I stood within the crowd, all our eyes fixed upon the public display screen showing the war on the Moon.
All of us, barring the two members of the Penitents with their shaven, scarred heads, could have stayed indoors and watched from the comfort of our neural laces, but there was something comforting about being in a community, watching events transpire together.
I suppose if you had sufficiently powerful eye augments, you could watch the whole thing for yourself, staring at the Moon as it unashamedly lurked in the daytime sky, but I doubt the finer details would be obvious.
A child whooped with awe as a large explosion appeared in frame, throwing up a massive cloud of debris, some of it thrown into lunar orbit. I peered at the Moon myself, but it was too bright to spot the blast.
"You think that killed anybody?", a woman to my right idly asked, one hand twirling her curly hair.
"Wouldn't bet on it, unless a rock lands on the poor bastards down at the poles." Her friend demurred, before resuming watching.
I checked my uplink, and it seemed that the prediction markets concurred. There was only a 5% probability of more than a dozen people dying in this fight, though the numbers were hardly set in stone given that no Clairvoyants or Precogs had joined the betting pool.
12% odds that the rogue Crafters would escape. Surprisingly high, given how harshly violations of the Turing Accords were treated, but I suppose that a bunch of superhuman Thinkers and Technomancers had a better chance of escaping punishment than the typical script kiddie trying to rustle up another AGI on their gaming rig.
The viewpoint switched, showing a horde of drones rushing towards the blast site, presumably firing lasers that were invisible except for when they scattered off the dust clouds; railgun impacts, provoking flashes of lightning as the the ambient electric potential of the lunar surface was occasionally grounded.
Humans in space suits huddled in a crater, wisely unwilling to risk themselves while there were still drones capable of taking the fight, others, clad in exoskeletons or power armor, were joining the fray intermittently, but mostly avoiding any major risks. From the distant perspective of the teledrone broadcast, they were silvered beetles, scurrying about on the pockmarked surface.
Conspicuously standing in their midst, in fact the focal point of their attention, was a man who might as well have been naked in comparison to the others in their voidsuits.
He was tall, almost 7 feet in fact, with a jaw that could practically cut lunar regolith, immaculately coiffed hair that almost seemed to sway in the nonexistent atmosphere. A skintight suit covered most of him, emphasizing his abs and he had a cape that fluttered most egregiously without any actual breeze.
If that had been all, it would have been unremarkable. After all, pressure suits that didn't require bulky layering had been around for a while, and making cloth flutter was trivial.
No, what marked out this man as something extraordinary by even transhuman standards was the fact that he was unmasked, face exposed to the void. The camera feed zoomed in on him, and in response, he turned and offered his most winsome smile at us viewers. This prompted a whole lot of cooing and swooning in the audience, and in mild annoyance, I dove inwards, letting my vision be encompassed by images that didn't arise from my optic nerves.
Consul. The superhero's superhero. I'd never been particularly enamored by him, he was far too vanilla, but that didn't mean I didn't respect him. Anyone who could accelerate from standstill at 200g, withstand a railgun impact on his chest and barely budge, and who occasionally went diving into the photosphere of the Sun as recreation warranted that.
Oh, and he didn't need air to breathe, if that wasn't obvious already.
Boring. I'd have called him Superman with the serial numbers filed off if it hadn't been for the fact that he couldn't shoot laser beams from his eyes, or for the matter that he wasn't vulnerable to anything so trite as kryptonite. You couldn't kill him with a nuke, and people had tried. It was 50:50 odds whether a few grams of antimatter to the face might do the trick.
No, if Consul had any limitations, it was in that he was slow. Not in terms of absolute speed of course, he'd managed to hit a record of 0.2 C before he got bored, but in reflexes. He was peak baseline human in that regard, with sub 100 millisecond response times, but that was glacial compared to some other supes, or even augmented humans. I'd heard that he'd tried to have reflex boosters installed, but even the sharpest nanoscalpels or the most powerful medical lasers couldn't make a dent on his skin, and he had proved immune to gene therapy vectors and nanites. I wondered if he felt like he'd caught the short end of the stick, but dismissed the notion when I remembered that he was still one of the few Class 6 supes around.
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[https://i.ibb.co/fv2LtsV/183c7138-0bb3-4e0d-baf5-e100bb044642.jpg]
I flicked through the web, more concerned with figuring out what had drawn him to such a relatively inconsequential fight, and discovered that he'd been hired by the Chinese a few weeks ago, apparently to help expedite the construction of their competing space elevator. I felt the man's skills were wasted in construction work, but I supposed that being able to move megatons without reaction mass was always a boon. They must have been pretty desperate, I had heard his hourly rates were outright astronomical.
It wasn't the Chinese government that was cracking down on the Crafters though, so I suppose he'd just happened to have been in the area.
As I continued to observe the battle on the Moon, it became apparent that the Crafters were putting up a strong fight. They had managed to hold off the drones and the heavily armed humans for far longer than anyone had anticipated. Their defenses were ingenious, consisting of autonomous nuclear mines hidden in the lunar rubble that detonated with the slightest touch, and swarms of microbots that could disable electronics with ease.
It was clear that they had anticipated the assault and had been preparing for it for a while. But even with their clever tactics, they were slowly losing ground. One by one, their positions were being overrun, and their forces were gradually whittled down.
Consul seemed to be enjoying himself. He was in the thick of the action, taking out drones with his bare hands and tossing them aside like they were toys. He moved with a grace and fluidity that belied his massive size, and his blows were like thunderbolts, each punch sending the hapless target into orbit as a glowing mass of debris.
I couldn't help but be impressed by his raw power, but at the same time, I couldn't help feeling a twinge of unease. There was something unsettling about the way he dispatched his foes with such ease, almost as if they were beneath his notice.
As the battle raged on, it became clear that the Crafters had one last trick up their sleeves. A massive robotic spider emerged from one of their hidden bunkers, bristling with weapons and sensors. It was easily ten times the size of the other drones and was clearly designed for one purpose only: to take down Consul. Of course, if it was a drone obeying the normal laws of physics, it was less than a toy in his eyes, but the way it scuttled like a living thing suggested its makers had imbued it with more than a bit of their metahuman power.
The battle came to a sudden halt as the spider charged towards Consul, its legs pounding the lunar dust. Consul simply stood his ground, a smirk playing across his lips.
The spider unleashed a barrage of missiles, lasers, and railgun sabots at him, but Consul merely shrugged them off, his skin rippling with energy. With a single bound, he leapt onto the spider's back and tore off one of its legs with ease.
The spider reared back, its sensors flashing in alarm. Consul simply grinned and tore off another leg, then another. The spider thrashed and bucked, trying to dislodge its attacker, but Consul held on tight, like a rodent deciding to Ratatouille an elephant. He kept on punching, languidly this time, caving in the hardened carapace that had shrugged off the more mundane projectiles the human defenders had unleashed upon it.
Finally the spider collapsed, its legs twitching feebly. Consul stood up, dusting himself off. And then whatever had been powering the thing exploded. The shockwave scoured away the dust that had already settled in the battlefield, and the mundane forces hit the deck as yet another crater appeared on the much abused surface of the Moon. When it all dissipated, he was gone, and my heart leapt, hardly willing to believe that he'd been vaporized. There were gasps of shock, but they quickly abated when the camera swiveled over to show him as a blur vanishing over the horizon, headed back to his day job.
The battle was over. The remaining forces tentatively strode forward, heading into what remained of the lair beneath the surface, and the feed switched to something else, a feel-good documentary about UN relief efforts in Haiti.
As the crowd around me cheered and clapped, I couldn't help but feel a sense of unease. The power that Consul wielded was immense, almost godlike. And yet, I couldn't shake the feeling that there was something fundamentally wrong about it.
I wondered why he'd beat such a hasty retreat, and checked the prediction markets again. Ah, it seemed the consensus was that his clothing wasn't nearly as robust as he was, and he hadn't reacted fast enough to imbue it with his telekinetic aura. No wonder he hadn't stuck around for interviews, he was probably naked as the day he was born..
As I left the viewing area in the plaza and made my way back home, I couldn't help but wonder what kind of world we were living in, where metahuman superheroes like Consul were needed to protect us. I can't deny they had been doing a good job, Earth was still largely intact, despite the best efforts of the interested parties.
I felt more than heard the notification alarm go off in my head. Hurrying my pace, I pinged a robo cab, and set off for my apartment.
Once home, I settled in, and began the meditation loop. My senses dimmed, my lace began systematically disconnecting my sensorium, until I was floating in the virtual equivalent of a sensory deprivation tank. The conversation I was about to have was a very expensive luxury, and I'd be damned if I was distracted.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
I worked out the mantra in my mind, trying to avoid the visceral panic that always threatened to well up when you severed yourself like this. I didn't even have proprioception anymore, and it was a sensation you had to experience to understand.
My internal clock ticked away, the only connection I had with the outside world, until right on the dot, there was a flash and-
She smiled at me. She was just a touch older, the first hint of crow's feet and laugh lines on her sensual mouth. She had cut her hair short like she'd always been planning to, even if I loved it just the way it was. I leaned forward and hugged her, as if she was actually in front of me.
"Adat. I missed you baby.." She whispered, before gasping out loud when she realized she could feel my ghostly touch. "You paid for the full sensorium?"
I smiled ruefully, "Well, not full. I don't think he's emulating pain."
"You're in luck, I'd slap you for being so wasteful if I knew you'd feel it." Anjana declared, before sitting down in her room four lightyears away.
"It's our anniversary baby, I'll handle the expense. But seriously, I needed to hear from you, it's been fucking hectic back home, so I want to know what's going on with you."
Anjana nodded, her hair bouncy in the microgravity. She made a gesture, and the walls turned transparent, a simulation of the environment outside. A bright star took up a large portion of the view, subtly whiter, or rather more blue, than Sol. There was another, in the distance, too dim to be called a sun, but brighter than any distant star normally would be. And from the projected shadows on her face, there was yet another star behind my viewpoint. My first in-person glimpse of Alpha Centauri, the ternary system that was Sol's nearest neighbor.
"Right. Censor, are you active?" She called out to an AI.
"Yes ma'am, you can speak freely, I'll seamlessly redact as you go." A disembodied voice stated.
"I'm sorry hun, it's the rules, we've had too many issues with sympathizers back home, Command is cracking down." She apologized, settling into a couch, the smart-matter molded itself around her to keep her comfortably still, sticking slightly to the curves I ached to hold so that she wouldn't float off with an errant motion.
"I get it. We had an issue in Brazil last week. Attempted sabotage of a launch site."
"They're getting bolder. Was there any serious damage?" She reached out and touched my projection, and I felt some of the stress leaving my body as I felt her soft hands caress my face.
"Not that I heard of, one of the support beams was destabilized and would have broken down, but they managed to get a supe with large scale kinesis to the site and held it in place before it could fall apart. Close call, but no damage to population centers." I said.
"Well, we've made some progress in AC. There was a confirmed kill on a dozen of their Von Neumanns out in the Oort. They've still got a stranglehold on the inner system, but there's plans to recontest [REDACTED]". Anjana grimaced. "Fuck, looks like that's classified. Come on Censor, there's like three planets that could be, and Adat has security clearance anyway."
"I apologize, but that topic is still classified under [REDACTED], even if your husband has ULTRAVIOLET clearance. I hope you understand." The AI intoned, and she shook her head, it was pointless to try and argue further.
Instead, she gestured again, and a AR projection of the system sprang up around her. The ternary system was rendered in extreme detail, barring a few sections that were greyed out by the Censor.
"As you can see, they're behind schedule when it comes to the Dyson Swarm. We've been launching attacks at as high a tempo as we can maintain. There's speculation that they could bring a stellaser online, you know, a Nicoll-Dyson swarm turned into a laser, but they're prioritizing maintaining their grip on their primary worlds. It's still incomplete, and the reflector aren't in place, but they're shifting things around fast."
I watched a timelapse of the conflict, starting from the initial contact, accidental as it was. Ah, there had been so much optimism at the time, brutally misplaced as it was. After almost a decade of SETI and Deep Search ruling out any potential peer civilizations in the galaxy, to suddenly have them brought to us by a fluke had been a massive shock.
It happened during the initial attempt to create a proper wormhole to the nearest star system outside Sol. The Crafters and Technomancers had attempted something novel, entirely outside the scope of simulations, no matter how powerful. And then, it worked, and worked too well. For a full day, a rift had been torn in spacetime itself, connecting the research facility on Proxima Centauri b, newly christened as Outlook, to an entirely unidentifiable patch of the universe. (Or was it even our universe? Opinion was divided, it was likely outside our normal light cone, given the astral geography glimpsed through it. None of the visible galaxies aligned, at the very least it wasn't in the Laniakea Supercluster.)
A patch of the universe dominated by a fucking K3 civilization, which wasted no time in crossing over uncontested, since the entire project had been non-military in nature, an attempt by the squabbling nations of the world to regain some degree of unity after the turmoil of the last few decades. Does that mean anything to you, K3? I'm talking about the Kardashev scale, which, when I a kid, was just a fun toy for nerds to geek out over. It measured the energy output of a civilization, with K1 being one that used up all the energy its star gave its planet, K2 harnessing the star itself, likely through a Dyson Swarm, and then K3 represented the kind of hyperadvanced and old beings that used up the power of their entire galaxy. It was a logarithmic scale, so the jump up each level represented 10 billion times the energy budget. Back when I first heard of it, humanity had been a mere 0.7, not even a full 1. These days, we're closer to 1.2, but given that Earth isn't covered in a layer of solar panels, most of our power production is off-world.
The aliens had appeared peaceful at first, friendly even, wasting no time in establishing communications, what with the lucky presence of xenolinguist Thinkers as well as their own technological superiority. They had certainly been just as surprised as us at First Contact, but had sent emissaries and drones through the wormhole, eager to understand how the metahuman powers we possessed and they utterly lacked worked.
FTL transmissions from the local Clairvoyants had prompted great jubilation on Earth for days, right until the aliens dug just a little too deep into our archives, which we'd presented to them quite guilelessly, and found out about SAMSARA.
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/65211/ex-nihilo-nihil-supernum-original-hard-scifi-with/chapter/1357222/1-samsara
And then they started killing. Broadcast live by local Clairvoyants for everyone at home to see.
The image of the stars shifted, and I shook my head, trying to clear it of the memories.
"Anyway, we've been giving them hell since." Anjana said, her voice breaking through my reverie. I was glad, every minute of the FTL comms and the additional Clairvoyant mediation cost more than a week's wages for me, if not her. "We're still losing ground in some places, but overall we've made a lot of progress. We may even be able to take back Alpha Centauri eventually."
"You really think that's possible? This is a fight against an entire star system." I said doubtfully. "We don't have any kind of weapon that can affect them on that scale."
Anjana smiled grimly. "No, not yet at least. But Command has some ideas they're working on..". I didn't like the sound of that at all, especially if it involved more metahuman fuckery, that had been what got us into this whole mess in the first place. She gestured again and the projection zoomed out further, encompassing dozens of stars apart from the ternary system's primary suns. A few were highlighted with a faint blue glow; these were way-stations for our forces as we slowly spread outwards from Sol towards our enemies' home turf.
"It's going to take time and resources baby, but if all goes according to plan.. We might just win this thing after all." She finished softly.
Then she exclaimed, "Shit, excuse me just a second. I need to make the jump."
I nodded, her use of her powers was randomized so that the Centaurs didn't get a chance to get a lock on the station she was in. It was close enough to their bases in AC that there was a very real risk a stealthed warship might spot them. There was a faint flicker, but the ESPer we had hired for the transmission was aboard the station, so there was no disruption in our conversation. I noticed that the view was subtly different, the three stars in a slightly different alignment, corresponding to however far she'd teleported them this time.
She leaned back, sweat beading on her brow, and I had reached out to brush it away before remembering that I couldn't really interact with her. She smiled nonetheless as I caressed her skin, at least I could feel her via the medium's powers.
We talked a little bit longer, and I even quickly approved the overtime penalty for the transmission, right until I received a ping from the medium saying she was too exhausted to continue. I gave Anjana one last hug, this time remoting through a manipulator arm in her lounge so that she got a facsimile of my touch. It was a rough goodbye, and when I came to back home, I had to wipe away a tear and remind myself that she could handle herself. She had to.
Another year, and she might be redeployed to Sol, but a teleporter of her caliber was hard to relinquish, especially for the military, and the next potential replacement had miles to go before they could fill her shoes. I couldn't help but worry that I'd get a red letter, quaintly physical, in my otherwise atavistic mailbox one day. Far too many had, especially those close to the people fighting on the frontlines..