Chapter 15 - Calamity

 “Hey Jim, come in here,” Molly furrowed her brow down and pulling her mouth to a side, “you're on the news.”

“Oh?” Jim called from the bathroom, he had just got on base and gone through debriefing and had just got out of the shower, white towel still wrapped around his waist, sapphire-white eyes shining in the mirror back at him.

“Yeah, like, every station,” Molly was making gestures in the air as the projector screen cycled through the various state-sourced and independent news sources. “Some observatory satellite from the SU got a feed of your...whatever you were doing up there on Luna today. It's everywhere.”

“Really? Let me see.” Jim closed his eyes and touched his fingers to his temple, a trick he learned in training. He focused on the darkness behind his eyes and started building his Palace of the Imagination, as they called it. He imagined himself in an Old World-style war station, various different cathode-tube television boxes stacked on top of each other like in his movies, a huge panel of switches and buttons and toggles and keyboards wrapping the half-octagon-shaped desk. He filled in each various monitor with a rendering of his social network and news feeds, and then used his transmitter to access the network and fill it in with up-to-date data. His social networks were blowing up, all of his friends from Lyceum and the team posting the footage of the Cores online.

“Look, even John-Stephen al Bassam has a monologue about it,” Molly landed on their favorite comedian-turned-news caster.

“...can we trust the IA? How can we?” Jim heard as shook his head into focus and came through the bedroom, into the living room. “Really? That's the newly-discovered Kolchenko Nuclear base,” He paused as an extremely old archive picture appeared on the screen next to his face. “Let me rephrase that, the apparently-operation Kolchenko Nuclear base!” The picture changed to a satellite picture of the surface of Luna, a picture of the base Jim had just come from. “The one, let me remind you, from which the first nuclear weapons were launched that started the Great Collapse. That's like finding a huge block of cheese, and then just leaving it on the floor and praying your dog doesn't eat it!” John-Stephen paused and made an imploring face, arms akimbo, as the audience regaled him with laughs and applause. “This is the same IA that collapsed an entire mountain on a few dozen enemy insurgents that could just as easily have been captured by the Third Legion. But instead of bringing these, frankly, disadvantaged Gotoman conscripts to justice and having them stand trial for their crimes, we become judge, jury, and executioner and put them to death without due process of the law. It's outrageous!” Another moment's pause for a roar of applause from the crowd as John-Stephen leaned back in his office chair from his desk, a confident half-cocked smile wrinkling his aging but still youthful face.

“And worst of all,” the screen cut away from John-Stephen and a full-screen satellite feed of the base came up on screen. Jim and the gang were clearly within view as the went bounding into position. As the Tomah and Adrian were in position and destroying the the landmines, the jetsam from the explosions obscured the feed in a cloud of dust. “If it isn't our favorite IA Gestapo, the Kinghts of Steel. I mean, seriously, what kind of name is 'Knights of Steel' anyway. It's like they were named by some Pre-collapse warlord,” another laugh pause. “Seriously? 'Fraternal Order of the Knights of Steel?' What are they, some cut-rate crusaders seeking to impose their own personal brand of morality on the world 'or else?' Like 'Eh, if you don't keep that population growth in check, it'd be a real shame if my finger were to slip on this button and all of a sudden a -boop- nuke were to come flying your way,'”he said the last part in an accent mimicking the gangsters from the old classical movies to a chorus of laughs.

At this point Jim was sitting next to Molly slack-jawed, unable to respond, both he and Molly dead-eye focused on the stream.“But seriously, these are some scary people with scary toys. And just when you didn't think they could get any scarier, check this out.” The screen cut away again, and a satellite feed from behind the base on Luna, the characteristic bluish hue of an interpolated video extracted from a high-range electromagnetic telescope, showed Jim popping up over the ledge, the mass drivers firing and trained on him, and then stand up, suddenly appearing on the dome, the mass drivers retracting back into the towers. “When the observatory in Dalgranda mountains in the SU caught wind of this, they trained one of their Sky-Eye satellites on the base. These are imaging behemoths that record video streams in huge frequency bands at several thousand frames per second in extremely high resolution to analyze space debris as an early-warning for any space disasters heading our way. These satellites could see the pimple on your ass from the farthest reaches of our solar system, and capture you popping it in slow-mo.” More laughing. “Seriously. Watch, this.” A slow-mo replay of Jim standing up from the ledge and appearing on the dome behind it ticked forward frame by frame. In one frame, Jim was standing behind the crater ledge, and the next he was on the dome, no transitional frames between.

The feed cut back to John-Stephen who sat mouth agape, eyes wide, the corners of his mouth turned up in confused smile. “Our guys did the numbers, those satellites record at almost three thousand frames per second. He had to move from one side of the field to the other in, get this, a third of a millisecond,” He dropped his jaw again. “It's less like reality and more like something you'd see out of a video game. And,” he paused and held up a finger as he pulled something out from under his desk, “according to our public records researcher, which, by the way, can I give a shout out to? I know that just because our laws say we have to have clear and transparent public records, it was crazily difficult to get our hands on this. Our researcher has been working since those things touched down after the Square Bombings. But according to our public records research, the 'big game' analogy isn't too far off. The guy in that Core is a one Flight Lieutenant James Ross, a recent Lyceum grad and former professional gamer.”

“Oh god,” Molly broke she and Jim's silence. She had unconsciously started hugging her arm to her chest, her hand curled in a claw in front of her mouth as she breathlessly swung her head to meet Jim's scared eyes, her red ponytail swishing at the sudden movement, a lock of hair breaking away and tumbling between her eyes.

“It'll be alright,” Jim said nervously as he brushed the curl out of her face and behind her ear, not sure who believed it less.

The laughing on the TV broke their moment and they both quickly swiveled their heads to watch the feed. “I'm not kidding, they seriously code-named the thing Vishnu. Who is the IA to give a teenager just out of school literal Godlike power? And here's the kicker, guys, our research shows that the Cores aren't even IA property. They are actually a paramilitary group commissioned by our favorite Old World Movie villain, New Roman Industries.” A glamour-shot of Dyman appeared in the portrait box next to John-Stephen's head, one in which he looked particularly villainous. He was in a blood-red suit, a white button-down shirt and no tie beneath, reclined in a giant board room chair, one arm bent up, the back of his fingertips brushing his cheek, his ankle resting on his knee cross-legged, a log unlit cigar clenched inside the corner of his pearly-white smile, fingers dripping in jeweled rings, the ruby stuck between his eyes sparkling under the studio lighting. “I mean, look at this guy. All he needs is a fluffy white cat in his lap and you could see him living in a volcanic lair or something.”

The audience laughter was cut short as a feed of the Commander interrupted the broadcast. She was in the briefing room, Standish and everyone behind her already. “I've been calling you. We have an incident. Return to the briefing room, now.” Her voice was grave and clipped as she cut the feed abruptly.

Jim looked at Molly again, who still hadn't moved, kissed her on the lips, and ran into bedroom to get dressed.

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“Did you guys see it?” The commander started. She, and everyone else, it would seem, had changed into a fresh uniform themselves.

“Of course, we all saw it, it's on every channel,” Marion replied for the group.

“Don't worry about it,” Standish appeared mid-room behind the commander, he was in a fli harness suit, looking very un-Standish-ly. “Dyman has it under control. This'll all blow over in the next few days,” his hologram flickered for a second, drawing attention to the fact that the lighting on Standish was not consistent with the way the room was lit.

“Easy for you to say,” the Commander turned to standish and scowled, arms crossed, feet in her usual T stance. “You don't have to spend it down here on the surface.”

“You'll be fine. There'll be some news hullabaloo, they'll say some nasty stuff on the morning shows about you guys, and then Dyman will smooth everything over and we'll be praised.” Just like when we dropped down after the Central Square bombing. It's always the same. The public gets outraged at something new and hard to understand, a bunch of talking heads explain the subtlety that they're not seeing, and then the majority come around and see the truth behind what's going on. Let the rabble grumble, as the rabble is wont. Let the masses hoot and holler while we look after the greater good for them.” The odd light of Standish's dropshop drew long shadows underneath his eyes, contouring his high cheekbones and sunken, masculine cheeks. He hadn't shaved in a few days, the stubble peppering his jawline making him look a bit bleary-eyed and ragged the, pale white of his eyes cutting through the darkness.

“Ok man,” Blaize said, a palm held up, head sideways as he skeptically leered from the corner of his eye, “you sound like a movie villain.”

“Yeah,” Tomah tagged in, “the suits I get, those are hot, but that shit is creepy, man. You aren't in one of your movies.”

“Yeah,” Adrian cued off, “I'm having a hard time telling if we're on the good side or the bad side, too.”

“Will you all calm down?” The Commander didn't yell, she never yelled, but her voice cut through all the chatter, sending shocks of awareness through everyone as they all snapped their heads in her direction, faces in stunned silence. Even Standish had pulled his shadowed visage back into the spotlight he was underneath, plainly lighting a look of shocked dread. “Let's all keep our heads. And Standish, this is probably not the best time for your melodrama.” The Commander confidently strode in front of him, legs a bit farther open than shoulder width, her elbows akimbo as she stood dominantly, her hands on her hips, the backlighting casting a scintillating aura around her, her head uncraning as she turned it away from Standish to face them all. “We're the good guys, Adrian, don't ever doubt that. Life isn't broke up to good and evil. We're on the good side because we're trying to help everyone, not just trying to be self-serving. Everyone thinks they're doing the right thing. The difference between good and evil is who they're doing the right thing for. The IA isn't doing this for personal gain. We're the IA. We're the best nation on this planet. Even if, in actually, we're number one in exactly nothing. The IA hasn't held a number-one spot anywhere in centuries. And yet, everyone considers us trustworthy and calls us 'the best.' They trust the planet to our judgment. That's because we're deficient exactly nowhere, either. We're top 3 in literally every demographic. Because we're not trying to be 'the best in,' we're just trying to be 'the best.'”

The Commander begun pacing. Standish had moved off to the side and was looking at his fingernails, occasionally using his teeth to fix an inconsistency. “Look guys,” She continued after taking a few steps. “Our cause is noble. Our motivations are pure. There is no conspiracy. Dyman isn't magic and Standish's is neither a zealot nor a prophet. When Dyman explains why we're here, the people will trust us. That's what he's trying to say.”

“What she said,” Standish looked up from his nails wide-eyed, as though he'd forgotten he was still visible and struck a faux-authoritative stance to mirror the Commander's. “That thing about nobility and 'being the best' and all that. Good stuff, Carol, really.” He had ambled in front of the Commander, his holograph shimmering again. “Just sit tight guys, really,” Standish held position and hugged his arms to his large chest, “this will all sort out, you'll see.”

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“In today's news,” the caster began. Jim had built a Palace of the Imagination to look like a large wooded forest resembling the one in the Wilds where he deployed on his first mission. He was sitting cross-legged, the back of his hands palms-up resting on his knees in a yogic position. He had become accustomed to meditating during the day whenever he wasn't in the simulators.

“All IA military activity continues to be suspended,” the news desk sat in Jim's field of vision like a diorama between two giant trees on either side of Jim's periphery. He had spent a considerable amount of time coding up and training himself to integrate various feeds into his transmitter and building Worlds of Imagination for his brain to operate in. In the past couple of weeks he and Standish had spent a lot of time together training his Augs. Standish was a genius with the them, lecturing him for hours on his theories of cognitive neurofunctions and how he can use the his Augs to reprogram his subconscious.

“The Great Union's Council of Tribes met today and issued a formal chastisement on New Roman Industries, unseating former General-at-Arms Tyler Dyman as the CEO of NRI, and the de facto dictator of the International Alliance, after appearing on legendary interviewer John-Stephen al Bassem's comedy news program, considered to be the most-watched program, in the world,” the newscaster, Jerome Clarkschild, paused and delivered the “in the world” part in the extremely dramatic fashion for which he was famous. “Former Vice President of Operations Tim Kuiriston has stepped up to take over in his absence,” The newscasters and set appeared as though Jim were on stage with them. Unlike holographic projection, the way the Augs interacted with Jim's visual cortex meant that his brain would actually fill in the gaps in a 2D image, like a picture or a video feed, and the power of his imagination would add the the missing visual data on the fly, like a dream.

“The international court in the Southern Union's capital city of Solomon is expected to issue a formal indictment to Mr. Dyman, citing violations of international protection treaties and perjury for his claims surrounding the nature of the company's secretive CORE program,” the co-anchor of the broadcast, an overly-manicured woman in an extremely trendy one-piece outfit, followed up.

“Jim,” Molly's soft voice cooed into his ear as he felt a light touch on his shoulder. The contact, however, was synthetic. Jim had constructed an avatar for all of the important people in his life and associated them with their digital information, allowing him to interact with their various communications in his Palace. “How goes the furlough?”

“No training today,” Jim said through his own avatar. “CORE operations are still completely shut down. And with Standish still missing, I don't have anyone to help me with the Augs, either. Standish says I've already surpassed Tomah and Blaize, and that I just need to explore their usage, and I quote, 'get creative.' When will you be home?” the Augs picked up on the end of his thought and sent the message as text to Molly in reply.

In an instant, Jim made his avatar blink, and when his eyes opened, he was no longer in his forest. He had transported himself to a little workshop he'd built. There was a large wooden work bench, an assortment of hand tools behind it, and racks upon racks of scrap wood, metal, and such lining the walls around it. He was sitting on a little stool in front of the L-shaped bench, legs still folded and hands still resting on his knees. He broke position and snapped his fingers. A pre-Collapse computer terminal appeared instantly on the work bench. Using an operating system he had constructed himself as a sort of “front-end of consciousness,” as they call it in training, he opened up a compiler program. He started writing various lines of code in a language he had invented. Everyone learned the basic principals of coding in Lyceum. Standish taught him how to use those principals to create “thought-words” and train the transmitter's AEN to recognize them as “thought units,” allowing him to piece them together as macros and scripts.

According to Standish, he had spent years building an elaborate system of Palaces of Thought and thought-words that he claimed he could actually visualize and interact with his brain in the same way a mechanical engineer would interact with the processing units of a computer chip, down to the individual bit and neuron, reprogramming it to operate more efficiently and effectively. Magister Rinolado had told Jim during one of his follow-up checkups that he was skeptical of the claim, but from his brain scans and Natural Encephelograph maps, Standish's brain definitely operated differently than any he'd ever seen. “Standish isn't wrong in comparing the brain to a computer processor, Jim,” he had told him. “Even with the extensive research on brain function we've unearthed from this base, and the tireless research of my team, we still have so much to understand about it. But your neurons aren't like the bits in a computer chip. Those use a complex system of binary and multi-state nodes working in conjunction to build logic gates and state-machines for memory with layers and layers of obfuscation. Our brain works very differently. It's, instead, a sort of regularly-cycling cloud of electricity. Imagine a mouse running in a circle. Now, imagine that circle gets a dent into it, so it has a sort of right-angle fold that the mouse has to traverse through, now. Now imagine that folded circle is now a constantly changing maze. That's your brain. Every thought cycle is a sort of race around that every-changing circuit and every stimulus you receive from your external sensors - your eyes, ears, touch, taste, and so forth, and all of your internal processing mechanisms, like your sense of time, position in the world, and universal self-awareness, your consciousness, as we call it - changes the chemical environment your neurons exist in, and this subtlety, or dramatically, shifts the maze's path. The Augs work by reading the sort of 'state' of your maze, and we can use their electric discharge to alter the maze based on the state of it. We can't, however, alter the neurons or the way your grain naturally uses them. Once our nanomachines stop discharging, the maze returns to its natural position. Now, you could argue that you can't measure or alter something and then stop and have it be unaltered, and that's where Standish's theories come into play. He believes that he can use his transmitters to train his maze, and consolidate it into a much more efficient and easier-to-traverse path, like flattening the folds out into an ever-bigger circle and wiring in shortcuts.”

“But you said his brain doesn't look like ours,” Jim had interrogated further

“It doesn't,” Magister took a long time to think about what to say next. “Here, look at this.” The Magister brought up a picture on the digital chalkboard, and then put another similar picture next to it. “The video on the left is Standish's brain. The one on the right is yours. Now watch,” the Magister made a few gestures in the air and both brains started playing. “Watch this region right here,” Rinolado pointed to a small area on the interior of the scan. “This is a recording of us asking you to recall one of your memories during our initial mapping. When you recall this memory, you can see this area here lighting up like a twinkling holiday display. This part here,” he pointed to an area adjacent to it that was occasionally strobing like a party light, “this is your brain talking to your visual system as it builds the memory in your mind's eye, making it so you literally see the items. This is it accessing your emotional memory and reminding you of what that visual picture felt like,” he was wildly drawing a circle around a different part of the brain, his jacket flapping, white messy hair shaking loose. “Now look at Standish,” he said as he straightened his lab coat and pushed his hair out of his face. “Notice how much smaller this part of his brain is?” he circled the part that he had pointed to earlier. The activity looked like it had been consolidated into a block almost a quarter the size as Jim's. “And look here, this is the region of our brain we use to read. On your scan it's not even lighting up, but on his, it's going haywire, and look how big it is!” He was making circles around a gigantic portion of the brain that was constantly lit. “My researchers and I have been studying this scan for months. As best we can tell, it's almost like he's re-purposed a huge portion of his brain to be a sort of linguistic database. We've known about a phenomenon called 'tagging' for a while. That's when your brain creates Platonic ideals of everything, like when I say the word 'tree' you have an idea of what that looks like. But when I add the tag 'small,' that image changes. Your 'memory' is just a database of those Platonic ideas and tags and you build your remembrance of it based on the various tags you have associated with that instance in time. With Standish, it's almost like he's offloaded that onto his transmitter, the imaging stuff, and he's just remembering a series of words, and when we ask him to remember something, he uses his Augs to recall the image from his transmitter based on a complex web of tags. He's externalized his long-term memory. It's crazy.”

“And look at this,” the Magister followed up. He pulled up another image scan. “You won't be able to read this, but this is a scan of Standish's brain when he has access to his transmitters. Look at all this Aug activity! Now look at yours,” he pulled up an image side-by-side. A cloud of little red dots were nested in the 3-D rendering of their brains. On Jim's, there was an occasional-but-constant strobe of dull activity, On Standish's, the red dots were constantly firing. “Look, he's using his using his Augs to keep his brain in a constant state of plasticity. His activity patterns completely change once he can use his transmitter. Look at this, he's intelligently cycling his nanomachines so that they don't run out of charge,” the Magister used his finger to help Jim follow a set of red dots that were alternating discharge in cadence. “It's like nothing we've ever seen.”

Jim shook his head. The memory disappeared, and his avatar was back in it's imaginary workshop. The training had a way of making memories overtake his perception as he recalled things, enhancing the experience to completely flood his senses when he was in his trance-state “Aug World,” as he liked to call it. He began pecking away at the keyboard, cataloging the experience he just had, trying to “code” the memory with various tags, using his transmitter to capture the visual data and storing it as a file in its memory, almost like a video recording. He snapped his fingers, and the text from the screen pulled off and floated in between him and the monitor, and then zipped away into a little cardboard box in the corner of the workshop. He closed his avatar's eyes and recalled his first date with Molly as he clacked away at the keyboard, coding it up into thought-words and visual streams.