“Get up you maggots!” A woman’s voice screamed.
Faith sat bolt upright and almost hit her head on the bunk above hers. Blinking in confusion Faith looked around and saw she was in a large rectangular room with bunkbeds lining both sides. What was weirder was the dozens of windows looking out onto a forest.
“What the hell?”
“Come on you maggots get up!”
Looking towards the voice Faith was even more confused because the woman was immaculately dressed in an Empire of Thronos military uniform. Dozens of girls around her were rushing out of their bunks and lining up in front of them.
Not wanting to be yelled at again Faith climbed out of her bunk and realized she was wearing small gray shorts and a white shirt. Before she could make sense of what she was wearing or were she was the woman was in front of her.
“You took your sweet time getting into formation Princess! Drop and give me twenty!”
Blinking in total confusion at the woman screaming in her face she meekly asked. “Twenty what?”
The woman seemed to swell up and became bigger as the other girls tried to stifle their laughter. “OH! We have a comedian!” Looking around at the nearby girls she screamed. “Recruits drop and give me thirty!” Turning back to Faith, Faith gulped at the fire in her eyes. “You recruit will give me thirty - eight counts!”
Gathering her courage she asked. “Recruits? Eight counts? I don’t understand ma’am?”
Sighing, like Faith was the biggest disappointment in the woman’s life, she finally said in a softer but still hard tone. “Let me explain to you recruit because you seem to have lost your memories. You joined the Empire of Thronos military and now this is boot camp after which, if you manage to pass, which is looking less and less likely, you will be sent for farther training in one of our Empires major branches of service that you have an aptitude for.”
Faith was stunned. “Ma’am I didn’t sign up for the military!”
The woman gave an amused snort. “There is always someone who claims that. Every! Single! Time! No recruit you are here until you pass, no matter how many recycles of training it takes.”
Turning she barked at the girl next to her who was shouting. “Eleven Drill instructor!” In fact every girl in the room was shouting something similar.
“Recruit Rice front and center!”
Popping up as though on a spring the girl stood at rigid attention. “Recruit Rice! Show this princess the proper way to perform an eight count!”
“Yes, Drill Instructor!”
Crouching down with her hands’ palms down flat on the floor Rice yelled. “One!” Then throwing her legs straight out behind with her with arms at perfect ninety degree angle yelled. “Two!” Then lowering herself almost to the floor yelled. “Three!” Pushing herself back up and her arms again at ninety percent angle yelled. “Four!” Then she throw both legs wide apart and yelled. “Five!” Swinging her legs back together with ankles touching yelled. “Six!” Then half jumping with her hands never leaving the floor she returned to a crouching position. “Seven!” Then finally she stood straight up and at attention. “Eight! One Drill Instructor!”
Faith stared the girl in horror. Turning her gaze back to the drill instruction she gulped. “Well recruit?” The question was soft and dangerous, Faith knew if she asked anymore questions or hesitated any longer than the numbers of eight counts would go up.
Dropping to the floor she tried to follow Rice’s movements. Seeming satisfied after she completed one eight count and yelled. “One Drill Instructor!” The Drill Instructor wondered off to yell and harass another girl.
Faith sighed at the temporary relief wondering where the hell she was and what was going on.
“Faith, can you hear me?” Sarah AI spoke in her mind. Faith was so relieved that she ignored it and instead asked her most burning question. “Sarah what happened! Where the hell I’m I?”
Faith was still doing eight counts and was surprised out how easy they seem as she listened to Sarah.
“You are still on the medical bed at Agraria Station. A cover deployed and now a clear dome is over you, sealing you in. I have found a faster than light communications device embedded in the medical bed and is connected to the mainframes and servers of the Empire of Thronos main military base at Sedisca stellar system. This is a military training simulation the Empire uses to train all its military.”
Faith was stunned. There was a lot to explore in Sarah’s brief explanation and she did not know were to start first. The major news was the FTL comms. The faster than light comms were the most profound discovery since the discovery of the jump drive itself. The Empire had invented them seventy years ago and now they were vital for the Empires economic, political, and military development and survival. The FTL comms made the Empire a target for every other staller nation’s jealousy, avarice, fear, and anger.
The FTL comms themselves were extremely delicate. The first few versions barely worked and it took a long time to produce a fully functional device. Now the comms were a point three meter cube with the outer casing made of an extremely hard alloy used in military ship construction, the middle layer was several wire meshes with the lose weaves of different size holes, then a final inner layer of aluminum and lead.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
All this was to shield the inside form any radiation, be it form natural radiation found in space, or artificial radiation produced by anything from comm broadcasts to heating ovens. Any and all could sever the link and make the FTL comm worthless.
Inside the cube was a battery backup system that would power the device for six months, the hardware that made the device work, and at the center, two spheres.
Inside, the spheres were filled with pure oxygen and null gravity fields kept a liquid metal element, that was the heart of the faster than light comms, suspended at the center of the sphere. The field pushed on the element evenly form all directions but if there was even a micro second of a fluctuation in the field the extra push or shove would sever the FTL connection.
The liquid metal element was synthesized and artificially created and, as far as Faith knew, no other staller nation had recreated it. When created the drop of liquid metal element could be separated into two drops that maintained a quantum link to each other. Many tries had been made to further spilt the element into three of more drops but it always destabilized.
Still having two drops that were quantum linked was huge. What happened to one quantumly linked drop would instantly be transmitted to the other drop of the liquid metal element, regardless of distance.
It was years before they learned how to successful send information between the two. Since the liquid metal element was so delicate no lasers, gravity waves, or radiation could be used to affect the drops. They finally found that tuning a sound wave to the correct resonant frequency would cause the liquid metal element to vibrate, similar to shattering a crystal by hitting the right high pitch in a song, and the vibration would be transmitted to the other drop.
The FTL comms could send up to five petabytes of data by vibration rate and frequency, any higher rate and frequency would shatter the liquid metal element. Because of the limit of the data that could be transmitted and the inability to transmit and receive at the same time the FTL comms had two faster than light spheres. One sphere was for transmitting and the other was for receiving.
The other thing about the FTL comms that puzzled Faith was the faster than light comms only survived a few jumps in jump ships before the FTL connection was cut. That meant the ship that had sold them the cheap medical equipment must have traveled right to them after the ship picked up the cargo containers.
As for the FTL comms connection to Sedisca that was not surprising, all faster than light comms were routed through them. It was another form of control. No one could steal a linked pair of FTL comms when one half of the pair was in the most heavily guarded area of space for light years.
Another puzzle was just how she was linked to the simulation. The military had invented neuro chips that linked someone’s mind to computers a decade ago and it was still the most costly and time consuming investment the Empire made.
To produce a neuro chips you needed to build it by manipulating individual nano sized particles to slowly construct the neuro chip with a complete neuro chip made up of trillions of nano particles. The Empire had a work around for the tedious and time consuming effort that went into building neuro chips, they assigned high level AIs to do it.
The AIs were just a short distance form being sapient so had more than enough processing power to operate the equipment continuously for years to produce the neuro chips. One improvement that speed up the time frame was building pieces of the neuro chip in parallel. A single AI could operate dozens of machines at once so the neuro chips were broken up into different parts and the AI would build all the different parts simultaneously.
The other improvement to speed was having dozens of factories overseen by different AIs. Those two improvements made producing neuro chips viable. It still took a long time so the manufacturing was staggered so one of the factories would complete a new batch of a few hundred units a day.
But there was also a very high failure rate, even with the meticulousness and precision of the AIs the machinery they operated could only be pushed so far. The other problem with building neuro chips was just how fragile they were, especially when the pieces were not fully constructed yet. After a piece was fully constructed did the failure risk lower but it was not until all the pieces were combined into a neuro chip that the risk was lowest.
Faith did not have a neuro implant; Sarah would have told her if the medical bed had implanted one.
Before she could ask Sarah and investigate further the Drill Instructor told them to line up. Faith was surprised that she completed the eight counts. She also just remembered that Sedisca had one point two seven one gravities which made her even more surprised she had completed them. She wondered if it was part of the simulation.
Before she could ask Sarah two medical personal in white come in. A padded white coat with a high round collar covering the neck completely and hanging to mid thigh with white pants underneath tucked into white single piece boots the only color was a black name tag on the left upper arm below that was a patch denoting rank and on the right upper arm a badge with the symbol of the navy medical corps and what unit they were in.
Faith only knew this because basic familiarity with military ranks was required on the adult test.
The drill instructor was wearing an almost identical outfit but in all dark green almost black colors with the name tag and rank in subdued grey and the right upper arm badge in more subdued colors.
“Time for your daily shot’s recruits! You want to grow up out of the maggot phase don’t you recruits!”
The other girls yelled. “Yes! Drill Instructor!” Faith was a second behind them still staring at the medical people wondering what this was about.
The other girls seem to know and started rolling up their left sleeve. One of the medical officers held a metal case up with both hands and the other officers clicked the locks open. Lifting the top part of the case open Faith could see dozens of greenish vials and an injector inside.
Picking up the injector he then picked up a vial and inserted it into the back of the device. Turning to the first girl on the right nearest the door he promptly pressed the injector to the girl’s arm and pressed the trigger. With a soft hiss the liquid in the vail was injected.
Without a word he turned back to has partner, pulled out the empty vail and place it back into the slot he took it form, then grabbed another vail and loaded the injector again. He walked down to the next girl in line and injected her.
Brisk and efficient this was the start of injecting all forty girls in the room. After ten minutes it was her turn and Faith was not concerned because this was a simulation so stood at attention when the medical officer pushed the injector into her upper arm and pressed the trigger.
“Faith a medical compound was injected into your physical body.”