01-28-2018, 10:15 PM
January 2, 2046. El Borj, Morocco.
She’d been flown in from Barcelona first via a sleek Gulfstream XLT8950 not at all out of place in the Catalan’s posh playboy airport and then deployed midair aboard a Personal Evasive Warfare Pod. Which was a less dignified means for travel.
The P.E.W.P. deployment device was developed by the Americans as a top secret infiltration method for their SEAL teams back in 2025. After only two years of service the method was scrapped, due largely to an unintended consequence involving the vibrations created from subsonic deployment upon the human excretory system. SEALs called it the poop device.
The castaways were then reported decommissioned and destroyed but the designs were snatched up by none other than Sir Elon Musk. A decade further of development, redesigns, design merges and testing by SpaceX saw the initially cumbersome pod evolve into what was essentially; a human glider. No one was really sure how that happened. It turned out to be mostly useless though as one British test pilot described operating the suit akin to, “trying to crab about on all fours atop a ball of ice in the middle of the ocean.” Still the name stuck, even if the project was scrapped and Musk gifted the surplus in utter secrecy to his friend, the Pope.
PEWP was then pushed about and shuffled around until finding a home aboard jump craft, for training, although the jumpmasters used it solely to threaten the unruly. Having never seen the system successfully tested, it devolved into a mostly harmless game to gauge machismo. The idea was to see if you could use the suit to land, without deploying your parachute. This was always a failure simply because of the change in aerodynamics from not wearing the parachute model the suit was designed with initially. No one had bothered to read the instructions though to change the fin configurations to match.
Nika was fifteen the first time she deployed in one, or rather, was thrown from a Lockheed Martin MC-230J by a cantankerous Irish jump instructor. Ground control, not having registered a chute deployment, were well into grilling the priest about the accident when the deceased showed back up on the tarmac. The teenager strolled past the group stating she’d missed the landing zone and wanted to try again. Nika later admitted to Father O’Roark that she’d hit the landing zone but her knees had been shaking so badly it had taken her twenty minutes to calm down behind the jump shed. Mainly because during their heated argument on the plane, Nika had forgotten to put her parachute back on.
O’Roark credits shock to consenting to her jumping again and the third time (depending on who was counting), he asked if she was mad. The girl grinned at that and responded pointedly, she was in fact utterly terrified before cannonballing off the rear ramp. Jump four was the closest she came to an untimely demise but by the fifth jump (a month later) she had an ace up her sleeve.
Since stability seemed to be the main obstacle in deployment, Nika had the idea to wear the protective base layer she used under her racing leathers. Safety systems for riders had evolved through the years from mere surface protection and padding to airbags and finally to something the media had immediately dubbed, ‘the stiffie suit,’ and later, ‘tumbleweed.’
Riders just called them jammies and started an unofficial, if fierce, contest to see whose prints were the most ridiculous and outlandish. Cartoon bunnies, red hearts and naked cherub aside, the technical composition became a baselayer of transgenic engineered spider silk reinforced with a carbon nanotube exoskeleton. It was thin, pliable and light enough to wear under racing leathers yet designed to become rigid in the event of a crash via a small electrical charge. The onesie was so nondescript in appearance that Nika stole her first from Ducati after swapping it with a thin wetsuit. They were prohibitively expensive and at 15, she was not yet a millionaire.
Perhaps it was stubbornness, or maybe it was the respect in O’Roark’s eyes but Nika never told the priest how she was able to control the flight system. She’d never heard of anyone else using it successfully, nor could she imagine briefing people with a straight face.
...the proper deployment of your PEWP… No.
Almost a decade had passed, a couple of hacked market upgrades and some open source coding later had the assassin happy with her PEWP suit.
Currently she had developed programs to stabilize the freefall enough to pick off ground threats with her rifle d'sniper or simply scout the terrain from above without having to deploy microdrones. Those little buggers were expensive!
Scouting the area via freefall, the FLIR filters of her Heads Up Display pinpointed the Atharim hunter team’s positions at her target landing zone as well as the ambient temperature, altitude, rate of fall, etc. She’d synced a throatmic into the neck of her jammies and microwired the connections after a mishap with bluetooth connectivity last year nearly got her killed. It was via the throatmic she issued commands to her computers' systems. Can’t have that go down again. There was a touch interface on her arm too but her hands were otherwise occupied. And sure, there were ways to beat thermal imaging and things that didn’t show up but a cycle through movement sensors left her reasonably satisfied nothing nasty was lurking. If it was? Well, Geronimo!
Edited by Nika Raskov, Jan 29 2018, 04:06 AM.
She’d been flown in from Barcelona first via a sleek Gulfstream XLT8950 not at all out of place in the Catalan’s posh playboy airport and then deployed midair aboard a Personal Evasive Warfare Pod. Which was a less dignified means for travel.
The P.E.W.P. deployment device was developed by the Americans as a top secret infiltration method for their SEAL teams back in 2025. After only two years of service the method was scrapped, due largely to an unintended consequence involving the vibrations created from subsonic deployment upon the human excretory system. SEALs called it the poop device.
The castaways were then reported decommissioned and destroyed but the designs were snatched up by none other than Sir Elon Musk. A decade further of development, redesigns, design merges and testing by SpaceX saw the initially cumbersome pod evolve into what was essentially; a human glider. No one was really sure how that happened. It turned out to be mostly useless though as one British test pilot described operating the suit akin to, “trying to crab about on all fours atop a ball of ice in the middle of the ocean.” Still the name stuck, even if the project was scrapped and Musk gifted the surplus in utter secrecy to his friend, the Pope.
PEWP was then pushed about and shuffled around until finding a home aboard jump craft, for training, although the jumpmasters used it solely to threaten the unruly. Having never seen the system successfully tested, it devolved into a mostly harmless game to gauge machismo. The idea was to see if you could use the suit to land, without deploying your parachute. This was always a failure simply because of the change in aerodynamics from not wearing the parachute model the suit was designed with initially. No one had bothered to read the instructions though to change the fin configurations to match.
Nika was fifteen the first time she deployed in one, or rather, was thrown from a Lockheed Martin MC-230J by a cantankerous Irish jump instructor. Ground control, not having registered a chute deployment, were well into grilling the priest about the accident when the deceased showed back up on the tarmac. The teenager strolled past the group stating she’d missed the landing zone and wanted to try again. Nika later admitted to Father O’Roark that she’d hit the landing zone but her knees had been shaking so badly it had taken her twenty minutes to calm down behind the jump shed. Mainly because during their heated argument on the plane, Nika had forgotten to put her parachute back on.
O’Roark credits shock to consenting to her jumping again and the third time (depending on who was counting), he asked if she was mad. The girl grinned at that and responded pointedly, she was in fact utterly terrified before cannonballing off the rear ramp. Jump four was the closest she came to an untimely demise but by the fifth jump (a month later) she had an ace up her sleeve.
Since stability seemed to be the main obstacle in deployment, Nika had the idea to wear the protective base layer she used under her racing leathers. Safety systems for riders had evolved through the years from mere surface protection and padding to airbags and finally to something the media had immediately dubbed, ‘the stiffie suit,’ and later, ‘tumbleweed.’
Riders just called them jammies and started an unofficial, if fierce, contest to see whose prints were the most ridiculous and outlandish. Cartoon bunnies, red hearts and naked cherub aside, the technical composition became a baselayer of transgenic engineered spider silk reinforced with a carbon nanotube exoskeleton. It was thin, pliable and light enough to wear under racing leathers yet designed to become rigid in the event of a crash via a small electrical charge. The onesie was so nondescript in appearance that Nika stole her first from Ducati after swapping it with a thin wetsuit. They were prohibitively expensive and at 15, she was not yet a millionaire.
Perhaps it was stubbornness, or maybe it was the respect in O’Roark’s eyes but Nika never told the priest how she was able to control the flight system. She’d never heard of anyone else using it successfully, nor could she imagine briefing people with a straight face.
...the proper deployment of your PEWP… No.
Almost a decade had passed, a couple of hacked market upgrades and some open source coding later had the assassin happy with her PEWP suit.
Currently she had developed programs to stabilize the freefall enough to pick off ground threats with her rifle d'sniper or simply scout the terrain from above without having to deploy microdrones. Those little buggers were expensive!
Scouting the area via freefall, the FLIR filters of her Heads Up Display pinpointed the Atharim hunter team’s positions at her target landing zone as well as the ambient temperature, altitude, rate of fall, etc. She’d synced a throatmic into the neck of her jammies and microwired the connections after a mishap with bluetooth connectivity last year nearly got her killed. It was via the throatmic she issued commands to her computers' systems. Can’t have that go down again. There was a touch interface on her arm too but her hands were otherwise occupied. And sure, there were ways to beat thermal imaging and things that didn’t show up but a cycle through movement sensors left her reasonably satisfied nothing nasty was lurking. If it was? Well, Geronimo!
Edited by Nika Raskov, Jan 29 2018, 04:06 AM.