Waking to Another Sky Ch2 bit – Assembling questions

~ crossovercreativechaos

Clothes, Lisbeth thought, nervously picking a bit of lint off her sleeve as Agil and other guild leaders summed up what little they knew about Project Bluebook. Her family had sent stuff to wear, but a lot of people hadn’t been so lucky. We all need clothes. Or something to make them out of. I wonder if Ashley’s figured anything out yet? It’s so weird, seeing Kirito without his coat.

“So they call this the Project Bluebook Rehabilitation Center,” Thinker stated, “but you say Bluebook is something that goes on in Colorado. In someplace called Cheyenne Mountain.”

“Which is part of a big Air Force base,” Agil nodded. “My wife and I ran a cafe pretty near the place. Bluebook works under NORAD-”

“What’s a NORAD?” Asuna pounced.

“U.S. Air Force guys who keep an eye on the sky for missiles and other nasty stuff,” Agil filled her in. “It’s a big base dug into the mountain. Bluebook’s in their basement. They say they do deep-space radar telemetry.”

Klein gave him a sidelong look. “From under a mountain?”

“If they’re using satellites, that wouldn’t matter,” Kirito observed. “But you don’t think they are.”

“I don’t know what to think,” Agil said honestly. “But Dr. Jackson – the tall blond guy with glasses, you’ve probably seen him asking about weird things – he works for Bluebook. He comes in for coffee, usually with a stack of papers half as tall as he is. Sometimes he’s with O’Neill. Sometimes he’s with a few of the others. Never thought much about it. Bases hire academics for stuff they can’t find in the ranks all the time.” He paused. “But why would deep-space stuff need an anthropologist?”

Asuna nodded. “And why would a radar facility say they’re still looking for Kayaba?”

42 thoughts on “Waking to Another Sky Ch2 bit – Assembling questions”

  1. Hey SG1, hear that hissing sound? That’s your badly-made paper thin cover story deflating/collapsing under the slightest of investigations. These people might not know what they are really doing (yet) but they sure as hell know you aren’t doing what you say you are.

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  2. In fairness, deep space radar telemetry could touch on the same fundamental physics breakthroughs that could be used by Kayaba on the IT end. Kayaba’s zero latency tech would be very useful on a bunch of hardware platforms scattered around the solar system. You might be able to build a virtual telescope the size of the solar system. Of course, the Air Force would need the spacelift to be able to take advantage of that.

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      1. Air Force and NASA used to cooperate on projects a lot, but I understand that they ended up moving in different directions.

        Our time line, there ended up being a huge stock of rocket engines that no one was using, so R&D and production tapered off. I understand that a lot of the private spacelift programs involve buying unused engines from the Russians. Anyway, lift capacity is expensive, and interested parties would put some effort into tracking who is doing what.

        Supposing that what happened our timeline must match what happened in WtAS is something I have decided not to do. If the Air Force is using rockets to dump stuff in the outer solar system that they won’t talk about, people know. If they are using extraterrestrial propulsion tech, that is probably deeply classified, and not something they can use as a cover story.

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  3. I remember a line in Urban Legends, Jack saying that Archangel would _never believe_ that Colonel O’Neill was doing deep-space radar telemetry. Turns out, you don’t even need to be an intelligence agent to see through that…

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      3. To be fair, the Air Force loves to assign officers to mismatched commands. Which often leads to interesting results, but just as often to misery.

        My buddy the civilian contractor is currently dealing with a general who does not understand how a research facility works, and wants to try to apply best practices for a combat fighter wing. That does not work.

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  4. He paused. “But why would deep-space stuff need an anthropologist?”

    A question that I’m sure many people have asked.

    Asuna nodded. “And why would a radar facility say they’re still looking for Kayaba?”

    Another good question.

    They need to work on their cover stories. Surely they could have come up with a story for Dr. Jackson working them for that actually made sense.

    Starting to wonder if SGC’s motto is “I take refuge in audacity.”

    Because they should know that is Simon’s thing and in many ways, he’s much better at it. Because actors and special effects as a cover for magic is actually plausible enough to work.

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    2. It was probably a decent cover story before they actually got the Stargate open. After that someone really should have come up with a different cover story. Transferring everyone to a different project in the same location would be easier to sell than Jack and Daniel doing DSRT.

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      1. Given that Jack is special forces, initially people might have thought it was punishment for Jack. When he was shown to stick around and more special forces people went there, it was probably assumed that it was a special forces antiterrorist thing. With antiterrorism science. They probably figure Daniel is there as an Egyptian Arabic linguist. And caves. And folklore.

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  5. Do you think there’s a betting pool in town speculating on what’s actually going on in the mountain? (More like, do you think Agil and his wife were running it?)
    See, this is the problem with lies and conspiracies this big. Something as small as Daniel getting coffee is all that it takes to bring the house of cards crashing down

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      1. Of course people notice. But talking about it is just Not Done.

        If you guess right and talk about it, your buddy may lose his job just on suspicion. Also, you may get to know various security agencies better than you like. Why would you speculate openly about that sort of thing?

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      2. Heard a story about a guy who took old blueprints home from Electric Boat to wallpaper his office. That… was not kindly looked upon.

        (For those who’ve never been to Groton, CT – Electric Boat does submarines. Not the sandwich. Hunt for Red October type.)

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  6. I think the more worrisome thing is what a radar facility wanting Kayaba says about the radar facility. Especially when no one knows why the radar facility wants him… Wanting people with obscure PhDs is on thing. Wanting people who’ve trapped people in simulations that kill people is another.

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  7. At the end of the day, the SGC is going to have to meet the players at a midway point somewhere.

    They can’t/won’t let them just go home with the whole genetic modifications/nanites things.

    But at the same time they realize (or at least I hope they realize) holding over 6,000 people captive with no explanation, pumping them for information and potentially running all kinds of tests while not allowing them to contact the outside world in any way, is simply not going to work.

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    1. Hammond and Jack are not that stupid. I don’t doubt that there are some people who would like to do that but if ANYTHING slips then suddenly a very inquisitive light would be shone onto Hammond’s command. The Japanese are already unhappy enough about the US kidnapping 6000 of their citizens (Well at the time they were ported over there would have been more than that), but running medical experiments on them that the military is not going to talk openly about? It would be a PR disaster of almost biblical proportions. As I said, Hammond and Jack, despite how sketchy things look now, are not that stupid. However what the end result of this..I have no idea. As you mentioned, they can’t let people walk off with alien nano-tech…but what do you do with the people who do not want to work with you? Keep them captive? that’s going to sour the attitude of everybody who might have met you half way.

      Of course, Kayaba seems to be setting his up to blow the Stargate Program right open and what to do with the players works well with that.

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  8. As someone who works in a (very) low position within a gov’t structure, it’s not so much that the higher ups are idiots as it is that people are idiots (we have a story about one of my coworkers deliberately stepping on a live land mine when he was in the military, no idea how he’s still alive) and the higher ups are people too. It’s just that their idiocy has an instant and lasting effect on a large group of people. On the other hand, my idiocy is not likely to affect more than myself and perhaps a handful of others.

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