Good Luck, Yukikaze

“Right. Humanity’s perennial crises are a much more familiar problem to deal with. Economics, politics, religion, cultures, race, gender issues, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”

Rei remembered what Lynn Jackson had written in The Invader.

Back when the JAM first drove through the hyperspace Passageway linking Earth and Faery and invaded Antarctica, humanity hadn’t united to fight them. In the end, humanity saw the JAM as just another race among many to be confronted. On Earth you could find a race called “humans,” but that group couldn’t be properly considered “Earthers.” Humans are basically animals who fight each other for dominance within and between groups, so if a controlling member of one collective loses even a little power, the group fractures. Joining and splitting, over and over. The relationship of the ruler and the ruled. Struggles for supremacy. Even the presence of the JAM did not change this. This desire for confrontation would persevere in humanity until the species finally fell to ruin.

“Just humans with a different skin color, eh?” Rei said to Lynn Jackson as they climbed into a taxi.

“Hm?”

“That was something you wrote in your book. You basically said that humans wouldn’t face reality until the very end.”

“And what do you think?” she asked.

“I think we eat, we sleep, we grow old, and then one day we vanish from this world. Anything aside from that is an illusion.”

“Spoken like an enlightened old Buddhist.”

“The JAM made me that way,” Rei said. He shut the taxi door.

As the taxi drove along, Rei spotted a newsstand out the window and asked the driver to pull over. He bought four different papers. When he returned, Lynn Jackson laughed and told him he could ask the hotel to buy as many as he wished, or else print out all the news stories he could carry from the MT in his room. Rei, however, had no intention of doing as she said.

“It’s easy to forge newspapers or computer data,” he explained.

“Ah, but a paper bought out in the city from a random location would be a little more reliable, is that it?”

“I guess.”

“Who do you think would be trying to forge them?”

“Someone trying to make me laugh,” Rei said.

Lynn Jackson shrugged her shoulders and kept her mouth shut.

After arriving at the hotel and checking in, Rei went his own way after promising to meet Lynn for dinner later.

Lynn offered to take him out to a nice restaurant where he could have a meal fit for a human and plan what he was going to do, but Rei wasn’t used to just relaxing. Major Booker had given him a one-week grace period. For seven days, his posting in the SAF was still guaranteed. The meaning was clear — if he let it pass he’d never fly Yukikaze again, even if he returned to Faery.

Rei doubted he’d find something new to live for in the next week, but he didn’t want to waste his time. He wanted to perceive the JAM with the senses of an Earther, to find out just what it was that he’d been fighting.

The room Lynn had booked for him was a sumptuous suite. On top of the enormous bed, Rei read the newspapers he’d purchased. There wasn’t a single mention of the JAM. Rei couldn’t believe it, but he read them through completely and couldn’t find one anywhere.

Throwing the papers down, he went over to the multimedia terminal on the writing desk. They hadn’t had these before he’d left for Faery, so he experimentally switched it on.

He first searched the major news sites for any information about the JAM, but there were very few recent hits. Particularly shocking was that a keyword search for “the JAM” yielded hardly any information at all. While the word was there, it was treated merely as a special-purpose term or colloquialism used by some. According to the definition that came up for JAM, “It is not known who first referred to them as the JAM, and the mysterious group that invaded Earth still has no official name.”

Thinking this was ridiculous, Rei next ran a keyword search for Faery Air Force. There was information on it, but again, nothing substantial, not even any official reports on the latest war progress. The reports should have been available, but they hadn’t been uploaded for display on the MT.

It was as though an information blackout was in effect. Perhaps there is, Rei thought. In short, somebody was making it difficult to learn about the JAM. It seemed to be taking him forever to find any information about them. There might have been tons of data about the JAM and the FAF, but if it took you a lifetime to search for and find it, the practical reality was that it might as well not exist.

Lynn would say that there were no articles about the JAM in the papers because writers couldn’t sell them. That was probably why she hadn’t yet found a publisher for the sequel to The Invader she was writing. But Rei sensed that the fundamental reason for the paucity of information was due to social manipulation with the goal of changing the minds of the general public. It would have to be a worldwide effort. Assuming there was some group that wanted to propagandize on the JAM’s behalf, Rei suspected that their agents might delete the word JAM as soon as it was entered anywhere, or possibly change the expression to something else in order to make it difficult to search for.

So who was doing it, then?

The ones who would profit from it. The JAM. The JAM were already in control of the network all MTs were connected to.

It was possible that the JAM had quietly slipped undetected past the FAF and invaded Earth, then carefully bided their time in order to realize their plan. Since the change was so gradual, it wasn’t surprising that only someone like Lynn Jackson would notice it. The other possibility, Rei thought as he stepped back from the terminal and sat down on the bed, is that this is all the fantasy of a returning vet from Faery, one of those psychological scars people talk about.

He’d risked his life fighting the JAM, and yet he’d come home to find that they weren’t considered worth discussing. So then, what was the point of the war? Why had he risked his life? Come on, the JAM are right there! It was natural for him to come to that conclusion.

Suppose the JAM were just a virtual threat created by humans? That would certainly make sense in some ways. If you explained Faery as being some international criminal incarceration system, it’d make a lot of sense.

Still, it was unrealistic to claim that the JAM and planet Faery were artificial virtual creations. If you considered the cost of maintaining such a system, you’d eventually have groups who’d refuse to pay for it and the whole thing would collapse. Rei also doubted that you could keep a system like that running for thirty years.

But even if that were all true, and the JAM were originally virtual creations, they weren’t anymore. The JAM were real. Even if the parties responsible for starting the whole charade declared “game over,” the FAF as it was now wouldn’t obey them.

The JAM weren’t virtual to the FAF. Real or fake, it was still kill or be killed out there. There was no way that the JAM were phantasms, because the FAF itself had made them real. The JAM would eventually invade Earth. Whether they were real JAM or something created by the humans and combat machines of the FAF didn’t matter, they were still JAM.

Wow, Rei thought, these are some pretty powerful post-combat psych aftereffects. He was basically desperate to make the JAM real by any means. Maybe it was due to the notion that they’d already invaded Earth. Well, if that was true, maybe this wasn’t the real Earth. Maybe the JAM weren’t real, and his sensing them here came from his inability to slip free of the illusion. Maybe some psychiatric treatment could cure him. No, there was no way he’d ever be able to forget the JAM threat. Better to live thinking they were real than to try and force himself to believe they weren’t. He didn’t give a damn what other people thought. The JAM were a threat to him. That made them real enough, no matter what their true nature might be. These Earth people who made the JAM into fairy tales would probably be destroyed without ever knowing what really killed them. They wouldn’t even think it was the JAM who were doing it.

That’s not for me, Rei thought.

As far as the JAM were concerned, media infiltration was a good strategy. There’d be no need to produce human duplicates to use as anti-personnel weapons. They could instead use the complex and advanced information