Beautiful Companion (Continued)

Ella asks what her current title is, since this changes fairly regularly, and Caitlin says that she is a consultant at the moment, specifically a consultant dealing with the psychology of combatants and adversaries, but that for all the usual reasons this is as specific as she can get. ‘What’s the difference between a combatant and an adversary?’ ‘Hmm. Well, a combatant can be friendly or hostile; there is psychology in common between the two, and a sophisticated understanding of a combat space will often need to draw a set of equivalences between them, so we use the generic term ‘combatant’. An adversary might be a hostile in the combat space, but not necessarily—we do a lot of work with future adversaries these days, and with adversaries who will never know or understand themselves as adversaries, with probabilistic modelling of potential adversaries, with the flows and pressures of adversary-ness through given populations, with their imaging and definition. This is all in…