He wished they could have talked more. Rei realized that this emotion welling up within him had been the source of his hesitation. He had a feeling that he and this man could have understood each other.
“Everyone hates me,” Yagashira had said. “Even I can see that. They don’t care how other people feel. My old commander, Lieutenant Mayle, once told me that I was like a machine. They treated me like a machine, never talking to me. But in so doing, they became the real machines.”
In piloting his plane, he too felt himself growing closer to this machine he called Yukikaze. Perhaps that was why he could understand the feelings of a man who had been created by the JAM. The reasons didn’t matter; Rei had simply wanted to talk to Yagashira some more. If he was a weapon, if he was conscious of himself as a weapon, then he must know how a weapon feels. Did he understand Yukikaze’s feelings as well?
The JAM might have been able to understand the details of Yukikaze’s combat intelligence better than he could. Even so, the JAM were attacking. It was out of desperation, Rei thought. What is their objective? he wondered.
He saw the missiles hit with his naked eye. The JAM fighter exploded, followed by Yagashira’s plane.
He hadn’t seen the pilot bail out. The man who could have understood him was dead.
Was this sadness? Was this regret? It was complicated to deal with feelings bursting forth that he’d thought he’d lost a long time ago. He was the first person who had ever made him feel this way, and he’d been a JAM, Rei thought.
Banking Yukikaze sharply, Rei released control back to her and looked up at the sky. It was blue, and aside from the twin suns, it looked like the skies of Earth.
I want to go home, Rei thought. But where?
When he’d first come to the FAF, Rei had been aware of his desire to return to Earth.
“I feel like I’m finally awake,” he said, closing his eyes, thinking that if this was a dream too, it wouldn’t be so bad.
II
A SOLDIER’S LEAVE
REI FUKAI WANTED a trip back to Earth, and he was going to do something about it.
From the time he was rescued in his immobile vegetative state till the moment he was awakened aboard Yukikaze, he had been trapped in a nightmare space, consumed at the thought of meeting those human copies created by the JAM. What he obsessed over in particular was the taste of the chicken broth he’d been forced to eat. It held the taste of Yukikaze’s flight officer, Lieutenant Burgadish.
Waiting for Rei upon awakening was a detailed debriefing to collect all of the information he’d gathered on his mission. This wasn’t just conducted by the SAF. Rei had to tell the same story over and over and over to the other air corps and even the FAF Intelligence Forces.
Of most vital concern to the FAF was Rei’s claim that the JAM were able to produce copies of human beings. SAF analysis had concluded that there was at least a possibility that the JAM had perfected the creation of human duplicates with which they had successfully infiltrated the FAF.
The top levels of the FAF had to investigate the possibility that Rei and the SAF itself were now contaminated by the JAM. They also had to consider the possibility that the JAM were manipulating Rei and the SAF in order to lead the Faery Air Force down the wrong strategic path.
Rei didn’t particularly care if the others accepted his personal experiences. Even though he knew well the threat posed by the mysterious alien JAM, he couldn’t recall feeling fear during his encounter with them. In that way, he was similar to the combat intelligences which existed within the FAF’s countless computers, but it was only after the experience that Rei’s true feelings began to make themselves known. What he was feeling and the changes he was seeing in himself became a matter of serious concern.
He was faced with questions: What he was doing on Faery in the first place? Did Yukikaze’s abandonment of him mean that he had no value or worth? Rei wondered if maybe he’d lingered in his coma for so long in order to avoid returning to reality and facing the questions his experiences had raised. He’d dealt with one of them while confronting the threat to Yukikaze in her new body, the power of that moment stimulating him back to consciousness. In that instant, he knew for certain that Yukikaze needed him.
Awakened by his experiences, he didn’t want to go back to the way he’d been. Rei had begun to feel closer to the JAM.
What were the JAM? How did the JAM view him? He used to be able to forget those questions when he flew with Yukikaze, but after encountering JAM weapons that looked human, and having a taste of Lieutenant Burgadish, he couldn’t just ignore his questions anymore.
The JAM’s human duplicates are not a new strategy they adopted suddenly or recently, Rei thought. They’ve been preparing this for a long, long time, perhaps starting work on it immediately after their initial attack on Earth.
Human existence must have seemed a strange thing to them. Doubtless, the JAM perceived it as something they couldn’t understand, wondering why these things called “humans” were always riding around in the Faery Air Force’s planes. As far as the JAM were concerned, their enemy was the planes of the FAF, not the humans. They recognized the combat machines of Earth as their opponents, not the blobs of organic matter inside them. If the combat machines and computers of Earth were the main adversaries, then the humans were weapons they were equipped with, like computers or missiles.
He could see them now, the JAM desperately analyzing their data, searching for the reason for why the enemy planes were always equipped with organic human matter. It had taken them some time, but it was possible that they now saw the humans as some sort of organic computer that supported the actions of the combat intelligence. At any rate, having realized they could no longer ignore these things, the JAM had likely been devising a countermeasure for them since early in the war. They’d undoubtedly concluded that, since these weapons called humans could move around autonomously, they would create a weapon just like it. Perhaps they’d been deployed for some unimaginable purpose or strategy, but the simple fact was that the JAM were making human copies.
They might have been indistinguishable from humans, possessing will and even emotions, but in the end they were weapons. There could be no other purpose for the JAM to make them, that much was certain. They were organic weapons created by an inorganic alien intelligence that might not even be properly termed a life-form. It was exactly the same idea as when humans created their combat machines.
He wondered how these human copies felt, these men and, possibly, women. An SAF investigation had concluded that there was an extremely high probability that the man called Lieutenant Yagashira, who had taken up a post in the SAF, had been a weapon created by the JAM. The original Lieutenant Yagashira had been killed in action during a mission with his previous squadron, and the JAM had created a weapon based on his body and then deployed it to infiltrate SAF forces. The same went for Lieutenant Lancome, who had been killed at TAB-15 by Yukikaze’s gun. However, the SAF couldn’t prove this conclusively, and so the FAF couldn’t accept their conclusion officially. It was being handled as a top secret matter for their squadron alone.
Despite his vegetative state, Rei had a hazy memory of Major Booker bringing Lieutenant Yagashira to visit him in the hospital. He’d said that he wanted to be a top-class Sylphid pilot, just like Rei. He’d said that he wanted to be his friend. He was a JAM weapon, and yet he’d said that.
Rei had never thought of himself as a consumable weapon in this war. He’d never been particularly concerned with whom or for what he was fighting either. But now, when he thought about the weapons the JAM were making, he couldn’t help but think that he was just like them. A weapon was only concerned with its own effectiveness. If it started to wonder for whom it was being effective, its effectiveness would decrease. Since Rei never thought about things like that as he grew to become the best soldier there was, it meant that when a JAM weapon said, “I want to be like you,” it was telling him that he was more like a weapon than a JAM weapon.