Chapter 14 chapter Five

She was gone when he woke up.He was sure it had only been a few seconds, not more than a minute, and it had.But the sun is gone, the colors run from the woods, and the night breeze blows the bare branches. Kassad put on the bloody coat that was torn and hardened.The French knight was still lying there, rigidly maintaining the most natural posthumous posture.He has become lifeless, a part of the forest.There was no sign of the woman. Feldman Kassad staggered through the woods, through the night, through the sudden, bitter drizzle. The battlefield is still crowded with people, both dead and alive.The corpses piled up like piles of toy soldiers Kassad had played with as a child.The wounded walk slowly while supporting each other.Here and there men were furtively seeking their way among the dead, and in the opposite woods a lively company of heralds, French or English, met in secret to discuss more immediate and lively matters.Kassad knew they were going to discuss the name of the battle, and both had to use it when recording the outcome.He also knew they would end up naming it after a nearby castle, Ajing Court.Although this term has never appeared in planning or fighting.

Kassad began to feel that all this was not simulated, that his life on World.com was just a dream, and that everything that happened in this gray world was real.However, at this moment, the surrounding scene suddenly froze, and the silhouettes of people, horses, and dark woods became transparent, like faded holograms.Then, Kassad was helped out of the simulation cabin of the Olympus Command School. The other colleges and instructors also got up, talking and laughing with each other. No one seemed to notice. The world around them completely changed. up. For weeks, Kassad had spent his spare time loitering on the grounds of the command school, standing on the fortress, overlooking the night shadows of Mount Olympus, which first covered the highland forests and then the populated Highlands, then everything halfway to the horizon, and finally the whole world.He wondered all the time what happened.He misses her.

Nobody noticed what was happening in that simulation.Not a single person left the battlefield.One lecturer explained that in that particular simulated scenario, everything other than war money did not exist.No one noticed that Kassad had disappeared.It all looked like what happened in the woods, including the woman, never had. Kassad knew better.He studied military history and mathematics.He passed the time at the gym and at the shooting range.He also goes to the Penalty Barracks in Four Corners Crater, although this rarely happens.On the whole, young Kassad had turned out to be a much better officer cadet than he had been.But he is always waiting.

Then she appeared again. That was the last few hours of the Battle.net simulation again.Kassad already knew by then that these exercises were not mere simulations.Lizhan.com is part of the global network of the world. The so-called "global network" is a real-time network that manages hegemony politics. The information on this network supports tens of billions of citizens who are hungry for information, and has evolved an autonomous system and self-awareness.More than 6,000 ultimate-level artificial intelligences have created a framework to integrate the data network resources of more than 150 planets, enabling the operation of the Battle Network.

"The Battle.net resources aren't simulated," whimpered Cadet Radesky, the best AI expert Kassad could find (and bribe him to speak up), "it's dreaming, That is the most realistic historical dream in the ring web. The way it dreams is not just simply adding a few characters, but also inserting comprehensive insight and facts. And, when it dreams, it will make us and It dreams together." Kassad didn't understand, but he believed it all.Then she reappeared. It was the first American Vietnam war, and they started smoldering after the ambush, when they were patrolling in the dark and scary night.Kassad wore crude camouflage uniform, no underwear to avoid inflammation, and a steel helmet not much more advanced than Agincourt's.She was wearing black pajamas and slippers, the most common attire for farmers in Southeast Asia.So did the Viet Cong, of course.They stayed naked in the night, standing there to go to the highest cloud.She leaned against a tree, her legs tucking his body, the world exploding behind them, the defensive belts flashing green, the claymore mines rumbling as they exploded.

The next day in Gettysburg, she came to see him again.Then there was Borodino, where the clouds of burning gunpowder rose among the dead, as if the souls of those departed had condensed in steam. They were in a damaged armored personnel carrier in the Greek Basin, and at this moment, the battle of the suspended tank was still going on, and the simon wind was approaching with red dust, howling and scratching the titanium hull. "Tell me your name," he whispered to her in Common Tongue. She shook her head. "Are you real, outside the simulation?" he asked in the Japanese accent of the era.

She nodded and leaned over to kiss him. They lay in a bunker somewhere among the ruins of Brasília, while the death beam of the electromagnetic vehicle hit like a blue searchlight on a broken clay wall.After the siege of a forgotten tower city on the Russian steppe in an unnamed battle, he dragged her back to the ruined house and began to have sex. He whispered to her, "I want to be with you." She touched his lips with a finger and shook her head. They were lying on the hundred-story balcony after the retreat in New Chicago, Kassad's sniper site, in his rearward mortal defense of the last President of the United States.He put his hand on the warm skin of the woman's chest and said to her, "Can you follow me... get out of here?" She put her palm on his cheek and laughed.

In the last year of the command school, only five Battle.net simulations were performed, because by this time, the cadets' training had begun to transition to real field exercises.Sometimes, such as when the battalion was dropped on Ceres, Kassad would sit in the tactical command seat, fasten his seat belt, close his eyes, and look at the monochromatic map of the tactical terrain matrix generated by cortical stimulation, Then, he felt a... someone's breath?Is it her?He's not sure. She never appeared again after that.Not in the final months of schoolwork, not in the final Battle of the Coal Sack (the one where General Horace Glennongall's rebels were defeated), not in the graduation parades and reunions, Nor was it present at the final Olympus military parade, the march that preceded the Overlord CEO waving from his red-glowing floating deck.

For the young officers, time was so tight that they could not even dream of it. They were sent to the moon of the earth to participate in the Masada celebration;Then, the study career is over. Kassad, promoted from Second Lieutenant Cadet to Lieutenant.He has a universal card issued by the military, which can be used unlimitedly by him, and he can go anywhere in the ring network at will.So he was free to spend three standard weeks in the ring.Then fly to the Overlord Colonial Service Training School in Luses to prepare for active duty outside the net.He was sure that he would never see her again.

But he was wrong. Feldman Kassad grew up in a poor and precarious culture.A member of an ethnic minority who call themselves "Palestinians," he and his family live in the slums of Talsis.Here is the only bitter legacy of the last destitute.Every Palestinian on and off the World Wide Web has a cultural memory: the nationalists finally won a month of glory after centuries of struggle, and then the nuclear jihad of 2038 destroyed everything.Then began their second diaspora, a five-century flight that finally brought them to the hopeless desert world of Mars, where their dreams were buried with the death of the Old Earth.

Kassad, like the other South Tulsis redistribution camp boys, had two choices before him: either run wild in packs, or be prey to every self-proclaimed predator in the camp.He chose to play wild with others.At the age of sixteen standard, Kassad killed a young companion. If there's anything on Mars that the World Wide Web is known for, it's hunting at Mariners' Canyon, the Schward Zen Hills in the Greek Basin, and the Olympus Command School.Kassad didn't need to go to Sailor's Canyon to learn how to hunt and be hunted, and he had no interest in Zen spirituality.When he was young, he had no other thoughts other than contempt for those uniformed students who were receiving military training from all over the Ring Network.He and his peers mocked the "new bushido" as the law of gay men.Yet an ancient sense of honor secretly resonated in Kassad's young soul, making him contemplate the life and work of the warrior class, full of duty, self-respect, and promises. When Kassad was eighteen, a high-ranking recruiter in Talsis Province offered him two jobs: to serve a Martian year in a polar work battalion, or to volunteer in the John Carter Corps to help calm the army. Glennon High rebellion revived in Tier 3 Colony.Kassad volunteered, and found he liked the discipline and purity of military life, even though John Carter's Brigade had only garrison duties in the Ring, and it was on the planet Resurgence that Glennon High's cloned grandson Shortly after his death, the Brigade was disbanded.Two days after his nineteenth birthday, Kassad applied to join the army at the Ministry of Military Affairs, but was rejected.He drank for nine days straight, and woke up to find himself lying in the deep pipes of a honeycomb in Luthers. His implanted military comlog was stolen. The thief seemed to have learned how to move in a correspondence course. The operation, his World Card and teleportation permission were also invalidated, and his head was developing a new territory of pain.