He sat — or floated or whatever you wanted to call it — in the Primary Strategic Situation Overview Space as it was rather grandly called, surrounded by the other members of the Grand War Council. The council was mostly composed of people who were his comrades, friends, colleagues and respected rivals. There was only the barest minimum of contrarians, awkwardistas and outright defeatists, and even they argued their points well and arguably contributed to the working consensus. Human, alien, whatever, he knew all of them about as well as was possible by now, and yet still he felt quite alone.
He looked round them.
There was no perfect Real analogy for the situation he and the rest were currently in: it was as though they all hovered around some modest spherical space maybe a handful of metres across. From the outside the sphere’s surface appeared solid and opaque, but you could stick your head through it from the outside if you had the right clearance and a sufficient degree of military seniority.
You stuck your head through and there you were; one bodiless head sticking through protruding into this dimly lit spherical space with lots of other bodiless heads — only a minority of them in any sense human.
Usually a spherical display hovered in the centre of the space. Right now the display was showing some detail of the general battle space; an antique faux-Real volume in which small rocket ships armed with nuclear missiles, particle beam guns and CREWs went skating around a few billion asteroids spread in a ring round a sun, blasting and zapping each other. He had seen such battle environments many times before. Versions of him had invested the simmed humans fighting in these, or invested the machines.
Most of his colleagues seemed to be discussing some pseudo-strategic detail of this particular environment that had long since ceased to interest him. He left them to it, retreating to his own musings and internalised visualisation.
We’re losing, he thought again. There is a war in heaven and we are losing it.
The war was amongst the Heavens, between the Afterlives, if you wanted to be pedantic about it. And it was over the Hells.
“Vatueil? Captain Vatueil?”
That was his name, but he wasn’t going to say anything back to them because he’d been told not to. He’d been ordered not to, and orders meant you had to do what you were told.
“Can you hear me?”
Yes, he could, but he still wouldn’t say anything.
“Vatueil! Report! That’s a direct order!”
That made him feel strange. If that was an order then he had to obey it. But then he had been ordered not to do anything that somebody else told him, not for now, not until A Superior got here who had the right codes. So that meant that what he had just heard wasn’t really an order at all. It was confusing.
He wanted just not to listen to what they said. He could do that, he could shut off comms, but he needed to listen so he could track where they were. The confusion made a sort of hurt in him.
He made the thing that he was in check its weapons again, counting rounds, measuring battery status, listening to the energy cells’ steady, reassuring hum and doing a systems-readiness check. That was better. Doing these things made him feel better. Doing these things made him feel good.
“He can’t hear you.” That was a different voice, saying that.
“The techs say he probably can. And he can probably hear you too, so watch what you say.”
“Can’t we private channel?” (The different voice.)
“No. We have to assume he can access them all too, so unless you want to bump helmets or use two cups and a string or something, watch what you say.”
“Sheesh.” (The different voice.)
He did not know what “Sheesh” meant.
“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.