[Original Novella] Perfect Enemy, Part 2

^{Part 1}

His obsessive habit of searching for glitches in the games he played at home on his own time led to the discovery that, if carefully herded about and managed right, a seeker missile’s turn radius was such that it would loop helplessly around his vessel.

The trick was to dodge out of the way each time it got too close for comfort, then move to a new position and repeat. It should have run out of fuel long ago, but obviously the sim’s designers hadn’t foreseen anyone playing matador with missiles.

Marissa’s signal on the sensor screen was his cue to send his new pet careening on a long orbit around the asteroid. “There you are. I think you’re just running from me now. No sense in putting off the inevitable.” Cocky little brat, he thought. Even if his far-fetched gambit didn’t work, it’d be worth the loss just to genuinely surprise her.

The dance of destruction that followed demanded the application of everything learned over the past hour; It seemed clear by now that he’d ‘maxed out’ the sim, i.e. learned everything there was to know about it, so the edge she enjoyed early on was now minor to nonexistent.

Slow, dumb seekers were out and cluster seekers were in; Each warhead split upon firing into six smaller, faster, more nimble miniature missiles that shared the inexplicably never-ending fuel supply of their bigger brothers.

It would’ve still been a chore to evade or deflect them all even if he hadn’t already used up his decoys, chasers and emp charges; complicating matters, she’d coaxed him into a relatively barren stretch of terrain punctuated only by volcanos.

Jeremy spiralled down towards the surface, all six missiles close behind as he began to hug close to the outer edge of the volcano. “What are you doing?” She sounded equal parts annoyed and confused.

It took another few seconds until his target came into sight; a bulging pustule of dimly glowing rock protruded from the volcano’s skin, a sign that magma was struggling there to find some alternate path to relief.

“Quit fucking around!” He spotted the sun glinting off of her fighter as she swooped in to ensure the kill. With that he unleashed a fast, but unguided torpedo normally intended for stationary gun emplacements against the bulging rock formation.

It exploded with a ferocity that exceeded his wildest hopes; The blast threw up a cloud of debris that exploded all six of the missiles behind him and sent Marissa’s fighter spinning off into the abyss. Her comms were off but she was no doubt swearing up a storm three spheres over.

“That’ll only work once”, she growled as soon as she regained control of her ship. He just kept laughing while using her anger to lure her into a particular spot. Naturally, his laughter only intensified when the lone straggler missile he sent on a long voyage around the asteroid ten minutes earlier connected with her ship.

“I can’t stand you. You’re shit, I hope you know that.” He kept chuckling softly to himself as if to fan the flames of her anger. “You shouldn’t have won, logically, since we were tied up until that point and I was killed by my own missile. Why does that even subtract a point? It’s arbitrary.”

She continued to rant, fume and gesture as the two walked side by side back to the dormitories. “He he he he”. At this point it wasn’t even genuine laughter, he was just rubbing her nose in it. “He he he he he he he he.” Her face transitioned gradually from bright red to a more moderate magenta during their walk, but she wasn’t done lecturing him, not by a long shot.

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

The door slammed, and Marissa shrieked in frustration. Some ways down the hall their RA briefly awoke, scratched himself, then rolled over and fell back to sleep.
First period was tense; He felt her eyes lock onto him the moment he entered the room. Nat noticed too, for her own reasons, but Marissa simply wasn’t interested in acknowledging Nat’s territorial death-glare.

“Marissa’s checking you out!” Mike nudged Jeremy, probably assuming he was oblivious rather than making a determined effort not to look back at her. “Trust me Mike, she isn’t. Your seat’s over there, Nat and I will be at the same table as usual for lunch.” That was enough to satisfy, and soon after everyone found their seats, the lesson began.

“What, for combat purposes, distinguishes a living organism from a machine?” Another one of those loaded questions; There were many correct answers but as usual he was looking for one in particular. Predictably even before he’d finished posing the question, his eyes came to rest on Jeremy.

This time, though, he had no interest in his usual back and forth with Warwick; Jerm’s mind was racing with maneuvers, tactics, and visions of the magnificent battle from the night before. He just wanted this class to end so he could face Marissa again in the simulator.

As yet he had no plan for how to repeat last night’s result, but then neither did he know what the conditions of today’s exercise would be. The uncertainty was difficult to bear; if only he’d thought to peek at lesson 2 while he had the chance....

“Really Jeremy? No witty one liner? Speechless, for once?” He looked at Warwick with the most potent expression of apathy he could muster. “Or maybe you’re finally going to give someone else the chance to answer. Very well, Kevin?”

A fuzzy blonde mane of hair with big brown eyes, two or possibly three years younger than the rest of the students sat up and belted out “Emotion. Constructs might or might not be sentient, nobody really knows, but what little we’ve recovered suggests their own neural architecture is set up to compute in a very rigid deterministic fashion.

They are more like the servers that run the sims than they are like us.” Several older students around him turned and nodded approvingly. He was a popular one with girls, smaller and cuter than the gangly pimple faced teenagers that surrounded him, but also with most of the guys on account of all the grades he’d skipped to wind up in their class.

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

“It’s likely that they feel emotions much like ours. Hatred, certainly. A few of the targets they chose over the past few years were of dubious military value, but had a demoralizing effect on the insufficiently patriotic.” Jeremy rolled his eyes.

Somehow, however he always did it, Warwick noticed and brought the full bear of his wrath down on Jeremy. “Forgive me if I’m mistaken, young master Jeremy, but I get the distinct impression you have something to add! Perhaps a derisive remark intended for those of us who are more completely devoted to a swift victory against the Constructs?”

This time Warwick had it wrong. Jeremy didn’t even look up as he replied. “It’s efficiency”. The room fell silent. For a minute or two nobody was sure whether Warwick was speechlessly furious and preparing to lay into Jeremy or simply stunned. “That’s an interesting answer, actually. Please expand on it.”

Warwick employed a much softer tone this time. A good sign, although he was no doubt still ready to spring the trap should Jeremy say anything other than precisely the correct sequence of words going forward. To even his own astonishment, he did.

“A fighter jet is dramatically faster and more capable than even the largest known species of bird or any other organism which flies.” All eyes were on him. He was actually still thinking about the night before, the words spilling out of him now seemed to arrange themselves without conscious effort.

“And yet, it makes far less efficient use of fuel. Machines, generally speaking, and especially those designed for combat, are engineered for performance at the expense of efficiency. There were periods in history where this trend does not hold true, during resource shortages typically personal automobiles and other consumer devices would shift in their design towards energy efficiency at the expense of horsepower, but even then they fell far short of the efficiency of nature.”

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

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

“Well, mark your calendars everyone. I’m giving this one to Jeremy. Don’t ever expect to see such a thing happen again, but yes, that’s more or less a satisfactory answer.” It took a few moments to settle in.

There was impulsive cheering that even Warwick’s carefully perfected death gaze couldn’t suppress. After things settled down, he made his best effort to continue the lesson, although now the students previously focused on what he had to say were beaming at Jeremy with unqualified admiration.

Marissa could not conceal her disgust, though Jeremy did not look smug as he would have under normal circumstances; in fact, there was no change in his demeanor throughout the argument. He was still staring down at his desk, still lost in thought, considering possible strategies for the evening’s sim lesson.

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

Jeremy normally would have been one of the handful who laughed at Mike’s terrible joke but he was still paralyzed with thoughts of facing Marissa that evening in the simulator. Every attack, counter attack, every clever little deceit replayed over and over for his review. There was no realistic possibility of paying any attention to Warwick, even to savor the petty victory over him that was rare even when Jeremy could afford to devote his full attention to it.

She was right, exploiting glitches wouldn’t fly with the instructor. At least, not doing so overtly. But a splinter in his mind nagged at him in words he couldn’t quite make out, something he noticed in passing during the previous night’s battle yet couldn’t fully recall.

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

Kevin, hungry for another helping of adulation, waved his hand about. “No not you Kevin, you’ve had yours. Someone who hasn’t spoken yet. Marissa!” Jeremy bolted upright in his seat, pulled violently back to reality by the mention of his new adversary’s name. She spoke in a cold, clinical tone, obviously putting on a show not just for Jeremy but anyone who had taken satisfaction in his small victory earlier.

“What my classmate Jeremy failed to mention earlier is that in spite of the fundamental differences between biologicals and Constructs, we keep trying to beat them at their own game. We send pilots against them in fighter craft based on their own technology, deployed from carriers very similar to their own, as if we’re trying to replicate their victories through imitation. But that can’t work; We can’t be better machines than actual machines. No matter how similarly our fighters perform, they still carry additional weight and must devote space onboard for life support systems to sustain the pilot. In order to match their maneuverability he must be immersed in oxygenated fluorocarbon, which only adds to the bulk and complexity of a system whose Construct equivalent is a chip the size of my thumbnail that runs on about six watts.”

Jeremy made every effort to hide his astonishment. Warwick didn’t. Obviously pleased to see a student joining in his vendetta, he lavished praise on her and did his best to drive home for everyone else how correct she was, how clever she was, all but saying outright that she was a more deserving recipient of their respect.

It was, in fairness, an impressive answer. He knew her to be an ace pilot firsthand, but this was the first he’d seen of her academic talents. The more Jeremy dredged up vague recollections of every instance in the past three years where they’d interacted, the more he came to recall that in fact she’d always been at or near the top in test results. He just never had a reason to care about it until now.

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

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

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

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

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 3!}