Entry-2(II) – The Storm

Continued from last part…

The storm in the horizon, slowly creeping towards our Dome City kept on bringing flashbacks in my head, the destruction wreaked by the unwanted yet unavoidable repercussions of the war, frozen dead bodies on the streets, building the Vault, everything.

I had my breakfast in silence and left for the Center as soon as possible. Husky observed me almost silently occasionally letting out a whine, he could always sense me well. Even though we were inside a virtually impenetrable dome, the storm worried me and he could smell it.

My anxiety was not because of the harm it could cause to my city because Dome City was nigh impenetrable. Dome City is the only settlement in my knowledge that exists on this destroyed planet and my current place of residence. I was worried because every storm brought news of fresh trouble be it radiation or formation of acid pools that would slowly eat away at the ground beneath. New Minnesota was under water for a month the last time it was hit by a storm.

The storm had begun its onslaught on the dome by the time I reached our command facility or in short, the Centre because it was at the centre of the city. The rest of the city was built around it. The Centre houses the administrative counterparts of all the civic facilities, R&D buildings, and the central command and at accessible distances from all corners of the city.

I went to the meteorology department as soon as I reached and enquired about the storm situation. Its origin was quite far from our city. This meant the storm’s current intensity was lesser than initial. Meteorologists were trying to trace the path of Domino, the storm. Bhagirath, a young member of the team, came up with that name and it stuck since the others couldn’t come up with anything better.

The tracing could be done using our highly sensitive underground sensors. The satellites that survived were still in their orbits but incapable of studying the Earth’s surface because of the perennial cloud cover, mistress of the nuclear winter. The data from the sensors brought creases on everyone’s forehead except mine. After the loss of Martha I stopped feeling any kind of emotions except for Husky, my only best friend.

The storm’s accurate origin however could not be found and nor was it continuous. Its presence was first recorded 500km north of Dome City which is practically a cold barren land, the Cold Fields as we called it. The storm seemed to just have appeared from nowhere, there was no abrupt change in air pressure anywhere in that region before the storm. Then things got weirder, the storm seemed to disappear from time to time. There were a lot of theories from the specialists but none seemed to hold. The only effective method was to send an unmanned probing vehicle for field observation and wait for results.

I was a little enthused because the unmanned probing vehicle or UPV was my design and tomorrow was going to be its first field operation. It is literally an all-terrain vehicle with a top speed of 431kmph powered by a huge fusion engine coupled with axles made of aluminium alloyed with carbon nano-tubes. The shock absorbers are pneumatic gas charged pistons with small heat exchangers for compensating the temperature difference. The vehicle employed 4 wheels, 9 feet diameter each, 1.5 feet thick in the rear and two slightly smaller ones of equal width at the front. The air pressure inside the wheels can be altered so as to maintain appropriate traction over the terrain. The outer shell of the UPV is inspired from a Rotem battle tank but with more effective aerodynamics.

When required, this vehicle can also operate underwater though we didn’t know of any existing water bodies yet. I had always wondered how it would feel to sit inside. Pity, it is an unmanned vehicle with no space for passengers.

The UPV was completely prepped for launch but the process was tedious. Of course , it was important that every little part was checked and rechecked before releasing my creation into the wild. There was no room for mistakes. Then again, it did exhaust us entirely.

The UPV is due to start tomorrow as soon as the storm dissipates. Hopefully that would happen before we reach the Center so that no time is wasted when we start recording our observations. Let’s see what nasty stuff the car drags in. I should sleep now.

Entry 1 Part II

Continued from the last post.

Vladivostok, the space station orbiting Venus confirmed the approach of the vessels after 50 minutes of launch and recalibrated their trajectory. The time for them to decelerate was approaching fast and precision was of essence. The ships approached their drop points, approximately midway between the orbits of Venus and Mercury. Mercury, has a short period of revolution around the Sun and hence, the choice of orbit.

After the carriers aligned themselves in five stable orbits, they would deploy their respective payloads, thirty million mica filled silver plate capacitors, each about ten kilometres long, folded over each other like the steel in the blade of a samurai sword to decrease their length. The capacitors were guarded by prótégo coated high carbon steel plates with one face connected to solar panels.

These plates were to form 5 elliptical rings which would form sections of a sphere. These rings had enough gaps between them to allow enough solar radiation required to maintain the brightness in our star system. They would revolve around the sun according to modified Kepler’s laws without disturbing the balance. Planning it was not a walk in the park. The calculations took months and a team of five people headed by our brilliant mathematician, Irene.

I always found mathematics beautiful and it was a treat to the eyes watching those mind-boggling equations come into play while those thirty million massive plates unfolded to form the five rings.

The solar panels blazed up to give a bright bluish white color. The sight was literally and figuratively out of this world. Why wouldn’t it be, the rings are my brainchild.

The whole process took 6 hours to complete. It was the biggest achoevement since the discovery of petroleum and also after the depletion of petroleum reserves. I still remember the day when it was announced that the rock oil reserves have been depleted. Riots spread like wildfire killing thousands on the very first day. It took over a month to bring everything under control during which thousands of cities were destroyed. It was a symbol that destruction caused by man can be as severe as caused by nature. Even though it was more than 300 years ago, the memories are still fresh like an open wound. I lost Martha in those riots, it was the last day for my dwindling hope in humanity.

I got back to my quarters after a long and unnecessary loud celebration. I never understood why any kind of celebration has to be loud for people. Centuries of technological innovation and yet the party culture never died down.

Husky ran down to greet me as soon as I drove down the garage door. We had a nice dinner and then I sat down to write the journal, my first journal after the war got over.

To be continued…

We are not safe…

26th July 2355, 10PM

I can’t reiterate enough the significance of a glass of Scotch in the comfort of your favourite couch. I am just appreciating the peace my home provides me. Husky is sitting beside me, licking himself, something he hadn’t been able to do because of our “field trip” at Sergei’s compound. I was examining the wound on my left arm a while ago and decided to record the final details of our expedition. Minerva is no more, because of me. She got what she deserved. She screwed with Chronos, repercussions of which are never good.

As I had already mentioned in the last entry, I was waiting near the perimeter wall. Husky’s body cam covered quite a wide angle. He had entered the building through the same gates from which the murderous robots had come out. From what I could see, it was a huge training area for soldiers and completely empty at that moment. I didn’t let Husky get cocky even for a second. His safety was paramount. I commanded him to stick to the walls or large objects as much as possible and his cloak did the rest of the job. I looked around and found security cams in every corner of that war room. After roaming about for a while, Husky was able to find the exit. He crossed the two large doors to enter another large area. The long rows of plants told me it was a greenhouse. I wish I had more time to observe the area. The plants were nothing like I had seen before. Some of them were even responding to Husky’s presence. I asked Husky to keep his head low and move steadily. The greenhouse was really large and very weird even by my standards. Sergei was not as myopic as I had assumed. Not only that, this also meant he had lied to us. I knew something was wrong since the beginning of the journey. Sergei’s eyes didn’t sit right by me. I have never been someone to take such matters lightly. As soon as I had realised the fact that Sergei had again being deceptive I called Phil.

Phil responded to my call in his usual manner, “Yeah, speak.”

I said hastily, “send an assassin to Sergei’s cell ASAP. Patch me through the comm of that soldier.” On the other hand, I asked Husky to get out of the greenhouse and stay in a corner. I needed to show Sergei the level of torture I can dole out.

In about a minute Phil called me back, “I have sent the Jonas. He will reach in twenty seconds.” I had the visual and the audio soon. Sergei looked up at the assassin and said, “I don’t think you found what you imagined in the building” and he started laughing hysterically. Somehow, he managed to speak, “You all will die here. I led you to a trap. I am not Sergei. I am just another clone. You will never find the real Sergei.”

I was extremely irritated and I have had enough at that time. I said to Jonas, “Can you please break Sergei’s left elbow and use his left arm to slap his face.” Jonas answered,”with pleasure.” He walked towards the clone and ripped off his arm from his elbow, followed by painful howls from Sergei. Then he slapped the clone’s face as I told him. I asked Jonas to allow me to speak, “Sergei’s clone or whatever you are, as you can see, I am in no mood for frivolities. I’ll ask questions and for each wrong answer, this guy in front of you will tear off a part of your body. Are you ready?”

Sergei’s clone was still howling. I asked Jonas to slap him again, the same way but harder. The second slap seemed to work. The clone said, “Sergei isn’t a human anymore. He managed to transfer his consciousness to a supercomputer long time ago. He procured research data from all over the world and perfected cloning. Then he made clones with different physical capabilities and transferred bits of his consciousness unto them.” I asked Jonas to hit him again.

Sergei was taken aback, “Why are you hitting me now? I am speaking the truth.” I replied, “I just felt like it. Continue”

“I am just one of the supervisors. I was tasked with overseeing the siege of your city. As soon as Sergei learnt of our capture, he started planning for the next step. Bringing you here was a trap. He had evacuated the facility before you arrived here. All the non fighting clones have been shifted to the other facility. I do not know anything more about his plan. Sergei maintained a strict need to know basis with his subordinates. With the fast calculating power of the supercomputer, he has been unstoppable. The machines you encountered are hardly the most lethal ones. There are worse below the ground level.”

As soon as I heard the last part, I asked Husky to return back to me. It would be very stupid to go in unprepared. I asked Jonas to amputate another hand of the clone and cauterize the wound for misguiding us before. I contacted the city administration and asked them to be on the lookout for another attack. As soon as Husky reached my position, we doubled back to our base. I needed to talk to the clone one on one.

Within thirty minutes I was in front of the clone. Fortunately, the prison van blocked all kinds of outside communication. So, the real Sergei, wherever he was, would not be able to contact his subordinates. I sat down in front of him, looked into his eyes and said, “You know what I’ll do to you if you lie to me again. I have a bunch of amazing doctors. I’ll make sure that you are alive to feel every kind of pain I inflict on you and I will be very slow. So, for your own sake, don’t test me. What else have you kept from me?”

I could smell the clone’s fear. He spoke slowly, “Sergei would kill me as it is. I was a supervisor, a clone with a part of Sergei’s consciousness. I oversaw weapons research. There are five others like me. The real Sergei does not come out of his strongroom which is at the bottom most level of the compound. We don’t even know whether he is in human form. Nothing goes in and nothing comes out. The last communication with him was before I was transferred into this vehicle.”

I asked him, “How much does Minerva know about Sergei? What was her role in your organization?”

Sergei looked at me and spoke, “She knows about the cloning and about real Sergei. She was the offspring of two of the clones and for some reason she showed intellectual promise. So, Sergei trained her to be a field agent. She was not associated with research directly but she did procure a lot of data from the outside world. She reported directly to Sergei and I have not much information about her reports.”

I said, “Okay, I’ll be back in a few minutes.” I stepped out of his cell and went inside Minerva’s. She was defiant as ever. I was in no mood to tolerate her antics. So, before she could even utter a syllable, I shot her in the knee. Her eyes showed surprise at first which quickly filled with pain and fear and she cried out loud. I injected her with a pain inhibitor which I had taken earlier from a medic. I spoke to her in a calm tone, “I will ask questions, you will answer. If I feel that you are lying, I’ll shoot again. Where can I find your reports to Sergei?”

She replied while sobbing, “They are stored in the memory chip in my head. It cannot be accessed externally so forget about it.”

I stood up, shot her in the head and got out. I stepped out of the prison van and approached Phil. He looked at me, shell shocked. I said to him, “There’s a chip inside her head. Remove it inside the van so that Sergei can’t access it.”

Phil looked at the van behind me and said, “You shot her in cold blood. You maimed that clone even after he spoke the truth. I never dreamt of seeing you like this.”

I looked at him and said, “Phil, there are things in my past which were way worse. It’s better that you don’t dwell upon it.”

There was no point in staying there. We had no idea about Sergei’s plans as of now, neither were we prepared. There’s no dishonour in falling back to fight another day. I made sure that Minerva’s dead body reached Sergei’s facility before we left.

Infiltration, in the future

The walls seemed higher as we moved ahead. I could feel my heart beating faster. I believe it was nervousness. We stopped about a hundred metres from the compound. The cloaking drones hovered above our heads, constantly maintaining an invisible shroud over us.

Jonas and Nate separated out and faced the rest. I hadn’t expected a speech from those cheeky fellows. Apparently, I was wrong. Jonas started speaking with Nate at his side, “Fellows, we are at the doors of our Rite of Passage. We may not have been born a long time ago but we were trained hard enough and we were trained for this day. We have stayed together as a team and we will win together as a team. We will fight as hard as possible. Today is not the day we die.”

The last sentence struck me. How the hell did he come up with that? “Today is not the day we die” was something I would tell myself everytime I embarked on an adventure. It always fired me up with a certain confidence. I’d have to ask Phil about it later.

I heard Nate shout out loud, “Boys!!! Are you ready to rain some fire?”

The others shouted in unison, “Hell, yeah!!!”

I felt the ground beneath me tremble. Thankfully, the cloak also absorbed any kind of sound produced inside its boundary. Jonas came up to me and said, “We are gonna move out chief. Any last words for us?”

“Last words are reserved for the last act of life, yours is just going to start. Just tell me something, where did you get the part about today is not the day we die?”

Jonas was little confused, “I don’t know, it’s something I just felt and said at that time. Maybe something to do with my programming. You should ask the guys who wrote the algorithms.”

I said with my right eyebrow raised, “is that so? Alright, I’ll ask when I return. Go now, take care of those sentries and all of you, get back in one piece. We have a long night ahead.”

“That’s a deal. Beers are on me when we get back to our city.”

I smiled, “I drink scotch.”

Jonas called on to the three musketeers.

Aramis came to me and spoke, “Can’t wait to see you in action. We will return soon.”

A grin appeared on my face though he couldn’t see it through my armoured head. I said, “Let’s see. Right now it’s your turn to show what you got.”

Aramis nodded and jogged back to his squad and they strode off to the compound. It was 11 o’clock. I requested Phil to transmit the video feed of the drones to my suit. Of course the drones couldn’t see the movements of the assassins physically but their transmitters provided us with the precise locations which were marked in the video feed.

Within seconds they reached the perimeter wall. The ascent along the minarets seemed peaceful since there were no alarms raised. Two drones now aligned themselves along the top level of both minarets, I saw two flashes and then saw the guards fall down. One marker remained motionless which I guessed belonged to the guy deactivating the sentry. After dropping the guard, the first guy stayed on the lookout, observing patterns of enemy movement I supposed. After two minutes, I saw both pairs of markers float down. There were thirty eight more to go. The Phantoms were signalled for take off. About an hour later, I heard Jonas’s voice crackle on the radio, “All done chief. We are on our way back.” I heaved a sigh of relief.

The Phantoms were about thirty minutes away. The Assassins were to meet us on either sides of the gate. As soon as we got the confirmation from Jonas, I ordered everyone to get ready. We were gonna move out towards the compound, in fifteen minutes. It was five minutes past midnight then.

At twenty minutes past midnight, we started. Nate lead the team, I stayed at the back, observing the compound. Thermal images showed no change in enemy routine. This meant our strategy till now has been successful. The ETA of the Phantoms was two minutes. We reached the entrance in sixty seconds and immediately Nate and his team got busy in attaching the tabificus explosives. I saw Jonas approach slowly behind Nate when he was connecting the leads of the detonator to the explosive device. I wanted to see what was Jonas trying to do. I saw his marker move in my feed when suddenly Nate fell over and his face hit the ground followed by Jonas’s weird laughter. Nate got up and muttered, “Asshole!” Jonas commanded his team mates to go to the other side and get ready to storm. “See you on the other side Nate!” He said as he jogged off to the other side. At that very moment Phil conveyed that the Phantoms were here. As I turned my head I saw some shifting of the clouds and two loud explosions rocked the compound.

It was our cue, Nate fired the charges. We waited till the acid ate away the door, creating an irregular opening. Six more explosions were heard at some distance. The Phantoms had finished their job. Now the outcome was entirely upto us. As we stormed inside the compound, all we could see at first was smoke and hear alarms blaring. The drones detected major movement of troops all around the compound. Defensive protocols were in place. We didn’t wait for the smoke to subside. Jonas’s team Jumbo went to the left and Nate led team Mumbo to the right of the compound. The formation for attack was simple. The machine gunner was to form a perimeter by raining bullets. The infantrymen were to be on the gunner’s either side, making precision shots using the sniper attachments on their rifles. The assassins’ job was to take care of anyone who got past the barrier of bullets.

I moved ahead, trying to assess the situation further. I chose stealth for the current job. The titanium scales on my armour were enabled to produce a cloak via micro projectors on their surface. I stuck to the inner side of the perimeter wall which gave me a wider field of vision while minimising encounters with enemy troops. Well, I managed to reach the end of the wall without attracting much attention. But I didn’t like what I saw at all.

Two flashing red lights had caught my attention as soon as I started moving along the adjacent side of the compound. I stopped to observe carefully. I heard a loud hiss and the soldiers posted beneath the flashing lights started jogging in a file toward opposite directions. With another loud but longer hissing sound, I saw white smoke emanating from the wall of the facility facing towards me, followed by series of metallic clanging. What seemed like walls were actually armoured doors about thirty feet high which had just started rolling in opposite directions, the wheels clanging against the rails. My tongue dried, heartbeat increased. Four files of heavily armed soldiers marched out, ten soldiers in each file. No, that didn’t worry me. The reasons for worry were led by the soldiers, twenty biped robots, walking slowly out of the gates, each of them about fifteen feet high.

I was out of my wits. Our assumption, rather my assumption that Sergei had exhausted his armaments while laying siege to our city was absolutely wrong. Not only that, it seemed that we had walked straight into an ambush.

To be continued…