[Location: High Command Science Division - Underground Sector 7] [Time: Subjective Year Zero. 100 Years Ago.]
Project Zero wasn't in a military base. It was buried half a mile beneath the surface in a pristine, blindingly white laboratory that smelled of antiseptic and ozone.
I felt completely out of place. I was still wearing my grease-stained cadet uniform, carrying my meager belongings in a standard-issue duffel bag. Scientists in crisp coats hurried past me, tapping on holographic clipboards. None of them looked like soldiers. None of them looked like they knew what a war was.
Dr. Aris led me through a series of heavy bio-metric security doors.
"The Algorithm is a hive-mind," Aris explained, his voice echoing in the sterile corridor. "It processes battle data in real-time. If we deploy a new tank, it calculates the armor's weak points in exactly 4.2 seconds. It is perfect logic. So, to beat it, we must introduce something it cannot calculate."
"Chaos?" I guessed.
"Humanity," Aris corrected. "Instinct. The sheer, illogical will to survive."
He stopped in front of a massive glass wall. Inside the room was a chaotic mess of servers, cooling tubes, and tangled cables.
And in the center of it all was a girl.
She was on her hands and knees, frantically trying to gather a stack of dropped physical paper files. Her blonde hair was tied up in a messy, uneven bun, secured with a stylus pen. Her lab coat was two sizes too big, and her thick-rimmed glasses were sliding down the bridge of her nose.
"Damn it, the entropy equation is completely out of sequence," she muttered to herself, bumping her head against a server rack. "Ow."
I blinked. I was used to the terrifying, hyper-competent Commander Vesper from my loops—the woman who could calculate artillery trajectories in her head while under fire.
This girl looked like a stiff breeze would knock her over.
Aris tapped on the glass. The girl jumped, hit her head on the rack again, and hurriedly scrambled to her feet, clutching the messy stack of papers to her chest.
"Dr. Aris! Sir!" she stammered, her cheeks turning bright red. "I was just... the temporal cascade algorithm... I dropped it."
"Breathe, Vesper," Aris sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "This is Cadet Caelum. Our primary candidate for Subject Zero. Cadet, this is Vesper. She is our lead theoretical physicist."
"Lead?" I raised an eyebrow. She looked my age. "She's a teenager."
Vesper's eyes narrowed behind her glasses. The embarrassment vanished, replaced by a sudden, sharp indignation.
"I am nineteen," she stated, stepping forward and pointing a pen at me. "And I published my first thesis on localized quantum mechanics when I was fourteen. My age is irrelevant, Cadet. What is relevant is that your neuro-plasticity scores are the only thing keeping me from throwing this entire project in the incinerator."
She looked me up and down, unimpressed.
"Though looking at you," she muttered, "I might want to double-check the math. You look like you failed flight school."
I grinned. I couldn't help it. "I did fail. Spectacularly. But Dr. Aris says I'm a pioneer."
Vesper stopped. Her expression softened just a fraction. She looked at my grease-stained uniform, then up at my face. "You don't know what this project is, do you?"
"I know it's going to win the war."
Vesper looked at Dr. Aris. There was a flicker of profound sadness in her eyes—a look I wouldn't understand until I had died a thousand times.
"Yes," she said quietly, looking back down at her papers. "It will."