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Engineer38Plotbunnies inspired by the awesome XCom saga on Fear The Boot The folk at Fear The Boot have written an awesome let's play of the XCOM remake, and it got me back into writing things that are longer than half a page! Yay! In the XCOM Remake, support staff (engineers and scientists) do not get names, unlike in X-Com:Apocalypse where they get a name and a skill rating, and UFO:Alien Invasion where everyone gets a randomly generated name. So here's the story of one of the engineers, not very heroic or smart, not very cowardly or stupid, just another red jumpsuit. Note that this is part of the FTB continuity, not the Academy continuity. Engineer 38 They told me I couldn't do things. They told me I couldn't be things. Until a few years ago I just smiled, nodded and did them anyway. But you know what? They were right. Timestamped video of a breakthrough won't stand a chance against a transcript with seals and signatures. Make communication satellites just that little be cheaper for all of history from now on? Sorry, you didn't have the proper security clearance to work on that project, so if you put that on a resume we can't call you back. I learned how that works. I'm a little thick in the head, so I had to learn it four, five times. Eventually after the tenth time I was told to fit my reality to their official record, I gave up and changed my line of work completely. Building power plants in Eastern Europe let me do creative engineering on the sly, and paid well, and the meat is yummy. The alien attacks didn't touch us: we were working in Serbia, not urban enough to be a terror target, not remote enough to be a good field for abduction. One time we saw a sunflower farm being rented out for some fashion modeling shot, and the models being captured and beaten by local boys for looking too thin and moving too unnaturally. Once it was clear that they weren't alien infiltrators, they were apologized to and sent on their way with a month's supply of lamb and onions. Another time, the Tesla museum in Beograd was closed for three days while some very conspicuous spook types went through everything again in case the FBI in the forties missed something. I told them a little story about how my great-grandma saw Marconi's death ray in operation, they got my contact info, everyone got a refund, that was the end of it. And then it happened again. Apparently, even though I was back working in Europe, my US green card paperwork finished going through. Which gave the US government, in the person of one of the NASA guys i worked for, authority to pick me up and ship me to an undisclosed location to do some work for some international undercover effort. Apparently whoever is in charge had to pick between me and Sebastian, or two neurologists, or some unpsecified oodles of cash. At least, that's according to the spook that picked me up after i asked politely. He even conceded that bringing a gun and a badge to a soldering iron fight was stupid, but his goons ended up handcuffing me for the flight anyway. Why are they getting an Italian working in Serbia as a reaction to an attack in Australia is beyond me, but, well, I sort of had family there, so I'm happy to help. There are around forty engineers here. The hierarchy as far as I am concerned is simple -- some guy in a fake cachmire sweater called Bradford who calls the shots, some other guy or two or ten who we don't get to talk to who call his shots, Grandpa, that being Dr. Shen, Head of Engineering and as far as I am concerned the reincarnation of every good teacher and lab instructor I ever had in college, and then everyone else. It feels a little like the old Star Trek, except we're not wearing red shirts, don't go on away missions (hooray for staying alive), and we're in a big box under the floor rather than a big box in space. The Dwarf Fortress succession game that Emily started died quickly because it looks too much like work, but it could be worse. Some days we're welding pipework and patching leaks, some days we're building actual laser guns. I like it. To the operations staff we might as well be extras in a play, but the science folks are nice to hang out with -- I like Dr. Vahlen's philosophy, although I'm very happy I am not working with her, boss from hell apparently -- and we're Fighting the Goddamn Alien Invaders, nobody cares about whether something is gonna sell or how it can be marketed, as long as it hurts what it has to and doesn't hurt who it shouldn't. Jin was right, I would have liked the defense industry, except for the whole "shooting at people just because they're from another culture" thing. That kinda stopped being an issue, I guess. The invasions never did bring about world peace thanks to a common enemy, but I've seen Serbians share a meal with Turks before leaving, after a UFO hunt that turned out to be a false alarm. I keep thinking there's someone on base who I knew before. Sebastian has more of a theoretical bent than I do, so he's been transferred to the science division in all but name. We get to do some reverse engineering of alien tech too from time to time, but most of our time goes to fabrication -- they call it, we make it. The small production scale means that we look more like a high tech workshop, or a prototyping lab, than a factory: last week I built two laser rifles, helped restore a vending machine from the sixties, and taught Jin and Andreas how to improvise a mass spectrometer from a security camera and one of the many, many analog laserdiscs that for some reason we have in storage. Dr. Shen occasionally lectures, when he can find the time, even -- last time we were kicked out of the briefing room used for that because an emergency came up and Operations needed the space pronto. The warriors are generally polite but condescending with us, and slightly suspicious of the science staff. After a conversation with one of the guards, Miguel, during which he kept addressing me as "Engineer" even after I told him my name five times, I got it across from him that the Operations folk think we're basically fungible. That got me pretty mad. I tried to sign up for combat duty, but I'm too slow and my aim stinks -- they'll keep me in mind for piloting SHIVs, since I definitely have experience with that, but that's it. After failing the range test, one of the warriors told me that this is my story as much as everyone else's. Maybe to make a point, she asked me who I was, but didn't give me her name. It made my day. If I have to save the world as Engineer #38 and not get name dropped when they make the movie, eh, so be it. I figured, at least my life wasn't directly at risk -- either we win, and I did my bit, or we lose and we're all barfer food anyway. Right the next day, our installation gets attacked. I've always been used to playing the protector role in my life -- I'm fairly beefy and have stopped fights just by stepping between the fighters and letting them hit me until they realized it didn't faze me. This was different though, this was to the death. We were evacuated quickly and efficiently, and got to see the fight mostly through cameras; we pushed the SHIVs out of the one door after giving them a once over, during a lull in the fight, but someone else was steering. A barfer broke through one of the air conditioning vents. It spat at Stephen, who had safety glasses on, fortunately. I picked it up and put it in a therapeutic hold, only headbutted it when it tried to spit at me again, I hope my hair will grow back at some point. Eventually one of Vahlen's people got one of the old sidearms, scolded me for trying to calm the creature down, and shot it in the head. Sorry, it's the only way I know how to fight... I guess we're a bit past deescalation with these aliens. I did win a small bet about whether I could lift a hulk, while we were helping with cleanup, but apparently my unwillingness to use lethal force means I probably won't get to drive a SHIV, either. I wonder if I'd have tried that with a live hulk. Probably. Might have gotten me seriously hurt. Since the attack, I spent what little off-the-clock time we got from playing plumbers inside a big hole in the ground (Yeah, I know I'm probably the one person on Earth who liked the Mario Bros movie, but calling it one of the reasons why barfers signed up to invade us is a bit excessive, come on) with Riley, building mini SHIVs to patrol inside the ductwork. It's a rehash of an old design, sure, but it gives better coverage than cameras and there's plenty of confiscated cell phones to make them out of. In here it's like working on a tug or an oil rig -- can't really leave, so can't really ever feel off duty. I imagine the actual warriors have it worse. What is incredible to me is that we had very few noncombatant losses, the people who were supposed to fight for us and protect us actually did. For me it's a first. I like working here; the boss shields us from most bureaucratic snafus and everyone is motivated. "I need someone who's good at improvising and works quickly. I can't afford to put a hardware guy and a software guy on this project, we have to do it with a skeleton crew, and you can do a decent job at both. Now go to sleep." "Er, Dr. Shen, sorry, what?" Seeing the old man harried is common. Seeing him genuinely freaked out isn't. He's been doing an incredible job of taking the top secret military black ops mindset that came with this place and figuring out how to turn it on and off at will for us in Engineering; except for the rare cases in which something needs done immediately, the Foundry feels like the world's best appointed hackerspace rather than the DoD prototyping lab it was originally designed to be. There's a lot more security than there was at NASA, of course, but as we saw last week there's actually a point to it. "In a few hours we're getting started on a very time critical project. We have three days' time to complete it, we can only assign a few people to this project, and I'm asking everyone involved to get some rest before we start. If you need stimulants, they will-" I read the work order. It looks like that this is something semi secret even within XCOM. A good thing is that they don't ask you to sign NDAs around here, they just tell you; less hypocritical, and you can see the guns. "I agree to do this" well, he could have just ordered me, but that's not his thing "but I'm not taking pills for it. Do you think I could have some coffee, thought?" He's puzzled. The Foundry pretty much runs on coffee as it is. "I guess so? Come to think of it I've never seen you drink any." I don't know how the whole thing about not being allowed caffeine ended in my file here, I swear there's got to be someone who personally knows me in this organization, but it looks like Dr. Shen didn't read my file any more than he read my resume, or he doesn't care. I can definitely work with that. "So, think you can pull it off?" I nod. "What are we doing, boss?" He looks at me and loses the slightly amused grandfatherly look that he had managed to keep up until now."Taking a step on the slippery slope." He's not happy. After seeing what we're doing, I kind of am, but just nod. Looks like he split the project into solo jobs as much as possible, so while I'll be taking orders from Vahlen's people as far as the what and why, the how is all mine. Thank you, Grandpa, that's just how I like to work. The project is simple in scope: one of the warriors (Soldiers? But this isn't an army, it's a beached oil rig with more firepower than the Texas State Fair. Actually, as time goes on, and we work in the world but not of it... I guess it's more like a tribe. A civil society has soldiers, a tribe has warriors.) was gruesomely killed when we were attacked, getting into a hand to hand fight with an invader, like I did. Only, I got a barfer, and he got one of those berserker hulks. Guess that my instinctive reaction would've gotten me very killed after all... Fortunately for us and possibly for him, one of those one in a million things happened, and enough of the meat was still alive that he can be brought back, some of him anyway. Apparently Doctor Vahlen's people have been experimenting with Meld without telling anyone, and since Mr. Hussey was by all reckoning a true badass whose last act was to donate his body to science, we get to see if anything can be done with it. Understandably, Boss Shen doesn't trust the stuff and neither do the people in charge, so we're using as little alien nanotechnology as we can -- there's also the fact that it's a limited resource, like their alloys, because we cannot make more. So my job is to rebuild the guy a voice box, plus the bits of brain that normally control it, because those are apparently already dead. The three-day limit is a guideline, the current estimate is that after that long, there wouldn't be enough of Warrior Hussey in the braincase regardless of how good the preserving technology is. They aren't sure if he is conscious or not, even. I wish I could ask my aunt about this, her theory about Robocop was that Murphy's soul was in heaven the whole time, and thus the protagonist was in fact a new person. Hooray for elderly Chatolic geeks. My job will be to extract what Hussey's thinking and turn it into words again. And I have three days to figure out how to do it. And for some reason the neural map of where i have to connect things to came on a floppy disk. Guess I will need that coffee. Dr. Shen said that the more natural he ends up sounding the better, it will help both him and his comrades feel continuity, but anything better than beeps and Morse code is a success here. On the plus side, sourcing hardware won't be a problem, we even got genuine SID chips to play with, since we have no idea what'll work. I don't know this guy. He won't know me. I am told there isn't much left of his self, the brain is still slowly dying, so I take that as believable -- and I say that as someone who generally looks past most of the meat as it is. I hope I can make him sound at least somewhat like himself. Apparently the family was told he's dead. Did anyone other than me in here ever watch the alternate Robocop sequels? Apparently my voicebox design is good enough. I was sound asleep when they did the surgery and installation, and I personally don't like the result, but Dr. Shen does and Mr. Hussey does. The whole concept processing thing had to evolve into some sort of inner voice debug thing as we went, per Dr. Vahlen's instructions, so it's not a very good voicebox, but I'm going to spend some time messing with it, it can be made to sound more natural over time, I'm sure. For now they want me to make another one, for a different neural map, which looks a lot less damaged, from what little i've learned about neurology from Livio. I think the science guys are wanting to do a standard design -- wait, they want to robocop healthy people? is that why Dr. Shen looks like he has been sleeping even less than usual and dropped his glasses while going over a design yesterday? -- but apparently this one is going to have to be custom regardless, since it will have to pair to an unusual brain. From what I can see, it looks a lot easier. The neural map didn't come with a name attached to it, instead, I got a note from someone in the operations division saying basically "Hey" and then my name ",I know you can probably futz with the database to figure out who this is for, but please don't." XCOM Foundry - Work Orders - Low priority queue
Don't block the hallway (Cowritten with Kite Winters) For every hour we spend building awesome death rays to go barbecue aliens with, we spend three or four keeping this huge ant farm of a base functional -- having found a steam vent means we get free power and free hot water, but it also means plumbing headaches, so today it's drudge-work for me. It's important that the hot water work flawlessly, that way we can "glitch" it for a few seconds when someone we don't like is taking a shower. I suspect Command is fully aware of the prank war between the Science and Engineering divisions, and lets it go on because it allows Dr. Vahlen and Dr. Shen to stay sane. We're basically in jail here, people need ways to blow off steam, and not just the warriors. In my particular case, the problem is steam blowing off a wall, so here I am trying to fix it. Stomp, stomp, stomp. Unfamiliar noise. Scary. I'm still jittery after the breach, and by that I mean terrified of the unfamiliar. MEC trooper, not in full suit, weapon in hand. Best to make way, let me get my tools off the floor -- Wait, that's not Mr. Hussey, who is it? "Er, hello?" The cybernetic soldier walks on, then turns around. Looks at me intently for just a moment. "Wait, Kay? What are you doing here?" How's she know my name? My name tag and passport say something else. Suspicion, fear. Who is this person? Why do we have another MEC anyway? Did someone else get brought back from the brink? What's going on? Like often, I notice the stupidest things when I'm freaked out. The wrist on her off hand is glitched, so i hold up the WD40 bottle and point at it. "Er. Do I know you? Uhm... Oil can?" She chuckles, which sounds a little odd through the synth. The answer is distant, but her face changes a smidge from the neutral expression we've managed to get Warrior Hussey to default to. "Kay... It is me. Kite. What is left of me, at any rate." I can't recognize the face, I'm not good at it. Kite's dead, has to be, she was abducted in Australia and... I can't recognize the voice either, and that's my own damn fault, too. Maybe it's my imagination, but she looks... disappointed? She unglitches her off hand and points at the can. "It does not need it. The joint is my fault. Bad posture habit of mine that carried over from meat." My jaw drops. That's what she'd say. I stink at telling faces or voices, but phrasing's another matter. I drop the bottle of lube and hug her, it's a bit cold, who cares. This particular hug was years in coming. She hugs me back, it's a bit too rigid, who cares. "You're alive! You're still there!" I'm crying like an idiot, and she has to hold me up because my legs gave. I used to think I could lift her... "I am indeed alive. And doing my part to make that true of a steadily diminishing number of aliens." I try to stop crying, maybe she wants to too but can't. I ask her if she got badly hurt at some point, and she tells me that while she did, it was a while ago and she volunteered for the MEC conversion. "Why didn't they tell me? I... You're alive! And you're not on a mad rampage so your husband's alive too! I..." More happy tears before calming down, the cling subsiding into what passes for a normal hug. She calms me down. Always the voice of reason - despite the monotone, the caring voice I remember comes through anyway. "All of me that matters is in here, yeah. I suspect they did not tell you for the same reason they did not tell me that you are here. While I did not know, there is no one I would rather trust with having rebuilt me. I can stop worrying about the possibility of random breakdowns now." "If I'd known you were out there fighting I'd... well, realistically I'd have gotten myself killed trying to protect you." My unwillingness to blow a barfer's brains out after incapacitating it didn't go well with anyone, although the written report says that I figured it'd be expedient to make another live capture, rather than me being flat out unsuited for the rage of war. "And now I am significantly less likely to get killed being stupid while trying to protect everyone I care about. Hell, first mission out in Big Stompy, first time back in the fight after getting chopped up, Mothership. Right to the face. If I had been standing there just as..." She tells me about her adventures. I listen. It's definitely interesting enough for me to stop crying already. Still... I feel guilty. This is someone I had sworn to look after. "I'm sorry. Sorry I wasn't there. Turns out I'm shit at fighting with actual weapons. I... Huh, I guess technically you're bigger than me now, so I can stop worrying?" One of the first things we do after the Skyranger comes back is patch the strike team's armors. Every hole is an accusation: we didn't make them tough or flexible enough, and now someone's in pain or dead because of it. She lifts me, and holds me. I always thought it'd go the other way round. And then she says something flat out wise. If anyone had any doubt about a MEC trooper's humanity, I wish I could make them watch this a few times. "You are here in the ways that matter. The tribe is a much more complex beast than it once was, and so are its enemies. We both protect the tribe, Kay. We who go and fight and kill and bleed cannot do so without the aid of those who build and maintain the tools that allow us to do so more than once. The tribe called 'human' is now made of creatures of artifice more than creatures of meat, even if most do not show it as obviously as Hussey and I do. As to the augs... Well, what do I do that does not involve something that came through engineering, anymore? The Skyranger, the systems that keep us in air and water down here. You do what needs doing. So will I." We talk a little more, after she puts me down. Hey, she can lift me, I can't lift her, on a primal level - I can let myself feel safe. We talk a little, just friends reconnecting, never mind where we are and what's going on. I'm not surprised that after all we had to do to her head, she still went on to figure out how to help one of her fellow warriors cope with things. Kite's husband is doing well. She's been eating okay, and mentioned something about hulk steak, but I am sure it was speculative. She also mentions something about making "Mk5 Cookiecake abominations", and that's absolutely droolworthy, so we agree to reconvene in a few hours in one of the kitchenettes. In fact... past the muting of body language, I have never seen Kite so, well, at ease. Maybe it's knowing what your purpose is. "What's it feel to take all the hardware off?" I ask. "Er, there actually is not enough left of me meatwise to unplug that much. The torso shell doesn't come off. The limbs do, but, yeah, my spine has less flex than my husband's BJDs." I tell her to do some crunches anyway, or try to, lest her spine get lazy. The shell not coming off must chafe a little, hmm, maybe I can do something about that... Look, sense of duty, at worst the showers will lose hot water for a moment, I'm interacting with someone who's been dead for years for all I knew. She finishes explaining. "It actually feels quite good. Simple, quiet. I am comfortable in this body as I never have been before." I take that as the highest of compliments. Now we both have work to do, so we hug briefly again, and get back to it. Many lost family through this, most without a chance to do anything about it. Experiencing the opposite is a moment to treasure; I know that someone is looking out for me, and I know I can trust her, and isn't that the whole point? For the first time since the base assault I don't flinch when I hear steps. Espirit d'escalier, I should've told her she looks really metal in that getup.
Morale issues The Engineering briefing room is mostly used for the occasional lecture, but since it's the only one that has at least one wall not covered in whiteboards or electrical paneling, it also sees the use it came with -- Bradford occasionally addresses us from two floors up via the projector, which is less disruptive for everyone. It's also where we get mission feeds. A good thing about having an old guy running the department is that he hates Powerpoint enough that there's a "I absolutely had to make a ppt slide" money jar on top of the projector housing. So here's the boss's boss's second in command (I think: for me it gets a bit hazy past "The old guy is in charge") talking to us with a big face. Video feed is two ways, he has us on monitor, I guess we do look like ants in a farm from there. "First off, I want to congratulate you on getting this place back to full function after we were attacked. While we do not expect such a security breach to occur again, the invaders know where we live, and we'll have to step up active security. This brings me to the second item on my checklist. As far as our enemy goes, we are no longer concealed. This has caused a number of deaths and injuries, which were unavoidable without the benefit of hindsight. It has also caused more lingering effects. A number of operatives and some of their family members have had a range of adverse psychological reactions to the breach; we thought we had a safe haven on downtime, and got a hell of a wake up call about that. I'm not going to ask you to uproot and move this whole operation elsewhere... down in front, I said I'm not asking for that... but I am asking for your help in making this place feel like home, as much as possible. This means that everything must work ship-shape. I already had this talk with Logistics; the lights must turn on instantly, the motion sensors must not have any dead spots, the showers must work perfectly every time, yes, even when Dr. Vahlen is stepping in, that was fun the first three times but come on now, and I don't want someone whose job is to go get shot at by monsters to be annoyed at being unable to torrent a movie.... I know one of our front organization got a MPAA letter, we'll get to that later. The bottom line is, I must ask all of you to step up the maintenance efforts; as those of you coming from a naval background know, a clean ship is a lot easier to manage. Well, that quieted everyone out quickly. Please coordinate with Logistics about what they want done soonest; in light of the added patrol requirements, I'm giving the green light to resurrect the THUNDER project for internal duty only. Yes, you can make them sweep the floor while they're at it. On that note, the LIGHTNING vehicles performed admirably during the last sortie; more work for you means less work for the medics, remember. To acknowledge your hard work and in order to promote food variety, I'm pleased to announce that everyone who had their cooking privileges revoked due to hazard can have them reinstated. All right, two more items on the agenda. One, we are resurrecting the REAPER project for one limited run -- one of the Council nations has requested prototypes. Some of the resulting funds will be allocated to living quarter renovations, and since it's you who will be doing most of it, I am removing standardization requirements for room layouts. Yes, I understand, before you worry about us becoming international arms dealers, the Reaper Rounds are considered dum-dum bullets by the Geneva Convention, and thus only cleared for use against aliens. No, we're sending the stuff to Australia, not America. No, actually it was the Chryssalids that got eaten by spiders, go Australia, I guess. Two, getting back to the question about the MPAA letter, I am pleased to announce that since XCOM would never do any of the vile things they have accused our front organization of, we will be sending a security team to investigate the obvious possibility of an EXALT double agent operating from their building. We are not going to issue them EMP charges or explosives, but any surplus may be left at the entrance of ground transportation in 48 hours. Thank you. Thank you very much." Judging by the applause, not many people here are fans of the Motion Picture Association of America. Nobody's going to get hurt, of course, but we're all looking forward to the video feed of some collateral damage -- don't bring a lawyer to a laser gun fight, and all that. Bradford's face disappears from the screen, and Grandpa stands up and clears his throat. "Well, you heard the man. More perks and less time to enjoy them in, so what else is new?" Since we're all here, we do some staff meeting type stuff that would otherwise have required gathering everyone up again and wasting time. A lot of people, me included, have a problem with what amounts to manufacturing reaper rounds for resale, so Grandpa asks for volunteers, and gets enough to get it done. We also get back the results for our firing range evals -- Dr. Shen returns them to us like they were a midterm. I have to give it to him, he's making a lot of us feeling like we're back in university. Live in a dorm, learn things from researchers, prototype stuff in the lab, watch aliens get slaughtered on a video screen... 2006 wasn't a bad year, you know? Some of us are taking well to it. Bradford is right: if the little things in life work out well, the laundry gets done and there's food on the table, big tragedies are a lot more manageable. "Sebastian, that was pretty good, you qualify for a sidearm. Daniel, not bad, but you have to try again. Riley, excellent job, you qualify. Kay, they politely asked you to not come back. Felix, are you sure you're from Texas? Try again. Amit..." There's a bit of polite ribbing, which I take -- the whole mess with the base attack, while meaning that I won't get to drive a SHIV any time soon despite being qualified, did solve itself leaving me one of the few non-combatants with a confirmed kill; one official nod and I went from a suspect "too squeamish to bag a X-ray" to a respectable "bad enough d00d to perform a capture with bare hands", which turns out to be worth a full point on the kill board. The person who actually put a bullet in the barfer's head was a little annoyed. Honestly? I don't care; I even said why can't she get the kill instead. After talking with Kite, I feel very safe in here now. We get back to work shortly after; I pass by the "Why haven't they nuked us from orbit yet?" wall, and see Riley adding to the conspiracy theory flowchart with the assigned marker. I suspect that it's because they have no way to do so, it's entirely possible that they understand their own technology only as well as we do. The current winner is that this is some sort of galactic boot camp. I get back to what I refer to as "my" workbench and find Felix futzing with the attitude control system for LIGHTNING-2, which we have to recalibrate after it took some fire. The battlebot/quadcopter hybrid is intended to be back in service later today, so I join in. Felix asks me why I'm so damn happy lately. "Turns out a relative I thought was dead is fine, she's working here actually." "Wow, small world. Anyone I know?" "Probably not." We get the circuitry done some time after the mechanical team finishes buffing the chassis. There are two emails when I'm done for the day -- next game night will feature a flash fight with the acclaimed 2012 Firaxis game, the Alpha Centauri remake, and a note from Grandpa. "I have received a request that you handle the maintenance for one of our MEC troopers. I am still of two minds about that program -- on one hand, we've seen alien cyborgs, on the other, it's one of the few programs that can eventually be made to not rely on alien materials at all if we keep at it. I consider it unsafe to let any one worker become too necessary to a project, lest there is another attack and we lose that person, but I'm going to pioritise you if a MEC or SHIV needs after-action repairs. Depending on operation times, expect to be woken up in the middle of the night. Please know that this is not a punishment; you're better at one thing than the other, and I would be a poor manager to not consider it." I reply with a brief thank you. Punishment? I know Kite will feel more confident if it's me working on her suit, I know I'll do a better job than most because it's for a friend, everyone wins except for whoever ends up at the end of Kite's rocket punch. Truth is, I should count my blessings. I am doing very meaningful work, we probably will get paid a nice lump sum after all this if we win (moot point if we don't, really), nobody is actively trying to shoot me, and I am building death rays to fight aliens with, and one of my best friends, who I thought was dead, is now a giant robot with a rocket fist. Who made me cookies. I wish I could share in a meaningful way the feeling of pride that my 12 year old self feels for me, especially with the warriors, I've seen a lot of smashed punching balls in the gym and know what it means. The bosses are right -- all we can do is make sure that the fighters are comfortable when they get back from the fight. This isn't total war, nobody is being asked to donate their car parts for the war effort, and volunteering for a couple extra hours every week mostly just has a symbolic value, so... what can we do that we're not already doing? Well, I just got my cooking privileges reinstated. Let's see if I can make a couple jars of pesto before turn-in. That keeps forever and I can just leave them in the mess hall for anyone who wants any. I mean, it's pesto, I'd have to try to set something on fire making it. Writing on the wall (Signed off by everyone mentioned here, although some was in Italian) One of the walls in the Foundry has been covered in whiteboard, and dry erase markets have been made available by the simple means of string (it's not that people steal the marker; it's that they need something to write with, and don't return them after... which is the same thing unless you're Chatolic, really). Dr. Shen, being somewhat old fashioned, prefers this brainstorming method to having a BBS or setting time aside for brainstorming sessions. Have an idea? Write it down quickly. The handwriting takes care of paternity issues, even. Most of the whiteboard is covered in diagrams, snippets of pseudocode, and little after-the-action manual supplements, but there are some more abstract threads. The "Where are the aliens coming from?" area was largely wiped out when the big ship appeared, since most of the speculation was tactical in nature; hopefully someone took a picture. Being as this is the Engineering whiteboard -- the science division set up a fancy motion capture thing for roughly the same job, only theirs can have hyperlinks and meta tags, and got done after they saw ours; we aren't sure if Operations has done something similar -- the questions posed tend to deal with practical problems, rather than conundrums of philosophy, although there are exceptions. WHY HAVEN'T THE ALIENS NUKED US YET? Brainstorming on "Why haven't the aliens used strategic weapons after losing ground battles?" This is some sort of galactic boot camp, to see if the species can function as a unit in the presence of a threat. -- Felix We're worth more as slaves, this is not an invasion army, this is a strip-mining operation with Pinkertons in tow. -- Riley They will after we've improved on their tech enough that they can get something patentable off us. -- Marissa They don't know how. They're using mostly-autonomous technology they scavenged, and don't know how to make WMDs. -- Kay They're weeding out the weak. They'll leave the top 5% alive. Then we can rebuild and go after them. -- Nicolo' This is some sort of trial, but for them, not for us. Some junior prophet is trying to get his wings by harassing Earth. -- David We are being punished for not expanding into space fast enough. -- Sebastian HOW DO WE STOP THEM? Brainstorming on "How do we deal with the hundreds of miles long temple ship sitting in the upper atmosphere?" If using an ICBM was ever warranted, this is the time, just make sure it falls into the ocean. -- Riley Capture the High Prophet, and just let him take a peek into Kite's head. They won't be back for generations. -- Kay We don't. We get ourselves in a situation whereby they keep making little raids on us. And we keep taking their tech until we can build SSTOs and all that good stuff. -- Sebastian We strap more boosters to it, then ignite them. -- Jeb -- Guys, sign your real name!! S. Make a landing on the big ship, and start clearing it out. But keep landing troops and equipment. By the time we find the Ethereal leader, we should have COLONIZED that shit, then we just toss him overboard, or lock him up. -- Felix Give them all the hippie UFO lovers, set up a shuttle service if we have to, and tell them they got what they came for, now go away before we nuke you. They can be each other's problem. -- Emily We ignore it and keep kicking their asses until it's empty, then we move in. Even empty we can use it as a space elevator of sorts. -- Marissa On a full stomach "To: Dr. Raymond Shen and anyone else who reads these things. Enclosed are preliminary ideas on implant firmware settings to allow for a toggleable, significant decrease in metabolic efficiency for MEC troopers. Note that it says decrease. Why? One, it prepares the ground for possible metabolic speedups which may improve reflexes and reaction times later on. I have to admit that I haven't had any success with that, although this firmware change makes some resources available, so this project has zero tactical value at the moment. Two, please keep in mind that our MEC troopers lost a significant amount of muscle mass. This modification should allow them to eat as much as an unaugmented human, and not become fat from it (which, while obviously being unable to impact athletic performance, would at the very least make it harder to fit in the MEC armor, as well as present other problems). In my opinion, which I am going to discuss with the science team as soon as I find someone who worked on this who has downtime at the same time as me, it is vitally important that MEC troopers remain human in the perception of their comrades and themselves, and this is a small but significant step in ensuring that remains the case. Wartime allows precious few fleshy pleasures, and although I have strenuously tried to avoid extrapolation on the subject, I imagine that this is even more true for MEC troopers. I do not claim to know what goes on inside Mr. Hussey's head, being as he was dead for days and all, but I know firsthand that Mrs. Winters greatly enjoys cooking and should be able to sample her and others' work without restrictions. To further the end of preventing augment discrimination in the mess hall, I have taken the liberty of destroying all OCP-branded baby food we had in storage by converting it into ballistic gel. Draw whatever conclusion you wish from the fact that said conversion was way easier than it should have been. Do go ahead and take that out of my pay if it helps any. Kay" |