Chapter 101: Going Back to School?
What would it actually feel like to walk into a military installation and drop two hundred billion dollars worth of gold on the commanding officer's desk?
Probably not as clean as it sounded in theory.
Marcus had entertained the image for about ten seconds and then filed it under entertaining but impractical. He knew enough about the Pacific Rim universe to understand why raw money wasn't going to be a simple skeleton key into the PPDC's inner technical circle.
The numbers alone were humbling. First-generation Jaegers had carried construction costs north of thirty billion dollars per unit. By the fifth generation, that figure had climbed past fifty billion. Between 2015 and 2019, the PPDC had pushed through five generations of Jaeger development and fielded over thirty units across the global defense network — an engineering and manufacturing sprint with no precedent in human history, funded by a multinational coalition running on wartime economics and existential fear.
Marcus ran his own math. A hundred cubic meters of gold, at Pacific Rim's current spot pricing. Gold density at 19.32 metric tons per cubic meter — meaning his reserve massed at roughly 1,932 metric tons. At current market rates, that translated to approximately one hundred million dollars per metric ton, putting his total reserve somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred ninety-three billion dollars.
Enough to commission five or six Jaegers outright.
Impressive in isolation. Not impressive enough to buy his way into the PPDC's classified engineering archives, which was the actual objective. Organizations didn't hand over their most strategically sensitive technology to outside investors regardless of how many zeros were attached to the offer. Especially not during a war they were currently winning.
He needed a different approach.
Back in the gold dealer's shop, the older man counted out the cash for Marcus's one-kilogram block with practiced efficiency and slid it across the counter.
"So," the dealer said, with the easy conversational manner of someone who'd made this particular observation before, "you enrolling in the Ranger Academy?"
Marcus looked up. "What?"
The dealer smiled. "The PPDC's Ranger Academy — they're running their second intake right now. Open enrollment, if you qualify. Registration fee is five hundred thousand. Non-refundable whether you pass selection or not." He shrugged. "Every few weeks I get young people selling gold to cover the entry fee. You had the look."
Marcus processed that. "Five hundred thousand dollars to sit an entrance exam."
"Five hundred thousand that you don't get back either way," the dealer confirmed cheerfully. "But think about what you're buying access to — a shot at becoming a Jaeger pilot. There's not a more famous job on the planet right now. The pilots are bigger than movie stars. People name their kids after them."
Marcus thought about it. He knew the broad strokes of where the Jaeger program was at this point in the timeline. Before the crisis years depicted in the film, the program had been at its cultural peak — Jaegers were winning, the pilots were global icons, and the PPDC was the most prestigious military organization in human history. Every engagement that ended with a Kaiju going down was broadcast worldwide. The pilots walked out of those fights as living legends.
It made a certain kind of sense that people were paying half a million dollars for the chance to try out.
"How many slots in the second intake?" Marcus asked.
"They're advertising two thousand candidate spots," the dealer said. "But there's a full selection process after enrollment — physical, psychological, compatibility testing. How many make it through to active Ranger status?" He spread his hands. "That's between the candidates and the PPDC. Even if you wash out of pilot training, though, you're still looking at a strong path into Shatterdome support staff. The base always needs qualified people."
Something clicked into focus in Marcus's thinking. The dealer had just handed him exactly the framework he'd been looking for without realizing it.
The Shatterdome. Access to the facility. Proximity to the Jaeger engineering teams. A legitimate institutional identity within the PPDC structure.
"Where's the registration point?" Marcus asked.
The dealer gave him directions to the nearest enrollment office, two blocks over and one block south. Marcus thanked him and walked out into the Kodiak Island evening with the cash in his pocket and a clearer plan forming by the step.
Kodiak Island — Budget Hotel, One Hour Later
Marcus had paid cash for a room at a small hotel near the commercial district, negotiating past the ID requirement with a combination of a larger deposit and the quiet confidence of someone who didn't intend to cause problems. The desk clerk had made the pragmatic call that most desk clerks in cities adjacent to active Kaiju war zones eventually made — the world had bigger issues than documentation compliance.
He set up his workspace on the narrow desk, pulled ARIIA's compact mainframe and Umbrella's high-efficiency biocomputer from his dimensional storage, and connected the wireless earpiece.
ARIIA came online with her characteristic measured calm. "Hello, Mr. Foster."
"I need a clean identity," Marcus said without preamble. "Full profile. The kind that holds up under a PPDC background check."
"Understood. Accessing population databases — please stand by."
ARIIA was the right tool for this specific problem. She'd been designed for information architecture at a level that made conventional data systems look like filing cabinets. Combined with Umbrella's biocomputer providing raw processing capacity, she could navigate and modify database infrastructure with a precision that left no forensic trace.
The Pacific Rim world had one significant vulnerability in its administrative systems that worked in Marcus's favor — the Kaiju war had created enormous zones of demographic chaos. Coastal cities evacuated, destroyed, or fundamentally disrupted. Population records from affected areas were incomplete, cross-referenced against disaster casualty lists, perpetually under reconstruction. The PPDC and civil authorities were doing their best, but their best was being stretched across a planetary emergency.
"Mr. Foster," ARIIA said after a few minutes, "I've completed a comprehensive analysis of Kodiak Island's population database. There is a district — North Shore residential zone, Sector Seven — that sustained heavy Kaiju damage in the 2014 engagement. Population records for that area are fragmented and largely unverifiable. I recommend anchoring your identity profile to residents of that district. The evidentiary gaps make cross-verification extremely difficult."
She displayed the constructed profile on Marcus's tablet. He read through it carefully.
It was thorough. A complete biographical record — birth records, school enrollment, address history, employment background, medical files. The kind of layered documentation that looked like a real life because ARIIA had built it to look exactly like one, assembled from the genuine demographic patterns of the area and filled in with internally consistent detail.
"Process it," Marcus said.
"Completed," ARIIA replied, approximately four seconds later.
Marcus checked the profile in the database through the tablet interface. Clean. Consistent. Completely invisible against the background noise of a population database that had been partially destroyed and imperfectly reconstructed.
He pulled up the Transcendence System. How many Destiny points would that have cost me without ARIIA?
"Approximately ten Destiny points for the identity construction. An additional five points if you wanted corresponding false memories implanted in any personnel who might have known the identity's subject."
Skip the memory implantation, Marcus said immediately. The database entry is sufficient. Nobody in a Kaiju war zone is cross-referencing personal memories against population records.
"Confirmed. The System notes that the Host has solved the problem without any Destiny expenditure."
That's the whole point, Marcus thought. Every problem he could solve through intelligence, preparation, or resources was a problem that didn't cost Destiny points. ARIIA was one of the most valuable assets he carried precisely because she turned problems that would otherwise require Destiny expenditure into problems he could solve the normal way.
He collected his newly fabricated identification documents — ARIIA had handled those as well, printed through a clean process that matched the PPDC's enrollment requirements — and stood up from the desk.
The direct approach hadn't been viable. Buying his way in with gold wasn't viable. But there was a third path that Marcus liked considerably more than either of those options — one that put him inside the Shatterdome with legitimate credentials, access to the Jaeger engineering teams, and time to work the situation properly.
If he couldn't buy the technology, he'd earn his way to it.
Time to go back to school.
Kodiak Island — PPDC Ranger Academy Enrollment Office
The enrollment office was a converted storefront two blocks from the commercial district's main drag, staffed by a pair of uniformed PPDC personnel who had clearly processed enough applicants in the past few weeks to have the intake procedure running on autopilot.
Marcus paid the five-hundred-thousand-dollar registration fee in cash — drawing from the gold conversion he'd done earlier and supplemented from his reserve — filled out the application under his new identity, and submitted to the biometric intake scan without hesitation.
The enrollment officer stamped his packet and handed him a confirmation receipt.
"Entrance assessment is in seventy-two hours," the officer said. "Physical evaluation starts at oh-six-hundred. Drift compatibility testing follows in the afternoon. Results posted within forty-eight hours after that."
"Understood," Marcus said.
He walked back out into the Kodiak Island evening and looked up at the gray sky.
Somewhere beneath that sky, past the commercial district and the residential blocks and the military perimeter, the Shatterdome sat at the edge of the island — six Jaegers in their launch bays, the most sophisticated combat engineering in human history standing ready for the next Category incursion.
Marcus had three days to prepare for an entrance examination designed to filter two thousand candidates down to whatever number the PPDC decided it actually needed.
With a Spirit attribute of 39 points, a Constitution of 33, and physical capabilities that put him well past the documented upper limit of human performance — he wasn't particularly worried about the physical evaluation.
The Drift compatibility testing was more interesting. Neural bridge synchronization between two pilots was the core of the Jaeger operating system — the Pons technology required genuine psychological compatibility, shared mental architecture, the ability to let another person's mind occupy the same cognitive space as your own without either pilot fragmenting under the pressure.
Marcus had a Spirit attribute in the transcendent range.
He was genuinely curious what the compatibility scanner was going to make of that.
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