by Ivan Kal
“None. Like the past three times, it was perfect; it felt real. The integration with our implants was perfect. I believe you finally made a perfect virtual reality,” Elias answered.
“I hope so, but these sorts of things need to be carefully examined each time,” she said.
“Could you forward Niko’s sound-detecting program to the development? I want them to incorporate it into the default suit design.”
“Of course, Elias. Are you staying for a while? I know that the programmers will want a rematch soon,” she said with a smile.
“I’ll have to disappoint them for now. Tomas needs me on the Cloud station,” he said.
“Space? I must say, the weightlessness managed to become a pain really fast. I have no idea how those who live there deal with it.” She shuddered.
“Tomas tells me that they will be putting in the artificial gravity fields. They should bring the generator online in a few days for testing.” They had managed to build a gravity field generator two years ago and had them in use, just not on the station yet.
“Something from a certain project?”
“Of course.”
“It amazes me sometimes how much we managed to advance in such a short time.”
“And still we have a long way to go.”
“I’ll arrange a transport for you to the spaceport. It will be waiting for you at the landing pad,” Maria said.
“Thanks. Tell the programming team that I’ll be expecting a new challenge when I return,” he said.
“I will.” They shook hands and he left. The programing team was comprised of ten game level designers that Maria had managed to steal from the entertainment branches of Olympus. They had the necessary experience to utilize this technology and build realistic challenges. Though they had gone overboard a few times in the beginning, introducing a lot of impossible obstacles. They had even put in an enormous troll ported from one of the games they’d designed. The troll’s appearance had come as a complete surprise to Elias and his team; it had scared most of them witless as it exploded out of the ground. And then it had proceeded to clobber them to death. They had since calmed down and focused on recreating tough but realistic situations, though they did tend to find new and inventive ways to use existing technology. There were other security teams that competed against each other in simulations. But the programmers were the ones that created the environments, and so they created their own team.
Laura was already waiting for him in front of the facility. She would accompany him to the station while the rest of the team remained here to train in various scenarios for another two months before rotating with the teams that were currently in the field. She fell in step with him as he passed.
“John didn’t take the exercise seriously,” Laura said evenly.
“He was never in the field before and he is young. He will learn to take matters seriously after he gets some more experience.” Elias’s team frequently rotated two promising rookies through their ranks every few months so that they could get a feel for them and their responses.
“If he returns,” Laura said.
Elias didn’t say anything at that. There was nothing to say. Olympus personnel were as capable as those in the armies. Their technology was better, and their people were older, on average. John would of course be put in low-risk operations in the beginning. But even in those, there were sometimes casualties.
They entered the elevator that would bring them from the heart of Nephthys to the surface.
“Niko was good,” Elias said.
“Yes, he has potential. And he is smart. I was thinking of putting him through tech and then command courses. In a decade or two, he might be a great commander.”
“I was going to suggest the same. Make it happen.”
When they arrived at the pad, the transport ship was already waiting for them as Maria had promised. They boarded the transport, and it immediately took off towards the space port located in the Pannonian Basin. The trip from Nephthys would take just over an hour and forty minutes. They sat in a comfortable silence; both of them had many reports or requests to review during the flight. Elias opened his implant’s inbox and started reading through the list of requests Laura had forwarded to him.
Anything she couldn’t deal with or was unsure how to handle she sent to him. He opened the first file and text started floating in his field of vision; he could have activated the audio mode, meaning that he would hear a voice reading the text directly into his mind, but more often than not he chose to read. The implant was capable of massive data storage and later recovery.
It was mostly used to store most any kind of data, from pictures to text and videos, and it could send and receive files. There had been some concerns at the start of implant hackings and a few minor incidents, but all those problems had been solved by the introduction of a buffer system. The implants were in closed mode until the user turned on the “receive and send” mode, and the mode wouldn’t activate until the sent items were activated and checked in an isolated system. Not to mention the high-grade firewall system that Olympus had implemented, borrowing some ideas from the alien tech.
By the time he finished the request list, they were already at the space port. The space port had been built nine years ago when Tomas had first started pushing for space exploration. He’d managed to convince the two major superpowers to allow him to build a private space station, and from there to coordinate his planned mining of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The other nations, most notably Russia and the US, were against a privately owned station in the Earth’s orbit. But the two opinions that mattered were Concordis and the League.
With permission from them, he’d started construction of the space port, and later on the station. He had even managed to convince them to give him permission to build structures on the Moon, under the guise of factories and storage for the planned mining operation from the asteroid belt. Though Elias knew that was just the beginning of Tomas’s plans. The US had again protested loudly, citing breach of the Outer Space Treaty, while the League and Concordis had responded by saying that most of the countries that had signed the treaty no longer existed. And so Olympus had gone ahead with Tomas’s plans while the former world powers watched from the sidelines, unable to do anything to stop him.
As Elias and Laura left the transport, they were met by two security officers who greeted them with a salute of their right fist to their chest, which Elias and Laura returned. The salute was Tomas’s idea; he believed that Olympus security should start to look more like a military as his plans went forward. And knowing his plans for the future, Elias agreed. The rest of the world wasn’t bothered by their salutes. They had grown accustomed to seeing Olympus security everywhere. But the militaries of the world frowned and believed them just a bunch of mercenaries playing soldiers.
“Sir, the shuttle is ready,” one of the officers said. Olympus security didn’t have a strict rank system yet like the military, but there were plans to implement some in the future, so they relied on the Olympus tier system for now.
“Good,” Elias said, and followed the officers to the shuttle.
The Olympus shuttles were nothing like the shuttles from the past; they weren’t 2/3 rockets and 1/3 the actual shuttle. These were built by using a combination of Earth and alien technology. They were capable of flying inside the atmosphere, leaving the Earth’s atmosphere, and traveling through space. They were used to transfer both people and cargo from Earth to space. The Hermes-class shuttle was never going to win any beauty contests, but it did get the job done.
They approached the blocky shuttle, the flight crew already having primed the engines. When they boarded, one of the pilots instructed them to fasten themselves in and then disappeared into the flight cabin. Soon after, they could feel the shuttle lifting off the ground.
The experience of leaving the Earth’s atmosphere was rather uneventful, as the shuttle itself was completely sealed. There were no windows, though th
ere were view screens that could show the video from one of the outside cameras. But Elias didn’t bother to turn them on; he found the whole experience a bit disconcerting.
A few minutes later, they could feel the effects of Earth’s gravity lessen, signaling that they had entered space.
A screen directly across from them turned on, most likely by Laura with her implant. All that could be seen was the dark void filled with bright stars. Much brighter than how they were seen from Earth. The shuttle’s cameras were much more advanced than the ones used long ago. He remembered when Seo-yun explained to him years ago how the images that had been taken back when mankind first left Earth were of a much lower quality. And when taking a picture or a video, the lens had focused on the things that were brighter than the stars, like the moon, a space station, or astronauts. So the stars weren’t captured because they were much dimmer, giving the impression that you couldn’t see the stars in space. The technology then wasn’t enough to capture the same things that the human eye could. Now those cameras outside could capture the same things the human eye could see, and much more.
The stars slowly moved as the shuttle turned. Then Earth appeared on the left side of the screen, and a few moments later, the Cloud station’s form could be discerned in the distance. As they drew closer, the station grew bigger until it almost filled the screen. The station itself had a unique look; Tomas had rejected the designs that relied on wheels and spin to generate gravity, as he’d planned on incorporating the artificial gravity generators as soon as the technology became available. The station kind of resembled a five-pointed star when watched from above or below. The center was the main habitat; it was cylindrical in shape, with both the top and the bottom housing numerous pieces of sensory equipment and relays. From the cylinder’s center extended the five star “points.” The points were more like five skinny arms, at least for now. They would, in time, be decorated with multitudes of other boxes and pods as the station grew.
One of the arms that was designed as the station’s food production facility, where the food for the station’s inhabitants would be grown, had already been constructed, and it had slowly started production. Each star point was about 400 meters long and was planned to be around 200 wide. The rest of the points were mostly just building blocks. The other fully finished part was the center, the heart of the station. It was 700 meters high and had a diameter of 500 meters. It was a feat of engineering that had never before been attempted. It was silver in color, and it had no windows on the outside. But Elias knew that there were many cameras on its surface that would allow those living inside to see outside.
The main part was imagined as a business and recreation area. But for now, only a few floors or decks were used for those purposes, and the rest was used as temporary housing for those that lived on the station. It would remain like that until one of the fingers intended for habitats could be finished. The shuttle made its way towards the lower part of the cylinder, which housed docking stations. A couple minutes later, they safely landed inside the station’s hangar, the door closed, and air was pumped back into the hangar. The hangar wasn’t large; it was just big enough to house three Hermes-class shuttles, and Tomas planned to have a docking ring installed around the cylinder in time to accommodate the bigger ships he planned to build. As they landed, Elias could feel the effects of gravity, which meant that Tomas had already installed the gravity generators. That was a relief for Elias, as he hated constantly bumping his head on the ceiling in zero gravity.
As they left the hangar, they were met with a woman in an Olympus business uniform, black skirt, and jacket. Elias approached and offered his hand.
“Nadia, it’s good to see you again,” he said.
“Likewise, Elias. Laura,” Nadia Wilson said as she shook his hand and then Laura’s. She was Tomas’s assistant and second ever since Elias stepped down from the position and focused only on the department he was the head of.
“How have you been?” he asked.
“Well enough. I just hope that the generators keep working so that I can finally stop exercising with those blasted machines.” The machines she was talking about were designed for the people that stayed for an extended period of time in space, to battle muscle atrophy.
“They seem to be working fine. It feels as if we are down on Earth,” Laura commented.
Nadia nodded. “Yes, now if they can only keep it working, everything will be fine. Come this way; you know how Tomas gets when he is kept waiting.”
“Lead the way,” Elias said.
They moved through corridors, passing people in Olympus uniforms rushing from one end to the other carrying all kinds of different equipment. Every so often, they would pass by an open panel in the wall with wires or big conduits peeking out and someone fixing something. The inside of the station might have been habitable, but it wasn’t finished just yet, not by a long shot. The walls were still just metal plates with no paint or decoration, at least in this part of the station.
Elias had visited the station once before with Seo-yun when it had been just barely habitable. It amazed him sometimes how fast Tomas managed to build everything. But then again, he had the advantage of near unlimited resources—and alien technology. Most of the things here had been built using Olympus’s version of the alien fabricator. Seo-yun and her team had managed to unlock and somewhat improve on the concept, in its complexity if not in scope. Olympus nanotechnology was, as it turned out, more advanced than the one they found in the alien ship; their nanites were capable of much more sophisticated work, and they could be programmed to do much more.
They arrived at the elevator that would take them up to the top part of the cylinder where Tomas’s office was. They entered and the elevator started moving as soon as the doors closed, meaning that Nadia had sent instruction via her implant.
“You’ve finished a lot of work in a short time,” Laura commented.
“Yes,” Nadia sighed. “And still we are only about twenty percent done. The central section is operational and habitable, but it still isn’t close to being finished; we are currently using only ten decks of the planned fifty. And other arms are all still in the beginning phases, except the food processing, which we needed to get operational as soon as possible. Tomas wanted the station to have its own food supply, rather than relying on supply ships from Earth.”
“It’s impressive nonetheless,” Laura said.
“It certainly is,” Elias said.
The elevator slowed and the doors opened as soon as they got off. They arrived at the security station, where the guards on duty asked for verification, which they provided with their implants. When their identity was verified, the guards saluted and let them through. They entered the office space, which was the entire deck. There were dozens of doors on each side leading to private offices, with dozens more desks in the middle of the room where employees sat and worked. Each desk was an improved version of the command desk Tomas once had in his office. The new ones hadn’t changed much in appearance, but were much faster, with better hologram technology. These had mostly replaced personal computers back on Earth.
They walked beside them and arrived at Tomas’s office.
“He wants to speak to you in private first,” Nadia said to Elias. “We’ll wait in my office,” she added, pointing towards her office next to Tomas’s. Elias nodded and entered.
Tomas’s office looked very much like the one he had on Earth, the couches and a table in the middle. Tomas sat at his desk and looked up when Elias walked in.
“Elias, come sit, we have much to discuss,” Tomas said gravely.
Elias reached the desk, shook Tomas’s hand across it, and sat in a chair in front of it.
“This is serious, then?” Elias asked.
“Very much so.”
Elias remained silent and waited for Tomas to continue.
“You know that our space projects caused a lot of protests by the world governments outside of the League and Concordis, primari
ly with Russia and U.S. They protested our right to explore and build facilities on the Moon and other planets in the solar system, citing the Space Treaty. The League and Concordis gave us permission and responded to their protest by saying that they didn’t sign the treaty, and that Olympus was a company, not a state. Since then, Russia, India, and the US have been trying to get their own joint space program up and running. Their technology is inferior, but over the years they have managed to buy enough from the League that they have reached the point where they can start sending their own missions out into space.” He looked Elias in the eyes and said. “They plan on colonizing the Moon.”
“That is not good,” Elias said. Both Concordis and the League agreed that Olympus could only put storage facilities on the Moon. What no one knew was that Olympus had not only already built those facilities, they had expanded and started to colonize the Moon. There were now around one thousand people living there. Concordis didn’t realize since all of the inhabitants were also Olympus employees, and their families came from the underwater cities under Olympus control. It was easy enough to make sure no one found out that the people were gone.
Tomas nodded. “They plan on sending the first test mission in two years, and to start colonizing in five years. The people that will live there will obviously come from their three countries, but since they have announced this, the League and Concordis want to start doing the same. Both the League and Concordis governments sent me a request. They want to hire us to build them the ships to go and start colonization of the Moon; they want to be there before the Russians and Americans,” he finished grimly.
“That is definitely not good,” Elias responded.
Tomas closed his eyes and rubbed his temples with his hand. “We could stall, though if we do, at most we get two years until the first mission starts. Or until Concordis and the League grow tired and find someone else to do it. It’s not hard to get to the Moon; they could do it a hundred years ago, for God’s sake! It will only make them suspicious, and when they get there and find our colony, they will know something is wrong—not to mention the freaking station and shipyard we built on the dark side of the Moon,” he said.
