Time Altar (eBook)

CHAPTER 41: TIME PERIOD #3: ACTION

[APRIL 22, AD 2441]

[LOCATION: ISLAND JUST NORTH OF ST. GEORGE’S IN GRENADA]

Jake was pacing the floor of the communications suite, contemplating the message and the warning. Despite a sense of foreboding, he decided to trust his father. He would join MST. From that point on, there would be no turning back.

The door made a loud clunking sound when Jake unlocked it. Ben jumped, startled by the suddenness of the noise. He waited, staring at the door. Nothing happened. ‘Open, darn it!’ His mind screamed. But nothing happened. He checked the handle. It was unlocked. He knocked lightly as he opened the door, just enough to stick his head in. Jake was sitting in front of the bank Vintel units. His expression was hard to read.

Jake sensed Ben’s indecision. “Come on in,” he said. He handed Ben the recording. “It’s unlocked. You are free to watch it later if you like.”

Ben accepted the device but was still confused. Finally, he blurted out, “So what’s the verdict?”

“I have decided to follow my father’s advice,” Jake said. “I’m going to trust MST. So, where do we go from here?”

There was an immediate sense of urgency. Ben talked in a hushed but hurried tone as they briskly moved down the launch corridor. “Latest intel indicates it’s going to happen. United America is about to launch an invasion of Brazil. The South American coalition is circling the drain.”

“How much time do we have?” Jake asked.

“About seventy-two hours. We need to get you briefed in the use of the latest tech from MST and introduce you to the team. I think you’ll be pleased. The file is labeled 4ALPHAG.22441. I have not seen it,” Ben admitted. “Above my pay grade. It’s encrypted. You should know the security questions.” Ben motioned to his BCD and then initiated a file transfer over to Jake’s. The transfer wiped the data from his own in the process and it only took a blink for the files to appear on Jake’s system. He would review them at his leisure.

“What’s Brazil’s disposition?”

“Can’t stop it,” Ben admitted. “United America is a juggernaut. The overall discrepancy between their capabilities and the rest of the world’s, well, throughout history, I don’t think it has ever been so out of balance. There is no effective counterweight. MST’s strategy is to support Brazil, get in front of the invasion, and slow it down if we can. Save as many lives as possible in the process.”

“What’s the military intel?”

“We’ll see noise all along the Atlantic coast, but the main thrust is going to come across a corridor on the Northeast coast of Brazil.”

“Numbers?” Jake asked.

“We estimate about two to three million men. That means the combination of androids and human,” Ben said. He caught the surprised expression on Jake’s face. “Sorry. A lot has changed,” he explained. “Men is a collective term. Just like when gender neutralization laws passed hundreds of years ago and the distinctions between men and women were eliminated, android equality laws have advanced the rights of autonomously functioning artificial intelligence to the same level as humans. It’s all included in the word men. The numbers are estimates of humans and androids.”

Jake reluctantly indicated his attempt to understand, “That’s going to take some getting used to.” Then he redirected, “What are the regional politics?”

“The South American Coalition was established as a counterweight against United America. MST was instrumental in its creation, but the North American Intelligence Agency, the NAIA has been active. Intel is soft, but there’s a chance the whole thing could fall apart. If the last six hundred years has taught us anything, it’s that regional conflicts are endemic to the Continent. The South Americans don’t get along. The unification was only ratified because of a universal distrust of their neighbor to the north. The South American Continental Government is dominated by Brazil, but most of the power is still decentralized, being maintained by the individual countries.”

They emerged from the corridor into the launch bay. It was a dark subterranean chamber with seven water-filled launch platforms. In five of the platforms were the latest incarnations of MST’s Gopher technology hybridized into a combination of hypersonic jet and mini submarine. All except one were elevated and out of the water as human technicians worked alongside androids that ranged from bipedal to octopedal. One of the dark blue smooth-skinned crafts was in position to launch, with its nose tilted downward into a rock hewn tube. The exterior of the Gopher was soft, gel-like, almost biological to the touch.

“In flight, the properties of the exterior change,” Ben commented. “We call it the skin. It is a new shape-memory alloy that will self-heal exterior damage, act as a heat shield, and when hypersonic it will become the toughest metal alloy yet invented.” He handed Jake a helmet and snapped his own in place. They boarded and strapped into the auxiliary seats.

“Welcome aboard,” the pilot said. She looked human but was, in fact, an android. She barely managed a glance, distracted by the safety check. Once she completed the process of entering the navigation sequence, she turned toward them, verified they were strapped in, and then twirled her finger in the air, indicating that they were ready to roll.

The canopy closed above them and the craft accelerated through the launch tube. The velocity was stunning and yet they felt nothing. Ben was ready to give Jake an impromptu lecture on the technology, but Jake beat him to it.

“This tech makes nearly everything we were doing sixty years ago during World War IV obsolete.” Jake was ripping through the advanced tech files that Ben transferred to his BCD.

For centuries, manned vehicles were restricted in performance to the biological limits of the human body. They could only achieve a limited G-force before rendering the person unconscious, or even killing them. This eventually made drones the norm. However, they were so susceptible to hacking that they became dangerously unreliable. They were often turned against their creators. However, after hundreds of years, MST had done the impossible. They learned how to manipulate gravity. It was all about respective coordinates, or position in space, and matter in relation to anti-matter. The old paradigm was that if one person stood still and the other sped away in a craft at 5G, the person in the craft would experience five times the force of gravity, while the person standing would experience no comparable force. It was all about the respective coordinates in relation to the Earth’s gravitational center and the rate of acceleration. With MST’s tech, it was as though the person in the craft was standing still and the rest of the world was moving away at 5G in the opposite direction. They learned how to do this through the manipulation of gravitational force.

Within 15 minutes, Jake had gone through all the files. Ben was beyond impressed by the feat. It’s as though Jake’s brain wasn’t human. But even an android couldn’t do it that fast and incorporate the information. It was increasingly plain to him…Jake was proving to be everything he was cracked up to be.

“How would you like to link BCDs and we can do a simulation with the new exosuits?” Ben suggested. “Be prepared though, the realism is about to impress you.”

“We shall see,” Jake said. Soon he was test-flying the latest MST Exosuit. The BCD rendering was so good that the simulation was nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. The exosuit was a thing of beauty. “I am impressed,” Jake admitted. The hands and feet had embedded tech to complement the primary anti-gravity unit, which was mounted across the back. It contained enough redundancy to survive any major catastrophe. The exosuit was sleek and black with gray trimmings, the bio-enhanced muscle fibrils and sensory systems built into the suit made it magnificently superior compared to the exosuits Jake wore during World War IV.

“Try to keep up,” Jake said.

“Hold up,” Ben said. “I need to change my color combo.”

“What?” Jake said.

“My color combo. Black and gray are boring. The programmers lack boldness and creativity.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Jake asked.

“Nope. You’re going to be jealous.” Ben was proud of himself. “Check it out…dark green with deep grey trim and a skull on my chest.”

“You look pretty,” Jake said.

“Oh…you just shut yourself up,” Ben said. “When we spar, I’ll have trouble telling you apart from all the other novice-level computer bots with your boring default black and gray suit.”

Soon they were flying at hypersonic speed, stopping, twisting and turning on a dime, and then reversing direction. “The neural integration is seamless,” Jake said. “I’m registering a response time of less than a millisecond.”

“Let’s see what you can do without the anti-gravity system,” Ben suggested. The simulation brought them down in a holographic urban setting. On Ben’s suggestion, they disengaged flight controls and limited their exosuits to manual power. “Okay. Just me and you and our suits. You’ll find that these suits are limited in many respects to the limitations of your mind and body rather than technology. It’s not only...