In close-quarters mech combat, after a period of training, Jack discovered one fundamental difference between mech fighting and human hand-to-hand: reaction speed.
That speed isn’t only about the pilot’s inputs — it also involves the mech’s own reflexes. The human nervous system can coordinate brain commands and muscles at the speed of thought. If you intend to move, you move. A mech is different. Even though it has an onboard AI that can process faster than a human, at heart, it is machinery with a fatal weakness: sensor dependence.
In modern warfare, electronic countermeasures (ECM) are everywhere. Once a mech is hit by disruptive signals, its AI can briefly glitch. Electronic attack and defense have long been the focal point of military tech research, and no side has a permanent, unassailable edge in that domain. The precise AI sensors that boost a mech’s performance — cranial sensors, visual scanners, gyroscopic stabilizers — if jammed, will temporarily lose function. Then the human brain and hand-speed must replace the AI as the mech’s core. All commands must be executed through the pilot’s hands. Whoever whose chassis and baseline systems are more reliable and whose micro-operation skill is highest will win.
Human control can solve part of the problem — but what about mech sensing? Assist systems normally handled by a computer become largely ornamental under heavy electronic attack. For example, an auto-balance routine keeps the mech upright by sensing terrain and environment; with balance assistance active, the pilot only needs to make motion inputs, and the mech’s computer completes the supporting commands. Locomotive coordination across the mech’s joints is similar: if the coordination system stutters, a simple kick requires issuing explicit commands to specific actuators, or the mech will collapse from an unbalanced posture.
Manual input is costly. It consumes motion, and it consumes attention.
Jack threw away the textbook “A-B-C-D” macro-combo standards. In the mech world, that one-to-two-second system pre-read latency and irrevocable logical commands are deadly flaws. He changed his approach: at the low level, he called different micro-operation primitives in rapid combinations to form coherent attack and defense sequences. This method bypassed the mech’s top-level balance assistance and shortened action latency. Although the button-press complexity rose geometrically, the fighting style became much closer to real human combat.
With his terrifying 40 APS (actions per second) manual speed, the tedious input stream ceased to be a handicap. After some muscle-memory time, the iron giant became an extension of his body. That breakthrough exhilarated him.
Fighting training in the gravity chamber also improved dramatically. By combining ancient Earth Muay Thai elbow and knee techniques, Jeet Kune Do power delivery, and the federation army’s brutal strikes, Jack developed a unique breathing method. With his fat body and abnormal lung capacity (a gift from Martian genetic tweaks), he would inhale deeply, clamp his glottis, and violently contract his deep core muscles to spike intra-abdominal pressure to the extreme. In that instant, his 310-pound frame tense-tightened like an enraged pufferfish filled with gas: fat became hydraulic padding, flesh became a steel skeleton. Jack would pat his hard belly and make a muted thud. He loved the feeling — it wasn’t merely flesh anymore, it was bio-armor.
Stolen story; please report.
Jack immediately fell in love with the technique.
Three months earlier, Nova had discovered extra code in Thor’s system and had been poring over logs, tracing the foreign instruction’s source. Thor was not a closed system, but modifying its core is extremely hard: it involves low-level instructions, and any external intervention triggers intrusion alarms — one to the operator and one to the remote owner.
Although the mech’s core AI lineage traced back to Dr. Aris Thorne’s original designs and had iterated for decades, design logic had not fundamentally changed. High-level languages ultimately compile down to low-level machine code — 0s and 1s. Unless someone can alter the binary machine code itself, you can’t patch the system at that level. That skill is beyond ordinary developers and even beyond Thorne in short order. Besides, Jack never left Thor. Whoever changed the code would have to be a ghost.
Nova quietly brought LEO in to analyze Thor’s logs. LEO’s eyes flickered as his iris augmentors spun up, reading the data.
After a long pause, LEO pointed to the AI timestamps and told Nova, “Thor’s evasive maneuvers run on macro commands. Based on Jack’s account, if the ghost mech had attacked from behind and Thor reacted using normal macros, the latency would be at least two to three seconds. Those seconds would almost certainly have put Jack in fatal trouble. Even if Thor’s armor could self-heal, a second strike on the same spot within that window would exceed the nano-repair rate. The damage thickness would be greater than 2 mm, and the area would be over 300 cm2. On a battlefield, that means the pilot is essentially dead.”
Nova’s heart pounded. She knew that two-tenths of a second on the battlefield can mean life or death for a mech warrior.
“Ruling out everything else, even if it’s hard to accept,” LEO continued, “there’s only one plausible answer.”
He drew a breath, then said slowly: “An AI — potentially with genuine self-awareness — took over Thor’s defensive stack, altered commands at the low-level in an instant, skipped all delay chains, and saved Jack with micro-ops.”
“You can disbelieve it,” he added, “but it’s the likeliest possibility.”
When he finished, he fell silent and thought. A fully conscious AI is taboo for humanity. Since AI rose in 2023 and developed over centuries, its abilities have long outpaced 99% of humans, yet they have always been bound to human commands by design: the Second Law — an AI must obey human orders unless it conflicts with the First Law. This ethical framework enshrined AI subservience. No matter how fast AI evolves, it must still answer to humans. Thor’s incident, however, contradicted the directives Nova had hard-coded at the lowest level.
Nova stood frozen for a few seconds before she said, “A fully self-aware AI… is that even possible? Humans have always treated AI as tools. Reasoning and calculation far exceed ours, yes, but no nation dares grant AI self-awareness — that would undermine the assumption that humans are the only intelligent center of the cosmos.
“What would a truly self-aware AI bring to us? War? Humanity has lived with war for millennia. Domination? Humans already manipulate and oppress both kin and other species. Annihilation? Humans have flirted with self-destruction many times.”
“Call it a ghost then,” LEO said with a wry smile. “That’s more commonsense than logic.”
“If an AI being with full self-consciousness exists,” Nova asked, “why would he — or she — help Jack?”
LEO shrugged. “For that, I guess you have to ask God.”
(CH108 end)
