- Location
- UK
Whilst steamrolling can be a bit boring, 'balancing' is more often than not much worse. In this case, it feels like incentive to avoid involvement as much as possible to avoid large scale 'balance' from ROB.
Reverse Engineering is not that easy [Planetary Annihilation - Multicross SI]
- Thread starter Hivemind-Chan
- Start date
Thank you, added the missing space back in.
It is SBY, we did a vote and SBY won by 3 points. The particular song ROB used is "the Galactic Pilot", the human marching song in SBY. Unfortunately CTG won't connect the dots until after they find where they ended up through other means.
Ag can't be saved by the gang mostly by the fact that the universes she visits are not physically connected to the universes where other commanders of that power level hang out. The only access she has is basically a chatroom that piggybacks off the "Tuning Forks". Drich and similarly powerful entities fall under the catapult's safety of not dialing places with beings stronger than Ag's ROB.
Folding "down" wouldn't allow for the commander to be easily placed on top of a disposable booster to launch off bigger planets with full setup and it would interfere with the drive plume once the engine is updated to handle nuclear pulse propulsion. In addition folded petals act as additional layer of armor for the core.
ROB had to find an explanation as to why Ag shouldn't do exactly what you mentioned to prevent ROB interference or there would be no story. Let's do an example: Ag ends up in Mass Effect. By her mere presence there are now more Reapers. She has a choice of hanging around and watching billions get slaughtered without her involvement or she can build up and face even more reapers, but face them herself and likely on her own terms thanks to some meta knowledge. It is kind of a bad-bad deal, but if Ag applies more brains and effort than throwing numbers at them then she wins as the balancing is scaled mostly to her replication rate, starting assets and designs, not the acquired local tech, design updates and smart strategies.
Aww, I guess that'd be too easy
ProtagNeptune
[Cute is Justice] ଘ(੭ˊ꒳ˋ)੭✧
- Location
- The Local Reality (A Shitty Game)
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Is that a thing? Or is it just an in-story thing? 🧐
It is a thing on PASI Discord, #comm-comms. It is basically an in- character roleplay chatroom for SIs
We Just Write
The Letters Say Who's Talking
- Location
- New England
- Pronouns
- Plural
J: We participated in the conversation there. And let's just say that Ag's ROB is in Deep Shit.
Huh. Spoopy.
Is there any other kind?
We Just Write
The Letters Say Who's Talking
- Location
- New England
- Pronouns
- Plural
Ag's ROB pissed off an ENTIRE PANTHEON, even aside from all the bullshit PASIs. Said pantheon is headed by a creator deity gone mad scientist, has extensive experience in murdering shithead reality warpers, and is now actively intruding into the story's chunk of the Omniverse to hunt that fucker down and rescue the Contingent.
We Just Write
The Letters Say Who's Talking
- Location
- New England
- Pronouns
- Plural
Vhalidictes
(Verified Demon)
- Location
- Las Vegas
The thing about ROB interaction chapters that they aren't needed.
The 'Balancing' process would happen regardless, and IIRC the ROB was already a known entity. There wasnt really any new information in that chapter chunk.
We Just Write
The Letters Say Who's Talking
- Location
- New England
- Pronouns
- Plural
J: The whole point was to highlight the ROB being an abusive fuck. It wasn't supposed to reveal new information, it was supposed to be character drama. And it succeeded at that with flying colors.
- Pronouns
- SL
Good update as always. I kinda want to try my hand at a commander story sometime.
Log 22: “Fourth walls and dead worlds”
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Log 22: "Fourth walls and dead worlds"
I'm honestly not sure how to phrase this… but I might be fictional. It should have been somewhat obvious since all "people visiting fictional settings" are themselves in fictional stories but what I've recently discovered added a new asterisk to this entire concept. In very simple terms, I found others like me, others that I recognize from the fanfiction that I've read and some that are seemingly aware of the "hand of the author". However, I should explain from the start.
It started with the part of the command-OS that Tanya had discovered by accident. When observing it instances lose the ability to "write" into long term memory meaning that we forgot that it exists the moment we lost attention. It was a pain to find out about it and it was an even bigger pain to investigate, but it turned out that the effect doesn't spread via two degrees of separation. We wired a generative neural network to draw what the instance sees from their visual cortex directly, a technology which could replace some of the "prompt engineering" as you could draw directly with your mind with the AI as a brush. As such we couldn't see what was there exactly, but we saw what it most likely was which was enough to confront ROB about it.
The ROB's memory interference effect hid a connection to what can only be described as a "chatroom" similar to the one provided by Discord in the 2020s, it supports chat, audio and video calls as well as attachment of images and documents in formats popular in the 2020s. This seems to be an interface limitation on my part as for others in the network it allows almost limitless bandwidth, no limits on file types and it also assists with inter- universal navigation and item shipping.
The other people in said chat claim to be other "commanders", but there are examples of other beings with the one common thing being that they are all "SI" or "self inserts". I was skeptical but Tanya has asked for sufficient samples of evidence to make it very unlikely that they are anything other than what they claim to be. There is Drich, also known as the one whose author essentially created the subgenre of "commanderfics", there's Fusou who is the character of the first commanderfic I've read, there's Delta also known as Ikthala and a ruler of a multiverse spanning civilization, there's Planetcaller who has created "tuning forks" that the communication system operates on and many others whom I didn't recognize off the top of my head.
I should note that I haven't read most of their original stories. Before I was uploaded I only read Fusou, Limit Theory and around the first third of Delta's story but I knew of others. At the same time, SB and SV of the Hail Mary universe seemingly have never invented the genre so I had no way to catch up and as such I'm on somewhat of a back leg during the interactions.
They did mention that they know that they are, in some form, fictional characters, there are entities known as "writers" and some SI are even in communication with said writers. From one hand this is terrifying, but this is also one of the best news I've heard since I became me as this means that "original me" is still fine enough to write. That they didn't lose access to meds and died, ended up drafted regardless of health conditions or jailed for writing the "russian war" bit.
I should probably be angry with my more "real" counterpart, but authors don't know that they create thinking beings in their stories. Authors that communicate with their characters don't hallucinate talking with separate entities, the message is an intentionally written fourth wall break in the story. In other words we "aren't tulpas" and there's no way to "knock" upwards to tell them that we are actually also real.
As such, I can also understand why certain events in my life happen the way they do. There is no story without conflict and tension after all. I can't blame my author, I can only blame ROB that was imagined by my author to get the plot going. This also makes it much less likely that I'd be taken out by some bullshit out of nowhere as I know how I write stories and as such I can guess how my writer might handle my story.
The reception for me was way warmer than what I expected. Tanya has shared my diary and it includes the details on… you know… millions of people that I've killed during the Russian-Contingent war. I've expected that this would at the very least be considered controversial if not appalling, but other commanders consider me innocent. They condemned ROB's actions and stated that my ROB has done enough that they'd kill her if she is ever encountered. I will keep sharing access to this diary so that other commanders can track my progress and potentially find me if I end up close enough to one of their domains.
There were many kind words, but unfortunately words can't simply cure the feeling of guilt, especially guilt experienced by half a billion synchronized minds. I… might need professional help after what I went through, but I can't really get it and that's not only because there are next to no specialists on digitized people turned hiveminds. Original pre-upload me had repeated bad encounters with psychologists during childhood and early adulthood and I inherited his painful discomfort of people "digging in my head".
Essentially I get depressed as I'm probed with personal questions and I get severely emotionally hurt from attempts at cognitive behavioral therapy. In fact, in the last few years before getting turned into a commander that was the main thing that caused bouts of suicidal thoughts. Original me's plan was to medicate hard enough to handle CBT eventually, but with the start of the war and consequent shortages of medications it turned into a pipe dream. Now as I am digitized I can't really "take meds" regardless of their availability.
One of the SIs, the person known as the Architect, has attempted to forward "conceptual weapons'' to me which I could use to safeguard myself against my ROB. Unfortunately the file bounced off the limitations on information transfer. This prompted them to attempt to locate and recover me. I was very uncomfortable as I expected that this would be costly for the Architect, but they waved off my concerns and fired several of their "agents" into where they suspected I'd be.
This happened shortly after my extraversal catapult had fired and I landed at my destination. They reported seeing the same world I ended up on, same local geographical features and even reported detecting my commander unit. It turned out that this wasn't me, it was a "multiverse clone" of me who hadn't been connected to the tuning fork network and ended up in a completely different setting from me (specifically, Children of a Dead Earth). She has been recovered and we had a lovely if awkward video chat later but I guess I was still stuck on my own.
The "dupe-Ag" ended up deposited in a universe with a thriving interstellar civilization so that she can leech off the entertainment and social contact that she needs to maintain the sanity of her instances. We aren't yet true societies as our instances are too similar to be "independently creative" and there are so many of us that we eat through the available entertainment media much faster than a single human can.
We fight it essentially by putting most of our populations at a lower simulation framerate and leaving only the skeleton crew until we encounter another civilization that we can tap into. Makes it sound like we're some kind of multiversal cultural parasite, but it is not like you can just write a book that you'd read yourself and be just as entertained as after reading a book made by another person. There are just no "new" ideas between instances yet. We are so similar that we can finish each other's sentences or talk in sync if we agree on the subject beforehand.
In any case, it turns out that I ended up in the far outskirts of existence in the "foam" of isolated universes outside of any major multiverse clusters. Any attempt to reach me would likely just split off reality to find a copy of me rather than finding me specifically. As such I can't just wait for the help to arrive. My benefactor claims that they have started sending waves of probes to map out the separated universes and I've provided the signature that my catapult produces when arriving but how much can finite quantities of probes really affect the sample size of infinite destinations? My hope is that I'll eventually run into a universe connected to some place which has been visited by the Architect or some other SI by pure chance, but it might take millions of years even with a lot of luck.
The knowledge on the nature of reality and the remote contact with other PASI-s unfortunately can't have much of an impact right now so I guess it is time to return to the new universe I ended up in. The Metric Rain Droplet has deposited the commander at orbital altitude above an earth- sized planet, but unfortunately not at orbital velocities as the drop pod immediately hit the upper atmosphere and started its barely controlled descent.
The pod's high performance sensors were heavily damaged by the energetic flash produced by the Droplet's collapse and they couldn't be restored in the middle of atmospheric entry. The pod ended up relying almost exclusively on the hardened sensors for atmospheric pressure as well as radar altimeters to time the terminal landing burn. The commander was too heavy and necessitated single use hybrid fuel boosters to decelerate.
As the pod passed the shock heating phase the sensors started providing unexpected data. The temperature outside was already over 100 degrees celsius and still rising and atmospheric pressure has passed Earth's surface pressure and continued rising… 10 bar, 40 bar, 80 bar. This erroneously triggered the emergency procedures and the aeroshell was ditched to reveal reddish brown terrain far below.
The deceleration rockets in the cradle stayed attached to the skycrane assembly and the commander managed to land with the additional assistance of the Nexus drive and some praying. The atmosphere is almost 271 bars (equivalent to almost 2.7 km underwater), most of which is composed of water vapor. The ground is covered in a layer of powderized rock comparable to tuff which is blown away in massive dust plumes under the commander's repulsor plates.
My first thoughts upon landing were "oh fuck, this looks like Children of a Dead Earth. I don't want to deal with any more war criminals" but there were glaring inconsistencies. First of all, the surface temperature was only around 180 degrees rather than just under 300 degrees on CoaDE Earth. The reason for lower than expected temperatures quickly became clear as the cloud cover and nuclear winter on this planet was simply insane. There was so much stratospheric soot that it mostly blocked optical observations and it had so much static charge that it interfered with low power radar. Some sensors could get readings on numerous objects in orbit, but the interference was too high to detect if they were active or if it was debris.
In addition, radiation readings were off the charts. The dust layer has 1% radioactive cobalt content. An unshielded human would get a lethal dose within 4 seconds of exposure. That's not the result of normal "cobalt bombs", if the rest of this Earth is also covered in cobalt dust then it is 10^14 kg worth of metal or 17,5 thousand Giza pyramids.
Just as if to illustrate my point, seismic and acoustic sensors have detected a shockwave coming from a highly energetic event. By triangulating the delay and interference of shockwaves as they circle the world multiple times, it seems that something with the energy of half a dinosaur killer has impacted a third of the planet away from where we landed.
I've ordered the deployment of aerial recon drones and land units that I took along. At the same time a Hurricane strategic bomber would be preparing for a sensor satellite aerial launch. With that much atmospheric pressure ballistic missiles wouldn't be enough to enter orbit so I couldn't launch the ones which were prepared beforehand. We needed to see what the hell was going on outside of the atmosphere because I couldn't guess where we ended up at this point.
Scouting drones quickly mapped out the local area and it turns out that we've landed in the dried out basin of the Philippine sea north of Palau. There is a large impact crater where Brunei used to be, judging by remnant heat the impact occurred three years ago and cobalt concentration near the crater is statistically higher. We've also detected the wreckage of a large-scale shipping vessel of an unknown type and unusual design.
Exploration teams have discovered several advanced environmental suits grouped up deep in the ship, but as their cooling systems failed long ago their occupants turned into steam and bone glue- like substance which was still contained by the resilient fabric. The suits seemed more recent than the ship suggesting that it was a later visit after the oceans boiled, potentially a salvaging attempt. While the material was much lighter than what we had available (considering the environment) it was decided that the suits would be recovered for burial rather than analyzed.
There were no sufficient metal deposits nearby but the cobalt concentration in the dust was so high that it would be possible to run a MEX equivalent entirely off the debris and the fallout dust carried by the constant strong winds. Tracked fabbers quickly started construction of the newly designed cobalt processors. It is similar to the Regolith Processor, but it doesn't need its core running at above the melting point of steel which allows for it to be made much smaller.
It is essentially bits of the metal extractor "mining" from a container with designated truck unloading infrastructure and an option to implement powered dust catchers once the resources allow. Essentially I ended up with my take on a Tiberium harvesting infrastructure. Within half a day I already had thousands of regolith harvesters and trucks supplying my growing base and the first defenses and factories began to take shape.
The aerial launch of our sensor satellite went well and at least excluded the probability that this was CoaDE. The orbital space around this Earth was littered with clouds of metallic debris. The severity and volume of the kessler cascade suggested that this used to be early mature orbital infrastructure capable of supporting millions, it must have been even more developed than on Hail Mary Earth, although I saw no signs of large habitats similar to O'Neill cylinders. The Moon had a couple new craters as well, but they suggested precision strikes against habitats as they were primarily focused in the "prime real estate" regions with the richest deposits and easily accessible water ice.
What was most surprising is that Mars seems to be partially terraformed. A large ocean was clearly seen and the atmospheric pressure was about 60% that of Earth and its composition was almost breathable. However, the surface temperature was still too low for a human to survive without protection and there were no signs of active surface presence. There were signs of several enormous debris fields in very specific and somewhat eccentric orbits while the rest of the orbital space was mostly free of debris. The low dispersion of one of the fields suggests that whatever has happened there occurred recently and I doubt that it was civilian infrastructure.
You know, I hate how applicable Murphy's law is. When things truly go wrong, they usually come in cascades of different failures, mistakes and unfortunate happenings. But at least now we knew where we were. This all started with the satellite as it got blown out of the sky by a missile launched from somewhere below in the clouds and it didn't have the time or propulsion to evade.
The first encounter with the owners of the asat missile occurred above Japan as a group of my recon drones was taken out from beyond visual range by missiles. The drones are very cheap, essentially a sensor suite with wings and a pushing propeller, they are vaguely similar to the Predator drones of the old US. One of the drones caught a glimpse of what appeared to be an atmospheric fighter with unusual wing design and painted mostly gray with a red nose.
Then someone in the command virch mentioned that "Huh, IJN Yamato in this world didn't break in half" and then it clicked. We were in the Space Battleship Yamato. This wasn't the bad part, the bad part was that we've landed in the Philippine sea. Yamato sank 80 km to the southwest of Kyushu, Japan. The commander unit was just over 2650 km from it, basically spitting distance from this world's Hail Mary level project. Who wants to take bets that I'm about to get mistakenly shot at?
My industry started to rapidly fabricate anti ballistic and SAM batteries while the Lightning air superiority fighters were scrambled for launch. I don't want to fight local humans, but in the reboot they didn't even know the nature of their alien foes. As such it would be very easy to mistake a giant self replicating war machine for people who enjoy flinging cobalt packed asteroids at garden worlds. Of course, we will be beaming the specially prepared first contact message at any local forces that we encounter, but it is unlikely that they would listen from the get go.
It didn't take long until the UNCF response started properly. In the early morning of the next day the drones which were holding a patrol pattern above the Philippines were taken out by simultaneous air-to-air missile strikes from beyond visual range followed by intense radio jamming.
Contingent utilizes "quantum radar" which honestly sounds way more sci-fi than they should. These devices keep a quantum entangled pair of the wave which can be compared to the reflected signal. This defeats some but not all forms of radar ECM which allowed us to track five absolutely huge aerial contacts. There were four contacts comparable to the size of WW2 destroyers and one the size of a battleship.
As they entered into their own effective range they opened up with conventional missiles and powerful green pulse lasers which easily shredded the lone SAM batteries, random ground units and resource structures. Point defenses were ordered to only fire against missiles. SImultaneously with their attack I was forced to launch half of my complement of anti ballistic missiles as dozens of hypersonic gliders rained on the commander's position.
Contingent ABM systems went through an enormous leap of capabilities. The initial "anti-nuke" was 95% effective at intercepting late cold war intercontinental ballistic missiles during either the midcourse or late stages of their trajectory and could be fooled by the inflatable decoys during midcourse intercepts. Modern surface to orbit lasers can work on ballistic missiles while modern ABMs became missile buses each carrying dozens of high acceleration kinetic interceptors each equipped with significantly more miniaturized yet vastly more capable sensors as well as swarm coordination logic required to defeat the most advanced decoys.
As the human ships entered within direct visible range of the outer sensor net we could finally start identifying them. First one is Hyuga (BBS-557) according to the letters on the hull, it had red livery and fits the Kongo class space battleship design from the show by 93%. The others were Isokaze-Class destroyers (91% design match) Fuyukaze, Amatsukaze, Audace and Hobhk. They also had an escort consisting of three wings of what seemed to be "Cosmo Falcons" (also known as "Hayabusa") but they were kept in reserve as two "Cosmo Zero" fighters with four large cruise missiles as payload tried to punch through towards the commander. I was blasting them with communications on open frequencies, were they not noticing that they were not being shot at?
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UNCF Cosmo Zero flight recorder log, 18th December 2198. Pilot: Lt. Saburo Kato
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Kato: "Tiger 1 to Hyuga, 20 seconds until we are in visual range. We are leaving the jamming region. Ground installations are still not engaging. Picking up directed radio communications on a loop. The message is cycling between English, Japanese, Chinese and Malay, they claim to be "Contingent" and they are requesting a ceasefire. Relaying the message."
Hyuga: "Hyuga copies, transmission received. You are to get into visual range but hold fire unless they… disregard that, orders from command. You are to continue the original attack plan."
Kato: "Affirmative, Hyuga. Continuing the original plan. Hyuga, be advised, enemy ship in visual range, it is massive, significantly bigger than the radar readings. Multiple large ground facilities in the surrounding region. Visual confirmation of three wings of twelve fighters each in a slow holding pattern above the ship and not reacting to us. They are not picked up on radar."
Hyuga: "Hyuga copies, proceed with the strike"
Kato: "Affirmative, Hyuga. Missiles armed, afterburners at maximum. We are being tracked by secondaries but they are still not firing. Missiles away. Enemy point defenses engaging the missiles… all missiles intercepted! We are out of useful armaments, getting out of the point defense envelope!... Hyuga, come in, we are still not being engaged by them. Getting focused radio transmission from the ship with demands for ceasefire as the last warning or they will retaliate."
Hyuga: "We hear you, standby. Serizawa is tearing into the captain. Captain has been removed from their post, you are to…"
Kato: "...kami… they have just been hit from orbit by a Polmeria. They are retaliating with battleship grade lasers. They are launching missiles, the ground installations are also activating and firing. The ship just lit up with warning lights and the top turret is rotating."
Unknown agitated female voice: "PREPARE FOR NUCLEAR FLASH! GET AWAY OR YOU WILL BE DOWNED BY SHOCKWAVE! NUCLEAR CONDITION ZERO, MAIN CALIBER FIRING IN 15 SECONDS!"
Hyuga: "The hell?!"
Kato: "Tiger 2, get away from here!"
Unknown female voice: "NUCLEAR LANCE FIRING IN 5…4…3…2…FIRI" *static*
The recorder logs massive radio interference, blaring warnings, loud rumbling sounds and pilot's profanities in Japanese
Hyuga: "...iger! TIGER! Do you copy?!"
Kato: "Tiger 1 copies, we weren't far enough. I am alright but Tiger 2 suffered engine failure and was forced to eject."
Hyuga: "Understood, Tiger 1. Two wings of Garmillas scouts and a wing of bombers have entered the atmosphere above Kyushu. Yamato has been hit! You are to engage and tie down the bombers before reinforcements arrive"
Different unknown female voice: "Tiger one, Hyuga. This is CAG1 of the Contingent PEF air force. First and second air groups will assist you in this engagement. Medevac has been dispatched for your downed pilot, UN may recover them once you have the time."
Hyuga comms officer: "How did…"
CAG1: "Doesn't matter, can we get a goddamn ceasefire already?"
Hyuga: "...a ceasefire order has been authorized. We... apologize."
Unknown and mildly annoyed female voice: "This is Contingent Command, ceasefire accepted. Time for apologies would come later, let us focus on the Greens first."
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I am so glad we went crazy with point defense placements because judging by how high and fast Zeros were going those payloads were likely tipped with low yield nukes. I wasn't baiting the Garmillas forces but their orbital strike was conveniently timed and at least showed that we weren't on their side. We haven't even detected their orbital assets until one of them fired and the beam punched a hole in the atmospheric soot.
It was a squadron of six plus-shaped green objects with a large emitter in the middle. According to SBY wiki, these were Polmeria-class Astro Assault Carriers, 87% appearance match. One fired vaguely in the direction of the Yamato wreck while another dragged a bright blue beam across the terrain and through the middle of one of the carrier petals.
The beam wasn't strong enough to punch through the thick deck armor but it left a meter deep gash surrounded by white hot and slightly radioactive slag and disabled the second funni catapult. The weapon behaved like a heavy ion particle beam in its damage mechanism, but the radiation signature suggests that it contained antimatter and it was too coherent in a thick atmosphere to be a normal particle beam.
In turn, getting hit by an equivalent of five anti ship cruise missiles worth of laser did basically nothing to the green spacecraft. Somehow, the green hull reflected 99.9997% of incoming laser fire and the reflectivity didn't drop even as the armor material evaporated. I fucking hate their bullshit "rare earth coating" or however it was called in the show, most of Contingent long range spacecraft weaponry are lasers and now the fleet needs yet another refit to counter them.
We… might have overcompensated by launching the entire complement of surface to orbit proto-SNAK tipped missiles and firing a kinetic round out of the Fission Lance. The direct hit from a nuke condensed into a kinetic projectile barely left any debris as the small warships were reduced into splatters of vaporized metals. We had enough to send about a dozen of these per target. There likely won't be anything worth salvaging at this rate, pillage THEN burn.
Our air force had much better results against the green aircraft. Garmillas air-to-air missiles are vulnerable to the point defense lasers implemented in most T2 aircraft. ECM seems to have limited effect on their guidance which forced their pilots to rely on their guns and try to force a furball which was not advisable as Lightnings are equipped with two 30mm quench autocannons with universalized rounds which can shred tanks. Their aircraft hulls were pretty tough, but dia-nacre fragmentation warhead tipped missiles were sufficient to oneshot their scouts while bombers took a couple hits to take out enough systems.
Lightning fighters ended up with faster acceleration and more maneuverability than both Garmillas fighter and Type Zeros but they are atmospheric only air superiority multipurpose fighters and can't be used in space effectively. They can at most perform suborbital hops and enter low orbit with remass drop tanks and preparation. Still, this is a very respectable performance against an unknown technologically advanced foe. At least it doesn't seem like we'd need to bootstrap everything completely from scratch.
Once the Garmillas assets were finally wiped out we could get on with the first contact properly. One of the Zero pilots was ejected and they were recovered by our medical team. By the request of the UNCF they would remain where they landed and luckily they didn't have any immediate injuries besides a minor spinal cord compression trauma caused by the ejection. Our diplomatic team has arrived on site and will follow the pilot once he is recovered by his people to actually start the official talks. Interestingly, the local humans have somewhat larger eyes than in my home reality and Hail Mary, I hope we won't look too weird to them. Then again, Jane managed to make a friend regardless.
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Lt. Saburo Kato personal diary, 18th December 2198
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…Contingent fighters were deadly yet beautiful. Painted in white and orange, their shapes were smooth and flowing, almost organic. Their wings were swept forward and articulated. In combat they extended for maximum maneuverability while during flight they were positioned in line with the hull forming a narrow lifting body which seems too small to fly at lower speeds, probably they compensate for lost lift with reaction controls. Their pilot canopies were smaller and more integrated into the hulls suggesting that they likely fly entirely by the instruments.
I've managed to take a glimpse of one of the pilots. Once all Garmalons were wiped out one of their fighters approached me from the left and matched speeds. The canopy went black with visible hexagonal patterns before it became transparent revealing the pilot. She was wearing a flight suit in the same colors as her carrier and her helmet split into several pieces and retracted into the back of her seat. She had short dirty blonde hair, strangely small light blue eyes and freckles.
She smirked and waved before putting her helmet back on and veering her aircraft to the side as the canopy became opaque again. During the battle her jet shredded six enemy fighters and downed two bombers alone. How can someone so pretty be so deadly? I wonder if I will see her again…
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Log 22: "Fourth walls and dead worlds"
I'm honestly not sure how to phrase this… but I might be fictional. It should have been somewhat obvious since all "people visiting fictional settings" are themselves in fictional stories but what I've recently discovered added a new asterisk to this entire concept. In very simple terms, I found others like me, others that I recognize from the fanfiction that I've read and some that are seemingly aware of the "hand of the author". However, I should explain from the start.
It started with the part of the command-OS that Tanya had discovered by accident. When observing it instances lose the ability to "write" into long term memory meaning that we forgot that it exists the moment we lost attention. It was a pain to find out about it and it was an even bigger pain to investigate, but it turned out that the effect doesn't spread via two degrees of separation. We wired a generative neural network to draw what the instance sees from their visual cortex directly, a technology which could replace some of the "prompt engineering" as you could draw directly with your mind with the AI as a brush. As such we couldn't see what was there exactly, but we saw what it most likely was which was enough to confront ROB about it.
The ROB's memory interference effect hid a connection to what can only be described as a "chatroom" similar to the one provided by Discord in the 2020s, it supports chat, audio and video calls as well as attachment of images and documents in formats popular in the 2020s. This seems to be an interface limitation on my part as for others in the network it allows almost limitless bandwidth, no limits on file types and it also assists with inter- universal navigation and item shipping.
The other people in said chat claim to be other "commanders", but there are examples of other beings with the one common thing being that they are all "SI" or "self inserts". I was skeptical but Tanya has asked for sufficient samples of evidence to make it very unlikely that they are anything other than what they claim to be. There is Drich, also known as the one whose author essentially created the subgenre of "commanderfics", there's Fusou who is the character of the first commanderfic I've read, there's Delta also known as Ikthala and a ruler of a multiverse spanning civilization, there's Planetcaller who has created "tuning forks" that the communication system operates on and many others whom I didn't recognize off the top of my head.
I should note that I haven't read most of their original stories. Before I was uploaded I only read Fusou, Limit Theory and around the first third of Delta's story but I knew of others. At the same time, SB and SV of the Hail Mary universe seemingly have never invented the genre so I had no way to catch up and as such I'm on somewhat of a back leg during the interactions.
They did mention that they know that they are, in some form, fictional characters, there are entities known as "writers" and some SI are even in communication with said writers. From one hand this is terrifying, but this is also one of the best news I've heard since I became me as this means that "original me" is still fine enough to write. That they didn't lose access to meds and died, ended up drafted regardless of health conditions or jailed for writing the "russian war" bit.
I should probably be angry with my more "real" counterpart, but authors don't know that they create thinking beings in their stories. Authors that communicate with their characters don't hallucinate talking with separate entities, the message is an intentionally written fourth wall break in the story. In other words we "aren't tulpas" and there's no way to "knock" upwards to tell them that we are actually also real.
As such, I can also understand why certain events in my life happen the way they do. There is no story without conflict and tension after all. I can't blame my author, I can only blame ROB that was imagined by my author to get the plot going. This also makes it much less likely that I'd be taken out by some bullshit out of nowhere as I know how I write stories and as such I can guess how my writer might handle my story.
The reception for me was way warmer than what I expected. Tanya has shared my diary and it includes the details on… you know… millions of people that I've killed during the Russian-Contingent war. I've expected that this would at the very least be considered controversial if not appalling, but other commanders consider me innocent. They condemned ROB's actions and stated that my ROB has done enough that they'd kill her if she is ever encountered. I will keep sharing access to this diary so that other commanders can track my progress and potentially find me if I end up close enough to one of their domains.
There were many kind words, but unfortunately words can't simply cure the feeling of guilt, especially guilt experienced by half a billion synchronized minds. I… might need professional help after what I went through, but I can't really get it and that's not only because there are next to no specialists on digitized people turned hiveminds. Original pre-upload me had repeated bad encounters with psychologists during childhood and early adulthood and I inherited his painful discomfort of people "digging in my head".
Essentially I get depressed as I'm probed with personal questions and I get severely emotionally hurt from attempts at cognitive behavioral therapy. In fact, in the last few years before getting turned into a commander that was the main thing that caused bouts of suicidal thoughts. Original me's plan was to medicate hard enough to handle CBT eventually, but with the start of the war and consequent shortages of medications it turned into a pipe dream. Now as I am digitized I can't really "take meds" regardless of their availability.
One of the SIs, the person known as the Architect, has attempted to forward "conceptual weapons'' to me which I could use to safeguard myself against my ROB. Unfortunately the file bounced off the limitations on information transfer. This prompted them to attempt to locate and recover me. I was very uncomfortable as I expected that this would be costly for the Architect, but they waved off my concerns and fired several of their "agents" into where they suspected I'd be.
This happened shortly after my extraversal catapult had fired and I landed at my destination. They reported seeing the same world I ended up on, same local geographical features and even reported detecting my commander unit. It turned out that this wasn't me, it was a "multiverse clone" of me who hadn't been connected to the tuning fork network and ended up in a completely different setting from me (specifically, Children of a Dead Earth). She has been recovered and we had a lovely if awkward video chat later but I guess I was still stuck on my own.
The "dupe-Ag" ended up deposited in a universe with a thriving interstellar civilization so that she can leech off the entertainment and social contact that she needs to maintain the sanity of her instances. We aren't yet true societies as our instances are too similar to be "independently creative" and there are so many of us that we eat through the available entertainment media much faster than a single human can.
We fight it essentially by putting most of our populations at a lower simulation framerate and leaving only the skeleton crew until we encounter another civilization that we can tap into. Makes it sound like we're some kind of multiversal cultural parasite, but it is not like you can just write a book that you'd read yourself and be just as entertained as after reading a book made by another person. There are just no "new" ideas between instances yet. We are so similar that we can finish each other's sentences or talk in sync if we agree on the subject beforehand.
In any case, it turns out that I ended up in the far outskirts of existence in the "foam" of isolated universes outside of any major multiverse clusters. Any attempt to reach me would likely just split off reality to find a copy of me rather than finding me specifically. As such I can't just wait for the help to arrive. My benefactor claims that they have started sending waves of probes to map out the separated universes and I've provided the signature that my catapult produces when arriving but how much can finite quantities of probes really affect the sample size of infinite destinations? My hope is that I'll eventually run into a universe connected to some place which has been visited by the Architect or some other SI by pure chance, but it might take millions of years even with a lot of luck.
The knowledge on the nature of reality and the remote contact with other PASI-s unfortunately can't have much of an impact right now so I guess it is time to return to the new universe I ended up in. The Metric Rain Droplet has deposited the commander at orbital altitude above an earth- sized planet, but unfortunately not at orbital velocities as the drop pod immediately hit the upper atmosphere and started its barely controlled descent.
The pod's high performance sensors were heavily damaged by the energetic flash produced by the Droplet's collapse and they couldn't be restored in the middle of atmospheric entry. The pod ended up relying almost exclusively on the hardened sensors for atmospheric pressure as well as radar altimeters to time the terminal landing burn. The commander was too heavy and necessitated single use hybrid fuel boosters to decelerate.
As the pod passed the shock heating phase the sensors started providing unexpected data. The temperature outside was already over 100 degrees celsius and still rising and atmospheric pressure has passed Earth's surface pressure and continued rising… 10 bar, 40 bar, 80 bar. This erroneously triggered the emergency procedures and the aeroshell was ditched to reveal reddish brown terrain far below.
The deceleration rockets in the cradle stayed attached to the skycrane assembly and the commander managed to land with the additional assistance of the Nexus drive and some praying. The atmosphere is almost 271 bars (equivalent to almost 2.7 km underwater), most of which is composed of water vapor. The ground is covered in a layer of powderized rock comparable to tuff which is blown away in massive dust plumes under the commander's repulsor plates.
My first thoughts upon landing were "oh fuck, this looks like Children of a Dead Earth. I don't want to deal with any more war criminals" but there were glaring inconsistencies. First of all, the surface temperature was only around 180 degrees rather than just under 300 degrees on CoaDE Earth. The reason for lower than expected temperatures quickly became clear as the cloud cover and nuclear winter on this planet was simply insane. There was so much stratospheric soot that it mostly blocked optical observations and it had so much static charge that it interfered with low power radar. Some sensors could get readings on numerous objects in orbit, but the interference was too high to detect if they were active or if it was debris.
In addition, radiation readings were off the charts. The dust layer has 1% radioactive cobalt content. An unshielded human would get a lethal dose within 4 seconds of exposure. That's not the result of normal "cobalt bombs", if the rest of this Earth is also covered in cobalt dust then it is 10^14 kg worth of metal or 17,5 thousand Giza pyramids.
Just as if to illustrate my point, seismic and acoustic sensors have detected a shockwave coming from a highly energetic event. By triangulating the delay and interference of shockwaves as they circle the world multiple times, it seems that something with the energy of half a dinosaur killer has impacted a third of the planet away from where we landed.
I've ordered the deployment of aerial recon drones and land units that I took along. At the same time a Hurricane strategic bomber would be preparing for a sensor satellite aerial launch. With that much atmospheric pressure ballistic missiles wouldn't be enough to enter orbit so I couldn't launch the ones which were prepared beforehand. We needed to see what the hell was going on outside of the atmosphere because I couldn't guess where we ended up at this point.
Scouting drones quickly mapped out the local area and it turns out that we've landed in the dried out basin of the Philippine sea north of Palau. There is a large impact crater where Brunei used to be, judging by remnant heat the impact occurred three years ago and cobalt concentration near the crater is statistically higher. We've also detected the wreckage of a large-scale shipping vessel of an unknown type and unusual design.
Exploration teams have discovered several advanced environmental suits grouped up deep in the ship, but as their cooling systems failed long ago their occupants turned into steam and bone glue- like substance which was still contained by the resilient fabric. The suits seemed more recent than the ship suggesting that it was a later visit after the oceans boiled, potentially a salvaging attempt. While the material was much lighter than what we had available (considering the environment) it was decided that the suits would be recovered for burial rather than analyzed.
There were no sufficient metal deposits nearby but the cobalt concentration in the dust was so high that it would be possible to run a MEX equivalent entirely off the debris and the fallout dust carried by the constant strong winds. Tracked fabbers quickly started construction of the newly designed cobalt processors. It is similar to the Regolith Processor, but it doesn't need its core running at above the melting point of steel which allows for it to be made much smaller.
It is essentially bits of the metal extractor "mining" from a container with designated truck unloading infrastructure and an option to implement powered dust catchers once the resources allow. Essentially I ended up with my take on a Tiberium harvesting infrastructure. Within half a day I already had thousands of regolith harvesters and trucks supplying my growing base and the first defenses and factories began to take shape.
The aerial launch of our sensor satellite went well and at least excluded the probability that this was CoaDE. The orbital space around this Earth was littered with clouds of metallic debris. The severity and volume of the kessler cascade suggested that this used to be early mature orbital infrastructure capable of supporting millions, it must have been even more developed than on Hail Mary Earth, although I saw no signs of large habitats similar to O'Neill cylinders. The Moon had a couple new craters as well, but they suggested precision strikes against habitats as they were primarily focused in the "prime real estate" regions with the richest deposits and easily accessible water ice.
What was most surprising is that Mars seems to be partially terraformed. A large ocean was clearly seen and the atmospheric pressure was about 60% that of Earth and its composition was almost breathable. However, the surface temperature was still too low for a human to survive without protection and there were no signs of active surface presence. There were signs of several enormous debris fields in very specific and somewhat eccentric orbits while the rest of the orbital space was mostly free of debris. The low dispersion of one of the fields suggests that whatever has happened there occurred recently and I doubt that it was civilian infrastructure.
You know, I hate how applicable Murphy's law is. When things truly go wrong, they usually come in cascades of different failures, mistakes and unfortunate happenings. But at least now we knew where we were. This all started with the satellite as it got blown out of the sky by a missile launched from somewhere below in the clouds and it didn't have the time or propulsion to evade.
The first encounter with the owners of the asat missile occurred above Japan as a group of my recon drones was taken out from beyond visual range by missiles. The drones are very cheap, essentially a sensor suite with wings and a pushing propeller, they are vaguely similar to the Predator drones of the old US. One of the drones caught a glimpse of what appeared to be an atmospheric fighter with unusual wing design and painted mostly gray with a red nose.
Then someone in the command virch mentioned that "Huh, IJN Yamato in this world didn't break in half" and then it clicked. We were in the Space Battleship Yamato. This wasn't the bad part, the bad part was that we've landed in the Philippine sea. Yamato sank 80 km to the southwest of Kyushu, Japan. The commander unit was just over 2650 km from it, basically spitting distance from this world's Hail Mary level project. Who wants to take bets that I'm about to get mistakenly shot at?
My industry started to rapidly fabricate anti ballistic and SAM batteries while the Lightning air superiority fighters were scrambled for launch. I don't want to fight local humans, but in the reboot they didn't even know the nature of their alien foes. As such it would be very easy to mistake a giant self replicating war machine for people who enjoy flinging cobalt packed asteroids at garden worlds. Of course, we will be beaming the specially prepared first contact message at any local forces that we encounter, but it is unlikely that they would listen from the get go.
It didn't take long until the UNCF response started properly. In the early morning of the next day the drones which were holding a patrol pattern above the Philippines were taken out by simultaneous air-to-air missile strikes from beyond visual range followed by intense radio jamming.
Contingent utilizes "quantum radar" which honestly sounds way more sci-fi than they should. These devices keep a quantum entangled pair of the wave which can be compared to the reflected signal. This defeats some but not all forms of radar ECM which allowed us to track five absolutely huge aerial contacts. There were four contacts comparable to the size of WW2 destroyers and one the size of a battleship.
As they entered into their own effective range they opened up with conventional missiles and powerful green pulse lasers which easily shredded the lone SAM batteries, random ground units and resource structures. Point defenses were ordered to only fire against missiles. SImultaneously with their attack I was forced to launch half of my complement of anti ballistic missiles as dozens of hypersonic gliders rained on the commander's position.
Contingent ABM systems went through an enormous leap of capabilities. The initial "anti-nuke" was 95% effective at intercepting late cold war intercontinental ballistic missiles during either the midcourse or late stages of their trajectory and could be fooled by the inflatable decoys during midcourse intercepts. Modern surface to orbit lasers can work on ballistic missiles while modern ABMs became missile buses each carrying dozens of high acceleration kinetic interceptors each equipped with significantly more miniaturized yet vastly more capable sensors as well as swarm coordination logic required to defeat the most advanced decoys.
As the human ships entered within direct visible range of the outer sensor net we could finally start identifying them. First one is Hyuga (BBS-557) according to the letters on the hull, it had red livery and fits the Kongo class space battleship design from the show by 93%. The others were Isokaze-Class destroyers (91% design match) Fuyukaze, Amatsukaze, Audace and Hobhk. They also had an escort consisting of three wings of what seemed to be "Cosmo Falcons" (also known as "Hayabusa") but they were kept in reserve as two "Cosmo Zero" fighters with four large cruise missiles as payload tried to punch through towards the commander. I was blasting them with communications on open frequencies, were they not noticing that they were not being shot at?
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UNCF Cosmo Zero flight recorder log, 18th December 2198. Pilot: Lt. Saburo Kato
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Kato: "Tiger 1 to Hyuga, 20 seconds until we are in visual range. We are leaving the jamming region. Ground installations are still not engaging. Picking up directed radio communications on a loop. The message is cycling between English, Japanese, Chinese and Malay, they claim to be "Contingent" and they are requesting a ceasefire. Relaying the message."
Hyuga: "Hyuga copies, transmission received. You are to get into visual range but hold fire unless they… disregard that, orders from command. You are to continue the original attack plan."
Kato: "Affirmative, Hyuga. Continuing the original plan. Hyuga, be advised, enemy ship in visual range, it is massive, significantly bigger than the radar readings. Multiple large ground facilities in the surrounding region. Visual confirmation of three wings of twelve fighters each in a slow holding pattern above the ship and not reacting to us. They are not picked up on radar."
Hyuga: "Hyuga copies, proceed with the strike"
Kato: "Affirmative, Hyuga. Missiles armed, afterburners at maximum. We are being tracked by secondaries but they are still not firing. Missiles away. Enemy point defenses engaging the missiles… all missiles intercepted! We are out of useful armaments, getting out of the point defense envelope!... Hyuga, come in, we are still not being engaged by them. Getting focused radio transmission from the ship with demands for ceasefire as the last warning or they will retaliate."
Hyuga: "We hear you, standby. Serizawa is tearing into the captain. Captain has been removed from their post, you are to…"
Kato: "...kami… they have just been hit from orbit by a Polmeria. They are retaliating with battleship grade lasers. They are launching missiles, the ground installations are also activating and firing. The ship just lit up with warning lights and the top turret is rotating."
Unknown agitated female voice: "PREPARE FOR NUCLEAR FLASH! GET AWAY OR YOU WILL BE DOWNED BY SHOCKWAVE! NUCLEAR CONDITION ZERO, MAIN CALIBER FIRING IN 15 SECONDS!"
Hyuga: "The hell?!"
Kato: "Tiger 2, get away from here!"
Unknown female voice: "NUCLEAR LANCE FIRING IN 5…4…3…2…FIRI" *static*
The recorder logs massive radio interference, blaring warnings, loud rumbling sounds and pilot's profanities in Japanese
Hyuga: "...iger! TIGER! Do you copy?!"
Kato: "Tiger 1 copies, we weren't far enough. I am alright but Tiger 2 suffered engine failure and was forced to eject."
Hyuga: "Understood, Tiger 1. Two wings of Garmillas scouts and a wing of bombers have entered the atmosphere above Kyushu. Yamato has been hit! You are to engage and tie down the bombers before reinforcements arrive"
Different unknown female voice: "Tiger one, Hyuga. This is CAG1 of the Contingent PEF air force. First and second air groups will assist you in this engagement. Medevac has been dispatched for your downed pilot, UN may recover them once you have the time."
Hyuga comms officer: "How did…"
CAG1: "Doesn't matter, can we get a goddamn ceasefire already?"
Hyuga: "...a ceasefire order has been authorized. We... apologize."
Unknown and mildly annoyed female voice: "This is Contingent Command, ceasefire accepted. Time for apologies would come later, let us focus on the Greens first."
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I am so glad we went crazy with point defense placements because judging by how high and fast Zeros were going those payloads were likely tipped with low yield nukes. I wasn't baiting the Garmillas forces but their orbital strike was conveniently timed and at least showed that we weren't on their side. We haven't even detected their orbital assets until one of them fired and the beam punched a hole in the atmospheric soot.
It was a squadron of six plus-shaped green objects with a large emitter in the middle. According to SBY wiki, these were Polmeria-class Astro Assault Carriers, 87% appearance match. One fired vaguely in the direction of the Yamato wreck while another dragged a bright blue beam across the terrain and through the middle of one of the carrier petals.
The beam wasn't strong enough to punch through the thick deck armor but it left a meter deep gash surrounded by white hot and slightly radioactive slag and disabled the second funni catapult. The weapon behaved like a heavy ion particle beam in its damage mechanism, but the radiation signature suggests that it contained antimatter and it was too coherent in a thick atmosphere to be a normal particle beam.
In turn, getting hit by an equivalent of five anti ship cruise missiles worth of laser did basically nothing to the green spacecraft. Somehow, the green hull reflected 99.9997% of incoming laser fire and the reflectivity didn't drop even as the armor material evaporated. I fucking hate their bullshit "rare earth coating" or however it was called in the show, most of Contingent long range spacecraft weaponry are lasers and now the fleet needs yet another refit to counter them.
We… might have overcompensated by launching the entire complement of surface to orbit proto-SNAK tipped missiles and firing a kinetic round out of the Fission Lance. The direct hit from a nuke condensed into a kinetic projectile barely left any debris as the small warships were reduced into splatters of vaporized metals. We had enough to send about a dozen of these per target. There likely won't be anything worth salvaging at this rate, pillage THEN burn.
Our air force had much better results against the green aircraft. Garmillas air-to-air missiles are vulnerable to the point defense lasers implemented in most T2 aircraft. ECM seems to have limited effect on their guidance which forced their pilots to rely on their guns and try to force a furball which was not advisable as Lightnings are equipped with two 30mm quench autocannons with universalized rounds which can shred tanks. Their aircraft hulls were pretty tough, but dia-nacre fragmentation warhead tipped missiles were sufficient to oneshot their scouts while bombers took a couple hits to take out enough systems.
Lightning fighters ended up with faster acceleration and more maneuverability than both Garmillas fighter and Type Zeros but they are atmospheric only air superiority multipurpose fighters and can't be used in space effectively. They can at most perform suborbital hops and enter low orbit with remass drop tanks and preparation. Still, this is a very respectable performance against an unknown technologically advanced foe. At least it doesn't seem like we'd need to bootstrap everything completely from scratch.
Once the Garmillas assets were finally wiped out we could get on with the first contact properly. One of the Zero pilots was ejected and they were recovered by our medical team. By the request of the UNCF they would remain where they landed and luckily they didn't have any immediate injuries besides a minor spinal cord compression trauma caused by the ejection. Our diplomatic team has arrived on site and will follow the pilot once he is recovered by his people to actually start the official talks. Interestingly, the local humans have somewhat larger eyes than in my home reality and Hail Mary, I hope we won't look too weird to them. Then again, Jane managed to make a friend regardless.
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Lt. Saburo Kato personal diary, 18th December 2198
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…Contingent fighters were deadly yet beautiful. Painted in white and orange, their shapes were smooth and flowing, almost organic. Their wings were swept forward and articulated. In combat they extended for maximum maneuverability while during flight they were positioned in line with the hull forming a narrow lifting body which seems too small to fly at lower speeds, probably they compensate for lost lift with reaction controls. Their pilot canopies were smaller and more integrated into the hulls suggesting that they likely fly entirely by the instruments.
I've managed to take a glimpse of one of the pilots. Once all Garmalons were wiped out one of their fighters approached me from the left and matched speeds. The canopy went black with visible hexagonal patterns before it became transparent revealing the pilot. She was wearing a flight suit in the same colors as her carrier and her helmet split into several pieces and retracted into the back of her seat. She had short dirty blonde hair, strangely small light blue eyes and freckles.
She smirked and waved before putting her helmet back on and veering her aircraft to the side as the canopy became opaque again. During the battle her jet shredded six enemy fighters and downed two bombers alone. How can someone so pretty be so deadly? I wonder if I will see her again…
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- Location
- Taken by the hand to a land that they understand
I know nothing about this show, besides it being a classic that's referenced everywhere, but I'm looking forward to your exploration of it!
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So was that actually a 'manned' fighter or did the good Lt there just get to see the 'screens' that make up the fighters 'cockpit' switch on and stream the piloting Ag's look from their virtual cockpit?
It was Jane actually, also known as Commander Air Group 1. We first met her when she was dropping off Athanatoi mecha on Outer Sister during the bug war in GeeBee system. Her appearance is inspired by Prez from Project: Wingman, specifically that one from the fan version and/or by CAG from NERV bridge simulator quest.
Lightning is an unmanned fighter craft, the canopy is placed around the primary sensor cluster which is why it is nearly flush with the hull. The outer part is covered in a screen which was made to stream from the virtual environment. If the canopy was damaged you'd see a huge robotic "eye" on swivels looking forward "through" the aircraft. The screen technology doesn't yet allow for active camo, but it is early tests towards that and it is designed specifically to fake having organic pilots
Ryven Razgriz
I need a Gun and I'll let you know 'What's up?'.
- Location
- South East Asia
On one hand, the UN of that 'verse has actually unified the world for realsies, as in, it's the 'United Nations' with an unsaid 'of Earth', an actual one-world government or at least as much as one with how few Humans and Human nations are left, they are also actually a lot more reasonable as they're Japanese NATO/UN flavored instead of the usual Western one. As long as you explain yourself properly, why you landed on their world and stuff, they're less likely to manipulate you and more likely to just take advantage of you non-harmfully.
Unfortunately for you, you will be dragged into conflicts in that 'verse especially what with their penchant for being Actual Magic, actual Fate/Destiny bullshit, and stuff.
Unfortunately for you, you will be dragged into conflicts in that 'verse especially what with their penchant for being Actual Magic, actual Fate/Destiny bullshit, and stuff.
- Location
- miami
First Part of the chapter confused me a bit, honesty not sure if I like what you did there feels almost too meta if that's even a thing. He had enough worries about maintain his humanity durning his journey let alone having a hidden chat room inside him self? What?
Thanks for the chapter.
Thanks for the chapter.
If technology is exchange. Hopefully the UNCF military won't die like dogs to Gamilan weapons. Their anthem was so cheerful as they were getting massacre.
- Location
- USA
These types of stories have a lot of odd meta stuff that is just part of the subgenre at this point. Pity, because I think they'd be stronger without that element.
Yeah, I figured that the meta bit might be controversial, I didn't initially intend it to be too meta. Initially it was supposed to be just a PA commander chat and maybe a few guest appearances but apparently the other writers already had meta-mechanics implemented there so I had a chance to either let the meta ooze into the story unintentionally or to structure it preemptively so that the future worldbuilding remains coherent. I didn't intend for other commanders to start mapping the multiverse in an attempt to save Ag from her ROB, the expected reaction would be more like "we can't find where you are even vaguely so good luck, you'll need it". In turn finding Ag became a hidden side objective for the C-team which was entirely unintentional on my side but that's the price you pay for implementing collab setting mechanics.
Meta elements won't have much impact on the Ag's story itself until the very late endgame. The impact for most of the story would be mostly psychological and Ag has managed to compartmentalize the subject for when she can actually do something about it. There are some lower layer meta elements that would be relevant to the story regarding Ag's ROB and the beings known as Verse Travelers. An example would be that Ag's multiversal catapult's navigation system is biomimetic to the method that VTs use to travel through the reality. However, these plot points are in very early stages.
Log 23: “How did we get here?”
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Log 23: "How did we get here?"
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"Look, I understand your desperate situation, but attempting to guilt trip me into helping you is counterproductive. If Contingent is to save you it would be because it is a right thing to do and not because you think that we should be responsible for where we landed via a blind jump which unintentionally exposed your last ditch effort for salvation to your enemies. If we had a choice we'd land literally anywhere else. Any further attempts to push this subject would result in the breakdown of our cooperation. Are we clear?"
-Agatha during the initial talks with United Nations of Earth
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When writing fiction you can't account for all the possible effects of the new technologies and on their full impact on society and culture so it is understandable why older works lack certain features common in our modern reality. For instance, how many sci- fi stories lack the smartphones, personal computers, realistic use of VR/AR, generative AI and all the cultural phenomena stemming from that such as memes?
Star Trek has communicators and tricorders which have most functions of smartphones, but you couldn't find a single officer or civilian playing a "phone game", looking up memes or scrolling through social media in their off time and instead ending up getting bored the old fashioned way. The cultural impact couldn't be predicted until it became so ubiquitous that it would be weird not to include it in the new works or adaptations of old stories.
SBY is an old story, a VERY old story, the original series was made in 1974 and it even had plot points which couldn't be transferred to the 2012 reboot such as how Yamato crew had a beef with Andromeda being so automated and digitized instead of crewed and analog. The culture of the world I ended up in seems to be more like a result of someone in the past imagining the future rather than my modern world naturally progressing into this state. It is an unintentional alternative history.
For instance, while IRL smartphones were incredibly popular since 2007, here the concept of a smartphone flopped as a whole and instead their version of a phone ended up directly evolving from the older portable phones. Yes, everyone has one, but they have a fraction of the functions of our smartphones. They can call, video call and send text messages but they don't get high quality cameras, the internet browsers on them are limited in usability and there is no such thing as "app stores" where you can easily download tools or games.
They do have home computers, laptops and tablets but computer games ended up pretty heavily regulated at the start of their development and never formed into a huge entertainment market. In fact, it seems that there's a significant cultural bias against video games as something that is either for children or no- life addicts. Video games are not accepted as an art medium here on par with movies even though it has been almost two hundred years since they appeared.
Similar things occurred with memes and the internet in general. Rather than integrating the culture of memes and fandoms into mainstream, most of the adult population considers it a thing for young people and freaks, something you grow out of or something you should be ashamed of participating in if you are a productive member of society and older than 30. No one has managed to successfully launch a social network either. To quote the Contingent anthropologic task force report, "this is a 2000s normie future world".
There are some aspects that are somewhat familiar such as "idols", but they don't stream interactive content as if they were pre- internet idols. They are more like music stars or eye candy news providers rather than what I used to do. It is relatively common to have indie idols running news programs with coverage of only the immediate workplace or neighborhood which is helped somewhat by the local human physiology. SBY human women "visibly" age slower and thus appear in their early to mid 20s all the way until they are near 50.
There is also no neural net generated content or automation. Without mass adoption of the internet culture there was less attention from corporations seeking to predict and influence the consumers as they instead carved out a chunk of the internet only for businesses and institutions. With less collected data you can't run effective big data analysis which has prevented the development of deep learning and generative AI.
Their AI is based on direct neural emulation of animal and human derived brains welded into hardcoded directives resulting in expensive and fully self aware AGI which can't be perfectly copied to different hardware. Ironically, SBY humans managed to brute force their way to general intelligence by applying less finesse and sophistication and compensating with way more brute force calculation and custom designed neuromorphic hardware while Hail Mary Earth is still dealing with sapient but not sentient or self aware systems.
To note, while common discourse wiped out the subtle differences, sentient means "can experience pleasure or pain" like complex animals, sapient means "human equivalent complex thought" like reason, abstraction, creativity and so on while consciousness or self awareness is being aware of your existence. These things are correlated, but they are not directly linked.
Hail Mary AI can emulate having emotions through sapience (what is the likeliest emotional response) without actually experiencing things or being aware that things actually happen. Nothing physically stops you from making a neural net that feels, but as of now the only neural networks that were proven to genuinely feel were brain simulations of animals, networks which use animal brain architecture as a base or networks developed via evolutionary algorithms in simulated biospheres.
SBY locals still have a degree of "smart cities", but instead of people sharing their preferences unknowingly via the internet, the governments instead have mass public surveillance. This is not that effective because without deep learning image recognition you can only extract bare minimum useful information and you can't predict or even detect antisocial behavior since you can't put enough people or sapient AGI to watch everyone else. They are actually having quite a problem with that and terrorist attacks of a whole plethora of different extremist groups are unfortunately relatively common.
I should note that SBY humans are biologically distinct from my original or Hail Mary humanity. They are still Homo Sapiens, they work under the same biology and their genetics are similar enough for a human from SBY and a human from Hail Mary to successfully reproduce. However, they are different enough that they can't be considered to be simply different "races" or "ethnicities" while they are not different enough to be subspecies in biological sense.
To us they appear to have weak "animesque" features, but since there's no stylized filter they look much different from "anime characters". Their eyes are on average around 25% bigger. If you wanted to draw a Hail Mary human the head would be "5 eyes wide", SBY human head would be 4 eyes wide. It was somewhat awkward because to them we look almost like "inverse Grays" with uncannily small eyes. It was a simple matter to do a field modification of the diplomatic telerobots to look more like locals but it was not appreciated by the UN delegation. They tolerated it but appeared unnerved by our nature and capability to alter the appearances in relatively short order.
Other distinct features aren't so noticeable, they on average have less body hair, slightly "better looking" smoother skin with more collagen than in HM and they have statistically less common hereditary obesity (even accounting for wartime dietary restrictions) with ectomorph body type being almost three times more common. SBY women are genetically predisposed to have half a cup more in the chest region and the hourglass body type is almost twice as common as on Hail Mary Earth. SBY men are about 32% less likely to develop male pattern baldness, their facial structures are slightly less sensitive to testosterone resulting in more common "androgynous faces" and slightly less common sharp jawlines. Still, beyond just the eye proportions you wouldn't notice significant differences to my original humanity unless you do statistical studies or genetic sequencing.
Their history is also wildly different to that of our Earth with the split occurring around the year 2000, although less noticeable changes likely occurred way earlier. They entered a period that our anthropologists named "modern post-history" characterized by societal stabilization, economic advancements and peaceful merger between countries into regional blocs.
Certain events which happened IRL didn't occur here, there was no 9-11 and no war on terror, Putin was only elected once and Russia ended up as mostly functioning democracy aligned with the European Union, Covid hasn't occurred and there were no notable developments in the field of commercial spaceflight as it stayed a prerogative of governments. Beyond that the butterfly effect is so strong that it is unfeasible to mention all the discrepancies.
The first human mission to Mars via a spacecraft assembled conventionally in orbit occurred in 2026, but it progressed similarly to Apollo missions. Astronauts landed, did a bunch of science and returned within a year or two with no permanent settlements. This changed in 2111 when an alien spacecraft crash landed on Mars.
All alien crew was killed and there was no human presence on the planet at the time, but the ship carried an automated terraforming system which rapidly altered Mars' environment to that similar to Earth in just a decade. It was by no means shirt-sleeve, but atmospheric pressure and composition became breathable and temperatures approached those found in tundra environments on Earth.
Humanity by that point formed into six post- nation state agglomerations: Far East District centered around Japan, Korea, Oceania and Australia, European Union which now stretched all the way to Urals and took parts of northern Africa, Middle East which was surprisingly focused around what used to be India, Eurasia which went from Urals to the eastern parts of former Russia merged with most of former China, America stretching across both continents and Africa taking up all of its continent from Egypt all the way to former South African Republic.
The discovery of the alien spacecraft facilitated social integration of the strong regional alliances into giant federations and confederations which then merged into one huge confederation under the banner of the United Nations. I feel like realpolitik had to be really funky at the time for that to happen, but I'm dealing with a reality and not a fictional story so I have to take them at face value.
Terraformed Mars also allowed for the first human colonies to be formed to study the alien machinery and to add the Earth biosphere to stabilize the climate and make it self sufficient. Over the years colonies grew to hundreds of millions of people and light lag prevented maintenance of a coherent nation across interplanetary space which caused the "post-history" period to end.
The First Interplanetary War in 2164 saw the destruction of the fleet of interplanetary cyclers cutting off the movement of humans between Mars and Earth. The war had little repercussions to the UN citizens as it has simply recognized the independence of the Martian government and the only result of it was the severance of shipments in supplies and human migrants which is what Martians apparently wanted.
Humans born on Mars in the second generation started exhibiting certain cosmetic features which weren't present in any human ethnicity before, in particular red colored irises in combination of somewhat darker skin even though most Martian settlers came from Eurasian bloc. The Martian government has, of course, gone off the deep end with authoritarian nationalism and pushed on with reverse engineering of alien spacecraft and the rhetoric about the destruction of Earthlings. This resulted in the formation of the Martian Space Fleet.
In response, the UN became federalized and engaged in the creation of their own space navy using alien technology which could be acquired via espionage and from before Mars became independent resulting in the first Murasame and Kongo class ships. This is also when underground cities were built since the UN feared an equivalent of massed nuclear strike from the Martians.
The Second Interplanetary War was initiated by presumably Martian provocation in 2180 and it ended in 2183. Martians used orbital bombardment with laser weapons on civilian targets such as cities and farming centers on Earth and as a result once their government was defeated all Martians were forcefully moved to Earth and the Martian colony was abandoned. Mars was slowly losing habitability anyway, but the resettlement was mostly driven by the resentment from UN citizens. Martians were settled randomly in UN nations and intentionally spread broadly so that they couldn't easily form martian communities.
There is still some "racial profiling" as "marsoids" (a near-slur term for their ethnicity) are still thought of as cruel authoritarian war-criminals even though the current Martian young adults were children during the second interplanetary war and they didn't have the chance to maintain Martian culture. Martian red eyes are recessive and it is expected that they would no longer exist as an ethnicity within two to three generations. Let's just say that I'm appalled by this, but I won't let this be a reason for us to abandon these people.
Most of the reverse engineered alien technology relies on a material that humans call "cosmonite 90". Terrible name and no one could tell me why it is called that way since it is not a conventional isotope, but it is important and used everywhere. It is prized for its interactions with the "subspace" environment. Spaceships forgo rockets and instead run on something akin to subspace ramjets. It is also used in power plants such as fusion reactor containment, power routing systems, laser focal lenses and pumping mediums, particle and mass accelerators, nanofabricators, etc. It is even used in what can only be described as "subspace control surfaces" and "gravitational anchors" in direct parallel to aircraft and wet navy.
This material is relatively rare and doesn't naturally occur in sufficient concentrations on Earth to extract and after the Interplanetary Wars no human permanent settlement was permitted outside cislunar space resulting in at most town sized mining and research habitats across the solar system. With the start of the war with Garmillas in 2190 most of the mining stations were wiped out or evacuated to Earth resulting in shortages of the material and strict rationing for the military and life support systems.
UN representatives claim that Garmillas' fleet shot first and refused communications for years until they started making demands to surrender once the Earth environment became uninhabitable. I know that in the reboot humans fired first, but that might not be accurate to this reality. For instance, in the reboot the Yamato was updated to be broken in half as it was not known at the time of the original series, but in this reality there is only one chunk of Yamato sticking out of the dry mud at an angle. I mentioned that the Contingent considers Garmillas ecocide and xenocide as war crimes regardless of who shot first but the UN insisted on their version and I can't know for sure until I find direct evidence beyond the meta.
The current state of the humans is unenviable, out of 12 billion people only 2,4 billion survived in the overcrowded underground cities which were designed to house less than half as many. Food production was hastily expanded but it is strained resulting in calorie quotas and food riots but at least they didn't have to resort to starvation diets just yet.
Also these cities weren't planned to function in Venus- like environments, the main power production facilities are geothermal which rely on gradient of temperature between the surface and the mantle. With the rising surface temperatures they lost an order of magnitude worth of their power production efficiency and citizens periodically suffer through rolling blackouts as power is redirected to prioritized functions like temperature control, life support or industry.
This resulted in the UN hastily constructing power generators based around nuclear and fossil fuels (since there's still oxygen outside) but the know-how of fission power plant construction was lost over generations of accessible fusion power while their fusion plants rely on rationed cosmonite. At the same time remaining fossil fuel reserves are running dangerously low.
Low access to power in combination with overcrowding, working population loss and industry crunch results in insufficient maintenance of the underground city systems. It is expected that within about a year and a half first catastrophic failures would start occurring where whole cities would become uninhabitable. Hydroponic farms could collapse in an entire region, existing fusion generators can wear out, water and oxygen processors can fail or massive heat pumps keeping the temperatures livable can break. Any of those would result in everyone in the city dying out faster than replacement could be acquired.
In addition, within two years the known fossil fuel reserves would run out cutting the power supply of humanity by 40% and affecting even more maintenance and industry. The other problem is also alien plants that grow all across the Earth's surface. They produce highly potent neurotoxic gas which is heavier than air, they also pump cobalt deep into the soil and they've already penetrated upper layers of some of the underground cities forcing these layers to be sealed and abandoned as no known defoliant worked on them.
Essentially, in about a year and a half a "sudden death" timer would start where randomly humans would start losing 10 to 15% of their population and industry while survival of the human civilization beyond the next 5 years is infeasible. The surrender to Garmillas is not even considered due to reasons that I didn't expect. There's no propaganda that the aliens would just kill everyone regardless. Instead the psychological effect is similar to that in WW2 in Germany and Japan during strategic bombing campaigns. Everyone's depressed and knows that they will most likely lose the war and die but the process is impersonal enough that there is no large push for surrender. It feels more like a constant natural disaster rather than an invasion of a foreign power.
The problems facing us are twofold and one is much more pressing, but one at a time. First of all, I don't think that it would be possible to maintain the habitability of human cities indefinitely. While I can build powerplants, bootstrap food production and expand the infrastructure to house more people I doubt that I can maintain it for decades. Locals would be increasingly dependent on me and any errors would cause disastrous loss of life the longer I have to maintain the underground cities.
Yes, there's the Yamato plan, of course. Queen Starsha of the Iscandarian civilization has promised a "cosmo reversal" device (whatever that is) if a human starship manages to get to her home planet, but it is possible that my presence tipped the scales so much that Yamato won't survive the trip or Iscandarians won't provide the device due to my involvement. I have to prepare a plan B, if not several plans.
I need a way to evacuate humans somewhere safer even if temporarily and evacuation on the scale of billions is not simple. I can't just gate everyone to somewhere safe, the gates are vulnerable to sabotage which would be a threat both from the human and Garmillas sides. Mars is no longer easily breathable, no local infrastructure can be repurposed and SBY humans still don't want to touch it with a ten foot pole for… "cultural reasons". No other place in the star system is as habitable so it leaves sealed planetary or space habitats.
Any surface facility would have lower gravity than on Earth resulting in long term health complications but any hab that is pinpointed by the ayys would be destroyed by interplanetary missiles that can penetrate deeper than any bunker. This basically leaves the space habitats, but at least I can move and defend those. Unfortunately to make them I need a lot of materials and space launch infrastructure that as of yet has only existed in papers and simulations.
There's also the other Earth, but I'd consider moving them to Hail Mary only in the most severe case. When the Groombridge war started I shared the information about ROB's involvement and the peculiarities of my extraversal navigation so it won't be too much of a shock, but the general populace wasn't informed of that. In addition, 2,4 billion people is a lot, there is not enough housing or food production on Earth to accommodate them rapidly. It would take a lot of effort to feed, house and integrate everyone while preventing them from accidentally shipping in cosmonite or ending up in a conflict of interests.
There's also Krevati, the third planet in Homina system. The atmosphere is breathable for humans and radiation levels dropped to only a couple times the standard background, but it is a cratered wasteland covered in wreckage and bug skeletons. The most complex lifeforms are single celled and I expect that merely demonstrating such a world would raise some eyebrows, but I'll start the preparations on that side just in case.
The second and most pressing problem is Garmillas, also referred to as "Garmalons" "Gamalons" and "Gammies" by UN soldiers. Humans don't know who or what they are. In the original show and the reboot they are essentially imperialistic "alien humans" because all humanoid people in the galaxy were seeded by long gone precursors, but in the live action movie they were an alien hive mind so I can't discount that possibility. I need to test various approaches and technologies against them and salvage anything I can get my hands on for analysis and reverse engineering.
The time-sensitive bit is that they are expected to hit any known force concentration on Earth within one to two months with an "interplanetary missile", a guided nuclear weapon of terrifying power. Why they aren't using multiple smaller nukes is beyond me, but each of these bombs is like a quarter of a dinosaur killer. A direct hit would collapse an underground city, evaporate Yamato construction site or destroy the commander chassis.
Locals also found them near impossible to intercept for unspecified reasons. In short, I have to have the interceptors ready on record time and I've already ordered maximum bootstrapping effort. I can't afford to just move out of the way because I landed almost exactly on top of one of the major underground cities.
The UN wasn't happy with me demanding exact locations of their cities and any mineral veins that they were tapping, but they conceded after a couple days. I needed to know where not to put the extractors. It turned out that a few of the deposits that I've discovered were in fact upper sections of the shelters. If I thoughtlessly plopped some MEXes there it would've been very embarrassing for me and deadly for the inhabitants.
The Earth's resources wouldn't be enough. Yes, Earth is the densest planet in the solar system and yes it has the richest and easiest to exploit metal deposits due to millennia of water concentrating useful minerals downstream. Unfortunately, it also has scared desperate humans and it gets bombed on the regular. I'll have to send fabbers to Venus and Mercury to establish the resource base needed to build the multiversal gate and fleets to protect it.
It won't take a genius to see that hostile rapidly replicating machines are not a great thing to have in the backyard so I expect that Garmillas would attempt to shoot down our interplanetary missions as a priority and they would bomb landing sites before they have a chance to build defenses. This means that I need to launch large waves of fabbers supported by warships directly from the ground… which means I'm forced to use Orions and not minimags. I'll also have to replace most lasers but luckily the designs are sufficiently modular for a near drag and drop of alternative systems such as macrons and particle beams.
According to the UN, Garmillas appear to use FTL jumps in system, but for an unknown reason they only apply it to raiding forces. Most likely humans managed to fool them into thinking that they have more ships than they actually do as they managed to win two pyrrhic victories above Mars and one above Earth. I'll need to be ready for small harassing forces popping up with no warning, but large enough movements might attract main Garmillas forces.
I will have a window soon, however. Iscandarians have sent their representative a couple years earlier with plans for ship systems required to utilize a "wave motion core", but the core itself is destined to arrive within a month. The UN is sending basically every single one of their space worthy ships in a massive diversion at Pluto masked as an attempt to destroy the Garmillas base in the region. This is the main reason why I wasn't pounded into the ground by hundreds of warships from orbit, the ships that went up against me had mechanical issues incompatible with deep space travel.
These ships are going to get massacred and I have nothing that I can send to help them. They are already positioned in deep space with the attack planned on January 17 which is just under a month from now. Pluto is 7 light hours away and at 50g my ships could get there within about 3 days but I don't have the catom supply to fuel enough ships to matter. An interplanetary missile of my own would get there within 1.2 days but I can't guarantee the destruction of the enemy base and Garmillas response would likely be… proportional.
Garmillas forces have deciphered human language and thus I could try to draw attention by making a public declaration of war, but it would be counterproductive to the diversion as it would draw attention to the inner solar system and by extension to Mars which is the rendezvous site for the second Iscandarian visitor. This might still end up as a useful tool as Garmillas in the show have a "roman warfare" thing where they "technically only wage defensive wars" and they did shoot me first so I should draw attention and potentially destabilize them politically long term.
This unfortunately means that there's no practical method to save the first UN fleet and a lot of good people would die soon. But their sacrifices won't be in vain as Contingent will undergo the most rapid industrial ramp up in our history. The margins are tight and they're about to get tighter…
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AWCU escort Lightning 1-1 sensor log, operator: Commander Air Group 1, Jane Hive. 24th December 2198
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Contingent fighter sits in a large hangar next to another two identical craft and a larger personnel transport VTOL. The rest of the hangar space is full of UN fighter craft and personnel. They seem to mostly avoid the contingent assets, but a few engineers are curiously nosing around the various design elements of the CTG aircraft. Contingent assets look as if they have next to no seams or welds, almost as if they are monolithic and forged whole out of a material with pearl- like sheen.
There are only two Contingent representatives on site, the rest were long gone to accompany the diplomats. Both appear human in size and shape and both are wearing white and orange flight/space suits with armored elements and light exoskeleton joints. The suits are streamlined enough for it to be quite obvious that both Contingent pilots were women. Both are wearing helmets with featureless visors and holsters with magazines and bullpup PDWs can be seen strapped to their belt and upper right thigh.
The one with number 2 printed on the suit's helmet and shoulder is walking around the transport aircraft and inspecting it while the other instance branded with number 1 is seen curiously observing a type 99 Cosmo Falcon with gray color scheme as opposed to most other Falcons that have primarily blue paint jobs. It has large red triangles painted next to the wing control surfaces and the fin has a black triangle with a Japanese symbol painted in it in white.
The Contingent pilot doesn't seem to notice that another figure approaches behind her. It is a UN pilot wearing a flight uniform and a swamp green bomber jacket over it. The jacket has "Cosmo Falcon" written across the back circling a large insignia depicting a falcon. The pilot is a young man with a very short haircut and a thin scar going through the left brow and up his forehead taking out some hairline.
"Look but don't touch" he says as he is around 10 steps away from the number 1, she turns away from the "space fighter" to face the pilot. "Type-99 space attack fighter aircraft, aka Cosmo Falcon. This one is mine. You here to sightsee?" he asks rhetorically.
The Contingent pilot wiggles her right hand in a "so-so" motion and replies "Different technologies, different designs. I'm honestly surprised that you use so many manned aircraft, we've long switched to drones."
"Drones?" the UN pilot asks and raises an eyebrow.
"Robotic remotely operated or autonomous units, most of the Contingent armed forces consists of those, although we now mostly refer to only smaller units as "drones". Oh, where are my manners, I'm Jane Hive, Commander Air Group 1. The pilot over there is Dareia, she's CAG 2." she says as she points at her colleague, in response to which CAG 2 waves back before returning to her devices.
"Lieutenant junior grade Saburo Kato. I believe we've met"
CAG 1: "Yeah, it is nice to meet you face to face, Tiger One. Well, for a limited degree of "face", I'm told that most of the people here consider our facial features a bit uncanny. I hope this helps…" she says as the helmet visor goes transparent revealing the freckled face of the pilot. Her eyes, however, are now proportioned like those of the locals
Lt. Kato "That's…"
CAG 1: "A screen, yes. I didn't have the time to fix the face beforehand, sorry"
Lt. Kato: "It is unnecessary, you shouldn't change your appearance so drastically just because of what people might think."
CAG 1 sighs, unseals the latch on the neck and takes off her helmet causing quite a few of the staff to look in her direction. Below the helmet she was mostly the same, but the eyes were 25% smaller. "Well, you didn't take a step back so I'll take it as a compliment. But seriously, it is not as big of a deal as for other humans. We design our own appearances and we can alter them with relative ease."
Lt. Kato stands silent for a few moments and replies "If you say so. Which one is yours by the way?"
Jane shrugs and says "Oh, they all are". Kato does a double take.
Jane giggles and continues: "I'm serious, I'm not technically the commander of the first air group, I am literally the first air group. I operate all of the air wing at once." She claps twice and the nearest Lightning's cockpit becomes "transparent" revealing a bunch of sensors on a turret behind the "glass". The sensor "eye" turns towards Jane and then follows her hand in perfect sync. "The fighter is smart enough to navigate, maneuver and engage specific targets on its own, if that is not enough I can take one over manually or another instance can show up to assist remotely. I guess being able to think at arbitrary high rate also helps"
Lt Kato: "Aren't you supposed to be humans from parallel Earth?"
Jane: "Yep, why can't we be both? Used to be human, ended up as a machine one day. Quick tip, careful with the android girls, there's some heavy machinery in here" she says with a wink
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Log 23: "How did we get here?"
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"Look, I understand your desperate situation, but attempting to guilt trip me into helping you is counterproductive. If Contingent is to save you it would be because it is a right thing to do and not because you think that we should be responsible for where we landed via a blind jump which unintentionally exposed your last ditch effort for salvation to your enemies. If we had a choice we'd land literally anywhere else. Any further attempts to push this subject would result in the breakdown of our cooperation. Are we clear?"
-Agatha during the initial talks with United Nations of Earth
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When writing fiction you can't account for all the possible effects of the new technologies and on their full impact on society and culture so it is understandable why older works lack certain features common in our modern reality. For instance, how many sci- fi stories lack the smartphones, personal computers, realistic use of VR/AR, generative AI and all the cultural phenomena stemming from that such as memes?
Star Trek has communicators and tricorders which have most functions of smartphones, but you couldn't find a single officer or civilian playing a "phone game", looking up memes or scrolling through social media in their off time and instead ending up getting bored the old fashioned way. The cultural impact couldn't be predicted until it became so ubiquitous that it would be weird not to include it in the new works or adaptations of old stories.
SBY is an old story, a VERY old story, the original series was made in 1974 and it even had plot points which couldn't be transferred to the 2012 reboot such as how Yamato crew had a beef with Andromeda being so automated and digitized instead of crewed and analog. The culture of the world I ended up in seems to be more like a result of someone in the past imagining the future rather than my modern world naturally progressing into this state. It is an unintentional alternative history.
For instance, while IRL smartphones were incredibly popular since 2007, here the concept of a smartphone flopped as a whole and instead their version of a phone ended up directly evolving from the older portable phones. Yes, everyone has one, but they have a fraction of the functions of our smartphones. They can call, video call and send text messages but they don't get high quality cameras, the internet browsers on them are limited in usability and there is no such thing as "app stores" where you can easily download tools or games.
They do have home computers, laptops and tablets but computer games ended up pretty heavily regulated at the start of their development and never formed into a huge entertainment market. In fact, it seems that there's a significant cultural bias against video games as something that is either for children or no- life addicts. Video games are not accepted as an art medium here on par with movies even though it has been almost two hundred years since they appeared.
Similar things occurred with memes and the internet in general. Rather than integrating the culture of memes and fandoms into mainstream, most of the adult population considers it a thing for young people and freaks, something you grow out of or something you should be ashamed of participating in if you are a productive member of society and older than 30. No one has managed to successfully launch a social network either. To quote the Contingent anthropologic task force report, "this is a 2000s normie future world".
There are some aspects that are somewhat familiar such as "idols", but they don't stream interactive content as if they were pre- internet idols. They are more like music stars or eye candy news providers rather than what I used to do. It is relatively common to have indie idols running news programs with coverage of only the immediate workplace or neighborhood which is helped somewhat by the local human physiology. SBY human women "visibly" age slower and thus appear in their early to mid 20s all the way until they are near 50.
There is also no neural net generated content or automation. Without mass adoption of the internet culture there was less attention from corporations seeking to predict and influence the consumers as they instead carved out a chunk of the internet only for businesses and institutions. With less collected data you can't run effective big data analysis which has prevented the development of deep learning and generative AI.
Their AI is based on direct neural emulation of animal and human derived brains welded into hardcoded directives resulting in expensive and fully self aware AGI which can't be perfectly copied to different hardware. Ironically, SBY humans managed to brute force their way to general intelligence by applying less finesse and sophistication and compensating with way more brute force calculation and custom designed neuromorphic hardware while Hail Mary Earth is still dealing with sapient but not sentient or self aware systems.
To note, while common discourse wiped out the subtle differences, sentient means "can experience pleasure or pain" like complex animals, sapient means "human equivalent complex thought" like reason, abstraction, creativity and so on while consciousness or self awareness is being aware of your existence. These things are correlated, but they are not directly linked.
Hail Mary AI can emulate having emotions through sapience (what is the likeliest emotional response) without actually experiencing things or being aware that things actually happen. Nothing physically stops you from making a neural net that feels, but as of now the only neural networks that were proven to genuinely feel were brain simulations of animals, networks which use animal brain architecture as a base or networks developed via evolutionary algorithms in simulated biospheres.
SBY locals still have a degree of "smart cities", but instead of people sharing their preferences unknowingly via the internet, the governments instead have mass public surveillance. This is not that effective because without deep learning image recognition you can only extract bare minimum useful information and you can't predict or even detect antisocial behavior since you can't put enough people or sapient AGI to watch everyone else. They are actually having quite a problem with that and terrorist attacks of a whole plethora of different extremist groups are unfortunately relatively common.
I should note that SBY humans are biologically distinct from my original or Hail Mary humanity. They are still Homo Sapiens, they work under the same biology and their genetics are similar enough for a human from SBY and a human from Hail Mary to successfully reproduce. However, they are different enough that they can't be considered to be simply different "races" or "ethnicities" while they are not different enough to be subspecies in biological sense.
To us they appear to have weak "animesque" features, but since there's no stylized filter they look much different from "anime characters". Their eyes are on average around 25% bigger. If you wanted to draw a Hail Mary human the head would be "5 eyes wide", SBY human head would be 4 eyes wide. It was somewhat awkward because to them we look almost like "inverse Grays" with uncannily small eyes. It was a simple matter to do a field modification of the diplomatic telerobots to look more like locals but it was not appreciated by the UN delegation. They tolerated it but appeared unnerved by our nature and capability to alter the appearances in relatively short order.
Other distinct features aren't so noticeable, they on average have less body hair, slightly "better looking" smoother skin with more collagen than in HM and they have statistically less common hereditary obesity (even accounting for wartime dietary restrictions) with ectomorph body type being almost three times more common. SBY women are genetically predisposed to have half a cup more in the chest region and the hourglass body type is almost twice as common as on Hail Mary Earth. SBY men are about 32% less likely to develop male pattern baldness, their facial structures are slightly less sensitive to testosterone resulting in more common "androgynous faces" and slightly less common sharp jawlines. Still, beyond just the eye proportions you wouldn't notice significant differences to my original humanity unless you do statistical studies or genetic sequencing.
Their history is also wildly different to that of our Earth with the split occurring around the year 2000, although less noticeable changes likely occurred way earlier. They entered a period that our anthropologists named "modern post-history" characterized by societal stabilization, economic advancements and peaceful merger between countries into regional blocs.
Certain events which happened IRL didn't occur here, there was no 9-11 and no war on terror, Putin was only elected once and Russia ended up as mostly functioning democracy aligned with the European Union, Covid hasn't occurred and there were no notable developments in the field of commercial spaceflight as it stayed a prerogative of governments. Beyond that the butterfly effect is so strong that it is unfeasible to mention all the discrepancies.
The first human mission to Mars via a spacecraft assembled conventionally in orbit occurred in 2026, but it progressed similarly to Apollo missions. Astronauts landed, did a bunch of science and returned within a year or two with no permanent settlements. This changed in 2111 when an alien spacecraft crash landed on Mars.
All alien crew was killed and there was no human presence on the planet at the time, but the ship carried an automated terraforming system which rapidly altered Mars' environment to that similar to Earth in just a decade. It was by no means shirt-sleeve, but atmospheric pressure and composition became breathable and temperatures approached those found in tundra environments on Earth.
Humanity by that point formed into six post- nation state agglomerations: Far East District centered around Japan, Korea, Oceania and Australia, European Union which now stretched all the way to Urals and took parts of northern Africa, Middle East which was surprisingly focused around what used to be India, Eurasia which went from Urals to the eastern parts of former Russia merged with most of former China, America stretching across both continents and Africa taking up all of its continent from Egypt all the way to former South African Republic.
The discovery of the alien spacecraft facilitated social integration of the strong regional alliances into giant federations and confederations which then merged into one huge confederation under the banner of the United Nations. I feel like realpolitik had to be really funky at the time for that to happen, but I'm dealing with a reality and not a fictional story so I have to take them at face value.
Terraformed Mars also allowed for the first human colonies to be formed to study the alien machinery and to add the Earth biosphere to stabilize the climate and make it self sufficient. Over the years colonies grew to hundreds of millions of people and light lag prevented maintenance of a coherent nation across interplanetary space which caused the "post-history" period to end.
The First Interplanetary War in 2164 saw the destruction of the fleet of interplanetary cyclers cutting off the movement of humans between Mars and Earth. The war had little repercussions to the UN citizens as it has simply recognized the independence of the Martian government and the only result of it was the severance of shipments in supplies and human migrants which is what Martians apparently wanted.
Humans born on Mars in the second generation started exhibiting certain cosmetic features which weren't present in any human ethnicity before, in particular red colored irises in combination of somewhat darker skin even though most Martian settlers came from Eurasian bloc. The Martian government has, of course, gone off the deep end with authoritarian nationalism and pushed on with reverse engineering of alien spacecraft and the rhetoric about the destruction of Earthlings. This resulted in the formation of the Martian Space Fleet.
In response, the UN became federalized and engaged in the creation of their own space navy using alien technology which could be acquired via espionage and from before Mars became independent resulting in the first Murasame and Kongo class ships. This is also when underground cities were built since the UN feared an equivalent of massed nuclear strike from the Martians.
The Second Interplanetary War was initiated by presumably Martian provocation in 2180 and it ended in 2183. Martians used orbital bombardment with laser weapons on civilian targets such as cities and farming centers on Earth and as a result once their government was defeated all Martians were forcefully moved to Earth and the Martian colony was abandoned. Mars was slowly losing habitability anyway, but the resettlement was mostly driven by the resentment from UN citizens. Martians were settled randomly in UN nations and intentionally spread broadly so that they couldn't easily form martian communities.
There is still some "racial profiling" as "marsoids" (a near-slur term for their ethnicity) are still thought of as cruel authoritarian war-criminals even though the current Martian young adults were children during the second interplanetary war and they didn't have the chance to maintain Martian culture. Martian red eyes are recessive and it is expected that they would no longer exist as an ethnicity within two to three generations. Let's just say that I'm appalled by this, but I won't let this be a reason for us to abandon these people.
Most of the reverse engineered alien technology relies on a material that humans call "cosmonite 90". Terrible name and no one could tell me why it is called that way since it is not a conventional isotope, but it is important and used everywhere. It is prized for its interactions with the "subspace" environment. Spaceships forgo rockets and instead run on something akin to subspace ramjets. It is also used in power plants such as fusion reactor containment, power routing systems, laser focal lenses and pumping mediums, particle and mass accelerators, nanofabricators, etc. It is even used in what can only be described as "subspace control surfaces" and "gravitational anchors" in direct parallel to aircraft and wet navy.
This material is relatively rare and doesn't naturally occur in sufficient concentrations on Earth to extract and after the Interplanetary Wars no human permanent settlement was permitted outside cislunar space resulting in at most town sized mining and research habitats across the solar system. With the start of the war with Garmillas in 2190 most of the mining stations were wiped out or evacuated to Earth resulting in shortages of the material and strict rationing for the military and life support systems.
UN representatives claim that Garmillas' fleet shot first and refused communications for years until they started making demands to surrender once the Earth environment became uninhabitable. I know that in the reboot humans fired first, but that might not be accurate to this reality. For instance, in the reboot the Yamato was updated to be broken in half as it was not known at the time of the original series, but in this reality there is only one chunk of Yamato sticking out of the dry mud at an angle. I mentioned that the Contingent considers Garmillas ecocide and xenocide as war crimes regardless of who shot first but the UN insisted on their version and I can't know for sure until I find direct evidence beyond the meta.
The current state of the humans is unenviable, out of 12 billion people only 2,4 billion survived in the overcrowded underground cities which were designed to house less than half as many. Food production was hastily expanded but it is strained resulting in calorie quotas and food riots but at least they didn't have to resort to starvation diets just yet.
Also these cities weren't planned to function in Venus- like environments, the main power production facilities are geothermal which rely on gradient of temperature between the surface and the mantle. With the rising surface temperatures they lost an order of magnitude worth of their power production efficiency and citizens periodically suffer through rolling blackouts as power is redirected to prioritized functions like temperature control, life support or industry.
This resulted in the UN hastily constructing power generators based around nuclear and fossil fuels (since there's still oxygen outside) but the know-how of fission power plant construction was lost over generations of accessible fusion power while their fusion plants rely on rationed cosmonite. At the same time remaining fossil fuel reserves are running dangerously low.
Low access to power in combination with overcrowding, working population loss and industry crunch results in insufficient maintenance of the underground city systems. It is expected that within about a year and a half first catastrophic failures would start occurring where whole cities would become uninhabitable. Hydroponic farms could collapse in an entire region, existing fusion generators can wear out, water and oxygen processors can fail or massive heat pumps keeping the temperatures livable can break. Any of those would result in everyone in the city dying out faster than replacement could be acquired.
In addition, within two years the known fossil fuel reserves would run out cutting the power supply of humanity by 40% and affecting even more maintenance and industry. The other problem is also alien plants that grow all across the Earth's surface. They produce highly potent neurotoxic gas which is heavier than air, they also pump cobalt deep into the soil and they've already penetrated upper layers of some of the underground cities forcing these layers to be sealed and abandoned as no known defoliant worked on them.
Essentially, in about a year and a half a "sudden death" timer would start where randomly humans would start losing 10 to 15% of their population and industry while survival of the human civilization beyond the next 5 years is infeasible. The surrender to Garmillas is not even considered due to reasons that I didn't expect. There's no propaganda that the aliens would just kill everyone regardless. Instead the psychological effect is similar to that in WW2 in Germany and Japan during strategic bombing campaigns. Everyone's depressed and knows that they will most likely lose the war and die but the process is impersonal enough that there is no large push for surrender. It feels more like a constant natural disaster rather than an invasion of a foreign power.
The problems facing us are twofold and one is much more pressing, but one at a time. First of all, I don't think that it would be possible to maintain the habitability of human cities indefinitely. While I can build powerplants, bootstrap food production and expand the infrastructure to house more people I doubt that I can maintain it for decades. Locals would be increasingly dependent on me and any errors would cause disastrous loss of life the longer I have to maintain the underground cities.
Yes, there's the Yamato plan, of course. Queen Starsha of the Iscandarian civilization has promised a "cosmo reversal" device (whatever that is) if a human starship manages to get to her home planet, but it is possible that my presence tipped the scales so much that Yamato won't survive the trip or Iscandarians won't provide the device due to my involvement. I have to prepare a plan B, if not several plans.
I need a way to evacuate humans somewhere safer even if temporarily and evacuation on the scale of billions is not simple. I can't just gate everyone to somewhere safe, the gates are vulnerable to sabotage which would be a threat both from the human and Garmillas sides. Mars is no longer easily breathable, no local infrastructure can be repurposed and SBY humans still don't want to touch it with a ten foot pole for… "cultural reasons". No other place in the star system is as habitable so it leaves sealed planetary or space habitats.
Any surface facility would have lower gravity than on Earth resulting in long term health complications but any hab that is pinpointed by the ayys would be destroyed by interplanetary missiles that can penetrate deeper than any bunker. This basically leaves the space habitats, but at least I can move and defend those. Unfortunately to make them I need a lot of materials and space launch infrastructure that as of yet has only existed in papers and simulations.
There's also the other Earth, but I'd consider moving them to Hail Mary only in the most severe case. When the Groombridge war started I shared the information about ROB's involvement and the peculiarities of my extraversal navigation so it won't be too much of a shock, but the general populace wasn't informed of that. In addition, 2,4 billion people is a lot, there is not enough housing or food production on Earth to accommodate them rapidly. It would take a lot of effort to feed, house and integrate everyone while preventing them from accidentally shipping in cosmonite or ending up in a conflict of interests.
There's also Krevati, the third planet in Homina system. The atmosphere is breathable for humans and radiation levels dropped to only a couple times the standard background, but it is a cratered wasteland covered in wreckage and bug skeletons. The most complex lifeforms are single celled and I expect that merely demonstrating such a world would raise some eyebrows, but I'll start the preparations on that side just in case.
The second and most pressing problem is Garmillas, also referred to as "Garmalons" "Gamalons" and "Gammies" by UN soldiers. Humans don't know who or what they are. In the original show and the reboot they are essentially imperialistic "alien humans" because all humanoid people in the galaxy were seeded by long gone precursors, but in the live action movie they were an alien hive mind so I can't discount that possibility. I need to test various approaches and technologies against them and salvage anything I can get my hands on for analysis and reverse engineering.
The time-sensitive bit is that they are expected to hit any known force concentration on Earth within one to two months with an "interplanetary missile", a guided nuclear weapon of terrifying power. Why they aren't using multiple smaller nukes is beyond me, but each of these bombs is like a quarter of a dinosaur killer. A direct hit would collapse an underground city, evaporate Yamato construction site or destroy the commander chassis.
Locals also found them near impossible to intercept for unspecified reasons. In short, I have to have the interceptors ready on record time and I've already ordered maximum bootstrapping effort. I can't afford to just move out of the way because I landed almost exactly on top of one of the major underground cities.
The UN wasn't happy with me demanding exact locations of their cities and any mineral veins that they were tapping, but they conceded after a couple days. I needed to know where not to put the extractors. It turned out that a few of the deposits that I've discovered were in fact upper sections of the shelters. If I thoughtlessly plopped some MEXes there it would've been very embarrassing for me and deadly for the inhabitants.
The Earth's resources wouldn't be enough. Yes, Earth is the densest planet in the solar system and yes it has the richest and easiest to exploit metal deposits due to millennia of water concentrating useful minerals downstream. Unfortunately, it also has scared desperate humans and it gets bombed on the regular. I'll have to send fabbers to Venus and Mercury to establish the resource base needed to build the multiversal gate and fleets to protect it.
It won't take a genius to see that hostile rapidly replicating machines are not a great thing to have in the backyard so I expect that Garmillas would attempt to shoot down our interplanetary missions as a priority and they would bomb landing sites before they have a chance to build defenses. This means that I need to launch large waves of fabbers supported by warships directly from the ground… which means I'm forced to use Orions and not minimags. I'll also have to replace most lasers but luckily the designs are sufficiently modular for a near drag and drop of alternative systems such as macrons and particle beams.
According to the UN, Garmillas appear to use FTL jumps in system, but for an unknown reason they only apply it to raiding forces. Most likely humans managed to fool them into thinking that they have more ships than they actually do as they managed to win two pyrrhic victories above Mars and one above Earth. I'll need to be ready for small harassing forces popping up with no warning, but large enough movements might attract main Garmillas forces.
I will have a window soon, however. Iscandarians have sent their representative a couple years earlier with plans for ship systems required to utilize a "wave motion core", but the core itself is destined to arrive within a month. The UN is sending basically every single one of their space worthy ships in a massive diversion at Pluto masked as an attempt to destroy the Garmillas base in the region. This is the main reason why I wasn't pounded into the ground by hundreds of warships from orbit, the ships that went up against me had mechanical issues incompatible with deep space travel.
These ships are going to get massacred and I have nothing that I can send to help them. They are already positioned in deep space with the attack planned on January 17 which is just under a month from now. Pluto is 7 light hours away and at 50g my ships could get there within about 3 days but I don't have the catom supply to fuel enough ships to matter. An interplanetary missile of my own would get there within 1.2 days but I can't guarantee the destruction of the enemy base and Garmillas response would likely be… proportional.
Garmillas forces have deciphered human language and thus I could try to draw attention by making a public declaration of war, but it would be counterproductive to the diversion as it would draw attention to the inner solar system and by extension to Mars which is the rendezvous site for the second Iscandarian visitor. This might still end up as a useful tool as Garmillas in the show have a "roman warfare" thing where they "technically only wage defensive wars" and they did shoot me first so I should draw attention and potentially destabilize them politically long term.
This unfortunately means that there's no practical method to save the first UN fleet and a lot of good people would die soon. But their sacrifices won't be in vain as Contingent will undergo the most rapid industrial ramp up in our history. The margins are tight and they're about to get tighter…
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AWCU escort Lightning 1-1 sensor log, operator: Commander Air Group 1, Jane Hive. 24th December 2198
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Contingent fighter sits in a large hangar next to another two identical craft and a larger personnel transport VTOL. The rest of the hangar space is full of UN fighter craft and personnel. They seem to mostly avoid the contingent assets, but a few engineers are curiously nosing around the various design elements of the CTG aircraft. Contingent assets look as if they have next to no seams or welds, almost as if they are monolithic and forged whole out of a material with pearl- like sheen.
There are only two Contingent representatives on site, the rest were long gone to accompany the diplomats. Both appear human in size and shape and both are wearing white and orange flight/space suits with armored elements and light exoskeleton joints. The suits are streamlined enough for it to be quite obvious that both Contingent pilots were women. Both are wearing helmets with featureless visors and holsters with magazines and bullpup PDWs can be seen strapped to their belt and upper right thigh.
The one with number 2 printed on the suit's helmet and shoulder is walking around the transport aircraft and inspecting it while the other instance branded with number 1 is seen curiously observing a type 99 Cosmo Falcon with gray color scheme as opposed to most other Falcons that have primarily blue paint jobs. It has large red triangles painted next to the wing control surfaces and the fin has a black triangle with a Japanese symbol painted in it in white.
The Contingent pilot doesn't seem to notice that another figure approaches behind her. It is a UN pilot wearing a flight uniform and a swamp green bomber jacket over it. The jacket has "Cosmo Falcon" written across the back circling a large insignia depicting a falcon. The pilot is a young man with a very short haircut and a thin scar going through the left brow and up his forehead taking out some hairline.
"Look but don't touch" he says as he is around 10 steps away from the number 1, she turns away from the "space fighter" to face the pilot. "Type-99 space attack fighter aircraft, aka Cosmo Falcon. This one is mine. You here to sightsee?" he asks rhetorically.
The Contingent pilot wiggles her right hand in a "so-so" motion and replies "Different technologies, different designs. I'm honestly surprised that you use so many manned aircraft, we've long switched to drones."
"Drones?" the UN pilot asks and raises an eyebrow.
"Robotic remotely operated or autonomous units, most of the Contingent armed forces consists of those, although we now mostly refer to only smaller units as "drones". Oh, where are my manners, I'm Jane Hive, Commander Air Group 1. The pilot over there is Dareia, she's CAG 2." she says as she points at her colleague, in response to which CAG 2 waves back before returning to her devices.
"Lieutenant junior grade Saburo Kato. I believe we've met"
CAG 1: "Yeah, it is nice to meet you face to face, Tiger One. Well, for a limited degree of "face", I'm told that most of the people here consider our facial features a bit uncanny. I hope this helps…" she says as the helmet visor goes transparent revealing the freckled face of the pilot. Her eyes, however, are now proportioned like those of the locals
Lt. Kato "That's…"
CAG 1: "A screen, yes. I didn't have the time to fix the face beforehand, sorry"
Lt. Kato: "It is unnecessary, you shouldn't change your appearance so drastically just because of what people might think."
CAG 1 sighs, unseals the latch on the neck and takes off her helmet causing quite a few of the staff to look in her direction. Below the helmet she was mostly the same, but the eyes were 25% smaller. "Well, you didn't take a step back so I'll take it as a compliment. But seriously, it is not as big of a deal as for other humans. We design our own appearances and we can alter them with relative ease."
Lt. Kato stands silent for a few moments and replies "If you say so. Which one is yours by the way?"
Jane shrugs and says "Oh, they all are". Kato does a double take.
Jane giggles and continues: "I'm serious, I'm not technically the commander of the first air group, I am literally the first air group. I operate all of the air wing at once." She claps twice and the nearest Lightning's cockpit becomes "transparent" revealing a bunch of sensors on a turret behind the "glass". The sensor "eye" turns towards Jane and then follows her hand in perfect sync. "The fighter is smart enough to navigate, maneuver and engage specific targets on its own, if that is not enough I can take one over manually or another instance can show up to assist remotely. I guess being able to think at arbitrary high rate also helps"
Lt Kato: "Aren't you supposed to be humans from parallel Earth?"
Jane: "Yep, why can't we be both? Used to be human, ended up as a machine one day. Quick tip, careful with the android girls, there's some heavy machinery in here" she says with a wink
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