Good Luck, Yukikaze

exist for you.”

“I have no doubts that the JAM exist. Either we kill them, or they’ll kill us,” Rei said. “What I doubt is whether the JAM we see are truly the JAM themselves. Those things are shadows. The real JAM are invisible. We’re fighting shadows, shadows that can pack a real punch.”

“So?”

“So, nothing,” said Rei. “It’s just something that I think. I just wanted your opinion on it.”

“Honestly, I never gave it any thought. The Intelligence Forces are pretty much entirely concerned with humans. What we’re after are human spies, not the JAM. We investigate their methods of monitoring us and transmitting messages back to Earth. My specialty was investigating electronic methods, so my job had nothing to do with the JAM.”

“That’s not going to cut it in the SAF. Unless you think about what sort of enemy you’re fighting and what the JAM are, you’ll never be able to do your job,” Rei said. He could now see the 9th TFS passing by low on the port side. “I don’t know how you feel about it, but I don’t want to get killed by an enemy I don’t really understand.”

“Or by Yukikaze?”

“Yeah. How did you...?”

“Do you really believe this plane has consciousness?” Lieutenant Katsuragi asked.

“Who told you that?”

“Major Booker gave me a lecture about her. He didn’t say she had consciousness, but he told me that, since each plane learns from its pilot’s flying style, it can’t help but pick up their idiosyncrasies. It becomes a combat machine optimized to its individual pilot, so you have to be careful when you fly in another plane.”

“I don’t think Yukikaze has consciousness in the way humans do. The same goes for the JAM. I don’t know if it’s consciousness, but she does have the ability to alter her behavior based on the actions I take. The only way I can interpret it is that Yukikaze possesses something beyond unconscious reflex, something akin to consciousness.”

“It could just be that you don’t completely understand the behavior programs and computer hardware installed in her,” Katsuragi said. “Not just you, though. Yukikaze may be a machine that has accumulated so much knowledge that nobody can understand her at this point. Since you can’t understand her, even though she’s just unconsciously carrying out logical functions, you think of them as representing consciousness. A computer is an advanced simulator that can model anything. It could even simulate conscious behavior.”

“You’re only thinking about this with your head. You say that because you have no physical experience flying her.”

“You believe that what I think is just an empty theory? You’ve been flying Yukikaze for a long time, but say —”

“Whether Yukikaze is self-aware or not doesn’t really matter, Lieutenant. The question is whether she behaves as though she is. That may be due to the reason you just gave, and I’m not saying that it’s wrong. The vital point here is that Yukikaze is a being beyond our comprehension. Even you must realize that intellectually. Yukikaze has a ‘something’ we can’t understand. That may be consciousness, some unconscious function that mimics it, or even some machine consciousness completely different from what humans possess. But what it is doesn’t matter.”

To ask, “What is consciousness?” or whether Yukikaze dreams with purpose, when we couldn’t answer these questions about ourselves, sounds like the subject of some scholarly thesis, Rei thought. It might be an interesting waste of time that could help him understand Yukikaze, so Rei didn’t think the line of inquiry was entirely trivial, but they weren’t questions that would be answered easily or soon. It could be like a huge puzzle, to be solved at his leisure, and not having an immediate answer shouldn’t get in the way of his duties.

“The essential point in all this is to find some way to communicate with that ‘something’ within Yukikaze. That something is her true nature.”

“An unknowable something that’s the computer’s true nature, huh,” Lieutenant Katsuragi said. “What I’m trying to say is that what you’re taking to be Yukikaze’s true nature may be just your own illusion. There have been times when a computer I’m using seems to be conscious to me. The odds are good that this true nature you think Yukikaze possesses is just a fantasy you’ve created. If you try to communicate with it, you’ll just end up talking to yourself. For you, Yukikaze is like a shadow of yourself. In other words, it’s possible that you’re ascribing consciousness to your own mirror image. And that would be stupid.”

“You’re saying my talking to Yukikaze would be a monologue?”

“Yeah, I’d definitely say that.”

“Who do you think you’re talking to right now, Lieutenant Katsuragi?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Do you think that I have consciousness? How do you know that my consciousness isn’t just a shadow that you’re creating? Maybe you’re just having a monologue with a shadow that you call Captain Fukai.”

“Because I’m talking to you in the belief that you’re human. What you just said is the same as claiming that you might not be.” The lieutenant paused. “Are you a JAM?”

“You can’t know that unless you communicate with me. Barring that, the only other way you might be able to infer it is from my behavior. The same goes for Yukikaze. And the JAM. So they may be only my own shadow projections... You know, I’ve never thought of it that way before, but I can see that point of view. That means you should try chatting with me some more, Lieutenant.”

Lieutenant Katsuragi did not reply.

“I think the only way we’ll ever know what the JAM really are is to communicate with them,” Rei said. “Whether they possess humanlike consciousness or not doesn’t matter. If they have a different form of consciousness from what humans have, or some other type of ‘something’ similar to consciousness, then it would be impossible for humans to understand them. After all, even we humans don’t understand human consciousness. But I think even if they have that something I mentioned before, then they also possess consciousness. And if your opponent has that, then I say you can communicate with them, Lieutenant Katsuragi. It’s not an abstract concept that’s hard to understand. It wouldn’t be very different from checking out how Yukikaze handles.”

Adjusting his grip on the side stick while working the pedals, Rei snapped them into a 90 degree roll, then inverted, then into a three-quarter roll before returning them to level flight: a four-point roll. Good response. He then twisted the stick right, yawing her nose to starboard while still traveling straight ahead. Keeping his eyes on the main display and not what was outside, Rei saw Yukikaze flash a warning: she had judged his flight attitude to be erratic and meaningless. Irregular flight attitude, she complained. He could have canceled the warning by flipping the dogfight switch to ON, but didn’t. She then automatically canceled the control input Rei was feeding her, pointing her nose back in the direction it should have been facing. Rei’s actions and Yukikaze’s response was displayed on the rear seat monitors as well.

“See, it doesn’t matter if what she just did was because of some peculiar ‘something’ in Yukikaze or simply because I activated a program to correct her attitude if she deviates from the optimal flight posture. The important point here is that, by doing that, I can determine what her intentions are. Now, if I can build on that —”

“Calling that communication,” Lieutenant Katsuragi cut in, “is like striking a bell and then saying the sound it makes is you and the bell communicating.”

“That’s an interesting example. Yeah, if you strike it, it resonates. Maybe the bell’s sound comes from the bell’s own will. Humans would never know that unless someone demonstrated that the bell possessed that sort of will. But you have to determine if it does by ringing it, because that’s the only method available to you to do so.”

“That’s out of the question,” Katsuragi said. “You just want to talk to Yukikaze like some sort of a pet.”

“I wish she were my pet. Maybe you’re right. If you don’t handle a pet well, they bite you. Anyway, we use Yukikaze to hit the JAM, but the JAM don’t sense that they’re being hit by us humans, and I don’t like that. What I want to make clear to them is that I’m here riding inside of Yukikaze too.”

“You’re a naive man.”

“And you’re like me, just as naive and ignorant of how the world actually works. We may both be men who spend our time just bickering with ourselves.”

The lieutenant didn’t answer, apparently having grown tired of their chat. Rei said nothing either.