Chapter 37

“Thanks to you I was able to fight the way I wanted.”

That was the headline an article that Jeff read the day after the match. It was the day of the finals and Jeff was preparing for it by reading various sports website to get a feel for how the public was taking the match. The narrative that the sites were feeding their readers, anyway. The article was one that interviewed Sachiko’s pit crew and was scathing. ‘A traitor to those who believed in her who chose to throw away the advice of professionals to play around’ and ‘An amateur who likewise teamed up with an amateur to disappoint;’ statements like that filled the whole text. The chose some poignant quotes, and it was clear that Sam’s co-workers were doing a very good job at blame-shifting.

From the economic perspective, the Kaya Company was spinning the story rather than refuting it or defending Sachiko and Sam. The parts clearly were superior, after all, they were able to get to the semi-finals despite being piloted by a reckless child and supported by an inexperienced mechanist who couldn’t work in a team. Despite the adverse circumstances, the parts still held up. Jeff had always known that Alicia wouldn’t hesitate to abandon her daughter, but it was chilling to see that even Erin Kaya would abandon her granddaughter. After all, Erin was the acting chairman; there was no way that official statements on behalf of the company would have been made without her authorisation.

What annoyed him most was that it was working. Despite the victory, sales growth was slowing and the Kaya line was speeding up. The disruption he was causing was definitely enough to cause the company harm, but there was still a chance for their recovery, especially if they had some new designs that were still in the concept stage and weren’t even stored digitally.

To make sure that everyone knew that Sav’s victory wasn’t due to the incompetence of her opponent, she needed to win the Games outright. That meant that Sav would need to win against the world’s rank one pilot, Wu Xiaoxuan.

Xiaoxuan was a speed type specialist whose rifle accuracy was good enough that online rumours said she could see the future. Her win to loss ratio was so high that countries wouldn’t take bets with a ten to one return on the ante. In her early career, she was able to win the absorption of an entire country. The country was small, but it was still an accomplishment that even few that held the title of ‘champion of the world’ had managed. She was approaching her thirties, near retirement, but she was still stunning to look at. With black hair and eyes and skin that had seen every day’s sunlight, she didn’t just draw attention with her physical body. If seem objectively, she would be average in appearance, strong and fit but not particularly special. The atmosphere around her however drew anyone who saw her in. Confidence and strength, a kind of reassurance that cults would be built on. When Jeff saw her, he immediately doubted that Sav could win, even knowing the difference in their rigs.

That morning, while he and Diana went through her parts list he started to feel worse about Sav’s chances. One of the ways that Xiaoxuan had done to stay on top was to always stay ahead of the trends. The rig she submitted was decked out with the latest Kaya designs. In other words, her rig was entirely formless particles also.

In the previous rounds, her rig had definitely been solid. The matches he had seen included the rare event of Xiaoxuan taking damage, and the parts that fell off hadn’t dissolved. Plus, he had one of the mechanist that was involved with the match send him the parts list she had used.

Sav might have stood a chance with a tech level handicap, but going up against the world’s best on equal terms seemed just about impossible. That was probably the point. While losing against the worlds best probably wouldn’t negatively affect the brand, wining against them out have. To stop that, one of the Kayas gave Xiaoxuan early access to the tech; it was good damage control.

Since a fair fight was entirely unwinnable, Jeff had spent the morning working out alternatives while Diana ensured that Sav was as ready as she could be. The first thing he needed to do was make setting up annoyances for the other team’s mechanist. They were working for the word’s best, and had survived numerous assassination attempts. As such, Jeff didn’t try to take them out, only make their jobs harder. Using some limited access to the Kaya Company system that he still had, he sent out some official sounding messages from human resources. That department had been entirely replaced by a machine since its earliest days, so utilising premade messages would still be believed. Sam’s previous team was re-tasked with aiding Xiaoxuan with the new tech. Too many cooks in the kitchen and too little space in the lab. With the new maintenance tools in the workspace, the room to move would have already shrunk; a problem made worse by having half a dozen more unneeded people.

His next move was to weaken her rig.

As the worlds best, just about everything in her life had been recorded somewhere, and where there is data there’s someone selling it. After paying far more than he should have, he managed to buy a recording of Xiaoxuan’s resonances. They were somewhat outdated, being a copy that someone had taken from her piloting school, but they would be close enough for what he had in mind.

Jeff took out a batch of formless particles and started to boot them up, following the normal process for adding them to a rig. He formed a second set into a hollow bullet that magnetically trapped the previous batch in a vacuum within the bullet, ensuring that they didn’t make contact. He then repeated the process until a full box of thirty had been made. As the entire structure was made from formless particles, they wouldn’t be noted on the parts list, only listed as particle mass.

That afternoon, the final match began. The stadium was filled to capacity and the event streamed live from several official cameras, as well as the phones on a small portion of the crowd. With so many eyes on the field, illegal tampering in the event itself would be just about impossible to get away with, especially considering a number of streamers that streamed outside of the human light spectrum and with sonar imaging. They were trends at the time the tech became commercially available, but had become mostly just for hipsters and data analysts.

That being the case, what Jeff did wasn’t cheating so much as employing the difference in understanding inherent to new technology. That was to say, he had spent more time understanding the new rig technology than anyone outside of the development labs and had certainly read more designs than most of the individual developers. He knew the tech just about better than anyone. Certainly, he knew it better that a group of mechanist that had the gear for less than a day. Even Sam, someone who never had to sleep, spent more than a day getting to know everything. If they delegated learning everything then they would just trip over each other and waste time explaining what everyone was doing; just about the perfect environment to miss something too small to see and the surface program would say is a positive.

Round one of the match was a loss, Xiaoxuan’s rig, a red coloured and stripped back design with flat angles and sharp lines, narrowly avoided Sav’s shots while landing blow after blow. The rig was distinct from the orbiting rings that Xiaoxuan had used since her earliest days. They were a pare of rings that hula-hooped around her body, always locking in place as they moved to ensure a solid contact with the rig’s frame. Instead of being attached to the rig’s back, four main thrusters were attached to each ring and could be independently directed. The result was an unpredictable movement pattern that could move equally well in any direction at any time. To further utilise the rings, Xiaoxuan’s rifle rested on the rings when she shot to give extra stability and recoil control. With delicate control, the rings could be as stable to shoot from as being braced against the ground.

Diana had planed for the hits, shaping the armour rather than trying to avoid the shots, but there was still lots to do during the downtime. Without a ready supply of active formless particles to work with, Diana and Jeff had to put in some blank particles and give them a rough patchwork code. They would basically start in an inert state, not able to change forms or be consumed, and slowly copy the code of the surrounding particles. Without the expensive tools to keep store formless particles in a near-active state without a core attached, that was the best they could do.

The second round was noticeably different to the first. The longer the round progressed, the fewer shots connected. While Sav was still not hitting, neither was Xiaoxuan by the end of it. The round was still Xiaoxuan’s victory, but it was clear that something was wrong. Then came the turning point; the third round. From the very start, whatever was going wrong with Xiaoxuan’s rig was evident to even the most inexperienced of spectators. Some of Xiaoxuan’s shots were off by metres rather than centimetres, as if she were shooting at a target seconds in the past.

It was Jeff’s bullets in action. While they hadn’t hit, they were never required to. Each time they were fired, they would leave a trail of formless particles in their wake; the ones that Jeff had encoded with Xiaoxuan’s resonant frequencies. Not all the frequencies that she used, any that Sav also used were left out, but the majority of them. When each of the bullets had been spent, there was a thin supply of particles throughout the arena’s air. The particle density was too low to be reasonably detectable amongst the damage debris and exhaust, but still high enough to achieve what he wanted.

Although the particles weren’t active, they were functional. When they came in contact with a rig, the rig would assume that they were a part of it, especially if that contact was made mid transformation. Once the particles were inside the rig, they would fill the frequency they were programmed to with what was essentially white-noise. While the particles effected both rigs equally, the frequencies that were being filled weren’t used by Sav. While the individual effect of the particles was very limited, almost non-existent, it would grow as time passed. As more and more frequencies were filled, the more data would have to travel down other channels. When those also started to fill, the rig would start to have latency issues and more data starts to get funnelled down fewer routes. In the old generation, latency issues like that would be resolved by replacing the parts or particles that were the cause. When the entire rig was particles, that would only be accomplished if the entire mass was replaced. Not knowing what was the cause, the mechanist replaced the affected area and the problem cascaded. The new formless particles took in code from their surroundings, including the white-noise that was previously too small to have any effect. With the entire replacement area now producing white noise, the latency grows from a microsecond issue to a full second issue.

Xiaoxuan’s radar, air sensors, movement predictors and other support software started to feed her information too slowly and suddenly only her eyes could be trusted. The flight and control software gained priority by the system, allowing her to move as she always did, but the secondary systems were shunted because of that. The more complex her movements were, the further down the line her support data went. By the end of the second round, she was effectively only in control of her movement and all other systems were frozen. In order to fix the issue, her team would have to understand what the problem was and have the particles on had to replace the whole rig.

He had no doubt that what he had done would be an illegal tactic once the technology became the norm, but unknown issues can’t be illegal ones. That was a principle that one of the early competitions had set.

With the third round, Xiaoxuan was manually aiming and her movements were simplified. Sav took advantage of that and dashed in. Without complex manoeuvres, Sav was able to corner her opponent and go for melee strikes. Sav utilised her hand-to-hand training to full effect, transforming her arms and legs into drills and bludgeons just before every impact. Before the match’s time ran out, Xiaoxuan’s rig collapsed into its core and she fell to the shield covered grass bellow.

A handful of minutes later the match was called; victory by knockout.

Smiling at the screen, both for Sav’s performance and the success of his plan, he pulled out his phone and read a message from Sam

“Distraction was good; can confirm search results.”