Chapter 503 Backstories and Ellies
(Ed note: The title reference in this one is pretty obscure, so I’ll give it to y’all. Backstories is obvious, and “Ellies” refers to the 1998 Spielberg flop, “Deep Impact”, where they referred to an incoming meteor that would wipe out all of humanity by the name Ellie, which was code for ELE, or Extinction-Level Event.)
Low Earth Orbit, stealth shuttle ESV-228-01.
Jason Todd and Catherine O’Shaugnessy were reclining in seats in the small stealth vessel receiving final briefing updates for their upcoming task. Their mission: hunt down cult cells to the best of their abilities.
And their abilities were certainly no joke.
They would be heading to the Puget Sound area of Washington State, where they would take the identity of a newlywed couple moving to Harstine Island, an unremarkable, unincorporated, and very much out of the way island in the sound. Timothy Roberts and his wife Siobhan would settle down in Hartstene Pointe, a gated community on Harstine Island.
Siobhan Roberts would take up a job as a law clerk at the Mason County Courthouse in nearby Shelton, while Timothy would play the part of a gym teacher at Shelton Senior High and former naval reservist out of Bremerton. Timothy and Siobhan met at the University of Washington, where Timothy was using his GI Bill to pave his way to a degree in Environmental Studies with a focus on Conservation Science & Management, while Siobhan was a bright-eyed girl studying for a BA in Law, Societies, & Justice. They dated all through college and Timothy decided to support Siobhan’s goal of becoming a lawyer, and later, a judge.
After all, even though the Terran Empire had taken over governance for 7 of the 7.5 billion humans on the planet, once the imperial citizens moved into their fortress cities, the remaining people would still need to have a working society. And a working society naturally needed laws, and those who uphold them.
Siobhan was from an upper-middle-class family in Seattle, while Timothy was a transplant from the south side of Chicago who had joined the Navy to escape a terrible family situation.
Timothy’s dreams were more prosaic. He wanted to join the Park Ranger Service and eventually manage one of Washington State’s many, many public parks or campgrounds. Serving six years in the Navy had reinforced the idea that he was a very small cog in a very big machine and he should limit himself to small dreams, as being content with his lot was better than being frustrated when he failed to do big things.
On paper, their relationship shouldn’t work, but while their relationship only existed on paper, it had to work. Thus, the stunning nyxian of Irish descent and the corn fed white boy from a farm in Idaho were hard at work memorizing and internalizing their respective life histories during the short suborbital trip from Eden to the outskirts of Seattle.
......
“Timothy” was the first to log out of the simulation, having memorized everything about his past. “Status report, Two-twenty-eight,” he ordered as he changed into his new daily wear.
[ETA: eight minutes,] the shuttle AI announced. [It would be advised to begin checking your gear, sir.]
The shuttle was brand new off the printer in the cavernous hold of the ESV Armstrong, so it had yet to be named, let alone develop a facsimile of a personality as Felix’s Astra had.
“On it, Two-twenty-eight,” the reaper replied, then moved to the cargo lockers that lined the small cargo hold in the stealth shuttle.
He busied himself unpacking the lockers and sorting the equipment on the grated floor of the hold, muttering the names of all the gear under his breath. When he finished, he let out a low whistle and couldn’t help but remark, “Man, they’re really going all out for this mission.” The equipment he had just inventoried was straight out of Lab City; some of it still even had experimental designations that were simply numbers instead of the snappy backronyms the nerd herd usually named the gear that ARES and the nyxians routinely used in the field.
Take, for instance, the M11 Nanite Grenade, version 11827. It was a small cylindrical grenade that fit in the palm of the hand that, when detonated, would spread a nanite colony that would use any and all inorganic material in its surroundings to replicate and spread. Due to the potential of a runaway “grey goo” event, it had gone through almost twelve thousand iterations in testing before it was deemed moderately safe to use in a live test.
But it certainly packed a definite punch.
When it detonated, everything in its surroundings would simply disappear, leaving behind unarmed and helpless people that would soon discover that gravity had the upper hand in any conflict with living beings, as the three-second duration of the nanite colony’s spread would generally reach out to ten meters around the initial detonation point. And a ten-meter drop was rather harsh on anyone who wasn’t genetically enhanced and couldn’t fly.
Even Timothy shuddered at the thought, despite ten meter falls being the equivalent of a normal person stepping off a curb for him.
But the nanite grenade was far from the only piece of cutting edge—even for the empire—gear in their issue.
They had a full suite of nanite colonies, ranging from camouflage nanites, like those that hid Eden’s missile silos and other important underground sites, to injectable colonies of healer nanites, and best of all was the absolute latest in imperial atomic printing technology: the AP198 Type N Atomic Printer. Packed in a container the size of Timothy’s little finger was a nanoscale fusion reactor and a full colony of nanites that could perform the same tasks that any of the empire’s atomic printers were capable of, albeit at a much slower rate.
It had taken the Lab City researchers nearly eight hundred years of iterating on the now “venerable” atomic printer technology before they were able to miniaturize it to this extent. The biggest issue was, again, the potential grey goo apocalypse scenario whereby the relatively short-lived nanites would begin replicating out of control, printing more and more of themselves until nothing remained but an ever-spreading nanite colony.
But unlike the nanite grenade, which would only replicate using inorganic materials, the Type N Atomic Printer had no limitations on what it would decompose to print more of itself.
To it, everything was useful.
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