The Epsilon Project
Prologue
My name is Benjamin Key, but my handle is "Binary," strange I know, but a lot of things are these days. I was born a surface dweller, well, in a sense anyways. Other than the President and Secretary of Defense, no one knew about Project Epsilon - it was created before the machine takeover; a deep-sea venture highly funded by the U.S. government with the purpose of tapping into underwater volcanic vents as a cheap and covert source of energy- during initial paranoia that machine takeover was inescapable. The Navy dropped about $45 billion worth of equipment into the Marianas Trench, just off the Philippines, and then moved on. well, not so much moved on but got torn apart by enemy machine weaponry soon after, but I digress.
It's really surprising how much money you can skim off private sector bank accounts when everyone's scared for their lives. We dubbed it "Desperate Salvation," (The city effort 'Zion' didn't come till later) and privately contracted construction on weapons ordinances; life support systems, and general equipment usually used for submarines, but stored most of it aboard a modern aircraft carrier until the trench 'drop-time,' classifying it top secret.
Ironically enough, as if to prove the growing tensions between man and machine, the CIA had discovered that a method of cryogenic freezing existed in machine archives, but they had apparently withheld the technology from humans not seeing the advantage for themselves in it; possibly as it would only affect biological organisms. Obtaining said information soon proved not hard as the machine world, having it's own AI's, consequently had leaks. So after debate between government offices, the information was shelved for a time, not wanting to publicly announce that we were spying on the machines in an organized effort. Later on, Defense Secretary Edward Halings, during one of his infamous rummaging escapades through classified material (flaunting his security level no doubt; the man had an incredible inferiority complex, but was also debatably the greatest strategist of that time), stumbled across the cryogenic data. Foreseeing conflict with the machines Halings created the Epsilon Project with the afore-mentioned funds (neglecting to tell the President where those funds originated from).
Basically it was a "time capsule," using the remote location of the Marianas Trench and cryogenic freezing to take a group consisting of me, engineers, soldiers, and people from every walk of life and store them voluntarily in a deep freeze under the ocean with broadcast communication devices (no hard-lines) and the like for us, so that we could link to the internet and find out what was going on in the world around them, but remain unknown to the populace. Halings meant for us to be a weapon for any situation, able to strike at an enemy if one should appear or in the very least a legacy of humanity to live on.
A monitoring system was set up to watch one secure signal band keyed to the President's personal cell phone, so that he could unfreeze us and get us briefed on the current situation through our capsule's computers by just one coded key.
On the day the machines attacked, the president activated our capsule, but the machines had bombed an American base on the Philippines, unknowingly sending a wash of radiation to circulate overhead our capsule so that we were unable to launch a counter-offensive. our own missiles had a shelf- life shorter than the time it would take for the radiation to clear. so we had to deactivate them to prevent a meltdown. Seeing nothing we could do would have any effect at this time, we established a backdoor link to the sadistic new "Matrix" program and went back into 'cold storage,' setting timers for 1000 years, hoping that by then a solution would present itself to defeating the formidable machine army. So I will begin my story there. the first day.
Prologue
My name is Benjamin Key, but my handle is "Binary," strange I know, but a lot of things are these days. I was born a surface dweller, well, in a sense anyways. Other than the President and Secretary of Defense, no one knew about Project Epsilon - it was created before the machine takeover; a deep-sea venture highly funded by the U.S. government with the purpose of tapping into underwater volcanic vents as a cheap and covert source of energy- during initial paranoia that machine takeover was inescapable. The Navy dropped about $45 billion worth of equipment into the Marianas Trench, just off the Philippines, and then moved on. well, not so much moved on but got torn apart by enemy machine weaponry soon after, but I digress.
It's really surprising how much money you can skim off private sector bank accounts when everyone's scared for their lives. We dubbed it "Desperate Salvation," (The city effort 'Zion' didn't come till later) and privately contracted construction on weapons ordinances; life support systems, and general equipment usually used for submarines, but stored most of it aboard a modern aircraft carrier until the trench 'drop-time,' classifying it top secret.
Ironically enough, as if to prove the growing tensions between man and machine, the CIA had discovered that a method of cryogenic freezing existed in machine archives, but they had apparently withheld the technology from humans not seeing the advantage for themselves in it; possibly as it would only affect biological organisms. Obtaining said information soon proved not hard as the machine world, having it's own AI's, consequently had leaks. So after debate between government offices, the information was shelved for a time, not wanting to publicly announce that we were spying on the machines in an organized effort. Later on, Defense Secretary Edward Halings, during one of his infamous rummaging escapades through classified material (flaunting his security level no doubt; the man had an incredible inferiority complex, but was also debatably the greatest strategist of that time), stumbled across the cryogenic data. Foreseeing conflict with the machines Halings created the Epsilon Project with the afore-mentioned funds (neglecting to tell the President where those funds originated from).
Basically it was a "time capsule," using the remote location of the Marianas Trench and cryogenic freezing to take a group consisting of me, engineers, soldiers, and people from every walk of life and store them voluntarily in a deep freeze under the ocean with broadcast communication devices (no hard-lines) and the like for us, so that we could link to the internet and find out what was going on in the world around them, but remain unknown to the populace. Halings meant for us to be a weapon for any situation, able to strike at an enemy if one should appear or in the very least a legacy of humanity to live on.
A monitoring system was set up to watch one secure signal band keyed to the President's personal cell phone, so that he could unfreeze us and get us briefed on the current situation through our capsule's computers by just one coded key.
On the day the machines attacked, the president activated our capsule, but the machines had bombed an American base on the Philippines, unknowingly sending a wash of radiation to circulate overhead our capsule so that we were unable to launch a counter-offensive. our own missiles had a shelf- life shorter than the time it would take for the radiation to clear. so we had to deactivate them to prevent a meltdown. Seeing nothing we could do would have any effect at this time, we established a backdoor link to the sadistic new "Matrix" program and went back into 'cold storage,' setting timers for 1000 years, hoping that by then a solution would present itself to defeating the formidable machine army. So I will begin my story there. the first day.