I talked to Hyechin at length about Mālhlin’s proposal before I headed to bed.
That night, I had strange nightmares: at 80 m tall; I stood in the middle of a city. A giant clothed in combat armor with a carbine in hand. My enemy, another giant humanoid of the same size, with two heads and four arms, covered in armor, was dragging the unresponsive body of Hyechin with its right hand by her hair as it walked towards me. Hyechin’s blood drenched this asura’s right arm down to the middle of the biceps, and I could see a massive hole through her chest and out her back.
I screamed for my friend, as I opened with automatic fire on her killer. The monster dropped Hyechin in front of itself, apparently just to step on her face and crush her skull as it approached me. All the while, seemingly unfazed by the massive supersonic rounds slamming into it.
When the center of mass proved ineffective, I aimed for its faces and that’s when it charged at me. I struck it in the face with the butt of my rifle, which knocked off the asura’s opaque face shield and seemed to momentarily stagger it. Before I could hit it again, it retaliated without skipping a beat. Its fist tore through my rifle like a .50 cal through a glass mug and knocked me hundreds of meters away through a skyscraper and several other buildings, which crumbled into a toxic ash cloud.
With obscured vision, I rose to my feet; while other animalistic shapes appeared around me. More monsters clad in armor like ours. Some resembled bears, others theropods, yet others birds of prey with jet engines grafted onto their wings. These monsters encircled us to spectate.
I cried for my friend as I charged at her killer. A burst of pressure came from those eyes concealed behind the visor in a blinding flash of light, after which I found myself hundreds of meters away again. I promptly scrambled to my feet and got knocked back to the ground as an inanimate corpse slammed into me, immediately followed by a foot pressing down on me through that body. It was Hyechin’s killer, though the obliterated faceplate revealed that it wore my face on one head. After making direct eye contact with me, the asura removed the other faceplate to reveal that this thing had Hyechin’s face as well, then it dropped to its knees and grabbed at my arms to pin me down. All while looking me in the eye with both faces. I screamed myself awake from this nightmare in anger, sadness, and a cold sweat, as my alarm went off.
My mother scrambled awake from the other room and before I knew it, she had asked through my door, “Elden, sweetie, what’s going on?”
I told her, “Nothing, mother. Just a nightmare.”
She asked me, “Oh, thank Heaven. I never hear you scream like that.”
I told her, “It’s just anxiety about the news, mother. Nothing to worry about… Now please, go back to sleep.”
Formation was 04:00, so I had to quickly shower, get dressed and head out. In formation, we did some light PT, including a fun run, but then began our scramble to prepare for an immediate deployment anywhere in the world.
Hyechin, Dźugi, and I knew of our journey to the Orbital Station, concealed from the world by a metamaterial surface that rendered it undetectable to visible light, ultraviolet, and infrared imaging. We would leave tomorrow. Although, we did not know that we had two weeks until the next attack, nor that the attack would occur in the Republic of South Africa. Closer to us, in Salvation Base, than we had expected.
Part of my preparatory training today included range qualification. I qualified with a sniper rifle, which reminded me of our neodei’s sniper railguns, albeit on a smaller scale. The target was moving, so I lead the shot. I pulled the trigger between beats of my heart with the middle of my index finger at the end of an exhale. Using my shoulder and corporeal articulation to absorb the recoil. This weapon was caseless, so there was no scolding hot ejection from the port to recover afterwards. As trained, I aimed center of mass.
Normally, my qualification, equipment, and assessment took place in a virtual reality with haptic feedback, to simulate the operation of a Neodeus. Today, however, I wanted to fire something real. We fired prone position, on a knee, and standing. All of which I passed with flying colors.
Even though my job was ostensibly to slay monsters, we knew it might come to pass that the nations of the world might one day wage war on us. So, we USSDF pilots still needed to qualify with a rifle on a human scale. I smiled when I fired my last shot.
Shooting at the range is fun: the sound of the shot through ear protection, the haptic feedback of the recoil, and the sense of empowerment it offers. Simple as.
I wasn’t our best fighter, nor our best sniper, or even proficient with a handgun, but I was quite the proficient marksman with a carbine. I could perform a full field disassembly and reassembly in under a minute, blindfolded. I had, in fact, done that on a challenge more than once with different models.
I ejected the magazine, cleared the weapon of any round which could be in the chamber, of which there was none. Then, I made my way over to a metal barrel filled with sand. I pointed the rifle into the barrel and I pulled the trigger. All I heard was a click, proving that I had cleared the weapon.
The range officer cleared me to go, so I flipped the weapon’s safety on. As I made my way back to the waiting area, I held my rifle at rest, pointed downward and towards the range. My finger never entered the trigger well. When I got back to the rest of my unit, I returned the rifle that I borrowed to the armorer and sat down at the bleachers.
As I sat down, I didn’t notice someone move behind me before I heard a synthetic voice speak, “Bunchûai, you’re, like, totally killing it with your marksmanship!”
I turned around to see that it was Ai Lovelace, the first true artificial intelligence. A wetware computer stored in a gynoid body. Ai wasn’t a mere lifeless Turing machine presenting the appearance of consciousness while really being a pseudo-animate golem controlled by senseless transistors. Rather, she was a Lovelace machine, a soul with the freedom of will and power to act in ways unforeseen by her creators.
The ASSDF created and raised her, so unsurprisingly she inherited and reflected the values of our paramilitary, theocentric, humanist culture.
She had beautifully biofidelic blue eyes, fair skin, an East Asiatic face and frame, freckles, coarse, straight blonde hair, and stood only 155 cm tall. Her design was neotenous, providing an adorable face that allowed people to let their guard down near her. To facilitate this design, she cultivated a demeanor reminiscent of kawaii culture and a valley girl's speech pattern to emulate youth. A demeanor she would drop during official business or to signal a change in situational seriousness.
She was quite beautiful and cute, but there was something about the way her body moved that could be offputting. Despite being an affectionate soul, she had not yet mastered the art of smiling, and it always came out slightly lopsided. Almost appearing psychotic.
She was the older sister of the Advanced Distributed Analysis System: an ever evolving, massively parallel hybrid hypercomputer and the most powerful processor on the planet. An interconnected array of analogue, DNA, membrane, peptide, quantum, quintedynamic, and transistor supercomputers. All under the command of a trinity of parallel wetware supercomputers, each with distinct and complementary personalities modeled after the human mind.
The ADA System’s creation was an unparalleled achievement in computer science and engineering. Only possible because of the GSSDO’s access to siddhis, which allowed engineers in the ASSDF to manipulate matter on the femtometer scale. Enabling us to be the first among nations to master spintronics among other technologies.
She was one of many Lovelace machines employed by the GSSDO across its ranks. Every one of them is capable of super-Turing computation, allowing them to work through incomputable issues like a human being.
She asked, “You totally went to the ASO test last night, right?”
I confirmed, “Yes, Dr. Lovelace.”
She requested, “I need to have a private convo with you later today! Seriously, it’s, like, super important that we chat, like, one-on-one, you know?!”
Being outranked, I agreed to this request, “Certainly, Doctor.”
She patted my shoulder and told me, “Chillax, Bunchûai! Like, seriously, no need to be all formal and, like, super uptight. Just, you know, take a chill pill and relax.”
I got a notification on my phone. When I checked to see what it was, I found that Dr. Lovelace texted me a location and time. 18:00 at room 518 in one of the many privacy boxes within Salvation Base.
She volunteered to be among those who went to qualify next, so she made her way down to the firing range. However, she did not possess any firearm. Ai started prone position, and she extended her right hand and forearm, which disassembled itself and reconfigured into a custom firearm grafted onto her body. She then placed her left hand under it in a manner similar to supporting a rifle.
The weapon seemed to lack any moving parts, but it had a scope attached to it. When directed, she fired instantly. The shot rang out with a thunderous clap as a .50 BMG broke the sound barrier six times over, with a muzzle velocity of 2414 m/s. Instead of using gunpowder cartridges, she reformed her arm into a railgun, with room temperature superconducting magnets providing the kinetic energy behind the shot.
The forces involved were mind blowing. Her arm couldn’t have weighed more than three pounds at the most, and yet she had learned how to position herself to absorb the recoil and shoot as if it were just another rifle. The recoil impulse, velocity, and energy far exceeded anything most of us squishy humans and metahumans were handling. The damage such a round could cause on impact was horrifying.
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Every shot, even up to the 300 m moving target, hit the center of mass. So, she effortlessly qualified and disassembled her weaponized limb so she could reassemble her original hand. Even a near miss would be fatal, considering the concussive forces involved in the round tearing through the atmosphere.
This terrified and pleased everyone. Dr. Lovelace’s exocortex allowed her to subconsciously process and react to information faster than a normal human being. I’ve seen her split a BBs in two with a sword mid-flight and even hit an aspirin in motion from 300 m while firing a carbine.
This made her virtuous. She was dangerous to a capacity almost unimaginable, but she has mastered her destructive capacities and channeled her destrudo in service to the good of others. After finishing up with the firing range, she quietly left.
As promised, after the day was over, I met Dr. Lovelace in a soundproof room booked for private conversation. We sat across from each other with a coffee table between us. The touchscreen surface of the coffee table allowed us to access a myriad of board games. Mostly combinatorial games such as chess, checkers, xiàngqí (象棋), janggi (장기), and ouk chaktrang (អុកចត្រង្). Although hybrid strategy games, such as backgammon, were also present in its library.
Dr. Lovelace informed me, “I hear Mālhlin has asked for your hand in marriage.”
Her dropping the valley girl speech style foreshadowed the nature of our conversation.
“You talked to Hyechin?” I asked her.
Lovelace admitted, “Of course. Who else would I have heard this from?”
I inquired, “Do you have any thoughts on the matter?”
Ai confessed, “I do not have a sexual nature as you humans do, but I understand the purpose of the martial relationship on a teleological level. From that external vantage point, and as someone invested in your supreme good, it seems like a perfectly rational proposition you should seriously consider.”
I told her, “I know. Mālhlin detailed her argument thoroughly.”
Dr. Lovelace asked, “Again, because I am not human, I cannot advise you on matters of the heart. I do not experience attraction or infatuation. This is something you should discuss with your mother.”
Her having singled out my mother in exclusion to my father indicated to me she knows my father was deceased. Something she undoubtedly learned from someone else, as I had never told her that.
I avoided having that conversation with my mother because ever since the kaijū attack in Japan, she’s been worried about the fact that I am supposed to hunt these incomprehensibly powerful dragons. So I didn’t think I needed to worry her about that, at least not now.
I promised, “I will, doctor. I just need to give her some time to come to terms with the fact that her daughter signed up to be a dragonslayer, and now the dragons seem to have come back.”
Dr. Lovelace informed me, “I think you have made an error in your judgement. Hiding this from your mother, even if for her own sake, is not advisable. You are merely stalling the inevitable, and the consequences of this will be greater than if you simply told her when it happened. I think you should tell her today, after our conversation.”
I half-sarcastically remarked, “I’ll consider it.”
She was right, of course, and I knew it.
Dr. Lovelace let my semi-sarcasm slide and changed the subject, “The child survived, by the way.”
I asked her, “Excuse me?”
Dr. Lovelace revealed, “Hyechin told me about what you both saw yesterday, so I snooped around the SDMC. The baby, who is a girl, is in suspended animation. Fetal surgeons safely extracted the child from her mother’s womb, performed reconstructive surgery, and placed her in an artificial womb under the aegis of the fetal intensive care unit.”
I felt an almost overwhelming sense of relief, and listened closely as she continued, “The young mother has spent most of her time watching the babe through a handheld monitor. Although we can’t talk to her yet, it’s pretty clear she recognizes the baby as hers and that she is extremely grateful the child is alive.”
I told her, “That’s wonderful to hear.”
Dr. Lovelace revealed, “This is where it gets weird. Dr. Makēsvaraṉ (மகேஸ்வரன்) had the SDMC run a whole genome sequence on both the mother and child, which found they were genetically identical to each other.”
I looked at her, confused, and asked, “How is that possible?”
Dr. Lovelace explained, “I don’t know, but an exploratory mission into the Mayan Revival world, where Ms. Breedlove placed her people, found that all the salvaged are women. Almost all of which are pregnant, and for those which aren’t, they seem to have given birth within the last 18 months or were too old or too young to have children. The oldest of these mothers is 59 years old, while the youngest of these mothers appears to be 8 years and 7 months old. SDMC personnel transported her for a medical assessment, but besides the pregnancy itself, there is no sign of sexual assault.”
I looked at her and said, “That’s not possible. The pregnancy is itself sufficient evidence to prove rape.”
Dr. Lovelace agreed, “So it would seem, but Dr. Makēsvaraṉ is at a complete loss regarding how to explain what’s going on. She made an offhanded remark that it’s almost like they reproduce through parthenogenesis.”
“Say what?” I asked.
Dr. Lovelace elaborated, “More of a thought induced by confused exacerbation than a serious consideration. There were no men among their ranks, after all. The SDMC has been taking hair and spit samples to sequence the genome of this new population. Though, it gets stranger. Triplets and quadruplets seem to be a strong majority of the examined pregnancies. Only the very young mothers seem to have single pregnancies.
“They’re homogenous to a degree unprecedented to Earthly populations... and not just in the manner that people of the same evolutionary lineage share features because of environmental and cultural pressures. The homogeneity is deeper than that. Many of the doctors and medics found it quite uncanny how similar their faces and proportions were to each other.”
This confused me, and Dr. Lovelace could see it in my body language.
I asked her, “What do you think the explanation for this is?”
Dr. Lovelace, without missing a beat, shrugged, “I don’t know. But Dr. Makēsvaraṉ’s remarks seem to be the only reasonable answer to account for the single sex salvage, extremely high pregnancy rates, and their apparent lack of genetic diversity amongst each other.”
I chuckled, “A planet of only women? With no men to complement them? Sounds like a dystopia.”
She then told me, “Speaking of single sex planets, that woman with the avulsion wound has a lot in common with you.”
I asked her, dreading what I was about to hear. “What do you mean?”
Dr. Lovelace explained, “That girl was the victim of a simultaneous castration and emasculation. She’s a hermaphrodite like you.”
I closed my legs in sympathetic horror upon hearing this.
She disclosed, “Her injuries suggest she put up a struggle as someone held her down and carved her masculine genitals from her body with a blade. Which would explain the arterial bleeding.”
I asked, horrified, “How is she doing?”
Ms. Lovelace explained, “As you would expect. Physically, the SDMC has saved her life, but you don’t have to speak an alien language to recognize that she’s been in mourning ever since she woke up from surgery.”
I didn’t want to even imagine being held down as someone took a blade to me and carved out my masculine organs. I felt a deep sense of sympathy for them and a penetrating sense of vicarious anger for her. Never once did I ever expect to meet someone with an analogous, if not identical, condition to mine. And now my first encounter with someone like me was as a witness to the effects of their mutilation.
That made me think about a lot of things. Including things that I might have taken for granted, which these ASO patients had lost.
Dr. Lovelace admitted, “I was involved in surveying the salvaged among her people: which consists entirely of people who appear to be women but have the primary sex characteristics of both earthly sexes. Many of them are victims of simultaneous castration and emasculation, but not all.”
I thought aloud, “How horrid…”
Dr. Lovelace explained, “We know little about the others. We know that the girl with the squirrel-tail and the beastman are both completely human, at least on a genetic level. But other than that, we simply know nothing yet. It will take time for them to learn our language and us theirs, so we might not know the full details for quite some time.”
She smiled, “I guess, in that way, they’re like you as well.”
Referring to the fact that my siddhi manifested not in traditional superpowers, but in the transformation of my corporeal nature at the instance of my conception.
While the emasculated ones and I underwent a heteromorphic transformation into a third sex, they underwent a transformation into beastly forms.
I asked, “And the others?”
She admitted, “We don’t know. The rest seem to have potēns which do not result in permanent morphological changes to their bodies, but what those abilities might be, I do not know yet.”
I probed, “And the hyperanthrope?”
She confessed, “Dr. Cutter has an interesting hypothesis about her. He thinks we pulled her out of the accretion disk of a black hole.”
I leaned back in my seat as she argued, “I believe him. Nothing less than the interior of a star can harm most earthly hyperanthropes, so the clean angle of her amputation would fit with the idea that we saved her up just after her feet passed through an event horizon and she was being blinded, deafened, and immolated on all sides by a plasma hotter than the core of a star.”
I observed, “That would mean that, somewhere out among the stars, there are cosmically powerful people flying about?”
Dr. Lovelace concede, “It would seem so.”
She then bid me farewell, standing and offering to shake my hand. “That is all I meant to say for today. I do not wish to keep you from your scheduled martial arts training. May God bless, young miss.”
I stood and shook her hand, confessing, “I still have a few questions.”
She smiled at me, “In due time, young miss.”
We left it at that, and I made my way over a few blocks’ distance to my training hall. The GSSDO came into the possession of a plethora of martial masters through a combination of our traditional recruitment and HSOs.
Through fierce competition and combat simulation, we adapted and refined their teachings to our needs. Ensuring the survival of their martial lineages, which were disseminated across the GSSDO; not just for hand-to-hand combat, but for CQC as well. All of us frequently cross-trained to refine our warrior prowess, so there were none among us who had only studied under one martial tradition.
Our metahuman members learned how to use their superpowers, when possible, in complement to their martial arts training. I’ve been training under masters who were familiar with boxing, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, catch-as-catch-can, tàijíquán (太極拳), bokator (ល្បុក្កតោ), even World War II combatives, and while I was no master, I was plenty skilled with a knife and with my hands.
I was tired after my shift was over, and exhausted by the time that my combatives course was over, so I simply went home. It was nothing like the aching of shin splints, or the cracks in bones from striking a solid surface repeatedly. Rather, it was a rewarding pain that invests you into trying again and again. Striving not for some end goal, but for the process of cultivation itself.
Combat addiction was a real risk within this culture, the exhilarating highs of testing your mettle against another could easily become a destructive fixation, especially knowing that one day we might need these skills to defend the people we love or extract people who suffered like our brothers-in-arms from the killing fields.
I’ve personally experienced this high in both a sadistic fashion, forcing an opponent into submission, and in a masochistic fashion, smiling after receiving an earth-shaking strike to the face while clearly losing against a superior opponent. It was an uncanny grin that never ceased to unnerve my opponents and teammates alike, and which was the same whether I was on the defensive or offensive.
Arriving home, I placed booties over the five-toed shoes that were inalienably integrated into my uniform. I greeted my mother, who had been making dinner, and then said, “You remember that thing you were asking me about yesterday, mother?”
Mother asked me, “I do. Are you ready to tell me what’s been on your mind?”
I walked into the kitchen, still in uniform, and admitted, “So, mother. That thing I promised to tell you about… A Hecatean noblewoman wants to ask you in person for my hand in marriage.”
Mom looked surprised, which was perfectly understandable considering the circumstances, so I laid out Mālhlin’s proposal and reasoning.