Digital Exodus Chapter 18 (Patreon)

It's kinda wild how much easier it is to write now with these new meds. I hopped into the bath just now and nek minit it's been 2 hours and I've written 1200 words. Here, have the fruits of that bath!

EDIT: Added a huge chunk where it's explained why they gotta go save the servers from Paris.

The bodies we’d be using for our Earthside mission were so basic compared to my nanite-protected one that it was almost laughable. For starters, they were using generation one synth muscle, which was both less powerful and more power hungry than the current gen four stuff.

On the plus side, these bodies had limited lifespan heavy-duty servos in the main joints, meaning if a spanner got thrown into the works, we could pull out some serious torque. I was almost certain we'd need it.

From the outside, though, the bodies looked human except under close scrutiny. There were seams in certain areas that'd give them away, which looked like thin black lines running down the stomach and the inside of each limb. They were how they swapped the skins when different people wanted to use them! It was very cool and vaguely creepy.

Anyway, I was late in linking with my body because I'd gotten distracted reading the specs, so when I plugged my digi-frame into the senses of the bot body, the others were mid-conversation.

“I really thought this war was going to kick off during the Alps Water War,” Jason was saying. “Shit, Henry had us go hide in his fuckin’ prepper bunker.”

“That was a shitshow for the Exodus,” Cerri said into the group-wide communications channel. “Hell, it's still proving to be a shitshow now.”

“What? How was the Exodus involved in that,” Ed asked, eyebrows raised.

It was actually Elissa who answered that question when she laughed and blurted, “Remember that train heist?”

Everyone paused, and because she wasn’t actually present, we stared at Gloria instead. The train heist was infamous because nobody had ever taken responsibility for it. From what the news and eyewitness accounts said, a train got stolen from Vienna and driven all the way to the outer regions of the Paris megapolis area. Some people even claimed they had to fight an Austrian Ferdinand Heavy Mech to get away. The UN military repeatedly tried to raid and stop the train, even landing troops on the train itself multiple times, but they never succeeded.

“No way,” Roger whispered, eyes alight. “That was us?”

“It was indeed,” Cerri chuckled. “You’ve met several people who were on that mission. It was very critical to the early Exodus too, because a huge chunk of our population at the time was housed on servers inside the city. Complications forced them to physically move the servers, and to do that they stole a train.”

“That is fucking wild,” Roger swore with a grin. The boy was unexpectedly animated about this. I guess he was a fan. “I’ve always been a bit of a sucker for westerns, and man if that weren’t a modern western action sequence.” Still grinning, he shook his head while taking a breath. “I must’ve watched dozens of hours of footage from that incident. It was so cool. The part where that one bot— shit, I guess that was an SAI piloting a body like this. But yeah, the part where that one person jumped up off the train and fucking punched the dropship that was trying to land troops? I watched that so many times.”

“Based on who is in the Rangers and has connections to all the early Exodans, take a wild guess who was piloting that particular combat bot,” Cerri commented wryly.

“It was that Tami chick, for sure,” Ed cut in. “That girl is missing some vital part of her brain that regulates risk assessment, I swear.”

That got a few good-natured chuckles from the group, but David cleared his throat. “You mentioned it’s still an issue now?”

“Yup,” Cerri said, a grimace in her tone. “Those servers are both still in use, and still in Paris.”

Anxious concerned looks were shared, but my eyes blew wide when I realised what Cerri was implying. “Oh no. We’re going to have to invade France.”

“Nothing quite that dramatic, my love,” Cerri said with a laugh. “But yeah, I expect a contingent of the Rangers will be sent to evac the servers for sure.”

“That’s going to be wild,” David said, shaking his head. Then he frowned and asked, “Wait, why do we even need the servers? Can't we just download everything off there and onto the stuff we have in space?”

Cerri considered the question for a moment, then explained, “It's not as simple as that, unfortunately. Not all server capacity is created equal, and we don't have enough of it as it is. The servers that were extracted from Austria have been augmented, and others were moved to the same facility later on. Among them are what I’d describe as advanced computational cores, utilising esoteric and difficult to manufacture materials to grow the semiconductors from in place of the traditional silicon and nanotube. Now, to be perfectly honest here, it is those highly advanced cores that we're after. Exodus City on its own would have to cut several districts to maintain the quality of the simulation as a whole.”

“Fuck me,” David muttered. “I barely understood a quarter of that.”

“Basically—” Elissa said, speaking up through her link with Gloria. “Virtual realities are super intense for our computers, so we need extra fancy ones, but they don't grow on trees so we can't just write these ones off.”

“It's a pity we can't just raid the devs of CORA and steal their servers,” Jason muttered.

“We considered it at one point, but it'd kill a lot of potential SAI and we're just not comfortable with that,” Cerri said. “As for Rellithesh, well… I think some of it is running on those servers in Paris.”

“Great,” David grumbled, throwing his hands in the air. “I guess we gotta get everything of value off this rock and build some real physical infrastructure once we're in… whatever star system we're fleeing to.”

I nodded agreement while they continued the conversation, but I didn’t really pay too much attention. The bodies had been wearing simple hospital gowns when we arrived in them, but now it was time to find where the clothes were at. I needed a hoodie, stat.

Walking was strange without a tail, and my ears didn't feel right either. Gosh, but I couldn't wait to get this over and done with.

The building we were in was… odd. The walls were all foam-applied drywall, which meant whatever surface they'd adhered to wasn't really suitable as a wall. The rooms were all very similar in dimensions too, I noticed as I stepped into a corridor. Oh, and there were no windows, at all.

Down that passage, I found a second room with a bunch of clothing on racks. There were so many options that I almost turned around and walked out due to the overload of choice I was presented with.

Instead, I tapped into my digi-frame and set some visual search parameters. This was a relatively new feature that'd been developed and rolled out to all exodans a few weeks ago. It basically meant that you could set a certain type of item or items, and then your vision would highlight them using whatever method you preferred. For me, I’d created some custom code that slightly oversaturated the items I was looking for, while desaturating the rest of my vision. It was a little odd at first, but it was the option that felt best to me. I know Cerri had hers set to add a floating tooltip, and my gosh but that sounded awful and completely overstimulating.

What I was searching for right now was anything in my size, except for hoodies, which had to be several sizes above mine. Was it even really a hoodie if you weren't swimming in it? Nope, definitely not.

But, I did also choose to wear a cute black cropped tee that had a bioluminescent pink fox skull on the front. Since the neck on the tee was quite wide, I nabbed a pretty bralette for my tiny boobs. As for my bottom half, I went with dark jorts and more bioluminescence, this time on the pink tights I found. It's important to note that the bioluminescence in the clothes here wasn't the type you'd see on a beach at night. It was genetically engineered cotton that retained its ability to glow even after it'd been turned into thread. It still needed a little oomph to glow properly, though, which was delivered via the micro wires that'd been woven into the thread.

Basically, I looked glowy and pink and cute. Oh, and I chose some thick, chunky goth boots to go with the ensemble. All in all, I was very happy, and took all of them to a changing booth.

Cerri, who'd been silent in my head up until then, hissed greedily when she saw the finished look in the mirror. “I'm getting you that outfit in Exodus City.”

“Why?” I sang in a teasing, flirtatious tone.

“Cute—” she whispered, then I could almost hear the feral smile on her lips. “And so delicious.”

I loved her. I also especially loved how much she was unmasking when we were alone. It was glorious, and honestly a beautiful indicator of the ironclad trust we had. Just the thought of that brought a smile to my lips, so I decided to throw the hoodie over my shoulder rather than put it on when I left the booth.

The others were in the clothing room picking out what to wear when I stepped out, but the noise of the curtain shifting caught idle glances.

“Dayum!” Ed said, as soon as he saw me. “That's a fuckin’ look girl. Excellent!”

Blushing, I hastily dropped my gaze to the floor. “Thanks, man.”

Gloria, David, and Jason all expressed agreement, but very quickly went back to picking their own outfits, which I was thankful for. A little appreciation was very lovely, but when it went on too long, it made me feel all self conscious.

While they were all occupied, I decided to pass the time by checking in on the ship armour plating. I was so nervous about it. Like, would it work? Theoretically, yes. In the three days since we decided to go looking for Jason's folks, the manufacturing teams had been working.

My armour was even now being fitted to a test vehicle, and it was only a matter of hours until the first proper test. If it failed… so much would go wrong, and the evacuation of all remaining Earthside assets would be a bloody dicey affair.

A look into the Cherish and her progress was much less anxiety inducing and actually really exciting. The shipyard components were taking a back seat currently while the construction crews focused on everything we needed in the near future. Whole sections of the mushroom head shield were finished with their diagnostics and had been declared finished. The work that was happening now centred around what lay under the mushroom head. It held not just a thick layer of armour, but several buildings—a small city really—on the two hundred metre diameter ‘underside’.

Those buildings were where the majority of our flesh-and-blood folks would be housed in tiny booth-like apartments, where they could take advantage of thrust gravity to live somewhat normally. Of course, it was going to be very cramped, considering that we were taking a little under half a million people in total. It was due to those numbers that a second Cherish was already being proposed. To say I was sceptical about our chances of actually getting those people off Earth, would be an understatement.

The number of people versus the number of shuttles we had was actually the reason for my anxiety over the armour. If we couldn't just float in orbit shrugging off the UN and AR’s attempts to blow us up, we were screwed.

Assuming either of them were still around in a couple of weeks. The UN senate was still bickering over whether to declare war or not, but their inaction hadn't stopped the situation from deteriorating further. Just last night, several UN nations had issued an ultimatum to the senate—Either they destroyed the so-called ‘Damocles Stations’ or the signatory nations of the ultimatum would declare themselves independent of the UN.

Canada, in violation of the UN’s current standing orders on the matter, had begun to probe the American Republic’s defences along the border. Fifteen soldiers were already dead or injured on the Canadian side, while the drone swarms they operated were either destroyed or rogue. Something was going seriously wrong with the older style of AI that got sent into battle against the AR’s troops. The newer, post-SAI generation of AI were seemingly fine, but the rollout of those to the military had only just started.

All in all, the world was turning into the dumpster fire it'd been aspiring to be for centuries. The only real question, in my mind, was if the Exodus could get out in time to save everything it cared about. Oh, and what happened to us after that. Everything, all the drama of our lives, of history, and even further back than that, it’d all taken place in this little solar system, and we were on the cusp of leaving. What would we find out there—Other civilisations, or would it be empty?