Chōhei Kambayashi: Good Luck, Yukikaze

When the system of which we are a part can no longer protect us from the JAM, we will be forced to individually and collectively confront the aliens as Earthers. The JAM who will be gunning for me are not of this Earth, not a part of any system on Earth. Even if I had the title of president of some great nation, it wouldn’t matter. All that would matter would be that I was an Earther. Furthermore, we don’t have any other planet to retreat to. There’s no place for refugees from this world to flee to. If the human race can’t form itself into a group called “Earthers,” then we as individual Earther representatives will have to fight the JAM.

The truth is that we’re at war with the JAM. If we don’t want to die, we’ll need to fight with our own strength. Am I prepared to do that? Are you?

Fundamentally, we cannot just entrust this war to strangers because it’s a problem for all Earthers, for every individual. So long as there is no true leader of all Earth, and so long as we can’t expect such a messiah for the reasons I discussed previously, it’s a problem that you and I have to think about as individuals.

THE THING THAT’S got me thinking about all of this again is a letter I received a few days ago.

Not an email, mind you. It was a literal letter in an envelope. It’s rare for someone not to use the computer network these days, but the sender of this letter had no choice. He had no access to any computer network here on Earth.

That’s right, it came from the other side of the hyperspace Passageway, from the planet Faery, where the war against the JAM is being fought. There, the combat organization of the EDO known as the Faery Air Force fights day and night to hold back the JAM invasion of Earth. If the FAF were to be defeated, the JAM would surge through the Passageway and arrive on Earth itself.

The sender of the letter wasn’t concerned about having his full name, attachment in the FAF, or rank published. In fact, he made it clear that he wanted them known if possible, saying that he wanted the people of Earth to know his thoughts about his war with the JAM. In other words, he was using me as a megaphone to pass his message on to all the people of Earth.

His name is Major James Booker. FAF Faery Base, Tactical Combat Air Corps, Special Air Force 5th Squadron, more popularly known as the mission sortie manager and the de facto second-in-command of the SAF.

The major sent me a letter once before, after he read my book The Invader, which was my report on our war with the JAM. I answered his original letter, and we have since maintained an infrequent correspondence. I even managed to meet and speak to him one time.

“You don’t know the real threat the JAM pose,” he wrote to me in that first letter. Coming as it did from the battlefield, his prose brimmed over with a sense of tension. That was natural, I suppose. And owing to the special duties of the SAF, the war they fought had developed a dimension even more severe than that faced by other squadrons.

By way of simple introduction, a description of the duty of the thirteen fighter planes that comprise the SAF would be as follows:

Gather all data from the airspace where the FAF is engaging the JAM. Return the collected data by any means necessary. Even if an allied plane is in danger of being shot down, you do not have to offer them proactive support. In other words, stand back and let friendly planes be destroyed.

It’s a heartless duty, but the pilots of these planes don’t consider it heartless. The SAF is comprised of people who possess that sort of personality. If you were to ask one of them how they felt about watching their comrades’ planes being shot down, they would answer “So what? It’s not my problem. What do I care about people in other squadrons or on Earth?”

I can only guess at the hardships Major Booker must suffer in trying to command subordinates who think like this. But heartless people like these are necessary to pursue the war against the JAM. If we could make some sort of gentleman’s agreement between ourselves and the JAM, then maybe we could be more careful about who gets to play in this game, but the problem that reality poses to us is that humanity doesn’t have that luxury. The FAF recognizes that as well. In short, the duties of the SAF require these sorts of people, and they have been given high-performance fighter planes suited to them. These are the Super Sylphs, tactical combat electronic reconnaissance planes even faster than the FAF’s mainline Sylphid fighters, with greater acceleration and maneuverability. Developed by the Systems Corps, the elite engineering unit of the FAF, it is a fighter plane truly worthy of the word super. I doubt that there is any fighter plane on Earth that could beat them. At the very least, no Earth fighter can match one in the environment of planet Faery. This is only natural, since the Super Sylph was developed for the skies of Faery, which is why the FAF needs to have the Systems Corps as its own research and development unit.

The Systems Corps has developed numerous models of fighter plane, but as we’ve now reached the point where manned planes are no longer enough to beat the JAM, they are now rushing to put a superior unmanned mainline fighter into service. It was with this development concept as the background that the second letter from the SAF came. The theory was that integrating the weak human element into the system was degrading the system’s efficiency as a whole, and so the human element had to be eliminated. The human body is like a fragile egg compared to a fighter plane, with its inability to withstand the violent maneuvers of combat, the fear of battle felt by the human heart, and in its far inferior ability to think. Playing nursemaid to a human pilot prevented the Super Sylph from demonstrating its true potential, and so the human wasn’t necessary, or so they said.

From this idea was developed the FRX99, the SAF’s next-generation tactical reconnaissance fighter plane. The engineers felt that even the Super Sylph would be ineffective against the JAM so long as humans rode inside of them. But the SAF’s Major Booker didn’t simply accept this conclusion. The major had concluded that the superiority of the SAF came from the pilots’ possession of a combat sense computers did not have, and that their planes’ central computers had developed their own version of that combat sense. What had been burning the JAM’s fingers on the now-aging Super Sylphs was the tactical combat judgment the planes had picked up from their human pilots, and human behavior was something the JAM found impossible to predict. It was for that reason that the unmanned planes, lacking a learning function, could not perform the duties that the current SAF did. The major felt that since the computers on current Super Sylphs had learned enough by that point, they should be converted to unmanned versions and then the new planes be deployed as manned fighters.

The major then requested that the Systems Corps produce an FRX99 designated as a manned fighter. That became the FRX00 prototype. Whereas the FRX99 is a recon version of the next-generation mainline fighter plane that the Systems Corps are developing, the FRX00 became a version modified for manned flight. While the details have not been made public here on Earth, several FRX99s and at least one FRX00 have been completed. Both types of plane are prototypes, with production versions pending.

The reason Major Booker was so adamant that there be a manned version is that he doesn’t want this war to become one between the JAM and our combat machines. The major’s feelings on this matter are complicated and cannot be easily encapsulated in a few words, but if I had to summarize the misgivings of a soldier such as he who has been on the front lines fighting the JAM for many years, it would be like this: