Something odd about the book caught Sam's attention, and so he went back to the beginning and reread the whole volume, then he read it again one more time. By that point, he no longer believed it was just his imagination, which prompted him to take out a notebook to scribe his findings in.
The books had many typos, grammatical errors, and misspellings. At first, Sam attributed it to the poor quality of the work, but something stood out about those mistakes. The words always had one capital letter at the center. When he checked all the other mistakes, he found that they shared the same oddity. He had expected to find some kind of secret message by the end, but to his disappointment, after writing down all of the capitalized words, he was left with a seemingly random collection of letters.
If it were some kind of code, he would need more clues on how to solve it, seeing how he had no idea of its type or how to even go about solving it. He went back into the book and resumed his search, forgetting all about the exhaustion that prompted him to read it in the hope of falling asleep. Sadly, even after reading the book for the fourth time, he had no luck in finding any clues.
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 story once more. The heroines of the book were named Thirty and Thirty One; two fictional Valkyries 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 representations 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, but 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 that fell into odd numbers 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 sci-fi movies. 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, but it didn't take long for it to turn into a frown.
Though clever, the code wasn't that difficult to crack, so Sam hadn't expected the message it hid to be anything significant. That made the result all the more surprising. The hidden message was a series of commands written in the unique programming language used in Eir.
"How in the world…"
Sam recognized the language, having mastered it when he first took the job of the Valkyries' technician. Nevertheless, the sequence of commands was unlike anything he was used to. Having come this far, he wasn't about to wait until morning to figure out what they did. Changing his clothes in a hurry, he grabbed the book and his notes and rushed back to 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 rest after the stressful day they'd been through. The base was eerily silent. The dimly lit grounds made Sam feel like he was walking through one of the abandoned cities scattered around their apocalyptic world. It made even a grown man like him afraid of something jumping out of the shadows to end his life. Thankfully, nothing of the sort happened, and he made it to the lab without any problems.
No sooner had the door closed behind him than Sam went straight to work. Turning on Eir's terminal, he opened a command prompt 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 the function they are meant to execute wasn't something he was supposed to know.
'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 female robots. 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 alone won't get me anywhere…'
Was it his exhaustion that pushed his thoughts in this direction? Normally, his cautious self would have stopped him much earlier, forcing him to reconsider his plans a few more times before taking action. This time, his hesitation only lasted a couple of seconds before he made up his mind and pressed the button. Whatever disaster came out of it, Sam couldn't care less about preventing it at this point.
The commands were executed, and a new window appeared, listing three distinct folders—Eir, Valkyrie, and Freyja. While the first two weren't so surprising to see, Sam had never heard anything about the third. His curiosity piqued, he went to click on it. Inside were four files: Blue Prints, GIII.MC.TBR.U05, GIII.RC.BBB.U09, GVI.MC.SBG.U03.
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, but what drew his attention even more was the first file, the one named 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 a result, his already pale face losing what little color it had.
Those were the blueprints of the Valkyries. To be more accurate, they were the plans detailing the creation process of the Shells hosting the central processors containing the Valkyrie AI. Sam couldn't help but slowly back away. Stumbling upon one of the most guarded military secrets in human history was such a shocking experience that Sam had to take a few minutes to process what he had just seen.
The most obvious reaction should have been to reject them as fake, but Sam found himself incapable of that. He might not be a genius on Odin's level, but he was proficient enough in all the right academic fields to understand everything those pages contained, and that allowed him to tell with utmost certainty that everything had a basis in reality, even if most appeared to be in the theoretical realm. The value of those documents couldn't possibly be calculated, and if he could prove their authenticity, he would be looking at a source of infinite wealth.
Just as the thought crossed his mind, Sam started to feel like an idiot for ignoring the very logical thought that told him not to mess with the commands. The moment the powers that be discover that he had gained access to those files, his life would be over. He wouldn't even be surprised if they were informed the moment the commands were executed, and with him being the only other person in the base who knows how to operate Eir, there was no one else to take the blame for him.
'I'm screwed anyway, so I might as well...'
Abandoning all caution, he continued to read through the documents, trying to commit every detail to memory. He got to a point where he was confident that he could recreate the shells on his own, so long as he had the right tools and materials. Of course, the chances that he would ever come across those things were closer to zero than his chances of surviving an investigation into what he did.
One particular part stood out in the marvel of engineering he had the fortune to study. It was the source of the Force Field the Valkyries use for protection and enhancing their weapons, simply named the "Heart". Sam found himself mesmerized by the complexity of its internals and the wondrous nature of the theory behind how it's able to do what it does. Everything he 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 the three Valkyries. While most of it wasn't exactly incorrect, the info he found in the files shed some light on quite a lot of things.
One question a lot of people continuously ask is 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 had committed. They expected the number of humans to be much lower once the war ended, which would make it very difficult for humanity to rise once more. To help with that, they asked him to create artificial wombs to lessen the burden on the surviving female population and help recover the number 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 digital versions of the women of your dreams when you can make them 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, but that note just proved it.
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…"