[Original Novella] Perfect Enemy, Part 1

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

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

“Who can tell me what the first military technology to break this trend was?” Constructs were the elephant in the room. The eight hundred pound gorilla, impossible to ignore. The feeling of paranoid hesitation was palpable. Everyone knew Warwick delighted in posing trick questions, so going straight for the textbook answer meant guaranteed humiliation. Warwick’s eyes locked with Jeremy’s, and then narrowed.

He wasn’t hard to pick out, being the only one in the room who didn’t look as though he was struggling to hold a brick in. Jeremy knew every trick in Warwick’s repetoire, and vice versa, as he’d been using most of them himself well before landing in Warwick’s homeroom. Similarity breeds contempt, or in milder cases, passive-aggressive rivalry.

Jeremy’s hand shot up and as if the fish had just tugged on his line, Warwick excitedly called his name. “YES Jeremy, yes please answer once again, share your timeless wisdom and nudge all of us that much closer to enlightenment!”

Though soaked with corrosive sarcasm, this spoken missile seemed to pass straight through the intended target, who’d already begun to speak before Warwick had completed its delivery. The rest of the students looked on, their pupils following the exchange like a tennis match. It was a lot more entertaining than the material, and every second wasted on this spectacle brought them slightly closer to the bell.

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

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

Jeremy’s ears turned bright red. The familiar warmth in his cheeks followed. He felt dozens of eyes on him, muted snickers wafting into his ears just above the auditory threshold. They loved it when he put Warwick in his place. They loved it even more when Warwick put Jeremy in his. Throwing the curve and crowing about it has that effect.

Jeremy knew it’d pass quickly if he didn’t react. For a moment, he focused instead on how goddamn cold the chair was. plastiglass was a poor choice. Paper garments too, no insulation. Efficiency above all, everything for the war effort, heard it all before, but it’s not as if sparing the materials for warmer clothing would turn the tides.

“You shouldn’t antagonize him. He’s as bad as you. In fact you deserve each other”. Mike was ambling alongside Jeremy as he strode down the hall, an unwelcome elbow resting on his shoulder. Nat came to his defense for the usual transparent reasons.

“Warwick set Jerm up. The background visual was misleading. You show Hiroshima, we’re going to think atom bomb.” Mike laughed. “Yeah but nothing says everything he brings up on the walls has to be part of the lesson. No foul. Pretty clever even.”

Mike’s allegiances seemed to gravitate towards whomever had recently impressed him and away from whoever he was most annoyed with lately, which was usually Jeremy. “Jerm’s cornered him just as much. Clever maybe, but only as clever as a student.”

She gasped and turned towards Jeremy, gripping his arm. “Not that you’re just some regular student, I didn’t mean that.” He was still red in the face but she was blushing at least as hard. He pulled away and continued down the sterile, dimly lit corridor.

Lunch was algae shit with a side of yeast shit topped with regular shit. Some kind of dull orange goo with a spongy texture filled out the largest section of the tray, accompanied by a smaller blue maybe-pudding to the lower right and a thick brown sludge in the section above that.

The tray was edible, and usually his favorite part of the meal. The colors changed from day to day but after a while the same few flavors all blurred together. Everything for the war effort. Perhaps the Constructs’ master plan was to reduce us to wearing paper clown suits and eating recycled garbage, Jeremy thought.

Wearing us down to living like this without our realization, like a frog in a pan of water brought slowly to a boil. The thought made him smile, which provoked alarmed looks as some thought he might be enjoying his meal.

Mike collapsed into the opposite seat, and Nat pushed a chair up next to Jeremy’s. Just like every day for the past three years, and as usual before long she was trying to slide into the unused portion of his own seat. He could sense her staring at him but couldn’t take his eyes off of what he was eating.

He had a relationship with this thing, one built on morbid fascination but a relationship nonetheless. He was determined to eat it against his better judgement, and it was determined to resist all attempts at digestion. A worthy adversary.

Suddenly he felt Nat’s dangling red curls tickling his ear and, glancing to one side, noticed her face hovering just a few inches from his. “Attention unauthorized haircraft. You are intruding into sovereign chairspace. Leave at once or you will be fired upon.” Mike got a laugh out of it, but Nat wore a grim perma-pout for the rest of lunch period.

“Everyone should have received a simulator assignment in their preparatory packet last week. Make your way to the sim sphere with your number on it, ensure your neck and hands are bare, and position yourself in the seat as shown on the display.”

Jeremy thought back to the packet. Lucky number 8. The seat was a curvilinear recliner fixed to a round pedestal beneath an enormous hollow spherical display suspended above it. Through the hole in the bottom he could see the very edges of what looked to be a step by step guide to interfacing with the sim. Although he knew to expect it, he was still startled when, with a loud hiss, the sphere began to descend. Moments later it surrounded him, locking firmly into the base of the pedestal.

The seat was cold, but the gel brainstem interface pad felt mercifully warm as it conformed to the contours of his neck. No telling exactly what it was made of, but he resolved to avoid giving it too much thought.

Slipping his hands into the goo-filled pockets at the end of each armrest, Jeremy focused his attention fully on the instructional animation in front of him. Predictably stylized. The user was depicted as a matte white unisex figure with a thick black outline, shown getting into the recliner in a repeating loop.

A second later the screen went dark as the system detected and began adapting to his nervous system. It was exactly as he was told by seniors; Jeremy felt suddenly as though he had not four limbs but a hundred, with complete feeling and motor control for each. What shape was his avatar meant to be? The starfield that surrounded him offered no clues, as the sim appeared to be exclusively first person.

“Flex a little”. A disembodied voice boomed at him from all directions, recognizably that of his instructor. Jeremy cautiously wiggled what he thought must be his index finger. He felt a sudden recoil, and saw a cylindrical metal canister rocket off into the distance, then erupt in a small fireball.

“Those confuse chasers. The heat signature is more intense than yours and until it explodes it emits an identical radio signature. Try moving something else.” Jeremy bent his knee. His view suddenly began to spin. “I see you’ve discovered one of your thrusters. Now find the others.”

Left elbow? His view began to spin on an additional axis. No dice. Right elbow? That seemed to slow rotation on one axis, but his view was still spinning madly on another. Right knee. No effect. Motion sickness began to set in.

“What’s wrong? It isn’t working.” He waited a few moments, wondering if he was speaking to anyone at all. “Sorry, was assisting another student. Try to relax. System failures are part of the sim. Your starboard attitude control thruster isn’t responding. Experiment with the interface and see if you can initiate repairs.”

Jeremy understood about half of that. His stomach churned, and all of a sudden panic set in. He began to thrash and flail, trying more than anything to free himself from the recliner. Instead, every system aboard whatever craft he was supposed to be in activated at once.

Explosive rounds shot out in front of him, what looked to be guided missiles spiraled off into confused oblivion, semi-transparent shielding slid down to cover the cockpit, and a stilted female voice informed him that he just armed a thermonuclear warhead.

“Oh wow. I think that’s enough for today. Hang on a second, I’m closing down the sim.” The starfield disappeared and Jeremy found himself back in the recliner, surrounded by the familiar dull white display sphere.

It seemed to be spinning around him but that did nothing to diminish his relief. “Fascinating strategy”. Jeremy tried but failed to get past Mike without being spotted. Today wasn’t his day. “Were you hoping to confuse the enemy, or incapacitate them with laughter?”

The sim room had a surreal look about it even during the day, but at night the effect was greatly magnified; Light from the continuous looping instructions on each spherical screen poured down through the opening in the bottom, fluctuating in color and intensity as the images changed.

That is, except for the one firmly locked in place over pedestal 5, faint noises from the sim penetrating the bulbous white shell and carrying down the hall just far enough to catch Jeremy’s notice. There was no mechanism that would alert sim pilots to any activity outside their sphere, yet with conspicuously perfect timing the sim terminated and the screen rose with a loud hydraulic hiss as Jeremy approached it.

A pair of striking blue eyes shot out from beneath the sphere’s rim as it cleared Marissa’s head, eventually lurching to a halt. “Jeremy? What are you doing here? Don’t you know the sims are off limits after hours?” He barely knew her. In all his time at the academy they spoke perhaps two or three times and never for anything other than academic reasons.

“Spare me. You’re in violation as much as I am, and I’d wager anything you came here with the same idea.” Strangers no more, the two smirked at one another with a mixture of contempt and admiration. “It figures you’d do something like this. With those stunts you’re always pulling in class, trying to get one over on Warwick. Is it because of what Mike said?”

He shuddered. She heard that? Everyone must’ve. What did the other students think? Panicked visions of Friendspace threads about his fuckup earlier that day flashed before his eyes. He’d check when he got home, although he knew better than to attempt damage control.

“I think we understand each other. You could say you were out for a walk and stumbled across me but we both know they wouldn’t buy it. They’d heap on the demerits just for being out of your bed this late, regardless of what it’s for. Maybe it’s better this way.” He studied her face.

“How’s that?” Stepping down from the pedestal she flipped her long, glossy black hair over one shoulder. Marissa suddenly went from a nearly featureless blue eyed silhouette backlit by the sim sphere to a fully resolved but confusing figure; he could now clearly make out the strange garment she wore and it was like nothing he’d ever seen.

“The way I see it, if just one of us is heads and shoulders better than the rest, it’s suspicious. Even two of us showing sudden improvement would be sketchy, but less so than one. You don’t tell anyone and neither will I.”

Seemed agreeable. The entire conversation had a conspiratorial tone to it and the more he saw of this side of her, the more it intrigued him. “What’s with the swimsuit?” She grimaced. It did sort of look like a swimsuit, but he knew full well it wasn’t. Not only was the material seemingly a firmer, stretchy derivative of the interface gel from each sim chair but it was slightly translucent and tight fitting to the point of being obscene.

“You can stop staring. These are sim-suits, not swimsuits. They improve our linkup to the chair. They aren’t going to introduce us to them until tomorrow, and we’re really supposed to get changed while the sphere is locked. “Aha”, he thought, and the familiar thrill of seeing something he now knew he shouldn’t ran down his spine.

“Don’t flatter yourself, I was checking out the suit.” Her eyebrow raised to what was very likely its physical limit. “Sure you were. The suits are over there in those storage sleeves, numbered according to your sim. You’re 8 if I recall, suit up and we can do some sparring.”

Once sealed within the comforting isolation of the sim, Jeremy reflected on the exchange. In his estimation he could take her at her word when she said she wouldn’t bust him, although having the same leverage on her didn’t hurt. All in all, he concluded, it was the most constructive interaction he’d ever had with a girl.

It was just then, as he dwelled on the mental image of her slim figure barely concealed by the gel simsuit, that her missile struck. The match had begun without his realization. Typical. God damnit. Although he couldn’t properly feel it, his cheeks grew flush as he frantically experimented with the controls. She had several hours worth of practice on him, but he was determined to catch up quickly.

Not five minutes later, Jeremy soared effortlessly through the debris which constitutes the ring of Saturn. The practice round earlier that day took place in a wide open starfield; having the huge gas giant as a backdrop aided immensely in orienting himself.
It also helped that the malfunctions deliberately inflicted on him by the instructor were absent; Although he’d not yet mastered the weapons systems or countermeasures, Jeremy felt completely confident in both complex movement and navigation.

It was obvious Marissa underestimated his grasp of the mid range sensors at least, since he’d been watching her signal for some time now as she carefully snuck up on him by darting behind the mountains of the large asteroid chosen as their battleground.

With a shrill warcry, Marissa blasted forth from her cover and unleashed a volley of missiles. “Do you think I’m an idiot?” Jeremy spat through the comms system. “Yes”, came the reply, a little too quickly for his liking. It wasn’t clear what she was getting at until he saw the missiles, which split off seconds earlier to pursue his decoys, suddenly turning back towards his position. Not an idiot maybe, but careless; his radio transmission gave them something to lock onto.

It soon became a game of improvised defense, as both ran out of decoys within minutes but the caves, valleys and other geological features of the asteroid afforded no shortage of ways to confuse missiles. The animosity was also gone, replaced by a strange elation.

The thought that he was growing to understand her more moment to moment simply by studying her tactics initially repulsed him, but as the match wore on it became thrilling. “I wonder”, he thought, “if she’s feeling the same thing.”

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 2!}