October 8th, 629
My eyes opened after the barrier to my 9th Star shattered, once again making me acutely aware of the changes to my body.
Thankfully most had been finished by now. Umara worked quick, any wounds she gave me by cutting me open healing as fast as she finished with them. Still, I couldn’t help a light grimace looking at the pile of flesh sitting in a large bucket to the side, including a whole tub of black grimey fluid.
My body was mostly clean now with her help, and after feeling some more parts of my organs adjust into their positions, everything finally calmed down. Umara shut down the tempering devices once she was done, the residual Magika dispersing and flooding the estate, contained by the arrays across the structure.
I smiled at her, sitting up and feeling the changes to my body.
The most obvious change was to my senses. Even my vision, as incredibly amazing as it was, became even more so after being refined. Thankfully the Crown modified the body on a genetic level, so it wasn’t rejected as Umara’s magic sought to bring my body to its most perfect form.
While it had taken a short bit of studying and theorizing on my part, Umara and I had come to the conclusion that the “most perfect” genetic form was simply an exact match between someone’s genes and their current bodily state. In a sense, what Umara did was nothing more than some really good healing. But by forcing the body to adjust on a genetic level, some more thorough changes could be made to occur.
Of course, the body couldn’t handle everything itself. When it wanted to make certain changes, it would reject the parts it needed to. By cutting me open, Umara was simply allowing the rejection to occur, taking the burden off of the immune system and allowing my body to fill the void, another process that could be assisted.
The changes to my body weren’t drastic though, even if the process was a little invasive. It wasn’t anything like Crowns that would actually create changes. Technically, we didn’t change anything at all.
Still, after years of fighting, being poisoned, being put under incredible strain, and generally living in a not-so-healthy manner, my body was in need of a tune up. That was true for literally everyone. Only thing was, we took advantage of the advancement to make the process extra effective.
That meant that while my body was regrowing and regenerating its parts, simultaneously being resonated with my Umara’s magic, it was also being flooded with impossibly dense Magika. Temperings more often had to do with the soul, stuffing Magika in there while it was open to absorption in the hopes that some secondary magical energy would find its place. For me, that was Vigor and Mana, giving me their passive benefits.
Except, I was inclined to believe that there was a physical factor to their absorption. Given the power I was feeling, it seems I was correct.
I felt powerful, more so than I ever had before. Before, I was around an Authority 4 knight in strength. Now? I was at least double as strong, if not more so. It probably brought me near Authority 5 knight standard, maybe on the lower end given that growth across Authorities seemed to be more exponential than otherwise. Still, it was a massive boost to my survivability.
That went for my general health too. If I was correct, it would enhance the abilities of all my organs, not just my muscles. Combined with my new mental prowess, while I couldn’t be sure till I tried, I was getting closer to never needing sleep again. I could already go weeks or months without it before. Now? It was months at the minimum.
If my brain could carry out its biological processes faster than waste and damage could accumulate, then theoretically, sleep wouldn’t be necessary. I would have to wait and see, but given my current incredible mental clarity, I was leaning toward the possibility.
All around, I was looking forward to major enhancements to my body. Nothing ground breaking, but this tempering was already far more effective than my major one during my advancement to Authority 7. Once I hit Authority 10, my next major advancement, the tempering then would be baffling, not to mention when we refined the process further.
I’d be sending the technique to the Church for their general use. It would be significantly beneficial and another debt I’d get to hang over their heads. For now though, I pulled myself off the bed, doing my best to ignore the slime across my body while heading to the bath.
I spent an hour decompressing, letting the others clean up while taking stock of my new psykic changes.
A 23 times larger pool and 7 times the density. Multiply the two and that was a 161 times increase to my power, but of course, that didn’t necessarily translate accordingly. It was most often represented my Aura, but the soul had its own level of strength as well. When it expanded with each Authority, it didn’t take a genius to guess that it gained its own strength. That meant that a 161 times increase was actually underestimating the change, even if that change couldn’t be put into numbers.
Not that it was insignificant. I was feeling incredible for such a vast boost to my power. It never felt like I had enough power to dish out given the sheer volume of fire I could deliver. I could already see the limits of my current pool of Psyka too. There would be a volume and strength of enemies in the future that could eat my power and make me feel like I hadn’t even advanced. But it was safe to say that all of those enemies were firmly at Authority 10 or 11. I knew there wasn’t a single Authority 9 being on the planet that could survive my attacks. And if I met that Versal again? Well, I couldn’t imagine he would survive 161 times the damage I had already managed to dish out to him before.
Truly, it was a baffling thought to have. I was currently equivalent to 161 Johns from just a day ago. If I had that kind of firepower during the siege of that Nexus then I probably could’ve handled half that Royal army by myself.
Besides the sheer power though, I decided to quickly go through my 9th Star, projecting my Psyka and immediately finding every entry-level spirit. By modifying Maxwell’s projection technique that came with the Call, I could take advantage of my Quantum Psionics, making finding spirits that much easier.
The immediate finds nearly made me drool.
It was obvious that the technological level had taken another leap forward, perhaps a full generation, or perhaps not if I factored in humanity’s exponential technological growth curve.
The weapons were a little less obvious in their advancement. In the end, weapons technology still seemed to come down to “throw rock faster” so there were the hallmark designs. A barrel, a stock, and a trigger with everything in between. They were guns, but after bringing one out and getting a read on the knowledge that came with the spirit, I quickly figured out the differences.
My 8th Star had started to use a different kind of propellant, moving away from gunpowder cartridges and more toward caseless ammunition that used a far more convenient, albeit slightly more dangerous, liquid propellant. That propellant was denser and with the accommodating designs that caseless ammunition allowed, any soldier would be able to carry far more firepower with the same amount of weight.
But it seemed humanity still had managed to crack the ever-troubling battery energy density and mobile power generation issues, because in front of me was no longer a propellant based firearm, but a bonafide electromagnetic coilgun.
Well, it was actually a hybrid, utilizing both coilgun and propellant technology. Using a special liquid propellant a bit more advanced than those from my 8th Star, the explosion provided a projectile an inital burst of pressure. Then the projectile was further accelerated by the rest of the weapon, coils pushing supersonic into hypervelocity.
Because of this hybrid system, it was able to achieve incredible muzzle velocities while still keeping short enough to warrant it an assault rifle designation.
The engineering was incredible, but its name, the XCAR-1004, gave it away as an experimental design.
The weapon wasn’t mass produced nor used widely by a military, that much was clear. In fact, its skeletal design made it look like it was straight out of the lab, lacking many of the rugged structures that might seek to protect it from wear and the elements. I could gaze upon its impossibly complex components directly, suddenly worried about getting the water of my bath on it.
Well, it was technically still a spirit, so it would be fine.
Besides that, there was something similar for the snipers that I saw. Some of them were hybrids, others were straight railguns and were as big as they’d need to be. Those railguns were basically anti-tank rifles, longer than I was tall and explicitly designed to be used while inside an exosuit.
It seemed that future Earth cared not for stealthy sniper rifles because at some point, there was no such thing. If it wasn’t the explosion that gave away the presence of a sniper, it was the sound of the projectile. Hypersonic projectiles would be as loud or louder than a jet, so there was no point in making them potentially quiet using EM technology.
As for stealth in general, well, advanced technology meant that if someone was going to be covert about an operation, they’d be using a plethora of other tools and weapons at their disposal before ever resorting to a hypersonic railgun.
Some of that technology was put on display on the new exosuit I’d be getting access to.
Codenamed the MONARCH System, the exosuit was also experimental in design. While similar in looks, what was held underneath seemed to be a completely different story.
I held myself back before summoning it, feeling the memories within and deciding to hurry and finish my bath. After making sure I was clean as could be, I stepped out and put a hold to Umara’s quick questions, reaching through my 9th Star and finally summoning the MONARCH.
……
…
“Alright Jude. Test One-Two-Eight, commencing. Recorders active. All lights green. Detaching tethers.”
I felt the metal suit around me shift slightly as other scientists around me slid out the cords and tubes connected to it. At the same time, I saw the custom OS boot, running through a thousand diagnostics in the first few seconds before sending up a Singularity Industries logo.
The HUD bloomed to life, carefully tuned animations ensuring I wasn’t disoriented by the retinal projector.
“Firing up locomotion systems.”
I could feel the suit around me hum to life, a distinct sixth sense instead of any audible or tactile reaction. I couldn’t move though, the system going through more diagnostics instead of risking the possibility that the slightest voltage fluctuation would make one of my joints bend a way I preferred it wouldn’t.
As experienced before in other prototypical systems, the Lithium-based organometallocene muscular augmentation systems were a touchy system to use. Sensitive to precise applications of piezoelectric voltage, they could react even to field fluctuations and deform fairly strongly. That made them perfect for the most precise robotics in the industry when demanding micron-level tolerances for omnimovement.
That also made them the perfect candidate for exosuits, but until now, they never had the requisite levels of potential deformation to make them viable. Now that they did, they were finding out just how incredible the generational jump they were making over conventional locomotive systems was.
It was so incredible that the onboard systems had to drive most responses. Without that safeguarding layer of programming, most users would likely kill themselves out of pure lack of control.
“Unlocking locomotion in 5…”
I prepared myself, the suit already tied into my neuromuscular signals. By using a bio-metallic sensory layer to read the electrical impulses going through the musculoskeletal system while a person moved, the suit would automatically react in a mirrored fashion. It was effectively instantaneous reactions on the part of the suit itself, no discernible lag between someone’s intention to move and the suit’s augmentation.
That was precisely what made it dangerous though. Thankfully I had trained incrementally for this specific purpose. The suit had long come out of the proof of concept phase, but it wouldn’t become anything more than experimental unless this succeeded. The danger to the user could be reduced later by onboard intelligent systems.
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For now, if we wanted its full potential, it needed to be unlocked like it was now.
The 5 seconds went up, and I felt the suit come under my control. I held myself perfectly still, not daring to make any sudden or jerking movements.
Then, I faintly moved my arm, just barely giving my muscles a nudge to bring the limb upward, and feeling it move as if it were floating into position. It felt less than weightless, even with the weighted armor across its body.
I smiled, and under the direction of the others, started moving the rest of my body. We took it one limb at a time, using an entire hour before finally allowing myself to engage in compound and complex movements.
……
I continued sprinting at around half strength, feeling every step carry me so far that I felt like gravity nearly didn’t exist. The sheer strength behind each step threatened to crack the asphalt underneath me, and when I hadn’t been careful earlier, the dirt I was running on had simply sheared away under my boot, resulting in me tumbling.
But that was only half a mile and 60 seconds ago. I was still the fastest man on foot in history, so fast that sometimes I felt like my brick of a body would catch air and start flying.
Finally, I saw the finish line, running past and coming to a stop. The timer had put me at just under 140 seconds. Slow thanks to my stumble, but still incredible for being half of my potential speed.
I walked over to the docking station, scientists hooking me into all kinds of tethers and sensors to take measurements, as if the suit didn’t have everything they needed on board already.
“Looks like everything is stable, Jude. We can go full tilt next time. Do you want more weight?”
“Yes, please. It got difficult to keep my feet when I stumbled.”
“Very well. We’ll throw on another two hundred pounds. Just don't strain yourself.”
I nodded, feeling a large plate of iron be hooked onto me like a plate of armor. Strength and speed demanded the downforce to keep a vehicle on the ground. This armor was no different from a car in that way, except while I wasn’t catching air like a car would, my legs were still pushing me upward way too easily. Another couple hundred pounds would help make it feel more like normal running, but I’d still have to learn to distribute my force in a different way.
Regardless, at this point, the suit had moved on from being merely experimental. Not that its designation would go away anytime soon. As capable as the suit was, and as perfect as the tech had been for a while, it was still prohibitively expensive to make on a mass scale. Downgrades were already on the way, I knew that much. Still, this model of suit would only be improved, even if it would only go toward the military’s more covert or special units.
I was quite eager to see the tech in a more capable person’s hands. While I loved using it myself, there was always something exciting about it being put to test in the field, which I couldn’t do myself. War would bring out every point of failure and prove its worth in a more real way than tests and stat sheets ever could.
With adjustments made, I quickly lined up for another run, eager to bring myself down to the 60 seconds per mile mark.
……
“Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Detective Falks, and this is Agent Alex.”
I nodded to the man and woman before me, the detective taking a seat on the other side of the table from me.
I knew there was no avoiding this interview, but it still irked me. I wasn’t the one being investigated as a perpetrator for the crime, but my words could still affect the fate of Singularity Industries, especially their patents and suit technology. I didn’t want my darling MONARCH to be hampered by something as stupid as this, so I had prepared for this day thoroughly.
Thankfully after a few introductory questions they got straight to it, the detective flipping through a packet of evidence and notes.
“Jude, you were one of the few people capable of utilizing the MONARCH suit in a fully unlocked state. Were you aware of the dangers of the suit before running its most experimental tests?”
“Of course. Every researcher was fully aware of its potential.”
“But knowing its potential didn’t mean everyone could know just how difficult it was to handle it, correct?”
“Sure, as with every tool.”
“Most tools have safeties built into them, especially those that can be as dangerous as a bleeding edge exosuit. Did the exosuit have the necessary safeties?”
“Of course.”
“Explain them, please.”
I sighed just slightly.
“Joint locks, for one. They’re the most practical safeties to ensure nobody’s joints are bent the wrong way. Those were fully in place and rigorously tested before anybody ever came close to stepping inside a suit. There were also reaction and movement speed limiters, hard coded into the suit.”
“But not mechanical?”
I frowned, the detective pressing.
“Those latter two limiters. They were coded, not mechanical, correct? Meaning, a software failure, a bug, a glitch could bypass those limiters.”
“No, they couldn’t. Any failures or faults would shut down the system as a whole and lock everything back up. Not to mention, more often than not, the suits weren’t even given enough power to exert the kinds of forces necessary to injure a man, even in the event of a catastrophic failure.”
“Not unless they were unlocked. Then, there’d be more than enough power.”
I frowned again, refusing to retort against such a stupid statement.
Seeing that, the detective switched gears.
“Jude, tell me about what makes this MONARCH system so special. Nothing secret, of course. Just the part that makes your suit so much better than other actuated or servo motor suits.”
I pondered for a second, deciding to take the open ended question.
Another sigh, and I spoke.
“Putting it in layman’s terms, the MONARCH suit uses piezoelectric systems. Apply electricity to a material, and it’ll deform. We chose a material that contracts when it comes under an electric charge. It makes the material act just like biological muscles, except the power we can apply makes them far more powerful than anything biological. By weaving this special material in a way similar to blood vessels, we can create an all-encompassing bodysuit that works just like a conventional exosuit, except better in almost every way. It’s more flexible, faster, and more precise, lacking only in sheer possible strength compared to servomotors. Most importantly though, it’s intuitive. The suit is programmed to directly mimic the user’s own movements. It doesn’t do anything that the user doesn’t do themselves.”
“So it massively amplifies everything the body does?”
“Putting it simply, yes.”
“For better or worse?”
My mouth shut once more, and the man pressed again.
“It’s no secret that we can hurt ourselves with our own strength, and that’s just as normal people. But if you multiplied the strength and speed behind that exertion, you’d be injuring yourself in a far worse way than without the suit.”
“You can also beat yourself over the skull with a pipe wrench. Doesn’t mean the wrench is at fault.”
“Jude, we are here today because one of your colleagues was tragically killed while using the MONARCH suit, his body so twisted at the waist that he shattered his own spine and died an agonizing death after hours of constant lifesaving treatment. Do you think it's safe to say that such a thing wouldn’t have happened if Singularity Industries had taken further precautions with their experimental technology?”
“No, it's not safe to say that.”
My declaration was met with a frown, but I continued anyway.
“Safety was always the top concern because of this exact situation, especially since we knew its potential. We implemented every possible safeguard we could have on the hardware and software level. But you’re forgetting the other half of the equation. There was a rigorous set of protocols to be followed by the user while undergoing tests, which is exactly what that colleague had been undergoing. That he failed to follow those protocols due to his own negligence isn’t the fault of the suit. I know this for a fact because here I sit, perfectly unharmed after using the suit through all phases of development and testing, even while completely unlocked.”
“Yet you’re also the only one. We’ve already gone over the list of injuries others have recieved while testing the suit, both minor and major. That means it's safe to say you’re an outlier. Regardless of that though, such a thing shouldn’t be allowed to be possible in the first place. You call it a tool, so by that logic, that tool needs to be built in such a way that it can’t bring harm to the user.”
“I disagree. The MONARCH suit was meant to be a tool used by soldiers in war. In other words, it's a weapon as much as it's a tool of utility. And like any weapon, they’re dangerous, and they require training and safety standards to use. Like a naive child can cut themselves if they get their hands on a knife, a negligent adult can get hurt while inside the world’s most bleeding edge experimental exosuit. He knew the risks of stepping into that suit just as I did. It’s not the suit’s fault that he failed to follow protocol. It’s a tragedy that he died for that mistake and his family has my condolences. Yet I stand by my technology. The MONARCH system is the most advanced biomimetic augmentation system ever created, and I’ve already proven that in the hands of the right people, it’s too important of a technology to ever even attempt to stifle.”
I stared at the detective with pointed aggression, as if I couldn’t emphasive the suit’s importance enough.
And he went silent, simply scribbling in his notes. They’d be getting nothing from me that might ever hurt my MONARCH program.
……
…
“Holy shit.”
I came back to the real world, staring at Umara and feeling the passage of time.
It had only been a minute, the memories coming to me as quickly as I could process them. And since I was back to normal consciousness, I decided to test things out.
I stepped up, the suit appearing around my body. Not just the experimental version that I had seen in some of my memories, but one outfitted for the very people it was meant to be used by.
There were three main parts based on some of the finer details of the memory. The most important part was the piezoelectric bodysuit, which provided all of the physical augmentation. However, above that skintight layer was a reactive gel layer, one made for absorbing impact and regulating temperature.
Outside of that was the exoskeleton, conforming to the body with thousands of actuators and built to hold the rest of the external armor. The armor was light yet made of some of the best ceramic, metallic, and crystalline alloys and composites available to this future Earth.
Powering it all was a two tiered energy source. The first was built into the bodysuit, an independent and low power passive nuclear battery that would allow a soldier to use it even without the rest of the exosuit, albeit at a lesser level of strength and ability. The second was a direct energy conversion nuclear generator, one that provided far more power, enabling the full capabilities of the entire suit while also being a power source for energy EM weapons, like the railgun and coil-propellant hybrid weapons.
On top of that, it was outfitted with everything the previous exosuit from my 8th Star was, including CBRN protections, medical reaction systems, advanced threat and combat analysis sytems, a full AI suite, and as a consequence of that, completely autonomous and assisted functions. Basically, the suit could operate itself like a drone, with or without me inside of it.
Built into its back was a jetpack and advanced mobility system. It would allow short sprints of chemically fueled flight as well as regenerative bursts of propulsion, allowing one to jump to the top of buildings or engage in extreme lateral motion.
By the raw numbers, the suit wasn’t actually massively more powerful or strong compared to its predecessors. Stronger, sure, but not by an order of magnitude. Instead, what made the suit so great was how effective the meld between man and machine was. A system taking inputs directly from the user’s nervous system, there was no discernible disconnect between the actions of one and the reactions of the other. As well, its highlight was the lack of a need for mechanical servos or actuators. Being a flexible biometallic material allowed the bodysuit to be just that, a body conforming second skin. There was nothing so versatile previously developed.
With the varied layers of both soft and hard armor, it was outright impervious to any attacks that didn’t reach a certain threshold.
Of course, it was also specialized. It was a universal suit, but that didn’t mean it was better at everything. When I looked into my 9th Star more, I saw other suits, ones built for other purposes and far better than this one depending on the application. This MONARCH suit wasn’t built to be a tank. If I needed to be such, then there was another within reach that would fulfill that role much better.
Still, it was easily going to be my go-to. Previously, my suits had specialties for things like piloting, hazmat, assault, and stealth. All of those roles would now be covered under a single suit. It was meant to turn a normal man into a supersoldier, even more of one than the other suits.
And combined with my global Psykic enhancements?
I would be unstoppable.
I spun around like a girl in a new dress, getting a view of the armor. All of the exterior plating was completely sealed with actuated interlocking plates, and all those plates were covered in a special active optical skin. That meant it could become any configuration of colors I wanted it to. For now, that was set to gunmetal gray.
As for the helmet, there was no true visor on it, made of the same metal and ceramics as the rest of the suit. It conformed around my head nicely, actuators making any tiny adjustments they needed to for maximum comfort and protection. However, the actuated plates were configured and interlocked in such a way that the faintly visible seams created the image of rectangular eyes.
All in all, while the suit made me even taller and larger than the previous exosuit, it also did a much better job at protecting everything equally, including the power, computer, and medical systems.
I couldn’t feel the heat, but I could see the status of the nuclear generator, which was in naturally perfect condition. Given its fuel type, it was effectively an infinite energy source. It was only unfortunate that the entire industry that I had built in this world was done so upon magic and Crystals, not electricity. I might’ve considered jacking this suit into a power grid in that case.
I ignored the faint fear of having lethal radiation on my back as I finally decided to engage the one system I was looking most forward to.
I spoke.
“Where are you, mister AI?”
[Right here, User.]
It responded in kind with a semi-robotic, deep masculine voice, a curious visual brought up in the corner of my vision. I couldn’t help but feel the personality it was coded with could be summed up as serious and aggressive.
“What’s your name?”
[I am designated Charon.]
“Cool. I’m John Cooper.”
[I will refer to you as Cooper. Are you prepared to begin the onboarding protocols?]
“Hm.”
I looked around, setting eyes on Umara before responding.
“Negative. I’ll bring you back out later. Might have another thing to do with you when that happens.”
[I will stand by.]
I sent the MONARCH back with that, still looking at Umara, a smile blooming on my face.
“Hey babe, wanna redo that fight we had earlier?”
