Warden

be able to track her anyway, via his overhead map.
Unless she turned off location sharing.
“So then, my pupil, it is time to begin,” Bardain told her. “What is your name?”
“Rhea,” she said shyly.
“Rhea,” Bardain repeated. “An interesting name. You will call me Master until you graduate. At which point, you may address me as Master Bardain. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Rhea said. When Bardain simply stood there, as if waiting expectantly, she added: “Master.”
Bardain nodded. “All right, then.” The zipper that kept his cloak sealed lowered, and he produced a pistol from within. He offered it to her with a gloved hand.
She lifted a confused eyebrow.
“I know what you’re thinking, guns are outlawed in Rust Town,” Bardain said. “This is a toy. Fires virtual energy bolts only.”
She reluctantly accepted the weapon. She pointed it at the dirt ground of the road and squeezed the trigger experimentally: nothing happened.
“I’m going to need you to disable public rights to your HUD,” Bardain continued. “Can’t have random AR spam interfering with your training.”
“I already disabled public rights shortly after entering Rust Town,” she told him, remembering the profusion of AR ads that had filled her vision, courtesy of the different street vendors and shops.
Bardain smiled patiently. “Well, that’s good. Because the next step is, you need to give me access to your AR.”
She received a request on her HUD.
Bardain (745168) would like access to your augmented reality interface, and requests the following permissions:
- Ability to overlay objects
- Ability to provide haptic feedback
- Gaze tracking
- Location tracking
- Emotion tracking
Allow? (Y/N)
Note: Access can be revoked at any time.
Rhea agreed. A pop-up reminded her how to revoke access and she dismissed it.
Bardain disappeared inside the lean-to and returned a moment later carrying a pair of folding signs. Both had the same message scrawled onto the front:
Training in progress. Proceed with caution.
He placed one sign in the middle of the road not far from his abode, and the second several meters down the street, facing the other way.
“I’ll let you know when any passersby enter the area, and I’ll also highlight them in blue, just to be safe,” Bardain said. “Wouldn’t do to have you ripping people apart with your cyborg strength.”
“I don’t really think this body is strong enough to rip anyone apart,” Rhea said.
“You might be surprised…” Bardain said. “Now then. Let’s see what I’m working with. Eliminate the targets.”
The sky overhead became replaced with a vaulted ceiling, courtesy of AR overlays, and Gizmo and the few other drones up there vanished from view. She resided within the hallowed halls that Bardain had referenced earlier. Around her, the real-world lean-tos remained in view, as did the passersby in the distance, and Bardain himself. Which made sense, considering she’d have to navigate around them during her training.
Several small, motionless red spheres appeared on her HUD. They were randomly distributed throughout the street.
Keeping her hood raised, she aimed down the sites of the pistol, lining up one of the spheres. The weapon felt odd and unfamiliar in her grasp. Perhaps it was because she was wielding the weapon in a hand entirely different from that of her lost body, but the more likely explanation was that she had no muscle memory of the pistol whatsoever.
She squeezed the trigger. A yellow energy bolt erupted from the tip of the weapon, traveling instantaneously toward the target. It missed, and she adjusted her aim to fire again. It took a third try before she finally hit it. Upon impact with the virtual energy bolt, the sphere flashed white and vanished. A new one appeared in a different part of the street a moment later.
She targeted another sphere nearby and fired again. The first shot missed so she adjusted her aim and tried again. This time she hit it. For her third and fourth shots, she spent a good five seconds lining up each before squeezing the trigger and hit them both on the first try.
“Let’s see how you handle moving targets,” Bardain said.
The spheres began zipping back and forth, sometimes swerving towards her at the same time, and then away.
Rhea fired frantically but missed everything. She tried leading the targets, and came close a few times, but still failed to strike any of them. She spun in place one time, causing her hood to drop, and quickly replaced it.
“All right, I’ve seen enough,” Bardain said.
She tried to fire at her latest target, but the pistol didn’t respond. Bardain had remotely disabled it.
She lowered the weapon; the spheres continued to move in the background around her.
“I can see why Will brought you here… a salvager who can’t fire a pistol isn’t going to last very long in the Outlands, cyborg or no,” Bardain said. “Tell me, what exactly did you do before this?” He folded his thin arms beneath his gray cloak, and gazed at her through that AR visor, his eyes magnified bigger than ever.
“I don’t remember,” she replied.
He arched an eyebrow. “No? That’s unfortunate. Well, there’s one thing you certainly were not: a soldier. Nor a fighter of any kind.”
She nodded. “I guess so.”
He offered a reassuring smile. “It’s all right. I always tell those students who have no firearms experience that their ignorance is a good thing: they have no bad habits to unlearn. In your case, with no memories whatsoever, it’s all the more applicable! I’ll let you in on a secret: you will get better, but it’s going to take a lot of practice.”
“There’s no other way to do this?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” he replied.
“I guess I was hoping you could download weapons training directly into my mind or something, so I could skip the practice phase,” she said.
Bardain gave her an incredulous look, and then broke into a raucous chuckle. “My, but you are a naive one. The only people who had anything resembling the mind downloads you describe were the Ganymedeans, and they’ve been dead for over thirty years, along with their tech. There’s no substitute for practice, I’m afraid. We’ll concentrate on