Noticing something strange about the book, Sam went back and started reading from the beginning. After going through the first few pages he realized it wasn't just his imagination and quickly took out a notebook and a pen to write 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.
After going through all of the errors he had expected to find some kind of secret message by the end, but to his disappointment, what he was left with was a series of seemingly random letters.
If it was some kind of code then he would have a difficult time cracking it, seeing how there are no clues on how to go about that.
At that point, his sleepiness was completely gone and all he could think about was the strange sequence of letters. He went through the book again trying to find something else but had no luck.
Just when he began to think that all of it was just a big waste of time, a flash of inspiration hit him.
'Maybe the plot itself is the clue...' Thinking that to himself, 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 exactly 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. He tried converting the series of letters from hexadecimal to text however he was met with even 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 alphabet, those who fell into an odd number were 0s and the even numbers were 1s.
Once he was done he found himself staring at a wall of ones and zeros, just like some random baloney that flashes on computer screens in some sci-fi movie. Dividing the sequence into eight-digit parts he then proceeded to convert them from binary to text. A smile formed on his 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 encryption.
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 commands written in the unique 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, besides those on night watch, everyone else was 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 one of the abandoned cities scattered around their apocalyptic world. Even a grown man like him was afraid of something jumping out of the shadows to end his life.
It didn't take long for him to reach his lab, and as soon as he was sure the doors were locked he immediately got to work. Turning on the terminal he used when examining the Valkyries, he opened a command window and started writing what he had discovered from the book.
Just as he was about to press enter, his finger halted right above the button as he reconsidered his actions.
Sam already knew it was quite risky so the question he asked himself was whether satisfying his curiosity was worth that risk. Operating Eir was his specialty, his job. The series of commands he uncovered wasn't among the instructions handed to him by the headquarters, meaning he had no idea what they did.
He doubted it'd do something to damage the device though; anyone knowledgeable enough to know about it wouldn't be so stupid as to try to render it unusable.
'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 it, and for that reason he imagined him hiding some stuff in his other inventions 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, but 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 piqued 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 the forty sixth base. He was tempted to click on one of 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 and analyzing every picture he came across. His eyes slowly widened as he understood what he was looking at.
Those were the blueprints of the Valkyries. Or to be more accurate, they were 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 were 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, but at the same time, if anyone learned of what he did it wouldn't be surprising if he just disappeared one day without a trace.
Danger bells started ringing in his head and he felt naive for ignoring the hunch he had before. That said, stopping now would do little to help his case. Either way, he can no longer pretend that he didn't see anything. The only one who had access to that terminal was him so if anything strange was discovered there would be no one else to suspect.
"Damn… even if I know how to, it's almost impossible to get the materials to make one…"
Hours passed as he went through the document. Little by little he began to understand how the human-like weapons were created, what makes them tick, and how they're able to hold their ground against the Calamities.
The intricate design left him speechless. He considered himself quite informed when it came to the topics of robotics and nanomachines, but everything he saw in those files was far beyond the level of technology currently available to humans.
One part, named the Heart, stood out among the rest as it was responsible for generating the Force Fields Valkyries rely on for protection and enhancing their weapons. Sam found himself mesmerized by the complexity of its internals and the wonderous nature of the theory behind how it's able to do what it does.
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 the files was much more detailed and shed light on quite a lot of things.
One question a lot of people had asked was why the Valkyries had to be made in the form of a human female. As Sam read through the document he soon arrived at the answer.
"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 number of humans to be much lower once the war ended, which would make it very difficult 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 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?
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 find it hilarious.
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.
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…"