Jake cast an eye over the assembled recruits. They were a mishmash of people, some of them military veterans three times his age, some of them almost fresh off the streets. But they were all new to what he was teaching.
They'd covered a lot of the basics of morphing already. Technically, combat strategy wasn't Jake's area, but given how much strategy was influenced by what morph was being used, they'd gone through a lot of that, too. It was time to start digging into the real advantages... and dangers... of morphing.
The thing about being a teacher was that the stuff you used to ignore, to push away and sort of let take care of itself, has to come to the surface. Because it must be explained to be taught, and that meant it needed to be outlined and accepted in the teacher's own mind. As he walked across the front of the classroom, Jake slowly uncurled his fists and picked up a small, spike-like dagger off the table. A sai? He didn't know daggers.
"I need two volunteers," he announced. He scanned the recruits and made his selection. "Havard. Neilson."
Havard was a tall man who had clearly been built like a bull in his earlier years, but age had thinned him out. He looked about forty, although it was hard to tell with army guys. Peak physical fitness could keep them young much as seeing too much could age them. His dark, close-cropped hair was peppered with grey, and he had a way about him that made every movement look deliberate and thoughtful.
Neilson was a fair bit younger, probably not much older than Jake. Her dyed blond hair was cropped in a neat bob that complemented her too-wide eyes. Those eyes made her look timid and perpetually startled, seated as they were in a round baby face, but Jake had had a lot of experience reading people and saw right through that illusion. Neilson was a woman who picked what she stood for and damn well stood there.
Jake gave the pair a cursory glance before holding out the knife. "One of you take this, please." He cast his eyes back over the audience as he spoke, not wanting to bias the pair by appearing to favour one. In his peripheral vision, he saw them exchange a glance. The hand that tugged the knife from his belonged to Havard.
"Neilson," Jake said, looking at them once again. "Behind the table, please. Put your hands on it, palm down, where everyone can see them clearly." He noted the crowd relax as everyone figured out what must be going on. They'd seen such things before. Jake was setting up a scenario. By the looks of it, Neilson was the 'captive' in Havard's hands, and Jake was going to show them some neat morphing trick to get out of such situations. Neilson rushed to obey, placing out her hands as she would for an armed captor to show that they were empty and appear nonthreatening. Jake paused and let them relax in the familiarity of the scene for a moment, before walking over to murmur in Neilson's ear.
"If you do not want to go through with this demonstration, tell me, and I will find another volunteer, alright?" he said softly enough that nobody else could hear.
"Yes, sir."
Jake stepped back once more. "Havard."
"Sir."
"Put that knife through Neilson's hand."
Havard blinked. "Sir?"
Jake sighed. "The knife that you are holding. Stab it into Neilson's hand. All the way through, if you can."
Havard just stood there, frowning.
"You have your orders, soldier."
"I don't understand, sir."
"I thought the order was fairly explicit. Are you going to do it or not?"
"What? No."
"You're sworn to obey me."
"You're asking me to hurt my sister-in-arms."
Jake gave Havard a long, appraising look. Most people probably would've pulled out a line like 'you're sworn to obey human rights conventions', or something else with legal backing. Havard's choice of words said a lot.
Jake held out a hand for the knife. "Well done, soldier. You can sit down now. Neilson, stay where you are, if you please." He raised his voice, addressing the crowd. "You've all been through training. You all know what orders you are supposed to obey and what you are supposed to refuse to do. But in battle, right and wrong can be a little more difficult to decide. When somebody asks you to do something dumb, even a superior, don't ever just assume that he knows what he's doing. Especially if innocents are going to get hurt." Jake felt his face flush. Every single person I that room knew his history, and they knew exactly what mistakes he was learning from. They also knew that he was the idiot superior giving the orders then. But that wasn't really the point of the lesson. The lesson was about morphing.
Jake held the knife out to Neilson. "Neilson, if you are willing to continue this demonstration... stab yourself through the hand, please."
Neilson took the knife and inspected it to make sure that it was both real and sharp. She glanced uncertainly at Jake. "I'd... I'd really rather not, sir."
"Very well. Then sit back down, please." He waited for her to put the knife down and return to her seat before continuing. "Havard and Neilson expressed a strong aversion to harming themselves or others. This is a natural and healthy instinct for humans to have. But much as the instincts of certain morphs may conflict with what you actually know the dangers around you to be, so do your human instincts. There are factors to having morphing technology that your primitive brain doesn't, and won't ever, understand. There are things about you and your bodies that you didn't learn to handle growing up." In a single movement, Jake picked up the knife and forced it through his right hand, pinning himself to the table. As one, his audience flinched. He levered the end of the knife out of the wood and held his hand up, still impaled, for all to see.
"Point one: most pain doesn't exist. Pain isn't just the response of your nerves to damage. Most of the pain you feel is your own anxiety over that damage. This is why pain can be controlled, to a degree. It's why fearing pain makes it worse." Slowly, he pulled the knife from his hand, ignoring the way blood ran down his arm. "Point two: most pain doesn't matter. Everything in your body, every nervous and instinctive response that you have, assumes that you are a normal human. This hand hurts a lot right now because I just did something to it that, on most people, would render it practically unusable for a long time, and permanently damaged, even if it doesn't get infected. I damaged some very important tissues. Pain is a sign of damage, and damage is a problem... unless you can morph." As he spoke, his features began to ripple and melt, until they looked like somebody else's face. The wound on his hand closed. He wiped the blood off and held it high for everybody to see. Then he started to morph back. "To somebody who can morph, most damage is a temporary problem at best. Horrific, unrecoverable injuries are perfectly recoverable. To one of use, the damage my hand just suffered is the equivalent of a small bruise on somebody else... but your body doesn't know that. You keep thinking it's worse, that Havard stabbing Neilson would be worse than him bruising her in combat practice... but it isn't. And this is very, very important to understand, because not getting it throws your risk assessments way off. Don't damage your brain, don't damage your lungs enough to suffocate, don't damage your circulatory system enough to bleed out. Everything else – everything else – is a temporary inconvenience. My big advantage in battle was never being able to turn into a tiger. It was being able to charge into danger knowing I'd probably come out of it as a three-legged, severely burned tiger... and then healing. The sooner you learn to readjust your own perception of risk, pain and danger, the better chance you have of not getting killed making a decision that would've been the best decision available for a normal human. I learned that in battle. But there's no reason for you to repeat my dumb mistakes."
The recruits were all staring at him, focusing wholly on the lesson as always, but he thought he saw one or two little smiles, a few thoughtful looks. He gave them a nod. "Dismissed." They filed out.
The stunt seemed to have done the trick. He shouldn't expect any sort of disciplinary backlash for ordering a recruit to stab another recruit. Probably. Well... no more than a slap on the wrist, anyway.
Slowly, he balled his right hand into a fist, and then relaxed it. Pain rippled through perfectly healthy flesh as he did so.
Most pain didn't exist. Most pain didn't matter. Over time, it was possible to learn to make decisions with those rules in mind. But he could never quite make his entire self believe them. Just because the pain didn't exist, and didn't matter, didn't mean that it wasn't felt.
He'd left that part out of the lecture. Hopefully, the soldiers would never have to learn it for themselves.