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FAO: Col. Jack L. Adler

RE: Psych Evaluation, Willow Daphne Reynolds

Patient began psychiatric evaluation at RAF Hospital Norfolk Plaza on 22nd January 20XX. While initially resistant to evaluation, Reynolds proved more amenable after a course of REDACTED. Responsiveness remained good, and affect sanguine and euthymic. After some projective testing, I determined that the patient was ready to undergo deeper analysis.

Deep in the bowels of the base, Iris shifted uncomfortably in her plastic seat.

It was meant to be a short briefing, but they'd overrun by at least thirty minutes: thirty minutes of back-and-forth bickering between Colonel Adler and Doctor Klein, to which Iris herself had very little to add. Even if she had had something to add, she wouldn't have dared to say anything, lest she prolong the meeting any further. She was thirsty, her eyes were creeping shut, and her bum was rapidly falling asleep. Would all these meetings be like this?

"Look, Anna," Colonel Adler said. "I can't function on just one pilot. Is there any indication of when Amanita Gill will be able to serve again?"

Iris thought back to the infirmary trip a few days ago, after Amanita's arm had mysteriously started to spasm during a game of table tennis. None of the doctors or nurses in the infirmary could tell them why; Amanita's sudden seizure was a complete mystery to anyone who examined her.

The infirmary was a cold place, stinking of disinfectant. It was big, with about a dozen beds lined each wall, but besides her and Amanita, nobody was there that didn't work there. The staff all wore masks that hid their faces, and walking in there felt a little like walking onto an alien ship.

Though they'd crowded around the hospital bed like Amanita was the alien.

Doctor Klein's voice pulled Iris back to the present.

"Tests on Gill are still ongoing. The doctors say it's likely some sort of neurological feedback, but we're still not entirely settled on that hypothesis."

The Colonel didn't seem to like that. "You mean to tell me we have no idea what the problem is?"

Klein frowned. "That's not exactly what I said."

"I can read between the lines," he snapped back. "You think it's this feedback issue, but you can't be sure. That sounds like you're just speculating."

Klein looked over at Iris, giving her the distinct impression that maybe she shouldn't be hearing this conversation. She glanced at the door awkwardly; perhaps she could make some kind of excuse to leave.

"I'm not speculating," Klein said. "I'm not doing anything. I'm not a medical doctor. All I can tell you is that our medical staff are doing everything they can to speed her recovery."

Adler gave her a meaningful look, but said nothing. Iris had no trouble interpreting his gaze: you may not be a medical doctor, it said, but it's your machine that's caused this problem. But what else weren't they saying?

It hadn't escaped Iris' notice that the arm with the problem was the same arm that Amanita's unit had lost.

"Is Amanita—" Iris blurted; she only just barely registered that she'd said something when she noticed the other two staring at her. "Is she even going to recover?"

Klein gave her a withering look.

"I'm sure you're worried," she said, firmly. "But there's very little point in worrying. It's a waste of mental energy."

"But—"

"Either Gill will recover," she continued, "or she won't. The best thing you can do is focus on your own combat readiness."

Iris didn't find that thought very comforting. She felt small, and stupid, and useless. She was useless.

"And at any rate," Klein said, "her substitute will arrive soon."

Reynolds is an avid reader, and I found her choice of reading material a useful window onto her mental state. In all of our conversations I found myself impressed by both the breadth and depth of her knowledge, as well as her ability to recall minor details that I myself had forgotten. Reynolds rarely, if ever, has to refresh herself on a book that she's read, and I suspect she may have an eidetic memory.

Iris looked at the girl in front of her. She had a serious expression on her hard features, with shoulder-length mousy-brown hair, and wore a blue sundress and sandals. She dragged her suitcase behind her with one hand without much care; all that care was apparently reserved for the violin case in her other hand.

This was the new pilot? She looked even less intimidating than Amanita. What kind of operation was this, anyway?

Undeterred, Iris stuck her hand out.

"Nice to meet you!" she said, brightly. "I'm Iris. You must be—"

"Reynolds," the girl replied. "Willow Reynolds. Candidate Thirty." With that, she brushed past Iris and walked on into the meeting room.

Maybe she was a good pilot. But her social skills could use some work.

This was the third meeting of the day, and Iris was almost spent. Besides the personnel meeting earlier, she'd barely had a chance to check in with Amanita in the infirmary before being whisked off to a situational briefing about the current state of New Gloucester's defences. That one had dragged on for almost two hours, and by the end of it, even Colonel Adler seemed to need a break. This meeting was meant to be an introductory meeting with the new pilot.

Iris' stomach gurgled. Hopefully, this would be a quick one.

"Colonel," Willow said, greeting the man with little more than that.

"Miss Reynolds," he replied. "Glad to have you back with us. I hope your… secondment wasn't too difficult?"

She sighed. "It was trying," she replied, "but manageable."

Doctor Klein was next.

"You're new," Willow told her.

"Doctor Kelly retired not too long ago," Klein replied. "I'm his replacement."

"I see," Willow replied. "I liked him."

Finally, there was Harry Searl.

"Harry! It's nice to see you."

That was unexpected.

"Hi Willow," he replied. "How have you been? Not been working you too hard up in Norfolk?"

She shook her head. "No, nothing like that. Just a lot of dull routine work. Glad to be back here."

The ice in the room had almost completely lifted. Now, Willow's voice was practically dripping with honey; where had this girl come from?

"Reynolds will be with us at least until Gill is fully recovered," Colonel Adler said. "Beyond that, well… it's up to the Ministry. But I'd be glad to have another pilot around."

At that, Willow smiled. Though the smile was a bit cold, for Iris' liking.

She looked straight at her new comrade. "Hopefully there won't be another injury," she said. "I'm sure we're all eager to learn what lessons there are to be learned."

Ouch.

"I think we're all agreed on that point," Klein said. Whether she'd missed the barb in Willow's statement or had chosen to ignore it, Iris couldn't tell.

The rest of the meeting was fairly dry. Klein had explained a bit about the modifications to Willow's unit — most of which had gone over Iris' head — and then there had been some discussion of training. It seemed like there would be some team-building exercises in the future. Maybe that would thaw Willow a bit.

Maybe.

After that, it was lunchtime. Ordinarily, Iris would have gone back to the barracks and had lunch on her own: you never know what's in the food in a place like this. But this time, she went to the dining hall, making sure to stick closely to Harry as they went in. She had questions to ask him.

"Why's she like that?" she asked, once he was halfway into his meal.

He choked slightly in response.

"Like what?" he replied.

"So… high strung." She poked a bit at her tofu salad; it was passable. "She barely said a word to anyone. Well, anyone except you."

Harry Searl took a swig of his mug of tea. "I don't really know. I think she likes me. No idea why."

Iris could see the appeal, though he wasn't exactly her own type.

"I met her parents once," he continued. "Only in passing, but…" He took another bite of his steak, and chewed on it for a moment.

Iris couldn't hold her anticipation. "But what?"

Harry swallowed, and sighed. "Well, they didn't strike me as the warmest family."

She nodded, still picking at the more-edible bits of lettuce in her bowl. "What does she like?"

"She reads a lot," he replied. "And… one time she told me she wished she had a dog."

That wasn't really much to go on.

"Look," Harry said, giving her a concerned look. "I know you probably want to get closer to her. It's only natural, especially for a girl like you. But I'd be careful around that one."

Iris frowned. "Why?"

But before he could answer her, the base alarms had started blaring.

Reynolds is an obsessive, detail-oriented person but with a rather rigid approach in many situations. She is quite capable of being polite, generous and understanding, but rarely chooses to do so. Most of the questions I asked were met with terse, often single-word replies, save for the times I managed to happen upon a topic she was particularly enthusiastic about. If I failed to remember something that she deemed important, she generally made no secret of her displeasure.

At times, I suspected that she thinks herself rather above the evaluation process in general, and above me in particular.

Peel Square was empty.

The square — the largest in New Gloucester, flanked on all sides by shops and transit stops — had been evacuated not long ago. It was an eerie sort of quiet, an unsettling lack of noise rather than the presence of peace. The dark grey slate paving slabs were decorated only by the occasional piece of discarded litter, and wind blew through the space like a gentle caress of air.

The Aberrant was nowhere to be seen.

Iris was first on the scene, her gleaming-white unit approaching from the south. After a moment, she spotted Willow to the east; her unit was green and completely humanoid, no extra arms or legs, but well-stocked with guns and knives carried on her back. It was strange to see a Thanatos unit look so human.

"Well, where is it?" Willow asked. "Did you lose it already?"

Iris shook her head. "It was already gone when I got here."

Something wasn't right. The square was empty, sure, but Iris' taste senses were in overdrive, her imagined tongue salivating, screaming at her that the Aberrant was near. Was it hiding behind a building? In the sky? Under the ground?

Before Iris could look for it, a scream erupted from all sides, a piercing, intense cacophonous wail almost like white noise. It was totally unlike the wail of the last Aberrant, but it carried the same uncanny pseudo-human quality.

The air turned pink, turned thick, turned almost alive; it coagulated and collected itself, oozing towards the centre of the square as a creature precipitated itself out of a mist. The scream continued. It was like it couldn't move without it, like it wasn't so much screaming in pain as it was scraping against the air and ground as it moved. It was awful.

Iris fell to her knees in her mech, clutching her head in all four hands.

Suddenly, the screaming stopped. Iris looked up at the Aberrant, a shambling mess of limbs and organs, too many legs, too many arms, too many everything. She felt sick.

"Jesus," Willow said. "Is this your first time?"

"Second," Iris admitted.

Willow let out a brief, cold laugh. "Let me show you how it's done."

She pulled a kinetic shotgun from her back and unloaded a volley into the monster; it juddered with each impact, absorbing the full force of the blast. Its oozing flesh tried in vain to reform around each wound, screaming even louder than before as it did so, but Willow's attacks came too fast, too broad, for it to properly repair itself.

"Don't just stand there," she shouted. "Attack!"

Rivulets of monster-flesh spread across the square, snaking up buildings, desperate to escape. Last time, Iris had won by tearing out the creature's heart. But this one didn't have a heart; it was a body without organs, oozing, amorphous, continually reshaping itself. How could they hope to hurt it? They couldn't even contain it.

Willow shouted. "Attack it!"

Iris stood, readying to pounce, trying to block the awful noise out. She pulled her knife from its holster and leapt into the fray, slashing at the Aberrant's arms, legs, tendrils and tentacles with wild abandon. Each time, the flesh simply moved out of the way, sending out another pulse of disorienting noise.

But surely, it couldn't do this forever. Sooner or later, it'd have to take the hit. Right?

The monster lashed out with several appendages at once, vine-like arms wrapping around Iris' frame and bending in all the wrong places. Her knife went flying, arcing away from her grasp and towards the far corner of the square. Her rifle came off her back and crashed into the ground. Iris was disarmed, helpless.

Well, shit.

By the 30th of March, Reynolds was ready for simulative examination. We ran a number of scenarios on multiple levels — primarily casual, regimented and emergency — and analysed her reactions. In combat scenarios, Reynolds typically performed above and beyond expectations, while in social scenarios her performance was merely adequate, and a little artificial. Synchronisation scores were impressive: Α 72, Β 63, Ʊ 67.

Iris screamed.

Not in thought-speech; she screamed aloud, and her unit screamed with her, electronic noise emanating from it until it drowned out all other noise in the area. It was a battle of noise, her own "voice" forcing the Aberrant's body back into itself, gunk and goo collecting into one coherent humanoid form almost from her sheer force of will.

"Holy—" Willow said.

She took a step back and picked up Iris' knife in her left hand, still holding her gun in the right. She kept shooting the monster even as it retreated, but it was clear that it was Iris' sonic assault that was doing all the work.

The tendrils around Iris' body relaxed and melted away, retreating into the main body of the monster. She was free. She kept screaming. Without lungs, you can scream for a very long time.

"Iris," Doctor Klein's voice came over the radio. "Iris! Willow! What's happening?"

Gradually, slowly, Iris took control of her scream. The Aberrant continued to shrink in on itself; it almost looked human now, though it was still as tall as a building. It fell back onto all fours and rolled over, shielding its ears with still incoherent arms, face displaying a look almost of pain. Like it was terrified, pleading for its life.

"Situation is under control," Willow said simply.

She shot the Aberrant in the mouth; it fell limp. She tossed the knife back to Iris, and Iris caught it easily.

"Care to do the honours?"

Still shaking but no longer screaming, Iris took her knife to the helpless creature's throat. She slashed; blood spilled out. The creature was now definitely dead. She stared at the knife in her hand.

She'd never expected an Aberrant to look so human.

Willow cheered.

Unfortunately, on one occasion during simulation there was an incident in which Reynolds ended up in a violent altercation with a member of staff, and we had to administer REDACTED to defuse the situation.

Doctor Klein stood, awkwardly holding the notes from the latest mission. She was in the Colonel's private office, a small, drab room on the western side of the base. The walls were lined with filing cabinets and bookshelves filled with weighty tomes of military history — Klein knew for a fact that the Colonel had ready every one of them cover to cover — and the desk was tidy to a fault. Adler himself sat behind the desk, his glasses in one hand as he massaged the bridge of his nose with the other.

"Anna," he said flatly. "What the hell was that?"

Klein sighed. "Do you want the short answer, or the long one?"

Adler sat up in his chair, and put his glasses back on. "Let's start with the short one."

Klein nodded. "Well, we always knew the Thanatos units would be capable of adapting to unforeseen—"

"Shorter," Adler snapped.

She snapped back. "Look, the shortest answer I have is that we just don't know. I'm working from Kelly's notes here, and they didn't say anything about sonic weaponry. I'm doing my best to understand the systems and technology he developed, but…"

"But you don't know everything." Adler stood up and fixed Klein with a level glare. "Hell, you barely know anything."

That wasn't fair. But it was true.

"Jack, the system is reliant on the potentials of individual pilots. The manifestation of unforeseen abilities is just evidence that I was right to bring Forty Four on board." Klein gestured at the bundle of notes in her arm. "I just need more time to study her. There isn't any danger."

Adler looked at his desk, at his own copy of the mission data. Surely he had to see the potential.

"All right," he said, eventually. "But you'd better tread carefully. If something goes wrong, I'm not taking the fall."

"Of course," Klein replied. "But it won't. Trust me."

"Anna," Adler said. "You've known me long enough to realise that I don't trust people. Not ever." He gestured to the door. "Now go analyse your data. The next time we have one of these conversations, I want to get better answers."

"Don't worry," she replied. "I'll have them."

My overall assessment of this patient is that she is, under the strictest and most neutral interpretation of the criteria, combat-ready. However, due to the volatility of her nature and her broader emotional difficulties, I must recommend AGAINST Miss Reynolds' reentry into the Thanatos programme.

(I realise that this is probably not what you wanted to read, Jack. I'm sorry, but in my opinion you're going to have to find someone else. The risks are too great.)

Stephen J. Randell

Senior Consultant Psychiatrist, RAF Hospital Norfolk Plaza

Dictated but not signed

Next time:

It's a bug hunt! When a routine mission for Iris and Willow keeps turning up more and more identical Aberrants, it becomes clear that brute force won't win the day. But how exactly do you fight an enemy that seems to be everywhere? And how long can you last?

Find out in the next exciting episode. Episode Five: Deterritorialised!