Holding His Head Up for a Flag of All the Free

“I really don’t understand what the deal is with California being part of the Empire of Japan. They seem to basically be independent to me.”

“Emperor Fumihito’s face is on the Californian Peso for the same reason King William V is on the Canadian Dollar. Shared monarch, separate states. The parallel can be a little hard for an average American to spot because of the names: the British Empire rebranded to the Commonwealth of Nations, but the Empire of Japan was never as centralized in the first place, plus they’ve let power drift down to the regional level gradually over centuries, rather than decolonize in a hurry.”

“So the Emperor is more or less a figurehead?”

“As a practical matter, yes. Even more so than the British monarch, in some respects. Really, the fact that most of the Empire’s territories are separately members of the League of Vienna is a bigger legal obstacle to, say, the Shogun of Australia going to war with the King of Hawaii, than the fact they’re both the Emperor’s vassals. Even the Emperor being the head of the Shinto religion isn’t that relevant anymore– once upon a time, Japan was considered a Buddhist-and-Shinto nation, but now the entire Empire except maybe China and parts of Oceania are better described as Buddhist-and-Catholic. That’s a whole can of worms I can get into, the tensions between religious syncretists and the purists, but this episode is going to run long enough as it is.”

–Context podcast, episode #109, “Turning Japanese” ft. Dr. Albert Spitzer, professor of Japanese-Pacific Studies, Oklahoma State University. Recorded May 19th, 2029.

Chris had been stuck in some pretty outdated, barebones, or generally bad flight simulators in his day. The pre-ROTC program in his high school had an old American unit that might have dated back to their African wars in the eighties, with a wobbly suspension and 3D graphics straight from the depths of the uncanny valley.

This simulator had a lot of the same problems as those bad flight simulators, for the precise reason that it wasn’t a flight simulator, nor a tank simulator, nor any kind of simulator anyone had ever needed before.

Inside a cockpit pulled off a barebones proof-of-concept prototype Duelist, Chris’s vision of the starkly-lit digital facsimile of the Sonoran desert in his headset swayed as his simulated exoskeleton made its awkward strides, while his body remained bolt upright, making his head swim. There was a rudimentary scenario he was following, finding a target– in this case, a stationary model of a Colombian tank– and shooting it with the only weapons system that had thus far been programmed into the hastily-made simulation software, the twin coilguns running in tubes through the whole length of the arms. Really, he was just here to get used to moving in the damned thing.

The whole theory behind the Treaty of Budapest and its system of duels to stand in for wars was that two representatives of their nations were supposed to be fighting in personal combat, that the man-shaped vehicles around them were to be more like a knight’s armor than something mechanical. Chris had never put on more all-encasing armor than padded fencing gear or, for the rare small arms drill, ballistic plates, but he couldn’t imagine either his Eastern or Western predecessors of five or six hundred years ago, the mounted knights of France and Spain nor the samurai of Japan, had a harder time moving on donning their armor for the first time than he was having now.

He stumbled again, this time misjudging the depth of a rocky ledge as he stepped down it. The simulated Duelist slammed cockpit-first into a boulder on this narrow ravine’s opposite slope, and for once, Chris was glad they hadn’t rigged the physical cockpit to sway and jerk with its simulated position. It was enough to see that impact, without it running through his bones.

“Hey, kid,” General Earp called through his earpiece, “maybe you best be thinkin’ ‘bout callin’ it quits. You’ve been at this since the crack of dawn, and you’ve blasted that same tank a good fifteen, twenty times.”

Chris tapped a button on the inverted spheres surrounding his hands to toggle a more detailed heads-up display. He had finally gotten the hang of that motion, at least– he wore gloves that tracked his hand motions to control those of the Duelist, but if he held his thumb a certain way, the Duelist’s hands froze and allowed him to interact with the panels controlling his displays and weapons. He flipped through screens until he found the one with simulation metadata, and checked the real-life time.

“It’s only seven p.m., general. You’re talking like I haven’t even flown a twenty-hour mission before.” I thought this guy was supposed to be a hard-ass. I told him I would get the hang of moving in this thing before we called it quits, so damn it, I will.

“…Y’know, captain, you pulled that humble shit with the Shogun a couple days back, and I thought I wouldn’t need to deal with any fighter pilot bravado. That’ll show me, I reckon. Whether you can fly tired or not, ain’t nobody gonna learn well when they can’t hardly keep their eyes open.”

“It’s all about to fall into place for me, general, don’t worry. I’ll call it quits after this run.”

“You can finish, then you’re out of that thing, and that’s an order.”

Earp watched from an invisible flying camera in the simulation environment, as Captain Hernandez pushed one knee of the Duelist under its torso and got it to its feet without using any hands. Fighter pilot bravado. Once he rose, he accelerated the machine to a light jog– something he could, by this point, maintain over flat ground, but foolhardy in the rocky foothills the program had procedurally generated this time around.

The cameras mounted in and along this digital Don Juan de Austria’s head scanned the ground ahead of it. Inside the cockpit, Chris was fiddling with the multiple displays from the different camera outputs on this cockpit’s multiple swinging and pivoting viewscreens. There were two lenses, one in each eyehole, that fed him one overlaid regular camera feed, while most of the rest were set up for various forms of specialized vision– infrared, thermal, one even showed a heatmap of magnetic fields, which he hadn’t known was possible. While he had his main cameras watching the ground in front of him, he still wanted to be able to see dead ahead, as well, as part of one long, continuous display. If he could use the slit viewport on the cockpit from within this simulation, that might be easy, but this improvised simulator setup didn’t accommodate for that, and it was a habit the engineers probably would have discouraged anyway– peering through the viewport required sliding a hefty bar of steel aside, leaving only a brick of bulletproof glass between him and the outside world.

He did find a single, low-fidelity ordinary camera in the array, clearly intended as a backup, and enabled it in parallel to the main feed, on a screen positioned just above it. This long vertical field of view was a crutch, he knew, that he should grow out of needing in any but the most extreme environments. But it would help him get a feel for operating this thing at high speed, and it was something to be considered during a live Duel, should conditions call for him to outflank an opponent over the top of a mountain or pull some such harebrained stunt.

Speaking of which…

He climbed this hill until he could see through a saddleback to the other side, and pulled that thermal display back up. Though the Colombian tank blended into the pale green and brown of the desert brush, its heat signature was a stark rectangle of orange, with a billow out of a tailpipe discoloring the blue behind.

On every run through this scenario today, Chris had taken the shot stationary. Now, he wanted to see how well walking fire worked. He tapped a button to engage the in-arm coilguns, and all the joints past the shoulder locked straight– magnetic accelerators may not have needed pressure-bearing barrels, but they benefited every bit as much as conventional firearms from concentric bores. A path was traced on all his camera displays showing him where the ferrous slugs would go, once they cleared the Duelist’s palms.

He held the lines over the tank, and continuing to scale the hill, he fired continuously. Indicator lights came on in the corners of his vision– blue, once the coilgun had fired, then red once its capacitors were recharged and it was ready to fire again. This was fast enough to keep constant pressure on a large target, but a conventional machine gun, or even a semi-auto rifle with a shooter working the trigger fast, had it beat. As if he needed any more reminders, his weapons being adapted from the Shogunate’s artillery and not scaled-up versions of its small arms made him acutely aware he was in unexplored territory, getting ready to fight in a way nobody had before.