social thing. Maybe if you're an unattached sociopath,that would work, but most of us value our social connections pretty highly. You're fairly old, at least a hundred and twenty five or so, if you're a veteran of the Misguided War, and you're probably wealthy enough. You have plenty of friends, but probably a family,” Sun began. The instructor remained completely expressionless, but Sun grinned.
	“You're not going to lie and say you don't, and so your refusal to answer is an agreement- or, maybe, you're trying to catch me being stupid, but statistically- I'll hedge my bets anyway, and I'll assume you might not have family.
	“First step, kill, replace, torture, et cetera, all your friends and family first. Then we start replacing you with people who would certainly ruin the lives of all your friends- fine tuned, of course- so that everyone will remember you as a horrible, dreadful man. Then we crank it up a notch, making sure that you're perpetually recognized as some sort of horrible thing- let's call it a baby-eater, for example. And then we put you back in your body, and if you clear your reputation we'll just do it again and again.
	“Maybe they'll kill you, but we'll just boot you from disk. Not only will you be impotent, beaten, but anyone who might want to take vengeance wouldn't be able to. And anyone who figures out our secret knows what happens to our enemies,”Sun said. Jaws dropped. The instructor was silent for a full minute. Paza wondered if this is what love felt like, but then settled on admiration.
	“You make an extremely good point, Miss Sun Khvostovskaya,” the instructor said at length. “However, this does not change the nature of my ensuing lecture. The lesson here is that you're, both of you, loudmouthed incompetents who don't know the first thing about winning.”
	“What?” asked Paza and Sun in unison.
	“You couldn't begin to implement any of these tactics. This is like asking someone to invent another Gateway every time you start a new battle! It's folly! If you can perceive all the solutions, that is nine parts of being a good general- but the tenth, the most important fraction of being a general, is picking the solution that work. You don't have the far-reaching criminal empire needed to do any of these things to me. Lie to my bosses? They trust me over you, because I record all my memories, and am, frankly, harder to trick or subdue to fake them. Kill me in my sleep? I don't sleep! Blood embolism? This whole body is mechanical, and you should know that's likely because I am by far old enough for my own to have died. What you should have done is decided to bide your time, become my superior, and then assign me to work the algae vats! That's the working solution!” He ranted, the other children staring at him in rapt attention. The idea had, in fact, come to Paza, but she rejected it out of hand because she felt that it wasn't... what, immediate enough? Paza chided herself, because the ability to delay gratification was the obvious sign of maturity.
	“Now that you understand the value of choosing solutions that aren't unbelievably stupid, pair up. We'll be sparring, and I hope to the good health of President Terra that you've been over this in your primary schools. Paza, Sun, you're a pair- seeing the way the gears in your head turn makes me worry about the odds of any other partner surviving the afternoon,” the instructor said, to a stammering of nervous laughter among the students that weren't Paza McNeil and Sun Khvostovskaya. Paza's heart migrated up to her her throat, because she was not strong, and could not fight. Sun squared up against her, and then her fist was rocketing through the air, and Paza was too afraid to do anything. She ducked her head down, and spent the precious fraction of a second before the impact of the punch dreading the pain and the dull thump and the feeling of losing.
	It didn't come. When she looked back up, Sun stood by her, hand outstretched. Paza took the hand in hers, and shook it with apprehension.
	“Sun Khvostovskaya,” Sun said, “although, frankly, everyone calls my decanting group 'Those Russians,' and so I'm not going to be angry if you decide that that works better.
	“I am Paza McNeil,” Paza said, “and I suspect that that is a great deal easier to pronounce.”
	“Tell me about it. Naming computer must have been mental the day it settled on this. I get the whole having-names-from-dead-Earth-cultures thing, but you'd think they'd get Russian ones that parse better in Esperanto.”
	“Uh, yeah,” Paza said with the sort of resigned helplessness only seen in young, socially isolated people attempting small talk.
	“So. You don't fight, do you?” Sun asked, tilting her head. “That's not the worst thing in the world- I'm sure Alexander and Charlemagne and Napoleon and Rommel and Nkoenyane weren't the best at beating people up- I mean, Nkoenyane was in a wheelchair, not to mention the thing with his eye- but, like. Why did you sign up for this school, even? You look like... uh, mathematician, or poet. Maybe an engineer, or if you're only really good at pretending to be smart, a sociologist. But, general? Generals are these.. uh, these sort of 'big' people, and you're, uh, you're not. Uh, not physical size, I mean, obviously Napoleon shows that that's not such a big deal, but, like, with... I guess presence? ”
	Paza was taken aback by the bluntness, and the speed of the verbal assault. When Paza spoke it was like placing one block after another in sequence, each word well formed, but disjointed, each word devoid of a deeper connection to the others. Sun's flowed freely, but without distortion or babbling. It was a veritable riptide.
	“You're not, either,” Paza commented. Sun's brown hair framed her brown eyes and brown skin exactly averagely. It was like Paza was some sort of experiment, by the developmental geneticists, to create the most standard sort of individual.
	“Pfft. You think I want to be a general? Not a chance! I want to be on the Council-heck, I wanna be President!”Sun sang.
	She didn't have a shot in the universe at being President, because Braith Terra was President and had been so since time immemorial. The President was elected, of course. But the President was elected by a college of individuals that she ordered made. The education they received was written by the President. Nobody had ever known rule by anyone but Braith Terra, with the exception of those few who remained from Earth, who had usually left out of dissatisfaction with Earth governments. Her dictatorship, while legitimately obtained, was absolute and eternal, if through nothing else than by inertia. Sun knew this, in her heart of hearts, which is why she intended to become part of that coveted inner elite, Braith's handpicked few, the Council. Paza, not being one for history, had no idea, and found the Presidential aspiration a completely reasonable choice for such a girl, if only she wasn't wasting her obvious talents by not going into science like Antoniessen had said so clearly.
	“Why? Why do you want to do this?”Paza asked cautiously.
	“'Cuz I can. 'Cuz I want to. 'Cuz I'm smarter than dumb people and better with people than smart people. And 'cuz, if something bad happens, like, I dunno, another civil war, then I'll be able to stop it before people get hurt. I think that's a good aspiration, don't you? Speaking of which- what about you? This conversation is still about you, ya know. You're glubbing around like a fish out of water- what gives?”
	Paza thought about it. “Hold on, I'm not trying to dodge the question or anything, I'm just trying to make sure that I give the right answer,” she said, extending a finger in the universally understood gesture for “shush”.
	“This isn't a test, Paza McNeil,” Sun said. Paza knew it wasn't a test, but she also knew that to the right kind of person, every question was a test.
	As was often the case, Sun's question had not actually been that interesting, but it had spurred yet greater questions in her mind. The question dominating her mind was, succinctly, “then what?”. Humanity had never quite adapted, mentally, to never dying, and they were still remarkably short-sighted compared to the vast array of potential intelligences. So, if she killed the horrible enemy, what would she do after that? Celebrate, of course, but what else? What after that? Was there a yet more horrible enemy?
	Of course there was. The odds of nobody in any of the myriad stars in the universe having invented Seed AI was minuscule. Just because they'd never found intelligent life that wasn't derived from something from Earth didn't imply it didn't exist. And if it did exist, and you by the German Tank Problem assume that humanity's tendency to invent intelligences that were superintelligent and liable to kill everything was about average, then it was inevitable that someone somewhere had made something monstrously inhuman that needed to die as soon as possible.
	“I want to become stronger,” Paza said, the words even surprising herself, “so that I can destroy anything that threatens people before it can destroy them. So, after this war- all the infinite wars that will occur in the future, I want to be able to win them all, without anyone dying or suffering, but I have to get smarter and better than I am now to manage it.”
	Sun chuckled. “Might want to practice hitting things with your fists, first.”
Chapter 3- Winning, No Matter The Cost
	Paza and Sun became extremely close over the course of their four-and-a-half years in Waterloo even as they managed to antagonize just about every teacher they had. It was good that they had someone else to bear their deepest self to, because the war proceeded terribly. [Spoilers, fix the first sentence]
	The AI called itself Exalt, and would not accept less than an unconditional surrender. Nobody would surrender, and so the war continued without end. And Exalt was winning. He started with a huge material disadvantage, having sent only a single tiny probe ship to the first Formaltine habitat he encountered. He remained crippled, by the standards of modern Formaltine military tactics, because he could not open new Gates, not yet. Perhaps he was unable to think about it, because there were heavy, irremovable blocks on his cognition that were, perhaps, the only thing his human designers could inflict on him. The existing Gates, however, he could use, and humanity had grown proud in their use of Gates, and the enemy was patient, clever, and had potentially found his way around the violation that prevented the moving of one gate through another, he had many with which to work. And the Exalted- his chaises, each inhabited by an edited, crippled copy of his own mind- were fractal and self-replicating in a way that had long been considered impractical by human engineers. The enemy did not suffer crippling losses. Either their advance was repelled, or it was not. A success meant they took a week or so to replenished, a failure meant a horrible fate to all those left on the habitat, the permanent deaths of a number of humans, and Exalt's move one step closer to Fomalhaut Beta, the capital of humanity. Usually, humanity failed.
	Paza excelled as she always did. Her marks were usually the best in the class, and she had even obtained the ability to fight, her form graced by a tracing of muscle and a sharp fighting mind. But it was the most unusual, most modern class that she had excelled best in.
	Lateral Thinking, sometimes called Creative Solutions or Dynamic Problem Solving or, occasionally, and mostly by Sun, either the Manhattan Project or, when she was disappointed at her marks, Tube Alloys. It was generally understood, under Antoniessenian combat, that being able to think your way through the fight was more important than logistics or tactics or anything of the sort.
	The instructor was a pattern on a screen of a tall, thin man. He had perfect composure and posture, and while the fact that it was fake made it less impressive, the primate brain still considered him the obvious Alpha of the room. He had green, deep-set eyes that cut like filament wherever he looked. He cleared his throat, and began the first lecture which Paza had ever had in the class with, “your battlefield-analysis AI understands logistics! Your AI understands tactics! The AI knows how fast each of your ships should go when, and how many people to assign to each! The AI knows all of this better than any of us could!
	“What the AI does not understand is how to operate outside of the box! The AI /is/ the box, for all intents and purposes! It solves its assigned set of problems as perfectly as reasonable, and you will have subordinates who are good at these things to delegate solution-checking to. What your subordinates cannot do for you, is come up with the clever solution nobody was expecting.
	“On Earth, this happened so very rarely that it was largely considered a hallmark of fiction! But one day, the atomic bomb was invented by Franklin Roosevelt's chosen researchers, and then war changed! It became about diplomacy and brinksmanship and tiny polities nobody had ever heard of. When we went to space, and Braith Terra's chosen researchers invented the battle-analysis AI, war changed again! Every war is like the Second World War- every war must end in victory through intelligence.
	“Franklin's bomb was important because it was the first time anyone had ever considered an alternate victory condition! The atom bomb could destroy the enemy- utterly, and without massed invasion like every war had been won with in the past! And the legacy of that moment is what we teach in Lateral Thinking.
	“You will not be penalized for cheating! You will be penalized for being caught cheating, of course, because if you are caught cheating you are not successful- but you will not be expelled, and there will be no black mark on your record. I will tell the story of my own brightest pupil, who had managed to, over the course of the year, blackmail every single one of his classmates into deliberately failing their tests, so that he needed display but one iota of talent and he would be far ahead of the curve.
	“When I discovered this, he was immediately graduated. From what I understand, he now works for the Committee of Internal Defense, and has some scheme to replace the Committee's Councilor.
	“Another time, from what I gather, a young girl replaced my mind with hers, taught the class in my stead, and graduated with inflated grades and nobody knowing a thing. I wish only that I had been a better teacher than she was, or that she could have stayed in my place. She is Councilor now, and as far as I understand if I asked what she supervised I would be killed on the spot.
	“Lateral thinking is impossibly more important than any of your other classes. Maybe their teachers disagree, although I'm sure your instructor in sparring knows that he doesn't have a leg to stand on, pun not intended. But we allow these shenanigans because if you allow yourself to balk at cheating, then you will not obtain what the ancients called 'intent to kill'. You will always be limited by your own internal filters, unless you learn to shut them off, and do everything to win. Your performance in this class accurately predicts your future military skill- and so you may let go of worries about damaging the data, or being put in a sub-optimal place for your skill. Cheat! If your cheating damages your classmate's learning, so be it! If they were smart enough and cared enough, they would stop you! If you tell me that a child is cheating, it will be understood that you are a sore loser, and while I must punish the cheater for being caught cheating, and by that I mean by cheating in front of an idiot, know that you will lose my tiny sliver of respect for you, and that you have failed to understand this class and will never make it above Private. This is a promise, from me to every one of you- if you don't even try to understand the lesson I impart here, you will never be given command, because Lateral Thinking is, in fact, the only thing that will make or break you as a general,” he finally concluded. His every word dripped with Antoniessenian wisdom when it wasn't anecdotal. Paza found the lecture both stimulating and factually correct. She turned to Sun with a smile on her face.
	Sun did not reciprocate. She looked on in dull disinterest. Paza tilted her head and peered at her quizzically until Sun got the message.
	“What?” Sun asked.
	“Why are you so displeased?” Paza asked. Sun stayed and chewed her lip for a while.
	“I guess- it's callous. Uh. It's catering basically exclusively to the upper, um, group. Like. I mean, not /everyone/ can have a will to kill or, um, whatever it's called. And I don't think that could possibly be the sole defining characteristic of a good general- I mean, uh, obviously you have to be willing to take lives, but not in that-” Sun began, but the torrent of words dried up when their instructor barked, “Sun Khvostovskaya!”
	Paza experienced a curious feeling at this moment- anticipation of what awful thing the instructor would do to Sun, coupled with excitement at seeing more of him in action.
	“Sir?” Sun said apprehensively.
	“I heard what you said. You disagree with me. Do you presume to be wiser than me, then? Know that I was handpicked by the administrator of this extremely prestigious school for precisely the role I am now performing. I must be among the foremost lateral thinkers not currently in the war effort- and I would be there, too, were it not for circumstances outside of my control. Bearing this in mind, do you really style yourself, a twelve-year-old, to be smarter than myself?
	“No,” Sun said, “and I'm not sure why you all keep insisting that my finding a hole in someone else's argument makes me smarter than you. I don't have to be that smart to see something in a little bit of a different perspective, I mean, I think the fact that I'm a twelve-year-old might really be helping me here, since you haven't been twelve in a really long time.”
	“A /fascinating/ discovery, Khvostovskaya. Please, tell me about it. Tell the whole class about it- I'm sure they're dying to know what aspect of their education is being omitted!”
	Sun swallowed. Paza understood the stakes. The failure rate at Waterloo was extremely high. Their tolerance for mistakes was low. Even if Sun was uniformly /wrong/, she had to pull something out that would convince the instructor to let it slide.
	“Sir, the issue here is that you're training for the highest, um, quartile. Basically, you're being so exacting that you're going to fail plenty of decent generals who aren't ruthlessly pragmatic in the same way that you are, and frankly we need ever possible good general we can muster against the enemy.”
	“You are wrong, Sun Khvostovskaya, because we need the /best/ generals we can muster against the enemy. Stupid people are in my experience worse than useless and I'm doing Braith Terra a great favor by weeding them out preemptively,” the instructor said. Paza agreed completely, but the fact that Sun had yet to not be potentially expelled took the awe away. Sun gave Paza an extremely significant look. She was angled in such a way that the instructor could not see her, and she mouthed “I trust you,” to Paza. Paza thought that incredibly bizarre and resolved to think about what it could mean. She didn't have nearly five minutes before Sun looked back at the screen and the instructor located therein.
	“Okay, if killing intent is so important, and my strategy is such a bad idea, kill me! Do it! I'm obviously a bad influence on the others- don't think I don't see how some of them might agree with me. So if you want to terminate my influence, then-” and then Sun Khvostovskaya spoke no more because she was on the floor, clutching her throat, and then she was still.
	“Done,” said the instructor. Medical personnel retrieved Sun, to revive her. Death was not permanent. Expulsion was. “I trust you,” she had said. Paza now found it incredibly significant, but was no closer to finding out what it actually meant. As the instructor explained how intent to kill actually was important, and briefly covered the evolutionary pressures that had caused restraints that were currently maladaptive, Paza thought about it.
	What did it mean? If Sun had meant her strategy to actually work, she wouldn't have said it, obviously, or she would have said something else. Unless, of course, there was more to her strategy that hadn't happened because she died in the first part. But Sun was smart, and had recently seen a different instructor pry a young girl's eye out of her skull. Clearly, she knew that the instructor who harped on about nonstandard thinking would kill her. It wasn't even that painful, let alone permanent. And so...
	So Paza could only conclude that she had meant to die. Was Sun supposed to be a martyr on the lower seventy-five percent of the Waterloo population? Was Paza supposed to be her herald, and spread the story about how a young girl was briefly scared and uncomfortable for talking back to a teacher?
	No, because Sun trusted her, and Paza would never do anything so obviously stupid and cliched.
	And so the last  minutes of the class droned on, and Paza pried at the problem. With a few seconds to spare, she approached it from a different angle.
	“I trust you,” meant that Sun had assumed that Paza could do something to help her  at some point. Paza didn't have to wonder what that was. Paza just had to think of how she could help, and presumably Sun's assessment of her is that she would do just that thing. And then she seized on an awesome opportunity. As the students were dismissed, she instead made her way directly to the instructor.
	“Paza O'Neil. Hopefully you have not taken in Sun's claptrap. She was clever, but not smart. I'd hate to see the same happen to you. You're very promising, you know, though I had hoped for an outburst from you in class,” the instructor said almost absentmindedly. Paza cleared her mind of all thought and just... felt.
	“It would be hard for me not to take in the things she says, sir,”Paza said cautiously.
	“Oh? I understand that you have become fast friends after punching each other repeatedly, and presumably talking a great deal about attractive classmates and so on, but, honestly, you're a smart girl and it's been a week. You can't be that smitten with her- save such things for at least your third year, as I understand it is actually illegal for a twelve year old to opt into the reproductive urge.”
	“You've, uh, misread me, sir,” Paza continued, gauging each of her subconscious responses (which was quite easy with transhuman hardware).
	“Oh? I'm going to have to take back all the horrible things I've said about you, then- like, complimenting your cleverness, and so forth.”
	“No, you've misread me because I'm not Paza. I've won today,”Paza said. She tried to mask her diction as fervently as possible.
	“...Well, of all the things. Did you really-”
	“Of course I did,” Paza replied.
	“I knew you were smart, individually, but, smart enough for both of you?”
	“Uh, apparently, I am.”
	“Sun Khvostovskaya. I'm awed, truly. I know how you did it, obviously- you set up a plan with this girl, who, her files suggest, is really made for Science instead of the military. You borrowed her identity and her body- and obviously, you've got some heavy iron running in there, maybe split consciousness, entopic controls of Paza's body. I can't know what you offered her, but you clearly- you're not a twelve year old, are you? You represent some interest, and you probably borrowed Sun's body and identity too. You're not an Exalted saboteur because otherwise we'd all be dead, probably. So, what, criminal? Ex-Posthuman?”
	“I'm Sun Khvostovskaya,” Paza lied. “That's all you really need to know.”
	“But what do you /get/ from... whatever that was, back there. Making me seem  evil? I assure you, that's done. I'm widely regarded as the most outwardly malicious teacher in the school, although the physics teacher has some habits that nobody quite knows the full story about. Were you trying to make yourself seem weaker?”
	Paza thought as quickly as she could. It was as though time slowed to a standstill as she thought and thought and thought. And then she realized what Sun was talking about. Obviously, lateral thinking, the will to kill, all these things were important when it came to being a leader of men in conditions of warfare.
	But before a great general was a brilliant mind or a determined one, it was a manipulator. The primate brain that unfortunately still formed the core of all soldiers was inherently petty and had to be literally marshaled into place. That was what Sun had understood intuitively, Paza thought.  She had beaten the Lateral Thinking instructor into the ground by being gregarious and kind to a strange girl and by putting her trust in that girl and not by outstretching him or coldly assassinating him. The aspect of the condition of leadership that the instructor neglected was the social one.
	And Paza would, therefore, never be a great general. She understood people as forces, as pulses and flows in the world around her, but not as people. Maybe she understood Sun in that way, but certainly none of the other McNeil, none of her teachers. In Paza's tiny world, the only people were Paza O'Neil, Dirkje Antoniessen, Braith Terra, and potentially Sun Khvostovskaya. Sun could learn to kill. Sun could learn lateral thinking. She could even learn the Antoniessenian model of thought. But Paza, although Paza truly comprehended these things, could not really understand people. She had always known and accepted this, and when she had planned on being a developmental geneticist it hadn't really mattered (the frigid structures of academia done away with when scientists rewrote human society). But as a general, she would never be able to marshal the human element.
	The revelation struck her jumping into cold water, but she controlled her reaction, because the instructor could not see how it had effected her. She coughed, buying herself another moment.
	And in this moment, she decided it didn't matter. Even if it was literally impossible, Paza O'Neil would learn. Paza O'Neil would become the greatest general who had ever drawn breath, because that's what she needed to be.
	“I must become stronger,” Paza said, “and that's why I did it. I'm trying my best to, uh, command people at a large scale. If this means appealing to their sense of, uh, exceptionality, so be it. But I think I'm right, in ways- lateral thinking and intent to kill are important now, but one's ability to manage the humans under one's command has always been what,uh, separates the good from the great.
	“And, uh, your inferences were sort of wrong- really, I was just borrowing Paza's body, and she'll probably be back to normal tomorrow. She'll know all this happened, but you shouldn't, as a rule, assume that either of these bodies are expendable.”
	The instructor laughed wryly “Right. First off, you're an idiot. Never explain anything more than you need to. I can't pretend to know who you are or at what level you play, but, generally speaking, shut up. Second of all, I understand this well. I'm payed to neglect it, in fact. You will have class with my counterpart this time tomorrow, and she will tell you how great generals can be how-to books with no lateral thinking or drive, as long as they understand things like 'Delegation'. We disagree on finer points, but we both exaggerate, both know how important both Lateral Thinking and Group Dynamics are to being a great general. And, third of all, I can't wait to see what awful things you're going to do to pass my class. Perhaps I'll tell about it in a future lecture. Dismissed- go check on your other body, as I suspect Miss O'Neil will be wanting hers back.”
	Outside the classroom, Paza fell to her knees in exhaustion and stress and sadness. She knew what to do next, of course.
Chapter Four- A Brief Discourse On The Nature Of Empathy
	Sun sat alone in a white bed. There were no scars. No damage at all. Nothing to indicate that she had in fact spent several minutes very dead. Paza was there, slumped over in a a gray chair, looking decidedly not-very-twelve in the face.
	“Oh, Paza,” Sun whispered. “They gonna expel me?”
	“The instructor of Lateral Thinking thinks that you're a master criminal at least twice the age that you actually are, that you have improved and likely illegal cognitive hardware, that we're possibly the same person, and that we're madly in love. Oh, and he was payed to disagree with you. Provided I gave your argument the way you would if you weren't dead- it was something about the importance of group dynamics to success as a general? We have a class on it tomorrow,” Paza rattled off without thought. Lists were easy. Crushing, purposeless dread was not.
	“No, uh. That's part of it, but I also think it's really unfair that half the class gets, uh, shafted. But, uh, it's war. I guess, if you're not good you do get shafted,” Sun explained, “How in the firmaments did you convince him of that?”
	“I told a staggering variety of lies and tried to talk like you would talk if your whole twelve-year-old vocabulary thing was a cover and you were actually a rich criminal mastermind” Paza explained. Sun barely even blinked.
	“Is there like, a trick to it? Can you teach me?”Sun asked.
	“No,” Paza said, “and I'd insist you tell me how to work with people first if there were.”
	“It's really easy, Paza O'Neil. You just pretend the person speaking is as smart as you are. They're usually not, but that doesn't matter. 'Cause, like I said, even stupid people can notice something you don't. Not usually in mathematics, but, like, in war? They totally can, and so that's the real secret- don't just, dismiss them,” Sun explained, like she was telling a little girl why Earth's sky was blue. Paza blinked, licked her lips.
	“The secret's in a book by Dirkje Antoniessen called The Eponymous Marshall. It's a good book. You should read it,” Paza explained, “but after this. We have to go to class- being dead isn't a valid excuse in this school, I suspect.”
	“You're right,” Sun said with a wince. “So, uh, question? Why'd you do that kind of crazy shenanigan for me? I mean, we just met. I mean, I would probably try to help you out if you got in a fight with a teacher, but, I don't think I'd... uh, think that laterally, I guess. Definitely wouldn't make up some big, complicated story about how I guess I'm in the mob and we're lovers and also somehow the same person?”
	Paza was a little shocked at the question. She stared at Sun for a bit, and then gave an answer she felt satisfactory.
	“What else are friends for?”
[Past me: Fuck you, honestly, for quitting here. /so what/ if it turns out most of this book is about Paza and Sun and potentially some other assholes in Waterloo. You need to write it because the rest of the story doesn't make sense outside of that particular context.]
Chapter Five
	The next day's courses were



They went to class many, many times. Then they graduated, and it was mutually understood that they would likely die forever before their next meeting, as the enemy grew in strength, approached closer and closer to Fomalhaut Beta. It was a touching parting, from what Paza understood, far more tender even than the time they had opted into the reproductive urge on a lark together. And then Sun Khvostovskaya was out of her life, and she had a meeting with Braith Terra.
	Braith Terra did not have an office. Braith Terra had other people's offices, as when she was traveling in that avatar of pure white she endeavored to be as unobtrusive as humanly possible.
	It said a great deal about the society she had constructed for herself that an avatar of pure white was not noticeably more obtrusive than a regularly colored human.
	Braith Terra's office du jour, then, belonged to the administrator of Waterloo. She said, “hello” and Paza said “hello” and then pleasantries were dispensed with.
	“Paza McNeil. You've succeeded fairly well, no?
[Insert conversation about, uh, the objective, and introduce the secretary, who as it turns out is going to be a character, just not Sun and certainly not forever. After this battle we're going to convert to the standard Paza and Sun model and figure out what the fuck to do next]
Chapter Five- Humanistic Psychology: Benefits and Drawbacks
	The fabled Leadership class was upon them shortly thereafter. As Paza had inferred, being dead in Waterloo didn't actually mean that you could miss classes. Sun had been dead. But her cause of death was the implant in her heart, installed fully without her knowledge or consent and present in every recruit in Waterloo, briefly triggering and sending her into cardiac arrest. A functioning heart wasn't necessary to sustain her brain, but it was necessary to sustain the functioning of the rest of her tissue, and so her brain had shut itself off briefly until the problem could be rectified. From the post-Earth perspective, it was, essentially, a rap on the fingers with a ruler. And you didn't get class off for that, either. The fact that the instructor hadn't torn her eye out or inflicted some other gruesome fate upon her was likely meant to be taken as a compliment for her natural intelligence, even. And so they managed to make their way through the gently curving halls of Waterloo into the Leadership class just before they would bear the indignity of lateness.
	The room's configuration was bizarre. The Lateral Thinking seating had been in gray chairs, with black desks, in a room that wouldn't have looked entirely deviant in an Earth college classroom except for the fact that it was being taught by a one by four by nine monolith displaying a man's picture on it. Leadership was composed of haphazard clusters of seats, strewn about at random. Each had attached a desk in the form of a flat glass tablet. There were two unoccupied in the back, into which Sun and Paza slipped before the teacher could mark them late.
	They needn't have worried. There appeared to be no teacher in the room. Glancing briefly at the screen, Paza saw a few lines of text. They said,
	Welcome to Leadership. I will not give a speech. I am not the dreadful and anonymous figure who teaches Lateral Thinking, this class' necessary counterpart. I refer to myself as Francoise Leprof, and encourage you to do likewise. Upon touching the “I understand” button downward (that's the side closer to you, if you're from the tin cans) from this message, you will be taken to answer a few brief essay questions. I request that you answer them as fully as possible. I have fought to gain the necessary time to allow you to think your way through them by canceling the more... mundane classes of the day. While your teachers in Calculus and Physics are very good at their jobs, their jobs do not require thought. You may learn them out of a real-paper textbook and would not be too unduly hampered. This class teaches you- and there I go, getting ahead of myself. I said there would not be a speech. To recap- you may take as long as you want on these essays, just be careful to answer them as thoroughly as possible.
	Below Leprof's message, printed in white text on a black background, was a single blue rectangle, labeled “I understand”.Paza touched her finger absentmindedly to the region of the glass' cool surface corresponding to that rectangle. The screen shifted. There was another blurb of text.
	Instructions: You will be given as much time as is necessary to respond to these three prompts. Answer them in the boxes below. This display accepts entopic text input, both eye-motion linked and subvocalized, but numerous alternative methods of text input are available. The box underneath each prompt is a text input for a powerful question-answering algorithm named Francoise Leprof. You may ask the algorithm anything and receive an answer. This answer will often be “I cannot answer that”. Acceptable questions will be given thorough answers. Do not type anything stupid into the question box.
	Prompt one: Define “power”.
	Paza looked at the prompt in vague disconcertion. She was almost certain that there was a right answer being looked for. She entered into the box “from a physics perspective?”
	The box replied, “Paza McNeil, this is a psychological evaluation. Don't try to game the system. Just answer the question.”
	“What are we being evaluated for?”
	“I cannot answer that question,” the box replied. Paza furrowed her brow. Time seemed to slow as she took a minute to think.
	Would she try to game the system? It was a difficult question. She didn't know what a winning answer would look like, of course. She didn't even know if she wanted to win. But she had to at least try- she had just had a lesson on the importance of cheating a scarce hour prior.
	Dirkje Antoniessen explained in The Eponymous Marshall that the most important thing to do when thinking about a problem was to hold off on proposing solutions. This made the search for the answer breadth-first instead of depth-first, decreasing the chances of stumbling blindly onto the wrong answer and only discovering one's own falseness much later. Instead, what one had to do was to think about the problem for as long as possible, milling over each aspect of the problem as thoroughly as one could, until it became apparent that there was no aspect of the problem left untouched and one had assumed the fullest understanding of the problem. Then one could propose their solutions, in light of all the information.
	So that's what Paza set out to do. She didn't have much in the way of /direct/ information, but she could infer. The most important fact disclosed by Leprof in her opening was the fact that she hated the Lateral Thinking instructor. This meant that, with fairly high reliability, Paza could assume a few things about her.
	The primary way she would likely contrast with the Lateral Thinking instructor would be her teaching policy. She'd probably take Sun's perspective, and seek to cater to the whole class. So, then, this wasn't an /aptitude/ test, because that would imply that Leprof would teach them differently depending on their performance in some trait- it likely wasn't intelligence, based on the prompt. So, what?
	Dirkje Antoniessen had a healthy disdain of humanistic psychology. She thought it was near Freudian in its level of departure from scientific reality. And, obviously, since one cannot oppose an enemy one doesn't understand, Dirkje had taken classes, whose lessons she had incorporated into some dialog in The Velvet Sackcloth. Succinctly, they believed that all people could self-actualize. They thought everyone had the potential to be exceptional and special. Dirkje thought that was obviously untrue, but nonetheless the discipline had stuck around during the rebuilding of society. The initial likelihood of someone being a humanistic psychologist in Braith Terra's Fomalhaut was very low. However, among educators, it was quite a bit higher, as (Paza speculated) most teachers did not enter the profession endeavoring to teach the upper tail of the intelligence distribution. And among a teacher who disdains the sort of Social Darwinist approach that the Lateral Thinking instructor adopted, it was probably higher than fifty percent.
	But the humanists had explanations for the obvious scientific fact that people tended to be smarter than some other people. Their explanation was that everyone was equal, but not the same. That, like a video game character, each person's general potential was equal, but distributed over different fields. Alex, whose eye had recently been plucked out, would not do well in a society that valued linguistic interpreters or court stenographers. Paza herself would do poorly in a society that valued martial artists.
	That would be what the test was assessing- the areas wherein one could demonstrate the most growth. Paza briefly glanced around the room and could count at least three who, based on the nervousness and quiet demeanor they projected like an aura, would not triumph as drill sergeant. This is why the test was administered, so that they would not be forced to be drill sergeants and fail.
	Paza wondered where she should pretend that her aptitudes lie. And then she bit her lip and chided herself. She had not yet finished thinking through the problem as thoroughly as possible.
	There was one aspect in particular she had neglected, and that became readily apparent as soon as she wondered that particular thing.
	The answer from Francoise Leprof was direct and to the point. Surely, any number of people had asked if she meant in “power” in the mathematical, or physical, or electrical sense before. Waterloo was not new. And yet it had told Paza not to game the system. Paza liked gaming the system. What were the odds that a randomly selected person who asked a similar question immediately after reading the prompt also liked to game the system?
	She found that it mattered a great deal how intelligent the other children at Waterloo were. Or, for that matter, wherever else the test had been administered. You couldn't game the system until you were smart enough to understand the system. And there were two plausible reasons for asking that question, beyond gaming the system- spite, and stupidity. Both would be more common among the less intelligent.
	But this was a error, and Paza immediately recognized it. The instructor knew she was intelligent, so it didn't quite matter.
	And that was the salient point. If Francoise Leprof knew that Paza was intelligent, then she probably knew everything else the files said about her. And that meant that, for the most part, Francoise Leprof probably already knew what the answer was supposed to look like, and would notice severe deviations.
	All this work effected to put Paza back at the simplest level of games- just doing what was asked of her.
	Power, she wrote, is the capacity to effect change. As I noted, the word “power” can mean many things, and I'll be using the social sense of the word. Groups have power when they can ask for a thing to happen and it does. Obviously, the most powerful thing in the known universe is Braith Terra. . But she doesn't just have power as the commanders of vast legions of troops. When she wants a station built, it is built. When she wants a generation born, it is. When she declares that there shall be no genefixing of children to make them unusually intelligent, it happens. Her power comes from wisdom- because, in general, she knows far better than most what she's talking about, and heeding her advice usually goes well, her advice is often heeded, and because she's seen as valuable, her desires are often met. By contrast, the AI currently tearing apart our stations has hardly any power, at least in Fomalhaut. When it asked for our surrender, we said no. None of us were even tempted to give up against it. And so, for all its guns and bluster, it's really quite weak. It commands itself, and several tons of scrap metal we can only assume that it converts into corkscrews or something equally bizarre. Its power is dwarfed by even the weaker twentieth century governments. It is orders of magnitude less powerful than, say, Argentina, whereas Braith Terra is orders of magnitude more powerful than the USSR. That's what power is.
	There was another essay prompt immediately thereafter, just as the instructions had said.
	“What kind of a leader is the one the most ideal?”it asked, befitting a class in Leadership.
	Paza hardly thought about the issue for a  second.
	As Dirkje Antoniessen said in The Velvet Sackcloth, the virtue most important in leadership is skillful delegation. Even in today's society, no one person can be an expert in everything, especially because the value of “expert” keeps rising- by today's standards, Issac Newton was a moron, even though he was n his time regarded as the premier mathematician and physicist. And so a leader must delegate if they are to get any work done. Knowing who to give power, when to give power, and when to retrieve power is the skill of a true leader. Totalitarianism fails because one person can not take responsibility for the running of a state. By that same margin, true democracy fails because the general public lacks the expert knowledge required to make decisions, which is why rule by committees is best. And these committees needs a leader who knows which committee to hand what problem.
	It was not, by Paza's standards, a terribly elegant explanation of the conclusions reached by The Velvet Sackcloth's evil empress in the novels ending. But it was, she thought, good enough for Francoise Leprof
	The final essay question read, “Are you happy?”
	Paza stared in stunned disbelief. The word “what” echoed around in her mind hollowly. The box below the box, the text output for Leprof, said “Don't think. Feel. Say what you feel inside, not what you think I want. This will not affect you academically in any way,” which Paza felt adequately reassuring. Without thought, she wrote,
	I'm not. I won't be until the AI's dead.
	A dead, dull feeling settled into the pit of Paza McNeil's stomach. She thought it might be guilt.
	The screen cleared itself of text, outputting instead simple instructions to “remain in your seat at all times, please, and wait for the other students to finish”. Paza felt that this punished children with the aptitude for finishing early, but recognized that there was little she could do about the problem that would be cost-efficient.
	So instead she waited. The dull feeling refused to subside. And so Paza did a very bad thing, one of the things that Dirkje Antoniessen had specifically warned against. She chose to ignore the discomfort and not think about it in an effort to make the feeling subside. It subsided quite a bit while she was busy contemplating her relationship with Sun Khvostovskaya. It would subside, of course, but Antoniessen had written that that wasn't really the bad part. The bad part is that it left her defenseless to that strange feeling if it decided to crop up again.
	Sun's question in the infirmary had been well-posed. Paza was not the kind of person who habitually made extremely close friends out of casual acquaintances. And yet Paza had risked herself to a fairly insane extent to protect this causal acquaintance.
	She held off of proposing solutions and checked Sun for characteristics that differentiated her from everyone she'd ever met. Sun was very very intelligent, of course. Sun also had an innate model of how people worked. But neither of these things were unique. Paza was very intelligent, and she had not been the smartest person in the McNeil decanting group by an extremely wide margin. It was highly likely that there were McNeil, with whom she spent her childhood, who were more intelligent than Sun Khvostovskaya. With regards to the social modeling, Sun was less alone, even. Most people understood simple things about social interaction. It was Paza who was the unique one, Paza who needed an explanation as to how to relate to other twelve year olds.
	(The dull feeling returned, and again Paza shoved it down)
	An alternate angle of approach- who else did Paza feel any affinity towards? A dead Dutch futurist, and Braith Terra. It came with a bit of a start that she felt very close to her Glorious Leader, but it was only natural that she should admire someone so wise, so powerful, and so benevolent. It was not Antoniessenianism that made her feel that kindred spirit with Sun Khvostovskaya, though. It probably wasn't that with Braith or with Dirkje herself, either, since it would be simpler for her to have one cause of friendship that allowed Antoniessenism and not an Antoniessen-branded cause and an alternate cause for twelve year olds who had never previously heard the name.
	It struck her then. Sun had challenged her authority- in the snow field, she had shown everyone how socially inept she was. Maybe somebody else would have felt resentment, but nobody /ever/ questioned that what Paza said was the truth. This, with the exceptions of Sun Khvostovskaya, Dirkje Antoniessen, and Braith Terra. Dirkje's writing was confrontational- it went beyond “I dare you to understand this text,” to, “If you're an eighth as smart as me, you might grasp the meaning of a single sentence in this web of analogy”. And Braith- Braith knew so much Paza didn't, and wasn't afraid to rub it in her face (this, Dirkje had written, was partially the cause of the popularity of the Socratic method in teaching- making oneself seem superior and vastly more intelligent). Sun wasn't quite so direct, but she certainly had some talents that Paza didn't have, maybe that she couldn't have.
	It was a weird feeling, to understand that she couldn't really be friends with someone who had bested her. Maybe a psychologist would help.
	Paza was just about to remember that she had read easily three years worth of psychology textbooks (and the oeuvre of Dirkje Antoniessen besides) that she could begin to analyze the problem herself when suddenly the floor moved under her, thrusting her into her seat and sending her and the seat both spiraling across the floor. The room echoed with the shouts and screams of various children, but Paza remained as taciturn as was possible when she felt her brain being pressed into the back of her skull by inertia. As she spun dizzily, she looked to discover that the floor wasn't moving at all- it was the chair itself. Glancing down from the nausea, she saw that the flat panel now said, in large friendly letters, “Don't panic”. The advice was more-or-less completely lost on Paza, who continued her dizzying trip to who-knows-where. She saw (briefly, still spinning, still finding it difficult to focus on anything long enough to perceive it) that more and more individuals were clustering about her. There was some space in between this cluster and another cluster, and some more between these two clusters and a third, and except for a few stragglers, nothing. Paza managed to discern through diligent glimpse-catching that Sun was one of those stragglers, taking a long arc tangent to another cluster before coming to spin slowly around Paza's own desk. Suddenly, the desks lurched to a halt, and at that second the light in the room slammed off, so that they were surrounded by blackness. The screen lit up dimly, and there were words on it. Paza groaned softly and read.
	There. I probably could have accomplished that with slightly less theatrics, but if the idiot in the class before me gets to give his big speech, and apparently your souped-up PE teacher got to gouge a girl's eye out and talk about winning- this man doesn't have a relevant degree, by the way, in case you were wondering- then I get to have my special moment of disorientation. If you will look around yourself, you should see, dimly, by the light of the screens, the faces of fifteen other children. Importantly, you should not see the faces of the other thirty-two students in the class.
	Paza glanced about. She saw Sun, some children she would prefer to have nothing to do with, and nobody in the other two clusters.
	If you notice, we still have plenty of time left. The test was not as long as the length permitted would justify. This is because I have misled you. If I had told you what the test was about, you would have cheated, and that's just bad from a statistical point of view.
	Paza cursed herself. Why hadn't she thought of that sooner? Obviously, it was because  she was a vain person when it came to her intelligence. It wouldn't have occurred to her. On her ever-mounting list of ways to be more optimal, she added “stop assuming you're smarter than is feasible- or, model the ways stupid people solve problems before assuming you're smarter than is feasible”
	You likely assumed that the extra time was me catering to the slowest of the group. That's not true. There's something we're going to be doing this class period. It's called Beta Testing, and it's a game. A really fun game, or so I've come to understand. You pretend to be the military command of a country. There will be two other groups pretending to be the military command of a different country. The scenario is simple- there's an inscrutable alien (it used to be an AI, but recent events prompted a change) that lives on a dusty planet and has big, almost angelic powers. You, along with the other factions, have ideological incompatibilities. The standard fiction for this is that you are humans cognitively modified to value your answer to “is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?” extremely important, tautological, and a moral truth equally as high as the rest of human values, like sympathy and boredom. If you, by the end of the time limit, are viewed as having won, then your view of the Tomato Problem will be angelically enforced throughout the world, and the horrible, dreadful Tomato War will come to a close. If no clear winner emerges, the Big Angelic Power will forever separate the wormhole networks of the Fruits, the Vegetables, and the Berries, and you will live with the constant suffering of knowing that there are people out there who are /wrong/ about what a Tomato is- and obviously, pretend this is a value that actually matters
	...Tomatoes. Paza supposed it was a good way of explaining noncomplimentary utility functions that was not as horrifying as the Deathists, and not as horrifying as the Paperclip Optimizer (usually known as the Corkscrew Machine, based on Dirkje's writings). It just seemed incredibly childish to her. More importantly, these values didn't lead to accurate predictions regarding things that were unrelated to tomatoes. Warfare, from a technical perspective, incorporated very few tomatoes into its design. She hardly believed it possible, however, that anyone could reliably roleplay an alien species that was actually alien like the Deathists or a completely bizarre machine like the Corkscrew Machine.
	Anyway, while all the research suggests that withdrawing into VR environments is bad for you, Braith Terra personally vetted this particular piece of software, declared it to be testably safe, and frankly, she's the one paying for everything. So, that in mind, you'll find that there's an access jack in the back of your neck- if you didn't have on preinstalled, that's fine, you got one during your first night in the dorms. We smoothed it over with faux skin, which has likely fallen off. Trust me when I say that picking up what is essentially a collection of large scabs from the floor is no less disgusting when iterated. But I digress. There's a cord underneath this screen. Plug it in, and you'll be in Beta Testing. More specific instructions will be dispensed there.
	Obligingly, Paza sought the cord, and gently inserted it into her newly-exposed neck port as though she had done it a million times.
Chapter Six:Developing Empathy
	Paza was in a room. The room was a sort of uniform gray, plain except for a desk and chair lacking the sort of accouterments that were the whole point of having a desk- there were no papers or tablets or anything similar- and a bed, which appeared to be just comfortable enough to dispel complaints but not enough to actually be enjoyable. Paza herself was in a gray jumpsuit. The room had a small window, and from the window she could see the blinding blue light of a giant star. It was, as boring as it seemed, an astonishingly good simulspace. Paza turned around to glance at the yet unseen forth wall of her room and came face to face with a zombie Marie Curie.
	“I notice that I am confused,” Paza said. There was really no point in trying to reason things through this quickly. She took a moment to really savor her own lack of comprehension. The zombie handed her a piece of vellum parchment, beautifully handwritten.
	This is the form I chose to take in Beta Testing. You may ask why my neural model is so at home in a simulation of a zombie Marie Curie. I will tell you the story, if you wish it, when you obtain legal adulthood, and not a second sooner. I refuse to speak, and you would have to be older than the stars to wrest the reason from me. I am, obviously, your instructor, Francoise Leprof. You, Paza McNeil, have been chosen. By me, not by fate, I mean. You're one of the leaders of the three armies. Now, I'm sure you have some questions?
	“Why?” Paza blurted out before thinking. Leprof's avatar gave her another bit of vellum.
	Why not? If it makes you feel better, you are certainly my third choice of general-of-the-army, only marginally beating out the next most highly ranked child. And it is your naked ambition more than anything that qualifies you. Coups are not, typically speaking, in the spirit of Beta Testing, and I try to avoid them. You would increase the chance of something like that happening if placed under someone else's command. And I think, for reasons I shall not discuss, that there are children in the class that would learn best from your example. I will not contrast you with the other generals, because you will see them soon enough, and the element of surprise is always a resource I wouldn't wish to deprive any of you of. But know that you wield cold logic like... a truncheon, really. Some children are ruled too strongly by their emotions. You will teach them thought.
	They will also teach you traditional human values like “compassion” and “pity”, so, win win. Don't presume yourself immune from criticism, Paza McNeil, or learning. I have hope for you yet, but I don't think you agree with my theory of psychology. But by the end of your tenure here, you'll understand. Or be a vatworker, either way.
	Paza considered the statements. Harsh, but accurate, she pronounced them in her mind. There was a barely-noticeable post-scriptum at the bottom of the page.
	PS: You want an explanation, right? The rules of the game, or whatever? Anything before that?
	It was a test. It had to be a test. The way it was phrased was too obvious. And if she was supposed to be learning, what, empathy? Then it was time to call in the clearest voice of the social consciousness she knew.
	“Actually, yes. Would you mind bringing Sun Khvostovskaya here? I think I'd like her advice before I do anything exceedingly stupid,” Paza said quickly- it wouldn't do to be caught thinking, and the moments of slowdown she often experienced when considering a problem didn't seem to be coming. The zombie tossed her another note.
	Right, her. I've been told... assessing the statement, I've actually only been told that the instructor of Lateral Thinking thinks you two are the same person. Are you?
	“No,” Paza said slowly, setting the parchments down on her plain desk. She barely had time to drop the papers before more were thrust into her hand.
	Strange. I've been informed that you're to be kept together at all times, which is why she's in your army. Count yourself lucky- and yes, I'll bring her in.
	A moment later, Sun Khvostovskaya, in all her unassuming chestnut color, stood next to her.
	“Oh! Uh. Weird, could have sworn I was in some form of barracks?” she muttered. She looked around briefly, her eyes fixating on the blue star outside of the window for perhaps a moment longer than most would. And then she jumped out of it, scanned around again, and looked at Paza.
	“Oh! Paza! It's nice to see you! I wonder why we're both here- is this some sort of experiment, or, what?” She quipped, letting the question trail off.
	“No, Sun. I'm going to be making decisions, I think, about the army?”
	(at this point, the zombie Curie held up a sign that said “YES” on it. Sun, to her credit, hardly looked twice at it)
	“And I've inferred that it would be best to make the decisions in your presence. There's lots of errors in thinking that only effect groups, but there's plenty that groups mitigate, and I suspect that this particular group will not exhibit many of either category of error,” Paza concluded.
	“Clever. Did that, uh, whatsitcalled, Marshall book tell you this?”Sun asked.
	“Sort of,” Paza said. She turned to face Zombie Curie. “I need concrete details, as I'm sure you an infer from my personality. What are my objectives? What means are at my disposal? Can you tell me anything? What sort of Tomato do I endorse?”
	You win. Crush the opposition. When it becomes apparent that you will win by the evaluations of the Big Angelic Power (who is, I should note, not me) with an extraordinarily high degree of certainty, then you will be declared the winner. If, over the course of your education here, nobody /cannot/ win, then the Big Angelic Power will declare the Tomato War over and fail to solve the problem of people being wrong about Tomatoes. Avoid this, it makes an extremely anticlimactic ending and I am more or less payed in the mirth of children who love war games. You have logistic AI for the fiddly things. Almost all personnel are simulated (although I have it on good authority that sometimes the Calculus teacher pretends to be an AI pilot, and is apparently extremely good by many metrics) but you have sixteen commanders to distribute as you see fit. Counting yourself, obviously. You're Berry, by the way.
	“...So, is there a reason why someone has to play general-of-the-armies before playing, say, Corporal?”
	If you aren't up for the challenge, I assure you that there's another candidate waiting in the wings. They might not really want to do it, but if I told them to they'd give it their best effort.
	“It's not that, it's just that it can't possibly be the most efficient way of learning. This isn't.”
	She was about to say “how real millitaries did it”. And then she remembered where she was, and resolved to stop reading histories.
	“Look, Paza, I'm sure, if Madame Leprof has it set up this way, if Braith Terra has it set up this way, then we can probably assume that it's not bad. I mean, okay, Madame Leprof? How many of the commanders of the Misguided War were trained with this program, or, uh, something like it? Because, from what I was told, that war was basically as good as we get, warfare-wise.
	All of them. With modern technology, you don't actually need to know how to do your subordinates' jobs. Which, for you, Miss McNeil, is something you should be thanking your lucky stars for every day. Anyway, before I leave, there's some salient, really important questions that need posing, before I can boot up the game. The only thing you're going to control right now is your army's aesthetic. It can be anything, within reason. There's not going to be much in the way of mechanical benefits or rewards right now, but your interior design philosophy is echoed throughout the whole fleet. It's important.
	“Gray's fine,” Paza said without thinking.
	“No!” Sun yelled. “You can't do that! Be creative! Like, if we're moral crusaders, how about adopting, like, a universal church theme? Or, Camelot, or something?”
	“Dutch Coffeehouse,” Paza said, again without thought. “Actually, if you could make the whole thing like the regions in the beginning of The Velvet Sackcloth, that would be good.”
	“What?” Sun said?
	“Dirkje Antoniessen. She had a peculiar affinity towards Dutch coffeeshops,” Paza explained. “It was her aesthetic, from what I can understand from her books. She liked the smell and the interior design and. Well, everything about it.”
	“Do you like the smell and interior design and everything else?” Sun asked, cocking and eyebrow.
	“I...  Hold on, I'm not trying to dodge the question or anything, I'm just trying to make sure that I give the right answer,” she said again.
	“It's still not that hard!” Sun scoffed.
	“It is that hard, actually! It's incredibly difficult to figure out what you're actually thinking and to figure out what you believe versus what you believe you believe!”Paza said. “Please, then, just give me at the most five minutes to think.”
	“Fine,” Suns said.
	The question actually took startlingly little time to sort itself out. Ten seconds later, Paza said, “I don't really care one way or the other, but it's what they represent. Madame Leprof mentioned me being obligated to teach my subordinates to think- and so, since Dirkje Antoniessen is the great teacher of thought, it makes sense to borrow her aesthetic out of homage.”
	“All this talk about it being 'that hard' and it actually takes, what, ten seconds?” Sun said incredulously.
	“Look, nobody knows what they don't know, meaning, uh, the set of all the facts that you don't know- you can't even infer their labels, it's a big list, and while you might be aware that you don't know the lambda calculus, you probably didn't realize that you didn't even know how to think properly,” Paza explained rapidly. There was a moment of stunned silence, during which time Paza slowly realized that she really should put a much higher value on thinking before she opened her mouth.
	“I know how to think properly, Paza McNeil!” Sun shouted. “Just because my  way of thinking and your way of thinking aren't the same doesn't meant that one or the other is 'improper'”
	“It does, actually. Either they're trivial transformations of one another, or one's less right than the other. It's demonstrated extremely thoroughly in the opening of The Eponymous Marshall, where Magistrate Lars Kleinlugtenbeld says, and this I quote this directly, 'But, we easily could have become Deathists when we were starting out. This is a reasonable mistake. Surely, the Deathist way of seeing things is just as valid as the Dutch Rational point of view?' and then they kill him of course, because who would suffer him to live, and also- spoilers, sorry.”
	That explanation made a whooshing sound as it flew in one of Sun's ears and out the other.
	“So, what, if your book says that I'm wrong because I don't agree with you? We do a thing, uh, where I come from- maybe it's just a Trolley Problem station type thing, but I'm going to infer that wherever you came from-”
	“Ethics station,”
	“On Ethics station, that most people also do this, and it's just you who's in this weird Dutch cult. We have a thing called 'humoring someone', where you don't dismiss them out of hand because they disagree with you! That's how we avoid hurting feelings for no reason.”
	And there was a forthcoming of counterarguments in Paza's mind (most prominently “look, I have that too, it's just called 'insufficient data to make a conclusion' and I clearly have sufficient evidence to conclude that the irrational way is wrong”) but then she looked at Sun's face. Sun was biting her lip, rather hard. Her fists were balled at her side. Her breathing and heart rate were elevated, and she was blinking rapidly. This signaled to Paza that she was upset.
	And then she remembered the end of The Four Hundred and Eighty Nine Postulations of A Particular Scottish Child, when Dirkje Antoniessen reminded the audience that making people happy was, in the end, all that actually mattered. Steven had failed to do this, even though he kept his subject populations well supplied in other human values, like conquest and knowledge. But Steven was still evil, and his death at the hands of Janissaries was still completely justified, because he made the entire human population suffer. Even his if his /goals/ were justified, he carried them out in an evil way, and for that deserved nothing sort of painful and torturous death.
	And Paza McNeil decided that she wouldn't be Steven. Not ever.
	“I'm sorry,” Paza said. “I didn't mean to imply that you were, stupid, or somehow worse than I am. It's... okay, understand that I spent a lot of time reading Dirkje Antoniessen and the people that influenced her, and so maybe my... they would call it the false consensus effect, I just assumed that Antoniessenian thought was the way things worked, and if you-”
	“You had me at 'I'm sorry', Paza McNeil,” Sun said. She relaxed almost instantly- but, at least to Paza's underdeveloped sense of empathy, it didn't appear that she was faking the initial reaction. Sun had a quality that Paza would briefly decide to call “forgiveness”, and she had a lot of it. “I'll read your stupid Dutch book, too, just to see what the fuss is about. In the mean time, remember that even if you /are/ smarter than other people that doesn't mean you get to be a huge jerk all the time.
	“Also, that you're not smarter than me, for however much that counts,” She concluded with a devilish grin.
	Paza thought that zombie Marie Curie was smiling too, only it was really hard to tell through the part where it was a decaying corpse with no lips. The slip of paper read “right, so that's your final choice? Dutch Coffeehouse?”. The paper was passed from Curie to Paza to Sun, and both of the girls nodded their tacit approval.
	I'll see about having our engineers make your things suitably Dutch Coffeehouse. Your rank, then, will be Barista?
	It made sense in context. In The Velvet Sackcloth, the Barista was the one in the Coffeehouse who made the ultimate sacrifice and organized the entire fake rebellion. She died horribly in the first chapter, but her influence was felt throughout the book, as a generalized name for all the victims of the Coffeehouse Ploy. There was, in Paza's mind, no possible title that could supersede that of Barista.
	“No,” she said. “I haven't earned it. Call me the CEO. Sun, you can be my CFO.”
	“I'll pretend I understand why you can't be a Barista and say 'sure thing, Paza McNeil,” Sun said. The zombie tossed a parchment at Paza almost angrily.
	You know, Beta Testing is a game. It's a game about a literal Tomato War. Sure, it's classwork, but you could consider having fun with it and or not taking it so unbelievably seriously all the time, Miss McNeil. I can disclose that at least one of your contemporaries calls themself the God(/ess)-Emper(or/ess)of Mankind. Barista doesn't seem that much of an imposition.
	“Did the lady stutter?” Sun asked. Zombie Marie Curie shrugged, tossed down a last piece of paper, and vanished like so much smoke.
	As you wish, Paza McNeil, Sun Khvostovskaya. If you excuse me, I have business elsewhere. The game has not yet actually started, and so you will find a small trapdoor under your bed which leads to a room where you and your army may converse about, you know, all the things you just decided without asking them. Not that you were supposed to, obviously, but here's hoping they don't resent your choices too much and/or that they understand the huge favoritism you're showing your girlfriend. Zing.
	“We're not dating!”Paza shouted ineffectually into the void.
	The word “yet” flickered in her field of vision for a moment,and then disappeared. With a resigned sigh, she lowered herself and awkwardly shimmied her way down, under the bed, finding the trapdoor and pulling herself through it at great length.
Chapter Seven-Challenging Tradition
	It was a Dutch coffeehouse. Paza briefly wondered how the designers could act so quickly, and then realized that the coffeehouse from The Velvet Sackcloth was probably a pre-built simulspace that was on library somewhere on whatever station Waterloo was hosted on. It was, apparently, one of Braith Terra's own projects. The coffeehouse was filled with gray-clad individuals milling about. She found herself behind the counter, with Sun further to the back. She cleared her throat, and because there was only a whisper of ambient conversation, all heads turned to look at her.
	Paza immediately realized that she was totally immune to the traditional young adult fear of public speaking, and that this whole exercise would be much better for it.
	“Greetings!” Paza began. She held her face in a sort of gentle happiness. “I'm Paza McNeil, the CEO of this army!”
	“Why does the army have a CEO? It's an army,” asked a small girl, sitting far away from the counter on a comfortable art deco chair.
	“It's not just an army, it's a whole polity,” Paza explained, “and as I was saying-”
	“Why the coffeeshop look?” A different voice cried, source unidentifiable.
	“It's a book reference, but if you'd let me-”
	“Did you pick it? I can't stand coffee. I think most people prefer tea?”yet a third voice asked.
	“You can drink tea at a coffeehouse, so-”
	“Is this some kind of oligarchy? I want a say in what sort of thing we get! None of us are so stupid as to be taken out of the democratic process!” shouted a pale, blonde boy who sat quite close to the counter.
	“I wasn'-”
	“Shut up!” Sun yelled. Hush fell over the room. “Our CEO is speaking. You will politely wait your turn until she asks for questions, and then you will ask your questions nicely, okay?”
	“Thank you, Sun,” Paza said quietly. Sun grinned. A moment of silence in the room was there for Paza to capitalize on, if only she had the force of personality for it.
	“As she said. Sun Khvostovskaya is our CFO. She is responsible for telling me whenever I say something rude or do something stupid. Sun's moral decision making is law,” Paza said, gesturing towards her friend. Sun looked at her, eyebrow cocked.
	“I chose this coffeehouse for a reason. In a very good book, widely read in the higher circles of society and called The Velvet Sackcloth, the Dutch coffeehouse is a symbol of sacrifice, victory, and brilliant strategy. I hope to bring these values into our army. I was not permitted to consult you on this choice. I did consult Sun, and she approved of it.”
	“Provisionally,” Sun chimed in.
	“Sun approved of it provisionally on none of you having well grounded reasons why this thing should not be so. Anybody have any?”
	“I do,” said the blonde boy.
	“Melek, you hardly have a well grounded reason to keep breathing,” Sun said. Paza turned and stared, her eyes practically bulging out of her head.
	“Now now, Sun. Aren't you supposed to be the nice one in this power couple?” The boy named Melek asked.
	“We're not dating,” Paza said out of reflex. She continued to watch the Melek boy and Sun. Sun looked at him like she fully intended to tear his clavicle down through his pelvis one way or another. He smiled coldly, with brown eyes that distinctly reminded Paza of a pair of very, very hard, dusty rocks.
	“Not yet, at least,” Melek said. “Sun and I come from the same decanting group, you understand. She's practically a sister to me.”
	There were some confused looks among the less well-read children. “the hell's a sister?” one of them asked under her breath.
	“Why are you in this army, Melek? Some sort of hold over Madame Leprof?”
	“I would appreciate if if you didn't-” Paza tried to say, but Sun gave her a look that enticed her to shut up.
	“I'd imagine it's to inflict some family bonding between the two of us.”
	“Oh, right, family bonding,” Sun said. She redirected her stare to what must have been a particularly interesting piece of off-white plaster ceiling. “You know, like that time you flushed me out of an airlock.”Gasps of shock emerged from the crowd, prompting Melek to glare at them until they shut up
	“I was eight, Sun. When will you give that a rest?”
	“When you stop messing with me like the godawful person you are, Melek. I didn't know they still made sociopaths!”
	“If they made me one, they made you one too, Sun. Same group, same chemicals, et cetera.”
	“Shut up,” said the same small girl who had asked earlier about the coffeehouse, “I would very much like to hear what Miss McNeil has to say.”
	“Thank you, Miss-” Paza said, realizing she didn't know the girl's name. This wasn't terribly surprising given how disinclined she was to ever remember anyone's name in the first place.
	“Cittinus . Ines Cittinus,” she said, and there were some quiet murmurs among the others, because that was clearly a Latinate surname, and the only people with Latinate surnames were custom-ordered by the powerful and respected. Ines was born for the express purpose of performing some task for a powerful and ancient person, and that alone was enough to cause one to take notes. The part where her skin was pitch, her hair was white, and her eyes violet was just spice to the main dish.
	“Miss Cittinus,” Paza said without skipping more than a beat. Paza herself had been specifically selected by Braith Terra, and so really, the best Ines could possibly be is at par with her. “As I was saying, any strenuous objections, apart from the person whose objections I suppose will be vetoed by my CFO?”
	“I'll veto him, yeah,” Sun said.
	“Charming, the way you deal with dissidents,” Melek replied. He stalked off to the back of the cafe.
	“Bite your own tongue, Melek.” Sun replied with an eye roll that was almost a half-decade mature for her age. There was a moment of quiet, and before anyone could complain about not liking coffee, a disused television in the far corner of the cafe winked on. There was a dark, shadowed figure with a booming, brassy voice.
	“This is the God-Emperor of All Mankind, Theodosios Tanji! I am broadcasting this on all wavelengths! Do not adjust your sets! We have come to demonstrate before the Great Angelic Power that the Tomato is, and has always been, a vegetable. Your own pathetic arguments in favor of its non-vegetable status are irrelevant. We encourage you to lie down your arms and surrender yourselves to the tautological truth that is- Tomatoes are Vegetables. What say you?”it said.
	The zombie Marie Curie appeared, tossed Paza a microphone, which she caught absentmindedly.
	“Hm?” she asked quietly, being quite surprised at the turn of events. She heard that same “Hm?” echoed through the television set. “Oh, right. No,” Paza said with an unfocused wave of her hand, and then she dropped the mic on the floor, sending to the TV a horrible clamoring noise.
	“Then this is war!” Theodosios said. The image on the TV winked out as readily as it had appeared, and there was a complete vacuum of sound in the coffeehouse.
	“So, I think we were saying something about coffeehouses being fine? I'd like to start assigning you roles, as well as I can given my limited understanding of Beta Testing warfare, although it would be reasonable to assume that all the tech is going to be current to at least the Misguided War. We haven't been in the current war long enough for there to have been much change, so it would make sense to keep mostly Misguided War-era ship and habitat designs,” Paza said, staring through the light mixture of people and instead seeing probability before her eyes. “It's the most reasonable procedure. I would do that in this situation.”
	“How is this sorting going to happen?” Ines asked. “Wouldn't it be impractical to do anything like this without having seen us fight?”
	“Right,” Paza said, “I was planning on drawing up some hypothetical scenarios, but-” and, for the umpteenth time, Paza was interrupted by something entirely unexpected. There was a jolt like a small earthquake underneath them, and ceramic mugs tumbled to the floor as it shook violently. Paza opened her mouth and began to ask “what's going on,”but she barely got passed the first phoneme before her retinal display flickered on, with a fairly large message scrolling by quickly enough that only Paza would have a chance at reading it reasonably accurately.
	Welcome aboard the capital ship Paza McNeil's Capital Ship, name change pending. You have deorbitted from the small moon outpost you were previously stationed on, and are now mobilizing for total war against the Vegetable Faction, name change pending. Your logistics AI will have the exact data, but from a tactical perspective you have your capital ship and three other flagships near enough for you to mobilize within the week. Each flagship is packed with frigates. Each frigate is packed with fighters. Intelligence suggests that Vegetable Faction, name change pending, has a massive gate apparatus like your own, and is close to obtaining a lock on the position of a small tin can called Unnamed Berry Tin Can Station, name change pending. They cannot be allowed to take the station, or you will be forced to fight a ground war or to cauterize a large portion of your gate link network, since Unnamed Berry Tin Can Station, name change pending, links to a large cylinder which serves the major throughpoint for traffic in this arm of your empire. It would thus be good if you sorted out all your obvious morale problems before the first Vegetable Faction, name change pending, attack. Your instructor in Leadership, Francoise Leprof, is forbidden from interfering with this exercise on the level of offering specific aid. The instructor in Lateral Thinking, however, is not quite so tightly bound and traditionally offers to tutor students who are willing to learn- however, he still cannot teach more than general principles. You may ask your other teachers, because they are usually not very clever.
	PS: I understand that you got here fairly late and that you don't really know these people as well as they know each other. This is a challenge you get to learn to overcome, and suffice it to say that the other generals know their underlings names, at least.
	“Sun, did you see that?” Paza asked as soon as her wits returned to her.
	“The earthquake? Sure, but, I think that's really obvious if you just look around,” Sun replied, clutching the counter for support.
	“No, the instructions,” Paza said.
	“The whats?” Sun asked, focusing more readily on the still-rumbling floor.
	“I'm sending it to you now,” Paza said, tossing the file to Sun with well practiced rapid eye movements. She saw Sun's eyes glaze over as she read. The rumbling slowed to a stop a minute later, as Sun blinked back to reality.
	“Wow,” Sun said, “That's... a lot to put on us on the first day. Week. Whatever. You think this simulspace is run faster than one to one time?”
	“I am confident in our abilities,” Paza said. She was confident, of course, but she also recognized this thinking as strikingly similar to a character in The Velvet Sackcloth who had quite nearly allowed the dictatorship to continue because of his own hubris. It was still best to give the impression of cool effectiveness, as far as Paza understood. Just like how Aldric Pion, in The Four Hundred and Eighty Nine Postulations of A Particular Scottish Child, had inspired her crew to independently formulate the rebellion against Steven, so too would Paza force herself into serenity in a valiant attempt to get her crew to learn. In actuality, she knew that the victory she sought would be extremely hard won, if indeed it was won at all. She relayed the message to the rest of her troops, and gave another minute for them to read it. They murmured quietly among themselves, and Paza allowed another few minutes for that. Then she cleared her throat, because she had had a wonderful idea.
	“Madame Leprof?” Paza asked quietly. Curie appeared before her. She smiled. “Excellent. Would it be possible to run an instance of Beta Testing on the simulated shipboard computers?”
	The zombie Curie handed her another bit of vellum, and she read aloud from it to her bewildered audience.
	“Of course,” the note began, “what kind of a budget operation do you think we're running here?”
	“Okay, I would like computers- enough to run another copy of the game for all sixteen of us,” Paza began. The computers, antiquated 21st century models, appeared on the table with a dull thump before Paza had finished her sentences.
	“Thank you,” she responded. The zombie handed her another bit of paper.
	“Is this all for now, CEO Paza McNeil?” the paper said.
	“It is, provided you cannot help me with crew assortment as I strongly suspect based on your post-scriptum,” Paza said. The zombie Marie Curie shook her head with whatever passes for the zombiefied version of sorrow, and then she wasn't in front of her anymore. Paza blinked. The physics of Beta Testing were strong suggestions at best, but the sight of an obvious violation of things that should have happened was still jarring.
	“Attention, everybody!” Paza said, stepping onto the counter for dramatic emphesis. “You should be able to infer that the aspect of preparation we're most urgently lacking in this war is that of the command. Even in the event that this insight eluded you, you can probably infer what we're going to be doing with a second simulation of Beta Testing.”
	“Training, of course,” piped Melek.
	“Yes, Mister Khvostovskaya,” Paza replied. “Melek, stay by me. Sun, Ines, you're going to be playing the enemy. The rest of you, find the optimal distribution of soldiers between my army and that of Misses Khvostovskaya and Cittinus . If there's some kind of unfixable error- a person with whom you cannot stand to be, for instance- notify me, and I'll effect a change. Otherwise, the arrangement will initially be determined by who gets into position first. Those with Misses Khvostovskaya and Cittinus please stand by the opposite wall, and those with myself please come to the front.”
	The rationale behind putting Sun and Ines as the head of the oppositon was obvious. As Paza had already resolved to teach Sun as much about Antoniessenism as possible, she would be able to test Dirkje's military tactics as effectively as possible. It would also allow her to further train Sun in the Dutch Rational ways. It would also not serve her well to display obvious favoritism. Ines made a natural counterpart because she was clearly designed for military thought- being the protege of an ancient likely made her the closest compliment Paza had in the entire army. Paza could guess that Ines had never read anything by Dirkje Antoniessen based on her question in the beginning of the session, but it was unthinkable that she was completely uneducated in the ways.
	The rationale behind singling out Melek as a member of her own army was significantly muddier. Certainly, part of it stemmed from an attempt to prove that she was not to show significant favoritism to Sun. By taking on Sun's archnemesis as one of her compatriots, she demonstrated that she was capable of doing things Sun disapproved of, thus solidifying a view of Paza that didn't involve Sun pulling her strings like an overcomplicated marionette. But shielding Sun from the obviously unpleasant chore of working with Melek was also a significant factor.
	And, in the absence of Sun, it was vital that Paza had someone who would loudly clash with her. Conventional wisdom held that being seen to lose made one seem weak- and this would indeed be the case, eons of evolutionary history contributing to a deeply ingrained reflex against siding with the losers of conflicts. But, Paza reasoned, the way of thought sometimes demanded sacrifice. It was, under the traditional view of effective cognition (that is to say, Dirkje Antoniessen's, as well as those of her inspirations) the most important thing to be right. Not to prove that one's views were right, because that was worse than useless when they weren't, but to become right, in the same way one might endeavor to become strong or wise. If the sky was blue, one desired to believe that the sky was blue. If the sky was not blue, one desired to believe that the sky was not blue. One mustn't endeavor to hold onto beliefs one no longer wanted. Holding onto false beliefs was damaging. And, as far as Paza understood how incredibly easy it was to be wrong, the best and only reliable way to catch yourself believing the sky was blue when it was not, was to have someone shout at you. If you were smart, and actually considered what people told you, you might realize you were wrong, even if the shouter was also wrong, even if you were originally less wrong, because it was the process of forcing yourself to update your beliefs that did it.
	So, succinctly, Paza had acquired Melek Khvostovskaya in large part because he was an argumentative little shit.
	Paza shook herself as though fighting off sleep, and returned to gaze at her charges. Mostly, they ambled over to Sun and Ines' side, which wasn't surprising. Paza and Melek were, as Paza understood it, not nice, whereas Sun and Ines were. Halfheartedly, she called out,“Equal groups! Six with me, six with the Misses.”Then, she turned to Melek.
	“Mister Khvostovskaya. General rules. You may freely disagree with me, my policies, my philosophy, my treatment of my troops, my treatment of you, or anything else. You may voice this disagreement loudly and in public. I only ask that you refrain from mentioning Sun outside of the context of 'the enemy general' for as long as you don't want me to kill you in every layer of recursive simulation we might reach. Is this arrangement agreeable?” Paza asked. A myriad of emotions poured from inside Melek, plainly visible by inspecting his face.
	“Uh, yeah. Good to hear,” he finally said. He started to ask, “why” but bit his tongue as so not to ruin a good thing.
	Paza walked over to a table, seated herself comfortably, and rummaged around the back of the computer for something to plug herself into. Satisfied with the cord she obtained, she pressed it into the back of her neck and went one layer deeper.
	She floated in a generic, somewhat blocky spaceship. Simulated simulation graphics were awful. A plain-looking, relaxed man sat cross-legged near her.
	“I'm your Calculus teacher. Call me Ivan. I'm going to be helping you with your recursive simulation of Beta Testing. We're in sandbox mode, obviously, so no need to be frugal with resources or whatnot. Go crazy,” the man droned, glancing at a magazine he had in his lap, occasionally turning a page.
	“Thank you. What are the controls. No, wait, don't answer that. I want a frigate for myself and fighters for everyone else. Give Melek's something fancy, like a railgun- or, no, not a railgun, nothing functional. A nice paint job. A different cosmetic wing style. Something of that sort,” Paza said. Instantly, a holographic display flickered to life in front of her, showing one orange triangle surrounded by seven smaller orange triangles.
	“Done,” he said.
	“And, put me in contact with Sun Khvostovskaya,” Paza said. On the lower left corner of the display, Sun's face flickered on.
	“Oh, hi, Paza!” Sun said cheerily.
	“Make that Sun and Ines,” Paza added quietly to Ivan. He nodded, and Ines' face appeared next to Sun.
	“Okay. I propose that we face off with one frigate, seven fighters, to one frigate, seven fighters. This should help us get a feel for the commands. We'll start using more complicated arrays as soon as we can tell who's good and who isn't,” Paza said, and then she bit her lip and corrected herself, “that is to say, who's good at large-scale and who's good at small-scale combat. Skill in one doesn't necessarily preclude the other, but I hypothesize that their concurrence is at least fairly rare.”
	“I have no problems with that,” Ines said. Her bright eyes looked down at the floor.
	“Alright, we're doing it! Ines, would you take the frigate first thing, please?” Sun asked.
	“Yes,” Ines said.
	“Cut off communication, and then bring up all of my personnel,” Paza said to Ivan. Sun and Ines' faces disappeared, replaced with seven people of variable levels of irreckognizability, but mostly low.
	“I have devised an extremely simple beginning combat scenario,” Paza began explaining to the mostly blank looks of her army, “to help us learn the controls of the environment before we learn actual warfare. You will all be in fighters, and I will be in a frigate. Our object is to render incapable or unwilling to counterattack all the enemies. First things first- who knows what fighters and frigates are?” Paza posed the question like she was teaching through the Socratic Method, but in actuality the only things she knew about ship classes is that fighters went inside frigates which went inside flagships which in the more fantastical literature went inside capital ships but in most other works merely looked small in comparison to capital ships.
	“Fighters are small, fast, as agile as something in Newtonian space going at high velocities can be, and usually deliver a nuclear payload or a sample of self-replicating microbots,” Melek said with the sort of polished precision that meant that he had memorized it out of a book in all likelihood. This did not raise Paza's esteem of him very highly, because any idiot could memorize sentences out of a book. Anyone who wanted to be a general instead of a scientist would memorize war-related sentences out of a book. But, as Antoniessen had pointed out in The Eponymous Marshall, memorizing a sentence didn't make you smart. It sometimes did the opposite- your ability to guess the teacher's password made the teacher not notice that you had no idea what you were talking about, so you never got any sort of educational intervention and remained ignorant about the topic you were supposed to be most knowledgeable of. Still, the raw data was valuable to Paza, who did know how to think and would know these things beyond the level of guessing the teacher's password.
	It was at this moment that the cognition induced slowdown of relative time that she had usually experienced and often taken for granted had failed to happen, and she only caught the word “laser” at the tail end of the second half of Melek's answer. But asking him to repeat himself would be weakness. Displaying weakness wasn't as a rule bad- what is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. But appearing weak in front of a group of people she needed to have the belief that she was strong, especially when she wasn't, because people were usually disinclined to learn anything from someone they perceived as inferior.
	The complete absence of convenient time dilation happened again, it became apparent that the rest of the group was waiting for an answer, and Paza resolved to learn how to further bound her own intelligent to get good-enough answers quickly, and hypothesized that relearning heuristics that she had abandoned in pursuit of Antoniessenian perfection was probably a good way to go about it. But, after she thought her way out of the problem first.
	What resource hadn't she exploited? She could ask any individual person in the group what Melek had said, taking the tradeoff of appearing weak to them. But this was prone to signal corruption, of course, not to mention counter to the whole point of tactfully asking around. Asking Melek was probably a better idea, but Melek couldn't be trusted further than he could be thrown- it was already apparent to anyone with a brain that Melek hated being put in a position of inferiority and would probably do something unsavory to Paza unless they quickly formed a forth army and gave it to him.
	“Oh, there's someone else in the room,” Paza said. She turned to the disinterested man. “Shut off communications,” she said. When the faces had disappeared, she said “repeat what Melek said about frigates, then reenable communications with those same people.”
	“Frigates are bigger and usually used to keep fighters safe from enemy point defenses and techniques like plasma waves or graft that would easily destroy a lightly-protected fighter. They don't have missiles of their own, usually, but they have their own lasers,” he repeated. “If you want, I can switch on your AI suite and you can continue to bug me only for things that actually need bugging for,” he said, still turning the pages of the magazine slowly.
	That certainly was another solution to the problem that Paza hadn't thought about, not for ten seconds, let alone the typically-accepted standard of five full minutes. AI made her uncomfortable, since something that was almost but not quite a person and about ten steps away from tiling over the universe in happy faces was inherently creepy. But she shouldn't have allowed her emotional distrust of AI to cloud AI-related solutions.
	“Yes, please,” Paza said quietly. A quiet chime emitted from nowhere as the seven faces repeared on Paza's screen.
	“Your answer is correct, Mister Khvostovskaya,” Paza said. “And then, knowing our situation and the enemy's situation perfectly well, what should we do to ensure that we win?”
	“We should-” Melek began.
	“No!” Paza yelled. “You didn't even begin to think about the problem! You do not propose a solution until the problem space has been discussed as thoroughly as possible. We are not under strict time constraints, so we have time for rational cognition. So, what should we do to ensure victory means that we take time to think about the problem properly. This is your first lesson.”
	“But, Miss McNeil,” Melek said, his words dripping with bile. Paza deeply wished that he hadn't been the first one to call out a solution prematurely. “In Inge-Lise Elkjær's Elementary Tactics of the Misguided War Era, this problem is specifically discussed, in the context of two frigates carrying a half-compliment of fighters, and the explanation they give is-”
	“Melek, please listen to yourself,” Paza said. That was rude. She tried to rectify, again. “I mean. You've read this book. I'm going to assume that the enemy general has also read this book, since you were both decanted in the same group and have found your way to the same school. Is this assumption correct?”
	“Probably,” Melek said, withholding anger and cocking his head quizzically.
	“Then she knows what the book says to do in this situation. But, I'm guessing here, the book doesn't assume that the solution it gives is common knowledge- it's too unlikely, it's hard to find a strategy that can work well against itself, without relying on the individual virtues one side has that the other doesn't. So this mathematically perfect answer winds up not working in actuality, because it's assuming that you're playing against a bad general, not somebody who's read  Inge-Lise Elkjær's Elementary Tactics of the Misguided War Era. Answering any of these questions with out-of-the-book, canned answers, is worse than useless,” Paza explained.
	“Are you saying you've never read  Inge-Lise Elkjær's Elementary Tactics of the Misguided War Era yourself?” Melek asked.
	“No, but-”
	“How have you not read that book?” Melek shouted in equal parts surprise and poorly concealed anger. “It's practically required reading- it's everyone's introduction into the art of warfare, it's supposed to be the best book on war ever written, you'd have to be... nonhuman, to get into Waterloo without having read it!”
	“Your book is, potentially, the best book on military history and the best depository of useful facts about the military of several decades ago. It is not the best book on warfare. Books on warfare reason from universal principles- and the best books on warfare are books on thought, because you can, hypothetically, derive optimal solutions to any Turing-complete problem, if you're smart enough. All human thought is Turing-complete. So, I'm actually fairly certain that the best book on warfare ever written is The Four Hundred and Eighty Nine Postulations of A Particular Scottish Child, by Dirkje Antoniessen. But, please, continue your defense of the book,”Paza said, patiently, like she was addressing a small child
	“How can you talk about this book when you've never even read it!”
	“I can infer what that book is liked based on the information I know you obtained from it!”
	“That's insane!”
	“That's Antoniessenian reasoning!”Paza replied. For a moment, she hoped another unusual person would show up and yell at them to shut up, but that did not pass.
	“You can't read outdated philosophical tracts and call them books on military thought! That's, by definition, wrong!”
	“It's not wrong, it's just Lateral Thinking!” Paza replied, and then there was silence. She cleared her throat momentarily. “Now that I've explained how that thinking is fallacious, would you like to explain how  Inge-Lise Elkjær's Elementary Tactics of the Misguided War Era would want you to solve this problem?”
	“But you ju-” Melek sputtered. His face disappeared from her display briefly, and then reappeared with a significantly less red in the face sort of Melek Khvostovskaya. “The frigate's point defenses can pick off fighters, in principle, but they lack the capability of damaging other frigates. The way they recommended you solve the problem is that you fire half your missiles at them from inside the frigate, assuming that your frigate has that capability as most do, change course, come up from underneath them, and then fire the rest of your missiles. They won't be prepared to defend against that.”
	“Okay. Pretend that you're the general, Mister Khvostovskaya, and your spies have reported that this is the tactic that Miss Cittinus will be employing, since she's read the book. What would you do?”Paza said. There was a pregnant silence.  Ivan coughed from his position on the floor.
	“Oh,” Melek said quietly.
	“Yes, 'oh' is right. You don't do the same thing, do you?”
	“No, you don't,” Melek admitted, like it was some sort of embarrassing secret.
	“And why not?”
	“Because, even though this is the best general policy, if you can know what the enemy is going to do, there are better policies you can implement, that counter that one specifically, even though they might be, in principle, worse strategies than the one you're countering.”
	“Excellent. What better policy would you implement?”
	“I- no, we should talk it out first, shouldn't we?” Melek mumbled.
	“Yes. So, we have seven fighters. How many missiles in each fighter?”
	“Four nuclear warheads,” replied a distant, ghostly, and definitely not Melek Khvostovskaya-like voice. The seven faces glanced about.
	“Who was that?” asked roughly half of them in unison.
	“It's my AI suite, I'm almost certain,” Paza said, wrinkling her nose.
	“Yes,” said that same voice.
	“Please copy yourself to all of my soldier's computers if storage space allows. I'm not sure if they're given a suite too, but data is free, so we might as well,” Paza said.
	“Yes,” the voice said.
	“As I was saying, seven fighters, four missiles, that makes one-C base sixteen- sorry, twenty eight missiles. How do the missiles work? Are they controlled wirelessly?”
	“No,” the AI suite replied, “they're given instructions when launched through air-gapped connections and then operate autonomously.”
	“If I were to tell my AI suite to launch missiles at the enemy frigate, what would the full scope of their behavior be?”Paza asked.
	“They would hone in on the frigate's position but would not make course corrections to avoid an obstacle,” The AI suite responded, prompting a soft gasp from Melek (the rest of the group simply listened in what was some awe, but mostly utter confusion)
	“So, then. Melek? Any new strategies?”Paza asked.
	“...Right, so, if we just have a fighter take out the missiles- probably with their own missiles, when they come close enough together to be wiped out as a cluster- then that gives us six fighters, twenty four base ten missiles, to get them with.”
	“And how would you suggest we quote 'get them' unquote?”
	“If we feint, with the fighters, and successfully ward off the second attack with our point defense, they'll be exhausted, and we can close in at knife range and destroy them,”Melek said. It wasn't quite a Dutch Rational analysis, but Ines and Sun were almost certainly getting antsy, so Paza took what she could get.
	“This sounds like a good plan- any good plan, by the way, involves at most two things going right, or so it says in The Velvet Sackcloth. Since we're relying on two things going right, it's good enough for a first approach under some time constraints. We should tell Sun- Miss Khvostovskaya and Miss Cittinus that it's time to begin. Or, rather. AI suite, tell Sun and Ines that it's time to start,”Paza explained. Their faces popped into the bottom of Paza's still static display, which was growing increasingly cluttered.
	“Finally!” Sun exclaimed cheerfully. “We've been waiting forever! Don't worry, though- when we atomize you, we'll be sure not to gloat too hard about it!”
	“You're ready, then? I assume you have some way of putting us close together, then,” muttered Ines. Paza looked at Ivan, who with a wave of his hand changed her display, so it now showed eight blue triangles mirroring Paza's perfectly as being a medium distance apart.
	“Deploy!” Melek said. One fighter drifted slightly further away from the frigate on Paza's map. “Alright, cool- these things are operated by voice command. Just yell things out and hope for the best, I guess.”
	“Now that you've shown off, come back,” Paza said wearily.
	“Nah. I'm going to blow up the missiles- I wouldn't trust anyone else to do it.”
	“As you wish,” Paza replied. She looked back at her map, where all eight of the blue ships were quickly approaching. A few pips of light appeared, streaking towards her frigate at breakneck speeds. Missiles, almost certainly.
	“Take us upwards!” she barked to the AI. A tiny “+1” appeared next to her ships, less Melek's, and quickly incriminated to numbers requiring scientific notation.
	“What are the units on that number?” she asked, assuming that the number represented her height as compared to the arbitrarily picked z=0 that she had started on.
	“Millimeters,” the AI said. Paza nodded. The enemy missiles began incrimenting themselves, their representations slowing down (although, Paza understood, the missiles themselves were not slowing down, because the incrimination of the height level represented momentum just as surely as the movements of the little dots). Soon, they were far, far above Melek's ship, and the missiles were converging on her frigate with alarming speed. Melek's ship began ascending, closing on the missiles who were barely a kilometer away from impacting with the frigate. He released four points of light of his own, and the streaked towards the missiles just a few hectares away from the frigate. The fireball rocked Paza, sending her onto the floor and reminding her that the big orange triangle contained her, and was not merely a pattern. She got up, rubbing her knees and wincing. The missiles were destroyed, all of them. A tiny red triangle appeared within the triangle representing her ship, and a larger one inside Melek's.
	“These represent damage?” she asked.
	“Yes,” the AI replied. “A larger red triangle represents more damage. This indicates that this frigate received mere cosmetic damage, while the fighter received significantly more damage. It is likely damaged in function.”
	Paza became cognizant of vague cheering coming from her screen. The faces of her troops were lit up in elation. This was good. If she could encourage that sort of emotion more, they might come to view her less hostilely, and then they could learn well enough to help defeat the ultimate enemy.
	“Okay, well done,” Paza said. “Now, Melek. You've read the book- what does the book say you should do in this scenario?”
	“Surrender,” he explained. “They took surrenders in the Misguided War, and so the book has a whole big table explainging when you should and should not surrender.”
	“I am beginning to think,” Paza said wearily, “that this book was written for Misguided War reenactors and not, in fact, for actual generals. We're not staging the Misguided War a second time, we're practicing for the War Against The Machine, and that means that surrender is useless. Even in the Tomato War we're using as a framing device, we can't surrender to the people who do not think that Tomatoes are berries because they're the most evil sort of people.” She shook her head. “Melek, what would you do in this scenario?”
	“Scatter, then ram. Desperation,”Melek said without an instant's hesitation. Indeed, the fighters fanned out from that blue triangle like seeds on the wind, curving away from their mothership and towards Paza.
	“Is there any way to tell which of them have missiles?” she asked.
	“It could easily be any of them- you can move warheads between ships given a moment. We've readily supplied that moment several times over,” he noted.
	“...Right,” she said. “But, obviously, this plan is going to fail. We simply shoot them down as they approach us, yes? Fighters- fan out, run interception, keep at least one missile in reserve for when we gun down their frigate. Go!”
	The fighters of both sides curved towards each other slowly. Paza's released three pips of light each, the Blue side released two. Melek's ship, notably, abstained, sitting and observing the battle. As a few points of light headed towards a poorly-positioned ship, he moved his ship to intervene. The lights flared, and he was scrap. One other fighter was destroyed, but four remained- and the one Melek had saved had four missiles left. Paza noted the child who had mispositioned his ship, resolved to keep him marginalized in the overall command and coordination structure of her army, and then realized that Melek had died.
	Well, not really. It was a simulation simulating a simulation, it didn't get much less real than that. And yet Paza didn't have any understanding of how death might feel like in the simulation. It was curious that she was so willing to allow her men to die, then.
	And a moment later, she resolved never to find out. If that knowledge made her a less effective agent of opposition with regards to the Corkscrew Machine, it wasn't knowledge worth having.
	“Destroy them,”she said. The ships converged upon the enemy frigate, launched their missiles, and then the game was over.
	“Ivan, call Ines and Sun into here, in person. I'd like to speak to them. Oh, and. Reinstantiate all the casualties,” Paza said, and withing several seconds first Ines and then Sun popped into existence in front of her eyes.
	“Hi Paza!” Sun chirped as though she hadn't just lost the game for her team.
	“I assure you, that strategy was all Sun's,” Ines said. Paza raised an eyebrow at her, but otherwise remained silent.
	“True, it was. That was a clever stunt you pulled, with that fighter! You should make sure to keep the person behind it in mind, when you're handing out promotions,” she said, still without any shame.
	The problem became clear that Sun didn't care if she won or lost, only that everyone had fun. This might have been a useful anti-stress measure, but in a general it was a tendency that was incredibly dangerous.
	“So, Ines. Did you know how badly it would go?”Paza began cautiously.
	“Yes,” Ines mumbled.
	“What would you have done instead?”
	“Waited for you to go first. You're clearly undereducated on the ways of space combat. Odds are very good that you'd make some tactical blunder, and then we'd seize on that weakness. In a war like this, you don't really lose anything for waiting,” Ines said.
	“Is there a particular reason you didn't tell this to Sun?”Paza said, her teeth on edge.
	“She didn't ask.”
	“Yes, I did!” Sun exploded. “I said, 'Ines, is this a good plan? Anything to add?'. That was the very very first thing I said to you after I explained what  Elementary Tactics of the Misguided War Era had to say about it!”
	“Oh, right. I figured it would be good enough.”
	“You should have said something,” Sun grumbled.
	“Wait. I have two hypotheses here- either you didn't actually know and are just pretending to be smart, or you knew how to help your co-general succeed and willfully chose to withhold it form her for some reason. Which one is it- or, in your intelligence, do you have a better hypothesis?”
	“Nope. Honestly, I could care less about this whole thing,” Ines said.
Chapter Eight-Elaborate Ruses.
	“What?”Paza said quietly.
	“What?”Sun shouted.
	“You heard me,” Ines stated, She held up her hand and glanced at her nails.
	“What?”Sun repeated.
	“How could you possibly not care?” Paza yelled. Ines shrugged.
	“The ancient who commissioned me has the facility to take me into the new seeder colonies,” she explained. The seeder colonies were a vital fallback- the stations linking them to the main Fomaltine space were destroyed with antimatter, the seeds left among the stars. No record had ever been made of their location, and nothing could possibly figure out where they were, not when the location was randomly determined and they were small enough to be insignificant in the night sky. If the war was lost, human values would continue, at least, although without Braith Terra (who had refused to make any copies of her mind given the knowledge that eventually the civilizations would meet and she wouldn't ever be able to reunify herself) their future certainly looked exceptionally bleak.
	Paza stood for a moment, grinding her teeth hard. “Why does this have any impact on whether or not you care about Beta Testing Beta Testing?”she asked.
	“Because none of this matters, I'm leaving with my ancient to continue life far, far away from a Corkscrew Machine, and the war's as good as lost,” Ines said, as though it was a set of facts as uninteresting as what she had had for lunch.
	“So you're just giving up?” Sun shouted.
	“Yes,” Ines said. “I'm only here until my ancient's preparations are done. I have never wanted to be a general, fuck what my genes say.”
	Sun balled up her hand, and instantly Paza's hand was on her shoulder. “Not now,” Paza said, “Let's talk about this.”
	“What's there to talk about? She's going to let everyone die!”
	“Yes,” Ines said, “but I don't really care about everyone either, so.”
	She shrugged again. Sun lunged forward, and Paza didn't bother stopping her. Sun's fist hurtled towards Ines, who sidestepped gracefully and stuck out a leg. Sun tripped and crashed into the hard, metal floor.
	“How could you not care?”Paza spat, shaking her head.
	“Eh,” Ines said, shrugging, “probably in my DNA somewhere. Ask my ancient about it.”
	“How is it even possible to lack empathy that thoroughly?”
	“Nero did it. Hitler did it. Bourbonnais did it,” Ines said. She shrugged again.
	“You are comparing yourself to, among others, literally Adolf Hitler,” Paza said.
	“Yes,” Ines replied.
[[Tyme to sleep. If you can't figure out a proper rebutal to that statement then there's something seriously wrong with you.]]
	“That's...” Paza began. She trailed off.
	“Not really much of a Hitler, though. Hitler suffered from delusions regarding his own morality- I suffer from none. Really, I'm more of a Stalin,” Ines mused.
	“...Leave,”Paza said, her voice trembling. There was nothing more to be said to a twelve-year-old girl who casually considered what dictator she was most like, out loud.
	“I'd love to, but while my ancient thinks there's still a chance of the war being won, I'm obligated to stay. The worse I perform, the less likely that seems, since my ancient is pretty thoroughly convinced that if I don't win us the war, nobody will. So, please. Berate me. Make me look as bad as humanly possible. Maybe they'll expel me, and then I can leave,” Ines said. Her face betrayed no emotions. Paza thought it very likely that she didn't have any whatsoever.
	The principle question was “why”. The mechanism for Ines' morality wasn't under question at all- sociopathy was a well-understood affliction, and even if it had been all but destroyed by the bioengineers Paza still had a grip over its causes and effects. The question was how Ines wasn't gone already. The girl who had lost an eye had left the school in the very first class of the year, and yet Ines had managed to get to her first Leadership class without failing- and the girl hadn't even been trying!
	If Paza wanted to fail- no, abstract further. If Paza told someone that she was trying to fail, why would she be doing it?
	The answer was obvious. She wanted to appear utterly useless. And why would she be doing it?
	To conceal the fact that she was a threat until it was too late.
	The prize would be the generalship- Ines was obviously a candidate to run one of the armies. The fact that she, engineered to be a perfect instrument of war, was at best fourth in line spoke volumes of the skills of Theodosios Tanji, God-Emperor of All Mankind, as well as the yet-unnamed third leader of the army. But, more relevantly, Ines would resent that knowledge. The incompetence would have to be a veneer while she schemed to take out a general- and, given the ease of access, it would have to be Paza. Paza was suddenly aware of the fact that she was in a great deal of danger. Not merely inside Beta Testing- such a sociopath would stop at nothing to eliminate her foes, not even real life violence. That is, unless the sociopathy was also an act- it didn't take someone literally evil to say all those things if they were not meant sincerely, and it only took someone very shortsighted to place more importance on their relative standing in their resident social structure than on the continued survival of the human race. Paza could, without much difficulty, imagine Melek saying much the same things, if that was the route of attack he had thought of first.
	Paza began to say something, but thought better of it. If she didn't mention what she knew, then Ines would be much more likely to devise a strategy to eliminate her that required Paza to be ignorant of Ines' actual competence. That increased her odds of weathering it.
	“Fine,” she said at length. “If you have nothing more to say, then go to some other ship.”
	Before Paza could relay instructions to Ivan or her AI or physically wrest Ines from her position and throw the girl out the airlock, Ines' face twisted into a groteque mask of pain, and then she was gone.
	“Pulled out her own plug,” Ivan noted, flipping through a completely different magazine.
	“Should we go after her?” Sun asked, dusting herself off and rubbing her bruises after having gotten herself up, presumably while Paza was lost in thought. If this sort of delay happened every time anyone else tried thinking of something, Paza could suddenly understand much better certain aspects of her society.
	“No point,”Ivan said. “She's not going to blow up your capital ship, or anything else perminantly damaging. Let her be.”
	“How do you know this thing?”Paza asked.
	“That, kiddo, is above your security clearence. Now, did you want to practice more or something?”
	“Right,” Paza said slowly. The arrangements of potential generals, now that Ines was gone, all seemed awful. Paza should, of all rights, have opposed both Sun and Melek, to keep things on an even keel. But she knew that the two could never work together. Paza alone against just one of them might be fair- but she couldn't trust Melek, if demoted, and she didn't have the heart to demote Sun just because her broodmate was so intensely awful. Paza's eyebrows wrinkled.
	“Thinking about something?” Sun sang.
	“Yes,” Paza said wearily, and then she remembered why Sun was a good general.
	“I'm trying to allocate command talent between the Orange and Blue armies in a way that is fair and not conducive to inter-army conflict. How would you do it?”
	“Oh, that's easy. I mean, we need to scale up big- I think we could manage it with one flagship per side, though. Let Branimira Racman, from your army, take command of a small contingent of fighters, she's good with small-scale operations but doesn't really see much beyond the lights on the screen. Then, Makanaakua Wadhwa, from mine, can handle the more mid-level stuff, like frigate positions and deployment- I was talking to her during the battle and she totally caught on to what you were doing with that one fighter, although by the time I had understood it was too late. Their overall general should be... I didn't quite catch who was in the first fighter you deployed, but that person,” Sun rattled off. Dazed, Paza mumbled, “that was Melek,”and to her credit Sun did not scream at all, although she did gasp and roll her eyes.
	“Obviously. Well, he might be a huge prat, but he's good at what we've come here to do. Since he's not here to take the wrong idea from it, I can bring that up. And, anyway. Uh, did we want to practice asymmetric command structure to figure out which works best, or did we need more practice with how ships work?”
	“The former. Time is of the essence, if we want to win against the God-Emperor,” Paza remarked, still ill-processing everything.
	“Okay, then what we should to for Orange Army is-”Sun began, but she politely halted as Paza interrupted her with only a twinge of anger.
	“So, you were tracking the activities of every single person in the entire army?”
	“Of course I was!” Sun said. “How couldn't I? Every ship moves differently, you know, and since they're identical it must be because of the pilot. I pride myself on being able to infer a lot from a little, and the piloting shows a bunch about how you think about combat.”
	“How?” Paza squeaked.
	“I'm guessing you've never cracked open any war book, right? Like, ever?”
	“Wh-”
	“I'm sure that Dirjke lady's smart. I really trust you on this. But she was never in any wars. Smart people think that they've solved complex problems all the time, and often they do, but sometimes they've made things too simple because they've never actually been there. Did you know that there are bioengineers who think that they've quote 'solved' unquote the nature versus nurture problem?”
	“That's not even a thing you can solve, that's-”
	“Yes, that's the point. I bet Dirkje said something like that about war, right?”
	“I have solved war!” Aldric Pion exclaimed, extending one digit in roughly the direction of Stephen's face.
	“So you have,” Stephen replied. “I solved it when I was eight. Anything else?”
	“...She thought it was easy, actually,” Paza admitted sheepishly.
	“If it were easy, the Misguided War wouldn't have dragged on for literally thirty-two years,” Sun remarked.
	“...Right. So, how about this- you appoint all the commanders, and then we go back to a totally unconnected station and read each other's books?” Paza suggested.
	“Okay!” Sun chirped. She said something quietly out loud, and there was the chime of the AI dealing with it. “We're all set, then. Time to crack the books!”
Chapter Nine
	It was, unfortunately, only a scant ten minutes into  Inge-Lise Elkjær's Elementary Tactics of the Misguided War Era when Paza received a message on her entopic display. She would, ordinarily, ignore this, but for the byline.
	Hello, Paza, the message said, I've arranged a meeting in the first level of abstraction. Please make your excuses to Miss Khvostovskaya and disconnect from this layer.
	“Uh, Sun- I have to go. I'll be back soon, I promise, but it's important,” Paza said nervously. Sun frowned, her lower lip sliding forward into a pout that Paza decided must have been practiced to be so precisely engineered to provoke empathy.
	“Fine,” she said with a drawl. “Just be back fast! I don't want to get too far ahead of you!”
	Paza messaged Ivan with instructions to disconnect her, and then she was out of that level of simulation.
She wasn't in a diner. She was in an office. The office strongly resembled the office of Aldric Pion from Dirkje Antoniessen's The Four Hundred and Eighty Nine Postulations of A Particular Scottish Child. A brilliant point of whiteness sat in Pion's desk. Even in virtual reality, Braith had retained her tendency to steal other people's deskspace for her own use.
	“Hello, Miss McNeil. Please, take a seat.
	The note had been signed Dirkje Antoniessen.
	She was in the diner. Ines was nowhere to be seen. Her AI chimed and informed her that there was a courier requesting landing in the diner, and so of course Paza granted it. She entered
	“I'm sorry, Paza, but I'm really not understanding this,” Sun said, “Can't you give me a hint?”
	“I believe in your ability to understand what this text means to say,” Paza said. “If I told you, you wouldn't have actually passed the cognative barriers that Dirkje installed to withhold knowledge from those incapable of using it correctly. It would be horendously unethical. Not to mention unfair- it would be cheating, Sun.”
	Paza suspected that Sun understood cheating much better than she understood the weird academic gate keeping that was Dirkje's whole corpus and signature.
	“I get it!” Sun said, “I'll keep reading. How're you going, then?”
	“Well,” Paza replied curtly. She had actually finished the book an hour previously, but she didn't want to show off her unusually fast reading speed. As near as she could tell, she could read as fast as text was presented to her, but she did have to take some time to digest the work. It still took far less for her to read Elementary Tactics of the Misguided War Era than it was taking Sun to read The Eponymous Marshall, despite the fact that The Eponymous Marshall was roughly a sixth of the size of Elementary Tactics.
	The book had exceeded Paza's every expectation. She felt as though she understood war in a way that even Dirkje Antoniessen might not have managed. Specifically, she had one great insight that was almost too big for her twelve-year-old brain to contain.
	This insight was why there were so many stupid generals in history. If books like this were how military matters were learned, then it was no surprise that the vast majority of all generals of every country ever established by humanity had been a bunch of morons with rocks in the place of their brains. The book was unbelievably awful. Rescuing Sun and Melek (because, provided she could keep his loyalty, Melek was definitely an asset worth having in the Berry Nation) from these teachings with an appreciable dose of Dirkje Antoniessen was now of the highest imperative. Paza hoped Sun could get through The Eponymous Marshall more quickly, because they really had to read Scottish Child after that, as it was the Antonissen work that dealt most heavily with warfare.
	“It's all incomprehensible sets of flashing lights and infrasound that constitute a language to an unknown alien race to me,”Sun declared, slamming the book shut with a grimace.
	“Really?” Paza said, eyebrow arched warily. It was frustrating, because giving Sun any good advice would constitute cheating for her, and even if Sun was willing to accept illicit aid, Paza would never give it to her. All she was able to offer were platitudes like “just keep trying”. This was what Dirkje and her predecessors had referred to as Pretending To Be Wise. It was extremely easy to seem wise, because most conventional wisdom had already been heard dozens of time. If one could simply match that pattern of known wisdom and repeat it, they would be seen as enlightened sage-monks. Departures from the pattern were viewed as obvious aberrations, and therefore unwise. Even when Dirkje Antoniessen herself said a thing, it had to fight for dominance with the accumulated historical inertia of Socrates and Locke. The result was usually madness, but making oneself seem wise was a useful trick, especially when trying to motivate one's friend into reading a book for the sixth time. If Paza could seem wise, and Sun would believe that reading the same books would make her as wise, she was inclined to do just that.
	This was a breakthrough that Paza had made during Sun's fifth rereading, and it was going okay. She just needed deeper and deeper platitudes.
	“Understand, Sun Khvostovskaya, that knowledge is power. If you can learn from this book, you will become enlightened and free. It's the secret to existance, really. And I believe in you. Eveyrone has inside themselves a tiny seed of power waiting to grow into a big, strong tree. And, Sun Khvostovskaya, your seed is just beginning to sprout. You can do this! I support you, because isn't that what friends are for? I believe in you! You can understand all the lessons that this book has to teach!” Paza said.
	“How many self-help manuals were you quoting just then?” Sun asked, nose  buried in book for her sixth rereading. She had opened it back up at some poitn during Paza's speech.
	“Five,” Paza admitted. “But, and I say this with full candor, I do believe in you. Once you see why the book is so important you'll understand why you were having so much trouble.”s
	“Alright, cool. Book. Important. Gottcha.” Sun muttered.
	A half hour later, she dropped the book. This was the second time she had dropped the book in shock- the first being, obviously, during the killings of the Deathist children.
	Sun had gotten to that segment just as Paza was finishing Elementary Tactics. The book had slid from her hands and dropped onto the table with a resounding boom that didn't seem wholly attributable to its own weight. And she had cried, the tears dribbling down from her eyes, making tiny pools on the real (simulated) wood of the table. She had scratched at the table, for reasons completely unreasonable and probably related to ancestral instincts that were useless in the modern environment. She had turned to Paza, and had mouthed “why?” through the stifled gasps that filled her throat. Paza had shaken her head, unable to explain why, unable to do anything about it. And then Sun had done something that Paza was wholely unaccustomed to. She had reached around Paza and held herself tight to the stiff, unyielding mass that was Paza McNeil. After a moment of hesitation- or, rather, several moments, Paza being mostly unacquainted with gestures of affection- she had returned the favor, drawing Sun close to herself.
	Part of her had wanted to point out that Sun was crying over something that never really happened. Another part had astutely noticed that something very similar to that might well happen in the future, a third part had commented that Paza had cried herself over that part, and the rest of them were in favor of excising that first part of her from her brain. The had stayed like that for a long time, and then Sun had returned to read the book a second time.
[Lengthen the Hug Scene. Also, I really hope I remember this tomarrow or I'm going to feel uncomfortable.]]