“A drop, a raindrop, a mote,” said the major. “Zero. That’s the meaning of your name, Rei.”
“Look, I was born trouble,” Rei replied without turning around, still standing in front of the coffee maker. “My parents split up right after I was born, and I was raised in a home along with plenty of other kids like me. But the truth is, I was happy back then.”
“Sounds depressing. What time is it?”
“Coming up on 1658 hours. Wanna check things out up top, Jack?”
“Sure,” said the major. “I’ll allow it.”
The two men left the briefing room and headed for a huge elevator bank on the opposite side of the hangar. They walked in silence. The major carried his boomerang.
Elevator Three, the closest one, was a hundred meters away, around a tractor and a maintenance ramp. There were no elevators just for people here. Rei grabbed a remote control box hanging on the wall and inserted his ID card into the top to activate it as they stepped onto the elevator floor.
“Shall we go?” said the major.
The thirty-by-twenty-meter-wide platform began to rise. As they ascended Rei kept his head tilted back, looking up the shaft. He’d always found the pattern made by the rings of light panels encircling it beautiful. The platform paused briefly as they waited for an isolation bulkhead above them to open. There were three of these bulkheads between them and the surface, each ensuring that its respective level was kept airtight. The elevator’s power source switched over at these points too; in the event of a failure, power drawn from the previous level would act as a backup system. Between each level there were also emergency bulkheads, each with their own independent power systems, which protected against fire, bombing, and contamination. At the last level, there was also a thick concrete blast wall that merged organically with the deck.
Once the platform stopped moving, the two men exited through an enormous square opening in the wall and were then on the planet’s surface. They were in the receiving hangar, although it was more of a shade port than an actual hangar. Bright sunlight streamed down. The generator vehicles, emergency power support units, and fire trucks stood silent.
The two of them did not walk out onto the runway but exited through the rear instead. The grassland outside was pale green. Facing them only about five hundred meters away was the edge of the primeval forest. Rei had heard that Faery didn’t have a formal land army because the forest was just too nasty. I can believe it, he thought.
With a thunderous roar, three interceptors took off in formation for an air patrol mission. The lieutenant and the major walked until they were clear of the shadow cast by the building’s enormous roof, then sat down on the grass. Faery’s version of grass was soft and pliant, and did not prickle at all. The blades were a blueish green, with deep blue streaks in the center. When cut, it smelled like irises.
“The wind’s delicious,” Rei said, taking a deep breath. “Nothing like the filtered air below.”
“I like it out here in midday because you can’t see the Bloody Road. I can’t relax when that thing’s there to weird me out.”
“That’s something I wouldn’t expect you to say.”
Major Booker drew the large combat knife he carried at his hip from its sheath, studied the trailing edge of the boomerang in his hand, and began cautiously shaving it. “Human instinct,” he said without stopping his whittling. “Not accurate, but very rarely wrong.”
Rei urged him to try the boomerang out. Blowing the wood shavings off, the major stood up and threw it with a practiced hand. It sailed into the clear, nearly cloudless afternoon sky, making a faint whirring sound as it cut through the air.
“It’s not coming back.” The boomerang traced a large circular path and then fell about fifteen meters away from them. “Was it because of the wind?”
“This doesn’t even count as a wind,” said the major as he went to retrieve the boomerang. “I made one that always came back, no matter the wind conditions or how badly it flew.”
He sat back down and took his knife to the wood again while Rei sprawled out at his side, looking up at the sky.
“Did it break?”
“What?”
“That perfect boomerang. The one you said you made.”
“I broke it. Actually, I didn’t make it to begin with. A computer did. I fed it the requirements and it executed thousands of simulations in a virtual airspace before spitting out the wing shape data. Then I input the data into a digitally controlled tooling machine and manufactured it. That was Unit 1.”
“I take it from your tone that it didn’t work.”
“The virtual airspace in the computer wasn’t a close enough model to real airspace. Next, I got the idea of putting an accelerometer into the wing and then fed that data into the computer. It could do variable pitch and all sorts of things. The one I fitted with a leading edge flap control was the best. That was Unit 2.”
“And what about Unit 3?” asked Rei as he spit out a bitter stalk of grass he’d been chewing. “Was that one perfect?”
The major stopped whittling and pointed his knife at the scar on his cheek. “This was the result. The wound that sent me to Faery. Ruined my good looks too.”
“I didn’t know that,” Rei said, raising himself up on his elbows and peering at the major’s cheek. “You got that scar from a boomerang?”
“It was fast. It pitched back at me from an angle I didn’t expect, and I couldn’t dodge it. Even though it had enough load resistance to give me a nasty clip, it still flew past me, made another turn, and came back again. I barely managed to catch it. I’d designed it to come back in a way that would make it easy to catch, but how it actually flew… It made that decision itself, based on the conditions at that moment. I never wanted to throw it again after that.”
“Did you put a rocket motor on it or something?”
“No. In the end, it was just a boomerang. But I’d installed a super-layered, single-chip artificial intelligence LSI into it. Since I could never get the feedback control to work, it was necessary to give it a control method to let it look ahead.”
“Predictive control, you mean?”
“Yeah. I threw the prototype boomerang again and again. Each time, the LSI would judge the conditions, master them, search for the causes of failure, and gradually learn to accurately predict them and respond instantly. Since the learning function was coded into the circuitry of the AI unit’s hardware, I didn’t even have to teach it the basic process. I just ordered it to use all the data from its sensors to adjust its flight path so that it would return to the launch point. That’s it. I flew it for six months and eventually lost the ability to predict how it would fly. Just when I was thinking that it was getting kind of dangerous, wham! I got three stitches from it. The doctor was clumsy and it hurt like hell. I thought about suing the wanker for malpractice, but he’s a doctor in the SAF. And since I’m technically his CO, I’d have to sue myself too.”
Booker re-sheathed the knife and stretched. He got up, brushed bits of grass off his fatigues, and threw the boomerang. It flew level and then climbed steeply from about twenty meters away, tracing a large arc.
“That’s the real thing,” the major said. “Machines are too stiff to fly naturally.” The wooden boomerang flew gracefully and landed lightly. “That’s why I can’t stand them.”
“Is that a warning, or are you being ironic?” Rei asked. He had a hard time taking that statement seriously from a man whose livelihood was building and operating advanced mechatronics.
“Take it however you want,” the major answered in his usual offhand manner. “My likes and dislikes have nothing to do with you.”