Chapter 503 Backstories and Ellies
?(Ed note: The title reference in this one is pretty obscure, so I’ll give it to y’all. Backstories is obvious, and “Ellies” refers to the 1998 Spielberg flop, “Deep Impact”, where they referred to an incoming meteor that would wipe out all of humanity by the name Ellie, which was code for ELE, or Extinction-Level Event.)
Low Earth Orbit, stealth shuttle ESV-228-01.
Jason Todd and Catherine O’Shaugnessy were reclining in seats in the small stealth vessel receiving final briefing updates for their upcoming task. Their mission: hunt down cult cells to the best of their abilities. N♡vεlB¡n: Transforming Moments into Memories.
And their abilities were certainly no joke.
They would be heading to the Puget Sound area of Washington State, where they would take the identity of a newlywed couple moving to Harstine Island, an unremarkable, unincorporated, and very much out of the way island in the sound. Timothy Roberts and his wife Siobhan would settle down in Hartstene Pointe, a gated community on Harstine Island.
Siobhan Roberts would take up a job as a law clerk at the Mason County Courthouse in nearby Shelton, while Timothy would play the part of a gym teacher at Shelton Senior High and former naval reservist out of Bremerton. Timothy and Siobhan met at the University of Washington, where Timothy was using his GI Bill to pave his way to a degree in Environmental Studies with a focus on Conservation Science & Management, while Siobhan was a bright-eyed girl studying for a BA in Law, Societies, & Justice. They dated all through college and Timothy decided to support Siobhan’s goal of becoming a lawyer, and later, a judge.
After all, even though the Terran Empire had taken over governance for 7 of the 7.5 billion humans on the planet, once the imperial citizens moved into their fortress cities, the remaining people would still need to have a working society. And a working society naturally needed laws, and those who uphold them.
Take, for instance, the M11 Nanite Grenade, version 11827. It was a small cylindrical grenade that fit in the palm of the hand that, when detonated, would spread a nanite colony that would use any and all inorganic material in its surroundings to replicate and spread. Due to the potential of a runaway “grey goo” event, it had gone through almost twelve thousand iterations in testing before it was deemed moderately safe to use in a live test.
But it certainly packed a definite punch.
When it detonated, everything in its surroundings would simply disappear, leaving behind unarmed and helpless people that would soon discover that gravity had the upper hand in any conflict with living beings, as the three-second duration of the nanite colony’s spread would generally reach out to ten meters around the initial detonation point. And a ten-meter drop was rather harsh on anyone who wasn’t genetically enhanced and couldn’t fly.
Even Timothy shuddered at the thought, despite ten meter falls being the equivalent of a normal person stepping off a curb for him.
But the nanite grenade was far from the only piece of cutting edge—even for the empire—gear in their issue.
They had a full suite of nanite colonies, ranging from camouflage nanites, like those that hid Eden’s missile silos and other important underground sites, to injectable colonies of healer nanites, and best of all was the absolute latest in imperial atomic printing technology: the AP198 Type N Atomic Printer. Packed in a container the size of Timothy’s little finger was a nanoscale fusion reactor and a full colony of nanites that could perform the same tasks that any of the empire’s atomic printers were capable of, albeit at a much slower rate.
It had taken the Lab City researchers nearly eight hundred years of iterating on the now “venerable” atomic printer technology before they were able to miniaturize it to this extent. The biggest issue was, again, the potential grey goo apocalypse scenario whereby the relatively short-lived nanites would begin replicating out of control, printing more and more of themselves until nothing remained but an ever-spreading nanite colony.
But unlike the nanite grenade, which would only replicate using inorganic materials, the Type N Atomic Printer had no limitations on what it would decompose to print more of itself.
To it, everything was useful.