"Your body isn't as weak as you think," Rose said, her hand tracing over my bare chest. "Your body belongs to a warrior. It has seen and trained for many battles in the past… Your weakness lies in your mind. It's not that you don't know how to fight; it's that your mind isn't ready to fight. So we will start by preparing your mind for battle."
It had been about four days since she said that to me. Or maybe more, I don't know. Because after the second day, I didn't get a chance to ask Rose how long we had been in this mind.
As a teacher, Rose was ruthless. She had no patience for unnecessary questions. She had no patience for resting. She had no patience for casualness. The moment she saw any casualness, the scene we were in would change, and she would teleport me to the torture chambers on CLAUDIS IX. I would come back after hours of getting shocked and beaten in those CLAUDIS IX prisons.
Yes! It was a pretty ruthless method. In fact, I had told her a few times that I wanted to break the agreement, but she had answered me, "The pain you feel in your mind only hurts in your mind. Your body doesn't get damaged… At least, I, as a half mind-weaver, can't cause such damage."
"But I'm in pain, woman!"
"It was all good when you were playing the hero. If you're going to be a hero, you have to be strong, Mehmet. If you can't even endure pain in your mind, what will you do when you feel pain in real life? Will you go back on your words and tuck your tail between your legs and run away?"
That's when I kept wishing I hadn't been spurred on by Rose's words. Because ever since Rose's words spurred me on, I've been dragged from one pain to another, 24/7.
One day I was trying to sneak into a facility to steal documents on a secret mission, and the next day I was fighting bears in the arctic, trying to survive. One day I was trying to escape from a mine where I was forced to work hungry and thirsty, and another day I was training in a cult.
Rose lunged forward with the staff in her hand and tried to hit me in the stomach, but I stopped it with the staff in my hand. The moment I stopped it, the other end of the staff landed a hard blow on my cheek, and I stumbled back two steps. If I had taken one more step, I would have fallen off the edge of the cliff.
"Concentrate!" Rose yelled. "If you are in a fight, you have two options. You either fight or you run! If you choose to fight, you won't think about running. You must do whatever it takes to win! Sometimes you may have to lose a limb to win. Sometimes you may even have to die to win."
I was out of breath. I was drenched in sweat, and the sun in the sky was burning my skin. I could hear what Rose was saying, but my panting was so furious that I couldn't really understand what Rose was saying. I had become something like an idiot.
"Will… will this training never end?" I said and lunged forward with my staff. The staffs clashed with each other, one after the other. Rose kicked me in the stomach. Before, if I had taken that kick, I would have flown backward, but I had realized I was going to get kicked, and I had tightened my stomach, putting all my breath into it. After taking a few steps back, I had planted my feet firmly on the ground.
"There might be months waiting for us, Mehmet."
***
I had pulled my hood over my head and was walking with heavy steps down a reeking, narrow alley. The only thing illuminating the alley was the light of an ad on a skyscraper miles away. The light came into the alley at an angle, illuminating only a part of the alley. This… meant too much light. If there was one thing I had learned, it was that the worse the conditions, the better. Because you had trained for bad conditions, but your opponent might not have.
I reached my hand under my robe and pulled out a signal sync device. I held the device in my hand and moved it around. When the signals on it became rhythmic, I had found my target. A few meters ahead, there was a wall with graffiti on it. When the device came to that wall, it suppressed the signal rhythms on it as much as possible. I put the device back under my robe, and when I ran my hand over the wall, I found a bump. I pressed that bump with the knife I took out of my pocket. That bump caved in with a size no bigger than a pinhole. With the bump caving in, the hologram on the wall disappeared, and a metal door appeared in front of me.
When I stepped inside the metal door, a weapon dealer was waiting for me. His table, the counter behind him, and many other places were full of weapons. The light on the ceiling was a dim green, and it was reflecting on the metal body of the seller, who was cybernetic but corpulent. The gun seller took a puff from his electronic cigar. The gears in his cybernetic throat turned, and his eyes opened as if blood had been pumped into his body.
"I know what you came for," he had said. "Did Rose send you?"
"Then you must also know what I want."
But there was something strange. Even though I wasn't a mind-weaver, I could sense this now, for some reason. I had bought weapons hundreds of times. I had been in rooms where illegal things were done thousands of times. This room was too muted. What does a muted room look like? It's not really possible for me to explain this to you, because there may not be a real explanation for it. But the intensity I felt while breathing, and the sharpness in the cybernetic man's gaze, were the two things that made me feel this mutedness the most.
The cybernetic in front of me wasn't in a hurry. The cybernetic in front of me wasn't curious either. The cybernetic in front of me was neither afraid of me nor did he respect me. I took two steps and started walking towards the counter, when I noticed something else. A small melody was playing from the room's speakers. Since when did a cybernetic have a soul that yearned for music?
I had met tens of thousands of cybernetics. The only reason they were different from evolved humans was that large parts of their minds were also robotic. Even though most cybernetics didn't need pleasure like humans did, they might want to mimic this pleasure. But this music he was playing couldn't have been a product of mimicry.
The music sounded like a rhythmic sound. It had neither a memory nor a purpose… It sounded like the music played in a hotel elevator to entertain customers. Only the rhythm of the melody inside was more technological. It was as if this music was trying to suppress a sound. Maybe a footstep, maybe a conversation… Or maybe the rhythmic sound of a mechanical component…
I smiled. I didn't know since when I had been able to notice such small details, but I had started to enjoy it.
"Can you turn off the music?" I asked.
"Why?"
"Because listening to music while talking business distracts me."
"Nah…" he said. "…it's fine. I was just curious as to why."
There was another mistake. The place he bent down to turn off the music was under his counter. Who would want to put a music-off button in such a secret place? After all, listening to music was a different kind of activity. You had to be able to turn up the volume, turn it down, change the music, and do many other things. You couldn't do all these things with a single button under the counter. Customers might want to see the music you were listening to when they came in. Your friends might want to come and adjust the volume themselves when you weren't in the shop if they really wanted to.
I took the gun from under my robe and shot the man in the head before he could press the button. The man's half-metal face had exploded, but he could still move. This meant that his power source or information system wasn't in his head.
"Holy crap!" I yelled and ran out the door.
With a huge explosion, the weapon dealer's room had been blown up. The building was collapsing from the impact of the explosion, and I was thrown against the opposite wall from the impact of the explosion. My spinal cord was broken; I couldn't move. What would happen if I did move, anyway? What could I do as the massive building fell on me?
I closed my eyes and waited.
When I opened my eyes, I was sitting in a café with Rose. The table in front of us was very elegant. The tablecloth was pristine white, and there were no wrinkles or dirt. The plant placed at the edge of the table was probably a very rare plant and was brought in organically from a very distant planet.
Rose took a sip from the cup she was holding with both hands. A very elegantly dressed waiter approached her, and she whispered something into the waiter's ear. She was wearing a yellow, low-cut dress. This was one of the few times you could see Rose in a dress. I, too, was wearing a very elegant suit. As the waiter walked away, I looked down from the window on my right. The dirty streets of CLAUDIS IX were below. The city looked like a brown stain from above.
"You botched it," she said, wiping the corner of her mouth with a napkin. For some reason, while I was busy with training in the Mind Tunnel, Rose seemed to be on her own epic vacation. It was as if she was acting like people she had never been and trying to gain experiences she hadn't. I found her in a different place every time.
"Ah… Don't you say."
"Your perception has increased a lot. You can notice most things now, but your decisions are still inadequate."
"My decisions are inadequate? What could I have done there?"
"First of all, can you put aside your primitive human instincts, at least for a little while? There is no rule that says a cybernetic will die when shot in the head. That rule only applies to humans."
"Oh, I'm so sorry! Next time I find myself in a situation like that, I'll shoot myself in the head."
"You're starting to talk nonsense again. Every time you do something idiotic, you ramble on."
"Idiotic?"
"Yes, idiotic…"
"You keep putting me in scenarios I can't escape from! Then you mock me by saying, 'why couldn't you escape, you idiot?'" I had gotten angry, and my voice had gotten louder. Normally, in this situation, I should have been sent to a prison in CLAUDIS IX to be tortured, but Rose calmly sipped her coffee.
"Scenarios you can't escape from? Maybe you're right. Maybe I'm putting you in scenarios you can't escape from, but this can't be the answer for the mistakes you made. The important thing is to be able to make the right decision in every situation."
"So what is the right decision?"
"Look… If your enemies are big and they want to take you down, then they will make a plan. The bigger a threat you are to those enemies, the bigger the scale of the plan. Everyone wants their plan to be flawless. A flawless plan is a plan where every detail has been thought of. If your enemies are making a plan where every detail has been thought of, it means that the plan is made up of many layers. You are taking action without even seeing the layers of the plan, without understanding the plan, or without questioning the plan."
"So I should have waited for it to blow me up, is that it?"
"You looked for a weakness in the very first step of the plan. The first step was for you to enter. You can't know what their next steps would be. You reacted in the first step and caused your death. What if there was an opening you could encounter in the later steps of their plan? An opening that could save you…"
"What if the next step in their plan was to blow me up… What if there was no next step in their plan… It's ridiculous to talk in terms of possibilities."
"Not staying calm is ridiculous!" Rose said, raising her voice a little. "You can use a gun, you can fight, but you don't know how to use these two tools. Why? Because your instincts are still controlling you."
"My instincts that keep me alive…"
"If you were hunting mammoths when you said these words, I would agree with you. But your enemies are not mammoths. Not anymore… Your enemies are the ones who hunted mammoths millions of years ago and are now trying to hunt you."
"Ah…" I sighed and got up. "…I don't want to listen to this nonsense anymore, Rose. I'm leaving, send me to the next scenario."
"What's with this tired tone? Don't you want to train?"
"Train? All you do is drink coffee here while I'm in pain. This has turned from training into a theater play where you enjoy seeing me in pain."
"If you think so, let's end this."
"No, I just…" I was about to say when she cut me off.
"One last scene… After that, the training will be over."
***
I couldn't hold my tongue, and it seemed to have angered Rose quite a bit. Because in this next scene, I was neither in a battle zone nor on a stealth mission. The scene I was in was a house. A luxurious house… The house of a rich man, filled with objects, designed nostalgically. There was no sign of danger in the room. Rose was probably going to test my patience in this last test. That's fine, because the chairs were very comfortable, and I had no trouble sitting in them.
I went to one of the single chairs and sprawled out. I stretched my legs on the coffee table in front of me, kicking the decorative items on the table with the back of my foot. My hands were dangling on either side of the chair, keeping rhythm on the edge of the chair. I closed my eyes for a while and rested. 5 minutes, 10 minutes… It was pretty funny that Rose would try something like this to test my patience. It wouldn't be nice for the entire training to end with a training like this.
Out of sudden boredom, I got up. I looked around. I found a photo frame on the dining table in front of the window. I picked up the frame and examined it. It was a classic rich and happy family portrait. A pot-bellied but proud father, a thin and gray-haired mother, a spoiled blond-haired child.
"What's all this, Rose?" I said, holding the frame up to the ceiling. "What am I doing here?"
At that moment, I heard a scream. Strangely, this sound seemed to be coming from the other side of the walls. There were no doors in the room I was in. The scream sounded like the scream of a little girl, and that scream echoed once again. I threw the furniture aside, I threw the decorations on the tables aside. Finally, when I pulled one of the lamps hanging on the wall, the wall on one side of the room moved, and a door opened.
There were three corpses lying on the floor. The mother and son were almost in each other's arms. Both of them were riddled with holes. Their blood was mixing together. They had elegant clothes similar to the ones in the photograph, but each one was now a blood-red color.
There was a trail of blood on the floor. When I followed that trail, the thing I saw was the third corpse. The father was lying face down on the floor. And a little girl was on top of him. She was continuing to stab the man's corpse with the knife in her hand.
With a momentary reflex, I ran and grabbed the girl by both her arms.
"Let me go!" the girl yelled, and I took the knife from her hand and threw it aside. Then I slammed the little girl onto her back and put my knee on her.
"What are you doing?"
"I said let me go!"
"Did you kill these people?"
"Yes!"
"And why!"
"They deserved it!"
"Did the mother and child you killed deserve it too?"
"Yes!"
"In the name of the Emperor of CLAUDIS IX, please surrender!" I heard a voice. This room was actually a wide corridor, and this corridor had five doors. One of these doors was now being forced open with great force.
"The security forces have arrived! Damn it! They'll definitely blame this on me too! Rose, if this is the scenario you thought of, it's really a scenario lacking imagination…"
"Let me go so I can leave! Otherwise, I'll have to slit your throat!" the girl said and started punching my knee.
"You can't slit a damn thing! Stay where you are…" My neck was itching from stress. Normally, every scenario I was in had a beginning, a middle, and an end. It was as if I had been thrown directly into the end of this scenario. "What should I do?"
The door suddenly broke. A smoke bomb thrown from the door of the security forces was tumbling towards the middle of the room, and I took the girl from under my knee, picked her up, and ran to the door on the opposite side. When I shouldered the door open and got to the other side of the door, the smoke bomb had exploded with great fury. I had to close the door behind us so the smoke wouldn't leak into where we were.
After we passed through the door, we were on a rooftop. There was a convoy of flying cars gliding in the air. They were busy sweeping the area with their lights. With the girl in my arms, I had thrown myself behind a concrete wall.
The voices of a few of the forces could be heard from the other side of the door. And the flying cars were constantly circling around us. I had no idea what I could do.
"I'm in trouble because of you!" I said and shook the girl. The girl, in turn, spat on my face and said:
"Fuck off!"
The light from one of the flying cars had moved past us. After wiping the spit from my face with the back of my hand, I suddenly started running and jumped to the rooftop of the opposite building. The security forces who were hiding on the rooftop of the opposite building suddenly appeared in front of me. I dropped the girl from my arms to the floor, drew my gun, and took both of them down with a single shot each.
"Run after me!" I yelled to the girl. The flying cars, having heard the gunshots, were turning toward us.
We started running, jumping across rooftops. One of the flying cars came to our side and started making an announcement:
"Please surrender, or we will open fire!"
"I'm innocent! All the blame is on this little girl!" I yelled.
"Fine! These statements will be evaluated. Please surrender!"
"Will you really evaluate them?"
"Yes!"
"Then…" I said and kicked the girl, who was a few meters away from my feet, causing her to fall to the ground. Then I held the fallen girl's hands behind her and showed her to the flying car. "…we surrender!"
***
The security forces got out of their flying cars and surrounded us. They searched us thoroughly and collected any weapons, IDs, etc. The little girl next to me had nothing, so they directly put her into the vehicle by tying her entire body with metal handcuffs as if they were packing her into a box. While the little girl was stuck to the wall of the flying car, rigid with metal handcuffs, I was only chained by my wrist. I didn't know whether the fact that this girl was seen as a bigger threat should have comforted me or scared me.
We were in a large compartment in the back of the flying vehicle. The chair in the all-white room was quite uncomfortable. The little girl could only move her mouth and eyes. The rest of her body was wrapped in metal handcuffs. She was hanging on the wall with her feet in the air.
A flying screen glided and came in front of me. When the screen turned on, a man with a black mask started speaking.
"First of all, thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Mehmet. According to the field investigations, you have no connection to the murder."
"You're welcome…"
"But you will be tried for the crime of murdering two force personnel."
"Holy crap! I missed that detail. You're talking about the two men I shot reflexively when I jumped onto the rooftop, aren't you? I hadn't even considered them when I surrendered."
"Yes…"
"Idiot!" the little girl yelled and laughed. "…you're an idiot!"
I ignored the little girl and continued speaking: "So will I get any reduction in my sentence? Since I handed the girl over to you…""
"Your sentence can be reduced from 120 years to a maximum of 98 years. The judiciary will decide on this."
"98 years? I don't know if you're aware of this, but I'm not a cybernetic. I don't think I'll live that long."
"That doesn't concern us," he said, and the screen suddenly turned off.
As the young girl let out laughs of enjoyment, I leaned back in my chair. I must have botched this scene as well, but once again, I had not the slightest clue as to what I should have done. The good thing was that the scenario had ended quickly. I wished the last scenario had been a more impactful one.
***
But the scenario didn't end. I really did go to court and was judged like a prisoner. I was thrown into prison with my hands in cuffs. Every day, as I waited for the scenario to end, the scenario was progressing even more.
I got into fights in prison. I was tortured by the forces. I had already learned how horrible and violent the prisons of CLAUDIS IX were thanks to Rose; that's why what I experienced in prison didn't feel very alien to me.
Then one day, as I was eating in the dining hall, a prisoner approached me. This time it wasn't to fight or pick on me. It was to apologize.
"You must be Mehmet, right?"
The man who came to me was a cybernetic. Cybernetic prisoners usually had inhibitors on their bodies. This was a device that restricted their body's technological system. This device would be wrapped around their ankle or wrist and would shock the prisoners' bodies with a circuit-breaking electrical signal every few seconds. This is why cybernetics generally avoided making contact with other prisoners. After all, if the prisoner in front of them suddenly got shocked, the fight that could break out would be endless. But this cybernetic had held out his hand to me. And I had shaken the man's hand without fear of the electricity.
"Who are you?"
"My name is not important."
"Oh, really?"
"Yes… My name is not that important." He was trying to act like he had a secret identity, but the sound systems inside this prison were recording everything that was said.
"What do you want?"
"I want to know how my daughter is. You saw her…"
"Are you talking about the little girl."
"I heard she was brought to this prison."
"Yes… That crazy girl riddled three people with holes."
"Ugh… What kind of ridiculous thing is that? Do the courts deal with such shitty things?"
"The court is theirs…"
"The court is theirs?"
"The Queen shared her power with the nobles to be able to control the power and protect her throne. Since then, corruption has engulfed this planet. There are only us, the nobles and their servants. My daughter, by killing those bastards, brought freedom to a large human population. The perverted son of that family was fond of my daughter, so they kept her with them even though they didn't love her. My daughter knew this, so she gave the boy whatever he wanted. Her body, her mind, and many other things… She waited for the right time and seems to have done a great heroic act. You are the last person to see her; how is her condition? Please speak, is my daughter okay?"
I couldn't tell him that I had kicked his daughter and sent her flying. So the only thing I could say was: "She seemed to be in good spirits the last time I saw her…"
***
After this conversation, I went back to my room and looked at myself in the mirror. I still had no idea what this scenario was trying to tell me or what its purpose was.
"So what, Rose? What are you trying to tell me? A little girl is waiting for the right time to finish off a family, and I'm acting impulsively, is that it? If this entire scenario is to give me this life lesson, thank you, but you could have given me this life lesson in a different way. It wasn't impressive at all."
I thought a little more. What could this scene have been trying to tell me? I looked at what I had learned. A little girl is sacrificing herself to save her family. The rich are evil, the nobles are evil… What does all this have to do with this training…
"Wait a minute…"
I went to the metal door of my cell and looked outside.
"There are no hunters in this story. Everyone is prey… The Queen is a prey that the nobles are trying to take down. The nobles, as much as they look like hunters, are actually the prey of their crazed slaves… And the slaves are the prey of the system… There is no real hunter in this story. The system? No… The system itself is more of a result of this predator-prey relationship than a prey or a hunter waiting to be destroyed… So who is the hunter in this story?"
I thought for a while. I thought about the previous scenarios I had been in. I had been on countless missions full of incredibly big dangers, but in this scenario, I had no mission. I had no enemies, just as I had no mission. I… I was neither the prey nor the hunter in this story, just as I am in the real world.
Yes, the scourge of John Crowrift was upon me, and the Supreme World Republic was after me, but it was highly likely that I could get away from them and live a normal life. If I stopped moving forward and got away from everything a little, I could turn into a simple man with no worries. That's what I would become when I got off this planet.
But just as in this scenario, the outside was full of prey. Prey busy eating each other… They weren't strong, they weren't wise, but they were dangerous.
The Queen was strong but a coward. Because of her cowardice, she had become more of a prey than a hunter. The nobles were brave but arrogant. That's why their arrogance had turned them into prey. The people were numerous but helpless. They had become prey because of their helplessness.
So what did it mean to be a hunter? Weren't the nobles becoming hunters by exploiting the people? Weren't the people becoming hunters by rising up?
The fight or flight reflex was the most ancient human reflex. Humans would fight if they saw themselves as strong, and they would run if they saw themselves as weak. The ones who fought would become the hunters, and the ones who ran would become the prey. As much as all these residents of CLAUDIS IX looked like they were fighting, they were actually running.
The Queen was running from ruling and being a great monarch. The nobles were afraid to step aside because their arrogance was preventing them. The people were afraid of hunger and failure. As much as they looked like hunters, they were all actually cowardly prey trying to run away.
Being a hunter meant refusing to run. Being a hunter meant accepting to fight. This scenario was perhaps a scenario trying to tell me that those who seemed like hunters could be someone's prey. It was a scenario showing that even hunters have hunters.
But why am I in this scenario? Because I have to make a decision. Just as in the real world… Will I be a hunter or a prey? Will I be a coward or a brave man? Will I fight or will I run? I spent months in this prison just because I couldn't make this decision.
"In the previous scenario, I thought I was the prey. That's why I was scared and I suddenly reached for my gun. But the person in front of me was not a hunter. But I was the one who made myself the prey anyway. If I had accepted that I was a hunter, if I had continued my mission with that cold-bloodedness; then maybe I could have completed that mission successfully, right, Rose?"
"I'm glad you understood," Rose's voice said from somewhere.
"Then can you get me out of here? I need a nice shower."
"Not before you meet him."
"Who…"
"Me…" said the man waiting in front of the door. His body had the perfect symmetry of a war machine covered in steel plates; carbon fibers and crimson energy cables were coiling in place of his muscles. In the center of his chest, there was a blue core that burned as if forged from the essence of a cold star. Everything except his face was robotic, but there was a mask covering his face too. This dark gray mask was shaped like a demon's mouth. The man had two sharp laser swords on his back and a turquoise cape. One end of the cape was connected to the curves of the reactor on his chest.
"Who are you?"
The mask on his mouth was moving as the man spoke.
"I thought you would know me. My name is Raiden."