Ravens of Eternity

68 Mental Note

Eva sat in her core with her eyes closed as she flew across the surface of a pristine forested planet. She was deep into a Promethean Merge, and perceived the world through her fighter’s sensor suite.

Trees whizzed by on her flanks as she flew at top speed above a brisk river.

Readouts of the terrain spilled into her visual cortex as the ship continually scanned its surroundings. She had become used to the amount of information her mind received while merged, and was able to filter it out on the fly. Though it was still incredibly taxing to her.

Even though she was just doing some basic flight on an uninhabited planet, she was still overwhelmed with the data she received.

After some time, the rushing river turned to roiling rapids. And at 200 m/s, it didn’t take long for Eva to reach the end of the river.

The treeline had cut off close to the cliffside, and the rapids fell into a raging waterfall. The water rushed to a pool below, and the river continued further north.

Free from any obstacles around her, Eva maneuvered into a tight barrel roll. She then smoothly transitioned into a brief spiral dive, but straightened out and leveled off a handful of meters from the river.

Her thrusters kicked water into the air as she recovered from her dive and blasted off further downriver.

She then pulled up her nose, and performed a quick loop to cap off her aerial stunts.

.....

Although she had successfully pulled off three high speed maneuvers in a row, she wasn’t particularly pleased. In fact, she felt rather disappointed after doing them.

The maneuvers themselves weren’t particularly difficult, though they weren’t easy either. And she should have been glad after doing them all so effortlessly in a merge.

She slowed down and hovered a couple dozen meters in the air, and sighed.

Admiral Chase appeared in a comms window in her mind.

“What’s wrong, Freya?” she asked. “We’re only three hours into the merge.. Did something go wrong? Did you tire out quickly?”

“No, not tired at all,” she replied. “It’s just... this sim doesn’t quite feel right.”

“Alright, let me end it real quick.”

The Admiral then deactivated the simulation that she fed to Eva’s core. The digital facade of that lush green planet faded away from Eva’s mind.

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It was quickly replaced by the cold sterility of the Admiral’s lab.

Eva spun down the Promethean Merge and collected herself for a few minutes. After she had regained her sense of self, she opened up the core and hopped out.

The Admiral helped her out, and into a seat nearby.

“Those sims are the best the Federation has to offer, you know,” she said. “Literally cutting edge, direct-to-brain imagery.”

“I know,” replied Eva. “It’s really stunning. Almost real, even. I wanted to hop out and walk in the forest a number of times. It’s that almost is what bugs me.”

The Admiral took a seat next to her, and listened intently. She was determined to make this project her magnum opus, and every bit of feedback helped her shape it.

“I mean, my mind and my core knows it isn’t real,” continued Eva. “It doesn’t feel like I’m flying. It feels like I’m pushing buttons and the world spins around me. Those maneuvers – hell just basic piloting – everything feels flat in the sim.”

It was the same way back when she played VR games in her old life, or got into the sim pods at the training yard on Mars. Highly immersive, but ultimately flat.

The thing that was missing was the speed, the velocity, the gravity of it all. Her mind and body expected those sensations, but got nothing. It might have seemed like she flew through a jungle while going a couple hundred meters per second.

But the reality was that she was going exactly nowhere.

In truth, simulations were just tricks (albeit expensive ones) that pushed the boundaries of reality. They did their best to convince people in the realities it represented.

But it only truly worked if the person wanted to believe in that lie. And Eva’s mind refused to believe the simulation. There was something inherent in its programming that she rejected wholesale, and it was a lack of true immersion.

She needed to feel the world in order to make it true.

“Regardless,” said the Admiral, “we’re still getting good data from your time in the sim. Lots of hand-eye coordination statistics – and there’s a ton of improvement there.”

Eva nodded. She understood the benefits of the simulation. Hell, at this point she considered Bellum Aeterna to be a training sim for her new universe.

“Have you considered,” she countered, “that since our minds know it isn’t real, that it can take shortcuts? That the data you’ve gotten isn’t quite accurate? I mean, if we’re going to try to fool our brains, wouldn’t it make sense for it to fool us right back?”

The Admiral thought a little bit about what Eva was trying to say. And she had made some sense. In a normal simulation, there were physical switches that needed to be operated.

Human brains performed shortcuts all of the time, especially for things that it was incredibly adept and practiced at doing. It often trimmed the fat and presented only what was necessary to the task at hand.

For example, there was no point in actually calculating what 1 + 1 actually summed up to. Everyone had calculated what it amounted to long, long ago. There wasn’t any need to calculate it again. People simply “knew” it was 2.

And the same sort of concept held true in a simulation. If the brain knew it was being fooled into giving the answer of “2” – was there any point to doing the calculation?

And this fact threw the Admiral’s sim data into doubt. How much of it was the brain presenting a shortcut, and how much was genuine calculation?

“Alright,” she said. “I’ll have some chassis ready for you – after you get back from shore leave.”

They were actually only half a cycle away from the end of the second week. Although at first the pilots thought that they would stand by, those two weeks had been incredibly taxing.

Although they were now able to handle many hours in a Promethean Merge and still only took an hour to recover, it was still difficult. That level of mental stress took it out of them.

So, they collectively decided to go back to Helios to enjoy their leave. They absolutely needed it if they were going to continue piloting those cores.

~

Hours later, at the beginning of their leave, Commander Chase intercepted the pilots at the hangar bay. He had a host of medical data that he needed to review with them before they left.

With him was his sister, as she needed to know his report as well. The fact was that she was highly interested in their mental states. She needed to see if there were any serious repercussions. Or any repercussions at all.

The last thing she wanted was to turn pilots into raving lunatics.

And he had certainly uncovered a great deal of changes among all of them. The Admiral included.

“Before you all go back to Helios,” he told the pilots, “there’s something you should know about yourselves.”

This statement alarmed them to some degree.

“What? Why? Did we turn into mutants or something?” joked Redstar.

The Commander turned his head away, as though he thought about it. Then shook his head in disagreement.

“No, but your behavior has changed these past few weeks,” he said. “Not really sure if it’s Prometheus causing it, but the evidence points that way. And you all should know about them.”

“What do you mean changed?” asked Miko. “And how can you tell?”

“Well, we’ve got psych profiles for everyone, and there have been rather sharp changes since you all first merged.”

“Well so what? People change all the time! Damn!” said Redstar.

“This is exactly the problem,” the Commander replied. “Redstar, you came here very amicable, and now you’re much more irritable and argumentative.”

“That is true,” said Merlin.

“And you, Merlin,” continued the Commander. “You’ve become far too intrusive, no offense. You’ve started to stand closer to people, talk louder, gesticulate further. It’s as though your boisterous mannerisms have been cranked to eleven.”

He then turned to Eva.

“Eva – with you it’s much more subtle, and it took some digging until I figured it out. But you’ve become a little more forceful. And also much more impatient, though you’re not as prickly or irritable or hostile like Redstar. ”

“I resent that,” Redstar huffed.

The Commander turned to Miko, a rather worried look in his eye.

“And you, little one,” he said. “I’m not sure what changes you’ve gone through, to be honest. Could be you haven’t changed at all.”

“Why is it difficult to tell?” Miko asked.

“Well to be honest you’re still in your early teens. Technically your brain is still developing, and you should be changing greatly with every new thing you learn. Any changes you go through are technically normal.”

Then the Commander turned towards his sister, who suddenly became alarmed.

“M-me?” she stammered.

“According to your data, you started doing Promethean Merges two months ago, yes?” he said.

She slowly nodded in confirmation.

“But I haven’t changed much,” she retorted. “I’m not irritable or withdrawn or forceful. I still feel the same.”

“Of course you would,” he said. “You wouldn’t exactly realize you changed. But you did. In those two months, how did your other projects go?”

“What’re you getting at?”

“You used to be able to juggle a half dozen projects at a time. Expertly. And now? All you can handle is Prometheus. You’re a genius multitasker, so what happened?”

The Admiral was taken aback. He was completely right. She had become incredibly single minded recently, when before she was able to handle many. In fact, she had a rare Supertasker trait that allowed her to handle them.

Did Prometheus change her? Did it overwrite her genetic trait? Wasn’t that impossible?

The others thought on similar lines, and wondered if Prometheus had slowly changed them. The implications were staggering if that was the case. Would continued use change them completely?

The changes were rather obvious, and it was only after two weeks. If they used it for years, how much would they change? Would they be the same person afterwards?

And did Prometheus cause change, or accelerate it?

Did the difference even matter?

“Listen, all of you,” Commander Chase continued, “don’t freak out too much. Change is inevitable – it’s an immutable law of nature. Just be conscious of your mental state, alright?”

“Great,” groaned Redstar. “Yet another thing to keep in mind.”

.....