“How long will the repairs take?”
“I’ll know that once I get a detailed look at exactly what’s damaged on her. From what the maintenance team saw when they eyeballed it before, dismounting the damaged engine shouldn’t take too long. It should just slide right out. There’s nothing fatally damaged on the airframe, and the root of the primary tail stabilizer she lost is just fine. It should take us an hour to move her into the repair bay and run a damage inspection. Swapping out the engine and the other miscellaneous repairs should take about three hours if we push it, another two for general maintenance and inspections, so… Yeah, six hours should do it.”
“Do it in four.”
“Okay, we’ll aim for four.”
Lieutenant Eco began to issue orders to the maintenance team from his terminal, the display on the monitor mirrored on the big screen at the front of the command center. Data from Yukikaze’s onboard airframe self-monitoring system began to scroll onto it as well. Confirming that Yukikaze had agreed to the repairs, Cooley told the still-standing Major Booker and his subordinates to take seats at the empty consoles.
“Captain Pivot, enter Captain Fukai’s and Lieutenant Katsuragi’s reports into the strategic computer. Lieutenant Katsuragi, you assist him. Major Booker, monitor what the strategic computer does. Captain Foss, present your formal prediction of the JAM’s strategy and the results of your profacting. Please wait here while I read it to answer any questions I may have.”
“I want to delete the data related to the retraining unit in the Systems Corps,” Rei said. “Authorize the attack.”
“You are to read through the data that you and Yukikaze brought back, as well as the data analysis report we’ve generated here at HQ. Whether or not we attack will be determined by a comprehensive judgment of all available information,” Cooley said. “If you haven’t eaten yet, order anything you want. Captain Foss, Major Booker, that goes for you too.”
“Great, I’ll have a two-pound steak, please, and make it rare,” said Lieutenant Katsuragi. That immediately broke the tension.
This might be our last meal, Rei thought. Thirteen people weren’t nearly enough to be doing this. It occurred to him that there were thirteen planes in the squadron as well. When the final battle came, they’d probably all be served fuel and weaponry at the same time too…
The general’s young secretary, who hung by her side like a shadow, took their orders and called them in to the SAF mess hall.
Rei ordered a ham bun, and by the time the round, extra-large roll stuffed with ham and vegetables had arrived, he’d gotten to the part of the analysis report that General Cooley had reread, wherein Captain Foss and Major Booker had discussed the ontology of the JAM.
If they start calling the JAM gods, then it’s all over, Rei thought. The FAF will lose its reason for existence.
If what Major Booker had predicted came to pass, the FAF would split into two groups: believers and nonbelievers. Three, if you counted the group who wouldn’t care either way. And then those groups would probably split into even more subgroups. At any rate, since the JAM were unperceivable entities, it was impossible to ascertain just what was the correct way to conceive of them. With the stress of all these various groups within it, there’d be no way that the FAF could maintain its role as a coherent organization against the JAM. If the groups within the FAF started using force to validate their views, it’d turn into an outright religious war. Major Booker had been right on the money to call it “JAMism.” Even now, there were a lot of people on Earth who claimed that the JAM were illusory, with some of them practically believing that they were gods. The groups back home hadn’t yet begun making moves that threatened the FAF, but there was a real danger that they might.
“If humans really can’t perceive the JAM,” Rei said, “the FAF must never let that information go public.”
“I’d expect the Intelligence Forces have a media control plan ready to go,” said Major Booker, nodding. “What about it?”
“I was just thinking I’d like to tell Lynn Jackson about this. About what we’ve got here. She’s an Earther. She has a right to know.”
“I agree. There’s a saying that the three most useful friends to have are a doctor, a lawyer, and a journalist,” Booker said. “Although you’re inviting disaster if they aren’t very good at what they do. Still, we can rely on Lynn. She can understand the SAF. It’ll be tough to pull off, but I think it’d be worth it. If you were going to make a last will and testament, I can’t think of a better person to entrust it to.”
“It’s not certain that we’re going to lose,” said Captain Foss. “And it’s not certain that we’re going to die.”
“A will is something you write while still alive,” said Major Booker. “We’re losing our chance to leave it with the FAF.”
“The Intelligence Forces aren’t incompetent,” said Lieutenant Katsuragi. “They must have predicted the implications of knowing the JAM’s true form. You might say that the SAF was slow to figure it out. Well, I suppose that comes from being a combat unit. You only believe in what you can practically confirm. Still, this inability to pin down where the JAM exist is almost like quantum theory, isn’t it? Maybe the JAM are quantum beings.”
“You’re talking about the Uncertainty Principle,” said Captain Foss. “That’s the one that says the means of human observation itself makes knowing an object’s location unclear, since you can’t measure two exact values at the same time, right?”
“That’s not entirely correct,” said Captain Pivot, the man in charge of data analysis. “The values that can’t be simultaneously observed are those with attributes in conjugate relation to each other. For example, position and energy have no conjugate attributes, so it’s possible to know both simultaneously if you measure them precisely. If you make that into the conjugate attributes of position and speed, however, then you can’t observe both values simultaneously.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t explain it in a few words. Quantum theory is hard for us to think about in commonplace terms because it works like a mathematical metaphor. Anybody can understand the formulae if they work hard enough at it; the mistakes come when they try to interpret them. There are some people who make up suitable explanations while ignoring the formulae, which is probably where your own misunderstanding comes from. Now, it’s true that you get uncertain results from inaccurate observation methods, but that isn’t the uncertainty we’re talking about here. Quantum uncertainty doesn’t work that simply. I think what Lieutenant Katsuragi is trying to say is that if the JAM possess quantum uncertainty, then they only exist when you observe them, and that they don’t actually exist anywhere before you do that. One interpretation you can get from quantum theory is that an unobserved JAM really doesn’t exist. Another is that you can’t definitively know that a quantum object exists until you observe it. There are all sorts of interpretations. In any case, humans don’t currently possess an experimental means to determine which interpretation is the correct one. You could say that the incomprehensibility of quantum theory comes from humans lacking the means to make certain the uncertainty of quantum uncertainty.”
“I know exactly what you mean by incomprehensibility,” said Captain Foss. “Comparing something to God makes it seem like you understand it, but the truth is it just means you don’t understand it at all, doesn’t it?”
“Even if the JAM are ambiguous quantum beings like that,” said Lieutenant Katsuragi, sounding pleased with himself, “then they can still be observed and recorded, meaning it’s possible to calculate the probability of where they’ll appear. Conjugate attributes mean that, if you can observe one, then you can calculate the other.”