by Dan Davis
“How was your first night in the barracks?” Milena asked as Ram sat down.
They were meeting face to face in a section on the opposite side of the ludus ring. The room was small, set up as a counselor’s office. Ram took a seat in a chair made for his size and Milena reclined in the comfortable one opposite.
He looked at her closely, peered into her eyes. Her head tilted professionally to one side, her eyebrows raised in open enquiry. They probably taught that expression in counseling training, as if she was interested in what he was going to tell her and as if she was prepared to listen and be empathetic. But it was bullshit. She wasn’t there to help him. She was trying to present a poker face but he could see anxiety behind them, he was sure. She knew, no doubt about it, she knew.
“I can’t fucking believe you can sit there and ask me that,” Ram said, crossing his arms. They were so heavily muscled it was quite uncomfortable and he uncrossed them. “You're monitoring everything that happens to me. You tell me how things are going.”
“You're angry because something happened last night,” Milena said. “Yes, we monitor everything. I noted your adrenaline and cortisol spiking, your heart racing and all the other signs that you were undergoing some exertion. What happened?”
“You know what happened,” Ram said, shuddering. “I don't want to talk about it,” he said. “This place is crazy. Is this really the best way to come up with the best fighters on Earth? Really? It's like one of those college fraternity clubs from America. It's like an army barracks. It's like a school or something. Who are these people? How can something so important be entrusted to maniacs like these guys? Isn't there a better way?”
Milena looked Ram square in the face. “Mael attacked you.”
“Of course he did. Him and his gang,” Ram said. “The others even said he would, like it was inevitable, like what happened to that woman Samira. Why put me in with someone like that? Do you want him to kill me?”
Milena chewed her lower lip. “Why would we want that?”
“I have no protection in there. Make allies? Make allies, you said. Those people were useless. No way they couldn’t hear what was going on, did they bother to help me? Did they fuck. You have to help me. You’re here to help me, right? So don’t just tell me to get allies, I need you to tell me, right now, how I can defend myself against those psychopaths. What’s going to happen tonight is that I will get another beating and worse and then what are you people going to do? Why bother to bring me out here if you’re just going to leave me to get beaten to death in my first week? This is crazy.”
“You're bigger than Mael,” Milena said, tapping on her screen. “Bigger than anyone in the Sol System. Stronger, too, probably.”
“He's a trained fighter,” Ram pointed out, feeling a little less annoyed, suddenly.
“So are you.”
“In Avar?” Ram laughed at the very idea of it. “He's done it for real, his XP is all IRL. It's different.”
“It’s not so different. Avar was designed to be useful in the real world, it provides analogous experience. It has been proven that proficiencies in specific skills in Avar translate to proficiencies in the real world. You know this. You just never put any of your thousands of hours of Avar training into IRL practice before.”
“Exactly,” Ram said. “And look what he did to me.”
Ram pulled up his top to show her the bruising Mael and the others had caused.
But the mass of mottled purple that had covered his abdomen that morning was gone, other than a touch of redness here and there across the rippling muscles of his stomach. For a moment, Ram wondered if he had dreamt the whole attack. His confusion must have shown.
“If you were expecting to see wounds,” Milena said, “you should remember that your new body has remarkably accelerated tissue repair capabilities.”
“To help when we fight the Wheelhunter,” Ram said, pulling his vest back down over his abs. He was almost disappointed that his bruises were gone. They had been pretty spectacular and he'd never really had any proper injury before and he’d been as bizarrely proud of them as he was of his new genitalia.
“No,” Milena said. “A Wheeler fight would never last long enough for the healing effect to be noticed. And it was not designed to heal major injuries but instead to facilitate faster recovery from the exertions of training. You experience little delayed onset muscle soreness after training, muscles recover faster when overloaded, skin stitches together rapidly if you get lacerations in sparring and so on. If you break a bone or worse then you'll heal quicker than normal, sure enough but you're still out for days or weeks the same as anybody else.”
“Yeah, like Eziz, his fingers. He was one of the ones that attacked me last night.” Ram did not wish to give voice to what Eziz had threatened to do to him.
“He is one of Mael's true believers. He knows, for certain, that Mael is humanity’s best hope. Stay away from him.”
“Sifa and Te told me about the others. The Chinese woman called Jun with the neck like a guar. The American woman called Genesis looks insane, an Ethiopian guy Gondar. They all attacked me together last night along with Mael and Eziz, I’m sure of it.
Milena’s face was stern. “Stay away from all of them.”
Ram couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “That’s almost all the subjects in the ludus, there’s no way I can avoid them, you must know that.”
Milena shook her head, her hair shining in the artificial light. “You should have listened to Te and locked your door. That’s an easy fix from now on and that will keep you completely secure after lights out.”
Ram sighed. “Yeah, alright, fair enough. I fucked up there, I admit it. So I’ll be fine at night but what if they come for me outside of that?”
In truth, he felt as though he could deal with a beating, even being beaten to death. He realized just how frightened he had been about being raped by Eziz and maybe the others.
“You might mock but I also recommend that you continue to seek protection from Alina and her allies, Sifa and Te Zhang. They are united by their opposition to Mael's methods and from the fear of living and training with him. Alina does not lead in the same way that Mael does, she is simply astonishingly capable and intelligent and, although she may not seem it, empathetic. But she's also disinterested in dominating and leading. A natural draw for Sifa and Te who have no military background and also, somehow, appear to have at least a little compassion in them and chafe at authority. They believe in Alina's ability to beat the Wheelhunter and they are horrified at Mael being humanity’s greatest hero.”
“What about the others?”
“Yes, Alejandra, Didem and Javi. They all have a tendency toward social isolation or they flip back and forth between the two camps. Really, they do what they can to stay safe from Mael’s violence.”
“It still seems crazy to me that he is allowed to behave like this, dictate the whole show. Doesn’t Director Zuma want the rest of us to be safe?”
While she tapped away again at her screen, Milena shrugged, pausing with her shoulders up. “Why would she? All she needs, all the Mission and Project needs is to produce a single great fighter who will defeat the alien once we reach Orb Station Zero.”
Ram sighed and sat back.
“Te Zhang has this theory about the origin of the Wheelhunters. He says maybe they were manufactured by the Orb itself, through manipulating human or earthling DNA.”
Milena smiled. “A persistent theory amongst the more credulous guys in UNOP but it has been pretty thoroughly discredited. What about the fact that the Wheelhunters arrive in a ship, through a kind of hyper-advanced space warping drive? We see the alien spaceships arriving at the Orb, so it’s not as if the Wheelers are on the ship. And yes, they have DNA and RNA but their cell structure is different from eukaryotes. I’m no cell biologist but I’m told there are minor but unmistakable differences in cell structure. They have something equivalent to but different from mitochondria so you can imagine
the knock on implications for cell function. Even more than that, the Orb has explained that we are fighting for the right to colonize nearby systems. The Wheelhunters are being given star systems to colonize every time they beat us.”
“That's just what the Orb tells us,” Ram said. “What if it's lying? What if your intel people are messing up the translation?”
“For decades we've been building the biggest optical and radio telescopes we can technically achieve and we're looking closely at our nearest Sun-like stars. We're even sending microprobes toward these neighbors, accelerating them to ten or even fifteen percent the speed of light toward where these stars and their systems will be when the probes reach them. Indications so far are that all our nearest sun-like stars have either terrestrial planets around Earth masses or gas or ice giants with moons that are within an acceptable Earth mass within the habitable zone for their parent star.”
“Every star near us has planets we could colonize?”
“As far as we can tell,” Milena said, nodding emphatically. “Tau Ceti has three bodies we could colonize right now, if only we could get there. A rocky planet with a surface temperature allowing liquid water and a breathable atmosphere. It has a moon around an ice giant that is .91 Earth mass and has abundant water and breathable atmosphere. Another planet in the system has an atmosphere but it is very cold. Still, we could live on it inside habitats, as they do on Mars. But it is more than habitability. Our investigations suggest that there is electromagnetic activity of non-natural origin in some of these systems. So, whole new systems that could be ours if we beat the Wheelhunters. If we lose, they get the Solar System. That's what the Orb Station tells us. Why should we doubt it?”
“And we're risking the future of humanity on Mael?” Ram said. “A madman?”
“Mael, Alina and the rest of you, yes,” Milena said. “But all of you are just the end point. There is a hundred years of the Project behind you and the blood and toil of thousands upon thousands of people over those decades. All working toward this aim, many without even ever knowing about it. Did Zuma give you her line about how UNOP is a spear? Her heavy-handed metaphor?”
“Don’t think so.”
“She likes to tell the subjects that, figuratively, you are the point of the spear. We on this ship are the shaft of the spear. The leaders of Earth and the rest of the solar system are the ones grasping the spear and thrusting it toward that Wheelhunter that will be waiting for us inside the Orb.”
“And Mael is the best of us? That guy is insane.”
“He suffers from significant psychopathology, yes,” Milena said. “As does Alina. And yet they are the two best-performing people ever studied in this program. Which you can take that to mean they are the best fighters in human history.”
“You admit he's crazy,” Ram said. “Not just him, either. The others who attacked me, just because he said so, probably. Even Alina seems, I don't know, like she's not really here. Like she's schizophrenic.”
Milena tilted her head to one side. “Why would you assume that fighting prowess to corresponds to sanity?”
Ram opened his mouth. Then he closed it again.
“Alina has her share of neuroses,” Milena said. “More than most. But she was assigned an experienced driver to help her through the fluctuations of her emotional state. That’s the main issue with her performance. She has performed as well or better than Mael in most tests and assessments. She has demonstrated faster reaction time, faster hand speed, better decision making. She has lifted more weight, pushed heavier loads. She has run at a faster pace, for longer than Mael ever has.”
“So how come she's not the favorite? Because she's insane?”
“She’s not insane,” Milena said. “No one would get on this ship if they were assessed to be a danger to the mission, not even Mael. She is inconsistent, that's all. Alina is extremely intelligent but also has an overabundance of empathy. She has a tendency to over think things and also to experience repetitive thinking. Combined with what I assume are unresolved emotional problems, this leads to her lacking focus. Her performance is unpredictable.”
“You said you assume she has unresolved emotional problems? You don't know for sure?”
Milena shrugged. “I'm not her driver. I'm not privy to their discussions so I don't know her specific conditions and I'm not diagnosing anything. I'm just telling you what I have observed of her, generally.”
“Even still, it just sounds as though you're saying she's as mental as Mael.”
“She might be our Subject Alpha if it weren't for her inconsistencies,” Milena said. “But Mael is different. He is absolutely driven. He buys into our mission with every fiber of his being. He will drive himself as hard as he can in order to be humanity's best hope for victory. The traits that make him like this also contribute to his aggressiveness, his dominating behaviors. His inability to let perceived slights go unpunished.”
“Why don’t you just fix him?” Ram said. “You guys have the most incredible medical technology ever, I bet Dr. Fo could do something. Doesn’t his driver control his hormones?”
Milena sighed. “If only it were so simple. A lot of these behaviors come from what I would guess was an abusive home environment when he was a child and I also know he has certain brain regions that are underdeveloped. These could be genetic or brain damage from childhood but there are areas of his orbitofrontal cortex that do not work as they should. And yes, it would likely be possible to repair some of the brain damage. We could restrict his testosterone uptake. Yet we could not oppress these socially disruptive traits without impacting his performance. In fact, if anything we should do everything we can to make him more aggressive, within reason.”
“The more of an asshole he is, the greater the chance for saving humanity?”
She nodded. “A crude way of putting it but not inaccurate.”
Ram leaned forward and rested his head in his hands. “So what should I do? How do I survive another beating?”
“If he'd wanted to kill you last night, he would have done. He might not actually have any homicidal tendencies toward you.”
“That supposed to make me feel better?” Ram said. “Is he a rapist?”
Milena pursed her lips. “I suggest that you properly lock your door every night. Even then, do not be alone if you can help it. Attempt to woo Alina into friendship, although be careful not to annoy her because she would make a bad enemy. Te and Sifa might protect you. I believe they are engaged in sexual activity on most nights, although I don't know if they are romantically involved. You might attempt sharing a room with one or the other of them, or both of course, if they allow it.”
“Is Sifa trustworthy? She seems so friendly, it makes me wonder.”
“Wonder if it is an act?” Milena said. “She certainly uses her sexual charisma, extensive physical touching and so on, in order to manipulate others. The extent to which it is a conscious strategy versus her normal behavior, who knows.”
“You think it might be a tactical thing? What’s her endgame?”
Milena shrugged. “What we do know is that every one of the subjects, including you, is ultracompetitive. She might be messing with people’s emotions on purpose or just screwing around, having fun. A couple of the subjects have been hurt or offended by her sudden lack of attention after a liaison. Perhaps she is callous or oblivious or perhaps she does not invest herself emotionally in sex.”
“She sounds pretty great. But she’s kind of intimidating.” Ram looked down at Milena. “Sexually.”
“Or you can attempt to begin a relationship with one of the other heterosexual women, though most have arrangements that you might be disrupting that might cause you additional problems. Of course, depending on how fearful you are, you could attempt to strike up a relationship with one of the homosexual men. Javi, I believe, could be persuaded if you treated him right.”
Ram sat up straighter. “Are you kidding? I'm not gay, I couldn't do that.”
“Why not?
Are you saying you wouldn't trade sexual favors with a man to save yourself from being beaten to death?”
Ram drummed his fingers on the arms of his chair. “Which way does Alina swing?”
Milena sighed. “You’d be willing to have sexual intercourse with her, even though Alina has remarkably masculine features and physiology. If you can see past that, why not widen your options and give yourself to the men, also? We’re all people, does it matter what shape our genitalia is?”
“I don’t know, yes, it just does,” Ram said. “And Alina is a woman, she has a woman’s voice. And, you know, she doesn't have balls. Does she?”
“Only one way to find out,” Milena said. “I'm not certain but I believe she has no especially strong feelings for men or women, although she has had relationships with both. She is not an especially sexual person and engages in it somewhat unemotionally.”
“You’re a psychologist, you must know I’d rather not prostitute myself.”
She stared at him in disbelief. “You’d rather not? It’s rarely a first choice for people, Rama. You don’t have to enjoy it, it’s a transactional relationship. You can perform your own cost-benefit analysis by asking yourself a simple question. Is your life worth less to you than a fistful of blowjobs? Anyway, your nighttime bodyguard relationship does not have to be based on sex. You could attempt to find some sort of reciprocal relationship with anyone willing to risk the wrath of Mael in return for something you can provide.”
“Okay, good, great.” Ram leaned forward. “What can I provide?”
“I don't know, what can you?”
He sighed and sat back. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. I'll have to have a think about it.”
“Well, think fast, Ram, because our time is up. You have to return to your fellow subjects. I believe it's resistance training this morning.” She stood and folded away her screen.
“Oh man,” Ram said, standing too. “Te Zhang said he's got a bet riding on me lifting more weight than Mael today.”
Milena paused. “Interesting dilemma.”