The United Nations as we know it today was forged out of the remains of the great crash of 2025, in its aftermath the entire organisation was expanded, reformed and equipped with new credentials to uphold a relative degree of peace in the regions most affected by the economic crisis. The full extent of the internal restructuring of the organisation however was only discovered with a leak of UN documents by external forces, exposing many of the shady and downright illegal practises conducted by the UN, such as for example the Neo-Spartan program. However, legal action against General Secretary Miller and his associates was indefinitely put on hold after the Yellowstone-Incident. [...] Today the UN is mostly known for their continued international aid mission, their majority share of the Zhōu-Mining corporation and the Aeon-Program.
-Excerpt from "History of the United Nations",
Lara Smith 05/2069 NEUN, (Northern EU News)
You look at the blue pill in your hand. Zentrophan, the newest medication for your type of epilepsy. Compared to the other pills you have been taking during your 23 years of life these are neither the best or the worst, maybe better on the side effects compared to the previous ones and, from what you were told, easier on your liver.
You can't remember a time without the meds. You were diagnosed early - one of the good things that came from your parents protectiveness for their only son - and despite what both they and the doctor hoped, you carried it with you past child- and young adulthood. As such the worst thing that you ever experienced of it were the stories your parents sometimes told you of your unresponsive episodes when you were four years old.
You pop the pill and flush it down with hot chocolate, mind already occupied with what to do next when the question is answered with someone sitting down in front of you across the table. Looking up you look into the blue eyes of a person who looks like she can deal with waking up early way worse than you do.
"Morning Cal," she sleepily greets you, rubbing her face with her hands, only the slightest tint of an accent hinting at the fact that english is not her native tongue. Her tired blue eyes seem to correlate to the size of the cup of coffee in front of her.
Quickly you pull out your headphones before returning the greeting. "Morning Lea." You eye the cup of coffee as she starts emptying coffee cream packs into it. "I rarely see you drinking coffee."
"Today is Saturday and I am allowed to spoil myself once in a while." Satisfied with the color of her beverage, she takes a sip.
You pause. To be honest you had to admit that you lost track of weekdays long ago.
With a satisfied smile on her face and a bit more life in her eyes she continues the conversation. "I assume the ice plates shifting woke you up too?"
You nod. "It sounded closer than usual."
"Like some angry god has decided to split Antarctica in two right next to my bed." Lea shakes her head. "I could not fall asleep after that, something is in the air today."
You hum approvingly. Lea Beck, born 2042 in what remains of Sweden is the other potential pilot trapped with you at the Fridge, that you know of. From what she told you, she had been studying at a sports school on a scholarship, before her synch compatibility had been discovered and she had enlisted. She certainly looked the part to gain a sport scholarship, or at least looked much fitter than you were. The two of you quickly came to bond over the shared hardships of being in the same situation, even though her energetic nature far outstripped your social battery on occasion.
"I heard a rumor," she piques your interest and leans in closer to you. "Some of the support staff have been talking. Apparently the UN will get us out of here soon."
"Just us or…"
"Us and the Aeons," she clarifies.
"How are they going to do that?" From what you understand the problem was that the ion storm made landing for the specialised transport planes impossible, the only Aeon-transport capable vehicle that could make the journey so deep into the antarctic mainland normally.
"I am as smart as you are. But anyway, I really could go for some sunlight by now."
"I would love some fresh air."
"Getting fresh air is easy, if you are willing to risk it freezing the saliva in your mouth as soon as you step outside."
"Can that actually happen or are you joking?"
Lea leans back in her chair, stretching until there her spine cracks. "Joking of course, but not much and the outside becomes uninhabitable without a heated full-body suit. How long is it going to get colder, 20 years?"
"By current models around 25 if the ash dissipates at the same speed. But who knows what happened in the last 4 months."
Lea pauses, momentarily looking at the cup before continuing. "When did you get your last messages."
"Yesterday," you answer quickly. Private messages are distributed every two days, your parents doing the best to keep you updated with what happens in the outside world. "Are you awaiting something?"
"My sister is pregnant. The date of birth should be near and I have not heard anything for the last week."
"Maybe they have comm-problems too."
"Hopefully", she sighs. "Did you ever think about what kind of weird world today's children are born into."
You huff. "I have a yearly reminder of that fact."
"Oh right I forgot, you were born ON the day the world went to shit."
You play with your cup, nervously. "Luckily my parents were on the other side of the world when the Yellowstone exploded. My mum likes to tell the story how the power went out momentarily when the shockwaves reached them."
"Sounds like a banger of a story, but enough doom and gloom." Lea slams down her empty cup, before standing up and reaching out her hand. "We are Aeon pilots, let's kick the aliens' asses and leave a better world for those that come after."
You cannot help but grin as you take her hand, yelping as she pulls you, what feels like, effortlessly to your feet.
It is 09:45 when you decide to show up to your appointment. A bit early, but you will need a few minutes to change anyway, so it probably won't matter. When you open the door you are met with two people you don't know, sitting in front of the familiar simulation control stations, both in the uniform of the military UN branch. Though before you can quickly take another look at the room number to see if you are wrong here, you are stopped.
"Cal Warren? You are early, come in please."
One of the two men moves to shake your hand. "We haven't met before. My name is Sameer Jain, I am the commander in charge of this installation."
"I thought Doctor Hayden was in charge," you ask, voicing your confusion.
Jain gives you a weak smile. "I won't bore you with UN department politics, it is complicated." He turns to his colleague, who remained seated, and is currently preloading the pilot simulator from what you can tell. "This is Major Hennings, the two of us will be your advisors for today's simulation."
"What about Doctor Lee and Doctor Markus?"
"Both you and Miss Beck are ready where we can start the next training stage. Lee and Markus will return to their usual duties. Hennings and I will be your teachers from now on."
You pause. "Okay, so what now?"
"As usual you get dressed," the commander states and points at the door on the other side of the room. "Hennings will start the simulation and then we continue the training session as normal."
You swallow, hard. You had mostly pushed aside the thought that one day you were actually supposed to fight in an Aeon one day, the reality of it hitting you like a slap in the face. So far in your life the most you had come in contact with violence were the various forms of media you consume: Movies, books, video games. But they all were abstractions of reality. You shake your head. You have decided to do this long ago at some point you need to deal with your reservations one way or another.
The changing room is as always, the pieces of your pilot suit neatly sorted on a small bench. After stripping down you take the first piece, a full body overall made from a soft, stretchy material and put it on. Once you have made sure everything sits comfortably you press a small button on the suit's wrist. With a quiet electric hum the back zipper of the suit closes on its own, before the material of the suit hardens in some places, adhering to your skin. Despite the cheap plastic look of it, the suit is actually a marvel of electronic engineering, capable of both monitoring your vital functions, applying medicine, electric shocks, heating and cooling.
The second if piece, the helmet is too pieces in itself. The first one is a specialised headset, designed in a way that the ear pieces won't fall out no matter what. The second one is the actual helmet, but putting it on before being connected to the pilot plug would be a hindrance, given the total opacity of the helmet piece.
Finally dressed, you leave the changing room. The room you are now in is large, with what you assume an actual real pilot plug standing inside it at a slight angle. A myriad of cables cover the floor, going from the massive cylindrical machine to various outlets in the walls. Entering the plug is as easy as climbing the ladder leading to the entrance hatch. The interior is almost high enough for you to stand in, but only almost. Crouched down you climb into the pilot seat, making sure the 6 holes in the back of the suit line up with the bolts in the seat. With a single button press the bolts lock in, securing you in the pilot chair, serving secondarily as a power delivery system for the suit. Next you reach upwards, pulling down the air tube and locking it into the helmet piece. Last you put on the helmet, now in total darkness and cut off from the outside world. Leaning back the helmet locks onto two bolts on the headrest and the collar of the suit, completely securing you the seat. The helmet-suit combo now leaves you in total darkness, with no outside sound or light coming in.
"You can begin," you announce.
"Okay." It's not the commander who answers, so most likely Major Hennings, his voice coming clearly out of your ear pieces.
"We have green lights all over. You remember where the emergency vent is Warren?"
With your right hand you carefully reach down and grab the emergency vent pulley next to your right leg. Several cameras in the pod are live feeding what they see to the control station, so Hennings should see which one you mean. "This one."
"Yes, that's the right one. We will begin filling up the plug, please notify us immediately if you think the suit is leaking."
Slowly, from the bottom up, the plugs interior fills with water. All that you notice of it though is the cold feeling slowly moving upwards, the suits heater elements quickly activating to compensate. Two minutes later the plug is filled, the gentle pressure of water surrounding you.
"Warren, is everything okay?" asks the commander.
"I feel okay, are there any problems on your side?"
"None so far," answers Hennings.
"Neural activity is inside parameters, synch-value looks good at 67. I will begin the synchronisation."
You relax. At first you had to get used to the way your body is secured in the pilot seat, both legs in recesses, hips, lower and upper back and head secured with bolts against the seat, moving anything that is not your arms more or less impossible but now its not too bad. You relax, the gentle pressure of water surrounding you, your breathing the only sound you can hear.
You can't say that your first steps in the simulator were crowned with success. In fact they were not even steps at all. During your first dozen or so sessions your brain was way too occupied with how to actually target the new, external limbs at all. Slowly you learned how to flex and stretch both arms and legs then stand, then walk, then everything else.
Piloting an Aeon, or at the least a simulated, virtual one" feels weird, unreal in a way difficult to describe. The normal sensations of your body become dulled, while the ones you get from the Aeon come to the fore. The body of a 40 meter tall warmachine however feels very unfamiliar. For one gravity feels much weaker, weaker in the sense that while a human might fall 5 or 6 times their own height in one second an Aeon only falls around a quarter of its height.
You also learned why Aeons walked so slowly in the videos you had seen on the news, every step taking several seconds. Gravity simply does not allow for faster steps, especially with ground that crumbles under the immense weight. When you had demonstrated that you were able to walk significantly faster in the sim Doktor Markus had quickly changed the simulated ground to more accurately represent normal soil, quickly teaching you better with your quickly losing footing.
And you had learned something the videos did not prepare you for: How fast Aeons could move. They were portrayed as these slow giants, but they could be fast, really fast.
"Synchronisation complete. Starting simulation."
There is a moment of vertigo, a feeling of falling as new and foreign sensations flood your mind: Another set of limbs, of skin, of ears, of eyes. Suddenly there is another set of forces pulling on you, but you quickly catch yourself. Stretching out both arms of the, now synched to you, Aeon to balance yourself
You open its eyes. Around you the virtual training space extends for as far as your new pair of eyes can see. Rendered as a flat white ground with a dark grey sky.
"I don't think I can ever get used to this," you comment, the sound of your voice sounding dull in your skull, as if it was far away.
"All lights remain green. We are good to go."
"Allright," you raise the Aeon up to its full height. It feels wrong, too different from what you are used to, the proportions are different, the center of mass is off, the posture is too hunched. You begin with doing some basic movements, crouching down, flexing its arms, taking a few, slow steps to acclimate yourself.
"Okay Warren, could you do us a favor and demonstrate your hand and finger mobility for us?"
"Yes." you raise the hands of the Aeon slowly up into your field of view. They look like human hands covered by light grey armor, but the proportions are slightly off. You have never seen a human with limbs this thin and long before.
You start by slowly opening and closing both hands, then a bit faster, then closing each finger independently to the best of your ability and finally touch the tip of each finger with the tip of your thumbs, until the commander stops you.
"Okay that's enough, thank you. Impressive, and without the use of the hand controllers."
"The doctors made a big deal out of this too." you note, clenching the Aeons hands into fists. "But where a bit sparse as to why."
"I know of pilots with 5 years experience who still need to use the controllers for hand movement," Jain explains.
"But you should still get used to using them. We might need to cut your synch to protect you and without the controllers your hands will be useless. Major, cut synch down to 45, show him."
You watch with confusion as the hands of the Aeon go limp. You can still move the wrists but the fingers remain curled up no matter how hard you try to push your mental buttons. Slowly breathing in and out you calm yourself, refocusing your effort until the fingers finally twitch.
"Yup, I cannot move them at all."
Out of interest you blindly reach for the two joysticks on each side of the cockpit, feeling them up carefully. As soon as you touch them the fingers stretch and the palms take up a neutral pose. Carefully you move the joystick, the wrists of the Aeon moving accordingly. Pressing the five ergonomically placed buttons causes the fingers to flex.
"Synch jumped to 55," comments Hennings.
"Warren, please in the future don't fight against the operators giving you synch support, okay?"
You immediately stop what you were doing. "Sorry, what did I do? What happened?"
"You mentally tried to retake control over the Aeons hands. By doing that you forced your synch to go back up to your default while I tried to limit it." You can hear him typing over the comm.
"I deactivated the limiter for now. It's just that the equipment is delicate and should we try to push your synch in two directions It's possible your synch will do an up or down jump."
"Understood," You remove your hands from the controllers, finally able to move the hands on your own again. "Is a synch value that is too high actually bad?"
"Yes, didn't Lee or Markus tell you about it."
You laugh. "The good doctors were very good at teaching but very bad at answering my questions."
"A synch about 150 is dangerous because at that point we might have difficulties desyncing you from the Aeon," explains Jain.
"There was one case where a test pilot managed a synch of 155. They were in a two week coma after we had extracted them from the plug. And Lee and Markus are calibration specialists, not training staff, so they likely did not know which questions they were allowed to answer."
"Can I ask you a question?"
"Of course."
"The simulator lessons are fine and good, but when do I get to see and pilot my Aeon?"
"We can talk about seeing your Aeon after the session. For piloting one, you already are, technically at least. Your plug is connected to a training simulator unit which we improvised from a calibration unit, which itself is a stripped down and heavily modified prototype unit."
"Oh."
"In fact you are not even really in the simulation, but piloting the calibration unit which we have hooked up to a virtual simulation, but let us start we are on a schedule. Would you please kneel down?"
You do so, slowly lowering the Aeon down until one knee touches the ground, while Jain continues.
"We have yet to invent a practical power source that can support an Aeon indefinitely in the field. Without an umbilical cable plugged into its back an Aeon has about 5 minutes of full power and a further 10 minutes of emergency power with very activity. Today we will practise moving with the cable plugged in and removing and plugging in the cable by yourself. Hennings, now."
You feel a slight tug at the Aeons back, as if something had suddenly been attached to it.
"Go ahead, try standing up."
Standing up is not as difficult as you expected. The weight is only slightly offset . Turning around you see that an Aeon charging station as you have seen it a few times on city walls has appeared behind you. The cable goes from it to yourself and you guess into the Aeons back.
"Try moving around a bit. Note, that while it may be easier at the start the longer the cable gets the more force you need to carry it with you."
The rest of the session goes by without any issues.
Ending a simulator session is never a fun experience. For a few minutes you feel okay, although massively disoriated, but then your brain tries to readjust.
Readjusting has you currently emptying your stomach into a paper bin in the control room. For some reason today's dizziness is worse than usual. Hennings and Jain look at you with pity.
When your stomach is empty you slouch back into the chair, feeling better but dirty. Hennings offers you a paper tissue, one you gratefully accept. While you wipe yourself clean, jain continues, unimpressed by your sudden expulsion of half digested food.
"As I said, you did good. Because of your good hand control you are much more adept at plugging yourself back in. But we need to refine your use of the controllers, so that is what we are going to focus on next. Tomorrow same time, if you still feel sick in two hours, call into the medbay. They'll know what to do."
"Yes, Sir," you reply, only half listening, more occupied with rubbing your eyes. There are slight stars in your field of vision. Carefully you get up, moving towards the door to leave before Jain stops you.
"Warren wait, there's one more thing." He grabs your right arm and pulls up your sleeve until your ID-band is free. With the other hand he pulls up a tablet, quickly scanning it before letting go of your hand. "I must apologize, we are lacking staff and thus are kind of overworked. Normally we would have shown you your Aeon earlier, but there were more important things. You now have access to storage bay A-2. Take a look if you like."
You mumble a "thank you" before you go to leave. Two corners and twenty meters later your stomach wants to empty itself again. Panting and quivering you kneel on the ground, before realising you actually feel better now.
Why not take a look.
You take out your phone and open the Fridges map. The way to storage A-2 is about as complicated and winded as any path from a to b in this massive facility but 30 minutes later, you are there, a massive blast door marking the entrance to A-2.
Unsure you hover your hand over the handle, but your worries subside when there is a satisfying beep and a little light switches to green. With a groan the heavy door opens, revealing a small room. You enter, the door closing behind you, the heavy bolts sliding into place. A moment later an electronic voice sounds through the small room.
"Scanning. Scan accepted, ready for disinfection. Please close your eyes."
You are almost too slow to follow the instructions as you are sprayed with thin, like disinfectant smelling mist. You cough, breathing in some surprise, but a moment later, when your cough has calmed down, the other door opens and you enter A-2.
You need a moment to take it in. Here it is, 40 meters tall and supported by massive clamps holding it in place. Suddenly you cannot help but feel very small next to it, you never could see one from such a short distance. There is some scaffolding with stairs next to you, leading to a higher part of the storage bay, which you start to climb, taking a good look at the massive machine all the while
Your Aeon is a…
[]Assault type unit
-built for close quarters engagements
-higher strength and toughness
-medium maintenance
[]Production type unit
-essentially Aeon mk. II, the first real mass produced line
-average performance all around
-medium maintenance
[]Prototype unit
-one of the earliest Aeon-models it lacks some of the more advanced features of later lines
-much higher toughness
-difficult maintenance
[]Sniper type unit
-a Aeon built from lower quality parts, modified for long range engagements
-less strength and toughness, but more advanced targeting systems
-easy maintenance
[]Optional, write in. Primary Color, secondary color, name. (think pacific rim jaeger name)
Thanks again to Tayta Malikai for sitting through this post.
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