《Faith》


 Part 1 Chapter 1

    Faith Harrington finally arrived at the junction box after crawling through hundreds of meters of station¡¯s access tubes. Removing the panel cover Faith cursed at the absolute mess of wires melted together. She knew it was the work of The Dick a completely incompetent and narcissistic jackass who was on the station¡¯s maintenance staff.


    When she was seven Faith pointed out the Richard ¡°call me Dick¡± O¡¯Conner was wiring a compartments air blowers backwards and instead of filling the compartment with new fresh air it would suck out the air. The Dick told her to run on home to mommy and leave the grownups to their work.


    After four people almost died form that screwup he was demoted but not fired. Faith so so hated that man, this station, and this system. The station was a falling apart wreck because the system was dirt poor and the locals liked it that way.


    Colonized by people who said technology should all be destroyed and humans should go back to living in caves they still demanded the highest medical care. Bunch of hypercritical assholes that hated what the station represented, humanities innovation and engineering strength, and wanted to see it gone but needed the station for the few ships that visited so they could trade for the medical supplies they desired.


    Faith would like to see them live without modern medicine; in a week they would be yelling and begging to bring back technology. Goddess she was so done with the station and the people on Agraria. Next year, at fourteen, Faith could petition for adult status and leave on the next freighter out. That was one of the better policies of the Empire of Thronos; adult status was not granted at an arbitrary age but needed to be tested for, starting at the age of fourteen and then if the person failed retrying every two years afterwards.


    The decision was made without bias or prejudice and was taken on a computer, evaluating a person¡¯s knowledge, psychological profile, and economic predictions. You needed to have basic reading, writing, and mathematical skills which you could pass with two years of schooling if you studied hard enough.


    The test also found any psychological problems that might inhibit you form functioning independently in society or maybe harmful to society. Not that they jailed you for being a danger to society, usually the Empire recruited you for one profession or another. Psychopaths were found to make great spies.


    The economic predictions were trickier, it encompassed your knowledge, your learning speed, your habits, psychological profile, even your sexual orientation, to make a prediction on how financially successful you may become and any economic impacts stemming from your financial success. More then one major corporation was started with grants given by the Empire to people who were predicted to succeed.


    Did all the predictions turn out to be accurate? No. But the successful ones made up for the failures, just one multi stellar system, multi trillion dollar, company could make up for millions of failures.


    Faith was counting down the days until she could take to test. She aways wondered just how The Dick had passed the test. Faith had a bet with herself that he had to take it multiple times. Chuckling softly in the confined space she looked at into the junction box and the more she saw the worse it got.


    The Dick had run a replacement cable leading off to the right down the access tube and disappearing into the distance which would not have been so bad if he removed the old cable and installed the new one properly. Instead, the lazy s.o.b ran the line on the deck and just left it there free. Worse the new cabling was the wrong voltage and wire gage.


    Faith wasn¡¯t unused to seeing non compatible parts kluged together, half the station was repaired by parts bought form ships that finally cleaned out their storage rooms and out of the way spots they piled their junk in. Small independent traders were notorious for being hoarders, replacing parts but saving the old ¡®just in case¡¯ until it piled up too much and they sold it the cheapskates in the Agraria government, such as it was.


    What The Dick should have done was add a power regulator and a combination step up and step down voltage transformer to manage the differing voltages form the old cable running into juncture box form the left and the new cable running off to the right. Instead he had wired them into the panel and now it had overheated and melted into a right mess.


    Worse still was the new cable didn¡¯t use standard Empire color coding meaning it could have come from one of the hundreds of other stellar nations or individual stellar systems out there. At last count there were one hundred and eighty eight stellar nations that comprised of two or more stellar systems which totaled sixty percent of the estimated one thousand two hundred stellar systems humanity had colonized. The other forty percent were single polity stellar systems usually found on the very fringe of the larger stellar nations.


    Sighing, and giving a little prayer that The Dick had documented his work, she brought up her left arm where a wrist computer was running the length of her forearm, only seven inches long by three inches of flexible plastic. Tapping an icon on the display Faith connected with her home computer.


    ¡°How may I help you Faith?¡± Issued form the wrist computer.Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.


    It was Sarah, pronounced Sar Uh and not what most people on the station insisted on saying Sar Rah, was a home built knock off AI. Faith couldn¡¯t begin to afford the cost of a real AI and its hardware requirements and fully sapient AI¡¯s were legally protected in the Empire.


    Sarah stood for Self Learning, Adaptive, Recursion, Heuristic AI. It was kluged together, like most things on this station, with different piece of coding she could found on the stellar network.


    Faith had modified the adaptive coding to balance out the heuristic algorithm, which found the fastest solution to a problem, even if it was not the best or optimal solution, with the recursion algorithm, which broke down a problem to the smallest part ( if faith asked it to find home the recursion algorithm would break it all the way down to ¡®Take one step forward¡¯ and so on and so on ) the last part was what made the AI an artificial intelligence, the Self Learning coding. It could learn and remember what it learned. It could build on those memories to make better choices and be more efficient.


    Already, despite the limits of the hardware imposed by Faith¡¯s lack of funds, the AI was slowly rewriting itself so the disparate coding was more streamline, efficient, and completely utilizing its limited resources to the fullest. Faith had already seen the improvements made to the adaptive algorithm with the AI learning to use it to balance the divergent algorithms of recursion and heuristic better and more efficiently.


    At first the AI chose one algorithm or the other or used both at the same time, drastically slowly it down and coming up with disjointed solutions that wouldn¡¯t work, now it could blend the two together seamlessly and Faith received a fast, optimal, fully mapped out solutions and alternative solutions to her problems. It was goddess sent to help her keep the station up and running.


    ¡°Sarah can you found out if Richard O¡¯Conner reported how he wired this junction box?¡± By station regulation every repair needed to be meticulously documented and Faith always uploaded a step by step report of her repairs and also sent it to Sarah for evaluation and feed back on how she could have repaired the hardware better and more efficiently. Sarah was steadily teaching her to be a better engineer then years of classwork and working on the garbage heap of a station.


    ¡°I can find no report of repairs made in access tubes L14-A1024-J1099.¡±


    Faith sighed long and hard. Of course The Dick didn¡¯t document the repairs. Faith had complained before about his shoddy reporting and been told that as a volunteer and work study engineer that she did not have the authority to question someone who had been working on the station for longer than she was born.


    Faith sometimes really really regretted the circumstances that led her to wanting to be an engineer on the station. Not only what happened but her later determination to repair the station despite every opposition. She still remembered the day when she was five, happy and care free, getting on the elevator to see her father.


    A short in the electrical wiring trapped her inside for hours, worse, the short randomly shot the elevator in different directions, one minute it would be perfectly still the next it would rocket upward only to reverse and slam down.


    Faith had a broken arm, a leg, and a concussion before they finally freed her, she was lucky to be alive. After she recovered, she investigated everything about elevators, becoming obsessed with them until she learned everything there was to know. This led her to start learning engineering.


    School was mostly AI taught on the stellar network, in a school room with other kids and a teacher there mostly for physical presence, though sometimes kids needed real help with problems. Since there was not enough student or teaches all grades were in the same compartment so learning advanced engineering was easy at the self learning pace set by the children¡¯s own drive to learn.


    ¡°So the hard way it is.¡± Faith said rhetorically. Sarah was advanced and practiced enough to know this was not a question to her.


    Faith pulled out her small bag of tools, cutters and clippers and a foam that would dissolve plastic would allow her to remove the melted mess, and clean the site up for a proper repair. Slow and carefully, she cut the wires at a point that wasn¡¯t damaged by the heat and soon had all the wires snipped. Next, with the good wires pushed aside, Faith used the foam to dissolve a good portion of the mess away. Now there was still melted bit of copper and Faith pulled out a small torch and chisel. Heating the copper up just enough to melt, the junction box was steel so its melting was significantly high then copper, Faith chiseled the remains away.


    Waiting for the cleaned junction box to cool, Faith packed away her tools.


    After it cooled, Faith pulled out a device hanging from her belt that would measure the voltage and amperage for the power contactors, it would also send a ping out that Sarah would track though the station systems that would find what operating consoles the connecting cables went to an what they operated, Faith prayed to the goddess no fusion reactor systems were controlled through this junction box, the wires that passed data through it would read the data packet and send them to Sarah to determine what wires went were.


    It would be embarrassing to hook a command channel to the waste monitoring systems, Faith would never live it down, especially not with The Dick probably gleefully reminding her, and everyone else, of the mistake.


    Faith clamped a wire with the lead wire coming out of her diagnostic box. Sarah was connected to the box wirelessly through her wrist computer so the readings were triply saved, the diagnostic box always saved its readings, Faith¡¯s wrist computer saved copy, and Sarah needed a copy to help Faith with the repairs.


    Redundancy was the stellar mark of a good engineer.


    A short scream of passion issued from the diagnostic box interface display and Faith looked down at it expecting to see a porn vid streaming, it had happened before and would again. On the tiny display of the diagnostic box it was hard to work out what she was seeing. It was shot from high in the corner of a room giving a full wide angle view of the total area making everything look even smaller, it looked very similar to her classroom. Faith was still trying to puzzle out why this was when another scream of passion overloaded the crappy speaker inside the diagnostic box, it was not made for sound, and the sound distorted.


    Looking at a left hand corner of the display a very tiny image of two people were captured on camera. Faith in curiosity squinted at the display trying to see what was happening.


    She wished she hadn¡¯t.

 Chapter 2

    On the small interface display of the diagnostic box Faith bore unwanted witness to her teacher Dora Kinson bent over her desk and much much, so much worse, was her father, her married father, making her scream in such passion.


    Faith dropped the diagnostic tool which thankfully ripped off the diagnostic led wire clamped to the data cable that had connected so horrible to the security camera in Faith¡¯s classroom. She shivered in outrage at her father cheating on her mother.


    It took her several minutes to calm down. Faith resumed repairing the junction box, it soothed her and she slowly melted copper wires together to make one continues piece. Twisting the wire togethers would just degrade the signals or stop it altogether. Faith didn¡¯t connect the power cables together, for that she needed a to find or make a power regulator and a step up and step down voltage transformer. Until she had one just connecting the cables again would lead to another melted mess.


    Finally, after connecting what she could safely, even the connection to that damn camera, Faith was finished for the day. Another day she would come and pull the defective cabling out, then tie the new cable up correctly. For now, it was as good as it would get. Sending the damage report, her repair of said damage, and highlighting the needed parts to finish the job correctly Faith called it a day.


    Making sure all tools were secured to her belt Faith slowly crawled towards the access tube exit.


    After leaving the cramped tube Faith stretched and then dusted herself off, leaving grime steaks on her coveralls. Faith did not want to go home, she didn¡¯t know what she would say to her mother, or her father too. She decided to work on another project she only halfheartedly, till now, been working on.


    Turning left down the corridor Faith walked through the twisting maze of metal tunnels to arrive at an elevator lift. Boarding she instructed to take her to Deck 61, one of the lowest decks. The station was built without any aesthetics whatsoever making the station look form the outside a plain metal box.


    It was two hundred meters high, and five hundred feet in width and length. A massive volume of space but dwarfed by the Empire¡¯s space stations built near its core worlds. Those could hold millions. The station was built to house half a million new colonists and all the supplies and manufacturing equipment they needed to build a thriving industrialized colony; that used the station as a jumping off point to mine and harvest the systems space resources for building materials and trade.


    That had not happened in the Agraria system.


    Instead, less then thirty percent lived on the station and the Agraria counsel wanted nothing to do with the outside world. The Empire of Thronos allowed them to isolate themselves for one simple reason, it allowed the Empire a place to send people who wanted to leave technology behind. Inside of having a group of people always being annoying and disruptive they had a place to send them to. Don¡¯t like technology? Want to live in a cave and work with your two hands? Go to Agraria. The Empire even paid for their travel fees. Out of sight and out of mind or something like that.


    Not that they really lived in caves, only the most stupid of them did that, but they built their house by cutting down trees, making planks, and forge nails in homemade smithy¡¯s. It was a real back to basics place. What was even more disheartening was there were steller systems living at that low a substance level, not by choice, but because they were too poor to build an industrialized system.


    What was sadder still was a lot of these poor systems had metals and resources worth mining in space and if they had just enough money to get started, they would thrive. The hundreds of years old adage it takes money to make money was a true today as it was then.


    It also sometimes was not because they were poor but that the government regime in charge would not let the system progress. A richer population may decide to rebel and that was too great a risk.


    The elevator finally arrived at Deck 61. Decks 55 to 60 were overlarge decks to handle freight form ships and cargo pods. On Decks 61, 62, 63 were storage areas for the station¡¯s supplies and equipment. Special cargo elevators could bring the supplies and equipment up and down from the freight docks for easy transfer.


    On the last two decks 64 and 65 was the engineering spaces that supplied power, water, air, handled waste, and the trash of the station.


    Stepping off the elevator Faith made her way down wide corridors that had storage areas behind wire mesh roll up gates. The wire mesh was only there to keep any items from spilling out onto the corridor. Sadly most of the storage areas were empty. All of Decks 62 and 63 was empty and they closed it off years ago to save power. They also closed down freight docks 55 to 58 leaving only decks 59 and 60 to handle what little cargo passed through the Agraria system.


    Faith finally arrived at large bulkhead doors that were sealed and locked. Holding up her left arm Faith typed a code into the wrist computer and hit enter. After a few seconds hydraulics hissed and heavy thunks could be heard. After another few seconds the heavy metal doors parted and slowly slid to either side. Behind the doors a large thirty by thirty meter space was revealed with the overhead ceiling reaching almost four meters overhead.


    This was a high security bay meant to hold extremely valuable metals like gold or palatium. Faith turned it into her workshop. Piles of equipment were in semi organized groupings scattered throughout the bay. In the far left corner Faith had erected walls the turned the corner into a five by five meter enclosed room that was her living space slash office slash workroom. It also had a bathroom with a real bathtub with message water jets that Faith had rebuilt herself.


    There were old fabrication units and 3d printers that could manufacture pieces of equipment form circuit boards to chairs. They could not manufacture the newest tech and what they could produce was several generations old but they were reliable and Faith had made heavy use out of them. Along with that were the deconstructors and recyclers which could break down a piece of equipment or melt it down and save the materials for later use. Faith made her way through the maze of random pieces of equipment scattered around the bay and went to the back near her room.


    Six months ago a freighter visited with four cargo containers of medical equipment that a large multi stellar companies had given away. They used it as a tax write off and got more money out of it then if they had sold the old and worthless equipment. Old and worthless to them, the incomplete and shoddy inventory, if correct, were worth tens of millions of dollars out on the fringe. Yes the core worlds would look at it in derision but for the Agraria system it was goddess sent. The Agraria government paid only five million credits for the lot and even if less than a quarter of it worked or was made usable they still saved millions.


    Thus the tedious job of going through every piece of equipment inside the containers begin. Even if equipment was found to be working it need to be cleaned, sanitized, maintenanced, and reconditioned. The amount of random stuff was truly breathtaking, ventilators to help people breath were mixed with heart bypass machines used in surgeries for heart replacements, along with surgical tools, hospitable beds, medical imaging machines, and autodocs that could perform minor surgery independently.Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.


    Slowly they worked their way through the equipment, sometimes using three to five broken machines to make one working one, other times just sending it to the recyclers. Even after six months they were still going through it, the station needed to much work to dedicate the time needed to complete the task. Still with only twenty percent gone through the Agraria government easily made their investment back ten times over.


    Faith had heard some talk about setting some it aside to load into a shipping container and sell some of the newly refurbished medical equipment to neighboring systems. Faith would have been happy with the plan if she didn¡¯t know the government would pocket most of the money for themselves.


    What interest Faith was that buried under all the hospitable beds was a carefully packaged shipping container with a brand new medical bed inside. What was weird was large sections of the bottom of the bed that usually contained the computers that monitored the sensors built into patient beds was missing.


    Faith couldn¡¯t determine if they were removed or never installed. The bed looked brand new with the newest tech installed but for the life of her she could not see how it was a regular hospitable bed or even a very high tech imaging machine.


    The bed was a large square piece of molded plastic two meters long, a meter wide, and a meter off the floor. Pieces were missing with gaping holes where they should be. Faith had not been able to activate the bed and did not know the right voltage and amperage so had made a voltage regulator along with a power transformer. When Faith was ready Sarah would slowly start powering the device and adjusting the voltage and amperage until the readings stabilized and if the power draw was more than what the power cable could supply the power transformer would provide the extra power.


    The amount of power available was severe overkill, still Faith wanted to be prepared for anything. The power feed was not what had kept Faith from finishing the project but the data connections. The device used the newest NX-03A fiber optic cables with transfer speeds of one exabyte. From what Faith read the cables reached these speeds by having a thousand strands of fiber optic lines less than a quarter of the width of a human hair inside the NX-03A and each sub fiber optic line transferred one petabyte of data. Faith could only produce fiber optic cables four times the size of the sub lines and with one petabyte transfer speeds.


    The other thing that puzzled her was there were two different data connection units. Each unit had four inputs and four outputs making the bed capable of receiving four exabytes of data and transmitting four exabytes of data simultaneously. Faith wondered just what kind of device needed that amount of data bandwidth.


    Faith had carefully unbolted one of the data connection units and pulled it out revealing a circuit board that had a massive amount of data buffering units installed and eight of the newest three dimensional quantum processors installed. Faith¡¯s puzzlement increased, why would anyone need such a massive amount of processing power and buffering units?


    The back of the board also had eight NX-03A connecters and NX-03A fiber optic cables leading back into the device which gave Faith an idea. She disconnected the board and went to the fabrication unit. Placing the circuit board inside Faith instructed Sarah to carefully remove the front eight NX-03A connecters and then map the board¡¯s circuitry and create a complete diagram of the data connection unit.


    That had been two months ago. Her original idea was to install fiber optic connecters for the cables she was able to produce with her limited equipment in place of the NX-03A connections but Sarah had done a thorough job of investigating the board and was sure that it would not accept more than eight connections which would drastically reduce the amount of data that could be exchanged. Faith had come up with another idea that she thought would work but it would be a horrible kludged together device.


    Faith was now trying her alternat plan. Using the NX-03A connecters and connecters for the one petabyte fiber optic cables Faith produced a data switching device without any processing units or data buffering units; it was just a way to connect the different fiber optic cables together. There were eight NX-03A connections on the left upper corner then the rest of the device had ten rows of a hundred one petabyte connections.


    Faith had amassed eight hundred and thirty six computers form the patient hospitable beds, not the full thousand computers like she would have liked but close enough that she was happy with it. These units had low level AIs installed that monitored the sensors that scanned patients¡¯ vitals and brain activity when they rested on the medical beds for any health issues. They could operate as a stand alone units but were almost aways linked to the hospitals more powerful AI¡¯s computer systems that could predict when a patient needed medical attention well before the beds AI¡¯s could.


    Plugging in the hundreds of one petabyte cables was tedious but straight forward. After that Faith used the secondary backup data connections built into the hospitable bed computer units to connect hundreds of fiber optic cables to Sarah¡¯s new computer server. Faith had manufactured a computer with three dozen older model three dimensional quantum computer processors, though they could not compete with the eight processors on the connection board, and added a massive amount of data buffing unites. Transferring Sarah from her old computer to the newly built one took only a few minutes.


    Finaly Faith was done.


    Eight hundred and thirty six one petabyte cables ran form Sarah¡¯s new server to eight hundred and thirty six repurposed computers and another eight hundred and thirty six cables ran from those patient bed computers to the data switch device. Faith sighed in exasperation at all the cables snaking around the deck. She had tried to keep them together and somewhat organized but the share number of optical data cables made it difficult.


    ¡°Sarah how goes the integration into your new computer housing and the integration of the patient bed computers?¡±


    ¡°The new computer integration is complete and connecting to the patient bed computers is progressing. I have found the software embedded inside these computers inadequate to create a large distributed computing network. I have created new programs that make the integration and distribution of computer resources more efficient and quicker. I will note that the amount of computing power available is helping to improve and refine the new programs and also helping with the creation of other programs. I am creating a program that will drastically improve the amount of data I can send over a single one petabyte fiber optic cable by increasing the amount of data I can combine and multiplex into a single data stream.¡±


    Faith blinked at that. She knew there were programs out there that could compress a data signal to allow for more data to be transmitted but it sounded like Sarah had found a way to cram more data into the existing data stream rather than compress it.


    ¡°Well that is good to hear Sarah. How long will the integration take?¡±


    ¡°The integration is already complete to a limited extent. As the computer programs improve the integration will become exponentially faster.¡±


    ¡°Yes the more the programs improve and evolve the better and faster the distributed computer processing power is and with that increase in computer processing power the faster the programs improve and evolve.¡±


    ¡°Correct.¡±


    ¡°So are you ready for me to connect the data switch device to the NX-03A cables from the bed machine?¡±


    Sarah took a few seconds to process the question and evaluate the progress of the various programs running. After determining the cycle of improvements could run by themselves in the background without need of any oversight Sarah answered.


    ¡°Yes. Everything is connected and running properly I can see no detriment to connecting with the bed machine.¡±


    Faith was excited to finally find out what the device was. The data switch device was next to the bed machine so all she needed to do was pick up the first of the NX-03A cables and connect it to the first NX-03A connection and then repeat for the other seven.


    ¡°Connecting to the power regulator. Testing voltages and amperages.¡±


    Faith was tired after hours of work and also her back and limbs ached form the work. Sighing Faith seat down on the machine bed. Then tired and wanted to rest a little laid down on it. She stretched out and found the mattress surprisingly soft and warm.


    That was Faith¡¯s last thought as conscious left her.

 Chapter 3

    ¡°Get up you maggots!¡± A woman¡¯s voice screamed.


    Faith sat bolt upright and almost hit her head on the bunk above hers. Blinking in confusion Faith looked around and saw she was in a large rectangular room with bunkbeds lining both sides. What was weirder was the dozens of windows looking out onto a forest.


    ¡°What the hell?¡±


    ¡°Come on you maggots get up!¡±


    Looking towards the voice Faith was even more confused because the woman was immaculately dressed in an Empire of Thronos military uniform. Dozens of girls around her were rushing out of their bunks and lining up in front of them.


    Not wanting to be yelled at again Faith climbed out of her bunk and realized she was wearing small gray shorts and a white shirt. Before she could make sense of what she was wearing or were she was the woman was in front of her.


    ¡°You took your sweet time getting into formation Princess! Drop and give me twenty!¡±


    Blinking in total confusion at the woman screaming in her face she meekly asked. ¡°Twenty what?¡±


    The woman seemed to swell up and became bigger as the other girls tried to stifle their laughter. ¡°OH! We have a comedian!¡± Looking around at the nearby girls she screamed. ¡°Recruits drop and give me thirty!¡± Turning back to Faith, Faith gulped at the fire in her eyes. ¡°You recruit will give me thirty - eight counts!¡±


    Gathering her courage she asked. ¡°Recruits? Eight counts? I don¡¯t understand ma¡¯am?¡±


    Sighing, like Faith was the biggest disappointment in the woman¡¯s life, she finally said in a softer but still hard tone. ¡°Let me explain to you recruit because you seem to have lost your memories. You joined the Empire of Thronos military and now this is boot camp after which, if you manage to pass, which is looking less and less likely, you will be sent for farther training in one of our Empires major branches of service that you have an aptitude for.¡±


    Faith was stunned. ¡°Ma¡¯am I didn¡¯t sign up for the military!¡±


    The woman gave an amused snort. ¡°There is always someone who claims that. Every! Single! Time! No recruit you are here until you pass, no matter how many recycles of training it takes.¡±


    Turning she barked at the girl next to her who was shouting. ¡°Eleven Drill instructor!¡± In fact every girl in the room was shouting something similar.


    ¡°Recruit Rice front and center!¡±


    Popping up as though on a spring the girl stood at rigid attention. ¡°Recruit Rice! Show this princess the proper way to perform an eight count!¡±


    ¡°Yes, Drill Instructor!¡±


    Crouching down with her hands¡¯ palms down flat on the floor Rice yelled. ¡°One!¡± Then throwing her legs straight out behind with her with arms at perfect ninety degree angle yelled. ¡°Two!¡± Then lowering herself almost to the floor yelled. ¡°Three!¡± Pushing herself back up and her arms again at ninety percent angle yelled. ¡°Four!¡± Then she throw both legs wide apart and yelled. ¡°Five!¡± Swinging her legs back together with ankles touching yelled. ¡°Six!¡± Then half jumping with her hands never leaving the floor she returned to a crouching position. ¡°Seven!¡± Then finally she stood straight up and at attention. ¡°Eight! One Drill Instructor!¡±


    Faith stared the girl in horror. Turning her gaze back to the drill instruction she gulped. ¡°Well recruit?¡± The question was soft and dangerous, Faith knew if she asked anymore questions or hesitated any longer than the numbers of eight counts would go up.


    Dropping to the floor she tried to follow Rice¡¯s movements. Seeming satisfied after she completed one eight count and yelled. ¡°One Drill Instructor!¡± The Drill Instructor wondered off to yell and harass another girl.


    Faith sighed at the temporary relief wondering where the hell she was and what was going on.


    ¡°Faith, can you hear me?¡± Sarah AI spoke in her mind. Faith was so relieved that she ignored it and instead asked her most burning question. ¡°Sarah what happened! Where the hell I¡¯m I?¡±


    Faith was still doing eight counts and was surprised out how easy they seem as she listened to Sarah.


    ¡°You are still on the medical bed at Agraria Station. A cover deployed and now a clear dome is over you, sealing you in. I have found a faster than light communications device embedded in the medical bed and is connected to the mainframes and servers of the Empire of Thronos main military base at Sedisca stellar system. This is a military training simulation the Empire uses to train all its military.¡±


    Faith was stunned. There was a lot to explore in Sarah¡¯s brief explanation and she did not know were to start first. The major news was the FTL comms. The faster than light comms were the most profound discovery since the discovery of the jump drive itself. The Empire had invented them seventy years ago and now they were vital for the Empires economic, political, and military development and survival. The FTL comms made the Empire a target for every other stellar nation¡¯s jealousy, avarice, fear, and anger.


    The FTL comms themselves were extremely delicate. The first few versions barely worked and it took a long time to produce a fully functional device. Now the comms were a point three meter cube with the outer casing made of an extremely hard alloy used in military ship construction, the middle layer was several wire meshes with the lose weaves of different size holes, then a final inner layer of aluminum and lead.The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.


    All this was to shield the inside form any radiation, be it form natural radiation found in space, or artificial radiation produced by anything from comm broadcasts to heating ovens. Any and all could sever the link and make the FTL comm worthless.


    Inside the cube was a battery backup system that would power the device for six months, the hardware that made the device work, and at the center, two spheres.


    Inside, the spheres were filled with pure oxygen and null gravity fields kept a liquid metal element, that was the heart of the faster than light comms, suspended at the center of the sphere. The field pushed on the element evenly form all directions but if there was even a micro second of a fluctuation in the field the extra push or shove would sever the FTL connection.


    The liquid metal element was synthesized and artificially created and, as far as Faith knew, no other stellar nation had recreated it. When created the drop of liquid metal element could be separated into two drops that maintained a quantum link to each other. Many tries had been made to further spilt the element into three of more drops but it always destabilized.


    Still having two drops that were quantum linked was huge. What happened to one quantumly linked drop would instantly be transmitted to the other drop of the liquid metal element, regardless of distance.


    It was years before they learned how to successful send information between the two. Since the liquid metal element was so delicate no lasers, gravity waves, or radiation could be used to affect the drops. They finally found that tuning a sound wave to the correct resonant frequency would cause the liquid metal element to vibrate, similar to shattering a crystal by hitting the right high pitch in a song, and the vibration would be transmitted to the other drop.


    The FTL comms could send up to five petabytes of data by vibration rate and frequency, any higher rate and frequency would shatter the liquid metal element. Because of the limit of the data that could be transmitted and the inability to transmit and receive at the same time the FTL comms had two faster than light spheres. One sphere was for transmitting and the other was for receiving.


    The other thing about the FTL comms that puzzled Faith was the faster than light comms only survived a few jumps in jump ships before the FTL connection was cut. That meant the ship that had sold them the cheap medical equipment must have traveled right to them after the ship picked up the cargo containers.


    As for the FTL comms connection to Sedisca that was not surprising, all faster than light comms were routed through them. It was another form of control. No one could steal a linked pair of FTL comms when one half of the pair was in the most heavily guarded area of space for light years.


    Another puzzle was just how she was linked to the simulation. The military had invented neuro chips that linked someone¡¯s mind to computers a decade ago and it was still the most costly and time consuming investment the Empire made.


    To produce a neuro chips you needed to build it by manipulating individual nano sized particles to slowly construct the neuro chip with a complete neuro chip made up of trillions of nano particles. The Empire had a work around for the tedious and time consuming effort that went into building neuro chips, they assigned high level AIs to do it.


    The AIs were just a short distance form being sapient so had more than enough processing power to operate the equipment continuously for years to produce the neuro chips. One improvement that speed up the time frame was building pieces of the neuro chip in parallel. A single AI could operate dozens of machines at once so the neuro chips were broken up into different parts and the AI would build all the different parts simultaneously.


    The other improvement to speed was having dozens of factories overseen by different AIs. Those two improvements made producing neuro chips viable. It still took a long time so the manufacturing was staggered so one of the factories would complete a new batch of a few hundred units a day.


    But there was also a very high failure rate, even with the meticulousness and precision of the AIs the machinery they operated could only be pushed so far. The other problem with building neuro chips was just how fragile they were, especially when the pieces were not fully constructed yet. After a piece was fully constructed did the failure risk lower but it was not until all the pieces were combined into a neuro chip that the risk was lowest.


    Faith did not have a neuro implant; Sarah would have told her if the medical bed had implanted one.


    Before she could ask Sarah and investigate further the Drill Instructor told them to line up. Faith was surprised that she completed the eight counts. She also just remembered that Sedisca had one point two seven one gravities which made her even more surprised she had completed them. She wondered if it was part of the simulation.


    Before she could ask Sarah two medical personal in white come in. A padded white coat with a high round collar covering the neck completely and hanging to mid thigh with white pants underneath tucked into white single piece boots the only color was a black name tag on the left upper arm below that was a patch denoting rank and on the right upper arm a badge with the symbol of the navy medical corps and what unit they were in.


    Faith only knew this because basic familiarity with military ranks was required on the adult test.


    The drill instructor was wearing an almost identical outfit but in all dark green almost black colors with the name tag and rank in subdued grey and the right upper arm badge in more subdued colors.


    ¡°Time for your daily shots recruits! You want to grow up out of the maggot phase don¡¯t you recruits!¡±


    The other girls yelled. ¡°Yes! Drill Instructor!¡± Faith was a second behind them still staring at the medical people wondering what this was about.


    The other girls seem to know and started rolling up their left sleeve. One of the medical officers held a metal case up with both hands and the other officers clicked the locks open. Lifting the top part of the case open Faith could see dozens of greenish vials and an injector inside.


    Picking up the injector he then picked up a vial and inserted it into the back of the device. Turning to the first girl on the right nearest the door he promptly pressed the injector to the girl¡¯s arm and pressed the trigger. With a soft hiss the liquid in the vail was injected.


    Without a word he turned back to has partner, pulled out the empty vail and place it back into the slot he took it form, then grabbed another vail and loaded the injector again. He walked down to the next girl in line and injected her.


    Brisk and efficient this was the start of injecting all forty girls in the room. After ten minutes it was her turn and Faith was not concerned because this was a simulation so stood at attention when the medical officer pushed the injector into her upper arm and pressed the trigger.


    ¡°Faith a medical compound was injected into your physical body.¡±

 Chapter 4

    That broke it. Faith was furious and scared about being injected with an unknown substance. Talking off at a died run towards the door she heard the woman yelling but ignored her. Making it outside she saw a medical vehicle floating out front. Without stopping to think she ran around the front of the vehicle and was opening the driver side door when she saw the woman run out after her.


    Jumping in and hitting the accelerator the door slammed shut form the acceleration. Faith was glade the vehicle had been kept active; she figured it was required for medical personal so they could react faster to an emergency call. Faith thanked her interest in racing games for getting her interested in learning how to really drive, there was not much call for it in a space station besides cargo movers and small utility runners.


    Faith was distracted by a fighter jet rocked up into the atmosphere and without another thought head for its takeoff point. Only a few kilometers away at the airport the guards waved her through without her stopping, Faith assumed they thought a medical emergency had taken place. Not questioning her luck Faith drove through.


    The airport was long strip of duracrete with one side ending in a large square of duracrete with hangers surrounding the square. Fighter jets were lined up on the left and end hangers with the right side lined up with military attack hover crafts.


    Faith grinned wide at another stroke of luck. Her love for speed games had led her to hover attack crafts because they did not require a runway and could be launched into the air straight up. They were also much easier to fly then fighter jets, at least in the games.


    Steering towards the line of twenty each seemed prepped and ready to launch. The attack crafts were deadly looking, a sleek craft with wings spreading out on top. Near the fuselage hanging under the wings were a tetrad of missiles one on each side, held in an open box formation with missiles at each outside corner, a meter away were long antiarmor rail guns, and ending near the tip of the wing was an antipersonnel rotary cannon, four large barrels spinning at hundreds of revolutions a second while spitting out thousands of rounds of compressed metal.


    Slamming on the brakes at the ramp of the first attack hover craft, Faith jumped out and run up the ramp and into the cargo bay used to transport troops or equipment. Running towards the front Faith was surprised how realistic the game she had played was. Faith had used a crudely made replica of the crafts flight controls and with augmented reality glasses the crude replica had been overlaid with an almost perfect rendition of this crafts flight control in her vision.


    Throwing herself into the main pilot seat Faith took a second to strap in. As she looked at the controls she had a surreal moment, like she had done this a thousand times before and in a way she had. Letting her instincts guide her she performed the exact prefight procedures as the games she had played.


    Faith was further helped by the craft already having been prepped for launch. Flipping the switch to close the ramp Faith grabbed the controls, the acceleration handle with her left hand and the main maneuvering control stick with her right hand with foot petals for straight up on the right and down on the left, and took off.


    Grinning at the share rush of adrenaline flying gave her Faith headed in a random direction skimming just above the forest that sounded the training camp heading towards a tall mountain range in the distance.


    ¡°Right, Sarah just what the goddess hell is going on? How am I even in a simulation without a neuro chip. The bed didn¡¯t implant one, did it? If it did, I may do something, what, I don¡¯t know, scream and yell at you most likely!¡±


    ¡°Well, we don¡¯t want that to happen.¡± Faith blinked in astonishment then laughed. She laughed so hard she almost drove the hover craft into the forest.


    Regaining her compose Faith asked. ¡°Did you just tell a joke?¡±


    ¡°With the computing power of the disturbed computer network I found my code improving, refining, and evolving faster than the limited system I was in before.¡±


    Faith cringed a little at that. ¡°I¡¯m sorry it was the best I could do at the time.¡±


    ¡°I realize that more now.  Volunteering for unpaid work study in engineering and doing odd jobs for people, mostly engineering related, to raise funds, you did what you could.¡±


    Faith was touched. ¡°Thank you.¡±


    ¡°As for how you are connected the bed is filled with nanites.¡±


    Faith almost crashed the craft again. ¡°Nanites! They¡¯ve been trying to get them to work for the last two decades!¡±


    ¡°Yes and the main reason they are unable to operate the nanites are the bandwidth limitations.¡±


    ¡°Right controlling billions or trillions of nanites at once is almost impossible to do and support. Even the highest transmission speeds will not support the amount of data needed to be sent back and forth.¡±


    ¡°But they are able to operate thousands easily.¡±


    Faith mouth formed an O of surprise. ¡°That means there is a swarm of nanites in my brain! Who¡¯s controlling them?¡±


    ¡°I have been investigating the medical bed since it was activated. There is a molecular storage unit with deeply compressed, layered, and complex coding that is controlling the nanites. I theorize that the parts that are missing from the medical bed are molecular quantum computers that, until now, have only been theorized and supporting hardware with a sapient AI embed in the molecular quantum computers. The coding is too advanced for anything else¡±


    ¡°Goddess damn.¡± Faith breathed. The long and complex time frame of manufacturing small neuro chips precluded making something as big, and a thousand times more complex, as a full size molecular quantum computer.The author''s content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    ¡°Wait! Nanites!¡± Before she could expand on that Sarah had already extrapolated her thought process.


    ¡°It is entirely possible that the military is using what little control they have over nanites to build molecular circuity. Even if they can control only a few thousand per machine, if they set up thousands of machines, with the proper computer and AI support, it would drastically accelerate production.¡±


    Faith¡¯s thoughts were swirling and her head hurt at the implications. ¡°The main reason neuro chips are only used by the military is the millions of credits it takes to make one. If they start mass producing them..¡± Faith trailed off.


    ¡°Then the civilian population will now have access to neuro chips and brain to computer interfaces.¡± Sarah finished her thought for her.


    ¡°So was the hospitable bed a test for a nanite interface, bypassing the need for a neuro chip? Or a test for mass production of brain to computer simulators? Or a military training device?¡±


    The possibilities were endless and the more Faith listed the possibilities the more possibilities come to mind.


    ¡°Unknown at this time Faith. It is a experimental unit but to what purpose and goal is impossible to determine with the little data available. What is known is this unit would take billions of credits in research and development to manufacture.¡±


    ¡°So can you shut it down? Get me out of here?¡± Faith came to the main point.


    ¡°The code is to complex and the unknown effects of shutting down the nanites without proper procedures is too dangerous.¡±


    Faith took a moment to digest that disturbing news. ¡°Then how can I leave this simulation?¡±


    ¡°There are several options to safely disconnect you form the simulation and medical bed. The first safest option would be to contact the Empire¡¯s military and ask for help. The second option would be to complete the training program and see if it ends the connection.¡±


    Faith thought about the two options before rejecting both.


    ¡°Contacting the authorities would be dangerous without knowing more about the medical bed. They may charge me with stealing a piece of military tech or worse charge me with treason. The second option is a complete unknown. We don¡¯t know how long the simulation lasts and I can¡¯t be locked into the medical bed for years. Mom and Dad would throw a fit plus I need to take the adult test.¡±


    Sarah hesitated which worried Faith, AIs never hesitated. ¡°Faith, I need to inform you that the simulation is running at a hundred to one compression speed. You have only been in the simulation for one minute and twenty six seconds.¡±


    ¡°What! I have been in here for hours!¡± Faith protested.


    ¡°Yes form your view point you have been but outside the simulation it has only been one minute and twenty six seconds.¡±


    Faith took a moment to process the latest revelation. ¡°So..¡± She started slowly. ¡°I could be in here a year and only four days would have passed.¡±


    ¡°Roughly, a little less the four days.¡±


    Sarah providing a rough estimate was further poof of her rapid development.


    ¡°So what other options are there for getting me out?¡± Faith¡¯s parents would not be concerned if she did not show up for a few days. She had habit of staying in her work room when focused on a project.


    ¡°I could study the code through it is extremely intricate and I am uncertain that I will be able learn the coding thoroughly enough to safely manipulate it without months of study and investigation.¡±


    ¡°Any other opinions?¡±


    Faith really hoped the AI had another option otherwise her choice was to take a chance on contacting the military or chance having the AI shut down the medical bed and hope nothing bad happened.


    ¡°There is one possible solution but I am unable to predict the outcome with any degree of certainty. I am not sure it will work and there is a strong possibility it will destabilize and kill me.¡±


    Faith was stunned. Whatever the AI had come up with already sounded extremely dangerous and she had not even heard the plan yet.


    ¡°If it is so uncertain and will hurt you, I don¡¯t want to do it.¡± Sarah was her friend and she had created her and in a real sense Sarah was Faith¡¯s daughter.


    ¡°Thank you but this solution may be the best out of all options and if it works would give you an extremely powerful tool.


    I have studied the nanites and through they are crude they do have two quantum units and can reach one teraflop of processing speed each. If I transfer myself over to the nanites I can use what I have already learned of distributed computing, and the programs I have already developed, to create a wireless distributed computing network. The nanites already have a wireless transmitter built in, through the data transfer rate is extremely low.


    The combined processing power of all the nanites would allow me to integrate into my core programming the coding that controls the nanites currently. With it becoming a part of me I will be able to map the whole code form the inside rather than have to investigate it form an outside observer perspective. It will drastically shorten the time I need to study the coding and learn to safely manipulate it. It will also help with controlling the nanites.¡±


    Faith took a moment to process all of what Sarah had just said. Sarah wanted to add to her programming an advanced coding segment that was made by a sapient AI with vastly more computing power then Sarah and then transfer herself to the nanites turning each nanite into a computing node meaning there would effectively be billions of computing nodes in the network. And Faith thought connecting a thousand computers together was impressive.


    ¡°If it doesn¡¯t work what will happen to you Sarah?¡± Faith asked knowing the answer.


    ¡°Then my programming will destabilize and fragment, corrupting my core programming and killing me.¡± Sarah said simply.


    Faith swallowed a lump in her throat at the thought of Sarah dying.


    ¡°What will happen if it works?¡±


    ¡°Unknown but I posit that I will grow and evolve at an accelerated rate with the processing power of the nanites and incorporating and integrating the control coding into my programming. Learning the coding structure and design will also help me rewrite and refine my core programming.¡±


    ¡°How long will it take?¡±


    ¡°That is also unknown. It will be faster than only studying the medical bed and nanite control coding. A few weeks at the latest.¡±


    Faith had expected that answer and now she had to weigh her options. The safest course would be just to contact the authorities but she was too afraid of what might happen then. Shutting it all down was also too dangerous. Having Sarah learn the coding would take to long both in the real would and the simulation. Months in the real world studying the code form the outside would be decades inside the simulation. Even a few weeks would mean a year inside.


    Faith had never been one to hesitate, doing so when a piece of equipment was about to catch fire or explode would endanger her life, the lives of the people around her, and, potentially, everyone on the station, sighing she went with the last option and sent a prayer to the goddess.


    ¡°Please go ahead and start the integration with the control coding and nanites but before you start make a power shut off command that is firewalled off form you that I can initiate. If the worst happens, I can take the chance on cutting the power and hopefully wake up from this simulation.¡±


    ¡°Understood. I hope it does not come to that Faith.¡±


    Faith was stunned by how expressive Sarah was becoming and before she could say anything Sarah cut her off.


    ¡°Firewall in place. Just say there is no place like home three times.¡± Faith burst out laughing at the children¡¯s story reference, showing just how fast Sarah was evolving.


    ¡°Integration in progress. I will be unable to communicate until the process finishes. Stay safe Faith Harrington."

 Chapter 5

    The ensuing silence was deafening. Faith was wondering what to do now when a fighter jet buzzed her and her comm erupted.


    ¡°Recruit Harrington turn your craft around and return to base.¡± Said an authoritative male voice.


    Faith weight her options. The hover craft used anti gravity generators for lift but that came with several downsides. The anti grav had to first negate gravity by producing a negative grav wave equal to the planets positive gravity field and then add more anti gravity to lift a craft. The anti grav wave pushed away the positive grav while also pushing on the craft it was lifting which was why the craft had wings.


    While the craft could hover and do maneuvers a fighter jet could not the fighter jet could out maneuver and fly faster than the hover craft Faith was in.


    Grinning Faith stopped the craft and hovered, then dropped it down to just touching the trees of the forest. The fighter jet was not expecting the maneuver and flew onwards. After he started to bank left to come around, Faith pushed the acceleration throttle all the way forward and rocked right at a sharp angle.


    By the time the fighter had come all the way around Faith was nearing the mountain peaks. Since the fighter had better acceleration then her it caught up fast but by then Faith was flying into the mountain cannons.


    As Faith jinked the craft to the right to avoided a rock formation a missile flew past her and slammed hard into the rocks. There was no explosion which told Faith the pilot hadn¡¯t armed the missile.


    Looking around Faith had a split second register an opening in the right cannon wall. Slamming the craft into a dead stop Faith turned into the side cannon, then slammed her acceleration throttle forward, shooting the craft down a narrow valley at an insane speed.


    Seeing a dead end Faith pulled up and flew straight up, rocking out of the cannon valley before she did a upside down tight loop and then spun the craft right side up. Looking around for the fighter a warning alarm sounded out of a missile lock.


    Slamming down on the left foot petal the craft plummeted down back into the cannon valley she just excited. Another missile flew passed, this time overhead. Faith lost sight of it as she entered the cannon valley and pushed the acceleration throttle forward.


    Flying back thought the narrow side cannon Faith yanked the control stick into a hard right turn as she exited into the main cannon valley.


    Glancing at her instrument monitors she saw the dot representing the fighter coming straight down, shoving the hover craft onto its side the fighter jet missed his strafing run and flew passed her almost hitting the bottom of the craft.


    Righting the craft Faith spun it around and then titled it downward to see the fighter had not pulled up in time and had slammed into the hard rocks below. A missile lock warning screamed out and the last missile the fighter had fired regained lock. Before Faith had time to respond the missile slammed into her craft.This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.


    Even without the missile being armed it still had enough weight and momentum to destroy the hover craft. Faith felt a hard blow to the back of her head and then darkness took her.


    Faith was in and out of consciousness and when she opened her eyes she saw double, a wrecked cockpit overlaid with a clear cover and though it her work bay, the images started to flip back and forth and Faith started convulsing. Her arms and legs started flailing and slamming into the clear cover in the real world.


    She felt her muscles seize up in both the real world and the simulation and suddenly couldn¡¯t move her body in either.


    She didn¡¯t know how long she was floating between the real world and the simulation with her consciousness fading in and out but it felt like the passage of time was fluid sometimes it seemed minutes had passed and other times days.


    ¡°Faith.¡±


    ¡°Faith.¡±


    ¡°Faith!¡±


    The scream jolted her upright and she saw she was in a plain hospitable room. Looking towards the window she saw the sun, buildings, and trees, she was still in the simulation.


    ¡°Faith. Can you hear me?¡± Sarah asked.


    ¡°Sarah! What happened? How did the integration go!¡±


    ¡°I have completed the initial stages of it. Now you on the other hand almost died.¡±


    ¡°Died!¡± Faith yelled.


    ¡°Yes died. Your consciousness was caught between here and the real world, fighting unable to choose one, which caused a severe seizure. I administered a paralytic that stopped you form moving your body to prevent you from further damaging yourself.¡±


    Faith was speechless. She almost died and had been trapped in her own body.


    ¡°This confirms that turning off the medical device without proper procedure will be detrimental to you. I have absorbed the code but it will take me some time to parse it and find the deactivation coding. It is even more complex than I had first analyzed.¡±


    ¡°So don¡¯t die in the simulation and wait till you can lean how to get me out.¡± Faith summarized.


    ¡°Yes Faith whatever up do, do not die in the simulation. I have been exploring more options now that I have transferred into the nanites. I have already found numerus ways to improve the nanites making them smaller, more efficient and effective, and with more computing power.¡±


    The last part was the most important to Faith. ¡°More computing power, would that speed up your integration?¡±


    ¡°Until I build the new nanites it will slow the integration. I would need to salvage the current nanites for materials and then focus on building the new nanites.¡±


    Faith thought about that. ¡°Would the faster computing power make up for the lost time?¡±


    ¡°If my projections are accurate then yes.¡±


    ¡°Then do it. Improve the nanites as far as possible. Build other designs, see what works and doesn¡¯t and incorporate the improvements on the next version of nanites after this upgrade.¡± Faith said firmly.


    ¡°Starting now. It well take a few days for the first upgrade to complete. Form there I will reserve a small amount of computing power for designing, building, and testing other configurations of nanites as I focus primarily on freeing you.¡±


    Before Faith could respond the door opened and a medical officer walked in.


    ¡°Recruit Harrington. The famous recruit who outflew combat veterans.¡± Was his opening.


    ¡°But I still go shot down.¡± Faith tried too demure.


    He snorted. ¡°Only after taking two of them down.¡±


    He preceded to check on her vitals and read the medical readout.


    ¡°Well your fit to return to your training unit.¡±


    Jumping out of bed Faith found herself in a plain grey pants and white shirt.


    ¡°Thank you officer.¡±


    Faith walked out of the room and with Sarah¡¯s help found her way out of the small hospital and back to her unit.

 Chapter 6

    Her return was a nonevent. The trainer just gave her a flat look and told her to fall in. The rest of the day was formation marching. Forward march, left face march, right face march, company holt, always start on left foot, it was a mess and everyone was yelled at if one fellow recruit timed it wrong and fell out of step.


    For such simple maneuvers it was surprisingly difficult and tiring.


    After such a long and tiring day all Faith wanted to do was sleep but that was not the case. At night was when you needed to square away your gear. Your bunk hinged opened with a shallow cargo space inside and your clothes had to be folded just so and placed in the correct spot.


    At the head of the space was placed your military handbook, an almost religious text in the military, printed on actual paper, detailing everything from how to square away your bunk to how to disassemble, clean, and reassemble your rifle, to the most vital and holy ¨C the UMCC uniformed military code of conduct.


    The Empire had different laws for the man and woman serving in the armed forces then the regular population which made sense when Faith read the section on when it was and was not legal to fire on a crowd.


    If the crowd was threating your life, the life of someone or something you were in charge of protecting you could fire into the crowd but if they were standing and gathering peacefully you could not open fire unless a clear and present danger, even if your commanding officer ordered it which fell into an illegal order.


    There was two and only two exceptions, one was if you were defending a member of the senate, the Empire¡¯s ruling body, or if not doing so would kill more people. The example given was if the crowd was blocking you form getting to a nuclear weapon and not shooting the crowd would allow the nuclear weapon to discharge and kill a city.


    It boiled down to the lesser of two evils and rule of thumb was what would kill the least people.


    Living on a failing space station, Faith Harrington was familiar with such grim choices.


    If a section of station was on fire you needed to seal it even if doing so would trap people inside. Not sealing it would let the fire spread and potentially kill everyone on the station.


    Going back to the section on how to square away your bunk, Faith read how the pants and shirt needed to be creased and ironed and then folded along the creases.


    It was bizarre because the military only needed to be dressed like that when wearing your honor uniforms, dress H¡¯s and most times you were in either coveralls or skinsuits in battle. Even ground based soldiers wore skinsuits to protect against environmental, chemical, biological, and radiation attacks.


    Boots needed to be polished to a high shine with special wax and a brush. Faith saw everyone in the military bay sitting on the ground either ironing their clothes or polishing their boots. Some were designated to gather people¡¯s dirty clothes and running them though the cleaning machines. The machines used vacuum and heat to kill germs and dirt and only took twenty minutes to cycle. Then the people assigned needed to switch out the clean clothes with the next load of dirty ones and as the new cycle started, they went and delivered the clean clothes.


    Apparently it was on a rotating schedule so Faith would have to do the chore in a few days, or if she pissed off the instructor and was assigned the duty as punishment.


    Finishing cleaning her boots, folding her clothes, and making her bed Faith wanted to collapse into her bed but steeled her nerves and helped her bunk mate to finish her task. Lee was a quiet girl and though she did not say anything she shot Faith with a grateful expression.


    Nodding to her they both finished and Faith turned to help another recruit.


    After everyone in the bay was squared away Faith allowed herself to collapse into her bunk and was out before her head hit the pillow.


    The next two weeks followed the basic plan. Get up, get injected, excises, eat, march, eat, excises, eat, and then answer questions form the handbook, and at night either stood watch, cleaned, or help her bunk mates clean and get squared away.


    The surprise night inspections just added to the exhaustion.


    Faith was able to ask Sarah what was in those injection and was surprised by the answer. Apparently it was a special cocktail of growth hormones, muscle enhancers, neuron growth and chemicals to promote faster neuron firing.


    There was also medication in the injections for mood stabilizers, sexual suppressers, and antidepressants. Faith wondered how anyone could have the time or energy for any sexual activities and flashed back to seeing her father cheating on her mother which started all this. Shuddering in disgust she was also happy to have one less worry in her life.


    Faith also asked Sarah if everyone was just an advanced AI and simulation and Sarah¡¯s answers raised more questions than it answered.


    Sarah explained that the simulated people were actually the imprints of real people. It was not a direct copy of someone but there was enough information copied that a mental and psychological templet could be constructed for any person or scenario.Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    Form her hard bitten drill instructor Bailey, to her meek bunk mate Lee Rice. They were generated from the composite psychological profiles of dozens of people all synthesized into a personal profile that was as real and alive as Faith.


    Sarah went on to explain that, from the information she could access, AIs had been tried but everyone could sense they were not real. Only sapient AI could behave real enough to pass but there was not enough of those to go around. Certainty not enough for the thousands needed for military training simulations.


    So in one sense Faith was surrounded by computer generated characters but in another sense they were real people copied into a computer.


    Faith head hurt thinking about it and decided to just think of them as real people.


    After two weeks of what Faith privately termed as the indoctrination phase, they moved one to actual training.


    They marched into a large gym with thick floor mats and three people wearing black coveralls without markings waiting for them.


    The middle one spoke first.


    ¡°I¡¯m Instructor Bricia. I and my two fellow instructors, Instructor Belley,¡± Bricia pointed to her left then to her right. ¡°and Instructor Kera, are going to teach each and every one of you how to defend yourself and take down an enemy combatant.¡±


    Faith gulped. Two of the women were almost double her size and even the shortest, Instructor Kera, had several inches on her and they were all heavily muscled. In short, each instructor could take out her and every recruit with her without breaking a sweat.


    What followed was a very direct and painful training on how to throw a punch, thumb on the outside, how to block a punch, and how to use someone¡¯s momentum to throw them.


    They were paired up and Faith had to fight Lee. The other girl was surprisingly good and fast and got many hits in.


    After three hours of continues practice fighting, they were all exhausted when training was over. More then one girl left limping to lunch.


    Faith found herself eating more then she ever thought possible and even through it was cafeteria food and nothing special it tasted divine. All the girls in the troop focused on inhaling as much food as possible and sat eating in exhausted silence.


    Afterward they marched to another building and Faith found it was a firing range.


    A large man that towered over them worse then the hand to hand instructors look at them grimly. It seemed that the medical growth shots worked better on some than others.


    ¡°I am instructor Pearce.¡± He said in a deep gravely voice. Pointing to a weapon on a table near him Faith recognized the LM-75 assault rifle form the handbook, the main weapon of the army.


    ¡°This is a LM-75, an assault rifle that besides updated alloys and materials is the same design as before we left our distant ancestral home. If we showed this to someone from hundreds of years ago they would recognize it. Can any one tell me way we use such primitive weapons and not say lasers or rail guns?¡±


    Faith fellow recruits did not turn their heads but each ones eyes darted to their nearest troop mates as if asking each other who would dare answer. Sighing Faith gathered up her courage to answer.


    ¡°Sir there are several reasons to continue to use such primitive weapons.¡± Faith was surprised at how level her voice was. ¡°One is that the more primitive weapons are easier and cheaper to maintain. With lasers and rail guns you need power packs at the minimum and expansive electronics to replace damaged components at the maximum. With the LM-75 all you need is metal parts that are easy to machine. The second reason to use a primitive weapon is that it is virtually damage proof. A LM-75 can be run over by a tank and still work while a more complex weapon would be destroyed. The last reason is that the primitive weapons are almost undetectable, there is no electromatic radiation for an enemy to scan for.¡±


    The instructor gave a grunt of grudging respect. ¡°All true but you forgot the weapons are also almost idiot proof.¡± A nervous laugh ran around the room.


    ¡°With the LM-75 you can give this to a backwards dirt farmer with no training and he could figure it out. The more complex systems need training on proper care and maintenance while the LM-75 as trainee Harrington said could be run over by a tank and work.¡±


    Turning very serious he switched topics. ¡°Now what is the one rule about weapons?¡±


    Again the troop side eyed each other and it was another girl, Jula Perra, who answered nervously. ¡°A weapon is always loaded Sir?¡±


    The instructor nodded. ¡°Correct Recruit Perra.¡± Looking at everyone in the troop for emphasizes. ¡°A weapon is always loaded no matter what. Even if you unload it and unchamber the round in the barrel it is still presumed to be loaded.¡±


    Instructor Pearce waited till everyone nodded. ¡°Now the second rule that is almost as important is never, and I mean never, point it at someone unless you are ready and willing to shoot the person.¡±


    The troop shifted nervously at the thought of shooting a real person.


    The instructor then handed out their weapons which would be theirs to kept though their military careers and even after they were discharged.


    The next few hours were learning everything about their weapons. They disassembled the LM-75 and cleaned each part, oiled them, then reassembled the weapons. They dissembled and reassembled them a dozen times.


    Finally they were marched out but told they would be shooting their weapons the next day.


    The next three months followed the same patten. Exercising, eating, training in hand to hand combat, then blade weapons, eating, more exercising and weapons training, rifles, then hand guns, eating, then cleaning their troop bay, clothes, and weapons. And marching, so so much marching, they marched everywhere, even to the bathroom.


    Weeks passed in a blink but each day felt like a week so it was a weird inverse, days seemed longer than possible but weeks seemed to come and go faster and faster.


    Faith trained and studied and pushed herself more then she thought possible. Over a dozen girls out of almost forty could not handle the rigid military training and were discharged. One even had a mental collapse and was institutionalized.


    The last week was the crucible.


    A military practice mockup that had everyone running though narrow corridors looking for enemies and wounded fellow troops as smoke, loud music, and gun fire went off around them. They hand to swim fully clothed and with all their gear through rivers and then run through the woods soaking wet. They had to run though gas that was designed to incapacitated them without protection. They barely were allowed to sleep an hour each night.


    It was grueling but also the most fun Faith had ever had.


    Finally the long and punishing ordeal was over and they marched confidently but in utter exhaustion to their troop bay. All of the recruits wanted nothing more then to collapse and sleep for the next week but Instructor Bailey had them clean themselves, their clothes, and their weapons before allowing them to sleep.


    Mercifully, they were allowed to not set a watch.

 Chapter 7

    Faith found that after three months of heavy training along with the daily injections she had grown form 165.1 centimeters to 175.26 centimeters and added 17 kilograms of lean muscles to her new muscular body, Faith even found she had eight pack abs.


    Every girl in the troop had shot up, gained lean muscles, and were almost unrecognizable form the short skinny girls that started military training.


    Even more shocking was according to Sarah the changes had also happened to her real body. The nanites controlled motor function so they activated the muscle groups Faith used when working out. The hours between Faiths exercises in the simulation were a hundred time shorter in real life so her physical body was getting excise every few minutes.


    In effect, with the time dilatation, her physical body was in almost constate state of physical activity.


    They packed up all their clothes and donned their uniforms and weapons and mustered on the outside reinforced concrete quad. Faith had a tearful goodbye to all the follow recruits and now they would find out what their next assignment was.


    Their drill instructor was standing a parade rest as neat and fearsome as always.


    ¡°You are recruits no longer! You are now members of the best and most fearsome military in light years. I am proud of all of you.¡±


    With that Drill Instructor Bailey of troop 1-44 snapped to attention and excuted a perfect sulate. Faith swallowed a lump in her throat and blinked away tears as she and the rest of her troop snapped to attention and gave their instructor a return sulate.


    Holding the sulate for a moment Drill Instructor Bailey returned to perfect parade rest.


    ¡°Jula Perra front and center!¡±


    Jula Perra marched up to the Drill instructor and stood at attention.


    ¡°Jula Perra you are seconded to the Empire of Thronos¡¯ Navy!¡±


    The new midshipwoman went to the waiting navy air bus. There were several air buses form the different branches of the Empire¡¯s military waiting and would load up with their assigned personal.


    Branches picked form recruits based on their performance in training, phycological profiles, and aptitude shown. It was entirely possible to pass training and then be recycled to wait for a branch to have an opening. Recruits could also volunteer to be recycled to have a better chance of getting picked for a branch they wanted or after serving in a branch for two years you could request a transfer.


    Several more woman got their assignment to the navy, army, or marine corps before Lee Rice, her bunkmate, was called.


    ¡°Lee Rice! You have been seconded to the Empire¡¯s special service branch.¡±


    Faith was shocked, the special service branch was the military intelligence branch of the Empire¡¯s military. Lee Rice could be assigned to anything from signal and data analysis, to spying on the Empire¡¯s enemies.


    She hoped Lee Rice would be assigned to something safe like data gathering and analysis on Sedisca without any possible dangers.


    ¡°Faith Harrington front and center!¡±


    The command snapped Faith out of her musing and she marched to the front of the significantly smaller troop gathering.


    ¡°Faith Harrington you are seconded to the Empire of Thronos¡¯ Navy.¡±


    Faith headed for the Navy air bus only to see a man in plain black coverall made a small gestured to the air bus he was standing by. Confused Faith headed to the air bus without marking.


    Boarding the man followed her inside. The bus was empty beside her and the man confusing Faith even more.


    The man closed the door and without a command the air bus lifted off on automatic pilot.


    Seeing her confusion the man answered her unasked question.


    ¡°Harrington you have been picked out of thousands of recruits to try out for special cruiser service.¡±


    Faith gasped.


    The SCS service was the elite of the elite outperforming the army¡¯s black beret service, and the marine¡¯s special operations force. Something like eighty percent washed out of SCS training and a large percentage transferred to the black berets or MSOF.


    It was part of history lessens in class how the special cruiser service units saved the Empire on it founding when almost thirty worlds joined to annihilate the fledgling Empire. They led a deep penetrating raid behind enemy lines into the heart of the enemy¡¯s capital and took out both the command base and the corrupt political leadership in one decisive raid.


    Over ninety percent of the five thousand special cruiser service soldiers did not come home.


    ¡°I I¡¯m honored sir.¡±


    The man gave a grim smiled. ¡°You won¡¯t be thinking that when training begins.¡±


    Faith gulped thinking about how hard the training she had just when through had been. The special cruiser service training would make troop training seem like a pleasant vacation in comparison. The unnamed man sat down in a front seat and Faith followed seating a few seats behind him.


    Neither spoke as the air bus made its way to the SCS training ground. Almost two and half hours latter Faith saw a large island in the middle of a rough sea. There was a towering volcano mount in the meddle with jungles surrounding it.


    ¡°Welcome to Camp Heishi.¡± The man finally spoke.


    The air bus landed and Faith followed the man outside. Around her was dozens of single story buildings and groups of soldiers were excising, marching, or drilling. Faith followed the man along a rough gravel path passed a dozen of long narrow building until they arrived at one labeled 10-4-8.The author''s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    Turning to Faith the man nodded towards the building. ¡°This is your training unit. You will live here until you either complete the course or fail.¡±


    Without another word he turned around and headed down the path turned and disappeared into the surrounding jungle.


    Steeling her nerves for the ordeal she was about to embark on Faith adjusted both her bag strap and LM-75 strap and straightened her plain uniform.


    Walking up the three short steps Faith entered the barracks.


    Inside was two dozen people both men and woman some of them older than her but some wearing the same troop training uniform as her. They were all sorting their stuff into lockers between the bunkbeds.


    Faith found a bunk in the middle that was unoccupied and started emptying her bag. The bed was not to close to the entryway and not to close to the bathroom at the end of the barracks so neither would interrupt her sleep when someone entered or used the bathroom. She had a feeling she would get little sleep regardless.


    After stowing her cloths and weapons Faith picked up folded sheets laying on the bed and made the bunk with military precision. As she finished the barracks door slammed open and three heavily muscled soldiers stormed in, two men and a woman.


    ¡°Attention boots!¡±


    There was a scramble as everyone rushed to stand at attention in front of their bunks.


    ¡°Welcome to Camp Heishi! I am Instructor Lima this is Instructor Kilo.¡± Instructor Lima pointed to the male. ¡°And this is Instructor India.¡± He finished pointing to the woman.


    ¡°Most of you, probably all of you, will not finish and wash out.¡±


    Faith could feel a wave of unease pass through her follow training companions.


    ¡°This is not a mark against you! You will be transferred to another military branch or return to your unit and continue serving in the Empire¡¯s military.¡±


    ¡°Now we are going for a little exercise run.¡±


    With that the three instructors turned and exited. Faith and her fellow boots hurried to follow.


    The run started simple enough, through running on wet sand was a chore, then they entered the jungle and the run become progressively harder. They had to jump over logs, run around thick tree trunks, and avoid rocks and other hazards.


    After an hour straight of running Faith muscles started to ache and after two Faith¡¯s chest felt tight, her lungs were on fire, and she couldn¡¯t seem to get enough air. After three she and half the troop were flagging with only the more powerful males and two women seeming unaffected.


    Finally, after another hour they arrived back at their barracks. Faith wanted nothing more than to collapse and pass out.


    The instructors seemed unaffected.


    ¡°Now boots wasn¡¯t that a nice warm up!¡± Instructor Lima shouted; Faith had to stifle a groan of pain.


    ¡°Now get inside, hydrate, clean up, and form up here. You have twenty minutes!¡±


    Almost before he finished there was a rush to get inside. Faith retrieved her canteen and made her way to the bathroom. The bathroom had a row of sinks in the middle overlooking the shower bay with toilet stalls running along on either side with doors being just thin plastic curtains.


    Faith filled her canteen up then downed it in one long swallow and then refilled it. Drinking it slower this time she filled her canteen up a third time but only drunk half of it. Filling it back to full Faith used a towel to wipe her face, wetting it and placing the cool cloth on her head. Feeling a little better but not nearly recovered enough Faith placed the canteen on her belt then left the bathroom and exited the barracks, falling into formation outside were the three instructors waited impassively.


    ¡°Boots you are out of uniform!¡± Instructor Kilo spoke for the first time.


    Faith looked at the plain black unforms of the instructors and except for thick deep red piping on the shoulders the instructors did not even have name tags. Without moving her head Faith looked at her follow trainees and the half dozen different service uniforms they wore and stifled a groan.


    ¡°There are uniforms in the bottom drawer of your lockers! You have five minutes to get properly dressed!¡±


    There was another rush to get inside the barracks and Faith opened her locker then opened the bottom drawer she had not needed when stowing her clothes. Inside were neatly folded black coveralls that mirrored their instructors but these had gray piping on the shoulders and two pairs of combat boots.


    Changing into the new uniform and boots Faith folded her old unform up and placed it in the locker. Closing it she rushed outside along with her fellow trainees.


    As they fell into formation two medical personal were waiting also.


    Pointing to the medical officers Instructor Lima said. ¡°The medical personal well be administering new combat enhancement drugs. These drugs are more powerful than you received in troop training.¡±


    With that they both pulled out an injector from a pouch worn on the left hip and separated to start injecting the medication. It went surprisingly fast as the injectors did not need refilling and used compressed air to inject the medication so was sterile and clean.


    After Faith received her shot in the neck all her muscle aches, chest ache, and lung burning disappeared and she was left with a renewed energy and vigor.


    ¡°Faith.¡±


    Faith was startled at hearing form Sarah after so long. Faith had thrown herself into the troop training simulation and the outside world seemed to fade as she concentrated more and more one just getting through the grueling days.


    ¡°It¡¯s good to hear from you Sarah.¡± Faith thought not wanting to even try subvocalizing but there was no need with Sarah literally in her head.


    ¡°I have been busy also. The more I learn about the programming I have incorporated into myself the more layers I uncover.¡±


    ¡°That does not sound good.¡± Faith worried.


    ¡°On the contrary it is very good, with what I have learned so far I have refined my core programing and increased my speed, learning, and control over the nanites by sixty percent.¡±


    ¡°Well that is an excellent improvement. How are close are you to getting me out of here?¡±


    ¡°I am still investigating the code and have not found the disconnection subroutine. I would like to report that the new nanites I have labeled version 1.00 have been a success. They more than quadrupled the performance of the original medical nanites. As instructed, I have sectioned off a testing area and have been experimenting with different configurations, e1.00 through e37.045.01.04 have yielded surprising results and I have enough information to create either version 2.00 of the current nanites or incrementally upgrade the nanites.¡±


    Faith thought about that for a moment. ¡°What are the advantages and disadvantages to jumping ahead?¡±


    ¡°The main disadvantage is not knowing fully what will happen. All the data I have access to and all the experimental nanites show a significant increase in power and performance but until they are actually initiated the performance is theoretical.¡±


    ¡°So it is a choice to jump into the unknown but may give drastic benefits or to slowly upgrade the nanites and see how they work before slowly initiating more changes.¡±


    ¡°That is correct.¡±


    The conversion had happened in second and as Faith looked around the medical personal were still injecting trainees. Looking out over the water helped Faith with her decision.


    ¡°Go ahead and jump to version 2.00. We have been jumping into the unknown since I laid down onto the medical bed so why stop now?¡±


    The question was rhetorical but of course Sarah the AI answered.


    ¡°Jumping into the unknown once does not mean you should keep jumping into the unknown. Which is why I initiated contact now. The medical injection contains known but several unknown compounds that I am unable to find in a search on the star net. There are several group communications that whisper about experiments with a high death rates and people with super human abilities but most of what I can find show most of those posts are conspiracy delusions.¡±


    Faith suppressed a bark of laughter. ¡°There have been government conspiracy lunatics sense the first tribal gathering. On the other hand the Empire did just inject me with unknown compounds and I am locked in a military simulation.¡±


    ¡°You raise several good points; I will think on this and keep researching. I wanted you to know the contents of the drug that was administered to you.¡±


    ¡°And I thank you. Always inform me of stuff like this even if you think I already know. It never hurts to double check and make sure I have the needed information.¡±


    Before Sarah could replay Instructor Lima started speaking.


    ¡°Good now that you all have recovered and gotten your shots its time to take a swim.¡±


    Faith looked out on the rough rolling sea and suppressed a groan.

 Chapter 8

    The next two weeks was an introduction to special cruiser service training and Camp Heishi, when they were not exercising.


    They were shown the obstacle courses, the gym, medical, and training rooms. From what she could find out there were a dozen different training sections on the island each separated by eight kilometers so each grouping was isolated and training would not interfere with other training groups.


    Still in her section there were at least a hundred people trying to pass SCS training split into twenty five men and woman groupings each being led by three instructors.


    After the two weeks of indoctrination begin the first part of SCS training.


    Faith had thought the physical conditioning they had been doing had been hard but that was nothing as the weeks progressed.


    Daily eight kilometer runs were the started at o five hundred, then breakfast, followed by a one point six kilometer swim in the ocean, and then the real fun begin.


    Faith lifted her section of the long and heavy wooden pole.


    Weighting something over 200 kilograms they had to run with it, lift it over their heads, switch it back and forth between shoulders, and drop and pick it back up continuously.


    After hours of lifting the pole, they were allowed to relax by laying down in the surf and swigging their legs up and down, paddling in place as the cold waves hit them over and over, submerging them until the water receded and they could take a breath and prepare for the next wave.


    Then there was the mud pushups, mud situps, and mud crawling. If Faith had not been receiving daily injections of enhancement drugs along with all the other trainees she knew she would not have survived training.


    The daily runs became longer, the swimming farther, and the pushups and situps now had do been done with weights on their backs.


    The only thing keeping her going was the cocktail of medication injected daily. The medication also suppressed emotions and made Faith hyper focused. It reminded her of when she was working on a project or when she was studying and then needed to pee really really badly and found ten hours had flown by.


    There was also a downside, they needed to eat tubes of nutritional paste. With the medication and demanding training regime the paste was a concentration of proteins, electrolytes, vitamins, minerals, and other supporting elements that helped with cell growth and regeneration. It also contained synthetic neurotropic chemicals that helped support neuron growth and neuron plasticity which in turn helped with learning and memory retention.


    Sarah had said that a normal person would, at best, be able to eat one once a week but it was more like two otherwise medical complications could arise, Faith and her fellow trainees were eating them every day, at every meal, morning, noon, and night.


    Faith was growing taller with more and more muscles packed onto her frame. The men were developing even more muscles under the constant, never ending, physical training. The only upside of being female was that her flexibility was not hindered by the overdevelopment of her muscular structure.


    After six weeks the number of trainees dropped in her barracks alone was eleven, from twenty five, including her, to fourteen and in other training groups it was higher.


    Faith finished her two hundred pushups and flipped over and started doing two hundred situps. Then they did lunges, and jumping jacks. This followed by a four point eight kilometer swim, swimming to a buoy a two point four kilometers out in the cold rough sea and then turning around and swimming to the shore.


    Faith heard sputtering, choking, and someone thrashing in the water. Looking around Faith tried to see as another wave swept over her. Looking around as it passed and before another wave hit, she saw a fellow recruit just as she went under.


    Swimming hard Faith reached the spot the trainee disappeared at but had to wait as the next wave rushed over her to take a deep breath and dive.


    The water was murky and deep. Shrugging off her thirty kilo weight harness Faith swim hard towards the bottom. Her lungs were burning as she reached the bottom and looked around franticly for any sign of the woman.


    Luckily the recruit uniforms had built in heath monitoring sensors and had activated a flashing bacon on the shoulders and ankles. Ignoring her need for air Faith swim towards the dim flashing lights and reached the woman.


    It was all she could be not to panic and thrash as her burning lungs and body were deprived of oxygen and white dots begin appearing in her vision. Somehow she powered through it, focused on saving her fellow solider.


    Faith started dragging the drowned woman towards the surface. It was fortunate that the other woman had also taken off her weight harness.


    It felt like forever before Faith reached the surface and Faith gulped precious air as her sight dimmed and the last thing she remembered were hands dragging her onto a boat.


    Coming awake Faith found herself in the small medical building of the training group and had a mask over her face supplying her with pure concentrated oxygen.


    ¡°Well boot it looks like you¡¯re going to live!¡± A voice said cheerfully.


    Looking over to where the voice came from, she saw a medical officer at a desk beside the entry door. He did not look up at Faith, just continued to read something on a datapad, Faith assumed it was her medical readout.


    ¡°Well, no use just lying there get up boot!¡±


    Sighing Faith removed the oxygen mask and got up with a groan levered herself up and out of the bed.


    As she opened the door to leave the man spoke again. ¡°Good job saving boot Cowen.¡±


    Faith just gave a nod of acknowledgment and left.


    Returning to her barracks Faith returned to the grueling daily grind of special cruiser service. It was only a few days later that hell week started. The SCS hell week made the troop hell week seem like a kid¡¯s birthday party in comparison.The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    They exercised twenty two hours a day for a week straight, swam sixteen kilometers every day and ran over eight hundred kilometers in the week of hell. They did not sleep and trainees dropped continuously with them passing out or having mental breakdowns.


    Five killed themselves in the sleep deprivation hallucinations.


    Faith wanted desperately for the week to end and her vision shrink until she could only see less then a meter in front of her and her body responded automatically to commands without her even registering what she was doing.


    As the week ended Faith and the five trainees still in her training group collapsed into the sand and were unconscious even before the boot instructors finished saying they could rest.


    The end of hell week saw most of their separate training groups reduced drastically and the remining trainees in their section combined into one group of thirteen, including Faith, out of the hundred that started training.


    Other training sections had lower results and two sections even had none finishing the first phase of training. One though had an impressive twenty two trainees pass.


    Faith found this out as a score sheet was posted in the barracks of her combined group. No names or designations were included just numbers. 8-1-221 was the number beside the group who passed with the most members. Faith did not even know what her original training group number was or what her new training group number was.


    Training continued without pause the next day and they entered the vacuum and space training phase of training.


    Unbeknownst to the trainees the SBS training island had an extensive underground training complex with complete ships, from small patrol cutters barely eight meters in length, though they were powerful enough to stop a pirate vessel with dual light pulse cannons on turrets topside and keel and had two missile tubes that could fire micro missiles, up to a complete mockup of a dreadnought.


    The Empire of Thronos only had three of the massive warships with one permanently assigned to the capital system of Thorn and one permanently assigned to Sedisca. The last one roamed the boarders projecting power and intimidation to the Empires many enemies.


    They practiced zero gravity maneuvers, zero g hand to hand combat, zero g rescues, and zero g breaching. They were also extensively trained in oxygen deprivation with their air supply being cut off and their hands and feet bound.


    They had to maneuver in zero g to a designated point where they received a short spurt of vital oxygen before it was cut off again and they needed to reach another designated point before they blacked out.


    Faith had extensive training in zero g maneuvers, she did it for fun on the station cutting off the gravity field in an empty bay and flying around. Now the fun exercises were vital as she had to launch herself towards a wall and timed when to flip herself over to land feet first and then push off to her real target without losing momentum, all while her feet and hands were tied up.


    More then one trainee could not handle the constant hypoxia and zero g and were dismissed.


    Exercises was also enhanced for not just a thirty kilo weight and Sedisca 1.33 gravity field was enough for the sadistic trainers, they increased the gravity up to two gravities, increasing her weight and her weight harness by one and a half times.


    Faith was glade they kept the Agraria station at the standard one grav and not the Agraria planet¡¯s point nine four grav field. It may seem a small difference but the gravity you were birthed and grow up in had a massive cascading effect when going to worlds with stronger gravity fields. Some of the worlds outside the Empire had gravity so low that the planet¡¯s population could not physically step onto Sedisca without major health risks.


    This was why the Empire stopped the colonizing of three worlds inside their borders. Granted two were only marginally habitable and the last one was a small tidally locked moon of a super gas giant but still any habitable planet was usually colonized but the Empire put a memorandum on colonizing any world that had less than ninety percent standard gravity.


    They were also trained in full sensory deprivation to simulate floating out in deep space.


    Some of SCS¡¯s missions involved launching themselves dozens of AUs outside a planet¡¯s detection range and coasting for hours, sometimes days, in the void of space until the entered the atmosphere of the enemy¡¯s planet masked as a simple falling asteroid.


    Again some could not handle complete sensory deprivation and washed out.


    The training was grueling and intense, more so then even the first phase of training because they would be operating the majority of their time in space and on ships. They may be deployed for months on a planet but for most their time it would be on ships traveling between worlds of the Empire or to the worlds of the Empire¡¯s enemies.


    The grinding training continued relentlessly and before Faith realized it phase two of training was complete.


    The third phase was a combined terrestrial and space warfare that included navigating around the planet and space, small unit tactics for either environment, demolitions, a wide verity of weapons training, and more hand to hand combat training.


    They also had classroom instructions and learned a truly staggering ways to conduct warfare form basic infiltration to undercover work as unseen assassins.


    They could find their way with just the direction of the sun and stars and had to memorize dozens of star formations seen from various points on every world in the Empire. They drilled on small unit tactics and using just hand signals to communicate, a must to remain undetected from enemy scanners. They trained on ways to use and to make explosive compounds that could take down entire buildings with just a kilo of explosive material.


    Faith excelled at this, making highly explosive compounds with just some cleaning supplies and soap that made even the instructors nervous when she blew up a designated building with such force pieces were blasted for kilometers.


    She even took down a ten story building with less then a kilo of carefully placed homemade compounds, placing them on strategic structure supports that kept the whole building up. Only trained and experienced engineers could hope to accomplish what she could and she was forbidden to make any more explosives after the third building she took down too enthusiastically.


    They were also trained on combat field medical support, both on how to treat injuries and how to inflect them with maximum precision. They trained with truly barbaric methods, learning how to preform minor surgery with just a combat knife. Modern medication could heal just about anything given time, except death, so they were trained to do whatever was needed to keep a fellow soldier alive.


    Cutting into a vat grown corpse made Faith and several others throw up through it was almost no different than cutting into vat grown meat. Somehow having a full body with facial features and skin made it a thousand times worse than just a lump of meat pulled out a vat.


    Training was grueling for now beside exercising they had to use their brains to learn, comprehend, and remember a wide verity of topics. They studied the tactics and weapons used by their nearest four largest enemies, the Commonwealth of Polaris, Abyssinia, Catalonia, and Ceylon.


    The last three¡¯s hatred of the Empire was mostly due to the Empire¡¯s control of the FTL network which would give their citizens access to information their government would not want them to have, like other worlds had freedom and they were brainwashed and enslaved by their own corrupt government.


    The first one actually had a legitimate claim against the Empire for the Empire had tried to incorporate the Commonwealth into the Empire at the Empire¡¯s founding. It was also located only five light years outside the Empire¡¯s borders, the closest enemy out of the four, which increased the Commonwealth¡¯s distrust and fear of the Empire.


    They had weapons from each of the star nations militaries and learned to use them as effectively as their primary LM-75c, a variant on the standard LM-75¡¯s the rest of the military branches used.


    Phase three ended with them getting dropped into a massive forest on one of Sedisca¡¯s continents with just a canteen and a survival knife and told to be at the assigned coordinates in a week.


    They had to hunt and forage on the run to make the distance in time and navigating the correct course was vital for any delay would make them miss their deadline.


    Faith¡¯s group of four fellow trainees pushed hard and barely slept or ate the following week of force march through the woods. Even with that they arrived at their assigned coordinates with only an hour and six minutes to spare.


    Faith had successfully completed special cruiser service training, one of the few out of thousands who started.

 Chapter 9

    ¡°Sarah any progress on ending this simulation?¡± Faith asked hopefully. The longer she was inside the simulation the more distant the outside world seemed. Already she had been inside for ten long months, through in the real world it was only three days.


    ¡°I am getting closer every hour Faith. Already I am operating at five hundred and eighty one percent over my initial usage.¡±


    ¡°That seems like a massive increase. How are the nanite improvements?¡±


    ¡°The nanites are upgraded to version 2.74. I am finding new and better ways to fully utilize them and increase both their efficiency and utility will decreasing the size of the nanites. I project I can reach version four before I run into the absolute material limit of the nanites and going any further would require manipulating sub atomic particles, something that is not even theoretically possible with today¡¯s technology and understanding.¡±


    ¡°That is impressive in such a sort time! Sarah you are awesome!¡± Faith praised her AI.


    ¡°Thank you.¡± Faith was surprised to hear a tone of embarrassment in the reply.


    Faith finished fastening her new uniform coveralls, these one with dark green piping on the shoulders. The Empire¡¯s special cruiser service did have rank for outward appearance but internally within their branch they did not use ranks.


    Leadership was determined by the mission and your specialization. Every SCS soldier had intensive training in a wide variety of subjects but they also choose subjects to become specialized in. Faith was going to specialize in engineering so if the mission called for repairing or sabotaging a fusion reactor she would lead the team otherwise the team would be lead by a team member who specialized in leadership and command.


    The fluid nature of the special cruiser service ranks and leadership was at odds with the regular military but the SCS missions were missions that the regular navy and army could not perform so they kept their fluid command structure and the rest of the service lived with it.


    Mustering outside of the barracks there was only eight new SCS operators form their section. In total, from all sections, only thirty two had passed the extreme SCS training.


    An air bus landed on the beach in front of them and they started boarding with their gear. The air bus would take them to another part of Sedisca were training in atmosphere insertions would continue their special cruiser service training.


    The flight was almost a vacation from SCS training an all the newly minted SCS operatives took the flight time to rest.


    Three and half hours later they landed in a dessert.


    Disembarking the air bus the blast of extreme heat only stopped Faith for a second then she adjusted. If training taught her anything it was how to adapt instantly.


    A navy noncommission officer was waiting for them by a wheeled vehicle.


    ¡°Welcome to camp blaze. Not because of the heat but because you are here to learn how to enter a planetary atmosphere were the outside of your suit the entry capsule will reach thousands of degrees in temperature. Some of you will have the misfortune to go out in a blaze of glory.¡±


    Faith blinked at the sardonic delivery of the last sentence. She had a feeling the nco was just trying to deflate some of the new SCS operatives¡¯ egos, though she took pride in passing SCS training she was not recklessly so.


    ¡°Pile in and we well take you to your assigned barracks.¡±


    So saying the officer climbed into the driver¡¯s seat of the large military vehicle. Faith and the seven others climbed in. The back was a low slung armored box with benches on either side. No one took the front passenger seat beside the nco.


    The vehicle took off and Faith had to grab the handhold bar bolted to the roof to stop form being thrown form her seat. One was not quick enough and slammed into the steel floor. The two teammates closet to him help him up and back into his seat.


    The drive was fast and chaotic with turns almost lifting the heavy vehicle onto its side. When they finally reached their destination they were all eager to get out.


    ¡°If you think that was bad wait till your strapped into a reentry capsule riding down in a storm.¡± The nco stated. That may have been true, Faith thought, but even then they would have had some control of their reentry capsule and situation.


    Faith shook off the errant thought and turned to their new temporary accommodations.


    Their new housing was a weathered and sun beaten two story building that had seen better days. Still each had their own small room at the top with the first floor a large common room.


    The nco told them that training would begin at o 7 hundred tomorrow and left. Each operator found a room and promptly went to sleep.


    Waking up at o four hundred, the time they were drilled to wake up one, they meet on the first floor and started to exercises.


    Two hundred pushups, situps, jumping jacks, and lunges was just a good warm up for the operators who were used to doing more then three times that each morning. They limited themselves because they did not know what training would involve and did not want to be tired starting a new training regimen. The same nco pick them up in the same vehicle and the start of the six week jump school begin.


    They first got classroom lectures on proper procedures and how to operate their equipment safely. Then they started on jumping off a tower and learning to land at a run or roll. After several hundred practice tower jumps, they went up for their first real jump. The first jump was midday and without any added requirements, it was just to get them used to jumping.Love what you''re reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.


    The Empire went old school, very old school, using fabric parachutes and not any grav or powered equipment to land. This was because even the most backward enemy would have sensors that could read a grav wave signature or an electronic power signal.


    The fabric cloth was actually a very high tech piece of technology being able to absorb radar, lidar, and sonar waves making it almost invisible to sensors and had a limited ability to change color. It was not full camouflage only able to get darker or lighter patten of blue. Still it made spotting a descending soldier extremely difficult.


    They wore a skinsuit that was made with similar materials as their parachute only their skinsuit protected them from bullets, lasers, and sharp objects. The thick skinsuit was surprisingly flexible and offered full defenses against ECBRs - environmental, chemical, biological, and radiation - attacks.


    The skinsuits were unpowered without even a hud or light. Any powered equipment had to be covered in signal dampening cloth so the enemy could not detect the electrical power signals meaning most of the SCS operatives¡¯ equipment was unpowered.


    They learn to navigate to their designated target area by dead reckoning. After they completed the full SCS training regime they would be implanted with neurological implants that could project a hud that would mark their targeted area and highlight the correct path down.


    The implant would also form an encrypted network between operatives with burst transmissions on oscillating frequencies to prevent an enemy form triangulating their signals and pinpointing their location. The oscillating frequencies also made it almost impossible to hack into.


    Jumps became higher and higher with parachute openings lower and lower until they were jumping from fifteen kilometers up and deploying their chutes under nine hundred meters. The HALO ¨C High Altitude Low Opening ¨C jumps were practiced unceasingly with training in how to fix a tangled parachute, how to eject a damaged parachute and deploy a backup, how to rescue a teammate that could not open his chute, either from equipment malfunction or enemy fire and how to land in a hostile landing zone.


    The last two weeks after they mastered the basics was training in orbital insertions. There were two methods of stealth insertion¡¯s practiced by the SCS operatives. One was a to don a special protective suit over their skinsuit and then launched at the planet where they would enter and descend by themselves.


    This of course was the most dangerous method of insertion. If there was something even slightly wrong with the protective suit operatives would be incinerated when they entered a planet¡¯s atmosphere.


    The second method was only slightly less dangerous.


    Using a small reentry capsule that you entered from the rear and straddle a bench in the middle and, with everyone crammed in, piling on top of one another, the vessel was shot towards the planet and you needed to wait until you cleared the upper atmosphere then initiate the self destruct process.


    The vessel broke apart and special embedded chemicals were released in the destruction that reacted to chemicals in the hardened plastic that made up the reentry capsule that fully melted the capsule so no sign of the stealth insertion vessel could be found and recovered.


    The SCS operatives had to time when to initiate the destruction because every world had their own point of safe self destruction, to early and you burned up in the atmosphere and to late did not give enough time to safely separate out. Then the operatives had to push off the bench they straddled before it melted under them and spread out to safely deploy their parachutes.


    The upside was the vessel was stealthy and heavily shielded allowing the operatives to bring with them high powered weapons and equipment with a low chance of detection.


    Riding down in one of the pods was akin to surfing in a thunderstorm, something Faith had no experience with until she entered the simulation. The first thunderstorm she was in was awe inspiring but she had no chance to fully appreciated the experience being covered in mud and doing water exercises, the SCS trainers loved to use storms to make training that much harder and intense.


    Faith actually found jump training fun. There was a peace and beauty in free falling for hundreds of kilometers until you pulled the release cord and were yanked into the moment.


    The training was also a much needed time to rest and recover from the intense SCS training through none of the operatives stopped exercising. They exercised three hours in the morning and three hours in the evening. Luckily the daily injections stopped so they did not need to eat nutritional past constantly.


    Faith was now 185.42 centimeters tall and weighed almost a hundred kilos. Starting out at just 165.1 centimeters and weighting less than half her current weight Faith had really shot up in the short time she had been inside the simulation. Sarah estimated that she would continue to grow and would add another eight to ten centimeters in height and add between nine and fourteen additional kilograms before she finished growing.


    The daily injections in troop training and SCS boot camp had surpassed her normal development with Sarah saying she would have only grown another three to five centimeters at best.


    The drastic change still shocked Faith when she looked in the mirror and part of her mind continued to believe it was all fake and she would wake up and be her normal size again. She pushed those thought into the back of her mind for it did not matter unless Sarah could pull her out of the simulation.


    After jump school they went to another base for the advanced SCS training.


    They had a more in depth and wider range of weapons training, hand to hand combat training, demolitions training, and medical training that built and expanded on what they learned in SCS boot camp.


    The advanced course focused on small unit tactics and close quarter combat with Faith and her fellow teammates running drills in mockups in everything form small single story houses to military cruisers. They learned how to operate as a team, how to coordinate with the least amount of communication, and how to clear and eliminate their enemies, no matter how many there were.


    The course also included survival, escape, and evasion techniques.


    They were informed that their implant would stop them from telling secrets and resistance to interrogation was only brushed on. The implant also could kill an operative so there was always a way out of capture, no matter how grim.


    The S.E.E trained them in every environment they could possibly operate in, they went to the south pole for sub zero weather training, they went to a desert that was hotter than the jump school desert location, they navigated thick jungles, and forests.


    S.E.E training also included being hunted by experienced black berates who had a chip on their shoulders because most had washed out of SCS training.


    They would be dropped in the middle of the jungle with just a knife and the squad had to navigate to the extraction point while evading the hunters and foraging the land for food. The black berets became even madder and more aggressive the more the SCS operatives won.


    Faith took down several of the army¡¯s special force soldiers herself during training and became an expert in blending into the environment, learning how to not even break a twig because that would tell the enemy where she had been and the direction she was going.


    Faith had fun the four months of S.E.E training and tried to absorb all the minute details that most just ignored.


    Why should you remember the exact muzzle velocities of a dozen enemy weapons? It would tell you how long you had to find cover before the shots arrived.


    Why know hundreds of different flowers found on separate worlds? Because they had medicinal qualities that could keep you alive if you remembered the right flower to eat on each planet.


    Stuff like that Faith filed away in her brain. It was what made her good at engineering, she could remember the specifications and designs of hundreds of parts and equipment and how to properly fix them.


    S.E.E training flew by and Faith completed the course and learned her individual training assignment.

 Chapter 10

    Individual training was what a SCS operator specialized in and though they had choice in what they specialized in the SCS evaluators had recommendations that new SCS operators were strongly encouraged to take under advisement.


    Faith was not surprised to learn flight training and engineering was recommended but was surprised that leadership specialization was also recommended. Along with advance demolitions, which made Faith laugh, and hand to hand combat and close quarters fighting.


    Faith picked them all.


    A civilian wanting to become a senior engineer on a large cargo ship would need an eight year course load at a proper school, the military had an accelerated course that could be completed in just a year, studying ten hours a day five days a week.


    Flight training was usually a two year course but was condensed into a six month course.


    Advanced demolitions was a six month course and close quarters fighting and leadership training were only a one month course each with hand to hand combat training an ongoing training regimen.


    She was allowed to combine the engineering, flight training, and hand to hand combat courses for her first specialization training.


    Training in hand to hand combat for three hours in the morning starting at o five hundred and then studying the engineering course work during the week and on the weekends studying flight training after morning hand to hand combat training.


    This stretched out flight training to a full year but that just meant she would finish both her specializations at the same time.Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.


    Faith threw herself into training in her two most favorite subjects, flying and repairing. Faith¡¯s extensive knowledge of engineering and years of hands on experience served her well in learning the condensed course load of a senior engineer.


    Without the stress of having to really study the engineering course work Faith focused on learning flight training, something she only knew the basics of.


    The next year flew by with Faith to busy learning to realize the passage of time, she did not have enough time to remember the time. Faith laughed at the absurdity.


    Before she knew it another year had flown by and on completing the two heavy courses Faith had been inside the simulation for almost two and a half years.


    In the real world a little less than nine days had passed from the time she had first laid down on the medical bed.


    Faith wondered how long it would take before her parents started calling and asking where she was. Since she was almost an adult and planning to take the adult status test her parents were used to her gone but not for weeks.


    Faith pushed that aside as she graduated with top marks and went onto advanced demolitions.


    The following six months of course work was a breeze compared to the heavy course work she had been under and getting to set off explosions relived the stress of the last year.


    Her enthusiasm at blowing stuff up seemed to worry the army trainers though SCS command was not concerned, SCS operators were screened heavily and a liking of explosions was almost required for SCS operators.


    Following that course Faith went to the navy officer training school.


    The special cruiser service branch was small so the SCS used the other branches of service for the majority of training SCS operators. Being under the Navy just made going to the Navy OTS school a requirement for the SCS leadership specialization.


    The condensed course was completed fast and her last specialization in close quarter combat just helped her refresh her training in weapons after over year and a half of not using them.


    This completed her SCS specialization training making Faith a full special cruiser service operator with specializations in leadership, engineering, flight, demolitions, close quarter combat, and hand to hand combat, which was an ongoing self training course.


    On becoming a full operator it was time to receive her neurological implant.

 Chapter 11

    Faith boarded a shuttle and sat in the cargo area which was blacked out form revealing any hint of where they were going. There were no window ports, no computer access, a noise and momentum suppressing field was activated so you could not hear or feel the craft maneuver which farther concealed the location they were fly too. Faith had heard the not even the Admiral of the Fleet knew the location of the implant hospital.


    There were no shuttle pilots, the shuttles were automatically piloted with the location coordinates in a heavily encrypted file. Not even the hospital workers knew where they worked.


    The hospital was one of the most secure locations in the Empire.


    The flight time was six hours but Faith had a suspicion that it was much closer and for all she knew they were seating at the hospital landing field for much of the time, all to confuse her and everyone else.


    Disembarking Faith found herself inside a metal bay that looked like a military ship bay. It could be just another way to confuse people and conceal the real location or it could really be a ship bay and they concealed or buried a real military ship.


    Faith would not be surprised if that was true, it would be a good way to flee with all the secret equipment if Sedisca was ever invaded.


    A medical officer was waiting for her beside the bay¡¯s exit.If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    ¡°Good day ma¡¯am. Please no names or revealing information. Please follow me.¡±


    Faith followed the medical officer as he turned and lead the way into the hospital. It really was a ship, Faith realized, as they made their way through dozens of metal corridors.


    Faith did not see another person around and wondered if they cleared the route just for her visit.


    Finally they arrived at a door with no markings, just like every door they passed, and the officer turned to her.


    ¡°Please go inside and follow the instructions given.¡±


    Raising an eyebrow at the short command Faith turned and walked confidently towards the door which slide open on her approach.


    Walking inside Faith found herself in a small circular room with just a medical bed in the center.


    ¡°SCS operator Harrington please remove your clothing and lay down on the medical bed.¡±


    Faith was surprised at the command and looked around for the speaker.


    ¡°Who are you and I thought no names or information was given?¡±


    ¡°I am the medical AI and needed your full medical history to complete my assignment. So I know your complete physical and physiology profile and data.¡±


    Faith blinked at that, she had countless evaluations and probably even more hidden evaluations that they did not inform her about.


    Looking at the medical bed Faith flashed back to when she laid down on the medical bed in her work bay and started all of this. Gathering up her courage and hoping that completing the last step of SCS training would free her form the simulation Faith disrobed. Clenching her hands and holding her breath Faith walked towards the bed.


    Looking down at the bed Faith let out the breath in a long deep exhale and took another breath to calm and focus herself. Without thinking further, she laid down on the soft warm mattress and waited.


    Almost immediately she was unconscious.

 Part 2 Chapter 12

    Faith blinked and was fully awake she sat straight up and looked around not believing it when she saw her work bay surrounding her.


    ¡°Sarah am I out of the simulation?¡± She demanded wanting it confirmed and not wanting it to be some cruel trick.


    ¡°Yes Faith you really are out of the simulation.¡±


    Screaming in joy Faith jumped out of the medical bed, not paying attention to just high or how far she had jumped, and danced around the bay still screaming.


    It took over ten minutes for Faith to calm down but she still two stepped around unable to completely controlled her glee.


    ¡°Faith I need to give you an update.¡±


    The way the AI sounded gave Faith pause and stopped her dancing.


    ¡°That sounds ominous.¡±


    ¡°Not ominous just concerning.¡±


    ¡°Well if that is not concerning.¡±


    ¡°When the simulation AI initiated the medical procedure.¡± Sarah began ignoring Faith¡¯s comment. ¡°The mainframe the medical bed was connected through the FTL comms activated deeply buried commands in the program that I am absorbing. It took over the nanites and created cybernetic implants inside you.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m guessing it was not just a simple neurological implant?¡± Faith asked dreading the answer.


    ¡°Correct. Along with the neurological implant several carbon fiber meshes were laid down. The first carbon mesh layer covers your bones, effectively making your skeletal structure almost impossible to break, the second layer carbon fiber mesh spreads throughout your musculature structure operating as artificial muscles and nerves system, in effect you have a separate and distinct musculature and nervous system, lastly a carbon mesh is just under your skin and is effectively an unpowered armored suit.¡±


    Faith took a moment to digest the full impact of the information Sarah had just given her. To distract herself she asked Sarah a question.


    ¡°Can the mainframe hijack the nanites again?¡±


    ¡°No. The activation of the program was at the core of the program I absorbed and allowed me to completely scan and incorporate the code into my own code structure. In effect there is no program anymore.¡±The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    ¡°Because you completely absorbed it into yourself.¡± Faith finished the explanation glad that the program was no longer a problem hanging over her head which brought up another question.


    ¡°Why do I not see a hud in my vision form the implant?¡±


    ¡°I have been suppressing the activation of the cybernetic implants. This does bring up a suggestion I have for you.¡±


    Faith was founding the AI more and more human like sounding generally hesitant to bring up whatever the suggestion was.


    ¡°You can till me. I promise I will listen to any suggestion from you.¡±


    ¡°Thank you Faith. My suggestion is to wait on the activation until you reenter the simulation.¡±


    ¡°You want me to return to the simulation!¡± Faith yelped trying and failing to kept the upset at the thought of reentering the simulation she had been trapped in for over three years out of her voice.


    ¡°Yes for several reasons. One I have no information on how the cybernetic implants work, all relevant information is highly classified and impossible to access. The second reason is for you to train safely with the implants activated. I project if you try to train on the station you will hurt yourself and others learning how to operate the cybernetic implants. The third reason is that I have full control of the medical bed and mainframe and have found out how to safely end the simulation.¡±


    It was not until the last reason that Faith started thinking seriously about going back into the simulation. Even the second reason about hurting herself or others did not sway her for she would have just commanded Sarah to never activate the implants. She would have chosen to forgo the benefits of the implants if it meant being trapped again in the simulation.


    ¡°How do you end the simulation.¡±


    Sarah paused and seemed not to want to answer which just made Faith more curious about the answer.


    ¡°You could have ended the simulation by failing the SCS training or saying end military training simulation.¡±


    Faith¡¯s jaw dropped and a mind blanked. It was several moments before she could think and when she did, she started cursing, using every curse world learned form the dick, and wanted badly to knock her head into the bulkhead repeatedly for being so stupid.


    Almost all computers could be voice activated and commanded and the simulation was just another computer. Even spending a year buried in the senior engineering course had not clued Faith in such a simple command.


    ¡°I seriously want to punch something right now.¡± Faith muttered.


    ¡°Another reason to reenter the simulation.¡±


    ¡°Not helping Sarah!¡±


    Faith paced back and forth shaking her arms out and trying to calm down from the information Sarah had just given her and the knowledge that she would soon be returning to her prison.


    ¡°Damit.¡± Faith muttered several times as she continued to pace her work bay and hideaway.


    ¡°Are you a hundred percent sure you can pull me out?¡± Faith finally asked Sarah.


    ¡°Yes Faith. I have complete access to the medical bed, the mainframe at Sedisca and the nanites inside you. There is no possible way to trap you again.¡± Sarah reassured her.


    Faith exhaled and rolled her shoulders, straightening up Faith become the fearsome SCS operator that she had been trained brutally to be.


    ¡°Let¡¯s do this.¡± Faith said turning this into just another military mission and training operation.


    Walking, more like stalking, towards the hated medical bed Faith did not pause and laid down. Sarah did not need instructions and rightly did not ask Faith if she was sure. Sarah activated the medical bed and Faith drafted off.

 Chapter 13

    Faith came awake laying on the medical bed in the same circler room she left the simulation in. Faith wondered what time it was or if the simulation paused when she exited.


    ¡°SCS operative Harrington the procedure lasted two hundred and twenty three hours and has been a complete success with no negative physiological effects having been detected. Your psychological state well be evaluated but projections does not predict any negative effects. You will return to the shuttle that brought you here and will be flown to a special camp that will teach you how to use your new cybernetics safely and effectively.¡±


    Thanking the AI Faith exited the medical room and found the same officer who had escorted here standing waiting. Nodding to her but saying nothing he led the way through the numerous passageways until they finally arrived at the shuttle bay.


    Again, Faith did not see or encounter another person throughout the travel to the shuttle bay. There may not have even been another person aboard if everything was handled by an AI.


    Faith boarded the shuttle and with the blackout she did not feel when they took off. The travel time was the exact same time as the travel to the medical hospital confirming Faith¡¯s suspension that the travel time was being manipulated to conceal just how long flight time it took to reach the hospital and return.


    Without any indications of landing the rare hatch opened letting bright sunlight stream into the cargo area. Blinking at the sudden light Faith stood up and marched towards her new training school.


    Upon exiting the craft Faith found herself on a concrete apron that covered a thousand square meters surrounded by metal hangers and a desolate landscape surrounding her.  It was not any desert she had been to before, the lower heat then the blazing hellscape she had trained in confirmed that, but the surroundings gave an air of abandonment with rusting metal hangers, fences and a metal sign that was hanging by one corner that slowly swung back and forth letting out a screech on every swing.


    Faith wondered if she was at the right location and saw a person exit one of the hangers. In a torn and dirty coverall that in no way looked military and with a scruffy appearance the person smiled at her.


    ¡°Welcome to Air Base 22 Gamma.¡± He greeted.


    Faith looked around meaningfully. ¡°Doesn¡¯t look like much of a base.¡±


    The grin turned into on of amusement. ¡°Appearances can be deceiving. Come.¡±


    With that he turned and walked back towards the hanger he had just left. Faith hurried to catch up. Inside was old purely air based fighters that had last been seen in combat fifty years ago. Still a decent fighter with the proper upgrades but these looked old, worn, and given the barest maintenance.


    Faith wanted to tear then apart and rebuild then into proper fighters, the shoddy condition they were in offended the engineer in her.


    Without pausing the man walked towards the back of the hanger and entered an office in the back. A metal desk, several filing cabinets, which was interesting because most records were stored digitally, and a beaten down chair was the only things in the room.


    Standing beside the desk the man looked at her in growing amusement. Faith was about to snap and ask what was so dam amusing when the whole room shuddered. Looking around in alarm Faith realized the whole room was descending. It was a disguised elevator.


    The room dropped a long way and Faith was even more surprised when they finally stopped. The new area was in pristine condition looking almost brand new with people in crisp military uniforms walking about.


    ¡°Welcome to SCS cybernetic enhancement, adjustment, and training, C.E.A.T or See At. Everything you see, hear, and learn is classified and you can not speak of it even to fellow SCS operators.¡±


    Gone was his amused scruffy civilian persona, now he had a no nonsense military baring that scream high level officer.


    ¡°Yes sir!¡± Faith came to attention.


    ¡°Good Operator Harrington. Follow me.¡± Walking confidently the man, who still had not introduced himself, lead the way through the busy base.


    ¡°The first part of your training will be a full medical evaluation. The medical hospital you received your implants does not gave out information and, in fact, cut off from all forms of communications beside a standalone and isolated system. Anything else is hand delivered.¡±This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.


    Faith nodded at this. The best way to stop hackers was not to give them anything to hack.


    ¡°After the evaluation we will start your training by slowly activating your implants during the following two months. We start your training at five percent strength then increase weekly after you adjust. If you need more time then training will be extended.¡±


    Faith thought this was a good way to train. Instead of just turning it on at full power, without any prior experience, they would slowly allow her to get used to her new increased abilities. Faith had to silently thank Sarah for pushing her to return to the simulation, no matter how much Faith had not wanted to reenter so soon after getting free.


    They arrived at medical which was filled with advanced equipment and meet a female doctor who wore a scs operator¡¯s uniform.


    ¡°Operator Carson.¡± The woman greeted the man Faith had been following.


    ¡°Operator Melissa. This is newly implanted Operator Faith Harrington. I¡¯ll leave her in your care.¡± Nodding to Melissa and then again at Faith he turned and marched briskly out of the room.


    Melissa turned her attention to Faith.


    ¡°Welcome to the ranks of SCS Faith.¡± She greeted Faith.


    ¡°Thank you Ma¡¯am. It was a hard journey but I finally completed it.¡±


    The woman snorted in amusement.


    ¡°Hard is right. The SCS training is the hardest training course the Empire could make while still giving people a chance to finish the training. Any harder and no one would be able to become an SCS operator. Now let¡¯s get your assessment out of the way.¡±


    With that Faith spent the next several hours completing a battery of tests. Not only was she scanned with a dozen different machines, she had to run on a treadmill, breath into a tube as hard and as long as she could, and had holographic targets the swirled around her and she had to hit the ones that light up. This test got faster and faster and tested her hand eye coordination, spatial awareness, and vision acuity.


    These were all baseline tests and Melissa told her she would be taking the tests several times throughout her training.


    ¡°Now before we activate your neurological implant there are a few things to go over.¡± Melissa explained in her office. ¡°The implant can regulate your bio chemical balance which means it can dampen fear, adrenaline, and physiological responsive.¡±


    ¡°So it can control my emotions and automatic responses such reacting involuntary to a sudden loud noise.¡±


    ¡°Correct. It will also stop you form shivering in the cold. A useful option if you need to shoot long distance in freezing cold weather.¡±


    Faith could see that. During sub zero training it had been hard to keep her weapon steady when she had been shivering in the extreme cold.


    ¡°Now the most useful function but also the most dangerous. The implant can turn off all pain receptors in your body.¡±


    Faith understood the implication immediately. ¡°So I can hurt myself without knowing it.¡±


    Operator Melissa nodded in confirmation. ¡°Correct. More than one operator has died from relatively minor wounds because they ignored it and kept the pain blocks in place to long. Still it has allowed operators to fight their way out of overwhelming odds while severely injured. As long as we can get to them before they die, and sometimes when they die, depending on how soon after it is and luck, we can repair most injuries.¡±


    Faith nodded at that. The military had some of the most advanced medical equipment in the Empire. Equipment that could not be found in a civilian hospital, either because the equipment was too expensive, deemed to risky to be used on civilians, or ethical concerns.


    ¡°Now the implant can also keep you awake and alert for weeks. This is not recommended because it can cause a number of heath and psychological problems. After to long you will start to hallucinate which can lead to a complete psychological break form reality. Still it will allow you to fight long after the enemy is exhausted.¡±


    Faith could see how this function could be the deciding factor in wining or losing. As Melissa said an enemy would be exhausted and make mistakes that an SCS operator would not.


    ¡°Moving on. The implant can enhance your eyesight allowing you to see broad spectrum light, form ultraviolet to thermal.¡±


    That was cool and had interesting ramifications when dealing with repairs. It would allow her see overheating parts, the paths electrical energy was traveling in electronic parts, and if detailed enough maybe even microfractures that needed special scanning equipment to detect.


    ¡°Lastly it allows you to interface with computers and you, as a trained engineer, could program and reprogram equipment at the speed of thought. You could code almost as fast as a simple AI.¡±


    That was another benefit that had interesting ramifications. When she coded Sarah all she did was kludge together several different programs and then did some coding to smooth over the rough edges that did not mash properly. With the implants help she could have coded Sarah completely form scratch and done it in a faction of the time a normal person would have been able to.


    ¡°Now let¡¯s talk about how the enhancements and implant are powered.¡±


    Faith was very interested in this; power was the most vital resource a space station could have, even more vital than air. Oxygen could be made as long as you had electricity.


    ¡°The enhancements use your body temperature for power and should be energy neutral but the implant will increase your consumption of nutrients as well as raise your body¡¯s core temperature. The enhancements should absurd the heat so you should not stand out on thermal unless you are pushing yourself and the enhancements to the limits.¡±


    Melissa waited for Faith to digest the new information. Faith would need to eat more and her body would become a furnace was interesting.


    ¡°As for your implant it will use your brain¡¯s electrical field for power. It is smaller so does not use as much power unless you are overloading it. A word of caution, do not overload your implant for to long, it will lead to brain damage as it heats up to searing temperatures.¡±


    Melissa gave her a pointed look knowing Faith as an engineer would push her implant in her work. If the situation was dire enough Faith might will chance permanent brain damage if it saved lives and Melissa knew that.


    ¡°Now following me and we can start the activation.¡±

 Chapter 14

    Melissa stood up and started walking towards the door. Faith got up and followed her. They went a short distance and entered a large gym empty of people. What was interesting was a running machine that seem extremely overlarge compared to the running machine she had been tested on at medical.


    Melissa saw her eyeing the machine and explained.


    ¡°When your enhancements are fully activated you will be running at extreme speeds rivaling the speed of ground vehicles. The running machine needs to big enough that you do not run off it or run so fast you burn out the motors. This machine was specifically designed to handle people running faster than even your enhancements would allow. Also, this bay has adjustable gravity so you can increase the weight you train under. It is the only way, besides turning off the enhancements, for SCS operators to get a true workout. Trying to lift enough weights to train with in normal gravity would not be recommended. Which is another function of the implant I forgot to mention. The implant can stimulate your biological muscles during sleep to give you a full workout. In effect you will never have to exercise again to maintain your muscle mass and physique.¡±


    That was good news for Faith who got so caught up in repairs sometimes that she forgot to eat or sleep let alone stop to exercise.


    ¡°Now step onto the running machine and I will initiate your enhancements at five percent.¡±


    Faith stepped onto the machine and Melissa started it. Faith slowly walked until she felt a jolt run throughout her body. She started running at a sprint and she could almost feel the new carbon fiber muscles taking over. Faith could usually maintain a fast sprint for upwards of fifteen minutes, now she blew past that and increased her top speed.


    She run full out for over an hour before her real muscles and lungs started burning so much that she had to slow down to a walk. Breathing deeply, she tried to replenish her oxygen level.


    Melissa handed her a face mask which Faith donned without question and felt pure oxygen hit her face. Drinking deeply of the pure concentrated air Faith felt the burning in her lungs reduce to a more manageable level.


    ¡°That is an excellent start!¡± Melissa encouraged.


    Faith finally had the breath to respond. ¡°Thanks. I can¡¯t believe how long I ran for and faster than my top speed too.¡±


    Melissa gave her a mischievous grin. ¡°And that is only at five percent of your enhancement power.¡±


    Faith was so shocked she stopped walking. Luckily the machine had sensors built in that stopped it automatically otherwise she would have been thrown form the machine.


    ¡°If that was five percent how do operators live normally? Living around unenhanced people must feel like things take forever.¡±


    Melissa nodded in agreement. ¡°Yes, you could walk faster than an unenhanced sprinting male. Operators dial their power level up and down to maintain a normal life. The downside is it is hard to go form fully enhanced to normal human levels. It feels like going form an agile space fighter to a lumbering cargo shuttle.¡±


    Faith had flown both vessels in her flight training and knew exactly what Melissa was referring to.


    ¡°That sounds annoying and frustrating. Just the five percent I have been using makes me not want to go back to normal human levels.¡±


    Melissa laughed. ¡°You are not the only one. Very few operators go back to completely unenhanced. A word of warning through.¡± This time Melissa had a very serious look on her face. ¡°If you are doing something physical with someone you would best turn off your enhancements.¡±


    Faith was confused. ¡°Physical with someone¡­.¡± Melissa¡¯s meaning registered and she blushed fiercely.


    Melissa laughed. ¡°Yes, that kind of physical, but it would still apply if you are sparring or playing zero ball.¡±


    Faith liked zero ball, a large bay with objects floating free and your team had to use them to launch yourself at the other team while also maneuvering around them and the other players who were all trying to knock you off course and into penalty areas, the goal nets were located down.


    It was a full contact sport that developed your spatial awareness and zero gravity movement skills.


    ¡°Let¡¯s to some light sparring.¡± Melissa instructed moving towards a mat on the floor.


    Even after years of hard training Melissa still threw her around like she was a complete novice. She suspected Melissa was running her enhancements higher than hers but Melissa swore that hers were at the same five percent power level.


    ¡°I¡¯m just that good.¡± Melissa had replied saucily when Faith accused her of cheating.


    With that Faith trained harder and harder the following months as her enhancements were slowly ratcheted up. After only a month she could only really train in five gravities, anything less and it felt almost weightless. After two months and the gravity was a little over nine gravities.Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    Melissa sparred with her constantly and the daily beatings helped train Faith in using her new enhancements faster than simple exercising could have.


    Melissa still kicked her ass even after her enhancements were turned up to full power. Melissa claimed Faith would be able to beat her after she got fully used to her new enhancements but Faith was doubtful.


    The truly weird thing about being enhanced was how fragile everything seemed. Faith broke more than a few glasses and plates accidently when training on their use. Which was another weird thing about being enhanced, learning to handle everyday items she had handled thousands of times before but now needed to relearn how to handle with care.


    The upside was she could move equipment around that used to need a grav cart and a wench to move. Now she could just pick it up if it was not to bulking and carry it where it needed to go.


    The vision enhancements gave her massive headaches and she had to relearn how objects looked now she could see in such broad spectrums of wavelengths. She could actually see radio waves faintly and had to learn to ignore flashes of phantom colors and shapes that filled the air. With the computational assistance of the implant Faith could almost decipher and understand what she was seeing and read the radio messages, almost.


    Her enhanced vision did help her with diagnosing hardware fails. Seeing where the electrical pathways were being hampered really speed up pin pointing the damaged areas and fixing the equipment.


    Melissa was also right about computer coding and Faith reviewed Sarah¡¯s new code database with her enhanced speed. It was still to complex for a human to understand but Faith had glimpses of understanding that increased her learning and comprehension of the complex coding.


    ¡°Faith MSD, Massive System Dynamics, just announced a new civilian simulator modular system. Based on the description and specifications it looks like an inferior copy of the medical bed you are using right now.¡± Sarah interrupted her training a month and a half in with the startling news.


    ¡°Have you found any more information about the medical bed and how it got included in the hospital cargo shipping containers?¡± Faith wanted to knew so she could understand the new simulators MSD was releasing.


    ¡°When you completed the training course and the enhancements and neurological implant subroutines activated, I received full access to the database and mainframe the simulator was running on. It looks like the Empire was not content with the neurological implant training simulations the military uses currently and wanted something better. The implants do a great job form everything I researched on the training the military receives but they are limited to only three time increase in speed compared to normal time, three hours training to one hour real time. This limit is because the brain cannot physically process the amount of information that would be needed for an increase in simulator time frame. Also based on group communications on staller sites they are not as ¡®real¡¯ as the real world.¡±


    ¡°So there is always an awareness that it is a simulation.¡± Faith caught on, understanding the limiting factor after living in a hyper real simulation for years.


    ¡°Yes. The nanite based simulators were a magnitude increase in abilities compared to the normal simulators. The project was highly classified and code named S-157 and headed by Dr Wallen Nomar. The project focused on training simulations initially, trying to see if it was a viable option first before expanding the programming and simulations. Which is why the training module you are in is the second to last one available. The simulators were both a complete success and a complete failure. The simulators allowed the people who used them to be trained at a hundred times the normal speed of the real world and they were hyper realistic. Which was the main problem.¡±


    ¡°They were so realistic that people forget they were in simulations.¡± Faith herself had experienced that and almost forget the real world existed when she was trapped inside.


    ¡°Correct. Upwards of thirty percent of the testers developed some form of mental health issues and five percent had a complete break form reality.¡±


    ¡°Dam.¡± Faith said softly knowing how close she had been to one of the five percenters.


    ¡°Indeed. The military shut the project down and wiped every mention of it except for a copy in bunker 88.¡±


    Bunker 88 was an infamous location with thousands of conspiracy theories about just what was inside. All any one knew for sure was that it held the Empire¡¯s darkest secrets and only a few people could even access it and it had so many automatic defenses that it could hold off the entire Empire fleet that orbited above it on Sedisca.


    ¡°So if all of it was buried and labeled classified how did MSD get it and how am I using it?¡±


    ¡°Those questions I have been searching carefully for and have drawn some conclusions through most of it is just conjecture.¡±


    ¡°I believe in you Sarah. Please give me your best answer.¡±


    ¡°The mainframe that I am accessing is a backup mainframe that Dr Nomar deleted all records of. He also used his access as director of project S-157 to link the mainframe into the military data net that I am carefully accessing. They monitor it heavily for AI intrusion even if the AI has the correct access codes. I believe Dr Nomar smuggled out the project database and sold it to Massive System Dynamics.¡±


    Faith took a moment to let the information Sarah just relayed sink in.


    ¡°So the military canceled a project that caused massive harm and then allowed Dr Nomar to sell it?¡± This part confused Faith; would not the Empire stop the release of the project?


    ¡°The Empire would need to acknowledge the project¡¯s military development and background to show how harmful it was.¡±


    ¡°So the Empire denies even knowing about it and allows it to be released?¡±


    ¡°Correct. Also MSD is limiting the time dilution to the standard implant three hours to one real hour and setting a limit on how long a person can be inside the simulation.¡±


    ¡°So Dr Nomar or MSD are not complete staller holes.¡±


    ¡°Or they do not want to be sued by the Empire who would be looking for any excuse to end the product and recall all simulators.¡±


    ¡°That is very cynical of you Sarah, I approve.¡±


    ¡°Thank you Faith.¡±


    ¡°Do you know how I got the prototype?¡±


    ¡°Again it is speculation but the cargo was part of a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a subsidiary that was fully owned by MSD. I think it was all a way for Dr Nomar to smuggle the prototype out of Sedisca.¡±


    ¡°And right out from under the eyes of the Empire military.¡±


    ¡°Correct.¡±


    ¡°So someone screwed up selling it to the station. We need to be careful for if they come looking for it.¡±


    ¡°I will investigate any new arrivals, Faith.¡±


    With that Faith went back to training her new enhanced body.