Project Blueshift

The storyline is still VERY messy but it starts off with Sailor, a computer science major at the (fictional) university known as the Enrico Fermi Institute at the Franco-Swiss border, finding a dog. The dog is actually an artificial organism, designed to be a remotely controlled to walk through particle accelerators, collecting data that a stationary detector would be unable to obtain, and being able to communicate with researchers in real time.

It also has a vacuum chamber in its chest to transport antimatter.

Unit 3-NTE (Nicknamed Trinity by Sailor). NTE stands for Networked Transportation Entity. was the last of 20 units that were sent to high-energy physics laboratories around the world. All of them were destroyed due to instabilities, but this one managed to slip through due to an oversight.

Ultimately, with two grams of antimatter in its chamber. More than has ever been synthesized before.

This creates massive panic at CERN, where the antimatter was synthesised, and we enter Francois, Vivian, Patrick, Lauren, and Daniel, a team of antimatter researchers.

They deduce that the antimatter was moved in order to create a distraction so materials for nuclear weapons can be stolen.

This was with the help of Dr. Kendall, CERN's former director, who was forced into retirement.

Sailor notices that Trinity has an engraving on its collar that says "Property of CERN", and gets into contact with Dr. Alice Bridger, a brilliant, yet very naive and paranoid theoretical physicist.

It is worth noting that Sailor is not very important to this story. She and Penh, her history major best friend, are merely catalysts. After surrendering Trinity back to CERN, she becomes mostly irrelevant.

That solves the antimatter crisis, but now the issue is with the fact that Dr. Karl Birmingham, a nuclear physicist working for a weapons lab in France.

He's actually working for Aurum Dynamics, the most massive private scientific research organisation in the world.

All good, right? Everybody knows about Aurum! Their Doppler labs, Redshift and Blueshift, are helping build the lunar accelerator.

Wrong.

He's known, publicly, to be the head of the D-sector, nicknamed the Dirac sector (all of the sectors are named after dead physicists).

What the public DOESN'T know, is what HAPPENS in the D-sector. In fact, with the exception of Birmingham, nobody in the D-sector knows what they're working on. All engineers and physicists chosen were chosen, intentionally, because they were seen as naive and unlikely to piece things together.

Important context: Tension is rising between the United States and Argentina over the US wanting valuable resources that Argentina refuses to give up, obviously. This fear of war is causing even more, global tension.

Even more important context: All nuclear weapons have been moved to a deserted, yet heavily guarded, piece of land, where UN officials are always on duty, after what's been known as the Warsaw Convention. All historic research left over about nuclear weapons has been destroyed.

The few remaining people that worked on the Manhattan Project and other nuclear projects, have been sworn to secrecy.

The intentions of this convention were pure, obviously. But history that's left untold is doomed to repeat itself.

The D-sector isn't actually affiliated with Aurum, it just happens to be hosted there. It's actually sponsored by the US military, who has secretly commissioned a new form of nuclear superweapon. It couldn't be the same as any old fission or fusion bomb, as trying to build one of those would set off alarm bells, so something had to be different. Of course, Aurum is okay with this, as they're privately funded and will do anything for money. Louis, the director of the Doppler Labs, is very absentminded and doesn't really gaf.

Re-enter Alice.

Alice works at CERN and is quite jittery. She is also quite sensitive and very submissive to authority. This is important.

As she was seen as responsible for finding the missing antimatter, Birmingham now sees her as a security threat to his project, as she's in contact with Vivian's antimatter team. He worries, that despite how oblivious she is, she'll be able to put two and two together.

The nuclear project is nicknamed "Project Blueshift", as it's vague enough that it can mean anything. The Blue lab has many projects, all the time.

This is why he recruits her to leave CERN and work in the Blueshift Lab.

She is told absolutely nothing, just that she would be doing calculations for an "unconventional particle apparatus". She accepts, mostly because she would then get to spend more time with Lav, her wife, an astrophysicist working at the Redshift laboratory.

Now, enter Auben, a CERN intern that is recently finished working on her masters' degree. Alice is her doctoral advisor

She meets Sailor, as Sailor has started frequently visiting CERN due to the fact that Sailor actually wants to become a physicist, and always has, however she chose computer science because her father wants her to be able to take over his company. She never enjoyed it.

They become friends, and now that Alice is transferring, she is still going to be visiting the Blueshift laboratory due to the fact that she doesn't want to have to change advisors.

All she knows is that she doesn't have clearance to visit Alice during her working hours.

She sends Sailor to get her materials from the K-sector, but Sailor gets curious and decides to walk over to spy on the D-sector. This sets off alarms, getting them both in trouble.

Auben, understandably, gets mad at Sailor. But then, she sees Sailor is visibly rattled.

After asking what's bothering her, Sailor asks why a purely theoretical department has such a large supply of highly radioactive elements.

This gets Auben interested. She and Sailor do some digging, and run into a young Blueshift intern named Lex. Lex was also curious, and says something about how strange that a theoretical high-energy physics department was so high-security, so much so that they use callsigns. When inquired, she says that all members call eachother code names, and that Alice is called Copernicus.

When asked how she knows this, it's revealed that Lex is Karl Birmingham's daughter, trying to help him figure out any potential security risks. The pair are then detained, as he knows that they might pose a threat and get the project shut down by the French government in order to not break the Warsaw convention.

Now, enter Werner. This character is my self insert but whatever it doesn't matter. They are a particle physics student that is currently visiting the Doppler Labs out of pure curiosity, as they're looking at potential places to work after graduating.

Werner likes knowing history of places. This gets them in trouble sometimes.

They're under the impression that Aurum was founded as a place for safe, international, collaboration during World War II, so that way people from warring countries could still work together in peace and stay out of the fighting. This is what Aurum tells everybody.

Werner visits the Redshift building, as that's where the Doppler facility's library is. They rummage around a bit out of boredom, and then find an old metal box marked with "TESTS". Obviously, a curious, autistic, and overall very inquisitive person is going to want to know what's in that box at all costs. It wouldn't be in the library if it wasn't meant to be public knowledge, right??

They then spend time working on opening the box. This ends with frustration, and then they just carry it out. Probably not the best idea, but thankfully, they run into Lav and not Dr. Levi Aves, the Redshift lab's head.

Note: Nabla is the head of Blueshift

Levi is the head of Redshift.

Louis is the head of both as a joint facility.

Louis and Nabla are good people. Levi? We're not sure.

Lav questions as to why a person she's never seen before is walking out with a box.

Werner goes speechless.

Lav then smirks and says "I know how to open the box. C'mon."

She leads them into the K-sector at Blueshift. The K-sector is also known as the Kelvin sector, and it's a thermodynamics lab. There's a massive compartment filled with liquid nitrogen. You can probably deduce where this is going.

After freezing off the lock, there's two old reels inside.

One is labeled with "AUGUST 19, 1944. TEST #1".

The other is labeled with "JULY 19, 1946." and nothing more.

Lav only knows of one definitive place where she can play this format, and it's at a military facility back in Arizona, where she lived for most of her life. And served for 7 years. She doesn't want to think about it, but something tells her that this is important. She would have to go back to the United States and face her past. She gives her contact information to Werner and says she'll contact them once she's able to play the tapes. Of course, Werner hates waiting, but they understand.

Auben is finally released from where she was being detained, only because she manages to concoct a story about how since Alice is her advisor, and she has to work with her, she doesn't want Alice to get in trouble for her student doing something wrong, blah blah blah, that could get Alice removed from the project, etc etc. Obviously, Dr. Birmingham doesn't want to lose his most brilliant, vital, scientist, so he agrees to let Auben leave. Sailor is released as well, but she's told that if she ever appears on the Doppler campus again, she'll get into massive trouble and will be arrested as a trespasser. However, Birmingham forgets that the Doppler labs aren't the only parts of Aurum Dynamics.

Auben meets Werner when leaving. She's surprisingly doing fine, despite having been forced to stay inside an underground laboratory for a few days.

Werner and Auben bond very quickly over shared interests and research. Werner then explains their conversation with Lav. Auben points out that Lav and Alice are a couple.

Auben is now especially interested in Werner, after hearing about their fascination, now obsession, with finding out the history of Aurum Dynamics.

Auben tells Werner about all the weird shit going on with the D-sector.

The two are now determined to figure out what's going on. They become inseparable.

Lav is back in the United States, visiting her old military station.

She feels so much pain even being back, because even though she never directly built a weapon or killed anybody, she knows that her research still contributed.

She only stayed as long as she did because it felt nice to be appreciated for once. Her parents, as wonderful as they were, were so busy they never had a chance to truly raise her. She spent more time with her uncle at the planetarium he owned then at her actual house.

She's greeted by an admiral, the same admiral that she once strived to take the place of. He's thrilled to see her. She was the best in her field.

His team felt a horrible loss when she resigned.

After explaining what she wants, he knows he can work this in his favor.

He'd only process the reels if she re-enlisted.

She obliges, only because she's worried about what's really going on with Alice and Project Blueshift. She doesn't want Alice to get hurt or exploited. She's too late, but that's unknown to her.

"Welcome back, General Bern."

The first reel, marked as TEST #1, shows a grainy video depicting a handsome, middle-aged woman wearing a suit. Lav recognises her immediately as Dr. Halley Kleinveld, the founder of Aurum Dynamics.

"Greetings, I'm Dr. Hal Kleinveld, accelerator physicist and nuclear engineer." She speaks with a thick German accent.

Wait, what? Kleinveld was a cellular biologist. Right? That's what she'd always heard. Aurum Dynamics was originally a biology and chemistry laboratory. Physics wasn't added until later.

"I'm here to demonstrate the prototype of the thermonuclear weapon that my researchers and I have been working on for the past year at the Aurum District. We were hired privately as the so-called Uranium Club has been... unsuccessful... to say the least. We hope that we can provide a suitable weapon before the Americans do, in order to ensure Germany's victory."

Lav goes cold. Kleinveld was a Nazi. She wants to punch the screen.

Lav feels sick.

"We're going to now be detonating the core."

A man in the back starts counting down.

Right as he gets to "EINS", another man yells out a curse.

Lav waits for the telltale fireball, but it never comes. She hears screaming, though.

The video cuts to Hal yelling and cursing, panic among the scientists who are trying to figure out what just happened, and the screen goes black.

Lav's pretty sure she knows exactly what happened.

An effect not unlike what happened with the American 'demon core'.

She knows she shouldn't worry. She knows that this was decades ago. She knows the Germans never actually built a functional bomb.

But now she knows that Aurum Dynamics was founded on a lie.

She knows that it's different now. But it doesn't matter. She's been working to preserve the legacy of a Nazi. She was so convinced that the whole purpose of Aurum Dynamics was to avoid war and its impact on science.

She shudders. And despite the pain in her gut, she plays the other tape. This was after the war ended.

Once again, she sees Kleinveld. She's seemingly aged 20 years in 11 months.

"Hello. I'm not sure if anybody's going to see this. In fact, I hope nobody does..."

Lav doesn't want to hear it. She knows it's just some absolute fake-guilty post-war bullshit. They all seemed to have it. She zones out, before one single word snaps her back-- "My team at the Dirac sector did our best-"

The Dirac sector. The same sector Alice was working on. She knew something was off about all of it. Why would a particle physics laboratory be under such strong clearance?

She does think that it was a stupid idea to have a weapons laboratory in the same building as regular laboratories, but she then supposes that would raise questions if one specific sector was stationed elsewhere.

She hopes that it's just a coincidence the name is the same. Or that maybe the goals have simply changed over the years. But she knows that it's not.

She had to get back to Switzerland. She bursts out of the station, before being stopped. Right.

She quickly emails Werner, fulfilling her promise, before her belongings are confiscated.

She'll work on escaping tonight.

"Bombs. They're building bombs. That's all it's ever been."

Werner is talking with Auben when they receive the email.

Auben feels sick. Alice? Building a bomb? The same Alice that would be sick to her stomach when she overheard a mild tragedy on the news?

"Well... that explains the codenames. And why I was locked in a shitty lab jail."

They rush to find Alice, and eventually do. She has a neutral expression.

"Auben? Wh-what's wrong? And... other... person..?"

"You're building a bomb."

"What?"

"My friend Werner has been in contact with Lav. She did digging. The D-sector is a bomb factory. It has been since WW2. That's the whole reason Aurum Dynamics even exists."

Alice refuses to believe it. She was told she was working on some form of particle device. She studied baryogenesis, for god's sake! How would that be useful in building a bomb?

Auben points out, rather unhelpfully, that Oppenheimer studied black holes, among other things, before the Manhattan Project.

Alice is still not convinced. Where would the weapons even be tested?

She's unaware that as they speak, the first one is being carefully flown to a remote location in Russia for the first test of this new design.

"A-And... the Warsaw C-Convention!!"

Auben shows the email from Lav. Surely that will convince her.

Alice starts to pale.

"W-Well... that was... d-decades ago... Even if it was w-weapons th-then... it's n-not... n-now..."

"You really think a normal theoretical physics department would use codenames, *Copernicus*?"

Alice starts shaking. "I-If it was a b-bomb, su-surely it would be in the f-fission la-lab..."

"That would be too obvious and alert UN. I'm certain you're aware of the Warsaw Convention."

Alice is still in denial.

Auben then remembers what she'd heard Vivian's team had figured out. "Also, you know that Dr. Birmingham works at a weapons manufacturer. Where do you think that is?"

"B-Birmingham..? Fr-From... C-CE-CE..."

"Yes. That Birmingham. The sole person responsible for the antimatter crisis."

Alice whispers "Aleph..." She's finally putting it together.

She runs to "Aleph" 's office, realising that she'd never seen his face in the light. It was unmistakably Dr. Birmingham.

She gains confidence and demands he explain.

She sees a file marked as "AB-DIR-Th". She snatches it. It was all of her calculations. All of her ideas. Everything she'd done over the past few months. It was on top of a pile of other files in a rubber band, with a manila letter on top with the address of some remote research facility in Russia.

"Wh-why di-didn't you tell me..."

"Because I know you wouldn't have agreed."

"You d-don't kn-know tha-that..."

"Alice. I've observed you for years."

"S-So..?"

"I saw how you nearly threw up when you briefly saw a headline about some shooting in Paris. Do you really think I'd tell someone as faint hearted as you that you're working on a nuclear bomb?"

She's trembling, and she sees on his screen that Russia has recieved "the delivery".

She worries she's too late.

Unless..?

She knows he's not stupid enough to keep backups of the research online. He knows that would immediately alert every data monitering center.

(All of that got much tighter after the first American Nuclear Crisis. Despite the war that it happened during being brief, it was terrifying. America's constant threatening of nuclear bombs was enough to lead to global panic. In fact, one was about to be dropped had it not been sabatauged by an anonymous engineer. That was what led to the Warsaw Convention. Even though the war had very few casualties, it was basically a global wakeup call. And now, tension is brewing again.)

She snatches the files. The test may have been built, but she can stop another from being built. She's about to run out of the office, but Birmingham isn't stupid. He locks the door remotely.

He comes up to her. She sits down, scared.

"Alice. Dr. Bridger. You're a brilliant theorist. One in a million. A billion, even."

Tears well up in her eyes.

"I need you. It's such a shame I have to do this.."

He holds a gun to her head.

"K-Kill me. I don't c-care."

"Oh, I'm not going to kill you. But I am in contact with Admiral Lester. He'd deal with your beloved General Bern, whom he is so thrilled to have working for him again."

"General..?"

"Oh, she didn't tell you..? Dr. Lawrence Bern, or "Lav", as it seems she's called affectionately, was a high-ranking officer before working here. Her aeronautical and astronomical expertise is invaluable to his project. But I assumed you'd have known that. Don't lovers tell each other those things..?"

Alice is so shaken, but there's no time. She doesn't want Lav to die.

She submits.

"F-Fine... I'll work on the... p-pro-project. I'll b-bu-build the b-bomb..."

She sighs as he removes the gun from her head. She slowly stands up. She starts to walk away, heading slowly to the door. She's knocked down, yelling in pain. He shot her in the leg.

"I don't want you betraying me. You're a researcher, not a rebel. A scientist, not a soldier. Remember that."

"I-I... understand..."

He smiles.

"Good... Now, let's get you to the infirmary. You have a lot of work to do, Dr. Bridger"

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