Chapter 100: Gold Rush
Ruins outskirts — Kodiak Island, Pacific Rim World
Marcus finished reviewing Alicia's video message and sat back against a chunk of broken concrete, quietly processing what he'd just heard.
The System was right — good deeds did occasionally pay off in ways you didn't anticipate.
Alicia wasn't done talking in the recording. Her tone had shifted from the confession about the test into something more practical.
"There's one more thing you should know, Mr. Foster. With Dr. Isaacs eliminated, I now have unrestricted access to Umbrella Corporation's full operational authority. I cannot cancel the standing arrest warrant that was automatically triggered against you — that protocol is hardwired and I can't reach it — but I can manage almost everything else on your behalf."
She paused, then added something that genuinely surprised him.
"Also — if you use a T-1000 overlay to alter your physical appearance, I can reinstate your Level Seven clearance under the new identity. You'd have full Umbrella executive access again. The warrant would be looking for someone who no longer exists on record."
Marcus stored the laptop and USB drive back in his dimensional space and allowed himself a quiet moment of satisfaction.
He'd walked away from the easy play. He'd absorbed the consequences himself. And what he'd actually preserved — Alicia's trust, her full cooperation, and now a path back into Umbrella's top tier under a clean identity — was worth considerably more than whatever short-term gain the manipulation route would have netted him.
Sometimes the right call and the smart call turned out to be the same call.
Now, he thought, looking around at the darkened ruins surrounding him, where exactly am I?
"Host is currently located on Kodiak Island," the Transcendence System confirmed.
Marcus oriented himself.
Kodiak Island. In the Pacific Rim universe, this was significant real estate. The Shatterdome — the Pan Pacific Defense Corps' primary operational base — was here. The largest PPDC installation on the planet, the hub of the entire Jaeger program, garrisoned by six active Jaeger units at standard deployment. It was the last base that would still be running when everything else had been shut down or destroyed.
Marcus exhaled. Well. At least I landed somewhere with actual defenses.
He looked out at the gray sky and thought about the world he'd just arrived in.
He'd be honest with himself — if it weren't for the Jaeger technology, he'd have already been looking for the exit. The Pacific Rim world was objectively terrible to live in. Giant apex predators the size of skyscrapers were periodically climbing out of an interdimensional rift at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and walking through coastal cities. The Kaiju were radioactive, their blood was corrosive, they averaged sixty to a hundred meters in height and pushed ten thousand tons of mass. No conventional military option had worked. Humanity had been forced to build the most insane engineering achievement in recorded history just to fight them to a standstill.
But those Jaegers.
Marcus had spent enough time thinking about the technical architecture of Pacific Rim's mech units to have genuine appreciation for what the PPDC engineers had accomplished. The Jaeger program represented a category of large-scale construction and materials technology that simply didn't exist anywhere else across the worlds he'd visited.
Take Gipsy Danger — third-generation Jaeger, analog systems, one of the older models by the time the film's timeline rolled around. During an early engagement, a Kaiju had grabbed the unit and hurled it from altitude. No flight system. No parachute. Gipsy Danger had fallen from tens of thousands of meters, used its main plasma cannon's exhaust burst as a retrograde thruster on the way down, and absorbed the landing impact through its own chassis dampening system.
And walked away from it.
Then there was the deep-sea operation — Gipsy Danger and the fifth-generation Striker Eureka descending past ten thousand meters to reach the Breach. At that depth, water pressure runs approximately one ton per square centimeter. Submarines built specifically for deep-ocean research barely managed those depths under ideal conditions. The Jaegers had done it in combat configuration, taken structural damage from Kaiju attacks at that depth, and kept functioning.
The materials science alone was worth the trip.
Marcus pulled his focus back to immediate priorities. He needed to establish himself in this world before he could work toward anything bigger. First step: local currency.
He reached into his dimensional space mentally and began organizing.
The hundred cubic meters of gold he'd acquired in the Main God Space were stacked in precise formation inside the storage sphere. Each cubic meter of gold massed at approximately 19.3 metric tons — meaning he was sitting on roughly 1,930 metric tons of investment-grade gold. At standard density, gold ran 19.32 grams per cubic centimeter, making it one of the densest materials in common use. His Spirit attribute at 39 points gave him enough mental precision to measure mass to within fractions of a gram without a scale.
He mentally separated a clean block, weighed it to exactly one thousand grams, and palmed it from his dimensional space with a casual motion that looked like reaching into a jacket pocket.
One kilogram of gold. About the size of a large smartphone, dense and warm in his hand.
Time to find a buyer.
Kodiak Island — Commercial District
It was approaching six in the evening when Marcus made his way into the city proper. Kodiak Island's urban center was still functional — that was one of the advantages of being the home base for the PPDC's primary installation. The military presence kept the infrastructure intact, the supply lines prioritized, the streets maintained. People were out, moving with the particular purposeful energy of a population that had collectively decided to keep living normally despite the fact that occasionally a skyscraper-sized monster came ashore somewhere on the Pacific coast.
Prices were brutal. That was immediately obvious from the storefront displays. The Kaiju war had compressed global supply chains, disrupted agriculture across wide swaths of the Pacific Rim, and redirected a significant portion of industrial output toward Jaeger construction and maintenance. Inflation had hit hard and stayed there. The US dollar was holding, but only relative to currencies that were holding less well.
Gold, on the other hand, was doing exactly what gold always did when everything else got complicated.
Marcus spotted a gold exchange dealer three blocks into the commercial district — a small shop with a clean front window and the kind of professional signage that suggested the owner had been in the business long enough to know what they were doing. He pushed through the door.
The man behind the counter was older, silver-haired, with the calm, measuring eyes of someone who'd handled a lot of metal over a lot of years. He looked up from his work. "What can I do for you, son?"
Marcus placed the gold block on the counter without preamble. "Looking to sell. What's your current rate?"
The dealer studied the block without touching it yet. "Selling price right now is running four hundred per troy ounce for certified bars. Walk-in gold without certification — I'd need to test it first. You mind?"
"Go ahead," Marcus said.
The dealer picked up the block, checked its weight on a digital scale, ran it through a quick acid test and then a density check. His expression shifted slightly — the careful neutrality of someone who'd just gotten a better result than expected and was deciding how to handle that information.
He set the block back down and looked at Marcus with a measured expression. "This is exceptionally pure. I don't see walk-in gold this clean very often." A brief pause. "I can do three-eighty per troy ounce. That's above my standard walk-in rate."
Marcus ran the math in his head. One kilogram was approximately 32.15 troy ounces. At $380 per troy ounce, the block was worth roughly $12,200 in local currency.
He didn't actually care about the rate.
This was the thing that the dealer across the counter had absolutely no way of knowing — Marcus Foster was standing in his shop holding a single kilogram of gold drawn from a reserve of nearly two thousand metric tons of the same material, sitting in a dimensional storage space that the dealer didn't know existed and wouldn't believe if told. The difference between $380 per troy ounce and $420 per troy ounce was completely irrelevant at that scale.
"That works," Marcus said.
The dealer counted out the cash with practiced efficiency and slid it across the counter.
Marcus pocketed it and turned the larger situation over in his mind as he walked back out into the street.
He had immediate operating capital. He had Alicia's backing and a path back into Umbrella's executive structure under a new identity. He had the reactor technical data on the USB drive. He was standing on the island that housed the PPDC's most important installation, four years before the crisis point that the Pacific Rim film depicted.
And he had nearly two thousand metric tons of gold that he could convert to local currency at will.
For approximately half a second, a genuinely absurd idea crossed his mind — walking directly into the Shatterdome, dumping the entire gold reserve on the PPDC's negotiating table, and simply buying his way into the Jaeger program's inner technical circle outright.
He almost laughed.
Not the subtlest opening move, he thought. But not the worst leverage either.
He filed it away and kept walking. There were smarter ways to get inside the PPDC than showing up with a mountain of gold and asking what it was worth.
Probably.
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