Valkyrie Smash

Noticing something strange about the book, Sam went back and started reading from the beginning. He took out a notebook and a pen then started writing something down.

The books had many typos, grammatical errors and misspellings, however something stood out about those mistakes. The words always had one capital letter at the center. Sam found it odd so he decided to check and indeed every error had the same thing. Sam wrote down each of the letters and one by one. It took him some time but he was finally done.

He had expected to find some kind of secret message by the end, however what he was left with were a series of seemingly random letters.

His first thought was that it's some kind of code, however he found no clue on how to crack it.

At that point his sleepiness was completely gone and all he could think of was the strange sequence of letters. He went through the book again trying to find some kind of clue but had no luck.

He was about to give up, it all looked like one big waste of time, but then a flash of inspiration hit him.

Maybe the plot itself had some kind of clue? With that said Sam went over the book once more. The heroines of the book were named Thirty and Thirty one, two fictional units that didn't exist in real life. Throughout the book the protagonist has sex with each one exactly eight times. It didn't seem strange at first but Sam soon realized it was what he was looking for.

Thirty and Thirty one were the hexadecimal representation of 0 and 1. That was the only explanation for the two being named that way. Sam tried converting the series of letters from hexadecimal to text however he was met with more nonsense.

When that led to a dead end he started to wonder if the code was actually written in binary. He tried taking the letters and turning them into numbers according to their order in the alphabets, those who fell into an odd number were 0s and the even numbers were 1s.

Once he was done he found himself starring at a wall of ones and zeros that looked like some random baloney that flashes on computer screens in some sci-fi movies.

Dividing the sequence into eight digit parts he then proceeded to convert them from binary to text. A smile formed on Sam's face as he looked at the final results.

It was an easy enough code that he managed to solve it in a few hours on his own even though he didn't know much about secret codes.

The hidden message wasn't something one would expect given how inaccurate the depiction of the military base in the book was. It was a series of commends written in the programming language used in Eir.

"Guess there is no way I'll be able to sleep now…"

Sam had no idea what those commands did but he wasn't about to wait till morning to find out. The chance of them causing him trouble was present, however his curiosity overruled his judgment and he found himself changing and about to leave for his lab.

~◇~

It was the dead of the night so not many people were out. In fact, beside those on night watch, everyone else were trying to get some sleep after the stressful day they'd been through.

The base was eerily silent. The dimly lit grounds made Sam feel like he was in an abandoned city after the end of the world. Even a grown man like him was afraid of something jumping out of the shadows to take his life and in a world were strange monsters roamed nothing guaranteed that it will never happen.

Sam arrived at his lab and immediately got to work. He turned on the terminal he uses when examining the Valkyries, he then opened a command window and started writing what he had discovered from the book.

Just as he was about press enter he stopped himself to rethink his actions.

Was he really sure it is okay to do something like this? Operating Eir is his specialty, his job, however he never learned about such series of commends and didn't know what it would do.

He doubted it'd do something to damage the device though. Anyone knowledge enough to know about it wouldn't be so stupid as to try to render it unusable, and Odin, the guy who made it, wouldn't add something in it that would result in that.

It's probably some Easter egg that crazy guy put in…

When tasked with making weapons to fight the Calamities Odin went and created an army of beautiful women. Sam was sure the genius had fun doing that and for that reason he imagined him hiding some stuff in his other creations to surprise those curious enough to dig deeper.

"Well, thinking about it won't get me anywhere…"

Normally Sam wouldn't be so stupid as to go ahead with something like that. His cautious self should've warned him against it however exhaustion was affecting his judgment and cognitive abilities and because of that he pressed the button despite his worries.

The commands were executed and a new window appeared. It had three folders in it named Eir, Valkyrie and Freyja. While the first two weren't so surprising to see, Sam had never heard anything about the third folder. His curiosity peaked and he went to click on it. Inside were four files; Blue Prints, Unit BHTCNA05, Unit BHGTDWM9 and BHSFAB03.

Sam recognized the names of the last three. They were the full names of the Valkyries he had been responsible for ever since he started his job in this base. Sam was tempted to click on them, however what drew his attention even more was the first file with the name Blue Prints.

"Don't tell me…"

Swallowing audibly he clicked on the file and opened it. It was a compilation of documents with the title Project Freyja at the top. He began scrolling down slowly, carefully reading every line of text, carefully analyzing every picture he came past. His eyes slowly widened as he realized what he was looking at.

Those were the blue prints of the Valkyries. Or to be more accurate, they're the plans detailing the creation process of the shells hosting the central processors which in turn host the AI programs dubbed the Valkyries.

Sam couldn't help but slowly back away. If those are the real deal then he had just stumbled upon one of the most protected military secrets to date. Something like that would sell for billions as it would allow anyone to create the humanoid weapons. If anyone learns that he did it wouldn't be surprising if he just disappeared one day without a trace.

That said, he wasn't about to let it go now that he had discovered it. Most likely it's already too late, he can no longer pretend that he didn't see anything.

"Damn… even if I know how to, it's impossible to get the materials to make one…"

Hours passed as he went through the document. Little by little he began to understand how those human like weapons were created, what makes them tick and how they're able to hold their ground against the Calamities.

Everything Sam knew before was either something he had read on the official papers released to the public, heard from others in the field or stuff he had deduced on his own from working with those three. While most of it wasn't exactly incorrect, the info he found in that file were much more detailed and explained a lot of things.

One question a lot of people had asked was why the Valkyries had to been made in the form of a human female. As Sam read through the document he soon arrived at the answer to that.

"Project Freyja aims to create artificial wombs to help repopulate earth once the crisis has ended…"

It was a note at the very end of the documents, written by Odin himself. In it he spoke about how those in power feared the population decline brought by the massacres the Calamities committed. They expected the numbers of humans to be much lower once the war ends which would make it very difficult to for humanity to go back to what it once was.

To help with that they asked him to create artificial wombs to lessen the burden of pregnancy on the surviving female population and help recover the numbers of humans as fast as possible.

Sam couldn't help but break into a fit of laughter once he reached that point.

Odin who was working on the Valkyrie AI at the time saw that request as the perfect opportunity to execute a plan he most likely had since the very start.

Why settle on just an a digital version of the woman of your dreams when you can make her real? Why settle for an artificial womb when you can create the whole body?

,m Every single person knew what Odin's intentions were when creating the human like weapons, however that note just proved it and Sam couldn't help but laugh.

What the genius of a man and the savior of humanity wanted all along was to make the women he fantasized about real, and in order to achieve that he had the surviving human population provide him with everything he needed to do so.

Project Freyja is the plan to create not artificial wombs but artificial women, ones that can replace the originals in many ways, including being sexual and romantic partners.

"So it was true all along… hahaha…"