“Listen, Vatueil, this is Major Q’naywa. You know me. Come on now, Vatueil, you remember me.”
He didn’t remember any Major Q’naywa. He didn’t remember very much, he guessed. There was a lot of stuff he felt ought to be there, somewhere, but which wasn’t. It gave him a feeling of emptiness. Like a magazine that should have been full of rounds because it was at the start of a deployment and it was supposed to be full, but which wasn’t.
“Vatueil. Listen, son; you’ve got a problem. Your download didn’t complete. You’re in the unit but not all of you is in there, can you understand that? Come on, son, talk to me.”
Part of him wanted to talk to the voice of Major Q’naywa, but he wasn’t going to. Major Q’naywa did not qualify as A Superior because his signal did not come with the codes that would tell him he really was talking to A Superior.
“Some sort of sign, son. Come on. Anything.”
He didn’t know what the codes were that would tell him he really was talking to A Superior, which seemed like an odd thing, but he was guessing that when he heard them he would know.
“Vatueil, we know you transferred but we know it didn’t work properly. That’s why you’re firing on your own side, on us. You need to stop doing that. Do you understand?”
He didn’t really understand. He sort of understood what they were saying because he knew each of the words and how they went together, but it didn’t make sense. He had to ignore it anyway because the people speaking the words did not have the right codes to be Superiors.
He checked his weapons again.
He sat/floated back, maintaining just enough embodiment to ensure long-term sanity, ignoring the shared display and instead watching the whole war blossom, expand and develop inside his mind, seeing it happen in fast-forward, time after time, his attention zooming in on different aspects of its progression with each iteration. It looked just like the sims, of course. Except at any given point after it had all started to go wrong the sims had always developed differently, better, more optimistically.
Wars simmed in the Real did the same thing, naturally, but ultimately they were played out in the Real, in messy physical reality, and so didn’t seem to carry the same irony that this war did, because it – the real war, the conflict that actually mattered here, the war that would have continual and in a sense everlasting consequences – was itself a sim, but a sim that was itself easily as complicated and messy as anything in the Real. Still a sim, though, like the ones they’d used and were still using to plan the war.
Just a bigger one. A bigger one that all concerned had agreed to treat as settling matters. Hence as real as these things ever got.
That was the war they were losing, and that meant that if they were serious about what they had been trying to do – and were still trying to do – then they were going to have to think about cheating. And if cheating didn’t work, then – despite all the accords and laws and customs and regulations, despite all the agreements and solemn treaties – there was always the truly last resort: the Real.
The ultimate cheating …How the hell did we get into this? he asked himself, though of course he already knew the answer. He knew all the answers. Everybody did. Everybody knew everything and everybody knew all the answers. It was just that the enemy seemed to know better ones.
Nobody knew who had first developed the ability to transcribe a naturally evolved creature’s mind-state. Various species asserted that they or their ancestors had been the ones responsible, but few of the claims were credible and none convincing. It was a technology that had been around in some form for billions of years and it was continually being re-invented somewhere out amongst the ever-churning stew of matter, energy, information and life that was the greater galaxy.
And continually being forgotten, too, of course; lost when ingénue civs were in the wrong place at the wrong time and copped a nearby gamma ray buster or a sudden visit from advanced unfriendlies. Other hopefuls accidentally – or by demented design – blew themselves up or poisoned themselves or their birthplace, or contrived some other usually highly avoidable catastrophe for themselves.
No matter; whether you made it up all by yourself or got the makings from somebody else, once it was possible to copy a creature’s mind-state you could, as a rule, if you had the relevant background and the motivation, start to make at least part of your religion real.
“Vatueil, we’re running out of time here, son. We need to come in there. You need to stand down, do you understand? You need to off-line your … let me just see here … your Aggressive Response, Target Acquisition and Weapon Deployment modules. Do you think you can do that? We don’t want to have to come in there and … we don’t want to have to come in there and treat you like an enemy.”