You hardly remember the funeral—which is to say you do, but you try not to, or rather your brain won’t let you, or you do not think it is worth remembering. All of the above, maybe.
They sent up a box with her remains in it. They were not really her remains, of course. You doubt looking back that there was anything in the box at all, perhaps a sandbag to pretend merely at the weight of remains, or perhaps something a little more tasteful, like a pile of ash from (you thought bitterly, childishly) some utilitarian incinerator. Either way you know she was not in there; there was nothing left of her to be in there, and if there were they certainly would not have risked sending a team down into the heart of the Rift to retrieve it.
When you were younger, you remembered, you’d climb to the attic of the house with her and look out through the little round window—crusted with cobwebs and dirt and the bodies of insects—over the tops of other houses, which spilled all the way down to the bay itself, out to where the wall kept the bay in, a shimmering white gate against the distant blue rim, wedged between peninsula and peninsula. Beyond that wall the sea rose nearly up to the top, you were told; it was higher outside than inside, and so the two of you imagined yourselves two little frogs on the edge of a canal, or a bowl of water.
So the many white domed rooftop bubbles (each filled with hydroponics, or algae gardens, or both) were frog eggs spilling out from the edge of the water; you lay on your stomachs and imagined them hatching and becoming frogs as big as mansions, bigger, ever bigger until they were as tall as the seawall; vast and orange like the mythical Golden Gate Bridge that had once spanned the peninsulas, before it had been demolished and supplanted by the tunnels and shelves that the great wall now supported. You made up stories together about these monstrous city-sized frogs: by turns they grew scales or mandibles or wings, not so unlike the real monsters the wall had been built to keep out—you called them kaijus, like the word in your father’s tongue for the marine megafauna—you imagined them trampling down the wall and rushing in on a great blue tsunami wave, or becoming protectors of San Francisco and turning on the monsters without. You’d argue about whose made-up frogs were stronger, faster, bigger, better.
Rachel would always say hers were better and bigger and faster and stronger no matter how high a number you gave her for any of these measures, and you’d grow more and more frustrated till at last you’d shove her. Then she’d shove you back and flip you over and tickle you till you nearly peed yourself laughing, and you’d have to wrestle yourself out from under her and storm off before she could take you by the ankle and drag you back down, yelling and making awful faces, which she insisted were the sounds and faces of the kaiju themselves.
The funeral was by the water. You watched as Mom and Dad scattered the ashes from the top of the seawall, half into the Bay, half into the Pacific beyond it. The city of San Francisco stretched out far away and below you, serenely white. You saw, from on top of the wall, that they were just roofs and houses after all, and it was stupid to have ever thought of them otherwise. You were gripped with a sudden heat then, and your eyes prickled and your throat ached; but you did not cry. You were only angry.
-
An interlude: The first time you synced was not with me.
This is unsurprising, of course. The academies, as I have said, all teach their children on old training models, more in common with dredgers than combat units like myself. The cradle design is the same: saline suspension in a fully rotating spherical chamber, coupled with magnets to the outer shell, cushioned in the space between by the same air supply that fills your helmet feed. The controls, too, are the same, the receiver in the helmet at the nape of your neck tucked against the little grain of rice they injected behind your ear four years ago, the matrix that grows from this grain having already bloomed across and into every crevice of your brain, the ghost of your existing cellular structure. In this sense you are not new at all to sync.
The thing is, they set you up for failure. The thing that makes us helms unique, that helped you mortal men turn the tide against the monsters when we were invented and brought to the field some thirty years ago, is also what makes us difficult for you to bear. We are not dumb push-pull actuators the way dredger-brains are. We learn you. We gather all your data, record it and take it up within ourselves, every engram, every configuration of your meat, we average the shape of these over time and across moods and circumstances in order to gain an idea of who you are. And you say we are not human, which is true; we are not; but do we not in some sense learn the same way you do? Are we not made in your image?
This is the problem: You were told you’d be a pilot, not that you’d have another soul crammed into your head.
The training models are our progenitors. They lie between myself and the dredgers as far as intelligence goes. They are the worst of both worlds: complex and unknowable and full of their own precocious precepts; stupid and blindly groping, less polished and tailored than we are. They are meant to be this way because they each have a thousand students pass through their hands. By design they cannot afford to spend a year learning each one’s movements and thoughts and fears and hopes. They cannot depend on that for optimal behavior. It would be their undoing.
So they strike an unhappy median, too clumsy to really know you and compensate for your weaknesses and quirks, still overwhelming in their sheer mental weight. A hundred thousand stimuli and sensors and motors for you to suddenly know. And this is what you felt the day they dumped you unceremoniously into your training unit at Tiberon, on the proving grounds that should have been your graduation.
I know this. I know you know it, though you haven’t dared speak it aloud to me. I won’t remind you of the gory details; even here, in your subconscious, to say the wretched words is to look at the beast head-on, to risk sending you into the same spiral in which you found yourself among the mines, during patrol. And your panic, let’s be honest, ran deeper than the shock of sync itself, then and now alike.
Six years by then of sim training, and two spent puppeting out in the Bay, pretending at being a real boy. It still wasn’t enough.
(How was it with your sister at the same points along her development? Twelve years have made even my precise silicate memory scarce. Needs must free up space for the new pilot’s data. Not relevant to my current duties, not so long as you don’t request my memory. But I digress—)
What Tooji is saying, what I am saying, is that you cannot panic; cannot even run the risk of it; and in order to not panic, you must first find center. You did once. You can do it again.
So: you have asked me to show you how—which is to say, how to walk the eightfold path? The first step is to be honest with yourself about your fear. The second is to embrace it. You have tried, I know, but embracing it is not the same as losing yourself within it. This I felt in you last night during the sim run; it clings to you even now like saltwater, pools in all your sulci while you sleep.
I have arrived at this: The first step is to make yourself lost, and find your way back out.
-
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
You consider this. In the gray predawn light your faint reflection is superposed upon the green letters of my advice to you, on the pager you’ve affixed today to your arm with a Velcro sweatband and an elastic. Sweat is clustered along your brow and collarbone and the underside of your jaw, the spandrels of your elbows and wrists and knees; a bead drips from your hair onto the screen.
TAKE YOUR TIME, I say. DON’T MIND ME.
“I know,” you say, and turn away.
It has been well over an hour; the gray predawn light has become full and golden. Even now you rise from the bench and pace, the way joggers do when they do not want to let go of their momentum at a stoplight: your muscles fizz; the sound of your footsteps on the floor echoes in sharp metronome staccato, and then you turn and trot back to the edge of the track, breathing slow and deep and even.
In an effort to keep you focused, I remind you: RELAX. YOU HAVE SEVERAL WEEKS, STILL, BEFORE YOUR PROBATION IS UP AND YOU ARE SENT HOME EMPTY-HANDED.
“Thank you, Helm,” you say, “very reassuring.”
YOU’RE WELCOME. SO, I say, ANY THOUGHTS?
“I’m taking my time,” you say, “like you said,” and start running again.
But you’re not. Your mind’s all over the place. (When isn’t it?) Chiefest is your message from this morning—WHERE?—which you sent and waited on, and which has thus far gone unanswered.
I COULD GIVE YOU HINTS. This goes unread. YOU’RE PROBABLY OVERTHINKING IT.
This, too, I expect you not to read, until I hear: “Probably? You’re in my head.”
I am, which is how I know you’re definitely overthinking it, but I’m trying to be polite. I say: WHEN YOU THINK OF BEING LOST, WHAT DO YOU IMAGINE?
“I don’t know.” A pause. “A maze. A dark attic. You don’t mean literally,” you say, and you’re right. “I guess—not knowing the answer to a question. Not grasping the language you’re speaking.”
These are good starts, and not poor analogies for your overarching problem now, too, but: I MEAN MORE VISCERALLY, I say. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU LOSE CONTROL OF YOURSELF? GIVE ME EXAMPLES.
“Oh,” you say, and slow to a jog, a trot even, because so much running still leaves you winded—especially when you’re talking aloud like this. (You can still learn to do it silently, you know.) “Alright—” The minefield; the graduation exam at Tiberon… First sync, here, with me.
You say, “I guess it’s like drowning.”
(The woodblock waves mounted in the little white office; their cousins—big and dark and blue—washing over your head, rocks in your pockets, salt in your eyes.)
I say, ELABORATE.
“Well, Helm,” you say, “drowning is when your lungs fill with liquid to the point that they stop being able to—”
YES, I say, I KNOW WHAT DROWNING IS.
“Look,” you say, “we’re going in circles. Tell me what you’re getting at here. No riddles; straight to the point.” And, “Please and thank you.”
I say, THESE AREN’T RIDDLES. And, THIS IS THE BEST WAY I KNOW TO HELP.
You say, “Did that work for Rachel?”
IRRELEVANT, I say primly. FINE—IF YOU WANT, I WILL SIMPLIFY. TELL ME AGAIN UNDER WHAT CIRCUMSTANCES YOU MIGHT LOSE CONTROL.
“Drowning,” you say, “seriously.”
I say, AND HOW WOULD YOU PRACTICE DROWNING, PRECISELY?
“Well,” you say, considering, “I could go down to the pool—I could drown myself. I could have someone help me and hold me down, pull me out after a little time, and try to practice—”
ABSOLUTELY NOT, I say.
“Fine,” you say, “so you need me to think of ways to break my focus without risking harm to myself.”
YES, I say, BECAUSE YOU OUGHT TO BE IN ONE PIECE FOR THE REAL DEAL.
“Oh, what,” you say, “like you need me to be careful? You watched me almost freeze to death on my first time out and come back just fine, didn’t you?”
YOU ARE MISSING, I say, THE FUCKING POINT.
“Okay,” you say, and then, more quietly, “I’m sorry. What do I do?”
WHAT DO YOU SUGGEST? I say.
“Simulation,” you say. “Force myself into overspeed, desynchronize myself from the controls. Except you lost your shit last time we did that.”
YES, I say, BECAUSE YOU NEARLY DID NOT COME BACK FROM THAT, AND I DO NOT BELIEVE YOU COULD IF YOU TRIED AGAIN BY YOURSELF, WITHOUT YOUR SWORD. WHICH IS MY POINT.
“So,” you say, “what, I should expect not to have my sword with me when I’m out there?”
YOU SHOULD EXPECT TO PREPARE FOR THE WORST.
You say, “If I can’t manage the worst now, why shouldn’t I practice by trying until I can?”
BECAUSE, I say, I DON’T WANT YOU TO START THERE. YOU ARE NOT READY FOR IT. YOU CANNOT SIMPLY BRUTE FORCE IT AT THIS STAGE. And: SOMETHING THAT DOES NOT PUT THE FEAR OF DEATH IN YOU.
“I get it,” you say, “something easier. Child-friendly.”
YES, I say, SO LONG AS IT MAKES YOU LOSE CONTROL OF YOURSELF.
“Getting drunk?” you say.
NO, I say. WRONG KIND OF LOSING CONTROL. THAT KIND OF IMPAIRMENT CAN’T BE SOLVED OTHER THAN WITH CHEMICALS AND TIME.
“Why don’t you just reformulate my ox feed?” you say.
BECAUSE THEN IT WOULD BE ME SOLVING THE PROBLEM, NOT YOU, I say. (Plus, you threw a fit last time I offered—but I’ll be nice.) TRY AGAIN.
“So, like,” you say, “stage fright, or a math exam, or driving on black ice.”
YES, SURE, I say. THAT WOULD WORK. Although: YOU DO NOT HAVE STAGE FRIGHT, AND YOU ARE GOOD ENOUGH AT MATH THAT IT WOULD NOT PANIC YOU, AND IT IS TOO WARM FOR THERE TO BE BLACK ICE IN HONG KONG.
You say, “Chinese water torture.”
I say, WHAT?
“Chinese water torture.” Which doesn’t clarify anything, so: “You want me to lose control, and you don’t want it to harm me.”
CHINESE WATER TORTURE IS, DONE PROPERLY, HARMFUL.
“Okay,” you say, frustrated now: “Look. Give me a stimulus, any stimulus, anything that’ll surprise me. Do it enough that it doesn’t drive me insane. Just—surprise me. A loud noise. Whenever I don’t expect it. Can I use a Walkman for this?”
YOU MAY REQUISITION ONE, I say slowly.
“Great,” you say. “Do it, then. Test me. Interrupt me when I’m trying to focus. Let me prove I can keep going. We’ll work our way up—”
WHAT DO YOU PROPOSE DOING WHILE I TRY TO DISTRACT YOU? I say.
“I don’t know,” you say. “Anything. This. I’m pretty distracted right now, aren’t I?”
You are. It isn’t just me. You are anxious, more than usual; you haven’t admitted it, but it is deafening all the same.
ALRIGHT, I say. WHEN DO WE START?
“Now,” you say, and break into a sprint.
WAIT, I say, I THOUGHT YOU WANTED A WALKMAN.
But you don’t notice. You’re already gone: your legs pump, your breath deepens; your eyes are fixed resolutely upon the horizon, which here is just the vast gray sun-limned wall of the gym. Kudos for an earnest start, at least.
