Application for Bean, Ender's Game/Ender's Shadow

[beantheory]

A tiny boy appears in the Sorting Room. He appears to be about five years old, and small for that age, with thin hair and dark eyes. In reality, he is seven. The lingering effects of early deprivation haven't been wiped out, despite looking lean and strong. And he's careworn, unusually so for a child so young

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[mello_n_choco]

I lean against the doorway, nibbling on a bar. This kid...he reminds me of someone. I watch him examine the room, examine everything. One of the kids at Whammy's was like that. Always needing to know where everything was and how to get out.

I walk up to him when he puts the pen down. "Second?" I look at him. "Ever resent the guy who was first?"

[beantheory]

That's the second person to ask him this. Presumably this place is just as competitive as Battle School was, but with uglier rivalries.

"At times. Before I understood the reasoning behind his decisions." Before Bean understood him.

[mello_n_choco]

I raise an eyebrow. Battle school made automatons better than Whammy's did. "And how did that help you better yourself?" I wondered if this kid would have become like me when he got older. I wondered if I was ever like him.

No. I was always going to beat Near. "Did you want to be better than him?"

[beantheory]

Bean scowled. This was the attitude that he'd come to hate, the attitude that had held back their progress so much. "Ender wasn't my enemy. The biggest flaw of the system was to set up the children who were at the centre of the war effort as rivals. We should have been co-operating, learning from each other. Our task was to destroy the Formics, not get top place in the standings."

[mello_n_choco]

I smirk. "Who said anything about Ender being the enemy? You're reading into what I said." Nice to see the kid's got a temper. Would be terribly dull if he didn't. Now, how shall I play with him. "So, you created scenarios, then? Very practical scenarios that led to the end of the war?"

[beantheory]

He noted the smirk. A bully, then? If so, an intelligent one. "Sorry," he said, as blandly as he could. "You sounded like you subscribed to a way of thinking that held some of my work back. And you could describe some of what we did like that." If by 'scenarios' he meant 'strategies'.

[mello_n_choco]

Oh, this kid is fun. "I subscribe to my own way of thinking. I've seen scenarios played out." I frown, remembering the Chicago emergency rooms based on one of my own scenarios. "You ever see any of yours in real life?"

[beantheory]

"In battle, yes. I'm a strategist." He remembered the sickening rush, watching the remains of their fleet destroying an entire planet. Being the only one who knew that it was real, not a computer simulation at all.

[mello_n_choco]

"Not the best feeling, is it, knowing that all those people suffered because of you?" I'm not completely sure which of us I'm talking to.

Maybe I shouldn't have decided to play with the kid.

"Ever think about other things you want to do?"

[beantheory]

Bean had committed xenocide - the annihilation of an entire species, an entire civilization, tens of colony planets; he'd sent the men aboard his ships plummeting to their deaths. And unlike the other children under Ender, he'd done so knowing exactly what he was doing.

It was necessary. He was beginning to understand the idea of 'acceptable losses'.

He ignored Mello's first question.

"I want to remain a commander. I could easily become a theorist, or a scholar, but this is what I want to do."

[mello_n_choco]

The evasion is not lost on me. Perhaps he is too young, too embedded in the system, to fully understand the impact of the words he slings around so casually.

I smile. "And I wanted to be a rival, to be the best, to surpass those I was whose place I was training to take, but plans change in this place." Plans change when you die too, but that hardly needs to be said. I shrug. "I did succeed, but this place...is different." I eye him. "When I was your age, I wanted to be the best. I became indispensable. I'm not sure that is adequate compensation for the cost. Become a scholar."

[beantheory]

"In what way is it different?" Bean would normally wait to find out some of this information himself, but finding out from the adults he's around would do until he could figure out where information was stored here.

"I might become both."

[mello_n_choco]

I frown slightly. "This place seems to be...it's own world, in a way. Everything is disconnected from what it was." How much should I tell him? "I was dead before I came here. My rival is now...more a friend than I anticipated. My...idols, my childhood goals, have fallen off their pedestals." My lips twist wryly. "This place makes me talk more than I ever have about myself and reevaluate everything I've been taught." I shrug and add, "And then there's magic."

[beantheory]

Bean noted all this hungrily. If he was in a different place, a different time, he needed to find out as much as he could. Admittedly most of what the man was saying seemed over-emotional, but that didn't mean there wasn't important information that could be learned from it.

"Magic?" is what he latched onto. He wasn't so far back in time that science was regarded as a branch of witchcraft, that much was obvious. "What do you mean?"

[mello_n_choco]

"I've only read a few of the history books they have in the library, but it seems that magic is a way to work beyond the limitations of physics. I haven't had time to evaluate it completely, but it may be related to quantum physics on some level. Or perhaps a branch of physics that hasn't been studied yet. My specialties are in the soft sciences, so I am not completely sure. My rival specialized in the hard sciences." I frown a moment. "He put an enchantment on a piece of paper that made it impossible to write a lie on that paper. He also tends to levitate things around our room."

[beantheory]

"Advanced enough science can become indistinguishable from magic," Bean agreed, thinking of the formic technology they'd used to create the battleroom. But the things this man was talking about...

"How? How do you do those things?"