Nanosuit and Soul Magic: A Crysis/RWBY crossover

chapter 28

“You see, those weren’t fossils. Or machines. Those were the aliens. The Ceph are weird. They’re like some kind of mix between vat-grown life-forms, cyborgs, and biological drones.”

I pause. “Actually, lemme back up here for a second. There is probably nobody else alive that knows as much about the Ceph as I do, but I got into this pretty late in the game. Everything I’ve got on the aliens comes from a guy named Jack Hargreave. He was an egomaniacal asshole who thought he was better than everyone else, and thought that he was the only person who knew how to save humanity. He was also completely right.

“He was the first human to figure all of this out. He stumbled into some catatonic Ceph-tech a century ago, and actually figured how to make it all work. Even I don’t know exactly what he did with it, except that he wired himself into it to stay alive for as long as he had to, and he created the Nanosuit. He knew more about the Ceph than anyone, and coded it all into the databanks of my AI. Most of what I’m gonna tell you is guesswork, and probably wrong, but it’s the best Hargreave had. Telling you this now, so I don’t have to keep pointing it out while I’m talking.”

I’ve got their full attention. Taiyang and Ruby are both looking at me, and I’m pretty sure neither have so much as blinked since I began.

“Alright, some billions of years ago, the Ceph evolved in a different galaxy, three million light-years away from ours. They grew, they prospered, until eventually they reached the absolute pinnacle of what they could accomplish. Their bodies had evolved to perfection, and their technology had reached the limits of what they could dream of inventing. For some reason, instead of taking it easy for the rest of eternity, they decided to keep going. 

“Since they could conceive of absolutely no more ways to advance themselves, they decided to roll the dice, so to speak. Create a seed ship, load it up with what was to them extremely primitive life-forms equipped with extremely primitive technology, and launch it into another planet to see what they would come up with as they overcame completely new challenges. Evidently they liked the results, since they did it again. And again. By the time one of their seed ships hit Earth, they’d colonized their entire galaxy. “

Ruby raised her hand, like she was in a classroom. “Um, how did they get it to Earth from their galaxy?”

I shrugged. “Absolutely no clue. Maybe they teleported it. Maybe they used wormholes. Maybe they just launched it and waited. Whatever the case, it hit Earth about 65 million years ago. Mammals weren’t even really a thing yet, aside from tiny rats and stuff, so this would normally be game over. However, in a move that will come to be pretty typical for this war, humanity got stupidly lucky.

“A gigantic meteor hit us right after they did, with an impact big enough to kill almost everything on the surface. The Ceph decided to hibernate their way through it, and rode it out. But then they didn’t wake up. Not the day after the impact, not the year after, not for a whole 65 million years. There were sporadic activations every now and then, a piece of tech waking up and then exploding, but it wasn’t until three years ago that they really, actually started coming back.”

I half expect one of them to pull out popcorn. 

“Okay, so this is when that fossil thing happened. They woke up, looked around, saw the humans, and whatever incomprehensible mess they’ve got for a mind decided that we were the threat that needed to be overcome in their current environment. We had nothing to offer, our industry and pollution and shit was killing off the rest of the planet that might have stuff to offer, so they immediately began wiping us out. We won, after two days of massive casualties, multiple strategic nuclear detonations, and shooting down the thing they used as a combination command center, energy hub, and big-ass battleship.”