by Dan Davis
“How is it going with the asset? With Henry.”
Kat nodded slowly, pursing her lips. “That’s actually why I asked you here. You asked what are you supposed to do with yourself. And I said I hope you will feel able to help us. And so, if you’re feeling up to it, I wonder if you might be able to lend a hand.”
“Lend a hand with what?”
“With Henry’s training.”
***
“Hello?” Ram said. “Is anybody here?”
It was the largest space on the Hereward and rotated rapidly, providing a force above a single g though at times causing Ram’s head to spin so that he clutched the doorframe as he looked along the gently curving room. The high humidity and high oxygen content of the atmosphere did not help. It was like breathing in a hot shower.
Like the orb arena and the training chamber in Outpost Omega, the walls, floor and ceiling were painted black. It was largely empty in the center all the way along, though padded mats had been set up here and there. Great exercise and combat machines stood against the walls. The great hum of the engines filled Ram’s ears but he could hear no people.
Stepping inside, it felt like being back on the Victory, heading to Orb Station Zero.
It was strange to think his mind had been inside an entirely different head and body back then. His original head but a clone body and since then he had been downloaded into a new clone body. One which had suffered extensive damage in both deployments he had been on with it, one on a distant planet and one on Earth, and yet still carried him around.
Despite it being a clone, it still felt on some level that it was not his own, not his true body, and that sense came most of all when he thought of the brain damage he had suffered. The cells had withered and died and now he was less than he was. Thoughts came slower or not at all. Words were especially difficult to find. He found himself resenting the physical body that he was in, as if it was to blame for the degradation his mind, his self, was experiencing.
Shaking off the resentment, he approached an enormous combat dummy in the shape of a hex champion. The massive bulbous thorax atop the cluster of splint-like legs, all hanging motionless beneath like loose armored cables dangling beneath a monstrous shell. Ram ran his hand over the surface of the thorax. It was hard and yet flexible, just like the Hex were supposed to be in real life. He jabbed a finger and it barely gave but when he pushed it with his whole hand, the shell flexed inward just a little before springing back the instant he ceased pushing.
“We have no need of you,” a voice said behind him, startling Ram.
“Doctor,” Ram said. “I was asked to come by… the captain.”
“Obviously I know that,” the doctor snapped, scowling. “And I know her reasoning but it is superficial at best and utterly faulty in reality. Now, they thought that because you have experience defeating the wheelhunter champion, that knowledge will be of use for Henry.”
Ram shrugged. “Yes, and that experience will—”
“Do not interrupt,” Monash snapped, whipping up a finger. “Your experience however is worse than useless. It will in fact prove detrimental! I shall now explain this to you, so listen very carefully and attempt to understand what I am telling you. Now, your experiences in fighting the wheelhunter will only confuse matters. We are to be engaged in combat with a far more challenging champion and all your techniques and practices are worse than useless. You will be a distraction. You will make things worse.”
“Worse?” Ram asked. “They’re bad now?”
“Not at all,” Monash said, pursing his lips. “Everything is proceeding well within expected parameters.”
“But who’s training him?” Ram said, looking around at the huge empty room. “Who’s training Henry now?”
“I am.”
“You’re a combat specialist? But I thought you were a geneticist.”
Dr Monash crossed his arms. “Our training regimen was planned and implemented years ago by world experts in their fields. I am now continuing to implement their combat training program.”
Ram nodded slowly and looked around. “I got the impression from our captain that you needed help.”
“You got the wrong impression, I’m afraid. As I said, we are well within our parameters. Well within them. And therefore, this means, of course, that you should go back to whatever light duties it is you have now until the end of your days. Your condition will not allow you to do much. Eating yourself into obesity again, no doubt?”
Ram frowned and realized the doctor must have read the file on Rama Seti. “Well, that’s a very tempting suggestion, Doctor Monash, thank you for reminding me of my former aimless existence. But when I saw her, the Captain implied that your parameters were… wrong. Very wrong. In fact, she implied that things are not actually on course at all. So let me ask you a specific question. Is Henry beating the hex champion in Avar simulations?”
Monash looked off to the side. “It depends on the settings, of course.”
“You need me to be even more specific? Alright. When you set it to what the hex champion has been observed doing in the arena, Henry can’t beat it, right?”
Doctor Monash looked over his shoulder and sighed. “Currently. Currently, Henry has been unable to achieve victory in the simulations but that does not mean he will not achieve it by the time we reach our destination. We have time to improve. We will improve. We will.”
Ram jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “What about on the mechanical training dummies?”
“We have no problems.”
“Can he defend himself against them on realistic settings?”
Monash scowled. “The dummies are poorly built. The ones in Omega were far superior. And what is more germane is that they are simply not safe and it would be madness itself to allow Henry to battle these wildly flailing machines and risk injury or worse. No one could disagree with that.”
Ram smiled. “So he can’t beat the dummies or the sims? Is there anything that he can do? Sounds like you have serious problems to me, doctor.”
A woman’s voice caused Ram to turn. “We do.”
It was the AP assistant named R1 and stooped and hunching behind her like some giant lurking monster, stood Henry, with a sheepish expression on his strange face. The top of his head was close to the ceiling and his legs
“Oh, hello,” Ram said, pointing to the door they had emerged from. “Hi Henry, I’m glad to see you.”
“Glad to see you, too, Lieutenant.”
“Call me Ram.”
“Alright, I will do that. Ram.”
R1 stepped forward and held out her hand. “I want to thank you for getting us out of Omega alive.”
Behind him Monash scoffed and muttered. “Barely.”
Ram ignored the doctor and took R1’s small hand in his. It was soft and cool. “You’re welcome.”
“I am so sorry about your injuries.”
Ram released her hand, with some reluctance. “Injuries are a part of the job.”
“And I am very sorry indeed about your poor friends.”
Ram nodded, recalling Cooper being incinerated and Flores being cut to pieces. “Thank you.” He quickly changed the subject and pointed to the doorway behind Henry. “What’s through there?”
R1 glanced at Monash before she answered. “Living quarters, offices, workshop.”
“Alright,” Ram said. “Henry, you feel like showing me around?”
“Okay, sure.”
Ram followed him through the door without speaking to Monash, which Ram knew would infuriate him. But the doctor and R1 both followed Ram and Henry inside, trailing behind in silence.
“That’s my room in there.” Henry pointed to a doorway.
Ram poked his head inside and found a dormitory with two rows of three massive bunks. “It’s very nice, Henry. Very spacious. We were expecting more subjects?”
“They were prepared for up to six subjects from our program,” R1 said, while Monash scowled behind her. “Six g-couche
s in the launch ship, six berths on this vessel, and multiple staff from Omega.”
“What went wrong?” Ram asked her.
“It is not your concern,” Monash snapped.
“It was not any one thing,” R1 said. “There were multiple failures. Such things are expected to some extent in complex systems.”
“Overly complex systems, maybe,” Ram said.
“Perhaps,” R1 said. “But you understand this program was designed and implemented at an incredible speed under enormous pressures. We were being invaded. We did not have time to arrange everything as we would have liked. Whatever criticisms you may have of our systems, I can assure you that there is nothing we did not think of at the time.”
“I’m not criticizing anyone. It’s just… it seems like these are the most important… schemes… ever in human history and there are always so many problems.”
Monash scoffed. “You have no idea. You have no idea at all! You are merely a subject. You are a product of our systems and you think to stand before me and lecture me on my failures? You don’t understand that we are beyond the cutting edge here. These damned orbs have pushed us beyond our limits and yet we rose to the challenge each time, did we not? We are here, are we not? You are a backup of a backup of an experimental line. And you think yourself worthy of questioning me. Ha! Do not question me. You would not even exist if it were not for me and my colleagues.”
“Alright, there, Doctor Monash.” Henry held up his hands. “Alright, now. That’s enough, now.”
Monash scowled. “Look what you’ve done now, you’ve gone and upset Henry.”
“I’m not upset, Doctor Monash, I just think we would all feel better if we took a moment to—”
Monash strode toward Henry. “Do you understand that I made you?”
Henry sighed. “Of course I do.”
“Do you? Do you really? Well then, I think you should show some respect. Come with me. Come away with me now, you are already late for your fifteen-hundred post-exercise meal. I can smell it, they have delivered, come with me and we shall eat and discuss this evening’s lessons.”
Henry smiled at Ram as he left, following Monash into another room.
“Is there something…” Ram said, addressing R1, “something wrong with him?”
“With Henry or Jacob?” R1 said.
Ram smiled nervously. “I can see quite clearly that Doctor Monash is… in some way suffering from mental health issues. But I meant Henry. He does not seem like a warrior. But more than that, is he… I don’t know. Is he… slow?”
“Far from it.” R1 sighed. “But I know what you mean. Please, Ram, come with me.”
He followed her into a smaller room with nothing inside but an empty table and an array of chairs set before a wall which was filled with a black screen. R1 turned the screen on and flicked through a series of images before choosing a video. It showed Henry in a vast arena, crouched low, advancing on a massive Hex skittering around with its legs splashing in shallow water.
“This is an Avar recording,” Ram said, recognizing it at once.
R1 simply watched and Ram did, too.
On the screen, Henry darted forward across the arena with his huge hands up. He moved so fast that he was almost a blur.
But so did the simulated hex champion, skittering forward on its sixteen spindly tentacles where they clashed together. As Henry grasped at the bulbous thorax above the legs, the hex ducked low, splaying some legs out, folding others up.
Henry twisted away, fending off the attacks that came at him with desperate slaps until one got through and pierced his arm, and then another and more, before Henry fell as the hex speared him and sliced him into minced beef. The recording froze with the hex over Henry’s bloody corpse, its tentacles inside him and others raised in the air, curved like whips.
“So he’s fast,” Ram said. “So fast I can barely see it. But the hex is faster, is that it?”
R1 wiped her lips with her index finger. “This recording was played back at seventy-three percent speed to allow us to make out what was happening.”
“He can move faster than the eye can see?” Ram said.
“Faster than your eye can see, yes. Mine too.”
“And the hex is faster still?”
“No. That is, we’re not certain what it’s upper limit might be. The tips of the two razor tentacles and the two venom tentacles, when whipped through the air in this way, certainly move faster than any part of Henry. But the overall motor speed of the upper limbs between the first and second joints, are in the same range that Henry can manage.”
After a moment, Ram realized she meant that Henry was as fast as the hex.
“So what is it, then? Why can’t he win? Is it the hex poison from the venom spikes?”
“Henry has been engineered so that his physiology automatically counteracts the hex alkaline toxins without immediately impacting his performance. It will still hurt like hell and if he gets stung enough it will kill him but it will take a few minutes. Which is longer than he usually lasts in the arena. So, no, it is not that the toxins slow Henry down and cause him to lose. He also loses the simulations when he is not struck by the pair of venom spike tentacles.”
“Maybe he should use the smokescreen to cut a limb into a spear and use that to kill the hex?”
R1 smiled. “The Rama Defense does not work on the hex, sadly. Not in simulations and not in practice. Before we were cut off, the combat trainers gathered data on the strength of the hex carapace. It is remarkably resistant to puncture due to its structure. The only things that have a chance is the hex venom spikes but even they are likely to snap or fail to penetrate. It is hypothesized the spikes evolved to kill prey animals rather than for attacks on each other. However, the bladed arms do cut into the carapace. They are sharp with molecular precision but also the shape of the blades provides precisely the right cutting profile to penetrate the carapace of the thorax. That is what dictated the combat trainers’ development of these strategies.”
Ram nodded. “When did you lose your combat trainers? Early on, I assume?”
“Some, yes. Others we lost more recently. Two in training accidents. Henry has been trained since day one on how to fight and his training was intensive and practical.”
“So, it’s your techniques, then. The strategies formulated in Outpost Omega just aren’t cutting it.”
“Perhaps,” R1 said, nodding.
“But you don’t think so,” Ram said, peering at her. “And yet you’re too… embarrassed? To say what you do think.”
R1 came and sat beside Ram. “Henry has been engineered to do this. He’s been trained to do it. He wants to do it with everything in his being. He is a very conscientious man.”
“Okay, well, that’s good.”
“No, it’s not.”
“It’s not?”
“He scores very high on conscientiousness. That means he is organized and dependable, displays self-discipline and acts dutifully and he knows that his duty is to achieve our program parameters and ultimately defeat the enemy champion. So, while that can make him a pleasure to work with and just be around generally, his high conscientiousness makes him overly focused and somewhat rigid in his approach. He has a high preference for planned over spontaneous challenges.”
“His lack of creativity.”
“Correct. You, for example, do have a strong sense of duty but you dislike anyone having authority over you. This combination is often found in the military in senior officers who continue to climb the ranks. Your lower conscientiousness means you can approach problems with flexibility and spontaneity, which is an advantage in the kind of small unit engagements you excelled at in Avar and, I understand, in your subsequent short UNOP Marine career, as well as your victory over the wheelhunter champion. Henry would not have thought of burning his arm bones into a spear.”
“So I’m the perfect balance, right? That’s great.”
“Your lower conscientiousness also manifests in
your abuse of your body.”
“What abuse?”
“Your addictions to food and to Avar, your relaxed attitude toward personal hygiene, and your repeated avoidable injuries in combat.”
“Avoidable? I was lucky to get out of all those fights alive. It’s a miracle I’m even standing here.”
“I agree. You place your physical self in excessive physical danger because you have a relaxed attitude to your personal safety and to your long-term survival. But it is something that you can work to counteract, if you wish to do so. We would certainly do better with you in the program long-term, if such a thing was possible. In the short term, however, we need you to help with Henry.”
“You asked Lieutenant Commander Xenakis for my help?”
“Yes, I did.”
“You’re not like any Artificial Person I ever heard of before.”
“No, I am not.”
“Alright, well, what is it that you want me to do?”
“Draw it out of him. Draw out his anger. His killer instinct. Encourage him to bend and to break the rules.”
A sound behind him made Ram turn in time to see Monash and Henry opening the door.
“You’re watching my training?” Henry said, grim-faced. “Do you not think it’s any good, Lieutenant Seti?”
“I think you’re a wonder, Henry. I’ve never seen anything move so fast in my entire life. I almost feel sorry for that filthy hex bastard. He won’t know what hit him.”
Henry grinned and looked down at Doctor Monash. His face fell.
“You’re encouraging him to break the rules, R1?” the doctor stepped closer to her, glaring. “These rules are in place for a reason.”
R1 lowered her head and her voice. “You know it needs to be done, Jacob.”
He glared at her and opened his mouth to argue before Ram slapped his hands on the arms of his chair and stood up.
“Alright,” Ram said, grinning. “I’ll do it.”
“Do what?” Henry asked, half smiling.
