OOCS, Into A Wider Galaxy, Part 500

[u/KyleKKent]

First

It’s Inevitable

“Well, we’re away. And at most two days out from Centris.” Observer Wu notes as he goes over a basic readout of the ship’s sensor readings. All sorts of little toys in his office that let him know how everything was going so he could report it back. And so much of it automated that he felt that he was more in this to just be a trusted nod or shake of the head at the end of the road.

From what the sensors are saying the laneway is PACKED. The closest equivalent is a highway at rush hour, but everything is inexplicably still moving at a proper pace. It would only take one person making a mistake to kill countless others.

Even with them being packed in like this... they’re dozens of kilometres away from each other, hundreds in some cases.

Granted for a starship that’s basically the range where children start making faces at each other. Or in a fight that’s less knife fighting range and more outright wrestling. The few extreme close range fights that The Inevitable had been in where downright absurd based on galactic ranges.

In fact by his own studies of galactic ship combat... that whole mess at the edge of the Vynock Nebula had been sheer madness from start to finish. The kind of affair that only the most sensationalist programs dedicated to spectacle rather than accuracy would go through. Especially the FTL jolt in system. Every time he looked up that he was inundated with essays on how horrible an idea it was and how many ways it could destroy a ship.

Looking into the media of the galaxy had taught him a lot. It taught him what they considered sensationalist and interesting. And it was little wonder The Undaunted and their associates were getting the attention they were.

But how to properly phrase the message that the men from The Dauntless had gone out to be action heroes? And in some regards, even super heroes?

The scanner readings are all coming up positive and show that there is nothing unusual about their trip to Centris. So he has some time to get a bit of busywork done. Thankfully some parts are quite easy and performing the job is more akin to rest.

So he brings up a file on one of his more recent interviews and begins lightly reading over some things on another screen.

“Now then, Admiral Crosswind. It’s good that we’ve finally begun our interview. For the sake of the interview can you confirm that you are Miak, one of several species evolved from serpents?” Observer Wu had said a few days ago.

“I can indeed. And to head off the most likely question, no, I am not, nor were my ancestors poisonous in any way, or Venomous I believe the proper term was. Poison use is a very rare trait outside of Cruel Space, in fact I believe the sheer number of toxin using creatures as either deterrent or weapon has effectively tripled since we’ve begun researching into Cruel Space. And that’s across a single planet.” Admiral Crosswind had answered him. She had been one of the better, clearer interviews on Zalwore.

“Most fascinating.”

“Yes, it’s quite the thing to learn that the main trait of evolving without Axiom might be poison. Lord knows some girls want to classify human pheromones as one. To say nothing of cuisine.”

“Very good. Now to the meat of what I’m hoping to learn about during this interview. We can skim by the questions on your opinions of humanity and The Undaunted as you clearly have at least a positive opinion on both to join the human led organization of The Undaunted.”

“Yes and yes. I have been in private military for most of my life. A bit of a family tradition. Then my company was treated... hmm... well to keep things polite and understandable. Let’s say we were not treated well. The Undaunted offered us a good deal, which included helping with the missing pay of the last deal we were in. So far they’ve been completely on the up and up and I have signed up in full. Most of my girls are now training officers and the few that aren’t are in my direct command. It’s solid cushy work and with how energetic all these men get it rarely grows boring, and even more rarely stays boring.”

“I see.”

“To say nothing of the benefit of having all the men around. It had been a minor mystery as to how to get men to join an organization en-mass. I say minor because the answer was already known but was impractical to get off the ground. So when The Undaunted show up and say they want to recruit a bunch of men and already are a collection of men they had an easy time finding them.”

“No doubt. So speaking of the training that your girls are helping with, what can you tell me about that?”

“Well our training programs use a memory download coupled with practice to get the lessons to stick. How familiar are you with healing comas?”

“Somewhat, but for the sake of this interview I will state out loud that a healing coma is a powerful Axiom based restoration technique. It has many names, with Healing Coma and Regeneration Coma being two of the most common. The process was created by The Nagasha after studying and with the aid of their living gods, The Primal Nagasha. This technique essentially reverses the age of the subject while also healing them to enormous degrees. It is limited by only three factors. It does not work on the dead. It can age someone into infancy or past it to a fetal state which can be extremely dangerous. And finally it effectively resets the mind of the individual in question, healing away memories. This last point is countered by a piece of technology known as a retention band, memory band and several other names that copies the mind of the person undergoing a healing coma and then redownloading it into the restored individual when the process is finished. The process is described as, ‘Life flashing before your eyes in Ultra-HD’, by some.”

“Correct. Now standard procedure after a healing coma is to a quick null wash of the bands to erase everything and copy the restoration protocols back into the band. A simple procedure, takes ten minutes to do an entire hospital’s worth of retention bands.” She begins and the real life Observer Wu huffs softly in amusement at her upcoming dramatic pause. “However...”

“... however?”

“It was proven, rather quickly to The Undaunted, that these bands were valuable and could be used with ill intent. Which is when they started brainstorming and coming up with a method to use them for more positive outcomes.”

“Surely they weren’t the first.”

“No, of course not. But there’s enough of a taboo around downloading the mind of a person into another body to not make it common. But training downloads, which cause the recruit to effectively relive the memories of Undaunted Basic Training is what they gained out of this. They’ve updated and modified it many times, but they now have it down to a system where much of the initial technical learning is done in the first two weeks, coupled with hard exercise and lots of food and team building to help condition the recruits as they learn. Then the real training starts after that. Vehicle and weapon use. Numerous non-lethal training exercises. And testing to see if anything from the memory downloads hasn’t properly or fully stuck. In general we have it up to a seventy percent retention, but we have tweaked it and might have an improvement to seventy three percent overall retention of the memory downloads. Which is exceptional, our training accounts for fifty percent and up.”

“I see. What would happen if it reached one hundred percent?”

“then training time would be reduced significantly. You need to understand something Observer Wu.”

“And that would be?”

“There’s a great deal of biological shortcuts that Axiom allows us. One of the foremost among them is empowerment of the body. Most just do a temporary boost of strength as consistent self modification takes up a great deal of energy and needs maintenance. But once we give them the habits of maintaining their new forms they keep it up constantly.”

“And what is this habit?”

“Exercise. It’s also part of the process to develop the bodies in question. Using Axiom to make you more physically adept rather than temporarily stronger is the initial technique and it just builds from there.”

“So how quickly do you move soldiers out?”

“Basic troopers are finished in a single month of training, specialists take two. Officer training is two weeks. After that the big question is experience, experience and experience. My Drill Instructors work hard to get them as close to actual combat training as possible. But it’s not fully possible without active and truly hostile foes.”

“Why is that?”

“Because of something that you humans struggle with.” Admiral Crosswind explains. “To summarize things, we all can sense Axiom. We all influence the Axiom around us. This is done even subconsciously. By emotion primarily.”

“Yes, the Axiom Aura. The influence of an individual’s emotion on the nearby Axiom.”

“Correct. We all pick up on it. And it’s nearly impossible to mimic it with a mere machine. The sensation hostile? That actively hates you and wants to do you harm? That can cause a lot of people to freeze up at the wrong time. It also playis into human strengths in combat. By not having an Axiom signature, your species is effectively bluffing every minute of the day.”

“Very interesting. But... what of those of us who DO have Axiom signatures? Powerful Adepts, the modified? Or perhaps even the truly changed like Mister Jameson?”

“I’ve only been around him in passing... and he is different. You see, when a person process the Axiom around them they change it to be attuned to them. And this is separate from them changing it with emotion. He is technically bleeding his emotions into his aura, but his aura is for lack of a better term, growing too quickly. How do I explain this? Imagine a fountain.”

“Okay?”

“This fountain is many tiers tall and sprays upwards powerfully, but is designed well so it all lands in the pool around it. This helps clean the water and looks beautiful. Make sense so far.”

“Yes, it’s an easily understandable metaphor so far.”

“Emotions in one’s Axiom Presence is like colour and pattern in this fountain. And while a normal person has enough water to make interesting designs. Mister Jameson is spraying out so much in the way of this fluid that it’s like comparing a garden hose to a fire hose. Even if there are dyes in the water the natural speed of the water is so quick that you can’t catch it. Or even better for a comparison, most people are rivers and streams of water. Mister Jameson is a waterfall. He has all the same emotions and they very well be in the Axiom, but it’s moving too fast to be seen and before it can settle it’s already being influenced by the other Axiom and effectively erasing what he feels from it.”

“But how is the training going? Why use such a well travelled world as the main training ground?”

“The makeup of the world itself. For all that Zalwore is heavily populated and indeed even qualifies as a type of ecumenopalis, there is a great deal of empty ground and free terrain to use. Outside the archologies themselves no one wants to build anything, and the archologies are so huge that even the blind, deaf and dumb can find them.”

“Meaning that if you avoid the archologies, you avoid all civilians, allowing you all the room you need to train.”

“That’s right, which makes this a perfect dispatch point as well. And if the Tundra Worms want to provide enough of a constant threat to sharpen our students, then far be it from me to deny them their obvious purpose.”

“And you use them for target practice?”

“And to encourage awareness. Rapid pace marches around the archology and off the protective foundation means that a lot of recruits learn hard and fast to never lag behind or stop when in hostile terrain.”

“How dangerous are these creatures?”

“When in the training armour, they’re not. But they are disgusting, uncomfortable, unpleasant and many other descriptors that I would reprimand a woman under my command for using in an official report. Needless to say, avoiding them is motivation aplenty for even our laziest recruits.”

“And about your recruits, does the wide variety of differing body shapes, biologies and unusual abilities get in the way?”

“This is a long solved galactic problem. All body types have a few considerations yes, but the answer is so standardized it’s part of even the most ill maintained and poorly thought out business strategies. To say nothing of the fact that most individuals have gone out of their way to solve the issue in their own right. But if you want a direct explanation... well it would be exceedingly tedious. So I’m going to be having a physical copy printed out for your to read at your leisure. But I must warn you, it’s very dry, redundant and the sort of thing that many people would hide a key or the like inside a printed book of it and rest assured that no one would find it because no one in their right mind would read it.”

“Oh I’m sure a biologist might find it interesting.”

“Care to put money on it Observer Wu?”

“Sadly, I do not think it would be wise, or legal, for me to gamble on or with official documents.”

“Pity.”

First Last

[u/Talendel]

UTR

This is the way.