Barriers to Growth - ラスティフロント@Wiki

Author:pneumonica (Edmund Wilfong)
©2014-2015 pneumonica

【翻訳中】

Mira was warrant officer His official title was “division group junior auditor.” It's one of dozens of positions in the Imperial military of its kind. There are always places to put people who need to go nowhere, always window seats for the problem cases. His job was, on paper, logistical and tactical, but in practice all it did was give him access to some parts of the military research facility where he worked.

It looked very important to people who didn't understand, so if he wanted to impress people he could go out and tell people about his important position. Anybody in the Imperial military would know better – he was somebody doomed to be nobody.

Still, he took pride in his work. He believed strongly in leaving a place better than when he'd entered it, and that included the Prentiss Facility where he was stationed. He frequently checked the secured documents to which he had access and educated himself in all areas of the facility to which he had access. The head of experimental science (and vice-commandant of the Prentiss Facility), Vellan Philter, always watched him carefully. It was never clear whether Vellan trusted Mira and monitored him or distrusted him and waited for him to do wrong.

Others in the facility thought he was “all wrong.” They were certain they knew why he was in a dead end posting. He took a “diseased” interest in the drones. Some went so far as to say he felt them his “harem.” Drones were still new technology, and many voices said they were an atrocity committed on people – this reputation of Mira's fed into that idea far to readily. They kept him at arm's length, hoping never to brush up against him and touch his diseased body.

This suited Mira perfectly well. He didn't want to deal with them. His purpose was the drone fighter wing under his care, and that was what mattered.

Mira did as he did every evening when he left duty. He got dinner and then headed to the hangar. The Prentiss Facility was a military research facility, but it was an outlying facility that used live enemy targets for some of its research purposes. This one studied the operations of drone fighters. Mira had done everything he could to study the biophysics and biocybernetics of the drone.

There was a new drone in the facility, to replace one that had been lost by enemy strafing. He had a procedure he followed with the drones, a process that he was testing, unofficially. He walked into the hangar and lit a cigarette. There were work crews around, but they knew Mira and none of them ever wanted to interfere with him. They kept only enough watch over him to make sure he wasn't damaging anything.

He walked up to the new drone fighter, a modified GranViia. He still wasn't up on what the modifications were, but this was a research facility, after all. Chances are every vehicle, machine, device, and even the pens were modified in some way. Nothing comes factory standard in this place. He opened an access panel. The drone would be in low cycle now, preparing for rest but not yet relaxed. This was the best time.

He crawled into the interior chamber and slid into a tight-fit area, sometimes called the “medical chamber.” If the organic engine needed “repairs,” a doctor would fit in here and be able to bring some equipment, but it was still close and tight. Within was a mound of tissue. Although pliant, it had a hard surface. Along the surface was a shape, looking like nothing so much as a bald woman lying face down in the mound, only the front half of her body was absorbed into it and the body itself was just more of the tissue. There was usually some reminder that a person was lost in making this monster.

He turned about and lay on his back upon the organic mound, next to the shape that wanted very much to look like a woman. He took a drag of his cigarette. “I am Junior Auditor Mira. I know it's a girl's name, and I know you're confused that I'm speaking to you. I've studied the biophysics. You don't hear the way we do, but looking at what's left of the human anatomy I see a thin muscle fiber stretching across what once was your ear canal. A sound coming from close to your body resonates through it, which means you can, at least a little bit, hear me. I have a theory about you, and I'm testing it.”

Commander Philter knew where Mira was, but not exactly what he was doing. The man had been troublesome since he first arrived. A warrant officer who'd moved brilliantly up the ranks, but struck the mother of all dead ends – lack of permission. No aristocrat in the Empire wanted him rising. It seemed like they thought of him as some black mark on someone's name. What was he? The illegitimate son of the Emperor? That wouldn't be such a big deal – he's pretty sure there was one of those already an officer on some Creyhien somewhere. So long as they keep quiet and everybody can maintain plausible deniability, noble bastards actually got quite the advantage out of their bastardy.

No, there was something else at work. A diligent, intelligent, capable man, even if just barely a man (still a boy by some standards), should be flying through the warrant ranks, and the only dead end he'd meet would be at the top of the warrant ranks. Vellan hadn't seen this particular phenomenon before, and there was something that made his senses tingle.

Also, Mira was attractive and boyish, but Vellan insisted to himself that this had nothing to do with it. In fairness, it wasn't truly about that. Vellan was an officer and Mira was a warrant officer, which made any such relationship unethical and against regulation, even worse that they were in the same chain of command. Still, Vellan would occasionally pause to eat the eye candy – no harm in looking.

He remembered when Mira first arrived. Vellan took him into his office and explained the situation to him. “Mira... I don't know who you are or what you did, but I do know this. You're a junior auditor. That means where you are now, you will remain for the rest of your military career. You will not make any more of a name for yourself than you have. You will not gain promotion. Nobody leaves the auditor corps unless they leave the military. If you choose to leave, I will approve it immediately. There's no reason you should stay in this useless position.”

Vellan saw in Mira's eyes – he was hurt. He knew he had enemies, that much was obvious, but he didn't think they'd just pack him in a closet and walk away. Mira wrote something to himself, closed the cap on his pen, and then set in Vellan's desk, saying, “I don't need a name. My fingerprints will be on every success of this facility.” Then he walked out.

There's an interesting thing about pens in the Imperial military. The commissariat is notoriously tight about office supplies, which makes pens in short supply. Most people who use pens buy their own, and usually those pens are unique to the individual, who buy many of them from some vendor and then hoard them. Putting your pen on someone else's desk might be a kind statement, something of comradeship. It could also be a dolorous statement, a promise of haunting. Regardless, the words of the statement were always the same.

Remember me.

It was impossible for Vellan to forget him. The pen was a damned good pen. There was a lot of mythology about what someone does with a pen given in this way. Many people, a few of them knowing Vellan's “sensitive” nature, assumed this was a “pen proposal,” based on the urban myth of an officer proposing to another officer with a pen rather than a ring.

In Vellan's case, it was just that the pen was that good. You could step on it and it would twist your ankle before breaking. It could withstand up to three seconds under an arc welder. It could write upside-down while underwater, and it could continue writing in arctic cold. It could even fall hundreds of feet, land on a hard surface, and the ink within wouldn't be disrupted. It looked like a narrow bolt of ugly steel, but it was a damned good pen.

And it always reminded him of the slow-burning fuse in Prentiss Facility and made him wonder what would happen when the fuse burned down.

Mira breathed a cloud of smoke into the small chamber. The organic structure quivered, but slowly relaxed. “You see, I don't think you've lost every human impulse. I've studied the biophysics. Yes, I'm a tactical and logistical officer studying biophysics. Make jokes on your own time. But my assessment is that you can just barely hear, you can probably feel, and you definitely know things. I hazard the guess that you've still got the reflexes of a human being, like the touch reflex.”

At this, he rested his hand on the organic surface. He took another drag and continued. “Touching a person has an odd effect – it's like melting away barriers, perhaps very slowly. People actually trust you more the more you touch them. Of course, the way you touch them might offset the effect, but the fact of it remains. And touching someone while you talk to them makes them trust you more. So, I'm going to tell you about myself.”

The cloud was thick in the chamber, but the vent system was doing well to keep it from suffocating him. The engine itself needed to breathe, after all. “I am Mira. I was born to Cralend parents. They are a tribe of desert nomads, if you don't know, the Yellow Men. They're called Yellow Men because the men wear dyed veils. On the desert, water is more expensive than dye, so the dye is pressed into the fabric. There, it deposits back on the skin, giving the men their yellow faces.”

The organic structure began to relax. In reality, he had no way of knowing why, but he imagined it was because it was settling to his presence. “The Cralend are warriors. The men go to war because the women want to wed good warriors. The noblewomen have harems of warriors. They can even act as their own harem guards, without losing the goodies.” He had a chuckle to himself over that. “My parents weren't nobles. They got caught in a counter-raid. Their clan had raided a few Imperial caravans, and the Empire ground them into the sand. I was four.”

His eyes glazed over slightly as he described this. For him it was reliving a moment in his life that, at the time, was terrible, but now it was just a thing to watch. “I escaped into the desert and followed the oases to an Imperial city. I lived as a street urchin for some years. Officially, I lived like that for ten years, but it was more like seven. Boyish looks, indeed.” He took one last drag of his cigarette, then pulled out another one and lit it off the first one. “And I manged to read. I've always been literate. I don't know why my mother educated me – no Cralend man gets educated.”

He took the spent cigarette and put it out on the “thigh” of the woman-shape in the organic engine. The whole engine had a spasm, clearly feeling the pain of it. He dropped the cigarette on the ground and continued. “That's why I have a woman's name. A mira is a kind of desert flower. It's a woman's name where most people come from, but we're matriarchal. It's a man's name for us. But I read, and I learned. One day, when I was fourteen... officially... I sat in during a wargame at the Gant Academy. It was a rather nice academy. I started criticizing some of the plays made by the players.”

He took another drag, and the engine seemed to shift, not certain whether to be comfortable or nervous. “Some aristocrat approached me, a war minister or something. He muttered something about children, and invited me to dinner. Well, there I was, a child who wasn't actually fourteen being invited to dinner by a wealthy stranger. I thought I knew what was going to happen, but it didn't. Instead, he decided he'd sponsor me into the Gant Academy. I'd learn military discipline, military skills, and all that. I didn't know why, but now I think I do.”

He closed his eyes at this. This part wasn't so distant, even though it was six years ago. “He was playing a joke. On everybody. He was playing a joke on me for being an upstart. He was playing a joke on the academy – look at the boy named for a girly flower, the faceless orphan, the filthy gamin in rags, the camel jockey. He was playing a joke on the military, to see what they'd do with me. It was all a joke. But the joke was a tough one, because I succeeded. I paid attention and worked, and I had a talent. All Cralend have a talent for war, I figure.”

The engine seemed to relax, allowing him to sink slightly into it. A part of him wanted to think it was trying to comfort him, but he knew better. “And that's how I made it here. I'm in a position of little authority. I look and sound important and have nothing to do. So, I'm improving you. I'm going to make you the best that you can be. I'm going to drill you, in here, in operations. I'll talk you through it.” His cigarette was burning down, so he pulled out another one. The engine noticeably tensed. Its pattern recognition skills were admirable.

“Understand, you are like me. You're in a dead end. The difference is, I'm a person and you're a tool. You aren't a person, and you shouldn't confuse yourself into thinking you're one. You may remember being a person, but you gave that up when you walked into this thing. Now you're a possession. You're not even the property of another person – you're the property of a fiction, and Empire that exists only because people say it does.” The engine seemed to shift around, its musculature trying to relax and remaining tense.

“I will make you the best tool that you can be. Honest mistakes will gain honest correction, but I do not like thinking I've been ignored. If I think you're being temperamental,” at this, he lit his second cigarette off the first, “Understand that I've studied your biophysics and I know how to hurt you most efficiently without causing lasting injury.” He doused the first cigarette against the woman-shape thigh, and the thing struggled as if to come free of its own body. Unfortunately for it, it didn't have the right kind of muscles to do more than rock Mira in his position.

Mira took a long drag and breathed it out. “So, I'm going to talk you through your operational priorities. I know they'll say certain things, but some rules are always going to be true. Pay extra-close attention to this. These rules are what you live by.”

Some time later, Mira was walking down the halls towards his quarters. A Lieutenant Grable looked at him as he passed, and then burst out, “Junior Auditor, how do you explain yourself?”

Mira turned and responded, “I don't tend to, sir. What seems to be the trouble?”

“The back of your uniform is an ATROCITY. What have you been doing, lying in the mud?”

Of course, Grable knew where Mira had been, if not what he was doing. The human silhouettes in the organic engines of the drone fighters wasn't lost on anybody. “I'm returning to my quarters to change, sir.”

“Of course you are, and we're losing time in your duty position.”

Mira wanted to ask what duties he was supposed to be performing, but he restrained himself. “No, sir, I'm presently off duty.”

Grable was going to go on, but another voice called out, “Auditor. I'd like to have a word with you.” It was Commander Philter. “Lieutenant Grable, do you still need Auditor Mira?”

Grable knew better than to press when the commander spoke. “No, sir. I take my leave, sir.” He gave a polite bow and walked off.

Mira now turned to Vellan. “Commander, how can I help you?” He noticed the pen in Philter's pocket. Mira had bought five of them and more ink cartridges than a regiment could use in a month. He wasn't sure where Philter got his, but he was still using Mira's pen.

Philter replied, “The officers believe that you're treating these drones as your pets. They think you have some sick entanglement with them.”

Mira smirked. “Do the drones count as being in my chain of command, sir?”

If Philter's eyes could shoot beams, those beams would cut straight through Mira's eyes and into the wall behind him. “I know better. The scientists all say that there's intelligence in the drones, but no human intelligence. Anything human in them is absorbed and nullified. You, however, have a different theory. You think there are still women in there.”

Mira didn't break his gaze on Vellan. “If that's the case, sir, then these would not be war machines but people. I don't think I'd be comfortable treating people in this way.”

Vellan nodded. “I see. But still, you think they retain human reactions to events. By building trust from them, you want to make them a better-coordinated fighting unit. The drones do tend to coordinate more closely with each other. They hold very tightly to formations, and they almost reach a point of making command decisions on their own, but never to the point of undermining command.”

Mira shifted a bit uncomfortably. “Sir, I need to change my uniform. May we continue this another time?”

Vellan smiled. “Of course.” Mira walked past Commander Philter when Philter suddenly asked, “Just one thing. You've been talking to them, dealing with them, treating them almost like people. What would it mean to you to discover you now have five girlfriends?”

Mira stopped at that. He didn't turn to face the Commander, but he replied, “They aren't people. They're tools. They're machines. All I'm doing is to play on reflexes that will make them more efficient and effective. There isn't any 'girl' to have as a girlfriend.”

Commander Philter nodded. “Fair enough. Thank you.” Mira had said it very professionally. Still, something about what he said made Vellan quite cold.