The next day.
Timothy and Siobhan got out of bed at three o’ clock in the morning, neither of them requiring much sleep thanks to their enhanced physiques and various implants. In order to maintain their covers, neither of them would be accessing the simulation unless an emergency came up. Augmented reality was also limited, preventing them from using it for things like virtual keyboards and screens. What remained was mostly akin to a HUD that would give them increased situational awareness without the possibility of any outward signs that they were using imperial technology.
Even their old beat-up pickup truck was exactly what it seemed, just an old truck. Their only imperial technology, beyond the necessaries like their WESS and other layers of security systems, had been safely tucked away in various slicks and the growing underground facility that the atomic printer nanite colony was currently building and expanding. Their implants had informed them that the facility had reached initial completion and all that was left were the optional modules that could be customized and configured as necessary.
The two had discussed the options and chosen to build a storage facility for printer “cartridges”, a holding facility with room for up to ten prisoners in secure solitary confinement cells, a gym with the equipment necessary for maintaining their enhanced bodies—after all, no civilian gym anywhere outside the empire had gravity manipulation technology capable of creating weights in the range of tons, and anything less than a ton was about as strenuous for a reaper to lift as a beer can was to a normal, unenhanced civilian—and a hangar for their stealth shuttle.
The reason the pair of operatives had awoken so early was to tour the facility and perform their final inspection on the core modules.
After getting dressed, Tim moved the bed out of the way and disabled the nanites camouflaging the entry. He gave Siobhan an exaggerated, courtly bow, then gestured to the open hatch and said, “Ladies first.”
She winked at him and hopped into the hole, falling twenty-five meters to the first security hatch. Tim soon followed, and the camouflage nanites covering the hole in the floor and the ground under the crawlspace below the house reactivated themselves, ensuring a casual inspection wouldn’t discover the hidden entry. That “casual inspection” was by imperial standards, so the risk of discovery by any non-imperial tech was incredibly close to zero.
For the facility’s initial activation, it required both of them to be present for biometric checks and handshakes with their implants. Once that was out of the way, the security hatch opened, revealing an elevator that wouldn’t be out of place in any pre-empire office building. The pair entered the elevator and the security hatch slid shut behind them as the elevator began its journey to the facility five hundred meters below.
Ten seconds later, it slid to a smooth stop and the doors opened on a hallway built of walls that looked like circuit boards. And they were, in a sense, circuit boards; Tim and Siobhan’s “doomsday bunker”, as they jokingly called it, was one of two control centers in the Pacific Northwest of the North American continent. The main facility was in Spokane, and the facility under Harstine Island was a backup.
Both facilities were powered by enormous fusion reactors, and thanks to a new distributed quantum supercluster model developed in Lab City, the very facilities themselves were quantum superclusters. Each wall, ceiling, and floor contributed to the functioning supercluster. The nerd herd had fixed the design to look like circuit boards, with brushed steel and silver lines engraved into it, much like the copper and green circuit boards found in pre-empire electronics. The nyxians, on the other hand, humored the nerd herd and didn’t put up much of a fuss about the design, actually preferring it to the drab and boring office buildings that most modern spies operated out of.
As there was no security alert active currently, the main hallways were clear of any obstruction. At any moment, however, the base could be set to high alert, revealing drop down turrets and security doors practically every ten meters along the halls. Were an intruder to somehow find their way into the base, they would almost immediately be trapped in the halls and subject to a host of anti-intruder measures, including sonic waves designed to knock people unconscious, sleeping gas, darts with fast-acting tranquilizers, and other nonlethal incapacitating attacks. For more severe intrusions, lethal measures could also be taken, up to and including detonating the fusion reactor that served as the facility’s beating heart, though that would also wipe out about a quarter of the Puget Sound and accidentally terraform the coastline of the Pacific Northwest.
Tim and Siobhan confidently strode down the hallway to the center of the base and into a circular room of about fifteen meters in diameter. In the middle of the room was a five-meter-
wide sphere of shining metal, within which was an artificial star capable of outputting ten petawatts of electricity, more than enough to satisfy the entire North American continent’s annual energy consumption by multiple orders of magnitude.
The base was laid out in a cross along the four cardinal directions, and the central hub had access points at each main hallway. A brushed aluminum railing surrounded the fusion reactor, along which were various backup manual workstations capable of operating every aspect of the base itself in the event that the quantum microcomputer implants in Tim and Siobhan’s brains somehow ceased to function. And as the beating heart of the base, certain security measures were always in effect, with small turrets dotting the ceiling every meter or so and a complicated uneven stair leading from the doorways to the sunken floor of the rest of the room.
The two operatives nodded as all of their checks returned reports of fully operational equipment, then toured the living quarters in the north, consisting of comfortable apartments, a mess hall, recreation center, and the still-under-construction gym. To the south of the main control center was an enormous hangar capable of holding twelve stealth shuttles or four ARES combat landers, and across from the hangar was a cavernous storage facility of a hundred meters wide by a hundred meters long and six stories high. It was currently empty, but atomic printer nanites were busily producing modular storage containers in various shapes and sizes, each of which would be equipped with a temporal stasis field generator to maintain their contents in perfect condition.
To the west of the control center was the planned site of the prison complex—ten reinforced cells, a holographically simulated prison yard, and a shared dining facility. And to the east was an armory, a clinic with medical pods for up to fifty patients simultaneously, and a ground vehicle garage with enough room to fit ten buses, or any combination of a wide variety of smaller vehicles.
Tim and Siobhan toured the entire facility and, as false dawn was just beginning to brighten the sky over the distant Cascade Mountain Range, they climbed in their old pickup truck and headed toward Shelton, where they would begin their first workdays in the high school and courthouse, respectively.
