Galactic Arena Box Set

by Dan Davis

  “Yeah. Yeah, okay. Let’s do it.”

  20.

  Henry crashed into the hex training dummy, growling as he twisted the blade tentacle back and forth. The hex machine slashed at him and jammed both stingers into his abdomen.

  Henry flinched and redoubled his efforts, moving so fast his hands were a blur.

  “Break it off, Henry!” Ram shouted. “Break it!”

  The tentacle snapped at the joint but not before the pain overwhelmed Henry and he fell to one knee, brandishing the broken leg overhead.

  “Use it!” Ram shouted. “Cut it!”

  Henry struggled in the midst of the thrashing legs and remaining tentacles but he managed to press the blade against the thorax.

  But just for a moment. The warning lights flashed and the siren blared. The dummy powered down and Henry fell back onto the floor of the training room, shaking from agony and exhaustion.

  The medical team rushed in with their instruments ready.

  “Well,” Stirling said, “he came closer.”

  Ram held a hand over his eyes. “Close isn’t—"

  Shouts filled the training room and the medical team scattered, instruments flying everywhere, as Henry dragged himself to his feet, growling with rage. He punched the hex dummy again and again, grasping the flaccid legs and ripping them from the thorax.

  “Henry, stop!” Ram shouted. “Stop, the program is over, Henry. It’s finished. You were knocked out, stop it.”

  Henry smashed the dummy, pummeling the thorax with such force that the entire assembly shook. The structure was bolted and welded to a reinforced section of the ship’s frame but still it threatened to come apart.

  “He’s bloody destroying it,” Stirling said.

  “Someone needs to stop him,” Ram replied.

  Stirling turned in disbelief and held an arm out. “Feel free.”

  “I must be crazy,” Ram muttered and limped forward to grasp Henry’s flailing arm. “Henry, you must stop this.”

  Stars filled Ram’s vision and he was knocked back off his feet. The pain hit him and he realized Henry had caught him with an elbow.

  “Stop it, Henry, stop this at once!” Doctor Monash ran forward, tapping on his screen.

  Henry finally stopped, breathing heavily.

  “Oh, Henry, your poor hands!” Monash cried. “What have you done, you silly boy!”

  The doctor led Henry away to the med bay, clucking over his broken fingers and swollen arms.

  Stirling reached down and helped Ram to his feet.

  “I think my nose is broken,” Ram said, tenderly touching his face.

  “You’re lucky he didn’t take your head off.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  They looked at the ruined dummy, hanging on its support arm, bashed in beyond all recognition. The legs twisted and in tangles.

  Both laughed and shook hands, clapping each other on the shoulder.

  ***

  When Henry’s hands and arms had healed, they put him in against the Avar program at full speed.

  Ram sat in the chair before the huge screen, while Stirling paced behind him. Red lurked in the corner, watching silently. The faint whiff of sulfur wafted from him.

  “Now we’ll see what he’s made of.”

  Ram ran the program.

  Henry rushed the simulated hex, splashing through the shallow water on the floor of the arena. Ducking low with his fists beside his head, he blocked the thrashing tentacles, taking the toxic spikes on his arms as the blades sliced his skull. Moving into close range, Henry twisted and ducked even lower, coming up in the cluster of the legs.

  “Just like we planned,” Stirling muttered behind Ram’s shoulder.

  Henry was caught in the tangle of legs and struggled to free himself, twisting and pushing up. He started to lift and then tip the hex over.

  Stirling grabbed Ram’s shoulder so hard it hurt.

  But the hex wrapped itself around Henry and held on, squeezing tighter. For all Henry struggled, he could not free himself.

  The hex pulled him closer and at the same time sat its thorax down lower, enveloping Henry further.

  “No!” Stirling muttered. “Get out, you idiot, get out.”

  “The enemy will now devour the human champion using its mandibles.”

  “Shut up, Red,” Stirling shouted.

  But it was true. Henry was fed upward into the gnashing mandibles. The top of his skull was seized and sliced off as Henry screamed in rage. He was fed deeper into the hex’s mouth. For a moment, he managed to grasp one of the mandibles with his hand before it was fed into the maw also.

  “Alright, I’ve seen enough,” Ram said, turning it off.

  From his Avar chair, Henry shouted. “No! Put me back in! I wasn’t finished.”

  “You were finished, Henry. It’s alright, we’ll run it again. You did well.”

  “No,” Henry said, climbing from his chair and striding toward the control room. “You pulled me out too soon. I wasn’t done yet!”

  Henry yanked the door open and strode inside, his face a mask of rage. Ram jumped to his feet.

  Stirling moved to block Henry and raised his hands. “It’s alright, son. Plenty more chances yet for you to—”

  Henry punched Stirling square in the face.

  The blow knocked him back into Ram and he collapsed at his feet.

  “For God’s sake!” Ram yelled. “Control yourself!”

  Henry stared, aghast. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I’m so sorry.”

  Ram bent to Stirling. His face was broken but he had a pulse. “Get the medics in here. Now!”

  “Is he dead?” Henry asked, horrified.

  “Get out, Henry.”

  “Did I kill him?”

  “Not yet. Get out!”

  Henry ducked outside and fled for his bunk.

  “Where are those medics?” Ram shouted. “Come on, Stirling. Hold on, Sergeant. Hold on.”

  21.

  The medical bay lights were so bright they were giving Ram a headache. He turned them down and leaned back in his chair.

  Stirling muttered. “Is it bad?”

  Ram sat up and leaned over Stirling. His face was bandaged but his eyes were focused. “What do you remember?”

  “That bastard hit me.” Stirling licked his lips. “What did he hit me with?”

  “His fist. Your nose was broken.”

  “Oh. That’s not so bad.”

  “And fractured your maxilla, knocked out six teeth and dislocated your jaw.”

  “Right. Well. I don’t feel so bad, then, considering. Suppose that’ll be the drugs.”

  “They’ve patched you up pretty good. It’s been, I don’t know, almost two days.”

  “What the hell we going to do about him?”

  Ram did not need to ask who Stirling meant. “I gave him a couple of days of intense training. Just trying to burn up some of that aggression.”

  “You didn’t ask the docs to turn him down a notch or two?”

  “Thought about it. But what’s the point? At least he has a slighter better chance than he did before.”

  “If he can control himself until the big night.”

  “We’ll tweak it a bit, I suppose. Keep him occupied.”

  “I don’t think I like him anymore.”

  “He feels guilty about what he did, if that helps. He wants to apologize.”

  “Bloody well hope so, the mad bastard.”

  “I’m sorry, too. This is my fault. I set you up as the bad cop and had you wind him up all this time. It’s only natural he lashed out at you eventually. I could have gotten you killed.”

  “Well, I’m dying anyway, so what does it matter.”

  Ram blew a long sigh and leaned back, wincing. “That makes two of us.”

  “He was right, wasn’t he,” Stirling said after a minute. “He almost had it there, in that last sim.”

  “Almost. He’s almost there, you’re not wrong. He’s go
t all the heart in the world but, I don’t know what it is, it’s like once he’s set on a path of attack, he can’t change course.”

  Stirling growled. “Mmm, can’t think on his feet, the lad. But then, we knew that.”

  “We did. But now it’s the final piece of the puzzle.” Ram sighed. “So, he’s more aggressive. Fine. But what he needs is… creativity. Is that something you can get in pill form? Can we inject him with creativity?”

  Stirling laughed in his throat and winced. “I doubt it. But what do we know? Let’s ask your girlfriend.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Beneath the bandages, Stirling’s eyes wrinkled at the edges. “You know what I’m bloody talking about.”

  “Shut up.”

  Stirling growled a laugh again. “Let’s ask her.”

  “Yeah, alright.”

  “Good. Now, any chance you can send in the nurse with some more drugs?”

  ***

  “Creativity is not necessarily always some mysterious emergent property,” R1 said. “In many ways, creativity is synonymous with problem-solving. And problem-solving is really what we mean when we talk about General Intelligence.”

  “So, is he just not smart enough?” Ram asked, rubbing his temples. “Is that it? He’s got the urge to kill now but it’s like he can’t… he can’t think on his feet when we throw novel situations at him.”

  R1 nodded. “We were certain to make all clones as intelligent as we could, up to a sensible limit.”

  “What limit? You didn’t want to make them too smart?”

  She smiled. “Of course we didn’t. You don’t want overly high IQ soldiers, Ram. Very high IQ is correlated with all kinds of negative personality and health traits like introversion and low testosterone.”

  “Yeah but… intelligence doesn’t cause those things, does it? That’s just correlation.”

  She pursed her lips. “You’re right, causes are harder to pin down, but either way, you create high IQ embryos, you get poor potential subjects, as a rule.”

  “How do you make a clone smarter anyway? Can you do it with Henry?”

  R1 tapped her narrow fingers on her chin. “Gene editing in vivo is a recipe for disaster. There’s still too much trial and error involved. Which we can do when we’re dealing with raw DNA and embryos but we can’t risk mistakes with our only subject.”

  “How do you do it to the embryos then?”

  “There are a number of ways to engineer an increase in General Intelligence before growing them. The best way to inject genius into the lines is to study gametes and use polygenic scoring to identify those gametes which had the highest frequencies of those variants which are likely causal of general intelligence. Then we clone the gametes that exhibit the highest richness in terms of those variants. And those intelligence clusters, which will have a range of variants, you then include into your line.”

  Ram cleared his throat and nodded in what he hoped was a sage fashion. “So… so you start with sperm and egg taken from real people? I mean, from natural humans.”

  “Ones that exhibit the traits we are interested in, yes.”

  “So we’re just jumbled up mixtures of all different people?”

  She smiled. “Just like natural born humans are, yes.”

  “But we’re not natural. I mean, look at me. Look at Henry.”

  “We also manually edit genes and gene clusters and insert them in order to achieve traits found very rarely or not at all in nature.”

  “Like giants.”

  She pursed her lips. “Healthy giants. Very large people have all manner of problems my colleagues and predecessors had to fix. You can’t just find some magical height gene and turn it up to the maximum. It doesn’t work that way. Increased mass for example strains joints and the cardiovascular system. Addressing those problems genetically always leads to the introduction of all manner of new joint disorders and heart attacks and then you address those and find you’ve introduced a serious metabolic disorder or a mental instability. Human beings are the most complicated thing in the universe, that we know of.”

  “What about wheelers and the hex?”

  “I’m sure we would find them as complicated as we are, conceivably more so, but just as likely that they are simpler than we are. All life is complicated. A butterfly is orders of magnitude more complex than a star system. And our brains alone, our minds, are far more complicated still. There’s so much we don’t understand and for all we’ve learned and for all we’ve accomplished, we still just make as many lines as we can, grow as many embryos as we can, and take the likeliest of them as far as is possible.”

  “What happens to the ones who don’t make it?” Ram said. “Earlier versions of me, were they grown in artificial wombs, born, and then killed when they weren’t up to scratch?”

  R1 sat up straighter and swallowed twice before speaking. “Euthanized, yes. Many proved to have developmental disorders that did not manifest until they reached infancy, or puberty, or later even.”

  “And you just killed them?”

  R1 placed a hand over her eyes. “Euthanized.”

  Ram knew he should probably feel angry about the fact he was himself the product of such murderous iteration but he felt only sympathy for the suffering of the woman opposite. “I’m sorry about that. Working so hard on all those subjects and then seeing them… euthanized. ”

  She looked him in the eyes. “… everything we did, every sacrifice we made, it was for the Project. It was to save humanity. We knew we were giving up our own to do that.”

  Ram crossed his arms and leaned back. “I thought you were an AP. Why do you feel guilty?”

  Her expression hardened. “I do not feel guilty.”

  “You seem—”

  “Henry is the last of them,” she said quickly. “Out of all the thousands that failed, that we lost on the way, Henry is the last. And due to his deficiencies, my failures, he will also soon fail.”

  There was no doubt in his mind. She had the blandness of an AP and yet certainly displayed the emotions of a human.

  “I want to talk about his deficiencies. I know about his conscientiousness of course. And now we’ve dosed him so much that he’s ready to rip the head off everyone on this ship, let alone the Hex. But how do we make him creative? Is it really just a matter of intelligence?”

  R1 locked her fingers together on the table. “What makes a person into an elite level performer, Ram? Into a genius.”

  “You’re asking the wrong person.”

  “But you are a genius yourself, Ram, I would have thought you would have some ideas.”

  He laughed. “A genius? I don’t think so.”

  “Well, perhaps not now with your brain damage limiting you. But your performance data from your life in simulated warfare and your combat in the arena certainly suggest you fit the bill. What is intelligence, do you think?” R1 asked, tilting her head.

  Ram nodded. “I’ve heard that question posed a lot. There are many forms of intelligence, right? And you can be strong in one area and weak in others, so I guess we would need to increase, what, creative intelligence—”

  “No, not really.”

  “No?”

  “There is an underlying intelligence called General Intelligence which tends to cut across all aspects of an individual’s life, so we find people who display intelligence in one area will tend to display it across all areas.”

  “But some people are good at math and bad at writing, and vice versa, or they are a math genius but they can’t drive a car or they forget to put on pants before leaving the apartment.”

  “Right, well, you’re talking about different things there. People have preferences, that’s true. But how many people are there who achieve very highly in written language but appallingly low in math? I’ll tell you. It’s not very many. General Intelligence exists and it is important for elites to have it. It is a prerequisite. Now, Henry does have a higher than average IQ but that’s not all you ne
ed to become an elite in your field or in multiple fields.”

  “But IQ isn’t intelligence itself, is it. IQ is just a test, it’s not real.”

  R1 pursed her lips and lowered her head. “No, Ram, it is a measure of intelligence. If I took out a tape measure and measured your height and said you were two-hundred and twenty centimeters or whatever you are, would you tell me that height didn’t exist because the number was just a number?”

  “Wait, is that the same thing?”

  “Yes, so intelligence is very important in making a genius. But why are some people intelligent? What makes them that way?”

  “Their genes.”

  “In large part, yes. And what do those intelligence genes do?”

  “I really have no idea.”

  “Well, most differences in intelligence are caused by myelination.”

  “Right, sure. And what is that?”

  “Myelin insulates nerve cell axons to increase the speed at which information, encoded as an electrical signal, travels from one nerve cell body to another, as in the central nervous system or, for example, from a nerve cell body to a muscle. Children grow more intelligent with maturation because myelination increases into adulthood. The slowing of response times with age and the decline in intelligence is due to the degradation of myelin.”

  “Wait, I’ve heard of all that. Isn’t that what… the captain... Lieutenant Commander Xenakis had done to her? And other pilots. It’s called ERANS.”

  “Partly, yes, that’s right. Noradrenaline activated temporary partial myelination was an element of the treatment offered to combat pilots that increased their reaction times to what is rightly considered superhuman levels.”

  “And that’s what you did to Henry. Only permanently.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “No, it never is.”

  “More intelligent brains show faster nerve conduction, less glucose utilization in positron emission tomography, faster reaction times, faster inspection times, faster speeds in general, greater circumference and volume, smaller standard deviation in reaction times, greater variability in EEG measures, shorter white matter T2 relaxation times, and higher gray-white matter contrast with magnetic resonance imaging.”