I spent the first hour determined to spend the drive in silence as a small form of resistance to my new situation, only mentally chatting with Eris, but after getting more and more bored, I let my curiosity get the best of me and asked something I’d been wondering ever since Deus had called me.
“So why does Deus need me to work with her anyway? Why doesn’t she just design weapons and have others work with them?”
The man who I assumed to be in charge looked at me, seemingly surprised I’d talked. “Unfortunately, most designers do best working together on a single project. The mech and weapons being designed for each other produces far better products than making them separately and then mashing them together. You’ll also have a couple others working with you designing the sensor packages and computers you’ll need for your mech. You won’t have any aether material designers though. They’re too rare, though you will be able to set a bounty on a material you need, just specify things like shear strength, flexibility, hardness, conductivity, and set a credit bounty. If it’s high enough one of them may try to design it for you.”
I nodded, I guess that made sense, though it didn’t make my situation feel any better. I was going to have to find some way to get back at Deus, though considering Eris always seemed to side with her, I had no clue how I was going to pull that off.
Curiosity sated, I asked a few more questions about what was going to happen, but the man said that he couldn’t say much until I’d signed the NDA. Frustrated, I had Eris pull up a few chatting applications, discussing mech design with some of the others I was friendly with until we reached a massive complex.
After a needlessly complex security checkpoint, I was dragged into one of the buildings made of simple concrete and glass, looking purely utilitarian. I was told to wait, so sat down one one of the provided chairs and tried to pull up my chat application only to be told I had no signal. The wait wasn’t long, and soon I was filling out an obscene amount of paperwork, thankfully all digital, and doubly thankfully, Eris filled out basically everything for me, leaving me only to digitally sign it.
Once I’d digitally signed something like forty different things, I was escorted to a room and told to wait. It wasn’t long until a cute, bookish girl was escorted in in a similar manner I had been, her barely five foot frame a bit dwarfed by my six foot one inch. Her face had a smattering of freckles, which was surprising considering they’d been mostly eliminated by the gene washes most people would get for their children. She was lean in the same manner practically every VR user was these days, me included. The neural implants had a handy function of stimulating muscles as we were in VR. While it wouldn’t bulk you up, it kept you skinny and in shape, regardless of if you ever worked out.
I’d almost finished examining her, when she decided to start the conversation. “What? Don’t recognize me Miles?”
Hearing her voice, I did recognize her. “Deus, we’ve never even video chatted. How on earth did you expect me to recognize you.”
She pouted a bit. “Well I recognize you.”
“Of course you recognize me. My VR persona in Wartech looks the exact same as me, and all my social media accounts are linked to it,” I deadpanned.
“Well you’re no fun.”
“I’d assumed you’d already known that considering my personality hasn’t changed.” Eris soon pitched in to ask me to say hi for her, and I obliged, Deus echoing the greeting.
“Well I guess I should introduce myself properly since we’re going to be working together now. I’m Elizabeth Tear, though please call me Liz.”
“Well it’s a pleasure to meet you in the flesh, though I’d have appreciated it if it wasn’t because you’d dragged me into this.”
She only bothered to smile in reply, making her bookish looks light up in a way I hadn’t expected to be possible. After blinking that thought away, and pointedly ignoring Eris’ comment about how cute she was, I decided to try and get some more information. “So when are we meeting up with the other designers, the ones who’ll be working on the sensors and computer?”
“Well I may have dragged away a couple of interns at my dad’s company to help us out. They should be arriving pretty quickly.”
I blinked. Apparently her dad was some sort of bigshot. “What company would that be exactly?”
“Oh, my dad is the president of Tear Industries.”
I’m pretty sure I’d turned even whiter than the lack of sun had made me, this time completely ignoring the innocent smile she had on her face. Tear industries was the second biggest company when it came to manufacturing mech weaponry. At least I had an explanation as to how she had been so good at designing them. She’d likely been groomed from birth for designing weaponry.
“I can’t wait to get to play with the good stuff here, all of the stuff on the civilian Wartech is like twelve generations out of date,” she decided to ignore my plight while continuing.
“Wait, what do you mean the civilian Wartech?” My curiosity overcoming my surprise.
“Oh, you didn’t know? Wartech is an almost perfect recreation of reality, run by one of the most powerful AI on the planet. It’s how the military trains pilots and tests new mech designs. The civilian version just doesn’t have any of the modern alloys, weaponry or mechs to avoid aliens getting information on our technology.”
“Wait, what exactly are we going to be doing here?”
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“Basically the same thing we’ve been doing. Designing weaponry and mechs, and then testing them in Wartech.”
I blinked. I’d expected it to be a lot different from what I’d been doing, but it seems that I’d be able to continue my shut in lifestyle.
My happiness must have shown on my face, because Liz got an evil looking grin on her face. “Don’t expect to be doing the same thing, we have basic first, then we still have to do daily drills and meet up with our team daily for practice.”
Despair leaked into my voice as I questioned in a pleading tone, “Why do we have to do all that? We’re going to be designers for fucks sake. Why do we need to even need that? And what do you mean team?” Eris ignored my question, simply saying how good it was that I was finally going to be doing something.
“Well first, we’re going to need to form a squad of six mechs and practice with them. As for why, you don’t expect people to just randomly try out mechs from some unknown designers do you? If you weren’t a good player, the military would just have someone matched with you to showcase any mech designs we put out, but both of us are good enough to show it off ourselves, and that saves the government a good amount of training time for the trainees to use on the more standard mechs, though they can still choose to use any designs they like.”
“Wait, what do you mean we? As far as I know you don’t even play Wartech.”
“Of course I do. You may know me as Demon.” She was practically preening at the expression I was showing her. Demon was one of the best players in Wartech, bouncing around the top fifty places on the ranking, regularly making it to the top ten.
I shook my head. Apparently she was just the perfect person when it came to mechs. Resolving myself to not be surprised by anything else she said, my brooding about how she was apparently better than me at everything was interrupted by the door opening again.
Walking in were two more females, which made me start to pray they weren’t the others on our team. It was bad enough having Liz and Eris, but if I was going to be surrounded by more females, I was going to lose my mind from being so outnumbered.
My hopes that they weren’t who I despairingly expected them to be were dashed when Liz began to introduce them to me. Tae Chiyun was a confident looking taller asian woman with a slim frame, who would be working on the computers which would run the mech. On the other hand Kenna Kull was an average height woman with strikingly red hair and green eyes, who seemed very shy for someone so striking.
I stared pointedly at Liz before asking something important. “Did you have to get only females?”
“Hey, there was no way I would want to work with males.”
I looked down at myself, back up, then down again. “Do you assume I’m a eunuch?”
Her blindingly bright smile was painful to look at as she replied. “Well we’ve been working together a few months now, and you haven’t hit on me or flirted with me once.”
My eyes were dead as I replied. “Why on earth would I hit on someone when I don’t know anything but what they sound like.”
Tae was looking on with a grin, while Kenna was looking away, pretending she wasn’t hearing anything. “Well you knew I was rich, and Isn’t my voice beautiful?”
I felt a small grin slide across my face, deciding that I may have a way to get her to kick me off the team as I replied. “Well I will admit, your voice is beautiful, and it matches you well.”
She wasn’t flustered in the slightest as she said “Why thank you,” and I felt my grin slip a bit. At least I had some hope of getting out of this though, I just had to hit on her until she kicked me out of the team.
“Don’t bother trying to get me to kick you out of the team. You’ve signed the paperwork, and you’ll just get assigned to a different one if you do.” So now she could read my mind. I sighed internally as I heard Eris laughing uproariously in the back of my mind. After a bit Eris calmed down and gave me some unneeded advice. ‘I do recommend going after her though, you obviously think she’s cute, her personality fits yours pretty well considering how well you worked together, and she’s probably one of the richest people on the planet.’
That sunk the rest of my mood back into depression and I decided to try and hop back on my chat application in order to try and forget what was happening to me. The girls decided to chat, with Kenna sort of hanging in the background, with only a couple comments, her head shrunk down a bit, clearly as uncomfortable with people as I was, and worse at hiding it.
I was starting to consider a few new designs after finding out I had access to the internet again,likely due to having signed the NDA already. I was discussing pros and cons with a few of my fellow designers, when I realized that all I know might end up becoming moot considering all the new tech I was going to get to play with, and closed out the chat application as a skinny man with glasses wearing military camo came into the room.
“Now that you’re all here, I’m going to be explaining exactly what you’re going to be doing for the next few months. You’re going to have bootcamp for two weeks, and then you’re going to be attending classes to learn about the common alloys and materials you’re going to be able to work with in the military, along with some of the more common weaponry and armor. Don’t expect this to be anything like what you’ve worked with in the Wartech you’ve played, so I expect you all to work hard,” He said, giving me a pointed glare as he finished the last part, which I may have flinched at.
The girls seemed to be much more enthusiastic than I was, even Kenna nodding along. The man continued in a bit more detail for a bit before dismissing us and assigning us rooms.
The next day I was woken up far too early for my liking by some ungodly music that sounded like it was played on a klaxon alarm. I fell halfway out of bed, before dressing as fast as I could, a grizzled drill sergeant yelling at us about how little time we had to get ready.
The day continued to be hell. It was exercise after exercise, all the while being berated by the grizzled man who I quickly began to expect was a devil. I’d expected my high density aether body to be an advantage as it gave me strength beyond what my frame should have, but it only resulted in more work. When we marched, I was given almost triple the weight of the other recruits, and even pushups were done with the additional weight. I would look longingly at the others who had it better, and quickly became friends in pain with John, a recruit who was going to be solely a pilot rather than a designer. He’s been recruited in the large wave of recruits that were conscripted when the large scale war with the Clyx broke out over Ettin 4, the goldilocks planet we were fighting over. John tended to be a bit brusque, but he was the only other one with a high aether density, and we bonded in shared misery.
The days passed in a similar manner, and I repeated my mantra of ‘only fourteen days’ cutting down the amount of days in the mantra as each passed. Eventually we were done, and I thought that the hard part was done. I was wrong.
The actual schooling was even worse. Those who didn’t have an aether computer built off their brain were quickly given one, making the advantage I’d have over the average person after Eris had made me one completely moot. In fact, considering that Eris used most of it herself, I had less processing power and storage at my disposal than the average recruit, even with the modifications Eris had made. I got a bit closer with my team as we went through it, learning that while Tae had basically forced herself into the group I was in, Kenna had been dragged in after Elizabeth had found out how good she was at designing bleeding edge sensor tech.
Liz was constantly clashing with another woman I never got the name of, and they were both horribly competitive, fighting for the top two spots every damn test we took. Their constant scathing remarks at each other quickly made it clear that they had some sort of history together, but I wasn’t really interested, though I was worried that their attitude was going to carry through to when we finally formed our squads.
Studying, studying, and more studying. It was hell. Even Eris wasn’t spared, working as hard as she could to improve the aether computer, which was simply a computer built of pure aether that would directly interface with the brain through the neural chip. She worked as hard as an AI could to improve it to the point where I was no longer behind the other recruits who didn’t have an AI hogging most of the processing power and storage. The only difference was in our attitude. I felt like I was slowly withering away to death, while Eris was horribly chipper, happy that I would soon be working to help humanity rather than - as she put it - wasting away alone while doing nothing of worth. We weren’t even spared physically during the study period. While we would parse the information from our aether computers, trying to commit it to our own memory rather than having it simply stored, we would be hiking, doing pushups, situps, hikes, or my personal most hated, burpees.
At the end of it, I was ready to steal one of the guns worn by the guards that would patrol the outside of the base and end it, but then the last week appeared. I’d expected the hell semester to end in pain, but it was the final week we got into something I expected to find fun. We were going to get into the military version of Wartech and try out a bunch of different mech designs to acclimate ourselves with it. I couldn’t keep the grin off my face, even as I was woke at an ungodly time in the morning.