Back at his quarters in the SAF residential area, Rei changed again, into his ground duty fatigues. Since he had no intention of going to Captain Foss’s examination room, he headed to the sortie briefing room instead. Captain Foss followed him without a word.
The room was dark and deserted, the ceiling lights automatically turning on as they entered. As they did Rei felt a twinge of preflight nerves, which he hadn’t sensed for a while.
The main monitor along the front wall of the room, which normally would have displayed mission action data, was dark now. As Rei stood in front of the computer terminal to the side, Captain Foss finally spoke.
“How do you feel? What are your impressions, coming here?”
“My impression is that I want to get back into the fight as soon as I can. My physical rehab is going just fine, better than you claim. As far as I see, there’s no problem with me going back into combat. Major Booker’s just being cautious. He’s after perfection. Is that what you’re after too?”
“I am, though my position is different from the major’s.”
“What is your position in the FAF? Why did you come here? It doesn’t seem like you were forced to join up, but I don’t get the sense that you’re just another doctor who’s hot to do their job either. Military doctors don’t disobey their superior officers.”
“I’m not disobeying my superior. Who happens to be General Cooley. Even Major Booker has to admit that.”
“You’re just like the JAM,” Rei said, his voice cracking. “I don’t know what you think of me and I can’t communicate with you very well. I don’t know what you’re doing here on Faery. Meanwhile, you just keep coming after me. You’re an unknown, Foss. Does General Cooley even know who you are?”
“She’s a distant relative of mine.”
“Huh?” Rei leaned against the computer console, not thinking as he made his dumbfounded grunt of surprise. Captain Foss kept her eyes on him as she drew closer and sat down in one of the front-row seats. Almost like a child who’d been ordered to stay after class, thought Rei.
“Although,” Captain Foss said, “I’d never met her until I came here. She didn’t know we were related either. Still, I used the family connection. I was never going to get anywhere with my research into the psychological makeup of FAF pilots without actually coming here. The truth is, I wanted to come here as a civilian.”
“So that’s how it is,” Rei said. “What a pain in the ass.”
“Major Booker said the same thing. But my interest wasn’t going to get any priority unless I worked here as a military doctor. I’m working on a detailed report of the patients I’ve examined, which includes you. But there’s no evidence that Major Booker has read what I’ve submitted so far. I find it insane that he’d just ignore it and then claim that I’m unnecessary. It wasn’t like that back in the Systems Corps. My work was valued there. From what I’ve seen, I’d say that the SAF is a collection of weirdos.”
“That doesn’t sound like the way a doctor would talk.”
“Okay, that’s true. I was a little rash there. But I’m a human being with feelings too, you know,” Foss said.
“You’re the one who needs counseling. You aren’t used to the environment in the SAF. I don’t need you. Anything that has to do with me, I’ll handle by myself. I’m not looking for help from anyone. Conversely, I don’t help anyone. I don’t want to get wrapped up in anyone else’s feelings. Any feelings that aren’t mine are illusions. That’s the sort of people who make up the SAF.”
“Perfectly put,” Captain Foss replied with a nod. “You’re not abnormal individually, but in a group, you literally become ‘special.’ The idea of putting together a team of people with a limited ability to feel empathy is fascinating to me.”
“That’s thanks to Major Booker’s skills. Or, more accurately, to General Cooley’s. The JAM aren’t human. They’re beings whose true nature is still a mystery to us. The general thinks that you need people with inhuman abilities in order to collect data on and analyze entities like the JAM. She probably thinks that human sympathy would lead to projecting human qualities onto the JAM, and we’d end up coming to the wrong conclusions.”
“Assuming the JAM actually exist and are a real threat.”
“That’s true. There’s a definite possibility that they don’t really exist,” Rei said.
“What did you just say? You mean you really believe that? I’m amazed. I just said they might not exist to see how shocked you’d be.”
“You may see the JAM as illusory, but that’s not how I see them. They may not have physical existence, but I can sense them,” Rei said. “Their existence is more real to me than yours is.”
“Perhaps the FAF successfully repelled the original JAM long ago. What if the JAM we face now is an imaginary enemy created by the SAF to maintain this war environment? It’s easy for people like you to live in an environment like this, so maybe you’ve gotten together as a group to deceive everyone else. What do you think of that possibility?”
“I’m sure there are some people in the world who think that. It’s not that strange to me.”
“In other words, you’ve considered the possibility as well,” Foss said.
“I think that if a person were drowning in front of me, even I would hold my hand out to them. I’d have to help them. It’s not a question of feelings. It’s a reflexive action.”
“So…?”
Captain Foss didn’t question his abrupt change of topic. It’s a good method to induce me to talk, Rei thought.
“You seem like you’re drowning in your own thoughts,” he said. “I’m able to sense that. But if I were a JAM, I wouldn’t see you. Probably couldn’t see you. If you were drowning, the JAM wouldn’t directly attack you, but they wouldn’t help you either. They would ignore you completely. As far as the JAM are concerned, human beings don’t exist. I just don’t think the human imagination could come up with beings that can’t even perceive us as the antagonists in a story.”
“You shouldn’t underestimate the power of human imagination, or the clout of others. It may just be my own impression that the SAF has both the imagination and clout to create an illusion like that, but your viewpoint that I seem to be drowning just reinforces it,” Captain Foss replied.
“You can see JAM fighter planes with your naked eye, and they attack. But we can’t see what’s flying them. It may be the same for the JAM as far as humans go. They may not be able to recognize us directly, but when they began to sense the threat we posed, I think they started building a human-perception mechanism. One with the same sensory organs as humans to act as a system to perceive the world as we do. In other words, human duplicates.
“The human side of the war had the means to oppose the JAM from the start—combat machine intelligences, of which Yukikaze is a representative. It doesn’t take much imagination to come up with an idea like this. Neither does the idea that the SAF invented the JAM to justify its own existence to others. All people ever do is think up things that are convenient for them to believe.”
“And in that way, you can psychologically draw me in,” said Captain Foss. “Are you conscious of that and able to judge that for yourself?”
“I think you should withdraw your diagnosis that I’m not psychologically fit for combat. The JAM are the enemy, not Yukikaze. I realize that anew even as I say it. That’s thanks to your counseling. You really are a miracle worker,” Rei said. “Here I am, in the middle of a war, having forgotten about the existence of the enemy, and you’ve made me realize who they are: the JAM are the ones I should be out there killing.”