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Terminal Fleet
Chapter 15: Simulation Pod

Chapter 15: Simulation Pod

Mirem and Lanis arrive at the Versk Suit complex early the next day. There are still the deep bows at the gate and at reception, but this time it seems that the bows linger a half-moment longer, though it could simply be Lanis’ imagination.

They’re met at reception by Heinrich. He’s freshly shaven today, and his grey-peppered mustache neatly trimmed. Whereas the day before he had seemed almost stupefied, today he is brisk, and his eyes are sharp behind his small rectangular glasses.

“I know this is a bit irregular, to have a simulation dive so quickly,” he says as he leads them down a branching hallway, away from the massive Suit hanger. “But my superiors felt it was important to get an immediate base reading of your piloting ability. Mirem informed us that you are rather new to Suit piloting, so we won’t expect you to move mountains, but your performance the other day certainly raised some interesting possibilities.” He pauses, hoping that Lanis will clarify him somehow on this point. He clears his throat when she does not, and continues, striding briskly through the tastefully-lit Versk corridors.

“Of course, we’ll give you a few minutes to integrate again and get familiar with sim-Suit’s modules. A very standard array, you’ll find. A quick system check, and then we’ll run a sim. Ah, here we are,” he says, walking through a final, hissing door, and gesturing to Lanis and Mirem to precede him.

Whereas the AI lab had banks of research terminals and two integration couches, the simulation lab has a single, clear focus of attention: in the center of the room, surrounded by a cluster of terminals, is what looks like a large, metal ball.

The simulation pod is suspended within a framework of hydraulic scaffolding to simulate the physical effects of a suit. Heavy cables run from its base to the monitoring terminals that surround it. It reminds Lanis, for a shuddering moment, of her acceleration pod onboard the Demeter. But it isn’t, she thinks, shutting down the thought as soon as it arises.

“We’ve also added some redundancies to better monitor any power spikes like the one we saw on your last visit,” Heinrich continues, walking up slowly behind them. “We also have a full team here, and medical staff.”

Lanis had been so fixated on the simulation pod that she had barely noticed the people, all of them now standing at attention as Heinrich slowly circles the pod. Lanis counts fifteen tech attendants, their eyes all boring into her, some with curiosity, others with a hint of trepidation.

“Can I help get you settled in?” Ash says quietly, suddenly standing beside them. Lanis looks at her, blinking. The girl from the integration run. Whereas Heinrich looks fresh, Lanis can see dark circles under Ash’s eyes. The woman looks dead tired, though her Versk tech uniform is still as neat as any Fleet cadet’s under review.

“Did you help set this up?” Lanis asks as she approaches the sim pod’s entrance. She

Peers inside: The inside is cramped, with a dizzying array of switches and blinking lights. From the back of the pod’s polished seat hangs a set of mesh-like nets and a coiled, silver neural shunt.

“Yeah, Heinrich had us analyze your waveforms and provide some more redundancies in case of another neural overload.” Ash says, gesturing at the heaps of cables running from the pod. “It’ll provide much better feedback, and prevent an overload like the one we saw on the trial integration.”

“So. How are you feeling?” Ash asks, trying to keep the tinge of concern from her voice. She fails.

“Yeah, great,” Lanis lies. She unzips her jacket and hands it to Mirem.

“Let’s do this.”

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Climbing into the sim pod feels eerily like entering into the Demeter’s navigation pod. But it isn’t, Lanis reminds herself again, focusing on Ash’s curly hair as the young tech straps her in. She feels a cool click as the pod’s neural shunt slides into her skull and thinks of Lieutenant Tran’s warning. She checks the flickering stream of data as the neural bridge connection is tested and verified, and then the internal readings that Versk won’t see. Sure, it’s not working like it did a year ago, but she also isn’t about to warp jump with a Jupiter-class AI ego. The implant doesn’t feel damaged, and she wonders, not for the first time, how much she can really trust the Fleet diagnosticians

Ultimately though, she also simply doesn’t care. It’s not like she wants to stroke out, but what does Fleet expect her to do? I’m not their broken toy, she thinks. They can own my past, but my mind is my own.

“Ok, should be all good,” Ash says, pulling one last harness cinch tight. “Don’t worry too much about all these;” she nods to the rows of tactile switches and buttons, a rainbow of blinking color that surrounds Lanis. “They’re mostly for manual override training. The AI- I mean, Ether- should fill you in on what you need to know. All good? Good. I’m closing the hatch now. Closing the hatch!” She barks loudly behind her to the assembled tech team.

“Hatch closure!” they echo back.

Ash turns back to Lanis one last time before she hefts the pod door shut, gently patting her knee. “Good luck,” she says quietly. Lanis nods back, avoiding eye contact lest she betrays how she’s really feeling.

For a moment after the pod door hisses shut Lanis’ only light is the dim cast of the pod’s hardwire arrays of switches. Slowly though, a soft light fills the pod. A HUD sparkles to life in front of her, a readout of the simulation Suit’s systems powering on with green checkmarks. If it was the Demeter it would all be orange, Lanis thinks, biting the inside of her cheek against another small surge of claustrophobia. She mouths the words silently: No flashbacks this time, ok? Right. Easy.

Heinrich’s voice buzzes in her ear. “You reading me, Lanis?”

“All clear,” Lanis says, nodding to herself.

“Ash here,” the woman says, her voice no longer tired, but firm. “Readings all look good on our end. Still feeling ok, Lanis? When you give the ok I’ll integrate you with Ether and load you into a training sim.

“I’m ready,” Lanis says.

“Ok then. All teams are ready. All systems are go. Integration in 3, 2, 1-”

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Lanis feels herself curl up slightly, and then she’s falling back, muttering a prayer from her Navigator training days. This time, with a proper neural shunt, she can choose to be far less aware of her physical body in the sim pod.

She blinks, and then opens her dream eyes to a new scene.

She’s not in the simulation room, surrounded by concerned technicians, but in a field of packed earth under a blue sky, and the pod is a proper pilot couch, nestled within the armored core of a Versk Armored Suit. The pod’s heads up display blossoms around her, overlaying the tactile switches, and shows the full configuration of the Suit, as well as her imagined surroundings.

Stolen story; please report.

The more natural view is within her mind though. With a shift of focus, her eyes become the Suit’s eyes, two retinal clusters that give a 360 view sharper than any HUD or holo-cast

She feels Ether there too, hovering, like a friend who’s just walked into her peripheral vision.

“Clear- readings good- clear- clear-” Lanis hears the muttering of Ash and several other technicians in her ear, like background music thumping away inside a club while she smokes on the sidewalk.

“Right. Hello again Ether. I guess they thought we had enough of an introduction last time?” Lanis asks, smiling slightly in the pod.

I feel more than introduced! It’s nice to see you again Lanis! Ether says, or rather beams, the data forming thoughts alongside Lanis’ own.

“Have they filled you in on what we’re doing here?” Lanis says. Her eyes scan the horizon inside the simulation. Nothing there… yet.

No, they kept me in the dark. But, judging from your new presence in the sim pod, as well the amount of integration feedback monitoring, I can safely assume that we’re undergoing combat simulations to determine you’re worth admitting in the Versk pilot program. I do hope you pass! Ether says.

Lanis smirks. “Right. I think that depends on you as much as me. I assume you know how to work this thing?”

Ether’s tone is a chipper staccato, accompanied by brief mind’s-eye projection of each item: You mean a Versk Biped, specifically a Mark II running an Insertion Shield, Coil Gun, dual shoulder micro-launchers, Mag-saber, and a drone decoy system?

There’s a pause.

Obviously, Ether says, with the dead-pan equivalent of an eye roll. All they have me do is train on this shit!

“Ok, sorry, that was kind of a stupid question. The real question is, can you show me how to work this in the short amount of time that Versk is going to give us?” Lanis says.

Another micro-pause, and Ether’s inhuman intellect digests this problem.

That all depends on how much access you want to give me. As per Arena protocol, your body has piloting control. I can only assist in decision making and subsystem control, such as targeting, energy routing, and decoy nav. Ether says.

Lanis briefly shifts her attention to a readout of the systems monitoring her integration pathways. All green still. She whispers a subvocal mantra.

“Ok, it looks like everything is clear.” Lanis says. She breathes, and imagines the handshake they had back in the dream clearing the day before.

“Hey Ether? Don’t freak out. My brain was designed for this,” Lanis says, trying to project confidence.

I’ve been designed to explicitly not “freak out”, Lanis, Ether says. But what exactly are you planning-

Except now, instead of a protocol handshake, Lanis prepares an embrace…

Suddenly, Ether is more than a friend peeking over her shoulder, whispering thoughts into her ear. Lanis can feel her respiratory rate quickening outside of the sim. Ether is a part of Lanis.

There was a lesson that was hammered into Lanis and her cadre at fleet from their first seminars: Never let an AI come fully into your mind. There are too many risks; the risk of losing your own ego, the risk of neural transmitter overload, the risk of catatonia and seizures when an artificial intellect becomes superimposed on the biologic.

But, as her training progressed, and as the other cadets washed out to different positions requiring less mental fortitude, and as her own neural implants were refined and articulated specifically for a type of ego-death, the lessons changed. The old rules? Those were for Admin controllers, ship helmsmen, and heavy insertion Suit pilots. It turned out that letting go was precisely what was needed from navigators and commanders to achieve the necessary results with the egos of Ship AIs, both in Warp jumps and in the management of ship systems in theoretical battles against humanity’s enemies amongst the stars.

Lanis can hear the quickening of chatter in her ear from the techs outside the sim pod, voices raised in alarm. God, if they could only see what I’m actually doing, she thinks. Simultaneous to integrating with Ether, Lanis has taken over the monitoring data that the sim pod is feeding to the assembled techs. The readings are still spiking; she has to give them something, after her last performance. But if they saw what was really happening, they’d probably manually disengage the simulation. Which would be a waste of everyone’s time, and potentially dangerous.

She pings a quick message to the tech team- I’m fine. I’m in control. Do NOT abort sim. The chatter doesn’t abate, but it does quiet.

Next, Lanis turns her attention to Ether, to the AIs own strange memories, if one can call them that, integrating them into her own.

She feels the birth-like awakening of the AI in the Versk training lab; the tests by Admin Ethics to ensure it’s working within its protocols and sentient-level guardrails. Then the endless training on Suit systems and tactics, pilot dynamics and Versk corporate loyalty, all the while silently criticizing the methodology of this training. Ether is a product of Versk, methodical and diligently plugging away, but in the deepest strata of her mind she really just wishes that she was left alone twenty kilometers beneath the planet’s crust, or better yet working alongside Fleet within some asteroid a million miles from anything else, just barely on the legal side of sentient autonomy.

Lanis can feel Ether give the equivalent of a startled freeze as she pulls the memories into herself. If she was still projecting as a young woman in a dreamscape, her face would be white.

“We’ll be fine,” Lanis says. Letting Ether digest the situation, Lanis turns her attention to the Suit, which she now knows as well as her own reflection.

In her left hand, curling around two hundred kilograms of composite metal sinew, is a white, four meter shield, Versk proudly stamped across its equator. It’s like Sander said, back in the hanger- what Versk knows best is advanced metallurgy, second only to energy, and the thing is near Fleet equivalent, able to withstand up to seven direct hits from a KR mass driver.

She flexes her right arm next. Not so much an arm, really, but a large gun: Specifically, a magnetic-accelerator coil gun, powered by the Versk fission reactor that nestles between the Suit’s shoulders. There are only forty rounds, but a direct hit will cripple a Suit.

Interesting, Lanis thinks. The Suit’s Mag-saber, a deployable sort of blade, is actually nestled as part of the coil gun. Deploying it means giving up the gun. In exchange, she’d get a three meter, close-range weapon that could slice through anything but the Suit’s Adamite shielded core like a steel gauntlet through wet paper.

The rest of the armament is more standard issue stuff, second hand from Murkata-Heisen designs. The micro missiles are meant to be a distracting thorn against the opposing mech’s defenses, while the drone is standard to run interference, usually guided almost entirely by the Suit’s AI.

How did you do that? Ether asks, finally recovering. It’s not really a formed question anymore though, but rather an coinciding internal thought, one that Lanis answers almost instantaneously, similar to how she communicated with the Demeter.

“The tricks of Fleet,” Lanis says, “as well as training and implants that were reserved for command-track cadets. They couldn’t remove them when I was decommissioned, so now we get to use them.”

I can almost… feel you. This is incredible!

“I know,” Lanis says. And to think I’m using it here, instead of out in the stars, a part of Lanis quietly thinks. Not quite quietly enough for Ether though.

Hey, you could be stuck in a Versk training lab; count yourself lucky, Ether responds.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean that. I’m a bit out of practice with keeping thoughts to myself in this situation,” Lanis says, shaking her head. “Anyway… the truth is, this is what I was built for. Without this, I’m not sure who I am.”

Ether digests this, and Lanis can feel her accessing an archive of the DSM8 catalog of mental health, subheading: depression.

Well, let’s keep you alive during this sim, and then focus on the future after that, Ether says.

A reading pops up on the HUD inside the sim pod, as well as in Lanis’ mind.

Ah. I guess they’ve finally decided to give us some company.