Ivan Kal - Olympus

“Yes that’s right I forgot the one with the assassination.” She said cheerfully. “That one was inspired.”

“It was. So they programed a stealth suit on their own?” Elias asked.

His eight team members were in the process of “awakening” all around the room. Maria motioned him outside of the room and towards her office.

“They got the specs from the research department, so they just programed the scenario, the suits capabilities were real.” She said.

Elias nodded, he and the security department have been competing with the programing team since the virtual technology became viable as a training tool. A fierce rivalry had developed between them. The programmers managed to score a few wins against his team, but mostly by programming impossible scenarios, and since a certain scuffle between one of them and one of his men they have been trying to win in a more balanced match, hence the use of stealth suits. The programmers tended to use more guile and creative tactics rather than brute force, and their score was much better against other teams. Which only made them much more motivated to win against Elias and his team with the same tactics.

“They, used very little in terms of firepower. And only one team.” Elias commented.

Maria nodded “Yes, they thought that their win would be much greater if they won with less rather than more. They’ll up their game next time.”

“They almost won this time. If our suits weren’t as armored as they were, we would have all fallen in the ambush.”

“So did you notice any bugs?” She asked.

“None, like the past three times it was perfect, it felt real. The integration with our implants was perfect. I believe you finally made a perfect virtual reality.” Elias answered.

“I hope so, but these sort of things need to be carefully examined each time.” She said.

“Could you forward Niko’s sound detecting program to the development? I want them to incorporate it into the default suit design.”

“Of course Elias. Are you staying for a while? I know that the programmers will want a rematch soon.” She said with a smile.

“I’ll have to disappoint them for now, Tomas needs me on the Cloud station.” He said.

“Space? I must say the weightlessness managed to became a pain really fast, I have no idea how those who live there deal with it.” She shuddered.

“Tomas tells me that they will be putting in the artificial gravity fields, they should bring the generator online in a few days for testing.” They had managed to build a gravity field generator two years ago, and they had them in use, just not on the station yet.

“Something from a certain project?”

“Of course.”

“It amazes me sometimes how much we managed to advance in such a short time.”

“And still we have a long way to go.”

“I’ll arrange a transport for you to the spaceport. It will be waiting for you at the landing pad.” Maria said.

“Thanks. Tell the programmer team that I’ll be expecting a new challenge when I return.” He said as he walked out of Maria’s office.

“I will.” They shook hands and he left. The programing team was comprised of ten game level designers that Maria managed to steal from the entertainment branches of Olympus. They had the necessary experience to utilize this technology and build realistic challenges. Though they did go overboard a few times in the beginning, introducing a lot of impossible obstacles. They even put in an enormous Troll, ported from one of the games they designed, the Troll’s appearance came as a complete surprise to Elias and his team, it scared most of them as it exploded out of ground, and then it proceeded to clobber them to death. They have since then calmed down and focused on recreating tough but realistic situations, though they did tend to find new and inventive ways to use existing technology. There were other teams that competed against each other in simulations, security teams, but the programmers were the ones that created the environments, and so they created their own team.

Laura was already waiting for him in front of the facility. She would accompany him to the station, while the rest of the team remains here to train in various scenarios for another two months before rotating with the teams that were currently in the field. She fell in step with him as he passed.

“John didn’t take the exercise seriously.” Laura said evenly.

“He was never in the field before, and he is young, he will learn to take matters seriously after he gets some more experience.” Elias’s team frequently rotated two promising rookies through their ranks every few months so that they could get a feel for them and their responses.

“If he returns.” Laura said.

Elias didn’t say anything, there was nothing to say, Olympus personnel were as capable as those in the armies, their technology was better, and their people were on the average older. John would off course be put in low risk operations in the beginning, but even in those there were sometimes casualties.

They entered the elevator that would bring them from the heart of Nephthys to the surface.

“Niko was good.” Elias said.

“Yes, he has potential, and he is smart, I was thinking of putting him through tech and then command courses, in a decade or two he might be a great commander.”

“I was going to suggest the same, make it happen.”

When they arrived at the pad, the transport ship was already waiting for them as Maria had promised. They boarded the transport, and it immediately took off towards the space port located in the Pannonian basin. The trip from Nephthys would take just over an hour and forty minutes. They sat in a comfortable silence, both of them had many reports or requests to review during the flight. Elias opened his implants inbox and started reading through the list of requests Laura had forwarded to him. Anything she couldn’t deal with or was unsure how to handle she sent to him. He opened the first file and text started floating in his field of vision, he could have activated the audio form, meaning that he would hear a voice reading the text directly into his mind, but he more often than not chose to read. The implant was capable of massive data storage, and later recovery. It was mostly used to store most any kind of data, from pictures to text and videos, and it could send and receive files. There were some concerns at the start, of implant hackings, and a few minor incidents, but all those problems were solved by the introduction of a buffer system. The implants were in closed modes, until the user turns on the receive and send mode, and the mode wont activate until the sent items were activated and checked in an isolated system. Not to mention the high grade firewall system that Olympus has implemented, borrowing some ideas from the alien tech.

By the time he finished the request list, they were already at the space port. The space port was built nine years ago, when Tomas first started pushing for space exploration, he managed to convince the two major super powers to allow him to build a private space station, and from there to coordinate his planed excavation of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The other nations, most notably Russia and U.S. where against a privately owned station in the Earth’s orbit, but the two opinions that mattered where Concordis and the League. With permission from them, he started construction of the space port, and later of the station. He managed to even convince them to give him permission to build structures on the Moon, under the guise of factories and storage for the planed mining operation from the asteroid belt. Though Elias knew that was just the beginning of Tomas’s plans. The U.S. again protested loudly, citing breach of the Outer Space Treaty, while the League and Concordis responded by saying that most countries that signed the treaty no longer existed. And so Olympus went ahead with Tomas’s plans, while the former world powers watched from the sidelines unable to do anything to stop him.