“Just like you! You know you can’t beat me in a fair fight, so you’d rather sacrifice your own grade just to drag me down with you. I’m surprised you didn’t try something like that during the battle, like a kamikaze attack or some shit.” There was only time for a brief retort before they reached the cafeteria, so Jerm made it count.
“Naw, I’d never destroy my own ship. That’s your thing.” He smiled only after rounding the corner. Marissa hung back in the hallway for a moment, struggling to calm herself. “You’re dead, Jeremy. Dead.” Of course he couldn’t hear her, but it was more for her own sake than his.
By the time the display sphere fell into position around his chair, Jeremy’s anxiety was gone. The last few hours of obsessive strategizing had worked it completely out of his body, all he felt now was intense anticipation for his battle with Marissa. This would be the real deal;
although his victory last night was decisive so far as the software was concerned, he’d glimpsed her expression just before his sphere descended and she obviously didn’t accept that outcome. It was her conviction that she was owed a do-over, and she didn’t especially need his agreement on that point. But this time, come what may, the outcome would be binding. Jeremy versus Marissa, round two.
So, try to imagine their surprise when the sim initialized and both found themselves surrounded by a starless blue expanse. A nebula? Jeremy scanned the blue void for irregularities in density he expected to see in a cloud of interstellar gas. Then as his craft turned to follow his gaze, he heard whirring. Whirring?
“Oh wonderful”, he thought, “the instructor gimped my thruster again”. Not so, it was definitely causing his craft to rotate, whatever passed for a gyroscope in this thing was responding to the movement.
It was a strange sensation, having a nerve ending that terminated in a gyroscope. Felt very much like his inner ear, but more precise. He continued exploring his central nervous system and found several instruments that didn’t seem to belong. Pressure sensor? Salinity sensor? Thermometer?
He turned a bit more, and again heard that muffled whirring. Familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it. His HUD indicated an approaching enemy signature, which soon came back as Marissa’s. Jeremy’s tranquility faltered. Here he was still getting his bearings, and she’d almost certainly come out swinging.
Her craft loomed into view, gradually increasing in detail as it emerged from the strange blue fog, then suddenly it all made sense. Before him was a submersible. Not like any he knew of, but definitely designed to move through water.
It was long and phallic with a frighteningly sharp nose cone and diving planes that resembled the fins of a missile. Embedded deep near the tip with a transparent acrylic cover to guide water hydrodynamically around it was a small transparent dome. Marissa’s avatar peered out from inside, flashing a menacing grin almost certainly reflected on her real face at that moment.
Jeremy took it upon himself to break the ice. “Uh, hi there. Any reason you haven’t attacked yet?” Signatures of the other students’ subs flickered into and out of existence in his peripheral vision. They were thoroughly occupied with one another some distance away, giving Jeremy and Marissa an opportunity to negotiate the terms of their duel.
“Oh don’t worry, Jerm.” It was the first time she’d called him that. “When I attack, you’ll know it. I just didn’t want you to claim that you were ambushed before you could-” it was all the opening he needed. A moment later, without even realizing he was capable of it, Jeremy was supercavitating.
The nose cone of his sub emitted some fraction of the exhaust redirected from the rocket engine behind him, creating a bubble within which he could fly at high speed despite being deep underwater. It also created the most profoundly grating noise he’d been exposed to up to that point, the indignant howl of sea water being torn apart at three hundred miles per hour.
Marissa hadn’t yet wished death upon him over radio for exploiting the opening, which seemed suspicious until his attempts to raise her on comms revealed that radio wouldn’t travel further than a hundred yards down here. Gloating would have to wait until after the match.
Diving for a few seconds left Jeremy surrounded by impenetrable inky darkness, and ascending just as suddenly confronted him with what looked like an upside down mountain range.
Closer inspection revealed that it was the underside of an ice shell floating atop this planet’s ocean, and in a moment of reflection Jeremy recalled snippets of a documentary about ice moons of Jupiter depicted almost exactly like this. Except at the time it was made the ice shell was believed to be at least a mile thick.
This one couldn’t possibly be, as enough light penetrated from the surface to illuminate the uppermost layer of ocean. The confusing radiant blue surrounding him at the outset of the sim he now understood to be seawater as seen close to the surface of an alien sea.
Jeremy sent a note to the instructor asking if he was a high concept comedian or just a common sadist.
The note he got back read “Logs showed two students in a networked sparring session last night. Wouldn’t be fair if some of you went into today’s lesson with a sneak preview the night before, so I threw you a curveball. Roll with it, and I’ll forget about last night. I reviewed your match with Marissa and it was a riot, I’m mainly just interested to see how today’s rematch plays out. Speaking of which by the time you get this she’ll be about zero point three nautical miles from your position, closing at 260 knots. If I were you I’d stop reading and evade.”
It took him a moment to register the connection between that last sentence and his immediate situation but when he did, his first reflex was to dive at a severe angle and begin swearing. She was just close enough to pick it up over comms. “I was wondering when you’d wake up. I’ve been trailing you for miles. Got anything new in your bag of tricks or are you just going to run away from me until you’re out of fuel?”
Fuel? He searched his peripheral vision and sure enough this new craft had a finite fuel supply. So the sim wasn’t amateurish, just arranged with a gradual learning curve that introduced real world constraints one at a time. His brain throbbed like a combustion engine firing on every cylinder, rapidly restructuring his strategy to account for the new info.
When computation completed, it called for a course of action that surprised even the mind that devised it. Jeremy laughed to himself. “She’ll think I’m schizo.” The whole sub shuddered as he suddenly pulled up, compressing his avatar under multiple Gs and heading for the surface at a 45 degree angle. “In a minute I’ll find out if she’s right.”
“He’s figured something out. What is it? Looks like a suicide run from here.” Marissa’s avatar grimaced, its polygonal face contorting to express frustration and alarm. Her cockpit was flooded with the same oxygenated pink fluid as the spacecraft from the prior lesson, in this case roughly the same density as the outside seawater.
The acrylic dome through which she tracked Jeremy’s engine plume was the exact refractive index as seawater also, preventing optical distortion. So she could be fairly certain that the absolute madness playing out before her eyes really was happening. Not far ahead Jeremy’s glowing cavitation bubble and his sub within it plowed through salt water at 258 knots, heading straight for the ice shell overhead.
Marissa’s confusion gave way to amusement. “I get it”, she thought. “If he suicides, at the very least it denies me the kill. Must be the best outcome he thinks he can achieve in a fair fight.” Just as quickly as she’d gone from confusion to smugness, Marissa’s face now exploded into a mixture of outrage and disbelief.
Just ahead, Jeremy’s sub crashed straight through the ice and up into vacuum, carried by it’s own momentum. “Nope. I don’t fucking believe it. I refuse.” Her wits returned and she veered off at the last second to avoid striking the ice shell. “God damnit, Jeremy. God damnit. I am infinitely tired of your shit.”
Far overhead, Jeremy’s sub-turned-spacecraft gracefully soared above the surface of the moon, which he’d successfully gambled would possess only a small fraction the gravity of Earth. But not so little that his sub could escape into space, so very soon he found himself staring back down at the ice shelf from above as it rapidly approached. If his luck held, he’d strike another thin patch. If not, this sim session was about to prematurely terminate.
He didn’t realize how much he was taking the brief silence for granted until the piercing roar of supercavitation returned. All of a sudden he was back in the water, and back in danger. Marissa wasn’t far behind, mad as a hornet and closing fast. While out of the water he had no ability to change his trajectory so it was a simple matter for Marissa to estimate where he’d come crashing through the ice. Only she was about twenty meters off, so her torpedo exploded harmlessly against the rugged belly of a glacier instead of the laughing, whooping jackass now rocketing his way into the benthic depths of an alien ocean.
Her faces, both real and virtual, were now beet red with fury but the last message she could transmit to Jeremy’s sub before it moved out of range was completely monotone. “Jeremy. So help me, if you don’t stop fucking around and fight me in-sim then you’ll have to fight me in person when the spheres lift. You don’t want that.”
She was beyond anger. So murderously frustrated that all of her bloodlust came across with perfect clarity even though any overt emotion was absent in her voice. It was the intonation of someone preparing to strangle. Jeremy looped back around just so she’d be in range to hear him hoot like a merry gibbon before plunging back into the sunless void below.
It was obvious he was luring her in. She didn’t care, berzerker mode was in full effect. Projecting his route, she approached the anticipated end point at a gentler angle and throttled up her engine so as to arrive slightly sooner. She slowed, collapsed her cavitation bubble and went dark.
All exterior lights died, as did cabin illumination. For a strange, serene moment her sub seemed to melt away and she felt as though there was no barrier between herself and the surrounding water. It was an opportunity, she decided, to get her emotions under control and prepare for Jeremy. Deep breaths. Her cheeks slowly disarmed, from bright red back down to their natural pallor. More deep breaths. Then growing confusion. Shouldn’t he be here by now?
She probed sonar but came back with nothing in the way of enemy signatures. However it did return the outline of a monstrous hole in the seafloor, what Marissa concluded was the mouth of a hadal cavern at the precise moment that Jeremy plummeted into it. She gasped, sputtered, and then shrieked in renewed anger. Her cheeks returned to defcon one as she gave chase, and although Jeremy’s uninterrupted supercavitation left her with a huge gap to close, she soon found herself careening through the serpentine sea cave with Jeremy no more than five hundred feet ahead.
Marissa let loose with a torpedo. Then another. Eventually, having spent all but two torps with nothing to show for it but craters in the cave wall, she began to consider alternative strategies. In her moment of distraction, Jeremy vanished from sonar. The disappearance of his signature yanked her attention back to the HUD.
“That’s impossible. There’s nowhere to escape to.” She slowed, and collapsed her cavitation bubble. The only possibility she could fathom was that the cave had some narrow offshoot her sonar didn’t pick up. “He’s gone dark and he’s waiting there now. When I backtrack, he’ll appear behind me and let fly with the torps. That’s what I’d do.”
Now on electric thrusters only, Marissa’s sub crept gingerly along the tunnel. From within she scrutinized every neon vector of the cavern wall as visualized by her sonar display. Her own fuel gauge was at sixteen percent. Oxygen was at twelve. Given his acrobatics earlier in the match she estimated he was on emergency reserves right now, and would have to emerge from hiding some time within the next four minutes.
It dawned on her that his plan might be to run down the timer for the session itself, but a quick note to the instructor confirmed that everyone else had a generous fifteen minutes left on the clock. “If that’s his game,” she muttered to herself as beads of sweat dissolved into the liquid fluorocarbon, “he must realize by now that-”
A loud splintering sound roused her from deep thought. She strained her ears and guessed frantically at the source of it. She wasn’t guessing for long. A second, louder snap drew her attention to the viewing dome. Her sub’s lights played across the uneven wall of the cavern just outside, providing the contrast she needed to notice a hairline fracture in the viewing dome.
A creeping realization came over her that Jeremy’s plan was never to wait her out, but to draw her into the deep. For the first time since following him into the cave she took notice of a blinking depth warning in the lower right of her HUD. Another loud crack sounded as the fracture spread across the dome. Jeremy’s signature appeared behind her and the last thing she heard before the shockwave from his cavitation bubble imploded her sub as he passed was the foul, maddening sound of his laughter.
“Ahahaha! Hoo hoo hooooo!” Again and again, her slender pale hand formed a fist and struck Jeremy’s increasingly bloody nose. She just kept punching, but he wouldn’t stop laughing. All around the other students cheered. Some fetched phones to record the spectacle, others placed bets.
But Jeremy showed no intention of striking back, his body continued convulsing with laughter no matter how savagely Marissa laid into him. He already won back there in the sim and she knew it. Worse than that, she knew that he knew it. The decisive match between them was over, and the question as to which was the superior pilot was now and forever answered.
Tears began to tumble down her cheeks which once again glowed redder than molten iron. Marissa could no more stop crying than she could stop pummeling Jeremy, and wanting to kiss him. She raised a fist again as if to strike, then her arm fell impotently to one side. Her slender body, now straddling Jeremy’s stomach, quivered as she finally surrendered to the tears. That’s what it took for him to stop laughing. For a moment he wondered if he’d gone too far this time. She leaned in close to whisper in his ear. “You’re amazing,I hate you.”
“Questions?” Every hand in the room shot up in perfect synch. The instructor chuckled. “Let me save us all some time. Does anyone have a question that isn’t about why the sim took place underwater?” One by one the hands wavered, then withdrew.
“Not all tactically important targets are in space. There exist resources vital to the war machine in extreme environments of all kinds, including ocean worlds. This is total war, kiddos. There are no limits to the theater of conflict. You may fight the Constructs underwater, you may fight them among the clouds of a gas giant. If we keep losing ground, you may soon be fighting them on our doorstep. Be flexible. Your mind should be prepared for anything ahead of time, because you won’t get even one hot minute to adjust to your surroundings before a Construct craters you. They don’t wait to see the whites of your eyes, every nanosecond that passes they’ve executed a trillion new instructions with the singular goal of silencing your heartbeat. Constructs are at the top of their game right out of the gate, so you need to be too.”
Jeremy rolled his eyes while the rest of the students gaped in reverent awe at the instructor’s obviously rehearsed speech. It was all they talked about on the trek back to class.
Everyone earnestly assured someone nearby that they would never again be surprised by the content of a sim, then paired off to argue over the legitimacy of specific kills.
Jeremy searched the hallway for Marissa, but she was long gone. He dwelled on memories, still fresh in his mind, of how flush her face was back in the sim room. Then, memories of her warm body shaking against his as she cried. “Amazing”, she said. But also “I hate you”. Talk about mixed messages.
“So are you gonna explain what happened with Marissa back there or do I have to download the video from Friendspace after class?” Mike displayed his usual lack of concern for Warwick’s scolding, not just leaning out of his chair but literally flopped out across Jeremy’s desk. He was making his most determined effort not to acknowledge Mike, and in turn Mike was doing his damndest to make that impossible.
“Remember? You let a girl beat you up, then you kissed her.” A ploy to provoke him, but he fell for it. “We didn’t kiss! She was whispering to me!” He regretted the outburst immediately when he noticed all eyes except Marissa’s were drilling into him.
She had her face buried in a book. Not one she had any real interest in other than as a means of concealing her embarrassment. “Oh ho! She whispered something? If you don’t tell me what it was, I’ll start to guess. Out loud.”
Stay Tuned for Part 4!