{Corporal Jose Cuervo, report to docking bay two. Corporal Jose Cuervo to docking bay two.}Corporal Jose “Tekillya” Cuervo had graduated from Athena’s basic ARES training course two months ago, VR time, and his performance assessment had qualified him to become a Reaper after the initial training was complete. He picked up his black-and-gray ARES duffel bag, slung it over his shoulder, and rushed to his assigned docking bay for transport. The VR training facility was as realistic as anything else in the simulation and recruits were required to eat, perform the biological necessities, sleep, and everything else, just as they were in reality.He had completed the majority of his Reaper training and been on “leave” for the time it took his special enhancements to be implanted in the Reaper-specific VR pod, a hybrid medical pod and ARES training pod. All that was left for him to do was one final training mission, during which he would become accustomed to the performance of his newly enh
Jose slammed the door of his house, stomped up the stairs, and dropped his backpack on the floor before throwing himself into his bed. He buried his face in his pillow and screamed as hard as he could, then broke down into giant, hiccuping sobs that wracked his entire body.“Why? Why? Why, why, why, why, whywhywhywhy...” he sobbed, slamming his fists into the mattress for emphasis.Someone knocked on his bedroom door and he turned his pimpled face to the side and screamed, “GO AWAY!” Then he buried his face back into his pillow and continued sobbing, but wordlessly this time.He thought back to earlier in the day, when he was standing in line in the cafeteria to pick up his subsidized “poor people lunch” when the starting pitcher of their school baseball team sat down at the table next to where he was standing in line and loudly laughed about his name. The pitcher’s belief was that Jose was named after expensive tequila because his parents were dirt poor and couldn’t afford any, and i
Hellworld A-2485239/JS was a planet with ten times the diameter of Earth, putting it firmly in the category of “Super Earths”. It was unique in that it was 90% land and only 10% water on the surface, but instead of being dry and arid, as one might expect, it was entirely covered in lush, tropical foliage. From orbit, it looked like a brilliant emerald, and seemed like it would be a nice place to take a camping vacation every now and then.But that wasn’t the case at all.Code named “Jurassic Planet”, Hellworld A-2485239/JS was home to some of the most vicious species that Nova could design using all of the processing power at her disposal. The foliage was all either carnivorous, venomous, or poisonous, and the inhabitants were modeled after the most aggressive dinosaurs that could be proven to exist, then run through countless evolution simulations to crank up their lethality to a ridiculous degree. Essentially, everything on the planet would eat anything that couldn’t run fast enough
The giant snake hissed as the fifteen-megawatt x-ray laser impacted its body. The laser was only focused on it for half a second, but that proved enough to cause severe damage. It had hit the snake in its midsection and almost immediately drilled through the thinner belly scales, then dug its way into the meat and muscle, where the flesh was almost instantly sublimated into vapor, which rapidly expanded with the force of a small bomb, blasting snake meat and blood in all directions. The snake was almost cut in half and landed limply atop Corporal Cuervo, who sighed in relief as the giant reptile hissed its last.He pushed it off of him and it draped lifelessly over the branch he was laying on, then shrugged and muttered, “Snakes. Why’d it have to be snakes?”Jose sat up on the branch and brushed himself off; his uniform was durable and hydrophobic, so it wouldn’t absorb any liquids, but the idea of being covered in the blood and guts of one of his least favorite animals was still dist
{Because the only time you need to worry about a soldier is when they don’t have anything to bitch about. As long as they’re griping about something, they’re doing just fine.}“Well, then I guess I’m doing just fine, because this shit fucking sucks, Pontiac.”{Suck it up, soldier boy. You’ve got a big one coming your way,} Pontiac countered, then highlighted a large heat source that was on the move in their direction.Corporal Cuervo whistled, then sighed, “That thing’s the size of an apartment building, Pontiac. ETA?”{Faster than you can run. I’d give you the numbers, but it’d just make you cry.}“You know I can factory reset you, right?”{Psh. As if you’d do something like that. I’m amazing,} Pontiac bragged.“Right, right, right, you’re the best. Options?”{Don’t get stepped on and do your best to leave a pretty corpse? It’s bigger than you, probably stronger than you, and my scans show that its skin is way thicker than yours.}“Well fuck. Maybe I can find another ham and cheese o
Corporal Cuervo lay on the ground, his head in a small crater, as his AI assistant’s augmented reality form continued madly laughing at him. If it weren’t for his NUTS, he would probably have been nothing but ashes and small pools of molten metal with some chunks of solid alloys in it. The temperature readout on his retinal AR display had long passed the 6,000 degree celsius mark and was still climbing, albeit at a continually slowing rate.Soon, the raging fire ran out of fuel, leaving him surrounded by ashes and obscured by smoke. He rolled over and gazed into the smoky air above him and couldn’t help but wonder if anyone else had ever lit Jurassic Planet on fire. For some reason, he doubted it. Effective though the tactic had proven to be, it was still highly embarrassing and the NUTS colonies had only been recently developed. In fact, the active reaper teams were still cycling through in order to have their new tech implanted, and Tekillya’s batch was the first to have the implant
Nuevo Laredo, Mexico US border.Everyone in the city heard a loud buzzing coming from the north. When they looked up, they saw one of the Edenian flying carriers, but something was different about what they had seen of them before. After scratching his head for a moment, one man in the crowd shouted, “It’s flying too low!”The only time they had seen a carrier, it had been flying so high that it was barely the size of a book of matches and the sound of the rotors breaking through the air hadn’t reached the ground.Although the carrier hadn’t come to a complete halt, it was moving slowly enough to see the details of its sleek hull. Though they couldn’t see the flight deck on the top of the carrier, they soon saw dozens of aircraft rising above it and streaking off in different directions.A murmur ran through the crowd as they realized that one of them was headed toward the area controlled by Los Zetas, a cartel formed by disgraced former members of the Mexican military. Locals knew th
While John’s aide-de-camp was delivering the press briefing on the recent operation, Aron, Nova, and the other AIs were in VR overseeing an important milestone in their unification plan.“And with that, our preparations are complete,” Aron said, then stretched his arms above his head, limbered his neck, and heaved a yawn. Even with his enhanced constitution, going through iteration after iteration of proposed government structures had exhausted him. And that was after they had already gone through a number of think tanks composed of veteran political minds in Lab City to remove inefficiencies and reduce the chances of power grabs and coups. Then, after all of that and before presenting them to Aron, Nova ran them through millions of simulations to spot any remaining flaws and smooth them out.Aron turned to the newest AI and asked, “What do you think of the plan, Gaia?”Gaia was the latest “chief” AI and would take up the responsibility of managing planetary affairs, acting as Aron’s