Wearing Power Armor to a Magic School (158/?) WiP 1

(Author’s Note: Hey everyone! Here is the Work in Progress for Chapter 158 I hope you guys enjoy! :D)

Earth - Atlantic Ocean - Special Administrative Zone under requisition by the United Nations Science Advisory - Institute of Anomalous Studies (IAS) Pilot Research Facility Codename: ATLANTIS II. Local Time: 2345 Hours.

Dr. Ivo Mekis (Head of the Applied Exoreality Studies Department)

Four thousand meters of water might as well have been forty thousand meters of vacuum for how isolated the depths can be.

Not since my brief stint on Titan had I observed this sort of solitude, this type of isolation, this distance between myself and the beating — or at times fibrillitic — heart of civilization.

And this was just the way I preferred it.

Yet peace did not come from distance and isolation alone.

The calm of true silence only dawned after dusk had settled, especially in the midst of what would otherwise be the most active and bustling section of this facility.

Desks upon desks, interspersed between workstations and workbenches, lay dormant beneath my alcove of an office. What would otherwise be the vibrant symphony of clacking keyboards and buzzing haptics setting the stage for the occasional clink and clank of bleeding-edge tinkering currently lay silent beneath perpetually twilight rays.

Indeed, the dimmed lights of this hour provided for a tasteful ambiance when set against the windows into the brightly lit depths of the ocean floor, visible not only through the occasional porthole but through the innumerable cameras that provided a seamless transition between the opaque metal walls and the views just beyond them.

I kept this AR view open, just in case of another chance encounter — a titanic clash — between whale and squid.

This was what perhaps made this tenure more colorful than Titan’s.

Because even this far down, Earth’s inexplicable gift for harboring life did not relent. If anything, it demonstrated that gift in far more extremes.

This momentary foray into reflection soon gave way into the rhythms of work, as I scanned through line after line of pertinent data that—

FWWWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

I swiveled my chair around, my eyes widening not out of surprise but out of a subtle satisfaction of this age-old ritual.

With a slide towards the back of my office, I reached for the screaming kettle, pouring its boiling contents into the teapot’s built-in infuser.

I savored this moment, the calm, the break from—

BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.

My eyes flicked up.

Charts, graphs, and all manner of visual overlays displaying ambient exoreality radiation signatures took the place of everything else on my workspace, as monitoring systems and cross-sectional subsystems peppered my field of view.

The ECS was active.

…

But not in the way we’d ever observed.

The spike in readings was neither discrete nor transient.

If anything, it expanded exponentially, warning after warning coming into play in a way that far surpassed what the ECS was designed to—

BWWWOOOOP! BWOOOOOOPP! BWOOOOOPPPP!

“PRIORITY ALERT! UNSCHEDULED EXOREALITY ENTANGLEMENT ACTIVATION DETECTED IN THE ECS HOLDING CHAMBER!”

=====

Sol - Trans-Neptunian Military Exclusion Zone - LREF Ranger Station Epsilon - Ring 1 - Deck 1 - Command and Administration Center - Flag Officer’s Private Office. Local Time: 1145 Hours

12 Hours Prior to the UEEA Incident

Captain Calico Li

Docking with the behemoth… was never once an underwhelming affair.

This effect was doubled, tripled, and perhaps even quadrupled the longer one spent away from this rotating bulwark of composalite and plasteel.

Because unlike most ‘megastructures’, measured in double-digit kilometers, but ultimately built as a ‘shell’ for what dwelled within — O’Neill cylinders, Stanford Torus’, and the like — Ranger Station Epsilon wasn’t built to house communities nor to simulate the P-MASL comforts. 

It wasn’t built to look ‘inwards’.

Instead, it was built in typical true spacer fashion: to look out at the stars themselves.

What would have normally been a hollow interior pumped full of breathable gases, layered in dirt, and peppered with an ecosystem resembling a slice of pristine Earth was instead devoted to a single defined purpose — command and control.

No square meter of space was wasted, no volume was reserved for life-giving gases or aesthetic consideration. In lieu of it, was an environment as hostile as the space that surrounded it, an unapologetic glut of computing that filled the stations’ confines from surface to surface; along with the infrastructure necessary to keep this beast alive.

At its heart, were stellarators that pulsed with energy, each doughnut wrapped around a central axis that formed the ‘spine’ of the station.

Surrounding it, and snaking into each and every nook, cranny, and crevice, were the fluid coolants; impossibly long tracts of piping that permeated everything. From the reactors themselves, to the kilometers worth of computing hardware, the heat generated from their mere operation was effortlessly wicked away. Ensuring that these machines, by their own existence, didn’t melt into slag from the mere act of thinking.

This culminated in one of the most visually striking features of the station, an unexpected aesthetic expression that gave it its endearing nickname — the Orchid of Neptune — its five-layered radiators. 

Each ‘petal’ was an engineering feat unto itself, reaching so deep into space that it dwarfed the cylinder which it was attached to. And owing to its function, eschewing any sense of stealth for sheer heat-dissipating efficiency, each ‘petal’ glowed. Creating what was in effect a radiant display of light that many likened it to a glowing orchid, pulsing intermittently in between cycles of heat dissipation all along its various ‘layers’, completing a phenomenon no engineer had ever intended, but all quietly admired; an ‘living’ spectacle born entirely of thermal necessity 

It was, in essence, a living breathing titan of technology.

And we were just living on its surface — a fact one could almost forget in the eclectic spaces of those that called it home.

The Commodore’s office was one such space — an expansive open-plan room with more wooden slats than exposed metal walls, more plants than mandatory emergency O2 packs, and more splashes of vibrant colors, instances of boxy monitors, and paintings of rocket ‘ships’ than what most could ever imagine; all hearkening back to an aesthetic era of space exploration that never was. 

It felt as if I’d just been teleported into a Venusian apartment.

Though, frankly, the Venusian ‘Jetsonian’ aesthetic was a breath of fresh air from what ‘hardcore’ spacers often touted as the height of style.

This vibrancy translated all too well to its sole occupant, as the Admiral was quick to approach me the moment I entered through those unnecessarily ‘wooshing’ doors.

“Ah! Captain.” She announced chipperly, approaching me with a skip in her step, as I couldn’t help but to match that enthusiasm with a wholehearted salute of my own.

“Admiral Shelby.” I responded warmly, remaining where I was until she reached for a reciprocal salute. 

“From the abyss that is his domain, to the planet that bears his name, I find your current commute to be quite poetic in a sense Captain.” Shelby spoke in earnest, gesturing for me to follow, as we both came to a stop at the very center of the room.

There, we both intuitively reached our usual stations around the massive holoprojector — one of the few places in the room to have been spared the Admiral’s stylistic makeovers.

It was here that the ambient blue grid-like space in front of us erupted into a flurry of shapes, transposing live and past feeds alike into a 3-dimensional projection of local space. Or more specifically, the immediate ‘bubble’ of control that was de-facto GUN space.

The lights in the room dimmed in reaction to this, giving way to what felt like a near-virtual experience that dragged both of us into a physical manifestation of humanity’s domain.

We both stood at opposite ends of this 250 light year bubble, as star after star and sector after sector was shaded in until practically the entirety of the space had been filled with teal. 

However, that was just the start of it. Because from there, a further 100 light year sphere was drawn out. Though, as was the case with the first bubble, this too was colored in teal until no gap nor empty space was left.

This finally prompted the both of us to make eye contact, with both of our features coming to land on the same languid disappointment we always ended up wearing every single one of these meetings.

“Operation Black Lantern II is a bust.” Shelby spoke under a tired breath. “Though credit where credit is due, those new Quintessence sensors and the calibration protocols have increased search efficiencies by a factor of four. That’s at least one thing we got out of this.” She quickly added with an attempt at optimistic chipperness.

“I’ll pass on your praise to Dr. Mekis.” I responded, incurring a nod from the Admiral, but not without a firm side eye.

“I applaud all of our civilian counterparts in the IAS. The working men and women, the brains and hands of the operation. Though if I were to be blunt, Cal? I’d have wished for anyone else to take the helm.”