Chōhei Kambayashi - Good Luck, Yukikaze

First Lieutenant Rei Fukai—Yukikaze’s pilot; later promoted to captain

Major James Booker—FAF Special Air Force mission sortie manager

Brigadier General Lydia Cooley—Deputy commander of the FAF Special Air Force

Second Lieutenant Burgadish—Flight officer of the old Yukikaze

Second Lieutenant Yagashira—Pilot of SAF Unit 13

First Lieutenant Gavin Mayle—TAB-15 505th Tactical Fighter Squadron leader

Captain Edith Foss—Military doctor in charge of Rei’s rehabilitation

First Lieutenant Vincent Bruys—Pilot of SAF Unit 7

Lieutenant General Gibril Laitume—Commander of Faery Base’s Tactical Combat Air Corps

Colonel Ansel Rombert—An influential man in the FAF Intelligence Forces

Second Lieutenant Akira Katsuragi—Yukikaze’s new flight officer

Lynn Jackson—A journalist from Earth

I WONDER HOW many people nowadays have a palpable sense that Earth is under attack by the aliens we know as the JAM. It seems to me that the typical Earther now lives his life thinking that the JAM threat has nothing to do with him. You might even go so far as to say that people living their ordinary lives have forgotten about it completely.

The JAM threat, and even the existence of the JAM themselves, doesn’t enter into the consciousness of most people. That’s probably because they can put it out of their minds and still live their lives without disruption.

That could be taken as evidence that the group structures that we as individuals belong to—towns and states and nations and so forth—are somehow still functioning well. But it would be foolish to think that we can relax and expect this state of affairs to continue indefinitely. Even nations have a limited life span. The possibility is great that these invaders called the JAM are shortening them.

What I want to do is warn people of this.

In our Earthbound disputes between groups here, there is a margin for compromise, for striking cease-fire agreements. But I’d like you to think about trying to do that with the JAM. The JAM are an alien life-form, possessing completely different values from those of humanity. Negotiations with them may be impossible. All we can do is keep fighting and never stop. The sacrifices our task demands are enormous, but if we ease up, we’ll lose.

IN MY LAST book, The Invader , I wrote that when the JAM drove the huge spindle-shaped cloud into the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica thirty years ago and from there flew forth to begin their invasion of our world through the hyperspace Passageway, it was a golden opportunity for humanity to transcend their membership in squabbling tribes and nations and to truly become “Earthers.” I also wrote that it still wasn’t too late to achieve this. But the truth is that we failed.

On Earth now, there is no transnational organization that unites the people of the world. As always, we exist simply as mutually antagonistic groups of nations, economic blocs, religions, and peoples, and in truth there is no organizational level existing above them. I wrote in my last book that such a state of affairs demonstrates that we people of Earth see the alien invaders as just another nation, religion, or people. I still don’t think that this belief is necessarily incorrect, but I now believe there’s a different reason for its persistence.

In short, I think it’s because we were not able to find a strong leader who could transcend all the political, religious, and cultural systems they were attached to and declare to the world, “I am an Earther, and I represent the people of Earth.” Essentially, rather than find such a person, we settled back and waited for one to appear. However, the environment of modern Earth isn’t conducive to giving birth to such a saint. Earth is vast, with varied environments and an exceedingly great number of lifestyles, values, and histories. To have an appreciation of all of that, empathize with it, and then moreover dispense wisdom widely to all those different people without discrimination in order to help them live their lives well is beyond the capabilities of any one person. The scale of the target group to be led is just too big, crossing over too many divergent personal desires, and moreover individuals know how complex reality already is .

The human race has now established an unprecedented advanced information society and lives surrounded by a vast quantity of data. Truth and lies mixed together in the vast bulk of information available make everything seem ambiguous, and this vagueness breeds distrust. Indeed, modern people evaluate everything not by how trustworthy it is, but rather by how un trustworthy. Following the physical law that the reliability of transmitted data decreases as the bulk of information increases, relationships based on good faith and trust between people suffer. As the amount of material to evaluate increases, so too do the seeds of doubt bloom. We can call this the pitfall of the advanced information society. So, even if we found some self-proclaimed saint who could walk on water, modern humans have lost their original naive sense of awe for such a person.

And so, with no saint forthcoming, we didn’t set out to look for one. While the reasons are varied for why we never made an effort to form a truly worldwide organization to oppose the JAM, I now think it was the right choice. Consider what might have happened had the human race put its efforts into selecting a leader for all of Earth. To preserve their various group interests, we might have touched off a world war between nations, or a destructive religious war. If such a war to appoint humanity’s representative had been sparked, the JAM would have used it to their advantage, and their invasion would have succeeded. You could say that humanity managed to dodge that bullet. If a true representative for the people of Earth exists, his or her identity remains unclear.

Therefore, the people of Earth cannot now properly be called “Earthers.” Who then exactly are the JAM at war with?

We individuals have entrusted the war with the JAM to the Earth Defense Organization, and to be truthful, it operates in a democratic and efficient manner. I’m not being ironic here. It’s true. It’s because of them that we can forget about the JAM and live our day-to-day lives.

However, the truth is that this organization, established mainly by an array of people from all nations—all with their own fluid, individual expectations—has become a precariously fragile entity. As you might expect, each member views the war according to how they can benefit from waging it. Despite all of these various expectations, or perhaps because of them, they are still able to turn their strength on the JAM without being destroyed. This is, in a way, a far preferable situation than being led by some lone, foolish, half-baked leader. Following along from this truth, we can express another: the various groups that participate in this organization are fighting the JAM for their own sakes. In short, they’re not doing it for the sake of all Earthers.

We are at a dangerous juncture in human history—specifically, we will soon discover whether this method of opposing the JAM will always be successful. True, it’s working for now. Thanks to the Earth Defense Organization, most people have forgotten about the JAM. But in the future, if this system should stop functioning, the time may come when we think of ourselves as Earthers on a personal level. Because of the JAM.