Close Your Eyes (And Dream)

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome. 

Chaewon was nine years old when she felt driven to the edge of insanity. 

Shoot five targets in the span of five minutes. She fails. The buzzer rings to signify the end of the five minutes. Then her father’s voice calls out—

“Again.”

Chaewon exhales, feeling the humid heat of her own breath warming up the inside of her helmet. It’s made of plasteel – light and durable – but it feels like a lead weight on her neck after being cooped up in the sim cockpit. She didn’t even have time to cringe at the way her sweat-drenched gloves made a horrible squelching noise as she grasps the control sticks and tilted forward, the pistons surrounding the sim-cockpit hissing and groaning to emulate the sensation of a mobile suit propelling forward by the strength of its vernier thrusters. 

The young girl is searching for the targets she is meant to shoot at in the simulated depths of outer space projected from the screen in front of her. But Chaewon can’t see the targets on the screen. In fact, she can’t see anything at all, not even the myriad stars that should dot the inky black of sim space, which is the whole point of this training session apparently. 

Her father had explained it to her before they began while taping the visor of her helmet with masking tape. “You are going to shoot the targets without having to actually see them.” 

Shoot. Fail. Ring. 

“Again.”

At first Chaewon thought her father had been joking. But four straight hours of failing to hit the targets, of failing to even be able to perceive them, made her feel like the joke is on her. At one point, Chaewon had managed, somehow, to hit one target in the depths of the sim space. Warmth had crept into her father’s voice and Chaewon thought, maybe this is working, maybe I’m getting the hang of whatever this is. 

But it turned out to be a false dawn. Chaewon’s success meant that she was expected to replicate it many more times, and as more and more failed attempts stack up once again, it was clear to her father that the hit was pure luck.

“Do you see it?”

See? What am I supposed to see, she wants to yell, but Chaewon grits her teeth and answers, “No.” After all, her father had done a thorough job of taping the visor. Not even a single ray of light can pass through.

“Nevermind. Again.”

Shoot. Fail. Ring. 

“Again.”

At a loss, Chaewon tries everything. Aiming the plasma rifle randomly, focusing on her left side, then her right, then above, the only constant was the simulated hiss of the mobile suit’s arms dampening the recoil filling her ears. Boosting the mobile suit forward, swiveling around to fire blindly, firing at a still position, firing then moving and firing and moving and—

“That’s enough for today. Get out of the cockpit.”

Chaewon’s breath escapes in staccato bursts. Her fingers scrabble against the chin of the helmet, tossing it and gulping large mouthfuls of air. Her father stands to the side, face frowning at the clipboard in his hands, not even helping Chaewon as she stumbles out of the snug cockpit, legs weak like a newborn fawn.

As much as she is relieved to finally leave the damn cockpit, her head is filled with disappointment and self-loathing. Clearly she has failed her father. But in what, she might never know.

“We’ll continue tomorrow.”

Another session for Chaewon to disappoint her father again. She waits for him to leave the simulation room before she sinks to her knees and vomits.

Chaewon was nineteen years old when she learned how to hate someone.

That someone is Huh Yunjin. She was apparently freshly picked from an off-world farming colony, courtesy of the galactic draft, and she looks and sounds the part as well. Tall and broad-shouldered, with a lazy Spacer drawl that grates on Chaewon’s refined Martian ear. Yunjin is rude and loud, overly familiar with fellow trainees and quick to make friends. Everything Chaewon is not.

Yunjin transferred in halfway through the pilot program, and her lack of basic training could not be more evident. It might be childish to pick on the latecomer, but Chaewon cannot help but hide a laugh every time Yunjin fails to answer rudimentary questions.

“Yunjin!” The Spacer sitting at the back of the classroom jerks up, the textbook covering her face flops onto her lap and the classroom titters with laughs and whispers. Sergeant Kang shakes her head. “What’s a Lagrange point and how do you calculate it?”

“A what?” Yunjin’s questions draws more laughter from the class, and she sheepishly looks around, her large round eyes settling on her seatmate, Chaewon. A wobble of the lower lip is all it took. Chaewon clears her throat.

“A Lagrange point is a position between two large masses that is stationary relative to orbit.” The answer gets an approving nod from the Sergeant, and Chaewon gets up to write the formula in her trademark neat handwriting. She returns to her seat amid hushed whispers of praise. Chaewon turns to her seatmate to flash a smirk, and her smile drops as she sees the look of appreciation on Yunjin’s face. As well as the signs of deep exhaustion ringing her usually expressive eyes.

Chaewon spends the rest of the class covering for Yunjin.

What Yunjin lacks in piloting knowledge, she more than makes up for in piloting ability. Yunjin is a phenom in the cockpit, always ranking first in simulation battles. No one has been able to defeat the Spacer in a one-on-one duel, not even Chaewon. 

Every defeat is a stain on the top student’s sterling reputation. And the duels are not even particularly close. Yunjin seems to possess a preternatural sense, always one step ahead of Chaewon. Close-range beam saber clashes don’t work. Mid-range plasma rifle dogfights are a wash. Long-range sniper duels? The moment Chaewon’s mobile suit peeks out of asteroid cover, it gets tagged. Almost as if she can tell where Chaewon is at any moment.

Every defeat stings, and Chaewon usually coops herself up in one of her many hiding spots aboard the academy longship, tears streaming down her ruddy cheeks as she curls up into a ball and wishes to disappear, as a disappointment should. A disappointment to the academy. To her father.

“Chae?” She lifts her head, seeing Yunjin’s lanky frame through blurry eyes. 

“That’s Ensign Kim to you, Lieutenant Huh.”

For some reason, Yunjin is the only person who can find Chaewon in her hiding spots. Spots, because Yunjin has found her many times before. In an abandoned storeroom, a false compartment behind a lavatory stall, even in a mezzanine crawl space once. It’s almost like a game they play, despite knowing how it ends, because Yunjin is like a heat-seeking missile.

Yunjin wraps her long arms around Chaewon’s curled up form. Chaewon sobs into Yunjin’s neck.

“I hate you.”

Yunjin hugs her tighter. It’s as if she knows what to do to soothe her. When Chaewon eventually stops crying, she is smothered by the sleeping form of the larger girl. The light snoring lulls her to sleep too.

Chaewon is twenty-two years old when she sets off on a sortie. After all this time, she will never forget the awesome feeling of launching in a real mobile suit, the humanoid craft slinging off the flight deck of the Red Dawn and hurtling toward Saturn. Even after being warned that it was doomed from the start, she took on the mission. The war is coming to a close, and Chaewon does not have many more opportunities to prove her worth and earn a promotion.

The sortie turns into an ambush, enemy forces hiding in the dark side of Titan springing a trap that proved fatal for her fellow pilots. Now Chaewon is left adrift in a half-destroyed mobile suit, the digital screen wrapping around the cockpit black as ink, all communications down and Chaewon feels like she is nine years old again, wearing a pilot suit that was way too big for her petite body and gloves soaked in sweat. Except every muscle and joint in her body screams with pain, helmet cracked in half, blood drying on the side of her face.

Her mind runs through every single important memory like a zoetrope, faces and places flickering. Her father, his stern, unsmiling face staring down at her as she kneels in a pool of vomit. Yunjin’s round, beautiful eyes as she peers into yet another one of Chaewon’s hiding spots in the academy longship.

Yunjin.

Chaewon wishes for her last thoughts to be of the annoying Spacer as she drifts over the rings of Saturn. And she finally lets go, unclenches her chest, pulling down her walls and calls out to Yunjin, hoping that the girl will somehow receive her feelings.

A voice calls out in reply, the familiar drawl rattling in her mind.

<Chae?>

Chaewon gasps in shock, blinking the tears out of her eyes.

<That’s Lieutenant Commander Kim to you, Captain Huh.>

<Chae! Finally you can hear me. You’re such a meanie, Pupu.>

Chaewon wants to ask a million questions. What is this? How are they able to speak like this, separated by millions of kilometers of deep space, with no active comms?

<What do you mean finally?>