Inside a dimly lit, dusty basement room, a group of people with anger on their faces were seated on steel folding chairs. The only sound was the creaking of the unfinished basement ceiling and the occasional dust being knocked off of it and falling to the floor as someone in the house above stomped around like an upstairs neighbor. But no matter how loud the stomping echoed against the rust-red-spotted cement floor of the basement, the only disturbance was to the spiders that had spun their webs between the exposed wooden beams in the ceiling.Soon, the stomping above stopped and a door creaked open. Everyone seated in the basement swiveled their heads as one and looked at the stairs, where a shiny leather shoe appeared. Then a leg covered in tan slacks, followed by the hem of a navy blue blazer. When the man wearing the slacks and blazer turned the corner on the stairs, the blazer fell open and showed the blue and white horizontal stripes on the thin sweater beneath it, which had the
Felix was leaning back on the couch in his office, his feet crossed on the coffee table and hands clasped behind his head, obviously in deep thought.{What’s wrong, sir?} Raven, his personal AI assistant asked. {You seem to be zoning out a lot these days.} Felix had remained unmoving in his position for more than twenty minutes, the rise and fall of his chest and blinking eyelids his only movements.“Nothing, I’m just trying to figure out where things are going to go from here. It’s been a week since the countries signed their individual surrender accords, but no matter how I think about things, I can’t see a peaceful resolution. There’s guaranteed to be problems in the future, no matter what,” Felix sighed.{What makes you say that?} she asked.“History.”{Do you mean how those who fail to learn from history’s lessons are doomed to repeat it?}“Exactly. Every time one nation overwhelmed another and received their surrender or succeeded in an annexation, an insurgency has arisen from
“Bring me to Aron,” Felix asked as he logged in to VR. With the growing number of people who had access and their varied tasks and locations, Nova had created a navigational VI aid.Once he arrived at Aron’s location, he couldn’t help but curse in surprise. He was in a large, grassy meadow with Sarah, Henry, Rina, and all of the high-level leader AIs. The meadow itself was about fifty meters across, and outside of it was nothing but devastation. Craters were scattered around the cracked, bare earth, and more were appearing every second as explosions continued booming out in the distance.“What the hell is going on?” Felix wondered, his jaw dropped so far Sarah considered spawning an egg to stick in it to see if it would fit.{Sir Aron is having a sparring session with mother,} Athena answered, pulling up a screen that showed the action in real time with slow motion replays for Felix.After watching the footage for a few seconds, he asked, “Why fight with swords and magic if it’s a spa
407 - Corpses if Necessary, Prisoners if PossibleNova appeared out of nowhere right next to Felix. If people in the simulation had to deal with biological processes, he would have shat himself in surprise.{Sir, something’s come up that requires your urgent attention,} she reported to Aron.“What’s up?” Aron calmly asked, as if he were a pillar that could hold up the sky if it fell on him.{We discovered that a large number of Edenian and Esparian citizens have gone missing in a few countries. They all disappeared at roughly the same time over the course of an hour or two.}“How many citizens in total, and which countries did they disappear from? What were they there for? Are the disappearances done, or are people still going missing?” Aron asked, this time with a distinct chill in his tone. He had a few ideas of why his people would be going missing, and none of them were pleasant.{Fifty-seven people disappeared hours after arriving in Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador, Brazil, and Gua
{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