"I like to believe that people, in the long run, are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it." - Dwight D. Eisenhower on radio and television broadcast with UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan (1959)
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Feb 21, 2057, 1114 Hours (UTC -5)
Arlington VA, United States of America
Baron Nucleonics Research and Development Facility
Xolani knew why she was stuck with babysitting duty.
Strike one was that she was a PR nightmare, refusing the make-up, exercise, and diet regime prescribed by the corporate suits at Baron Nucleonics, refusing to let up her training regimen so that her muscles didn’t intimidate audiences, refusing to come up with some dumbass fake story about growing up surrounded by crime so she would seem “more black” and play to her “demographic,” and the worst crime of all: Having a mouth that liked to talk about how the United States needed Pan-Democracy and that leaving TOCUs in the hands of capitalist corporations like Baron Nucleonics was reckless and stupid. So her corporate overlords made sure never to put that mouth in front of a camera or mic.
If Xolani hadn’t had one of the United States’ 25 oversized temporoparietal junctions, Baron would’ve fired her ass years ago, but she did, and they had 25 giant robots to fill, so in one of them her ass firmly remained, whether they liked it or not. The most that dickhead Graham could do was stick her with babysitting duty.
“Why is it rumbling?” Apple asked.
“That’s simulating the combustion engine, honey,” Xolani replied.
The 13 year-old girl Xolani was training on the simulator was Apple Tran, the most recent pilot found through BN’s “discovery” program. She was a sweet girl, but the idea of an “ulterior motive” was beyond her ability to comprehend. As soon as she had joined, Xolani gave her the low-down on what working for Baron Nucleonics was really like, how the Head of Pilot Assets, Graham Magnusson, was an exploitative asshole who would try to get her to do things she didn’t want to do, and that Apple was about to become the figurehead for the “Asian demographic” and a tool for “US-Vietnamese cultural exchange” and other things that allowed BN to wring every last drop of profit out of their second and only living Asian-American TOCU pilot. And that no matter what Apple did, she would always be a background character for BN’s snow white darlings, Nicholas Johnson and Tiffany Fontaine.
To that Apple had said she didn’t care, and she was just trying to be the best pilot she could be. Well, Xolani thought, Apple would find out herself when she turned 18 and found the doors of career advancement guarded by men who cared about things other than her piloting ability.
“Oh! Oh no! Crap!”
Apple took too big of a step and the display of the training sim environment tilted towards the ground. Despite being a simulation, Xolani winced as the pilot POV smacked against tarmac and emitted the realistic sound of crumpling, grinding metal, shattering glass, and hissing pipes. The sound engineers for the simulation had done a scarily good job. At 30, Xolani was the youngest pilot to have actually served in an active-duty combat role in Mexico before the US withdrew in ‘49. When TOCU units fell down, that was exactly what they sounded like.
“That’s alright, we’ll reset and you can try again,” Xolani said, entering a scenario reset command into the simulator.
The room they were training in was pitch black save the simulator command terminal where Xolani was standing and the simulator apparatus. Apple was in the apparatus, standing on a raised hydraulic platform in full pilot suit surrounded by 360-degrees of accurate-to-life recreations of the interior of a TC-240, the model of TOCU she would be controlling when she turned 16 and graduated to live-fire training (Xolani still thought the age limit for “hazardous occupations” ought to be at least 18. Congress disagreed). Another 4,000 hours in the simulator stood between Apple and a real life cockpit, however, and Xolani was tasked with supervising the majority of them.
“Your steps should be shorter and more deliberate,” Xolani said. “Like you’re marching in a parade. The neural link captures your full range of motion, but that doesn’t mean the 30 tons of titanium you’re driving can accommodate it.”
Apple raised one foot up, testing the responsiveness of the simulated robot. Whirring gyros and hydraulic stabilizers hissed in her ears as they adapted to the one-footed stance. The rumbling ceased and was replaced by a chirping sound as the cyclotron in the robot’s stomach kicked on its high-activity Coulomb-suppression. Here was another common mistake.
“It’s not a problem in the sim, but remember that any non-routine movements will automatically switch primary power from combustion to fusion. If you do that in the real robot, Graham’ll chew you out for wasting money,” Xolani said.
“S-Sorry,” Apple replied.
Xolani laughed. “It’s why you make the fuck-ups in the simulation first. Here, try the manual shut-off. Think hard about the fuel switch.”
Apple squeezed her eyes shut like all new pilots did when they were told to “concentrate” on something for the neural link. It took a while before pilot and neural AI developed trust between each other and the expected command would come up quickly and naturally. Nonetheless, after a few seconds of concentrating, a prompt popped onto the view screen of the simulated cockpit:
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Fuel Mode: Combustion — {Fusion}
“Think about switching from Fusion to Combustion. Imagine the brackets around Combustion instead,” Xolani said, leaning against the simulator controls so she could watch Apple.
Her mentee opened her eyes to look at the prompt then squeezed them shut even harder to try and imagine the fuel change into existence. Nothing happened.
“It’s not working!” Apple called down from her platform.
“Don’t think about it so hard. Imagine it’s already happened and you just haven’t seen it yet. Like… how you know your favorite shirt will be in the closet,” Xolani said.
Apple shut her eyes again. The chirping receded and was replaced by the dulled roar of a turboshaft monster greedily shoveling jet fuel into its maw. Simulating the switch-over, the stationary hydraulic platform rumbled and shook, nearly knocking Apple over.
“You can toggle the automatic switchover protocol as well,” Xolani said, “but it’s better to leave it on and get used to moving in a way that doesn’t trigger it. In combat it gives you one less thing to worry about, so it’s better to have it on.”
“R-Right…” Apple said, sounding defeated.
Xolani frowned. Based on the two months she’d been training, Apple tended to get depressed if she wasn’t immediately good at something. Instinctually, Xolani disliked the girl for it, even as she was aware it was petty to dislike a middle-school girl freshly thrown into the military-industrial complex and trying her best. Sometimes she liked Apple and wanted to protect her from the worst of their line of work, and sometimes she never wanted to hear her squeaky, helpless voice again.
“Go ahead and try walking again,” Xolani said, purging her irritation from her voice. Despite what people said about her online and in the news, about how she was a lazy communist pannie, when it came time to do a job, Xolani did the damn thing. If that was whipping some discipline and grit into a 13 year old girl then that’s what she was gonna do.
The screens above jostled with the motion of a fictional step. Then another. And another. Apple’s movement erred in the opposite direction and now she was taking stiff, conservative marching steps to ensure she didn’t fall again, but it was progress. The girl was pleased with herself and Xolani was pleased with her for it. There was no denying Apple was talented. Their shared mutation ensured all pilots were talented to some degree or another, but Apple was also a quick learner, she just needed to stay focused when the learning didn’t come as quick.
“Try putting a little more speed on. Experiment a little. No need to be scared in a simulation,” Xolani said.
Apple giggled nervously and put a little more force into her motion, registered by the haptic pilot suit she wore. And she fell over again.
“Shoot, no! Agh! I’m sorry, Ms. Jefferson!”
“Xolani,” Xolani said, copy-pasting the command code to reset the simulation. “All pilots are equal. You don’t have to say Mr. and Ms. It doesn’t matter who you are, if someone talks down on you—and they will—you remind them of that fact. Same with Graham, alright, Apple?”
“Yes ma’am,” Apple replied, standing back up. “But what about you and Mr. Robicheaux?”
“Eli’s different. He earned my respect cuz he’s an oldhead and I know he’s got my best interests at heart. But I give that respect of my own volition which is how things ought to be. Even with me, if you don’t like what I’m sayin’, you tell me that. I don’t got thin skin. I’m not gonna demand your respect just cuz I’m older and I’ve been shot at.”
Apple nodded. Xolani wasn’t sure the girl had fully grasped what she was saying, but it was enough that the ideas were bouncing around in her head. Lord knew Graham fucking Magnusson was putting all kinds of bullshit in there too.
“Good. We’re gonna go again, and this time your goal is to make it to the other end of the tarmac in twenty seconds. If you fall flat on your face, don’t worry about it, just pick yourself up and I’ll run it back for you. Good luck.”
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Feb 21, 2057, 1153 Hours (UTC -5)
Austin TX, United States of America
Damien Castro’s Studio
Graham Magnusson clapped Nicky on the shoulder and shook. “You’re gonna do great my man. You always do. These guys are gonna be tougher than you’re used to cuz they’re coming from the right, not the left. Just remember you’re the boy next door from good ol’ Florida and they’re a bunch of shit-stirrers. When in doubt, throw your hands up, cuz the shit’s never on you and Tiff.”
Graham made an exaggerated gesture of throwing his hands up and making a face of, “who, me?” before laughing and patting Nick on the shoulder again.
“We both want another term of President Peterson, so let’s make sure that happens,” Graham said without explaining how a talk show circuit for a TOCU pilot related to election outcomes.
“Sure, Graham. I just want things to be civil,” Nicholas Johnson replied.
Nicky wasn’t stupid. He knew Graham was a slimy careerist who was climbing the Baron Nucleonics corporate ladder and that the people whose bidding he was doing probably shared conversations and handshakes with President Peterson. But Peterson was the lesser of two evils. His platform included an expansion of the public-private partnership with Baron Nucleonics focusing on genetic research and disseminating nuclear fusion progress to other countries. Both of these things were undeniably good things in Nicky’s book.
Peterson’s opponent, Jas Dawar, wanted to nationalize TOCU pilots for, in his own words, “direct force projection in the Western hemisphere” along with rolling back the expansion of civil freedoms of the past three decades. US defense contractors were split down the middle on who to support, but Nicky took it as a bad sign that companies like RTX, Lockheed-Boeing, and McDonnell-Douglas were leaning towards Dawar, and a good sign that Baron Nucleonics, L3Harris, and Alphabet were leaning Peterson.
As much as Nicholas wanted to prove he was the star pilot everyone thought he was, and prove to himself that he had the courage to fight for a good cause, the way to do that was not another ground war with the Federal Republic of Central America.
“You’re on in five,” said a streaming assistant with a tablet.
The assistant was doing his best to seem like this was just biz, but he wasn’t able to keep the awe off his face at being on the same sound stage as Nicholas Johnson. Though Nicky was too young to be a veteran of the first Central American War, he had still somehow become the public face of Baron Nucleonics, and thus the United States’ TOCU program. It bothered Nicky that he didn’t really deserve that status, but as Graham explained, Nicky’s position allowed him to be a force for change in ways that didn’t involve being on the battlefield.
Nicky watched the assistant give a ten second countdown. As the final fingers went down, he straightened his tie and walked, head high, into Damien Castro’s podcast studio.