Chapter One
How It All Began: A History Lesson
"The remaining survivor nations of humanity were safe from the initial Titan onslaught. They are the remains of the American continent nations, Great Britain, Ireland, and Australia, and they represented the known survivor communities that exist on Earth. The Titans appeared shortly after the climax of World War II in August 1945, soon after the two prototype nuclear bombs were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
"Six days after the bombings, the Japanese government surrendered to the Allies on the condition that their people were allowed to be evacuated to either the Chinese or American mainland 'due to economic and infrastructure failure'. The Allies suspected that the Japanese did not disclose the true reasons for such conditions, but they were allowed evacuation to the Chinese mainland. Several days after the bombing, the Allies discovered why the Japanese demanded such conditions: the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were crowded with large humanoids, Titans, and were spreading outward rapidly.
"The Japanese committed what little they had of their Imperial Armed Forces left towards repelling the Titans. A large number of the force, however, did not survive, and only a handful of Titans were killed outside the bombing fallout zone before they were overrun. They began evacuation despite setbacks from the Allies, going as far as to bypass blockades using whatever cruisers they had left to oppose the Allied navy. Once the scope of the situation was finally understood by the Allies, severe casualties have already been inflicted.
"Titans had already taken to the waters as well, headed for the mainland of China, their strange characteristics allowing them to somewhat traverse and survive extended periods underwater. They decided to evacuate as much of the population as possible, using any working ships from the ports and having Allied carriers and ships load as many people as possible. 24% of Japan's total population were onboard Allied ships headed to America, another 7% evacuated from small fishing boats and civilian vessels. The rest of the population were left behind to fend for themselves, their fates sealed when the President of the United States ordered Japan and the Pacific Theatre to be abandoned. He also gave an order to bombard overrun areas of Japan using the remaining prototype nuclear bombs in an effort to kill the Titans. Unfortunately somehow, this had the effect of almost doubling the amount of Titans that appeared.
"Japan fell in less than a year, with no survivors reported from scouting flights, and much of Eastern Asia was in disarray. Many islands and nations had no way of combating such a threat and as a result, their inhabitants perished or fled to the seas if they were lucky. The nations in Middle Asia tried to create a wall which would join each other in order to form the Great Middle Eastern Wall. Unfortunately, the Titan advance was too quick and not enough construction materials could be produced in a short term.
"The rapid advance of the Titans from the east devastated the continents of Asia and Europe. Africa was the last continent to fall to the Titans' advance from Asia, valiantly resisting but ultimately falling or were forced into hiding and ceding territory to them. The Americas, the British Islands, Australia and New Zealand had sufficient time to prepare adequate defenses and set up walls to barricade their cities and assets, keeping their losses at bay. The remaining nations formed their own sovereignties as we know it: the Americas forming the American Coalition, the British Islands forming the United Kingdom, and Australia and New Zealand forming the Oceanic Commonwealth Though they are separate government entities, they remained united under the common cause of survival. They represent humanity's last hope against the Titans.
"The fear of the Titans sparked a rapid evolution of technology with the remaining nations, focused on developing offensive and defensive capabilities that would give them the edge over the Titans' numbers and resiliency. Mistakes from operations were studied and improved upon, electronics evolved, efficient weapons and sturdy defense measures were conceived, new fields of study were introduced, many technologies that were considered a dream of the future were suddenly on the streets, all of which advanced us into the peak of the post-modern age in the span of 50 years.
"Our cities started to run on natural electricity and nuclear fusion, a direct counterpart of nuclear fission. It was understood that nuclear fission played a part of the appearance of the Titans, but it was not directly responsible for it. Realizing this, nuclear physics was further researched which allowed the conception of nuclear fusion reactors and related technology. The spark of technological evolution kept us fed and provided respite during a dark time, made sure that we used their now-limited resources efficiently and defend ourselves appropriately. It kept morale high with the thinking that the marvels of technological growth developed could be the solution to overcoming the Titans, and at the time, we weren't wrong.
"The American Coalition launched a string of deployments from an offshore base, also famously known as Operation Fairway, in 1976 up until 1980 in an attempt to determine the origins of the Titans and to prove that our technological growth was capable of opposing them. We were successful, to an extent. The answers obtained from raiding archives and old records only provided more questions about the Titans and what the Japanese at the time were up to. To this day, reports are still being deciphered and analyzed by the Coalition Intelligence Agency.
"This information came with a high price: several battalions of humanity's best soldiers dealt considerable blows to the Titans but were lost in the process, casualties numbering thousands of troops. The operation, though successful in its purpose, was considered a failure because of its high casualty rating. Morale was the most affected, causing surviving nations to scrap any other idea of expeditionary operations. However, the American Coalition has reconsidered launching another operation, this time learning from the reports and mistakes of Operation Fairway."
(Fort Carson, Colorado, September 7, 1999)
The room filled with a white light as the projector was shut off and the powerpoint slides were replaced by a blank white board.
"That's it for the introduction presentation," the instructor declared as he stood from his chair behind the podium. "Many of these subjects will be covered in more detail as Basic Knowledge progresses through the semester. Don't forget, CSM Kuriyama will be instructing your Combat phase column from now on. Dismissed."
The class members put away their books and tablets into their packs and stood up, filing out one by one through the door to the hallway. The instructor also secured his tablet and shut the screen off.
He waited for the last student to leave the room. "So what'd you think of that?"
"Heh," a man in the corner of the room huffed. He put his legs down from the chair and stood up. "I'm impressed. You made a boring introductory class sound… even more boring."
The instructor sighed and crossed his arms. "I worked on that for a week and all you can say is it's even more boring than the previous one."
"It's just a lot of information to take in at once, even if they are just introductory topics." The man shuffled down the shallow incline of stairs next to the wall.
"I put pictures and videos from actual missions! I had to dig deep for those videos from Fairway. I thought it'd be worth it," the instructor noted despairingly. He disconnected the interface connectors and slid his tablet into his shoulder bag, sitting on the tabletop.
The other man chuckled. "Those were definitely a good addition, it gives the viewer a visual aid, though the walls of detailed text could be… smaller."
The instructor nodded. "Okay, what else could it improve on?"
He smiled slightly. "For starters, it could be easier on the eyes. And make sure to keep it concise."
Recall – Akira Okazaki (Denver, Colorado, September 7, 1999)
A middle aged man overlooked the city of Denver through his apartment window, the reflection of the sun causing him to squint slightly. A large concrete wall about 30m tall dominated the perimeter of the city, the only way to prevent the Titans from entering. It is one of the many cities all over the American continents that have been expanded and walled up to preserve as much of the population and culture as possible from being lost to the Titans. Though the sun shone bright, it was only for a brief moment before the cloudy day blocked the sunlight from coming through. The shadows of the clouds cast on the city skyline showed the glimmering lights from each of the buildings.
The lights reminded Akira Okazaki of events that transpired long ago, almost 55 years in fact, when he was but a small child only 3 years old. He remembers it clearly, how his family was the last to leave from Takanabe in the former Miyazaki Prefecture. He remembers being taken by a US Marine and being brought onboard an American battleship, looking back to see the Titans overrun the port and consuming those who remained. He remembers seeing one of the Titans pick up a young woman, firmly grasping her torso as she screamed at it and squirmed as a futile attempt to bargain for her life. The final thing he witnessed before she was consumed was the futile attempts of others fighting the Titan and the woman's horrified expression on her face.
Back on that day, he swore to make the Titans pay for the destruction they brought down on the humans. He swore to avenge the woman's life on that day, the woman who was none other than his mother.
Near the window stood a table and four chairs, a vase of radiant chrysanthemums and a steaming coffee mug furnishing the table. He reached for the coffee mug and took a sip of the black liquid, the bitterness reinforced with a sweet tangent of sugar. He bit his lower lip and walked away from the window, away from the living room of his apartment which he stood for a quick breather from his reading in the study, where he was headed now.
He stepped inside his study and set down the warm mug on his desk beside his book and an opened letter. A gray tablet sat nearly upright horizontally on a metal platform with a digital interface panel, supported by a frame which lined the bottom half of the tablet and the socket on the metal platform on which the tablet fit snug, drawing power from the metal platform via its electronic port. The tablet displayed a 3D logo of the military's Recon Corps branch as a screen saver, the logo consisting of a marksman rifle and a sword intersecting diagonally in front of a pair of wings emblazoned on a shield. A speaker on the platform chimed twice and an amber button blinked on the panel. The tablet then displayed a camera view of the hall outside his apartment, a female dressed in a long brown overcoat and gray jeans waiting at his front door. Akira tapped the panel. "Come."
A door whizzed distantly from the hallway, opening long enough to let the guest come inside then whizzed shut. Another sound of mechanical whirring suddenly resounded from under the desk and Akira cringed in pain. 'Are you fucking kidding me?'
He inspected his mechanical right leg, which replaced his natural lower leg, and hit it several times. He sighed.
'Yup, it's broken for sure now. Leg can't feel my hand slapping it.'
Footsteps echoed outside the study, growing closer with each step until it reached the open doorway, a female appearing. She looked at Akira and smiled. Akira looked up and nodded.
"Captain Carter," Akira greeted her. "Just in time, my prosthetic seems to have malfunctioned. Again."
She chuckled and kneeled down next to the desk, near where the prosthetic leg laid at rest. She set down a tool kit on the floor and picked out a scanner, spending a few moments calibrating it.
"Good morning Sergeant," she replied. "Don't worry about it, I'll get it fixed. Again."
"You don't have to be so formal with me, Captain," Akira replied. "I'm not in the Corps. That and you outrank me already."
Carter started her scans on the leg, waving the device up and down the prosthetic.
"Force of habit, Akira," she paused slightly before adding in his name at the end.
The scanner beeped, its screen displaying a diagram of the prosthetic and zooming in closer, highlighting a section near the main electronics controllers.
"I found the problem. I didn't reinforce the electrical bonding on the third electroneural pathway properly, which caused a small breakdown in one of the dual receiver nodes, cutting off-"
"In English please," Akira interjected and waved his hand, motioning her to stop explaining.
"I didn't patch you up properly."
Akira always found it amusing whenever she unintentionally technobabbles despite telling her not to when conversing with him. Carter produced another tool from her tool kit and began to take apart a small panel on the knee of the prosthetic.
"Were you always such a pedantic Carter?"
She looked at Akira and grinned. "Ever since I graduated middle school."
"Hmm," he muffled. Her fiddling with the prosthetic caused it to make weird electrical noises before he felt a slight shock sting his upper leg nerves. It was nothing for Akira, but it was unexpected, and he reacted by cringing and clearing his throat. 'Definitely felt that.'
"Something wrong?" she asked.
"No, no," he replied. "Just clearing my throat. Ahem."
Carter continued her work, using the tool to recalibrate the microscopic digital boards on the panel before placing it back inside the opening in its socket.
"You know Akira, I never got a chance to… properly thank you," she said as she reached for a microspanner and microsolder in her toolkit.
Akira had given her some extra food last week when Carter was over to perform her monthly maintenance on his prosthetic, volunteering to do it herself regularly instead of having one of her techs to come and do it. He also cooked too much the other night and thought to share it with her so it doesn't go bad. He also thought that might not be the reason she's thanking him for.
"It was nothing, I think I slightly overestimated the portion of macaroni-"
"No," she interrupted. "Not for that. For what you did for me twenty years ago."
He was right. Akira's expression turned blank. He looked at the pictures tacked onto a taupe bulletin board hanging over his desk, its color contrasting the cream walls. One picture was an old one of his father and mother long before World War II looking happy, another picture was of his father, his wife and his son back in 1976, right after his graduation ceremony and induction into the Recon Corps at Fort Carson. They posed at the front entrance of Fort Carson, Akira donning formal military attire with his father and wife in regular civilian clothing and his son, the two year old being held in his mother's arms. Another picture beside it showed him, Carter, and nineteen others who composed his assigned squad, posing in front of a C-130 transport plane right before their deployment for Operation Fairway in 1978.
He stared at the picture briefly before finally locking his eyes on a picture below with his squad's fireteam element posing in front of a woodland-sprayed UH-60 Blackhawk transport, fully kitted out for their final sortie together.
'It's been 20 years since that mission…'
"Oh, for that," he said. "I was just doing my duty as a soldier of humanity."
He remembered. They were evacuating from Nagasaki, part of the final mission of Operation Fairway, and his squad was part of the three elements to evacuate alive out of their company. There was a Titan making way towards Carter, already dealing with another Titan ahead of her. He pushed her out of the way, and they barely cleared the Titan after it dove in an attempt to catch the human unsuspectingly. Akira helped her up but the Titan that dove still had energy to continue on, biting off Akira's right leg from the knee down when he was off his guard. The next thing he remembers was shooting its eyes and mouth before he fainted from shock, barely remembering that it was Corporal Carter and another Private First Class who carried him back to their transport. The next thing he remembered was waking up in one of the operating rooms at the Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington D.C., shocked that his leg was missing and feeling very unworthy of his survival from the Nagasaki mission.
"I know, but I wanted to thank you nonetheless. In a way, you helped me to realize that I wasn't meant to be on the front lines being a liability; instead, I do better backstage researching solutions for our dilemmas. Or better yet, solutions to prevent them. And here it is, I helped develop prototype prosthetics and by the time we had fully working models, I gave one of the first ones to you, for your leg, as a token of my appreciation. And I think this is one of our most advanced prosthetics that you're using, a major step up from the one I first gave you ten years ago."
She closed the panel, finishing her work and the prosthetic leg whirred back to life. Akira's instinct told him to wiggle the prosthetic toes and wave his foot around, and the prosthetic followed his instructions smoothly, the big toes wiggling and the foot waving around with a smooth mechanical hum. He smiled slightly. Carter got up from under the desk.
"55 years and everything's been going shit for me for so long," Akira answered her. "But, you've helped me see that there's still some good in this world. I should be the one thanking you."
He got up from his chair, opened his arms and embraced Carter platonically, happy that she managed to somehow give him his life back with a prosthetic leg, the one thing that brought him out of his suicidal tendencies. He was satisfied with the fact that by saving her, he managed to let one of humanity's greatest scientific minds live on to create such marvels of technology, allowing those who lost their limbs to regain them artificially. Also quite possibly, advancing the field of robotics into a new generation with her team's research. He was happy because he realized in a world ridden with despair, there is still hope.
The tablet on his desk played a notification sound and displayed on the bottom right corner "NEW MESSAGE (1 Unread, 1 Urgent)." Glancing at the screen, he let go of Carter and sat on his chair, tapping the notification to open up the email application. Akira had hoped it was from his acquaintance who had sold him a book he was searching for, finally getting the opportunity to meet with him to finalize his purchase and obtain it. The email application filled the tablet's screen, displaying the new message that Akira received. It was not the one he was expecting.
"It's from the Corps Chief of Staff," Akira said.
"General Shinseki?" Carter asked excitedly, looking over Akira's shoulder as he continued to read the message. "What did he say?"
Akira's momentary feeling of relief disappeared quickly as it came. The Recon Corps Chief of Staff wanted him to come to Fort Carson to "talk" amongst other things.
"Oh. That probably means he asked for me too," Carter said as she finished reading the message.
"No…" he rebutted. "I think I know why he called for me."
'Damn it,' he thought. He didn't leave the Recon Corps on the best of terms, especially with then-Colonel Shinseki who was his CO for Operation Fairway. He voiced very loudly that he doesn't want to come back should he recover from his "ordeal." Akira was given an honourable discharge nonetheless, but left before fully explaining what really happened at Nagasaki. The Walter Reed psychologists didn't recommend it to avoid a full mental breakdown but Shinseki probably felt it okay to continue his debriefing now that he's been given some time.
"Are you alright?" Carter interrupted his train of thought. Akira looked up and nodded.
"Yeah, just thinking about the last time I talked to him."
With another goodwill gesture, Carter reached out her hand to him. "Come on, I'll go with you."
Akira couldn't put his finger on it, but there was something about Carter that reminded him of his mother. Somewhat eerie, because he didn't get the chance to know her that well. He shut off the tablet screen and got up from the chair, the repaired leg now functioning like a charm.