"I am fully aware of my limitations, First. If I had not been, our most recent adventure in the Spike would have reminded me, would it not?"
Regar's good humor was unaffected by Kiril's reply, and he came up to join us both.
"I thought you two were working on non-lethal weaponry? How did you end up out here?" Regar asked.
"I wanted to ask Kiril some questions about stats, but then we got distracted by weapons, and you know."
"I do," Regar agreed. "If you have questions about stats, ask them. The sooner your curiosity is satisfied, the sooner you can return to your task."
"That fight we had answered some. Clearly levels and stats matter, a lot. I couldn't even touch you, Kiril. What level are you? What are your stats?"
"I am at the second tier of Ascendant Flesh. My physical stats are all in the mid-sixties. I haven't capped my stats, mostly because of the great expense involved. Soon, I will begin to experience diminishing returns," Kiril answered.
That was a lot of new information. I hadn't heard of diminishing returns for stats, but it made sense. You couldn't just keep getting stronger and faster forever, could you? Metra had mentioned Ascendant Flesh to me once in passing. It was the tier after Transcendent Flesh. Upgrading from Transcendent to Ascendant was apparently obscenely expensive and afterward you were pretty far from the animal you had started life as.
"Hold on, don't go confusing our young friend, Kiril. Sixty strength for a Humanity-branch species and sixty strength for a Faella aren't the same thing, Jake. Cross-species comparisons of stats are very difficult and usually pointless."
"I remember that from my Induction tutorial. I'm guessing that if I had sixty strength I'd be stronger than you at sixty strength, right, Kiril?"
"That's right, and at sixty agility, you won't be as nimble as I was at sixty."
"Those comparisons are pointless," Regar said. "Most of your fighting should be at range, with a weapon. If you need to get close, you rely on your armor. If you fight up close in light armor like Kiril you're one mistake away from death. Your power will come from your equipment, and your skill with that equipment."
Kiril shrugged, and having already made his case for melee earlier, I assumed he didn't want to restate it. It was probably an argument that Regar and he had hashed out many times.
"That reminds me then, something's been bugging me. The mental stats. Intelligence, for instance. I've upgraded a lot in that but I don't feel smarter. Not exactly."
"If you've got the wrong definition of intelligence, I could see how you'd think that," Regar said.
Kiril snorted when Regar didn't follow up. "What our First means to say is that the Intelligence stat doesn't necessarily help you make better decisions. If you think of your brain like a computer, think of the mental stats as hardware upgrades. They help you think faster, store and recall more information. Perception even helps your pattern recognition skills. What those stats don't do is give you information you don't already have, and they won't change unexamined assumptions. Even with those hardware upgrades, the software is still the same."
"Kiril has the right of it, Jake," Regar said. "Only machines make no mistakes, and they only manage that by simming out every possible scenario. Even with that great advantage, they still aren't undefeatable. Don't worry about being smarter, or not. Make the best decisions you can, and live with the consequences."
I thought about what Kiril had said. I had somehow been expecting the Union upgrades to my stats to fix my monkey brain and make me smarter. Even if the tech could theoretically do that, I wouldn't be me afterward. What the Union did instead was the next best thing—they'd made me better. I still had my blind spots and my mistaken assumptions. Only experience could change that. I'd just have to live with the impossibility of upgrading myself into a super genius who could also throw cars.
"I will return to the woods to try to find those wolves you mentioned, Jake. Kiril can answer any more questions you may have. You two have work to do, anyway."
With that, Regar left us, and Kiril and I returned to the outpost, sitting down in the control room.
"Now, tell me about your problem, Jake."
I showed Kiril everything, our plan and our problems, and he soaked up the knowledge like a sponge. He asked good questions to elicit details and quickly got a handle on our situation.
"If your companion Marty is successful in provoking the humans, they will easily breach the fences. The security personnel will then respond with lethal force. This is your problem," Kiril said.
"Well yeah, that's why I'm trying to design non-lethal weapons," I said, frustration leaking into my voice.
"No, you misunderstand me. Your problem is not your solution. You need to keep the people forming your distraction safe, that is the real problem to be solved. That doesn't mean you need to disable the soldiers."
"You're right, that is what it boils down to isn't it?" I mused. "Can we give them all bulletproof clothing? I don't think that'd work. Some of them wouldn't wear it. Plus there are head shots."
"Armor is not a workable solution as you say. We must look elsewhere. These slug throwers the soldiers are using are quite simple things. An explosive reaction generates pressure and propels the slug down the barrel. Primitive but effective. Why not disable them?"
"Sure, that'd be good I guess, but how? There are a lot of them and they're mechanical. It's not like we can just fire off an EMP or something. We'd have to disable each one, and we'd need to make sure we found them all."
"I have a design that can be adapted to this problem. You have seen it. Regar deployed it in the Spike."
"Yes. I was a bit busy but I saw it."
"I will scale it down. When deployed it will use the
