NationStates Jolt Archive

OOC: Development thread, closed, secret IC, yada yada yada ...

Serai tsaRikhan fixed her eyes upon a bolt in the wall opposite her seat, and tried to forget about the two kilometers of crushing pressure outside the hull.

"Don't worry," the Researcher opposite her said, "I've done this dozens of times. The only possible time anything could go wrong is during decompression, and even that's not very likely."

"Aren't we about to go through decompression?" she asked him, thinking, Who the hell puts a secret research base on the bottom of the seabed anyway?

Officially, Pearl had been run with a minimal upkeep crew since the amalgamation of the Navy with the Air Command - the billions of dollars it's construction had cost made it too expensive to simply abandon. Unofficially, it was the Greater Ascendancy's most secret research facility, and the submarine transport was full of people who, like Serai, had signed the various non-disclosure agreements and waivers.

"Yes," the Researcher replied, "But it's practically a certainty that it'll work fine - this place is military work, it was meant to be a fleet base after all. Decompression's just a big airlock."

"I suppose so," Sevai granted, but all that water still grated on the ape hindbrain, which remembered the plains of Africa. It was profoundly unnatural to be sitting inside a giant metal fish at the bottom of the sea.

A shockingly loud clunk rang throughout the sub.

"Cradle contact," her Researcher said, "Here we go!"

Someone else began to pray loudly, which did nothing for Sevai's peace of mind, but soon enough the captain announced that repressurisation had been achieved successfully ("What did I tell you?", the Researcher asked), and an official in Air Force black-and-blue came along the aisle with a register for them to sign - quite why she couldn't imagine, since they'd all signed a similar one back at the base in Rakenno, and the submarine hadn't stopped since then, but she scrawled S. tsaRikhan in the box besides "TsaRikhan, Sevai: Commandant, ExSec Corps" all the same.

The captain spoke over the intercom again to tell them they could leave their seats. Outside the submarine there was very little sign of the crushing pressure above them - just a flexible extension from the sub's hatch to the base itself, much like the ones found in airports.

"Commandant tsaRikhan?"

"Yes?"

The speaker was a man in a Researcher's white coat, shorter than usual for Tsakh. Serai, at the oher extreme, had to crane her neck to see him.

"I'm Researcher Sukesh tsaAkhan," he informed her breasts (in his defence, they were close to his eye level). "Er ... for Project Solaris. You have been briefed about what we're doing here, yes?"

"Somewhat - StateSec was leery about telling me anything before I got here. Augmentation, isn't it? I got the DNI last year."

"Yes. Sort of." tsaAkhan looked uncomfortable at this override of Research and Development's tenuous ethics by the State Security Corps. Serai, as a member of the External Security Corps, knew that StateSec had no ethics.

"Well ...?"

"Not here, Commandant - there's all sorts of different projects going on here at Pearl."

"Wow. Why is all this so hush-hush? No, on second thought, I don't suppose you can tell me."

"Sorry. All will become clear. Or at least most of it. This way!"

She followed the Researcher around the outer sections of the dome to a plain door recessed into the wall. Someone had painted over the original label with Project Solaris Research Core, and tacked to the steel was an image of some cartoon hero with a red cape, fist upraised and jaw outhrust in flamboyant defiance.

"I hope you don't expect me to wear my underwear outside my clothes like that," Serai remarked.

Sukesh grinned. "Not unless you want to." He ran a swipecard through the slot ("You'll get one soonish, I suppose") and admitted her to the Research Core.

It had quite obviously been a medical center, during Pearl's incarnation as a fleet base; the walls were still that perculiar shade of green native to medical facilities, and an open door gave her a glimpse into what looked like an intact surgical center.

The other Researchers of Project Solaris were gathered around the coffee machine in the break room.

"I should introduce you, I suppose," Sukesh said. "Here we have Zreydt keiMaré of the Cyborg Research Corps" - a fairly nondescript man, brown and short as all the Sche'dayach - "Kterris arSzaidu, who helped develop the power armour being used by the Ground Command" - a pretty young Ktrazirha woman, who smiled hesitantly at her - "Ekhano Sche'daya of the Military Equipment Programming Corps" - another bland Sche'dayach face, and Serai recognised one of the more prominent clonelines - "Szarokh arKtenoi of the Advanced Armour Development Corps" - a slender man so elegant he could only possibly be a very late cloneline - "Yseult keiMorahn of the Cloning Research Corps" - keiMorahn's sharp-edged face was legendary, at least within Tsaraine - "And Kathrai ralKezhet, Commandant of the Adaptive Programming Corps." Kathrai was plump, pretty, and seemingly far too young to hold command of an entire Corps.

"There's also a couple of assistants who aren't here right now - you'll meet them later. Everyone, I present to you Commandant Serai tsaRikhan of the External Security Corps."

"Hi." Serai gave them all her best public-relations smile, learned first in the Ground Command and refined in the Security Command. "So, uh, what exactly is all this about? StateSec didn't tell me much."

The Researchers looked at one another, and keiMaré sighed.

"I was afraid of that. You know what they say about paranoia, I'm sure, but it has it's downsides. But you signed the forms, I presume - what were you told?"

Serai shrugged. "Major experimental cyborg augmentation, not visually obtrusive, non-standard, voluntary. That's about it."

"Well, that is entirely accurate - just not very detailed. You see, what we're doing ... Kterris, you can explain better than I."

"Okay," the Ktrazirha woman said. "The Solaris Project is mainly an outgrowth of the Scarab Project a while back - with the development of synthetic myomers for the power armour, some of us began working on how to adapt that to implant engineering for covert work - power armour is rather hard to hide, after all.

"At that point it wasn't an actual brief, just ideas around the coffee machine and back-of-the-envelope simulations. Then Ekhano here got a brief to improve the Enhanced Situational Awareness programs for military DNI."

Serai nodded - she had the results of that on her own hardware.

"The brief was originally very ambitious," Ekhano continued. "They wanted all sorts of things which couldn't be accomodated with the current model of implants. I wrote a simplified version for that model, but most of what they wanted needed a next-generation platform. Hence Zreydt's involvement.

"He worked out that everything they required would need more space than could be provided for a cranial implant, so we hit upon the idea of installing aeryaghrana communications systems with a mainframe somewhere back home. All this required some pretty smart code, which is where Kathrai came in."

"It probably would have stayed in that side of the field for a while if it wasn't for Szarokh here," Zreydt picked up the thread. "If you'd like to explain ...?"

ArKtenoi shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "For a while now the AADC has been working towards reactive armouring on an applicable scale," he said rapidly, "Not reactive armouring in the traditional sense, explosive panels to disrupt shaped charges, but a substance which will harden upon impact to distribute the force of an impact.

"We've actually been able to make the stuff for a while, practically since the development of the nanoforge and the resultant boom in molecular-scale technology, but the problem was until recently that that remained exorbitantly expensive and prone to failure.

"I really didn't do much at all - just a few modifications to the basic structure of the stuff. It was keiMorahn who did most of the real work."

The Cloning Corps Commandant nodded, and spoke; "What I did was to adapt it to production by a cellular structure. It's not my usual field of endeavour, and I lost some of it's effectiveness in that process, but we can now culture reactive armour molecules from bacterial vats.

"It was one of my assistants who suggested that this might be adapted to secrete the substance from a multicellular organism. That took more work, but ..."

"I see where you're going with this," Serai said. "Some kind of cyborg Socialist Avenger, linked to tactical supercomputers, bulletproof, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound - it sounds like sheer fantasy. And even if it isn't, why me?"

"It has been quite definitively proven," Szarokh replied, "We wouldn't entertain the notion of implanting this in a human if it weren't. I'll show you Kal-El the Supermouse sometime.

"And neither the myomers or the reactive armouring are as effective in organics as they would be on an actual armour unit - while it ought to stop most common calibres, with a bit of luck, I would not advise trying that luck against a twelve-millimeter or above, or hypervelocity rounds, without substantial additional armouring.

"It's likely that Command is hoping for some kind of supersoldier who can shrug off artillery rounds, but until someone demonstrates laboratory-verifiable, useful telekinesis, they'll have to keep hoping."

"As for why you," Yseult continued, "You are the best qualified member of cloneline Eighty-Seven for this upgrade, and Eighty-Seven is the best engineered cloneline for this upgrade. We avoid discussing such things most of the time - the over-success of the clonelines in boosting Tsaraine's population, plus an aversion in otherwise sensible people to human genetic enhancement, has made it something of a taboo - but it is true."

"Over-success of the clonelines", in Serai's opinion, was a bloody cold-hearted way of encapsulating a crushing lack of individuality and the current crisis of lowered genetic diversity. She wondered what Szarokh thought of it, or Ekhano - Szarokh's was not a face she recognised, but there were millions of people with Ekhano's face and genes.

"Well. So ... I'm your superhuman guinea pig, then."

"Commandant, you're not superhuman until you no longer think like a human." Yseult smiled oddly, and winked at Kathrai.

OOC: Introducing ... the Post of Unsurpassed Crappiness!

A few days later, after Serai had been issued her swipecard and met Kal-El the Supermouse (supermice, really - there were half a dozen of them), Kterris showed up with a heavy stack of clothing.

"Tools of the trade, O guinea pig," she said, and grinned. "Vlrsiradt, trousers, boots, uniform."

"What, no cape?" Serai asked. "Shoddy work, Researcher, shoddy work! Ze superwoman, she must have her cape*!"

"Cape'd get you sucked into a jet engine or something, "superwoman". You get a badass coat, though." She tossed the topmost item on the pile to Serai - a long coat, black with only a hint of ExSec grey. "That's got reactive armouring, active camoflage, and a few millimeters of diamondoid for extra padding."

Serai shook out the folds and shrugged it on - the thing was heavy, no suprise given the amount of technology worked into it.

"Diamondoid - isn't that the stuff they use for ship hulls?"

"That it is. Given that this is all costing about as much as a Wraith fighter, I'd say it's justified."

"Really? Wow. So how does the camo work?"

"Right now, it doesn't. Controls for it are part of the implant package Zreydt's working on. Mostly it's identical to the stuff you're familiar with from ExSec - nanoforged microcameras and pinpoint displays. It's not perfect, but it's useful."

Serai nodded - she was well aware of the uses and limitations of the stuff. It was certainly no cloak of invisibility.

"And the rest of it? Not the coat, I mean - the implants."

Kterris shrugged. "We can't really do anything until Zreydt finishes working on the communications section and so on - I want to do that and the augments in a single operation, and the retroviral infection for the reactive armour would ... would not be good with that. So I'm afraid you have to wait a bit longer. Hey, it's an all-expenses-paid vacation under the sea!"