Digital Exodus Chapter 16 (Patreon)

It felt like my entire life was meetings, bursts of hectic activity, and then boring waiting times. I was currently stuck in the meetings portion of that triad again.

At least I was free of meditation stuff now. Gosh, my poor little brain had hated that. I just wasn't cut out for sitting still. I needed something to do, a project or problem to solve, or failing that, a game to play.

Now that we had a way to make Larry’s dream substance, we were hard at work studying it… or in Larry's case, shoving it directly into the engine they'd designed and then being surprised when it blew up.

Yep. That's right. Larry wasted the first batch of aether puff stuff on a very expensive firework. For all their number crunching and idea generating prowess, it appeared that not a single one of their kittens could be called anything like a safety officer or auditor.

At least blowing it up had forced me to make more and we now knew I could make it reliably. It wasn't even particularly hard to do, although herding it still left me exhausted.

So yes, we were now doing our best to understand the stuff. It was proving… resistant to intellectual dissection. Which was my way of saying it was totally blowing our minds. When we allowed metallic objects to sit inside the stuff, portions of it would begin to seep into the metal, making it begin to act in both a bizarre and volatile manner.

“Let's go down the list,” Larry said, tapping a holo-paper that sat on the large table’s surface. “Sublight engines?”

Right. That's what the meeting was about…

The development of spaceship tech had been split into several categories and handed off to various groups. Mostly it was centred around the Cherish, but we were still keeping future smaller ships in mind.

“Cherish has the fusion torch engines, which are actually installed and undergoing tests now,” everyone's favourite science cultist replied. I still didn't know her name, but she was fun and us digital sapients were an eccentric bunch. “As for potential smaller ships, we're working to increase fuel efficiency in the high acceleration yield MPD thrusters currently in the drones.”

“Good. Everything is running smoothly? Do you need more people or resources?” Larry asked, tilting their robotic head slightly.

“Short of extra hours with the big Cherish fabricators, no,” the cultist said, shaking her head.

Larry took her answer as rhetorical, since the fab schedules were stretched to breaking point anyway, and turned to the next item on the list, “Reactors… how are those going?”

“Cherish has several large tokamaks,” a voice I wasn't familiar with said. The man speaking was short and… well… not even remotely human looking. Let's just say that if I flirted with being a furry, he was already married with children. He also had a strange accent and a steampunk chimney sweep aesthetic. His metadata informed me that he was an SAI, which had me wondering where the heck he formed.

“Some of those tokamaks are even functional!” He continued with a barking laugh.

“How long until all are functional?” Larry asked, ignoring the joke.

The fox man… ah! That’s where I knew him from! He was taking the appearance of one of those fox people from CORA. Anyway, he huffed at his joke being all but dodged by the robot and replied, “We’re getting the last one online this week.”

“Excellent,” Larry said, and their face plates whirred and clicked into a smile. “Now let’s see… next on the list is heat management—”

The meeting continued on as we went down the list of each major technology we’d been developing and installing into the Cherish. Everything from the graphene sail radiators to the algae atmospheric recyclers was checked off the list, until finally Larry looked at me.

“Now,” they said. “Normally I'd ask about our fancy armour, but I know you've hit a dead end there. So, I will talk about what we just discovered earlier today. The aether puff as Alia insists on calling it, can be infused into materials when they are in a highly energetic state. For metals, this is as simple as heating them to the point of melting, then pouring the molten material through the puff in thin streams.”

“What kind of properties does the metal have once it's puff-infused,” I asked excitedly, leaning forward.

Their face plates fluttered into a grin. “For starters, it acts as what I am calling a hyper-conductor. Energy is able to flow through it at speeds faster than should be physically possible. This is limited by distance and volume of energy, however. It should be perfect for your armour, but replacing all our wiring with it will cause problems.”

“Yes!” I exclaimed excitedly, and my tail began to wag so violently that it swung around and scattered some holograms in all directions. Those at the table who could do so, grinned at my outburst and I sheepishly settled back into my seat. Someone muttered, “Adorable.”

“Indeed, dear Alia,” Larry chuckled. “Furthermore, it appears this ability is actually a byproduct of the infused metal’s ability to interact with the aether. It's not enough to actually change the other plane in any way, but when we run high enough quantities of energy through specifically shaped hyper-conductors, we are able to achieve superluminal speeds. The exact mechanism appears to be that when the metal’s hyper-conductor capabilities are overloaded, it becomes entangled with the outer membrane of the aetheric realm. By pulsing two of these skates—as I'm calling them—in a sequential pattern, we bypass the speed of light.”

Shocked, awed silence descended on the meeting as we all processed the news. We had FTL travel capacity now, at least theoretically. The holy grail of voidborne tech was ours.

“You're not joking,” the cultist lady breathed. “How fast…?”

“Twice the speed of light,” they said, flicking a robotic hand to summon a video. It showed the test vehicle moving through space as a streak of blurred light, with a barely visible cone of much sharper light cascading out from its tip.

“That's still… not very fast,” the fox man said slowly, as if hesitant to rain on the FTL parade.

Larry chuckled. “Indeed. We're working to improve the numbers. It still knocks over two years off a light speed travel time to Alpha Centauri.”

On the screen, the test vehicle suddenly and violently exploded.

“That,” Larry gestured with a sigh, “Is why we need your armour, Alia. A single micrometeorite impact will punch through all but the toughest materials, and even they will be severely damaged. The energy dispersal web should be our solution to that issue.”

“I'm willing to bet that our eventual top speed will be predicated on how effective Alia's armour is, more so than the skates themselves,” Cerri mused, her tail twisting around the base of mine. I shivered—nerve endings sizzling across my body. Oh crap, that was way too hot.

The conversation continued, but I was checked out. I think Cerri talked about the various sensor suites we had, and someone mentioned using the hyper-conductors for feeding energy into railgun rails. I, however, just wanted to go home where the tip of my girlfriend's tail could get much more intimate with my body.

When the emergency announcement silenced everyone in the meeting, I knew that my daydreams would have to wait.

“All Rangers,” Amelia's voice said over the channel. “All Rangers, please link into the virtual briefing address provided in the metadata of this message. If you are marked as an analyst or specialist, please attend in person if you're able.”

“Aw, fuck,” Cerri groaned. “What is it now?”

Looking at the metadata from the transmission, I saw that the briefing was being held here in Ranger HQ. “We're close to the room, and I think everyone here is classified as a specialist…”

Larry gave an auto tuned grunt. “True. We'll finish this later.”

Together, we trouped out of our meeting and made our way down one floor and over into a large auditorium.

A lot of people were already present as we drifted apart to take our seats with our teams and crews. Cerri and I were the only ones from the Turshen who were actually here.

Not even a minute after our arrival, up on the stage I saw Desmonia swear, “Fuck! We have to start now.”

Cerri and I exchanged looks. What the heck was going on? It evidently wasn't bad enough to throw everyone straight into combat… but seeing the leader of the Rangers lose her famous cool like that… not good.

“Alright everyone! Listen up!” She called, and the room darkened.

A hologram appeared floating in the middle of the room, showing the Earth and a fuzzy cloud of dots surrounding her. The image changed, with the continent of North America spinning to face us while most of the dots faded away. Remaining were just three angry red blobs, one above South America, one just peeking over the horizon above Europe, and one directly over the American Republic.

“These red dots represent known sister installations to the Temple satellite we raided,” Desmonia said seriously. “Each of these stations has the power to scour the Earth clean of life three or four times over, and is a direct violation of the United Nations’ own laws. There was originally another one in geostationary orbit above United Nations City, but… you all know where that one is now.”

Nervous chuckles rippled through the still filling room. Where was she going with this? Surely the UN hadn't…

“Thirty four minutes ago, at 0930 local time, three major AR cities went dark.” She continued softly. “For a minute, we investigated and entertained the idea that they'd been destroyed, but visual data indicated they were at least physically intact. Then, we realised the various power plants that supply these population centres were still active, and had even increased their output.”

Silence filled the room as we all held our breath.

“At 1000 local time, four minutes ago, a massive surge of expended energy was detected in rural Kansas. In the same exact nanosecond, something exited the atmosphere at zero point two percent of light speed. This projectile impacted and utterly obliterated the UN Temple satellite above the American Republic.”

Holy. Fuck.

How?! How did the religious extremist pariah state build something like that without it being noticed? How did… oh shit. When we deorbited the first station, we revealed to the world just what the UN had hanging over their heads.

The briefing room was in chaos as people called out questions or spoke to one another in rapid, agitated murmurs.

“Quiet!” Desmonia shouted, amplifying her voice. The noise cut off like a switch had been thrown, and she eyed the crowd gravely. “The UN has lost the proverbial Sword of Democles it had hanging over its greatest rival. As I was beginning this meeting, the United Nations released an emergency statement declaring this an act of war on the part of the AR. Simultaneously, many member nations have called for an emergency session of the senate. Our sources are indicating that several of those members are calling for a declaration of war, while others, especially nations closer to the AR are threatening to withdraw funding and support for the United Nations if the senate doesn't vote for a rapid de-escalation plan.”

“Membership itself for those isn't being discussed yet but the threats that have been made thus far are more than enough to seriously destabilise the global situation further.”

Sitting there in that dark room with the hologram bathing the room in an eerie blue light, I swallowed a deep sense of fear. I was part of the Exodus… but the comforting status quo I'd known for most of my life had just taken a literal fractional-C bullet.

“Larry!” Desmonia called, snapping me back to attention. “How's the Cherish situation?”

“Most systems are installed and beginning testing.” They replied, their calm synthesised voice carrying out over the crowd. “We cracked the problems with FTL half a week ago, and the last great hurdle for the energy dispersal web armour has been overcome. The shipyard facilities on Cherish are only at five percent, however, and internal non-critical facilities haven't been started.”

“We need her ready to leave the system in a week,” Desmonia said decisively. “She needs to be able to hold atmosphere and sustain it under… stress. She also needs to have that armour and be armed.”

“There's no way we can pull that off!” Larry protested.

“We're enlisting the help of anyone and everyone we can round up. Focus on work drones first so they have something to pilot, or find some other way to improve the timeline. Our political analysts are extremely worried, and thus so am I. I want our ticket out of this powder keg to be armed and protected as soon as physically possible, understood?”

Larry was silent for several excruciatingly long seconds, but then they sighed and nodded. “Understood.”