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

Comments

[cardarchitect]

From the vocabulary this apparently small child used, it was clear, well before his Hufflepuff answer, that this Battle School had trained him rather thoroughly. It made him someone to be wary of, for all his youth.

Near wondered how volatile he was. Perhaps a small test was in order.

"Second-best? That must have been galling."

[beantheory]

Bean thought about this. The conclusion of the war had changed his perception, of course, but...

"Not particularly. Our strengths were mostly on-par, but Ender is an excellent commander. No one else could have done what he did. I dislike being under-appreciated or underused, but that's somewhat different."

[cardarchitect]

Either calmer than Mello, or remarkably self-possessed, then.

"That's a very astute impression. This Ender Wiggin, was he much older than you?"

[beantheory]

"By about four years." Bean studied the man talking to him, wondering what his motives were for pretending not to know about Ender. Unlike the others, he kept a keen eye on what was happening politically on Earth. Ender was discussed constantly: his victory, his age, his training. His apparent ruthlessness. His state of mind.

[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."

[ijk_mno]

"Children employed as military commanders typically experience problems with credibility."

L is not questioning his ability, just the reactions to him.

"How did you compensate?"

[beantheory]

It was a fair question - and now that Bean intended to become involved in the approaching war on Earth, one that he'd wrestled with himself.

"We worked most closely with other children. The adults, we commanded from a distance; it's possible that our voices were distorted in some way to hide our ages."

[ijk_mno]

"There are enough minds of that caliber in your age bracket to make that kind of organization functional?"

L supposes he shouldn't be surprised. His organization draws only on orphans. If they were military, that meant they'd probably have access to the complete population.

[beantheory]

"I was the youngest," Bean admitted. And the smallest. And the smartest. "But all of the squadron leaders in the last strike against the Formics were pre-pubescent. I don't know whether the men we were leading were aware of this."

None had survived, in any case.

[nemofound]

((Oh, brilliant! It's been too long since I read the series, but still, YAY!))

The house elf pulls the fish tank into the Sorting room, and the small orange clownfish inside takes a good look at the boy standing there looking a little bit lost.

"You're little too! Just like me!" he says. "I'm Nemo."

[beantheory]

Bean looked at the fish that was addressing him, and wondered if this was some 3D variant of the game.

But why would they persisting at attempts to get him to play the game now that Battle School was as good as finished?

A better explanation was that the pressure had finally got to him and he'd started going a bit wrong.

"Ho, Nemo," he said, cautiously. "I'm Bean." No point in denying that he's little, but the comparison to a clownfish is a new one.

[nemofound]

Nemo smiled.

"Hi, Bean!" he said. "Now that we know each other's names we aren't strangers so we can be friends. My dad says not to talk to strangers. But in the Sorting Room it's different, because everybody who shows up here is a stranger and we have to talk to them so we know how to sort them."

[beantheory]

It occurred to him, as the talking fish talked, that it might be a child. Bean had never known a child who'd really been a child.

Perhaps his subconscious had constructed an idea of what a normal child would be like based on what he'd seen of newly-arrived Launchies, and was offering him a chance to forget about xenocide and commanding starships and sending men to their deaths.

Well, maybe his subconscious knew best. Might as well play along for a bit.

"Your dad was probably right. There are lots of dangerous people out there. But what do you mean, 'sort them'?"

[ibrokeaplanet]

Brenda's torn. On the one hand, she remembers being small and precocious. On the other hand, he's a small precocious person who talks about killing, maiming and warring so casually.

"Hi there. How old are you?" she asks.

[beantheory]

"I'm seven." At least, he believes himself to be seven. This is based partially on Sister Carlotta's explanation of child development (which suggested that he was around nine months old when he'd needed to escape the clean place) and his own intuitive grasp of the passage of time. Bean has never been given a reason to doubt this, so he's not going to start now.

"May I ask how old you are?" Because there are certain advantages to being thought of as a seven-year-old and not an elite military commander.

[ibrokeaplanet]

Brenda nodded; that looked about right. "Sure. I'm 16." She tilted her head. "Um. What're the Formic Colonies, and why're you at war with 'em?"

[beantheory]

The blanket ignorance about Ender, the Buggers, the war... clearly, he'd been relying too heavily on his own assumptions again. You can't rule out the impossible, Nikolai had said; and Nikolai was right again.

Bean was somehow somewhere else. It wouldn't take him long to figure out where, but it certainly wasn't Earth as he'd known it.

"The Formics - maybe you knew them as Buggers? They attempted to colonize Earth several generations ago."