Sorry for double post, but I think it's a valid break - posting for review and sanitization.
Berenice Vitali checked her uniform for the dozenth time. She knew, intellectually, that there wasn’t anything wrong with it, that her new bosses wouldn’t care - it was her first day for crying out loud.. She had earned this - a position at Gaia’s prime research and development laboratories. The position was proof she was among the best and brightest of a population that was in itself the best and brightest of human history. So, why was she practically shaking in her labcoat as she exited the car? Well, apart from the stress and fear she might not be up to the task, there was the riot.
She’d seen these on the news before, her father grumbling about how he had half a mind to pick up a picket sign himself while her mother was more concerned with how they were defacing the statues and fountains. She herself had no idea what to think - they were tampering with the fabric of the universe here and all she’d learned of physics screamed that they were screwing with things they shouldn’t, but in the name of humanity’s survival - if they didn’t do this, everyone was dead anyway, or so the story went. Whichever side was in the right, she was now in the middle of this week’s riot, with a Gaian R&D ID and a highly conspicuous labcoat.
For a few moments Berenice kept her head down and walked through the rioters unmolested, a few “pardon me”’s and “excuse me”’s going unnoticed with the crowd’s focus on the gates. It was only when she actually reached it and swiped her card for entrance, did the rioters notice an engineer in their midst. She felt a hand on her shoulder and felt her heart stop as she was turned around to face the angry rioter - but suddenly the hand was gone, and a massive figure, armor painted the deep purple of the Regime, pulled her through the gate as it pushed the man who’d grabbed her away. A canned message played over the figure’s speakers: “The Regime Command allows you to express your dissatisfaction. The Regime Command does not allow you to assault other members. Failure to cooperate will result in an appropriate duration of prison time and community service…” The message repeated a few times as more guards arrived and physically blocked the rioters from entering the grounds.
“T-Thanks,” Berenice stammered as she rushed off on her way, not waiting for a response and trying to calm herself. Alright, she was inside the compound. She patted down her coat, adjusted the glasses that had been knocked askew (these not actually for sight correction so much as sight enhancement), and continued on her way down the ornate stone path. Since the wall had gone up, they hadn’t been tampered with. She was walking among her heroes, the heroes of everyone on Gaia, those who had made the Expedition possible and those who had helped Gaia thrive. It was almost disorienting when she arrived at the distinctly normal reception desk manned by a bored looking man in clothes that wouldn’t look out of place in a bar.
“...Excuse me?” she asked distractedly as she looked around. It was very strange. There was a sort of ostentatious air to the building’s facade, soaring arches and windows into scenes of science far too blatant and security-breaching to be real - in fact a browse through old Earth media quickly showed that many such scenes were thinly veiled replicas with a Gaian coat of paint, not that any non-human observers would know that. They probably wouldn’t have even noticed that four different windows had the same bald, glasses clad man with a goatee playing with chemicals.
The inside, though, was distinctly utilitarian. Or… perhaps that was the wrong word. It had the look of practicality that places tended to get after they were destroyed and rebuilt for the thousandth time. Simple concrete, not even painted. Some plaster patch-jobs where something or other had chiseled a hole. The seats were all folding chairs, if comfortable looking ones. It looked like it might take eight people and an hour to pick up everything in the room and move it somewhere else. All polished to a mirror shine by the janitorial robots she saw picking through the room. The only particularly interesting thing was the tiny… borehole. Berenice tried to ignore her physicists instincts yelling at her that it was bringing on the death of the universe.
Beginning to get annoyed at how the receptionist had not acknowledged her presence, the new Gaian scientist and engineer (most in R&D were both, if usually specialized) rung the bell on the reception desk - a design largely unchanged from the days of Earth. The man started in his seat, and it was increasingly obvious he’d been asleep behind the sunglasses. “Mmgh, what, huh, yes?” the receptionist babbled as he straightened himself. “I mean, yes, how can I help you?”
Berenice gave him a glare and a frown, and showed her identification. This had sort of killed the awe she’d been feeling on her way in. “I’m new here…” she said, “Is there an orientation or something? Somewhere or someone I need to report to?”
Before the receptionist could respond, a tan man with a crazy mess of black hair in a labcoat stumbled in. “Gah, heck, you’re the newbie?” the man asked quickly, as he glanced over Berenice and then looked at a clipboard. “Doctor Vitali right?” Without even waiting for her to respond, he spun on his heel and lazily waved for her to follow. “C’mon, I’m supposed to give you a tour… sorry, was supposed to meet you at the gate, but ya know, riots.”
Berenice barely recognized that she’d been spoken to when she was rushing to catch up as he went on his way. “Y-Yes, I’m new. Berenice Vitali. I’m looking forward to working with you…”
“Doctor Amir Meinhardt. Gonna be your supervisor.” the man said. “So yeah, tour. Figure we’ll go spiral, outer sections first and work our way in.” Amir nodded to himself.
“Doctor Meinhardt-” Berenice began.
“Just call me Amir.”
“Amir. You seem… sorta distracted, if you don’t mind me saying.” she said, as they walked through a scene of Walter White creating something probably illegal in an immaculate laboratory.
“This is one of the outer rooms… most of them are just to assure the guys outside we’re doing something, but there’s nothing real happening in most of them.” Amir said, waving a hand through one of the holograms. Belatedly, he noticed the question. “...Oh. Been up all night. And last night. And the one before. Regime Command’s been making a bunch of demands, everyone’s working ‘round the clock.”
Berenice blinked. “Demands? Why?” she asked. R&D had always been important, but from class she knew that for the most part they put things out when they got around to it. Rarely did Regime Command make demands.
“Heck if I know. All I know is we’ve been getting asked to make some things, and getting all the resources we could ask for to do it. Where’d you think the guys outside came from?” Amir shrugged. The armored men were a new sight on Gaia. Her father had grumbled that the Regime must be worried about people turning on them, but apparently not…
“And the borehole development?” she asked. That was something she was a bit nervous about.
“Yep. Orders are a bit vague, but it boils down to getting us into fighting shape” Amir said, his tone serious. “I’m just as happy as anyone else for an excuse to kick physics around until it lets us do what we want, but… they’re asking for warships. A space navy.”
Berenice felt a chill down her spine. It had been peace since they reached Gaia. Honestly, it had been peace for the Expedition since they left Earth, and the Regime afterwards, whether the Command let people think that or not. Even when they reached the most hostile environments of their new home, rarely did they need new weapons, new armor. Never had they needed warships, while they focused on getting settled - such endeavors would divert resources from getting established and they couldn’t throw together anything that could put up a fight anyway. So why now? Were they simply well enough established that the Regime thought getting a self defense force on the line was a worthwhile investment, or…
“...I’ve picked an interesting time to join.” she said somberly. They had left the scenes R&D showed to the public, and were getting into the less fancy, more utilitarian environs of the facility proper.
“That you did.” Amir said, lighting a cigarette he’d produced from seemingly nowhere.
The next stop was the low-security bore-labs. Even if supposedly the less top secret and dangerous stuff went on here, things still seemed like they had been blasted or damaged - she saw another robot trying to sweep up some debris as another patched a hole in the wall in front of one such lab. “What caused-” she began, before Amir stuck out an arm to bar her way - something flashed past, crashing through a cleaning robot’s head and into the wall.
“Hey, hold it for a minute!” Amir called into the lab, before heading past. When Berenice looked at what had been buried in the wall it was a… ball?
“Aha! I win!” came a voice from the lab, and Berenice followed Amir inside. A pair of scientists were there, one with a shit-eating grin and the other with a dour glare.
“That can’t possibly be within the rules Kirk!” the dour one protested. “We’re supposed to be shooting them into the others goal, not into the cleaning bots!”
“And you’re not supposed to do the Portal trick to speed up the ball, Luke, but now you’re a stickler for the rules…” said the grinning one - Kirk.
Amir coughed, and the arguing scientists turned to him. “Gentlemen.”
“Amir.” they said in unison - now that she looked, Berenice could see they looked almost identical. Twins? “We were just running an… experiment, when it got a little out of hand…”
“What kind of experiment involves a winner?” Berenice asked. The twins looked at her, and she flushed. “Uh, Doctor Berenice Vitali. I’m new.”
“Ah.” they said at the same time. “We were testing to see how fast and precisely we could generate boreholes.” Luke answered.
“And we figured, why not make it a challenge, try to catch the ball as we do it. In a combat situation things are gonna be happening…” Kirk continued.
“...So you decided to play soccer with boreholes.” Amir finished for them.
“Isn’t that awesome?” they said in unison.
Berenice blinked. “But… can you really use this data?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” replied Kirk, frowning with thought.
“For one, we’re not in a vacuum, and we can’t turn off the gravity-” She paused, turning to Amir. “Can we?”
“I cannot confirm or deny that statement.” Amir said.
“So for the purpose of the discussion, no.” Berenice continued. “So that’s different than boring in space. Even if we were in a vacuum, you’re creating bores that go meters apart, not thousands of kilometers. If you want to test this sort of thing, wouldn’t the space facility be better?”
The scientists stared at her for a few moments. “...But it’s cool though.” Luke said.
“Is she one of those ‘think twice’ types?” Kirk questioned.
...Oh this was a wonderful first impression. “...I think the portal trick would count, if you’re trying to test like it’s a combat situation.” she said.
“Aha, told you!”
“But that still means I win!”
Amir and Berenice left the room quickly to continue the tour, and the new hire sighed in relief. “...Did I screw that up?”
“No, you’re right. They’re just fucking around with boreholes because they can.” Amir said. “But now they’re going to write down all the data they get anyway just to see if they can get anything from it to spite you, so we might salvage something from that.”
They continued through the facility, through more experiments (some more… real, than others), through a vacuum chamber for more bore-testing (spacesuits provided at each entrance - a spacewalk within Gaia’s atmosphere was certainly an experience). Berenice was getting overwhelmed at the sheer amount of science happening in the compound, and the sheer absurdity of half of it. She struggled to believe this was making progress, but in the last few years there had been a lot more coming out of R&D so there had to be something about it that worked.
They had reached a deeper part, come away from one display of an actually practical creation that Berenice had been incredibly curious about - it had seemed… incredibly familiar. A thought came to her mind. “Where are we getting the ideas for these things?” she asked Amir.
Amir frowned. “Hm… is your clearance high enough…”
“...Excuse me?” Berenice asked.
“I believe so, if barely. Come.” he said, dead serious. He led her down a couple of hallways, twisting turning and with many intersections as if it was designed to get any trespasser lost. Eventually, they came to a pair of oaken doors (oak had been one of the first earth trees planted in Rao and was often a very expensive decoration, although these doors looked recently installed). There was a plaque on it - O.M.E.P.
“What’s this…?” Berenice said, feeling as if she was being brought into something far too secret for her first day.
“The secret of where our grandest ideas come from.” Amir said seriously, nodding to himself. He pushed open the door, and Berenice followed…
...Into a normal looking lounge, with Gaian scientists studying screens with clipboards and pens and headphones. “...No seriously, what am I looking at.” she asked. She looked at what was on the screens - maybe they just wanted a comfortable think tank? But when she saw the screens they were playing… old sci-fi. They were all playing old sci-fi. Berenice was a nerd even among Gaians, she recognized the shows and films. Firefly, Red Dwarf, Star Wars and Trek… and in between bites of popcorn the scientists were taking notes. It began to dawn on her. “...You can’t *possibly* be serious. You can’t.”
“Welcome, Doctor Vitali,” Amir said, with a grin and a theatric bow, “To Gaian R&D’s ‘Official Media Engineering Program.’”
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Topic: The Gaian Regime Empire Thread | Terrans | GalactiRace (Read 44130 times)