Chapter 040: Introduction

The Human Diversity Restoration Project was the last of Mankind’s genetic programs launched by the Solar Commonwealth’s government. It happened in the aftermath of the War of Purity, during which numerous Variants and all genetic transhuman Lines went extinct.

The HDRP had three main goals. The first was to resurrect some of the exterminated Variants. The second was to improve both the resurrected and the surviving Variants, using captured transhuman genetic technology to eliminate numerous design flaws in their genetic templates. The third was to diversify the baseline two-zero template, as the genetic similarity of the majority of Mankind made it extremely vulnerable to various bioweapons unleashed by the Transhuman Alliance.

The first two points of the plan were achieved without problems. The third eventually derailed the entirety of the HDRP. What started with the creation of numerous ethnic fenosculpts (for example, a reborn and ‘purified’ slavic, germanic, korean etc. fenosculpts, or ones completely new) quickly devolved into the creation of fenosculpts that experimented on and modified human sexuality or attempted to create what could be considered a new attempt on the Pure Line transhumanity.

While the most abusive, dangerous or otherwise controversial fenosculpts were banned before implementation, the genetic data wasn’t destroyed. As a result, many of them ended up being used by fleeing groups of political and societal radicals that settled the Frontier during the last years of the Solar Commonwealth or by inhabitants of Discord.

Encyclopedia Galactica

Book 9, Page 276

***

EGS Echo, Crew Deck

14:12 04.08.2610 STT

Ensign Christopher Hall

In the end, they had to wait for a while to see the other recruit. Tiriel was irritatingly laconic, and despite doing his best Christopher didn’t get anything out of her. Other than the fact that the second new member was, too, a marine trainee. Just an even less experienced one than Cycle.

Cycle’s enthusiasm was… overwhelming. It had apparently watched too many fantasy movies and was absolutely singleminded in its desire to focus on melee warfare. Apparently the Sidhe enjoyed the ‘human style’ close-quarters combat. Which made perfect sense even in the 27th Century, at least for someone who quite literally couldn’t die and was practically built from armor.

Cycle could approach and stab everything that wasn’t a tank or a marine in heavy armor, as a sufficiently strong firepower was a good deterrence even against it. Although its melee weapons were exotechs. They could slice and stab through modern tank armor. There was also some weird type of Sidhe ranged weapon, but Cycle didn’t want to show it before a joint training or a combat mission. On the other hand, Cycle had absolutely no combat experience. And watched way too many films.

Christopher made a mental note to ask Tendrik to make a UI overlay that would replace Sidhe's sword with a lightsaber and add the proper sound effects - it should make the joint training exercises sufficiently hilarious.

The situation in the living room returned to normalcy. Christopher was watching the film with Nekia, starting from the moment when she fell asleep. Although this time she was resting her back on him and remained fully conscious. Tendrik and Cycle were babbling to each other in the corner. Ryan, to Christopher’s slight surprise, seemed to have been talking with Kivanna about something. Tiriel was reading a book once again, though this time with a small cup beside her, filled with cookies.

Then they heard the doorbell ring again. Christopher looked at Tiriel. The elf put away her book with a typical neutral expression on her face.

“It is Ananti. The second new recruit.” She announced. Christopher made a mental note to do anything he could to get access to her mysterious sources of information, no matter the cost. He was willing to beg. It was certainly worth it. “Get ready for another major shock today.”

Christopher sighed. He could almost hear Keller shouting BINGO in the background. He was yet to know what it was this time, though. He paused the film and remotely opened the door.

The person that walked inside was… peculiar. A female two-zero, of a slightly oriental look - she looked vaguely middle-eastern, but that was about everything that Christopher could assess. Brown hair, tanned skin, black eyes.

She was wearing rather skimpy clothes. A sport crop top that barely covered the breasts, and matching shorts. Every single place visible other than the face (so arms, legs, abdomen and the triangle between shoulders and sternum) was almost entirely covered in cyberware implants.

The body ones were all made to be visible but without standing out too much. Their colour and texture were extremely similar to the natural skin, but there were lines and occasionally some strange symbols where there shouldn’t be. The arms and legs were completely black, in the meantime, and quite obviously cybernetic. Though at the very least they weren’t blocky - especially the arms were shaped after the muscles that should be there, just without a skin on them and the wrong colour.

The visible part of her breasts seemed natural. Christopher decided that he had matured a bit when he noticed that accidentally. On the other hand, she had a rather athletic build. The breasts were visible, but…

It was at this point that Christopher decided he hadn’t matured after all.

“Oh, hello there!” The new arrival seemed to be of the enthusiastic or just generally extroverted sort. Christopher would have probably reacted with awkward and slightly embarrassed silence if he went into a room that turned out to be full of people, all of which were busy staring at him. “Name’s Ananti, and I’m…” Her eyes encountered Tiriel’s. There were daggers flying in the air, and Christopher was certain that he heard a lightning storm roaring outside for a while. “... supposed to join this team in order to muscle it up a bit.” She finished.

“Great.” For some reason, it was Christopher who was left to be the speaker for the team. It could have been the fact that he was supposed to be team leader, though he personally suspected some secret conspiracy. “Pick one of the vacant rooms, put your things there, and then come meet the rest of the team.” She responded with a salute and disappeared into the quarters corridor.

“Now, that’s quite an aesthetically pleasing new member.” Ryan decided to comment. “Athletic tomboy girls are to die for.” Christopher sighed. He wasn’t sure if there was a type of a girl that wasn’t in Ryan’s strike zone. He wasn’t having that talk right now.

“So, Tiriel.” The elf looked up from her book and stared at him. “What’s your beef with her? Other than the fact that she is a transhuman?” Different aesthetic entirely, but she was obviously a Mechanist.

“Ananti is not a Mechanist.” Tiriel replied, while Tendrik nodded in the background. “But a human cybernetic transformationist.” Christopher seemed to have stepped into another weirdness of the future.

“And the difference is?” Christopher took advantage of her chewing on a cookie to ask a question. “I mean, it’s both just people with cybernetic implants, right?” If anything, Tendrik’s implants appeared much more crude.

“Well, cybernetic transformationists keep implants visible, but generally adhere to human-like looks.” Tendrik decided to intervene. He of all people was most knowledgeable on the subject. “Which she does, save for the limbs, which I find a bit strange to be honest. You can keep implants invisible with modern technology, so if you keep them sticking out like a sore thumb, it’s pretty much a political statement.”

It was stupid. It made sense, but it was still stupid. If the future was completely traumatized by the War of Purity - which started with transhuman power-trip and growing dislike towards normal humans - then keeping yourself visually human (or not) certainly felt like a political statement.

Besides, Tendrik showed him some pictures of people of his world. Some of them were more cable and circuits than people. Everything in an extremely crude fashion. And not always humanoid.

“Okay, so cybernetic transformationists are Mechanists but with better PR. Got it.” Christopher summed the stupidity up and decided to ignore it from then onward. “Though this probably explains why Tiriel has issues with her.” Tendrik nodded. Tiriel shook her head with a slight disdain on her face.

“Who exactly do you take me for?” She asked. Christopher almost replied ‘a person who spent quite a while disliking Tendrik due to implants’, but he decided to not escalate the talk into an argument. Flexibility of beliefs wasn’t exactly Tiriel’s strong point. “My dislike for Ananti is caused by my general dislike of people who try to cheat while playing Longest War through the shipnet.”

“Well, I’m slightly surprised that you didn’t murder her for that.” Christopher said. Tiriel gave him a death stare. The Longest War was a serious business to the elf.

“Still, there goes our numerical superiority.” Ryan sighed. “We used to have four boys and three girls. Now we got one girl and one alien of indeterminate gender for…” He paused. It was still a bit too painful. “So now we have four girls, three boys and… oh wait, I forgot about Patches.” The team’s cat retreated to his little crate a while ago, due to the ship currently decelerating.

It was apparently animal cruelty to keep it outside of it during acceleration and decceleration. It was apparently not cruelty at all to keep recruits outside of well isolated boxes during the acceleration and decceleration. Six hundred years and cats still get preferential treatment.

Christopher knew that Tiriel was about to unleash some truly horrifying bomb merely by seeing her smile.

“Oh I did not mention that?” Her smile was as angelic as it was devilish. “Ananti is actually a man.”

“Fuck it, I’m going celibate.” Ryan announced in the resulting silence. Cycle was clapping its hands real fast, probably super excited that it got to witness one more relatively popular film trope (the ‘I’m actually not a girl/boy’) in action.

“But she has… uhm…” Christopher tried to gesticulate, but stopped when understood how vulnerable it made him to the top predator in the room.

“Yes, Chris? What does Ananti have?” Tiriel's smile became even more angelic, and focused entirely on him.

“The… uhm… face. Feminine face.” He managed to escape the encirclement. Probably. You could never be sure of that with Tiriel around.

“Yeah, he is from one of the weirder fenosculpts.” Tiriel decided to spare whatever remained of his public image. “One of the ‘person X wrote Y in book Z, and so I will try to unmake millenia of evolution and make something better, what can go wrong?’ fenosculpts.” Christopher had no doubt what political and societal option Tiriel would back with all her might if she happened to be on 21st Century Earth. He wasn’t going to enter that particular swamp - the best part of being in the future was that he could observe all the modern political clustermesses from an outsider’s perspective.

The more Christopher got to experience the future, the more he came to the conclusion that the future was pretty much his times up to eleven. Every single political, societal, and religious ideology of his times, both stupid and smart, marginal and popular, ended up being realized in some country out there. And typically to the absolute extreme. Sometimes, it seemed, even on the biological level.

“Just ignore the way he looks.” Tiriel sighed. “He is an absolutely normal young man underneath it. So a thick-headed and overly physically strong human, who tends to think with the wrong part of his body.” Christopher had to retract his earlier statement - Tiriel ocassionally went feminist in public. “Honestly, if there ever was a scientific achievement even less needed by Mankind than the fenosculpts, it probably never ended up being made.” She added, before returning to her book.

There was a moment of stunned silence. Nekia seemed seriously lost, leading to Christopher suspecting that she didn’t exactly figure out what all of that was about. Cycle was super enthusiastic. Kivanna had a complicated look on her face. Ryan was weirded out - Christopher began thinking that Ryan actually met Ananti earlier and had tried to sweet talk him without knowing who he was. Tiriel was emotionless.

Christopher himself was honestly indifferent. Surprised, but indifferent. On the other hand, the most surprising thing was how everyone seemed much more surprised and had much more mixed reactions than he had.

Then again, Ananti wouldn’t be a surprising sight in the Equality Front world. Such reactions on the Echo - crewed by members of the downright reactionary Res Publica Christiana and very conservative Alliance for the Preservation of Democracy - were probably understandable. The first world countries of his time split far and wide, and the old and new human members of the team seemed to be from different segments altogether.

After a few minutes Ananti returned.

“And I’m ba…” He noticed the stares. “Let me guess, she told you about it?” Once again, lightning and daggers flew between him and Tiriel. This time Christopher had enough, and decided to react quickly.

“Tendrik.” He subvoiced to the cyborg. “Could you tone it down with the overlay? The sounds of lightning strikes are starting to give me a migrene.”

“Only the part about your actual gender.” Tiriel replied in the background, without taking her eyes off the book. “I did not want some of our teammates to get false hopes.”

“Uhm, boss? It’s not me this time.” Tendrik subvoiced back. “It’s Cycle.” Now that Christopher thought about it, it made perfect sense. The Sidhe had to be a great - and fast - programmer by nature, and its interest in human films and videogames made the irritating special effects suddenly make sense.

“Ah, I see.” Ananti replied coldly. Half of the room suddenly froze. Nekia had snow in her hair, and her breath spread a white cloud around. The Sidhe was a really good and really fast programmer, or simply came prepared.

“Cycle, please, tone the special effects down a bit.” Christopher quickly subvoiced to the Sidhe. The alien replied with puppy eyes. Literal puppy eyes, displayed on its face Christopher started suspecting that the Sidhe was Innocent’s illegitimate child. What was the chance of two weird alien robots having identical senses of humour?

Eventually, it acquiesced. The room returned to normalcy.

“So, I guess it’s the time for me to introduce myself properly.” Ananti returned to his cheerful look, only to immediately abandon it in favour of a rather embarrassed expression. “Uhm, how do you exactly do that? I’m not exactly experienced with introducing myself to someone.”

Socially awkward extrovert. That’s a new one.

“You typically offer some abbreviated backstory.” Christopher decided to help Ananti. He also pointed to a chair. There was no real need for the new recruit to stand in front of them like it was an interrogation.

“Oh, well, I don’t really have any.” Ananti took the seat and replied immediately. “Backstory, I mean.” They stared at him in silence, so he continued. “I was a slave on the Hastati when you seized the ship. I don’t know exactly what I was doing there, as for some reason I demanded to be hard mentalsculpted. So my oldest memory is around forty days old.”

Christopher crossreferenced the strangely mismatched cybernetics, his knowledge about the culture that the Hastati originated from and a bit of theoretical knowledge thanks to the 21st Century internet. The result was his newfound desire to find corpses of the Hastati crew members so that he could do some pretty mean things to them.

Ananti didn’t seem to know. Besides, Christopher might have been wrong. So he wasn’t going to waste even a single second more on thinking about it. Much less actually talk about it with someone.

“Hey, now that you said that…” Ryan suddenly looked like he had an epiphany. “Damn, I almost forgot about the slaves that got saved back then. What happened to the rest of you?” Christopher had to agree. They pretty much went under the radar. In Recovery Team Eight’s defense, they had a lot of much more important things to focus on. Like trying to survive.

“Oh, they are on the other ships.” Ananti replied. “Innocent and Athalia did some absolute miracles when it came to patching us up. Although I have no idea what’s the basis of Alexander Keller’s recruitment system. I was one of the two former slaves that were singled out to join the Echo’s crew. The other one landed in Accounting, I think. I only saw that girl once during a group therapy with Innocent.”

Accounting. The half-mythical place of terror aboard the Echo. Christopher was yet to meet someone from that section. But he did hear talks about blood sacrifices that seemed to have been a joke that he was too outdated to understand.

“Nobody knows what’s the basis of his recruitment system.” Christopher replied. “He is extremely picky. Two people from the slaves, four people from several thousand Texian folks that joined us, about one person per country in the local subsector…” He sighed. This subject was absolutely forbidden with Tiaa Sistonen around. She reacted to it pretty badly.

Christopher found that mysterious. He was certain that there was some underlying secret to all that. He just couldn’t figure it out. He even asked Lith Athalia during one of their medical emergency rendezvous, but the medic had no idea either.

Tiaa found it angering rather than mysterious, but it was understandable for someone who was responsible for keeping the ship - now almost completely devoid of crew - operational. The Echo’s corridors were so empty that it was occasionally scary.

The talk continued for quite a while.

***

EGS Echo, Command Deck

23:11 05.08.2610 STT

Commander Lena Drathari

The wreckage of the Seekers’ fleet was rather spectacular. The largest she ever saw, in fact. Her country rarely engaged in large battles.

“Bitter Remark: There go several decades of gathering intelligence about the Seekers’ operations.” Innocent decided to rain on her parade. She knew what the robot meant. The wreckage was several times bigger than the most generous estimates of the main combat fleet of the Corporation.

“This story has a rather absurd escalation.” Keller announced, the cigarette temporarily out of his mouth. Lena was still surprised with her discovery that Alexander was actually smoking. She actually suspected that he had started recently and was just pretending that he was always doing that to save his face. After all, Keller the Magnificent falling to such an addiction out of stress? “A while ago I was surprised that the Seekers sent a fast battleship anywhere. Now I’m watching a wreckage of eight of their battleships and one dreadnought. I mean, what the hell?! Since when do they even have dreadnoughts?!”

She was staring at an equivalent of her old country's entire Navy. Fielded by a terrorist organization. It was both a humbling sight and something quite embarrassing for the Silverweaved Flame.

The dreadnought that she suspected to be the Corporation’s Navy flagship was certainly not salvageable. You could fly the Echo through the hole in its hull. It started around its prow and went through its entire length. Something vivisected a four kilometers long monster capable of resisting a dozen or so direct hits with nuclear warheads, and did so with a single shot.

“I don’t even know what they used this ship for.” Keller refused to leave the subject. He was seriously agitated. “A rogue research group running a DREADNOUGHT around? What next? A Red Cross Committee flying around in a superdreadnought and blasting anyone found guilty of warcrimes to smithereens with their entire solar systems?” Lena would have paid to see that happening. Especially to the Pact of Steel members.

Commander Drathari remembered the hole in the much better armored ship. The hole that was larger and longer than the entire Echo. She joined Keller in being agitated, but by a completely different thing. Good news was that if whatever destroyed the dreadnought fired at them, they wouldn’t have time to be scared.

“Announcement: I ran the structural analysis of the dreadnought through our database.” Innocent said. “No match. The weapon used to destroy it remains unknown.” Innocent decided to simultaneously rain on her parade and salt her wounds.

“Well, what now?” Lena decided to skip the talk to its logical conclusion. “Captain?”

“Uhm…” He was insufferable recently. The earlier overconfident Keller was no more, and to her surprise she began to miss him. “Well, now we are super happy that nothing has killed us yet. We also mark several ships, including one of the battleships, to land on. We steal everything we can, maybe even get to activate whatever we can. But after the mess with that damn cruiser I don’t have a lot of hopes.”

The Seekers’ cruiser they seized a while ago still followed their fleet, but it was pretty much an overglorified passenger ship. There were so many security programs and well hidden traps in its computer system that even Innocent had given up on the ship. It required all of its computers physically replaced to be perfectly sure that there were no kill-switches hidden anywhere.

It was visible on the display under its new name. EGS Deadweight.

“Well, the good news is that if we survive all of that… we’re pretty much set for life.” The Captain continued. When she stared at him for a while, he quickly added. “Prize law, Lena.” Then she understood. And chuckled loudly.

The possibly salvageable part of the fleet in front of them included six battleships, eight battlecruisers, twelve heavy cruisers, thirteen light cruisers, ten destroyers, a handful of frigates and several large cargo vessels. All of them were damaged to various levels, mostly due to flying parts of the vivisected dreadnought and a number of smaller vessels that got destroyed.

The entire fleet was on the verge of going Kessler - at least some of the smallest ships were damaged not by an attack, but by flying - and very fast - debris. Which, in turn, created even more debris. At least one battleship was half-broken by what looked like a light cruiser who was pushed out of its stable orbit by an impact of something, flew around the moon’s orbit and then hit the battleship with a really large speed.

According to the Guild’s rules - that Keller found no reason to modify in that regard - half of the value of the seized things belonged to the Captain - after all, it was him who had to pay for maintenance and so on from his own pocket. The rest was shared between the crew, proportionally to the rank (and occasionally with some bonuses for being responsible for seizing that particular ship).

The Echo’s crew was extremely small, and it was the only Guild’s personnel in their fleet, though she suspected that Keller would end up giving the crew members of the other ships a nice bonus pay. If he did that from his own wealth or his own share, then the Guild members from their fleet were going to receive an incredible amount of money.

She ran a quick calculation - after ten seconds she found out that there was a fair chance of her ending her first Guilds’ assignment as a multibillionaire.

She was excited. How many GoI items could she buy with around 675 billion CEUs? At this point even the Enlisted were going to become millionaires. It was enough to be settled for life if you were going to live in an austere way. Lena could as well just drop the money into a bank account and live comfortably off the interest.

“Notice: As much as I understand and share the need to spend insane amounts of wealth on drugs and hookers, I would like to notice that we might be thinking about spending the money we get for killing a bear while said bear is still in the forest.” Innocent interrupted her small fantasy. “Correction: I meant to say ‘orphanages and charities’.” Keller laughed a bit. Lena added a chuckle on her own. It wasn’t exactly a good joke, and it came together with a fair and rather unnerving point.

Maybe it was just Innocent trying to remind us about that gently?

“The real question is what exactly made the Seekers abandon the ships that were lightly damaged or not damaged at all.” Keller returned his mind to the task at hand. With a rather dumb question in her opinion.

“I suspect some sort of Silencer-like EMP blast.” Lena commented. “Most of them seem dead, some seem to be running on emergency power. Makes sense if they were knocked out, boarded and then abandoned. The Seekers’ computers seem to be able to partially repair themselves after such blasts, at least if they weren’t too strong. Some of them managed to partially repair themselves, others didn’t.”

“Right, right.” Keller nodded. Lena was surprised that he didn’t figure it out himself. “Let’s send Colonel Nowak to one of the battleships. I’ll give her Focquet, mostly because I want Innocent and Lith to stay next to me and that concludes the list of computer wizards we have.” Lena found it a bit saddening that despite being a Virtual and an accomplished programmer she wasn’t anywhere near that group.

She began considering asking Innocent for some programming lessons. She was ready to abandon her pride if it meant getting her programming skills to reach such a level. Focquet was a murderous psychopath, and Lith was Lith, which meant that the priest was her only hope in that field.

“Now, I also have another idea. But I expect our recently grumpy priest to complain.” Keller continued. “You see that group of ships over there?” He pointed towards a group of supply vessels that had mostly avoided destruction by being on the other side of the moon than the rest of the fleet. Though there still seemed to be damage. “I’m thinking about sending Recovery Team Eight on a lone mission there. These ships are a bit away from the main fleet, and if Colonel Nowak gets quick we should be aware if there are any enemies aboard the main fleet ships before Hall and his small group of misfits get into range of anything.”

Innocent didn’t like that idea. Lena had no idea why that idea even happened - the Captain was acting increasingly erratic, and suddenly sending Hall away despite earlier wanting to use him a human shield was incredibly dumb.

While the priest and the Captain argued in the background, she sent orders to the starfighters to reconnoiter the wreckage field, and for some probes to be sent to enter some of the wrecks. Then she sent orders to Colonel Nowak to prepare for the action. She had procedures and rules to uphold. And a ship to run, as apparently as time passed more and more of that was on her head.