Forging Ahead (GURPS Interstellar Wars/Celestial Forge)

[Doc Sithicus]

Eh, fair enough, I am not Polish and so I have missed one of the subtleties.

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You could have fooled me and now I know why there was no single "kurwa mać" in the story yet

 

[Ovid]

One nice thing about Cliff writing this story with full control over what's offered in the Celestial Forge? No sudden powerful options that ruins the scaling of the storyline. No sudden Valkyrie Frame Cores, no Endless Dust, no Armored Command Unit (or Planetary Annihilation Commander). At least, not yet.

Cliff's experiences with jumpchain stories and his other work means he already knows that having something be Too OP can be a story killer. Well, unless it's already a facet of the storyline itself, but Cliff already wrote that story.

 

[Doc Sithicus]

It's good to be OP as the protagonist but it's kind of hard for the author to keep the story interesting if the main character curb-stomps every enemy on his way.

 

[LZB1285]

I went several generations back into my dad's family of mutts and grabbed one of the nationalities there.

Click to shrink...

Odd little fact of Polish Law I once heard (please take with truck load of salt), is that Polish law is that if one of your ancestors is Polish, so are you. Not sure if that's true, but if it is, Polish may be the largest nationality on the planet.

 

[Doc Sithicus]

Yeah, if you can prove your ancestors were Polish you can apply for Polish citizenship.

 

[cliffc999]

"If you're such a genius, then what are you doing here?" my tormentor sneered at me scornfully.

"Double service credit and an interest in the research being done here." I replied tonelessly. I was doing my best to keep from sounding confrontational instead of properly de-escalating, but I was too frustrated to succeed much. Less than a day off the ship and I was already back in primary-ed. Oh, come on! Weren't we supposed to be adults by now?!?

The brainstorm I'd had on the trip out of getting officially qualified in a shipboard watch-standing position, at least on the entry level, had done exactly what I'd hoped it would do. Instead of being dumped into the general labor pool with all of the other Public Service kids sweating out their tours here, I'd been yoinked as an assistant by the first Peraspera Terraforming Project scientist who'd actually heard about my achievement. So far, the idea of going to a place where my chain of command would be more eager to get a surprise in their PopSnax box than disgruntled at how their latest square peg wasn't going to fit in any of their neat round holes was working out just fine.

What I hadn't anticipated - although I should have - was the reaction I'd get from my peers. Because in hindsight it was entirely obvious that the Public Service kids without any special aptitude - in other words, most of them - would be used for grunt labor and cleanup. And whenever you had a unit of draftees assigned to such duties, they rapidly worked out their own internal and informal seniority system for who caught the shittier parts of the shit detail and how often. And as was the eternal way of things in all organizations, the new guy was the one who got stuck with all the worst ones, and there she'd stay until someone else came along to be new girl and relieve them of that position.

Unless, of course, some strange little nerd came along out of nowhere and completely line-jumped the entire system. And got herself fast-tracked right into one of the best possible assignments a Public Service kid could get practically as soon as she got off the shuttle. And then still got assigned to the same living quarters as the rest of the PS detachment because she was still a brand-new PS person, after all, and that's where you put them.

So sure enough, as soon we got back to our quarters from dinner on my first day downside the unlucky gentleman who'd been desperately waiting for his chance to get off permanent toilet-cleaning duty and hand me the mop instead decided to box me into a corner along with a couple of his friends and verbally express his displeasure. And while he probably hadn't meant to take it quite this far - if he'd been intending mayhem from the outset it would have made more sense for him to wait until after lights-out and catch me somewhere more private - tempers were really starting to spiral out of control.

"I don't know what you want me to say." I finally replied, for lack of a better idea than just trying to tell the truth and hope it actually worked for once. "I didn't pull any strings to get here."

"Bullshit you didn't!" David, the allegedly aggrieved party, burst out angrily and then punctuated it with a hard shove that sent me staggering back a step into the wall.

"Um, are you sure we should...?" one of his cronies broke in tentatively, as they began to pick up that this situation was starting to rapidly edge off course.

"Shut up!" he yelled back, as his face reddened and warmed up to a full rant. "This rich little suck-up thinks she's so special because she's got connections for a plush assignment-"

That dry little voice that lives in the backs of all our heads sarcastically noted that he'd already contradicted himself in the space of two sentences, given that anyone who could arrange for a 'plush assignment' wouldn't be on this planet at all.

"- and if we don't make it plain what the pecking order around here really is straight off, teacher's pet will be lording it all over us forever!" he finished.

"You saw my datapad." I said, because he certainly had seen it when he'd yanked it out of my hands to toss it onto the couch before backing me into a corner. "Was that the model a 'rich, well-connected' girl would be using?"

"Shut up!" he screamed at the top of his lungs, as he visibly did his best to drown out that little voice in his own head that was telling him he was being an idiot. "One more word, just one more word-!"

"Please stop before it's too late." I replied with quiet determination, and then braced myself for what I knew would come next. This was always the hardest part, keeping it civil even when you most wanted to scream obscenities. But it was important, because-

Sure enough, my being years older and allegedly wiser since the last time didn't change the fact that pain still hurt.

And so that's how my introduction to my Public Service peers on Peraspera went about as badly as was humanly possible. Because of course it was my fault that one of their unit mates got himself arrested on felony assault charges the very first day. It surely wasn't because a large, athletic young man was stupid enough to beat on a girl almost half a meter shorter than he was and who barely weighed 50 kilograms soaking wet, especially when she not only hadn't lifted a finger against him but hadn't used so much as used harsh language. But hey, at least he'd be getting his wish to go back to Terra right away. Even if he'd be doing it in confinement onboard the next supply ship and facing several years' worth of prison sentence for aggravated assault.

About the third time I'd come home from primary-ed with bumps and bruises Mom had joked that I was the history of Poland in miniature - too small to avoid being trampled flat by invaders again and again, but still willing to stand up and fight again and again. One of the only unfavorable notations on my educational/development transcripts was that I had poor interpersonal skills, especially at de-escalation and conflict resolution. Which was a fancy way of saying that where the normal kid would have the common sense to back down from bullies, I just couldn't make myself do it. But once I'd figured out that the best way to avoid he-said-she-said was to make sure the physical evidence showed that the conflict was entirely one-sided - IOW, to make sure I was the only person in the fight showing any marks - the bullies eventually stopped, because they knew that it would end up in the principal's office again and people would end up getting suspended again. That it didn't matter how much bigger they were or how outnumbered you were, they'd still eventually stop pushing it if you could survive long enough to prove that it wasn't worth it.

Fortunately, the average bully didn't know a damn thing about how to hit where it really hurt someone - except for that one time when I was twelve, but his own friends had pulled him off of me after he'd started to put the boots in while I was down - so, I spent the night at the clinic for observation (and also so that they'd have time to scrounge me a room of my own somewhere, now that putting me in the Public Service quarters had failed so disastrously), got some painkillers for my bruises, and went off to my first day at work.

Achievement Unlocked - I WILL SHOW THEM ALL!
(Boost Your IQ Above 200)
Reward: 100 CP

Which is why I'd spent the 400cp I'd accumulated all on one perk, Genius Intellect (SyFy Combined Continuity), because if I was going to start creating a personal narrative around myself as some kind of once-in-a-lifetime genius then I'd need to actually be a genius. Merely memorizing and cross-indexing things could only take you so far, and I would soon enough need to go far, far beyond that. And this was the best - heck, about the only - 'boost your whole IQ' option available on the Forge's purchase menu right now, especially given how I'd noted on the voyage out that items would expire from or appear on the list at irregular intervals. So even if you saw something you weren't entirely sure would be immediately useful you still faced the question of 'Should I grab this now anyway, or risk having to do without it later? But wait, what if I run myself out of points now and something ideal comes along later?'

No, I didn't need my shiny new genius perk to figure out that between the limited window of choices and the random(?) time variable, the Forge was doing its level best to make proper opportunity-cost analysis impossible by denying me the ability to judge or even know the full range of possibilities. So the ongoing internal debate between the 'Lab Rat' and 'Pawn In A Game Of Gods' continued its eternal stalemate.

"Are you all right?" was the inevitable first question out of Dr. Ward's mouth as soon as I showed up to work. Dr. Antonin Ward, PhD, formerly chairman of the mathematics department at St. Petersburg University, was the chief data analyst for the terraforming project. He'd also been lucky enough to be the first to hear about their incoming PS volunteer's achievement and get his request for a new lab assistant through the system before anybody else could.

"Yes sir." I said. "It's just bruises. I've gotten worse falling out of- well." I did my best aw-shucks shrug. Fortunately that one seemed to work just fine on authority figures even if I'd never had the knack of communicating well with people my age-

"Well, there will certainly be none of such treatment here." he declared firmly. "So, I understand you have an unusually vigorous amount of self-education. Tell me about it. Do you have any experience with statistical mathematics?"

"College level." I said truthfully but incompletely, because the free download of knowledge that had come with Well-Researched included enough on mathematics to have a PhD of my own in the subject, and that on top of my new Genius Intellect boosting me to where I could do calculus in my head. But I certainly didn't want to come across bragging like I was the reincarnation of Carl Freidrich Gauss on the very first day.

"Perfect!" he agreed. "Now I can offload much of the routine dataset work on you."

"What else are assistants for?" I did my best to lean into the joke.

"Then we understand each other!" he replied amusedly, and the interview process went from there. And after a round of ad hoc oral exams interspersed in-between following him through his normal workday and fetching and carrying, by the end of the day I was officially assigned and accepted as Dr. Ward's new aide.

Less than a week into my new job I spent my 100 remaining CP on a Programming (World Seed) perk, because Dr. Ward needed someone who could translate his wishes into a format the machine could actually understand and vice versa. It's not that he was computer illiterate, exactly, but more that the standard mathematics software wasn't very intuitive or useful for the particular statistical constructs that he wanted to set up for all the vast amounts of terraforming data our satellite network and probe teams were bringing in. Especially given that the Project team was designing some of them as they went along. So while my genius and memory perks already meant that I could rapidly become one of the most skilled operators of our mainframe on the team, I chose to invest a little extra in making me a whiz at writing code to do pretty much anything within the capabilities of the machine. Because the only way we were going to get software perfectly suited to the Project's particular needs was if we coded the damn utilities ourself, and "hey! somebody's an unrecorded computer genius!" is one of the most archetypical talents a brilliant kid could bring out of her basement. And my comp-sci grades from secondary-ed, as prosaic as the course material had been there, would still support that kind of narrative as well.

And given how thoroughly intertwined computers and computer programs were with most forms of modern technology nowadays, a chance to get really good at working with and programming them was worth grabbing as soon as it became available. It would have all sorts of uses later, I was sure. Even hacking ability, if that perk description actually lived up to the promise hinted at in its text. Not that I was going to make any experiments along those lines right away - getting a criminal record of any kind would ruin any chance I might have at doing several important things later, and it just wasn't worth the risk at this time.

And speaking of criminal records, one of the things I had on my plate in my first week there was the trial of my assailant. Like all colony worlds without large enough populations to qualify for home rule and General Assembly representation it was under the jurisdiction of the Colonial Bureau, and that meant it also had a Colonial Constabulary detachment and a duly sworn-in Confederation judge. Even an asteroid mining settlement with a population of only a few hundred was still required to have a minimum of one constable in residence, because the abuses of 'corporate settlements' - privatized space habitats with only corporate security to be police, prosecutor, and prison all in one - in the pre-Confederation era had definitely left some lessons of history to learn from. But, the practical upshot was that our little planet-town was still large enough to have a justice system, and so David had had his fair trial - or would have had one if he hadn't seen the writing on the wall - and the jury's reaction - right after I'd finished testifying and had his advocate approach the judge to say that his client would like to plead guilty in return for less than the maximum sentence.

"Are you happy now?" one of the people who'd been standing around the break room watching that night confronted me angrily about an hour after the trial was over.

"About what, Claire?" I asked her brusquely, seeing her start mildly in surprise at my addressing her by name despite it having been said only once in my hearing and even that little an offhand mention in passing on the only occasion we'd ever met before. "About getting beaten up by someone almost twice my size? No, that actually isn't my idea of a good time."

"About helping ruin someone's life!" she yelled at me. "Sure, he could be a jerk sometimes but does he really deserve to go to prison for a year? And then spend the rest of his life with a 'convicted felon' tag on him that never comes off?"

"Was that a rhetorical question?" I threw back, pointing an emphatic finger at my face.

"Listen, miss supergenius, have you ever heard of a concept called 'forgiveness'?" she yelled back, red-faced.

"You mean-" I bit off the sarcastic remark I'd originally intended before it finished leaving my mouth and took a deep breath, because I really didn't need to have two confrontations spiral out of control on me in my first week. "Why in- why would you even think it was appropriate in this case?" I asked.

"He was under a lot of stress, okay?" she said, and fortunately for both of us continued before I could say the first thing that kind of excuse brought to mind. "He should never have been assigned to a sealed habitat like in the first place!"

"I'll grant that I'm about the only PS draftee weird enough to actually ask to come here, but not liking the selection system doesn't equal being having been unfairly singled out by it." I said as diplomatically as I could.

"That's not what I meant. He- he had claustrophobia." she said softly, looking around.

"He'd never have been assigned here if he had." I immediately replied.

"Well he hadn't told anyone about it." she continued, and I barely resisted facepalming. "He'd- he'd wanted to get into the Navy, but admitting to that would have meant he couldn't have gotten in the military at all-"

"Even the Army requires everyone to be vacc suit qualified, let alone the Navy, because they still potentially do planetary assault landings or get posted on worlds without breathable atmosphere." I agreed. "If even mild claustrophobia was on his medical record he'd never have gotten off of Terra. But he didn't come forward to the medics with it even after his Draft selection didn't select him for the military because...?"

"And admit that he'd lied on his intake medical?" she said incredulously. "That would have gotten him in trouble!"

"And deliberately concealing a medical condition that would materially affect what duties he could be safely assigned to didn't get him in trouble?" I replied with a meaningful wave back towards the colony's main (and only) courtroom that I'd recently left. "Okay, with the new data you gave me I can see in hindsight how he was basically a piece of unexploded ordnance waiting for any transient impulse to detonate it, but that still doesn't make this my fault."

"No, but you were so busy being all 'I'm too special to talk to you peons' all last week that none of us could get a moment to tell you this." she shot back. "You wouldn't even answer an email! You wouldn't even give a moments' consideration that there might have been a reason someone did something to you other than 'Oh, they attacked me so they have to be Evil McEvilFace to the core'?"

"Wait, you wanted me to be the one to bring this up in court as a mitigating factor?" I asked incredulously. "Why have him confess how he helped get himself into this? Or have the people who actually knew him beforehand be the one to bring this tip to the authorities?"

"Like they'd have taken his word for it? Or his friends' words for it?" she shot back.

"Does that mean you can't see the logical contradiction between assuming that as given and expecting me to take your word for it, or that you'd already tried to tell someone and gotten shot down?"

"... that second one." she admitted grudgingly.

"If they wouldn't believe what you told them, then they certainly wouldn't believe me telling them what you'd told me. Because even if I had agreed to pass on your message, I'd certainly have had to explain where I got this from. It's not as if I'd ever so much as heard of him before the incident, let alone knew him."

"Maybe it wouldn't have done any good." Claire conceded reluctantly. "But the point is that you didn't even want to try."

"I didn't even know anything existed to try." I pointed out. "And before you go 'That's my fault!', try to remember that I was settling into a completely new place, with a whole ton of extra work that I'd made for myself by getting into the job that I'd had, and just might have had a reason to not want to hang out and make friends with all the same people who'd stood around and-"

"We didn't know he was going to beat you up!" she insisted.

"I'll accept that even he probably didn't know he was going to beat me up before that conversation started," I conceded in turn, "because the way he spiral'ed so suddenly went past 'impulse crime' and at least halfway to 'psychotic break'. Which is actually one of the main reasons I believe what you just said, by the way. But that doesn't change the fact that you did know that a very large and muscular young man was going to trap a very small young woman in a corner, with several of you to help surround said young woman and prevent any chance of her slipping away, while he intimidated and harassed her in God only knows what kind of fashion. Is there anything in that description of events you want to say isn't true?" I finished angrily, glaring upward at her.

After a few moments' of the silent treatment in return, I continued. "To sum up, I had every reason not to like any of you - except the one person there who actually told the whole truth to the Constabulary when they showed up without having to have it yanked out of him - and why didn't you send him to try and talk to me, anyway?"

"He wouldn't come." she admitted.

"I guess him and David weren't friends, then." I nodded. "As to why I never answered your emails, its because subject headers like 'ABOUT DAVID' and 'ANSWER ME DAMN IT!', coming from somebody you only met once and on the other end of a violent confrontation at the time, look so much like harassment that it's an open-and-shut case of 'Delete before reading'."

"You still should have looked." she insisted mulishly. "And because you didn't, his life is over."

"No, because he made bad choices and his friends helped him make them instead of helping him not make them, his life has had a serious setback." I corrected her firmly. "I had nothing to do with it except for the part where I vigorously bruised up his knuckles with my face. And I am not going to budge on that one, so don't even try. But-" I forced myself to continue saying. "If the authorities don't legitimately have all the relevant facts of the situation - or at least the chance to decide whether they are relevant or not for themselves - then they should. So I'll give you this much. You and I can both go to the Constabulary office right now and ask them to enter what you just said into his case file for review on Terra." I thought for a moment. "Along with a suggestion that he be given a retest on his psych eval. And my own honest sentiment that in hindsight, his behavior seemed more erratic than simple criminal intent could explain. And then... whatever happens, happens."

"If that's the best you can do." she accepted grudgingly, and we trooped off to do just that.

I swear, even if I lived to be a billion years old and grew a brain the size of a planet I would still never understand how some people think. Or how they can so epically fail to think.

* * * * *​

So, except for the David incident and its particular fallout, the first several months I spent on Peraspera were actually really satisfying. Sure, I was basically a pariah with my junior peer group and stuck in an isolated pressure habitat on a toxic-atmo world parsecs away from home, but there was so much interesting stuff to do! I of course did my share of fetching coffee and running errands and such for Dr. Ward, but there were a lot of routine scientific duties that were things he'd rather offload on someone else but weren't quite important enough to hand to one of his fellow professors, and now he didn't have to do them himself. After all, the biggest component of the terraforming project was monitoring what was already going on, so there were a whooooooooole lot of atmospheric and geological readings being taken on a continual basis that needed a whole lot of preliminary sorting and correlating done before you could even shove it into the mainframe and see what happened.

Due to being a dedicated research outpost our small town of 13,142 (as of last week) still had as many scientists and technicians as a tech university, and that meant they'd outfitted it with a university-sized library to match. Computer scientists estimated that at the dawn of the 21st century the total amount of data stored on the entire planetary net had been roughly 1 exabyte - 1 million terabytes - in size, and given that modern data-storage technology could put a terabyte on a datachip no larger than a deci-sol coin then you could literally mail the entire original Internet between planets in a small crate. So equipping even the remotest outpost with a library rivaling MIT's was well within the Colonial Bureau's budget, especially given that the 1-week travel lag between her and Earth meant that it was simpler to just load up the whole thing with all the books, raw archived research data from relevant projects both contemporary and historical, and other such resources - non-classified, of course - that might possibly be useful instead of leaving the Project team sucking their thumbs for over half a month waiting for someone on Terra to get back to them with a needed reference cite. Because the only method of interstellar communication was messages carried by starship, with all that implied.

And the professors at this 'university' were even more relaxed than an actual university at allowing even a junior not-yet-an-undergraduate Public Service assistant to go rooting through the whole thing basically at will, duties permitting. Especially given that I rapidly became Dr. Ward's prosthesis for all things to do with the computer network, because between his administrative duties and his own regular dives into the deepest realms of higher mathematics it was a lot more convenient to use my talents at the keyboard than his own. Yes, an actual keyboard, how quaint. Voice input was great for routine tasks but when it came to rapidly inputting large amounts of data then trained fingers still beat out tongues by a country kilometer. Fortunately, my nerd habits had already made me a good typist and Programmer had made me an exceptional one.

So my first few months at Peraspera were actually fun, in a way I hadn't expected. Of course I hadn't been able to imagine how exhilarating it would be to have a supergenius brain until I actually got one, but it was a legitimate pleasure to just sit down and do several hours of concentrated intellectual exercise. I was getting to understand why most if not all the Project scientists had also volunteered to come here. What would sound like unimaginable drudgery to someone else - after all, the study of planetary formation meant you were looking at a process that would literally take a billion years to complete on its own, so it wasn't exactly the most fast-paced spectator sport out there - was what legitimately got them up in the morning. Human brains really were quirky things sometimes, and the further up the intelligence curve you went the quirkier they got.

And the practical upshot of the above is that unlike the rest of the Public Service labor draft here, who just wanted to sweat out their two years taking care of the routine drudgery and then getting back home and never leaving atmosphere again, I was surrounded by people who didn't care about my age or gender or lack of degrees or anything else so long as I was contributing to the ongoing intellectual effort that was our collective lives. It was everything I'd hoped for when me and my parents had originally come up with this idea and more.

Granted, the theory of planetary formation as well as the several experimental pilot projects the field teams were running regarding possible methods of tweaking it were not exactly going to win the next war for us, but I wasn't going to be having the same kind of experience with any military R&D teams until I had a top-secret security clearance, which wouldn't begin to happen until I could officially apply for such a position, which would require at least one college degree I didn't have yet. Hence the other reason I'd taken this position - to use the double-service credit of a hardship posting to get through my Public Service and back into school as quickly as I possibly could. After all, it's not as if trying to dodge the draft would have produced anything except a swift and painful end to any career aspirations except those open to ex-convicts - and that only after finishing my sentence.

However, the rate I was proving I could assimilate - and even more importantly, genuinely understand and usefully apply - knowledge of almost any sort prompted Dr. Ward to point out something that I hadn't even known about. Specifically, the part where Colonial Bureau regs contained provisions for allowing higher education to continue even in isolated outposts that weren't able to support universities. While the typical solution was of course to just get on a starship and head back to Terra or one of the larger colonies to go to school there, if certain exigencies prohibited freedom of travel and if someone was available who was already an accredited instructor at the university level, then that person could privately tutor students who could then, presuming their tutor gave them a favorable recommendation, take examinations on university admission to be given course credit for the work they'd already completed.

Or in other words, if I let Dr. Ward and several of his other colleagues here sign-off on my self-study, I could finish much of my college work here and only have to actually attend classes for things that they wouldn't let you test out of at all, such as certain laboratory subjects or 400-series coursework. In theory a frontier student could cut down the amount of time they'd have to leave home and attend a real university back on Terra down to one or two years, although the absolute minimum time of one year would require them to really really push it. Or to have spent more than time doing the remote study than would have been required for equivalent years' of college, assuming their settlement even had a suitably accredited instructor.

Or if they were someone with an IQ that went higher than the conventional tests could even measure - after all, 200 might or might not be the maximum physically possible for the human brain but it certainly was the point at which statistical psychologists threw up their hands and quit even trying to quantify things - and a superhumanly perfect memory,which meant she could complete all this coursework before her two years on Peraspera were over and her full normal workday in addition, and still not go crazy from overwork.

Damn. If this is the kind of thing that the Forge could do for someone just starting out with it, then where would it end?

Although I'd essentially given up on interacting with the other Public Service kids here after that disastrous first encounter, I was hardly lonely. A couple of the Project people doing tours here were married and working away from their spouse and kids for a year, so they had spare parental energy left over to slop onto me. Most of the rest were of the philosophy that a brilliant young mind was a tragic thing to waste and that it was their intellectual duty to help nourish it if they had a moment free to do so. There were a few curmudgeons, there always are in any population, but I was entirely willing to let them curmudgeon in peace and vice versa. Lord knows that I could understand how there were days where you just didn't want to put down the datapad and actually have to talk to people...

But very few of the Project scientists had come here for the money and this certainly wasn't a place you came to for the ambience or the glory, so that just left the ones who'd come because they had a sincere passion for the science being done here. And that sort of mind liked nothing better than to work with other intellectually curious minds, no matter what package that mind came in. Even some of the people who were here largely for the money still thought that way.

"Damn, Zofia. I still can't quite believe just how natural that is for you." the very large and muscular middle-aged man leaning over my shoulder as I worked at one of the master dataterminals in the central computer room complimented me. Andrzej Stepczinski was no professor but he'd spent his entire professional life working with advanced infosystems and networking technologies, and he was the seniormost datasystems technician for the entire settlement. A retired thirty-year veteran of the Confederation Army, he'd already been in the service for several years before my father had even enlisted, and unlike Dad he'd only gotten out last year. He'd then come straight here as a private contractor with the Colonial Bureau for a very generous premium to help him build up more capital to start his own small business with after he got back to Terra, and he ruled his own little fiefdom within the maintenance and support structure of the colony with an iron fist.

And as soon as my own datasystems support duties for Dr. Ward had brought me into contact with him, our shared national origin - as it happened we were the only two ethnic Poles on Peraspera - and my obvious talent for programming and analysis had motivated him to use every bureaucratic trick he knew towards the goal of maneuvering me into his orbit. As is, I was still officially assigned to the data-analysis department of the Project instead of to the datasystems support side of settlement maintenance, but I was up to unofficially time-sharing in his shop for almost a third of my work week - to 'better facilitate integration and computational support for the Project's needs, of course'. Besides, it did legitimately help when there was someone who could translate between the scientists who were programming their own dedicated analysis utilities and networks and the colony technicians who had to figure out a way to make it work and play well with the datasystems backbone that helped keep all the machines around here running.

Which is how I'd come to spend my morning using my Forge-granted Programming talent to bash together a compatibility suite for a particularly tricky requirement that the molecular biology department had regarding multi-dimensional protein-folding modeling that it had taken us two days to figure out why it kept crashing every time on a system that in theory should have had no problem running it - turns out there was a fatal bug in the math co-processor firmware that only cropped up if you were trying some very particular edge cases in 3-D modeling calcs - and then figuring out an alternative to putting that whole branch of the Project on hold for several weeks to send our write-up of the problem back to the manufacturer on Terra via ship-mail and have them get our hotfix back out to us the same way.

Which we'd still done, of course, on the contingency that we wouldn't be able to just figure out a way to code the damn patch ourselves... but that's the job I'd just been able to finish, with my natural genius and supernatural programming ability combining with Mr. Stepczinski's 30+ years of practical field knowledge in building, configuring, operating, and expedient-field-repairing all sorts of computers, computer networks, and peripherals ranging from the Army's most advanced battlefield tactical networking hardware to routine administrative datanets.

"Well... when it clicks, it clicks." I demurred as modestly as I could.

"It very seldom 'clicks' on that level for anyone." he replied. "When you originally had the idea of just trying to code the hotfix ourselves from first principles - even if your chain of command had signed off on it - I'd thought you were being just a tad overly ambitious. The main reason I went along with it is because my work schedule was largely clear this weekend otherwise, so why not. But you not only pulled it off, you made it look easy."

"Hey, you contributed at least as much as I did!" I replied.

"In the sense that I knew a lot of things you didn't know about microcode and the actual guts of advanced microcircuit design, yes." he agreed. "But I'd need specialized coursework to be able to code hardware-layer drivers like that - it's not quite my field - but I just saw you teach yourself that kind of specialized programming from what I was able to show you and the undergraduate comp-sci texts in barely a weekend. If you've got that kind of brains, why are you here instead of in officer training?"

"Public Service offers that to people straight out of secondary-ed?" I asked, honestly confused. "I didn't even see that kind of option on the list."

"Then somewhere out there in the PSB bureaucracy is a person who very much dropped the ball in your case." he said firmly, settling down into a chair next to me as I turned away from the terminal to face him. "Okay, the Armed Forces get their officers from three places. You've got your ROTC graduates who did it in college after their first four years in the Draft, you've got your 'mustangs' who were selected for OCS - or in my case, warrant officer training - after getting enough college credit on our own during our enlisted careers and showing suitable aptitude and attitude, and lastly you've got the ring-knockers - the Military or Naval Academy fast-trackers. Who are split between junior enlisted who stood out far enough from the crowd that they were offered an Academy slot instead of the military waiting until after "the needs of the service" meant it was time for another round of OCS selectees to fill the gaps, and young people who aced the CATs like you and get tossed straight into the Academy instead of making you spend four years on a service tour first. Between your National Honors and the part where you just absolutely destroy any intellectual challenge you're faced with and make it look easy, Recruiting Command should have had someone personally showing up at your house begging you to sign up. Do you have a disqualifying physical condition or something?"

"Healthy as a horse." I shrugged. "But yeah, nothing like that happened. I did get a really flattering list of choices from Public Service, and my particular caseworker always had time if I called instead of putting me in the routine queue, but nothing like that." I shrugged. "Still, it's not like I'm wasting my talents here, is it?"

"Not at all." he acknowledged. "And who knows, maybe it's just the drawdown."

"The drawdown?" I asked him.

"Shortly before I mustered out, the word around the Service was that they'd be easing off a bit on the pace of the military buildup to focus the economy on civilian growth instead. We've been running the war economy flat-out since before you were born, after all."

"I thought we'd already stepped down from wartime total mobilization and industrialization before 2160." I replied. "And I wasn't even in secondary-ed then."

"Well, apparently things have been peaceful enough coreward that the long-range projections all agree that nobody's going to pull another Kadur Eraasharshi in this generation. Which means the grand strategy is now to take a breather and use that to build up our colonial populations and civilian industrial base instead of putting it into more short-term applications. For one example, the new System Defense Boat project that's just coming out next year? The original schedule was for them to deploy in 2165, but they took it off of rush status and did it on a more relaxed budget."

"So they're still teaching 'Do Your Part!' to all us schoolkids, but the powers that be are shifting over to thinking in terms of peace dividends." I agreed, inwardly wincing at how I knew the next war was coming, but apparently nobody else believed it would be here remotely soon. Or were daring to hope it never arrived at all-

"What, you don't believe the optimists?" he asked me penetratingly. Yeah, my poker face was nowhere near enough to fool an old soldier like him.

"Warsaw." I replied simply.

"Yeah." he nodded firmly in agreement. "Still, nobody elected either of us Secretary-General, so the best we can do is hope we're the ones who were wrong."

I inwardly chewed my lip for a bit before I decided that if he was going to jump the conversation straight to where I'd been hoping it would go for the past couple of weeks instead of my sneaking up on it subtly, then I might as well ask it straight-out. "Apparently there's a lot I still don't know about Confederation recruitment and selection processes. Could you tell me a little more about it?"

* * * * *​

"-everything your father was able to pick up from the grapevine on-base matches with what I've been hearing from the Free Traders returning to homeport here. Captain McDonald in particular had just finished a long circuit that had taken him all the way out to Shulgiasu-"

As I continued to listen to my parents' vidmail, part of my mind took a moment out to be mildly awestruck at just how deep into the Imperium that particular intrepid voyager had gone. Shulgiasu was the seat of the Saarpuhii Kushugii, the Vilani satrap in charge of the entire Imperial Rim Province, and the most direct route between it and Nusku required sixteen jumps with a jump-2 drive. Although it was only slightly over seven parsecs from Nusku in a straight line, the local astrographic layout meant that with the restrictions of jump-2 drive the only route there required you to go travel almost two whole subsectors to spinward - the astrographic equivalent of 'west' on starmaps, meaning 'in the direction of the rotation of the Milky Way's galactic disk' - then half a subsector coreward ('north', towards the galactic core) to reach the jump-2 route there, then back trailward ('east', or contrary to the galaxy's rotation) all the way past Nusku again to the provincial capital. Assuming a ship with infinite endurance that stopped only to calculate the next jump and leap again, that would still take slightly over four months. In more practical terms, it was a seven to eight month voyage-

"-and although of course he wasn't invited to share confidential political discussions with the Vilani high officialdom, it was widely known throughout the system that Kadur Erasharshi's political position had not substantially improved from the day he withdrew from the Third Interstellar War to avoid being ousted from his position at home. And given the usual glacial pace at which Vilani politics moves, that means that from everything we know right now we shouldn't have anything to worry about here for years and years."

My father's voice broke in. "Of course we're glad to hear that you're still settling in just fine and impressing your superiors with your hard work, and that there hasn't been any trouble like there was the first day you landed with that- troubled young man." he trailed off disapprovingly. "We all know that you haven't always found it easy fitting in with people your age. Have you been able to make any new friends among the other first-tour Public Service people, or are you still living inside your data console?"

He knows me all too well, I thought sheepishly.

"Although I'm certainly glad to hear that you're going above and beyond to distinguish yourself professionally, of course-"

Which is as close as he can come to saying 'I'm glad that the long-range plan for you to get into a responsible position where you can use the Celestial Forge to save the Confederation is still on track' in a digital communication-

"-and from your last message, I understand you were working on something that would get your name credited in an actual scientific publication! It being four jumps each way between Peraspera and Nusku means that two months will have come and gone by the time a message can make a round-trip between us, so hopefully you'll be able to let us know all about how it turned out in the end in your next vidmail to us."

"We love you, słoneczko." my mother chimed in, and my father echoed her. "Stay safe, and we'll wait to hear from you in February."

"Oh, and speaking of February - since it will be sometime in mid-March before our next vidmail can reach you, surprise! You're getting it now." my father chimed in impishly, before they both burst into song.

"Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear Zofia
Happy birthday to you!"

An icon popped-up in the corner of my dataterminal's screen to let me know I had an incoming call, and the caller ID said it was Dr. Ward. I paused the vidmail that I'd gotten from my parents and collapsed the window, and opened up the vidchat program.

"Nowak." I acknowledged the call.

"Sophia, the Robert Haslam will be landing in half an hour." Dr. Ward said without preamble.

"I'll be right there." I answered him smartly, and he acknowledged me and the window blipped out. I got up, made sure my clothes were neat, took a last swipe at my face, and grabbed my already-packed carryall before out to join him and the other Project senior staff who were waiting to meet our visitors at Downport Reception.

The Haslam had been the ship that had carried the most recent round of mail here, as it was standard policy for any official Confederation vessel or postal-certified and bonded commercial vessel to carry any available mail that happaned to need forwarding to its destination. But the Colonial Bureau had hardly sent an entire 200-dton fast courier ship just to bring me an early birthday greeting from my parents, of course. No, she was here to carry several of the senior Project staff - and one junior un-graduate research assistant - back to Terra.

The Peraspera Terraforming Project was a very blue-sky long-range effort, given that Peraspera was a pre-garden world whose atmosphere was similar to what Earth's had been several billion years ago prior to the Great Oxygen Event. The main thrust of the Project had been figuring out a way to get the same type of worldwide cyanobacteria growth cycle started that had led to Earth's atmosphere becoming as saturated with oxygen as it had, but despite the best efforts of the molecular biology team to genetically engineer a suitable variant, even the strains that had shown promise in laboratory conditions failed in actual pilot projects in the field.

So the planetology and geology experts kept sampling and modeling as many subtle interactions in atmospheric and soil/water composition as they could to try and figure out any exact differences between Peraspera and what had been reconstructed about the Paleoprotozoic era of Terra that might explain the difficulty, the field teams kept taking out their contragrav air/rafts to drill for core samples and gather material from various regions of the planet, the climatologists and mathematicians kept trying to put together sims and analyses of all the mountains of raw data being gathered to make sense of it all, and one girl fresh out of secondary-ed had taken on and then successfully completed enough odd jobs, supplemental analyses, and other such technical tasks as they'd come up in turn to end up being listened to as an unofficial junior member of whatever one with the science teams she was 'liasing' with this week, seeing as how all the various different branches of effort of the Project began and ended at the central hub of statisticians and computer scientists of the data analysis/simulation team.

Which is why when my Forge-enhanced genius not only had a Newton-worthy stroke of genius regarding an obscure branch of chaos mathematics but my enhanced memory had integrated a round dozen separate obscure mentions both from the initial massive 'knowledge implant' that Well-Researched had given me and any number of texts, research papers, and even raw datasets I'd assimilated after coming here, I'd realized what the stumbling block almost certainly had to be.

It was the sulfur. Judging from the Terran fossil record, the atmospheric sulfur bloom that had ultimately fostered the cyanobacteria growth that had led to the Great Oxygen Event had been approximately (very approximately, given how tentative the measurements were when you were talking about trace elements in 2+ billion year old sedimentary rocks) a third lower than what was in Peraspera's atmosphere. Which of course the Project had already known for years - they weren't idiots - but which even the molecular biologists here hadn't realized all the implications of, because unless you also a memory with superhuman cross-referencing capacity - which they hadn't - then you wouldn't have put together the pieces that the adaptations made to the cyanobacteria for higher sulfur tolerance, which ultimately dated back to a decades-old industrial genetic engineering application for a particular strain of nitrogen-fixing bacteria used in agriculture, also meant that the damn microorganism was just marginally intolerant enough of chlorine ions that you couldn't use it in salt water. Which of course nobody had ever noticed before because you didn't irrigate crops with salt water, but which certainly ruined the whole deal when you were trying to get an algae bloom started in an ocean.

But even after my 'Eureka!' moment - and then persuading Dr. Ward and Dr. Michel, our chief molecular biologist, that I actually wasn't talking out of my hat - the microbiology team had hit stone wall number two, as it turned out that thanks to certain subtleties of protein folding in the original root design, there just wasn't any way to work around the ion incompatibility without also moving the sulfur tolerance range out of something useful for Peraspera. So it was a catch-22. We couldn't shift the atmospheric balance of the planet enough to where the sulfur/oxygen ratio would be tolerable for the original strain of cyanobacteria they'd been working on without at least the beginnings of an oxygen bloom, and we couldn't get the oxygen bloom without a workable strain of cyanobacteria in the field. So at this point it looked like the Project's hope was to start from first principles and do a whole lot of designing an entirely new class of microorganism from scratch, which given how genetic engineering was a hit-or-miss proposition for anything too complex even in the 22nd century - to skip over a lot of complicated mathematics, the number of possible permutations the same DNA molecule could have depending on protein fold variation was somewhere between 'yikes!' and 'eek!' - looked to be a very, very long and expensive proposition.

Or, as a certain junior research assistant pointed out, you could just cut the Gordian knot and start your initial oxygen bloom prep in a giant freshwater inland sea. And if the planet you were on happened to be inconveniently devoid of those, well, then you could just make one.

Which is why several of the seniormost staff - and said junior research assistant - were now grabbing their carryalls and making a trip back for a high-level scientific conference with senior Colonial Bureau officials and equally senior scientific experts.

After all, when you were going to ask for permission to deliberately crash a comet into an inhabited world, then you certainly didn't do that by vidmail.

* * * * *​

Author's Note: Still not quite satisfied with the pacing on this chapter, but I wanted to get in both some establishing character moments, an overview of the terraforming project, some more historical background, and her first noteworthy scientific achievement. As for her relations with her peer group... did anyone notice that she didn't actually devote narrative space to saying goodbye to any close friends from high school upon leaving Earth? Just one mention of some nameless people she knew from school in passing, and over and done? That was deliberate.

Plus, of course, we got in our first actual perk purchases. Note that the list of purchases and exact perk descriptions will be maintained in the Mechanics post on the first page of this thread, bookmarked right after the introductory section.

And so she takes her first significant step into a larger world.

In conclusion, I would like to think WaNoMatsuri for his advice on getting in at least a couple of suitably Polish pronunciations and loanwords. Not that I speak a word of the language, but I can at least Google.

Unspent CP: 0
Purchases: Genius Intellect (SyFy Combined Continuity), Programmer (World Seed)​

 

[omegasrevenge]

Damn. If this is the kind of thing that the Forge could do for someone just starting out with it, then where would it end?

Click to shrink...

You assume there is an end to power fantasies, grasshopper. The Forge's limit is only the limit of your own imagination.

Imagine the most absurd Clarketech. That is the limit of the Forge.

 

[Bloodalchemy]

detachment and a .

Click to shrink...

Cut off sentence.

 

[Blaflaix]

I've gotten worse falling out of- well." I did my best aw-shucks shrug. Fortunately that one seemed to work just fine on authority figures even if I'd never had the knack of communicating well with people my age-

"Well, there will certainly be none of such treatment here." he declared firmly. "So, I understand you have an unusually vigorous amount of self-education.

Click to shrink...

This makes it sound like her "vigorous self-education" is in being beat-up.
A traditional nerd pastime.

I swear, even if I lived to be a billion years old and grew a brain the size of a planet I would still never understand how some people think. Or how they can so epically fail to think.

Click to shrink...

If this is the kind of thing that the Forge could do for someone just starting out with it, then where would it end?

Click to shrink...

Perk: How to People
Cost: 1,000,000 points

"Figures."

when you were going to ask for permission to deliberately crash a comet into an inhabited world, then you certainly didn't do that by vidmail.

Click to shrink...

Fw: Purchase Requisition

Comet (1) delivered directly to site.

 

[A/N]

Like all colony worlds without large enough populations to qualify for home rule and General Assembly representation it was under the jurisdiction of the Colonial Bureau, and that meant it also had a Colonial Constabulary detachment and a .

Click to shrink...

Missing end of sentence.

It was the sulfur. Judging from the Terran fossil record, the atmospheric sulfur bloom that had ultimately fostered the cyanobacteria growth that had led to the Great Oxygen Event had been approximately (very approximately, given how tentative the measurements were when you were talking about trace elements in 2+ billion year old sedimentary rocks) a third tower than what was in Peraspera's atmosphere.

Click to shrink...

lower

I wasn't expecting her to be outright assaulted like that, yikes. It seems she either wasn't too badly injured, or she doesn't care about loosing teeth or whatever damage he did, or the medical technology is really advanced?

Always fun to make a splash with a comet.

 

[Osiris]

One thing that stands out to me is that the narrative has not quite internalized the MC is a woman. If I'm on an isolated colony world and I hear that a petite female conscript was beaten badly by a more senior male conscript on her first day in the dorms, my initial assumption is that he was trying to institute a rule of the grandfathers style campaign of sexual violence. There isn't really anything he or his buddies could say to shake that impression, regardless of any injuries they may have.

 

[cliffc999]

my initial assumption is that he was trying to institute a rule of the grandfathers style campaign of sexual violence.

Click to shrink...

And if Sophia had had the slightest inclination to lean into that accusation during the Constabulary's investigation then she could likely have hung it on him - but by now it should be apparent she's an honest enough person that she wouldn't say it unless she legitimately believed that was what was happening, which she did not.

Heck, I doubt she even thought of it.

 

[heralding_bubble]

While the typical solution was of cousre to just get on a starship

Click to shrink...

sent an entire 200-dton fast courier ship

Click to shrink...

typos

Hehe, nice to see how she's getting along with others. Or not, as with the other draftees I guess.
Going big too, taking some part in non-simulation astronomical body collision(s) in her first year in Draft. That'll look good in the resume, I think

 

[cliffc999]

typos

Click to shrink...

"dton" is an in-setting abbreviation for an actual unit of measure - "displacement ton", used to measure internal volume of ships.

 

[heralding_bubble]

"dton" is an in-setting abbreviation for an actual unit of measure - "displacement ton", used to measure internal volume of ships.

Click to shrink...

Right, I figured it was something like that but thought better safe than sorry. Should've probably checked since you used it in Chapter 1, but didn't think to do it until now lol.
I'll try and remember in the future

 

[Osiris]

And if Sophia had had the slightest inclination to lean into that accusation during the Constabulary's investigation then she could likely have hung it on him - but by now it should be apparent she's an honest enough person that she wouldn't say it unless she legitimately believed that was what was happening, which she did not.

Heck, I doubt she even thought of it.

Click to shrink...

I understand her characterization as a non-sociopath. I'm saying that the whole event, her thought process, and the decisions made by the various characters involved read as though she is a male nerd being hassled by jocks. Cornering the new guy to teach him a lesson and cornering the new girl to teach her a lesson have very different vibes, and it doesn't seem like the confederation's culture has mutated to the point where that wouldn't be the case.

 

[cliffc999]

Cornering the new guy to teach him a lesson and cornering the new girl to teach her a lesson have very different vibes, and it doesn't seem like the confederation's culture has mutated to the point where that wouldn't be the case.

Click to shrink...

Note that some of the people flanking David when he confronted her were girls. Claire, the girl who confronts Sophia about David's mental malfunction, was one of them.

The vibes are also different when the 'welcoming party' is mixed-gender. And, as mentioned, doing it in the break room instead of lights-out and in her quarters.

and the decisions made by the various characters involved read as though she is a male nerd being hassled by jocks

Click to shrink...

What decisions? We skip straight from the incident to the aftermath without showing the immediate responders. By the time anybody is talking again, Sophia and the eyewitnesses - reluctant or otherwise - are all giving substantially the same account of events, so the authorities have every reason to accept it.

BTW, there is something in the case that acknowledges that she was a small woman being beaten on by a large man, but since I didn't lampshade it you apparently missed it.

A barracks fight between two guys that didn't leave anything worse than bruises? Would normally be handled with non-judicial punishment. Inflicting the same beating on a young woman half your size? Prison time. Which is what David got.

 

[Potato and Chip]

I get mental problems and stress are a thing, but so is being a responsible human being. I don't see how revealing he was claustrophobic would have changed anything in trial, at best I assume the response to such a reveal would have been, "Does that mean whenever you're highly stressed you just randomly beat people? I'll let your guards know."

Honestly that entire peer group seems to be made of self entitled assholes and the mc is better off not interacting with them. Though I am surprised he had so many friends seeing how little self control he had.

Thank god at least the guy was caught before he could get a position of real importance and get people killed.

At least everything else is going well and the mc is having fun. I am looking forward to studying of planet growth in the next update.

 

[mpbjunkie]

Loved the chapter. I had no problems at all with the pacing.

I don't know if this is something you'd be interested in doing at all but I'd love to read about the MC reacting to the options the forge presents her and expounding on the reasoning of her choices.

Anyways, great stuff. I'm excited for hands on planetary engineering next chapter.

 

[cliffc999]

I get mental problems and stress are a thing, but so is being a responsible human being. I don't see how revealing he was claustrophobic would have changed anything in trial

Click to shrink...

If somebody with claustrophia is stupid enough to get himself stuck in the effective equivalent of a submarine for several months, the only surprise will be that he avoided a mental meltdown for that long.

Seriously, I have mild claustrophobia in real life, and my Navy medical records had a notation of DO NOT ASSIGN TO SUBMARINE DUTY literally stamped on the cover sheet in bright red letters. And a specific enclosure within from the psychs explaining exactly why it would be a really stupid idea.

I admittedly did almost get assigned to a submarine before the notation was put in my records - but that wasn't because I was stupid enough to conceal it from the doctors, but because I legitimately hadn't known I had it and they'd somehow missed it on my initial screening. However, one of my instructors later in the training pipeline must have noticed something because I got sent back for a retest and eee-yup.

But yes, Sophia was hardly of the opinion it excused David - her response was a thing of 'I'll make sure it goes on his record just in case somebody who actually makes those decisions has a different opinion' and 'Okay, Claire, if it will make you shut up about it.'

Honestly that entire peer group seems to be made of self entitled assholes and the mc is better off not interacting with them.

Click to shrink...

While the Peraspera settlement is a labor of love for most of the science teams and a very well-paid hardship assignment for the professional and service staff, it is one of the shittiest of the shit details for the draftees. Unless someone is insane enough to volunteer for here like Sophia did, they do not assign the best and the brightest.

Honestly that entire peer group seems to be made of self entitled assholes and the mc is better off not interacting with them. Though I am surprised he had so many friends seeing how little self control he had.

Click to shrink...

Sophia didn't mention it because it was not the sort of thing she'd notice at the time, but David was very, very pretty.

 

[Prince Chrom]

But very few of the Project scientists had come here for the money and this certainly wasn't a place you came to for the ambience or the glory, so that just left the ones who'd come because they had a sincere passion for the science being done here. And that sort of mind liked nothing better than to work with other intellectually curious minds, no matter what package that mind came in. Even some of the people who were here largely for the money still thought that way.

Click to shrink...

It's really nice to see fiction about scientists that actually understands how they think. And I'm not seeing a problem with the pacing.

 

[Xiosdestro11]

Lol everyone assigned there thinks its a shit job but the MC. She is having the time of her life. Advancing herself and getting rep.

 

[Potato and Chip]

I admittedly did almost get assigned to a submarine before the notation was put in my records - but that wasn't because I was stupid enough to conceal it from the doctors, but because I legitimately hadn't known I had it and they'd somehow missed it on my initial screening. However, one of my instructors later in the training pipeline must have noticed something because I got sent back for a retest and eee-yup.

But yes, Sophia was hardly of the opinion it excused David - her response was a thing of 'I'll make sure it goes on his record just in case somebody who actually makes those decisions has a different opinion' and 'Okay, okay, if it will make you shut up about it.'

Click to shrink...

My reaction wasn't because of the loss of control due to claustrophobia itself but rather the fact that he repeated lied about it (because they don't ask about things that might impede your ability to do a task just once) on his records and then likely had his friends cover for him to continue to hide it.

I'd have a much more mild reaction if he hadn't known about it. But because he did and willing put himself in a situation where something like this was likely to happen with the intent to move into a situation where it would be worse and lives would be on the line I have a rock bottom opinion of him after just a few sentences.

Though I would find it absolutely hilarious if the group did successfully convince the authorities that he had claustrophobia. Because I think Sophia is right, the people who make those decisions would likely have a different opinion on the what the punishment should be. Namely that it will now likely be much worse. Because being hot headed, making bad decisions, and being physically violent are one thing, thats forgivable to bureaucracy, but lying on government paperwork? With the intent of getting into a position where your situation makes you a dangerous liability?

Well... the guy probably should have read all those warnings about what happens if you lie on your documents. You know, those multiple pages of warnings everyone skims over before signing the dotted line?

Yeah... David... David kind of just ruined his life.

While the Peraspera settlement is a labor of love for most of the science teams and a very well-paid hardship assignment for the professional and service staff, it is one of the shittiest of the shit details for the draftees. Unless someone is insane enough to volunteer for here like Sophia did, they do not assign the best and the brightest.

Click to shrink...

I think a few years down the line there are going to be a couple people cursing their younger selves for never having become friends with Sophia.

Sophia didn't mention it because it was not the sort of thing she'd notice at the time, but David was very, very pretty.

Click to shrink...

Sigh... of course that would be the reason.

 

[Xiosdestro11]

Is she getting paid at all?

 

[cliffc999]

Is she getting paid at all?

Click to shrink...

Actually, yes, but she hasn't thought about it because there's very little to spend it on at an outpost.

 

[Kyrin Fireheart]

Awesome chapter! Pacing is fine IMO. I personally love the world building and can't wait til ya get to the crafting parts. Also, I really enjoy how you can still make a well written scene even just but showing the start and then the aftermath. It's a fun writing style.

 

[MissileTeatime]

"I thought we'd already stepped down from wartime total mobilization and industrialization before 2160." I replied. "And I wasn't even in secondary-ed then."

"Well, apparently things have been peaceful enough coreward that the long-range projections all agree that nobody's going to pull another Kadur Eraasharshi in this generation. Which means the grand strategy is now to take a breather and use that to build up our colonial populations and civilian industrial base instead of putting it into more short-term applications. For one example, the new System Defense Boat project that's just coming out next year? The original schedule was for them to deploy in 2065, but they took it off of rush status and did it on a more relaxed budget.

Click to shrink...

I'm pretty sure one of those years is a typo. Relaxed development timeline or not, I have a hard time believing a successor-generation spaceship design would be allowed to take an entire century.

To ramp up from "starting the design phase" to "full production", sure, that could be plausible, but not the R&D-equivalents only. What decade did the first scratchbuilt nuclear-powered submarines start entering service? What about the successor generation of submarines (nuclear or not)?

You assume there is an end to power fantasies, grasshopper. The Forge's limit is only the limit of your own imagination.

Imagine the most absurd Clarketech. That is the limit of the Forge.

Click to shrink...

I'm pretty sure the Forge's limits are more expansive than your imagination, though?

 

[cliffc999]

I'm pretty sure one of those years is a typo. Relaxed development timeline or not, I have a hard time believing a successor-generation spaceship design would be allowed to take an entire century.

Click to shrink...

It is a typo. That was supposed to be 2165. He's basically saying that a new class of missile boat was pushed back two years, which doesn't seem like much except it's a sign they're starting to back off the wartime mentality tempo.

 

[Jangofet54]

Holy crap do you just have a bunch of these already loaded up otherwise you're pumping out over 8k words a day which is awesome, Oh and thanks for the chapter it was really cool you have a great way of integrating actual scientific knowledge into these stories which is much appreciated and admired. Have a good one.

 

[TroyX]

Caught up now. Good stuff. I'm enjoying the brisk pacing. It's not hurried, but it's not getting bogged down either.

I don't know anything about the setting except what you've written so far. I have to admit, I was hoping it'd be a crazier setting (high-power, high-tech, high-magic settings are my preference), but that's not a reflection on the story itself, which is good thus far.

Wonder what the Celestial Forge is in this story, if it's something from a GURPS setting somewhere, the way the Celestial Forge was the Cosmic Forge in your Rifts story. Obviously it's not from this Interstellar setting, since it mentions "there's no magic in this universe" (emphasis mine), but perhaps it's from one of GURPS' other worlds?

Sophia clearly has a sense of responsibility. It's what led to her doing that self-study so she could get a good scholarship. One wonders if that played into why the Forge chose her. And if she's Pawn, Lab Rat, or something else entirely. One also wonders if her social isolation at all factored into its choice of her.

Speaking of which, David and his friends - sorry, "friends" - are asshats. They knew he was claustrophobic and stressed, and still planned to help him harass the newbie?

And if they're so fucking concerned about helping him out, why didn't they just offer to take some of the shit jobs from him to help him out, since the new girl isn't actually taking them?

(Answer to my question: apparently he's a pretty face, and that's the main thing they like him for, so not enough to take on any of those shit jobs themselves? Still, it's pretty hypocritical on multiple levels.)

I really like her interactions with the scientists and engineers and programmers. Actual professionalism and competence! Those things are like hyper-rare in fiction among non-protagonists for some reason

Also I don't science good, so I don't know how much of the science here is technobabble and how much is actually plausible, but at a guess I'd presume there's a good deal of plausibility here? Because A that's how you tend to write your fiction iirc and B because it's a low/hard sci-fi setting.

Anyway, I'm enjoying this, and glad to see such beefy chapters come out so quickly. Hope it keeps up, kudos to you!