Jude was logged out of the game along with everyone else huddling inside mechanical mech monsters arranged in a circle. The mechs that have been keeping him and everyone alive felt almost at this point like just playing another full dive game. Listening to the war stream, he along with everyone else was crying in absolute joy.
Humans were winning. The strange technology and alien tactics that were seemingly nonsensical could not stand against the human technology. The aliens seemed to be under some type of curse that drained their ships if they got very far from their odd shield ships. The moment one of their ships would leave the field, it would go dim and in just a few short hours would go dark. After an alien ship goes dark, even if a group leads their shield ship close enough to envelope the darkened ship, it stayed dark. The aliens would use these ships as shields or projectiles until the nukes hit them causing them to vaporize rather than the shielded lighted ships, which was an effective strategy.
The aliens failed to realize how many nukes we had and some of them could be stealthed and be absolutely massive in power. Measured in tonnage of TNT equivalent, the most massive blasts were in the10 to 20 Gigaton range which could throw the 100,000 ton ships around like dust in a heavy wind killing many directly even though their shields seem to hold. It is assumed the nukes cause blunt force damage on them smashing the crews inside, leaving their ships intact. Even so, the earth defenses took heavy damage on every insertion of the stealthed bombs.
Some elite ships with elite crews were able to invade the enemy ships but were unable to capture or use any of them. The moment they left the range of a shield ship, all the interlocked writing script would darken leaving them with no power. Replicating the power source was beyond human understanding even though they have boarded multiple shield ships and attempted to understand it.
Occasionally the human elites would come across a glowing gem or a crystalline layered latticework script that failed layer by layer until eventually the innermost layer would fail or the crystal would steadily darken. Some of the crystal structures could last days until the tiny spark at the center layer would finally go dark. If they got it close enough to an active shield ship, it would power back up, but again they were unable to utilize the power. Aliens would be incredibly strong when they had a charged gem or crystal lattice, but die in moments once the power faded.
There appeared to be at least 3 different species in the force arrayed against them, all of them using the same script technology, and they would all die instantly once the scripts or crystals darkened. It was like they were robots losing their charge even though it has been verified they are completely biologic. Some of the aliens had replaced eyes, teeth, ears, noses or some other small part of their bodies with carved stones of various qualities, all having scripted interlocking runes on them. Some of the implants were incredibly detailed and almost lovingly installed into their hosts. Their was evidence that many of these aliens of all 3 species had these implants for almost their entire lives and some scientists suggested implantation from birth.
The tactics changed once they realized that the shield ships were their power sources. They would not waste any of their shield piercing beam weapons on the bulk of the fleet, but just giving a path for the bombs. Once this tactic became prevalent, the alien fleets seemed to panic and started to flee except something intercepted the outer edge of those fleeing destroying them, causing the fleets to suddenly rush Earth directly.
As Jude sat in his armor's hulking monstrosity huddled around other identical mechs, the cavern they were in suddenly collapsed, while liquified watery sand suddenly drowned them all, not that it mattered. This has happened often enough they themselves were not even startled by the event. The suit's AI would take over for a bit slowly melting the sand and stone in careful arcs until they could again be huddled together in a newly created cavern with slowly cooling superheated toxic gas. The suits would then begin altering the atmosphere in the cavern until it was perfect normal air. They would even add lights and carve ridiculous things like couches, windows and TV's which would be augmented by their AI with a tv overlay, so when we looked at them it seemed like we were in a small house and could see "outside", sit on the comfortable couch and watch TV or play games. Even though it was all fake, we did acknowledge it helped our sanity a bit, removing the fact that we were miles underground and the surface of the earth was most likely superheated plasma when the hulking ships crashed onto it.
The Earth was covered in what some termed a non-Newtonian field that was 100 miles thick reducing the debris speeds from interstellar to mundane. Even with that, having hundreds of millions of ships fall from the bottom of the Earth shield, picking up speed to terminal velocity before hitting randomly on the surface causing massive ripples in the toxic sludge that seemed to cover almost every square inch of the surface. At first there were incredible tsunamis and great ejecta from craters and awakened volcanoes, but once millions of ships landed in the oceans, displacing the water of the world upward to an average altitude of 15,000 feet, everything became a slurry of water that would be occasionally baked on the surface with superheated plasma before being churned up by the next impact and another tidal wave of sludge working its way through the massive bulks of the ships.
Jude was thinking back about 5 months ago when all of humanity was "captured" by these AI controlled mechs causing mass confusion of the earth population because they were given no warning. Suddenly these armored suits dropped from the sky in the billions and diligently grabbed every human on earth including babies and infirm patients and inserted us all into a virtual reality. Apparently, all foretold paths forward in simulations showed a fatality of human populations on earth being at 99.99999% with only those in the most hardened extreme pressure bunkers deep in the earth having any chance. One woman in a meeting with the leaders of earth said, "Too bad you can't just put everyone in a Mech Suit to survive the war." causing them to all look at each other and nod, "Why not?" Changing the simulation to include humanity in these powerful mech suits changed the survivability from basically 0 to around 99.8% survival probability.
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Another odd thing about the mech suits was the mesh network virtual realities. We could choose to jack in and be back in an innocuously normal house and live life like seemingly normal. The main problem with this was that connectivity between all humans was basically impossible. The low-speed connections that could penetrate the earth to this depth let them sync their realities constantly, but every so often the AI filler would reach an odd uncanny valley where everyone still existed, but were not actually real people, but simulations of what the AI mesh thought they might be doing based on old actions. You would be going to school, yes, stupid school, in the virtual reality world and suddenly all your classmates would start behaving like scripted behavior, that sometimes took minutes to notice.
The best things about the mech's mesh virtual reality was always the games. You could for the first time in human history have "Full Dive" virtual reality games where you could be engaged in epic stories and build power and wealth like in many of the MMORPG games before the war, except it was SO REAL. Also there could be a time dilation effect to keep your attention so focused on these simulations that you would sometimes forget about your abysmal state.
Funny enough, the medical capabilities of the suits were almost magical. As long as your head wasn't crushed or vaporized, you could survive indefinitely. Many of the people with sicknesses were completely cured but of course now are suspended in nutrient solution like everyone else. As research is done somewhere, each update is pushed to all the Mechs eventually, constantly upgrading their capabilities. When we were all encased in the mechs originally, some of the features really sucked and the full immersion of the Virtual reality was rudimentary at best. But having the sum total of all of humanity working on the problems, quickly resolved them and the mechs internal 3d printers were upgraded to be able to make better 3d printers until we were all suddenly immortal as far as we could tell.
Pets were also captured into the mechs, but depending on their size, they were sometimes attached as a blister on the outside on the back or belly. If the pet was small it was put inside the nutrient solution with you. The Virtual reality for the pets wasn't a thing at all at the start, so they were put into suspended animation. Once the virtual reality system included the pets, somehow they figured out how to translate into your language what your pet was thinking, which is really weird and cool. You could quiet the words of the pet if it started to annoy you, but so many people enjoyed it so much they rejoiced. One guy in our group, Greg, did not have a pet, but now he has a cat stuck into his nutrien solution he named Morris. Apparently they AI in the mechs, if they had time would run around capturing all the stray animals and plopping them into random suits. Some through the remote mesh networks said they even had bears, alligators, snakes and other random wildlife attached in big metal blisters to their mechs, but no one in our group had anything like that except Greg with his new cat. We all did live in the heart of Los Angeles though and most of us had pets in our condo's which were brought with us.
The glitched radio was giving a play by play of action as it happened. Moments before we were all immersed in our VRMMO game named Virtual Earth when we received a message using the super low speed sonic communications that could penetrate deep into the real Earth.
Honestly, everyone was getting a little lost on which reality was real. For some reason, the fidelity of the Virtual Earth simulation was improved to the point that it was more "real" than reality. It can be difficult to explain completely, but imagine if you went into a simulation and your eyesight was 10 times better than in reality. Your hearing was 9 times better than reality. You could smell 17 times better. You could feel pleasure or pain up to 28 times more intense, though most left it at 1 or 0.5. Colors were brighter. Your presence seemed more centered. You could feel what others were thinking and feeling to some extent, even though no-one knew exactly how this worked because they all agreed it was impossible.
When you logged out of the Virtual Earth sim, and entered your nutrient solution with all it's nightmarish tubes and in your constant drowning state or even remotely piloted your own mech carrying you, everything seemed less.
I talked with a few of my friends in Virtual Earth school when they were not being simulated and a few actually were on the surface for some time and supposedly got out of their pods and walked around the floating cities they were in. They mentioned the colors were surreal and washed out compared to Virtual Earth. The blood red sky mixed with clear blue vistas as approaching shockwaves would have been awe inspiring before entering Virtual Earth. Afterward it was like blah.. Washed out. Boring.
Also everyone's minds were sped up to a minimum of 1.4 time normal in Virtual Earth, but in reality, it was just like lagging during a mesh reboot. It seems the consensus of all the programmers on Earth working with all the developing AI seemed to think this all made sense to keep people not only sane and surviving, but prosperous and striving to put their mark on the world.
The radio was clipped but they repeated over and over, "We have won! We have won! We have won!..." The speaker broke down into sobs for all of humanity to hear the extreme joy in his voice.
"Go to the surface and see for yourselves! The temperature is on average 72 degrees Fahrenheit be it equator or poles due to the shield leaching anything hotter. The air is still poisonous to breath, so bring an oxygen mask. Exposing your skin should be ok as long as you detoxify before re-entering your mechs within a few hours!" another radio host talked over his still overcome partner.
I looked over at my mom and others smiling. We were going to the surface!