Things continue to be strange as a month of having the Otters not sick with a lot of vacation days has been restorative, like a good cup of tea. But at least the air conditioning is finally on. As the summer season has begun, new ideas have been flowering. Does this mean that Embedded Agents (Badger Company book 2) is done yet?
No.
I’m still working through it, and I’ll probably put the whole thing up on Royal Road to generate interest as I complete the series. I’m doing something now that I think is a first in the genre. A first person “This is the events leading up to now” as a primer for the second book. I’m going to add it here at the end for you super fans. This summarizes the events in the Badger Company book 1 from Stevies perspective. Stevie Long is the Team Leader for Team Owl, the primary POV team for Embedded Agents.
Here’s the current blurb:
“It’s hard when you’re traveling at near light speed in between systems to stop and appreciate the local sights.”
Team Chief and Marine Corps Major Stevie Long is on a mission, destination unknown. She can’t deny that the three teammates that she has brought along for the ride are the finest people she has served with, but the circumstances that brought them to Alpha Centauri? Yeah she was uploaded into a self replicating spaceship and sent off to explore planets. She didn’t even get one of the cool mugs that came with it, but she’ll definitely be buying the shirt.
And here is the excerpt:
Malcolm Parker arrived on on the Moon Base August 30th, 2040 and made the rounds. He met up with my buddy, Jennifer Jones and then I met him as I was the logistician on ground there working in the J41. I was the plans logistician, which mean that people came to me to ask for money for pet projects. That or time with the 3d printer.
We did a survey of the moon on September 16th and I showed him around our current project, which at the time was a big old hospital. Of course we used the giant Moon Dozer Optimized for Gravity, or MOON DOG for short. A week later he was trying to persuade me and our boss to change the current 3d printer queue.
A week after that, Malcolm, Erwin Yang and Jennifer Jones convinced me to become an AI upload of myself. That was a hard sell until an incoming missile alert showed us the that there was a short shelf like for the moon base.
We were underway to Proxima Centauri and we arrived in February 2043. That was when Jennifer began to torture us with the flight simulator. Did I mention that she’d come with us? Yeah we packed four fully grown adults into one Von Neumann probe and sent it far away from home. Well four full grown adults uploaded into AIs. Then we started mining materials and making more of ourselves.
TChalla, a clone of Malcolm was one of the first. He was brought on board in June 2023. Clones tend to take more colorful names, mine included. Seraphina was my DND characters name for fucks sake. We all got our own EXODUS probes.
We started exploring the system but it wasn’t until July 2043 when a Russian Von Neumann probe attacked us and made Jennifer eject. It took us a month to recover her, but it was worth it in the end. Then, in October 2043, we split into three teams under the Badger Company umbrella.
Team Ghost left first to return to Sol system. Team Honey Badgers set up shop in Proxima Centauri, and the best team, Team Owl flew to Alpha Centauri.
English