Air Combat Academy Horizon Zero Dawn Audio Datapoint

AUDIO: 

Apocashitstorm Tour. Day 2. My father guest-lectured here, a 300-level military history course on the Age of Human Airpower. Might as well have bean teaching medieval siege tactics. I was eight when he died. 

TEXT: 

Hi Ma. 

You brought me here once to see baba teach I didn't know it at the time, but the class was like something out of the 20th century. He stood behind a lectern in a real-space lecture hall. raising his unamplified voice to be heard by flesh-and-blood cadets seated in plastic chairs. This being '45 or '46. our air forces must've alreadu been so-m% automated, but the academy was slut literally. 

I suppose the quaintness of the setting fit the subject he was teaching: 'The Age of Human Airpower. 1909 - 11?' The cadets probably thought the question marks were wishful thinking - or willful ignckance. From their perspective. the era of the human pilot was already over. But not for baba. I can still see the medals he kept in that drawer in the bedroom. the inscriptions in Sanskrit (*Touch the Sky with Glory.' you said one meant). Even as a Commodore in the IAF. he'd kept flying. He still remembered what it was like to sit in a cockpit with his hand on the stick and his finger on a trigger. 

And that's how he died June Sth. 2048 At the funeral. some Metallurgic International rep said we should be proud he died 'defending free markets Even then I knew that was a lie. He died for. And wril stop the truth-telling there? Really he died because M. Int wasn't yet rich enough to afford a fully-automated fleet. because It wasn't cost-effective to upgrade a military-surplus Razorwing with improved electronics warfare gear. He died because human combat pilots were just as obsolete as the crates they put them in, and just as expendable. 

When he spiraled into the jungle. our family crashed with him. For weeks you couldn't get out of bed. and then came the hospital, me staying with neighbors_ Even after you recovered. even when you said all the right things and promised we'd be okay. I didn't believe it