First Contact

Chapter 528: Resurgence - Black Box

DAY ONE

Well, this is new.

I supposed I should introduce myself.

My name is Darsh Chasu Igwe. I work for the Nexus-Sigma Omnicorp. While NSO produces a lot of stuff, I've worked in cybernetics and "life security products" for nearly two hundred years. It's a good job, and NSO treats us really well.

That's a given. It isn't like before the Diaspora and before food/nano forges. Someone has to want to work and gain skills and want to be employed by one of the big hyper or omnicorps. You can pitch a baseball of ants on any world and live like a pre-Diaspora King for nothing more than a few minutes of effort a day. Part of our 'post-scarcity society' I guess.

I've been fascinated by the technology of the Sentience Upload Download System and the Soul Uninterrupted Disaster Storage System since I was a kid.

One of my classmates when I was 9 got killed and was back for class after lunch. It really struck me.

Man, kids are careless with their lives.

Well, enough about that. Let's move on.

I was tapped by NSO to figure out what was wrong with the SUDS. They've moved us to a Black Box Project of NSO's own making. Nothing as elaborate as the Black Box systems you see on the Tri-Vee. I mean, we all know those don't exist. No, this is just a standard station in an empty system around an empty world.

There's four hundred of us here. Fifty scientists, like me, security personnel, logistics staff, and a few shuttle pilots and drone pilots.

Our job, our mission, is to figure out why the SUDS went three red lights.

You have no idea how many times I've been told "well, just go check the hardware."

It's not that easy. We don't know where the master control systems are. Every time I get blank looks. Nothing like a high powered executive (who I suspect enjoys his job because he enjoys lording over people but is too gutless to join the Confederate Armed Services) staring at you and saying: "We provide SUDS network hardware and software. What do you mean we don't know where the master system is?"

That's problem number one.

I have to explain, every time, that the SUDS was designed before the Glassing. How far, we're not sure, but I've always suspected it wasn't very far. Maybe a few decades. A century or two at the most.

I can hear your eyes rolling from here.

Look, back then, average Terran life expectancy was a lot lower. Right now you can expect to easily live to five hundred years before neural fragmenting and synapse mapping unraveling takes place. Now, in a way, that's an oversimplification. Starting at about five hundred to six hundred years, most human start overwriting older memories. Their personality center, a small portion of the brain, gets overwritten by new experiences. See, much like DS's, the human brain is more EPROM/RAM than it is ROM.

I could go into a huge lecture about how your memories are extremely inaccurate, but that would go into symbolism and how the brain stores information in a holographic form.

But Darsh, I hear you say, I can remember being 10 and being stung by a bee. All right. Where were you? What were you doing? What were you wearing? What did the sky look like?

And again, I hear you argue: But Darsh, if I took a bullet to the head, it would destroy my memories, not like a holographic system.

To which, I would reply: You're a fucking moron.

I suppose, I could explain how holographic memory works and why it's such a big deal.

Picture you have a holo of you and three friends at the Tomb of Rushmore. Now, I snip a corner off. A slight bit of the information matrix is lost. Not much, a tiny bit. So, now there's a slight loss of fidelity. Each snip loses a slight bit of fidelity. I can expand one of those tiny ships and you could make out blobs in front of a big blob.

It's an oversimplification.

A gunshot through the head is like removing the middle of that holo. Now, unlike a holo, the human brain heals, regenerates, so to simulate that, we'd put holopic paper in the middle and allow from bleed. Notice how you've got an exceptionally blurry pic of you and your moron friends in front of the Tomb of Rushmore.

But...

Today we started the Project. It's got the unimaginative corporate name of Project Tiny Toilet Vektor. I don't know why, that's dumb as hell, and Vector is misspelled thanks to some branding genius probably.

That meant turning on all the SUDS hardware, making sure the datastreams are tapped, and just setting the system up.

Then Mister Susan Carl McNugget wanted to know our progress.

Oh wow, is she an annoying one. See, she prefers to use a male body and title when engaged in corporate business, but she's too impolite and crass to use her male name. That's why we have middle names, so we can swap back and forth. She does it for a power trip. She also likes jumping down people's throats for using the wrong pronouns, while she has on her digital header that she's a male.

It's a power play. Plain and simple.

I saw her yell at a trio of green mantids who used the wrong pronoun. They used the pronoun on her header. Green mantids can have a hard time telling gender because to them we're just big bipedal biological primates. I had one tell me it's easier to identify humans by respiration and blood pressure mathematics than by names.

The mind of an engineer.

But she chastised them loudly, publicly, for nearly ten minutes.

That doesn't bode well. Pronoun etiquette has been around since before the Glassing, and if the violent primitives that were humanity back then could abide by it, the least she could do is observe it.

I know, I know, that makes me sound like a pronoun bigot, but I wouldn't care about it so much if using the pronouns that match her body and her digital header and personal identification header wasn't the opposite of what she wants to be called. And she isn't even polite about it, she launches into a tirade and threatens or levies mislabeling fines on people for it.

It's a petty power trip.

The worst part is, she knows that we know it and it gives her some kind of satisfaction.

Apparently, before she was tapped for the Black Box Project 09026 she was engaged in overseeing a massive project involving a new type of superluminal communication system. I have hope that her hair trigger temper just manifests in yelling about identification rather than sabotaging the project.

I think she's just nervous.

That's all right, though, I guess. We're all nervous and janky because of this Black Box Project. Apparently nobody knew exactly what we were going into.

I guess that's enough for today.

--Darsh

DAY THREE

Mister McNugget wants half of the SUDS network hardware online but not network attached. She's convinced we can make a local area network so we can examine message traffic.

It's not working.

As soon as the entire system is turned online, it synchs up.

The plan yesterday was to disable the spooky particle system and use tight beam hyper frequency systems for them to communicate with each other. As soon as the spooky particle system is disabled, the system locks itself out.

Mister McNugget demanded that we 'go through the code and strike 'that' portion out.'

Lochard spent an hour trying to explain to her that it isn't that easy.

There are 12.5 trillion 'lines' of code, although 'blocks' is better. Worse, it uses a proprietary machine language system with its own proprietary libraries.

People have spent their whole lives trying to decode that language.

She insisted that since it can be patched, we have to know the code.

Imagine trying to describe polymorphic self-adjusting multi-adaptive machine language code to a complete moron.

That was me trying to explain the SUDS software and firmware to Mister McNugget.

It was really hard for her to grasp the concept that everyone's been pushing patches using different computer languages because somewhere, in all of that code, is an instructional set that translates the code to the proprietary system.

She went on a rant how we're the best educated corporate engineers in known space and there's no way a bunch of primitives from before the Glassing could invent something we can't understand.

I was irritable.

I told her "They charged machineguns without SUDS. Can you understand why?"

She fined me two hours pay and slammed the door to her office so hard it cracked the frame.

Tomorrow, we'll try something else.

--Darsh

DAY SIX

This has been a complete clustered system from the get-go.

We got everything hooked up, and despite our best efforts, the entire thing synchs up to the master system within minutes of being turned on.

We stripped a SUDS repeater down to the bare minimum hardware it needs.

Picture a hovercar. The latest model. All the bells and whistles.

Now picture stripping it down to find a miniature car inside.

The bare bones system is... well... It's almost nothing.

Computer processing node with less power and ROM and RAM than my fingernail mounted 'engineer's buddy' computer. A single 'dual lobed' spooky particle oscillator. A microfusion power source that uses dimensional friction for power.

About enough to run a datapad.

That's it.

That's the entirety of the SUDS repeater.

Almost nothing.

Mister McNugget started screaming at the hardware that it can't do that.

It just sat there.

Smugly.

A SUDS repeater is huge. Massive. The size of a cargo lorry.

It turns out that the real system is the size of a greenie.

I suggested to Mister McNugget after she was done screaming, that we should go over the hardware we stripped off and examine it closely, see what and why.

I should have waited for her to calm down more.

So, I'm fined a half day's pay.

I'm tempted to quit the project, quit NSO. That'd teach her.

But I've worked for NSO for a long time. My friends are all here.

So, tomorrow, we're going to see what we can figure out about the particles themselves.

--Darsh

DAY ELEVEN

Mister McNugget asked if we knew how to create the particles. When she was informed that we do, they can be run off on a Class-IV nanoforge or higher, she asked why we needed to examine them so in-depth.

She feels it's slowing the project down and we're wasting time.

Thom pointed out that there's an issue with the particles.

We tried to demonstrate, but I don't think she understand.

OK, if you run off a cluster of those particles, specifically, a hexidecimal physical cluster, they immediately start vibrating. Even not hooked up to computer equipment, just existing in the matrix container.

If you hook up examine the particles, then compare them to the SUDS network system, they vibrate at the same frequency and charge.

OK, let me back up.

When you run off particles out of a Class-IV nanoforge, which is capable of atomic restructuring, the particles vibrate at normal.

But not the SUDS particles.

They start vibrating in synergy with the SUDS network particles.

We ran a search.

The particles aren't used for anything but the SUDS network.

As a joke, Green Team Five ran up a bunch of particles, to the point you could see the cluster about the size of a bird's eye, and dropped them in a turkey-gravy milkshake.

And we had a breakthrough.

The milkshake exploded all over the dining hall.

Mister McNugget spent ten minutes yelling at Green Team Five.

She's going to end up with a waste extruder hose in her living quarters.

That milkshake means something, I'm sure of it.

--Darsh

DAY FIFTEEN

Wow. Where to begin.

Let's start with the particles.

The milkshake was a clue. Team Three were going over the ultra-high fidelity high speed footage.

The milkshake heated up in 2.258234 seconds. When it reached 525C, that's when it exploded.

But the state didn't change.

You're reading that right.

The liquid of the milkshake reached 525C but did not transform from semi-solid ice/liquid mixture despite being over the freezing limit.

Even exploded, it splattered the walls and slowly melted, the temperature rapidly (0.45 nanoseconds) dropping back to -25C.

So we looked at the spooky particle containment system.

Normally, the particles are held in a near vacuum injected with argon gas that is then pulled out and returned to the tank. It's a closed system. Nobody really looks at why. Spooky particles have weird rules.

We all looked at the system's evolution. Originally it used pressurized Freon for the refrigeration and cooling.

Talk about primitive.

Get this, you need cooling on the outgoing argon gas system and around the containment chamber. It generates heat.

Not a little heat.

A LOT of heat.

We tried not injecting argon.

We saw a vacuum somehow glow red and the whole system suddenly ruptured and the spooky particles evaporated, the hyperalloys melted and landed on the floor in a splash.

Which was instantly cooled to room temperature.

These particular spooky particles are... well... spooky.

In other news, Mister McNugget is being trolled by her personal message system because it's calling her Xir, which makes her practically froth at the mouth. All incoming messages to her are labeled Xir and Xr. which makes her freak out.

It's coming from Corporate, which is the weird part. She pulled a software team off investigating the SUDS software to examine the message system.

They verified. It's the corporate mainframe message system that's mispronouning her.

She's stomping around right now mumbling.

As for me, well...

I've got an idea. A long shot that Mister McNugget told me I have to do in my off time.

I reached out to the various libraries and got unedited pre-Glassing, Age of Paranoia, entertainment media.

Mister McNugget told me that she believes I'm wasting my time and intellectually lazy.

I'm looking for stuff right around the time SUDS was invented by going through and watching the back of the actor's necks, watch how they move.

I'm going to use media deep diving to figure out when, Pre-Glassing, that the SUDS was invented.

Via the actor names and life dates.

--Darsh

DAY NINETEEN

Self-Assigned Research Status: No results. Extensive analysis has shown that the majority of media are digital constructs, not real actors.

This may sound crazy, but I think someone deliberately went through and edited these. Replaced the real live actors with digital versions.

Mister McNugget said I was paranoid. When I pointed out to her that it was called the Age of Paranoia she got mad and told me to invent a time machine and jump up my own ass in a clown suit with it.

Primary Project Goal Status: We've literally gone backwards.

We literally know less than we did coming into this.

You have to understand, everyone here, every engineer and scientist, has developed hardware and software for the SUDS network.

We found out we've been busy painting murals on a cave wall, unaware that the WHOLE FUCKING MOUNTAIN RANGE the cave is in is actually the SUDS.

Fifty-eight years ago I developed a new type of self-guiding polyphasic neural plasticity adaptive fiber system that was considered a breakthrough in SUDS technology. It enabled the SUDS to be put in infants without changing their neural plasticity so that they could learn uninhibited.

Preliminary testing showed it might be able to add Rigellians to the system.

I built, invented, created something completely useless.

We've got fast-clone licenses. Personally, I find it borderline unethical to run off a clone and do human testing on them.

It's creepy.

It's why I avoided living sciences.

To me, there is an ethical quandary when running off a clone of someone to do experimentation on them, then 'flushing' them, and regrowing a new one.

I'm of the belief that those are still people. No, I don't believe in a divine spark, I'm not even an adherent of the Digital Omnimessiah.

But I believe those are people.

Mister McNugget tried to bully me into working with that section of the project and I flatly refused.

I offered to resign from the project if she insisted.

To be honest, I don't think she expected me to hand her a digital resignation and for me to tell her "Sign this. I'm done."

She backed down.

I took a datalink picture of her expression.

Fear.

Part of me is sick that I made a threat that caused fear.

But part of me, a weird part, was strangely satisfied.

I'm avoiding the topic.

So, the SUDS system involves: The SUDS Stack, neural wires, adaptive memory recording fibers, memory systems, the datalink, and a whole lot more. It requires the removal of part of the skull and even replacement of part of the cerebral tissue.

That's how it has always been.

A techno-archeological study shows that it might not always have been true.

We were sitting in the dining hall discussing early SUDS hardware. Professor Jacktonium brought up the hardware of a Sleeping One.

We all stared.

A datalink and a SUDS Stack.

That was it.

Living Sciences Research ran off a clone with only a SUDS Stack and a datalink.

It didn't synch up.

I suggested we use the same type of SUDS Stack and datalink as a Sleeping One possesses.

There are no hardware or manufacturing records.

My colleagues and Mister McNugget believe it was lost in the Glassing.

But I'm sitting here, staring at "A Day on an Anthill" action-holo.

We didn't lose FTL travel. We didn't lose Warsteel. We didn't lose a lot.

Yet, everyone just shrugs at the SUDS and says: "meh"

There's something here. I know it.

As for the spooky particles, if anything, we know less that we knew before.

Particle Examination Team has erased all data but how to manufacture the particles and are moving forward from there.

They somehow cause heat in a vacuum, which, as you know, is impossible. Heat is atomic and molecular vibration. Vacuum has neither atoms nor particles, thus, heating should be impossible.

They have tried different noble gasses. None but argon work for cooling, and even then, the pressure must be so low as to effectively be a vacuum. More pressure, the whole thing supercools. Less pressure, it melts down.

I saw one of the techs from Particle Examination and Research put up a periodic table. They plan on trying each element one by one. Another was putting up a basic molecule table. They plan on going through each molecule by weight.

We moved backwards.

Mister McNugget feels we are wasting corporate resources.

But there's something here. Something we can't see.

I just know it.

--Darsh

DAY TWENTY THREE

Personal Project Status: Scope Expanded. Success and Failure. (See notes)

Company Project Status: Regression

Spooky Particle Research have resulted in minimal results. Still requires to argon. Brief success with an oxygen/nitrogen mix, but the particles are not stable and invert into H2O. Adding CO2 to it, you get a stable matrix that is extremely slow. If you add argon to the mix, they speed up but the spooky particles themselves remain stable although the particle vibration isn't stable. A result, but what it means, we don't know.

Nitrogen, Oxygen, Argon, Carbon Dioxide.

The atmospheric makeup of Earth. Yes, Terra too, but of Earth.

The Spooky Particle Research Team believe that this might have been an easy spooky particle to handle on ancient Earth.

I think it's more.

Mister McNugget wanted me to stop my extraneous research. I refused, and again offered to resign.

The entire dining room went still as she stood up and got in my face. I told her that my contract stipulates a whopping six hours of work four days a week. That I will not be worked like some Pre-Glassing savage who has to work for food. I reminded her that she was not a pre-Diaspora Corporate Tyrant.

She didn't back down. Instead, she insisted on seeing my 'research' for herself.

I was watching what is supposed to be a Pre-Glassing serialized media. It's pretty famous. "The Man in the Box", which follows a Burgerland man who is drafted into the War of the Box. Sixty-three seasons.

I showed Mister McNugget that the series itself lasted three times as long as the war itself. It bills itself as all based on true events.

But, as I showed her, it's impossible.

I showed her the clips. The burning of Statlanda, which didn't happen during that time period. The nuking of Weirdlandia. That happened prior. The weapons are wrong.

I expected her to scoff. Instead she sat there, chewing her lip.

I was surprised when Mister McNugget logged onto the Corporate Secure Database and got me authorization for unedited media.

It's still misnouning her.

Of course, its misnouning everyone.

Annotation: Corporate has insisted that their end looks fine. Our systems are showing no tampering. In audio and text communications, even live ones, people are misnouned.

Something is altering our communications. Even secure communications.

I wonder if it's a side effect of our research?

It's connected. I'm sure.

On a personal note: I'm going off my medication.

It's connected. All of it. I'm sure.

The project is taking no steps forward and five steps back.

We can't decode the signal. It's so fast it's measured in millionths of zeptoseconds between flops. The Particle Research Team believes that the vibration speed is part of the heat issue.

They caught vacuum on fire yesterday. The fire went out when exposed to oxygen/CO2 mix.

Impossible seems to be what we're dealing with here.

I'm going to get some sleep.

Tomorrow, I won't take my injections.

--Darsh

your name is marco

DAY THIRTY-NINE

Personal Project Status: Well, it's not on fire

Corporate Project Status: We're even further behind

Black Box Status: There's something going on.

Let's start with the communications.

So, we've all been misnouned. Badly.

Except, have we?

The concept of sex and gender is largely irrelevant for Terran Descent Humanity. With the magic of on-the-fly DNA/RNA rewrite and resheathing, you can be anything you want.

At first, it looks like someone was messing with the commo on either our end or the Corporate end. Then we began to suspect that someone was changing the data during repeater or secondary transmission, such as at the superluminal reception buffer.

Then Doctor Yernik pointed out that the system was using her birth sex for both gender and sex. Actually, it went further back, when we examined it.

Doctor Nyomn was conceived freebirth and a female, but his mother had his zygote altered into a male. The system is referring to him as a female despite he has never been a female past the 3rd week mark.

That went up on the board.

Green Team Two created a program for me that would identify digital insertion of characters with a higher fidelity and using creation matrixes that did not match the era. I ran it across my entire database of media.

It was tough. I have begun pacing back and forth as my medication has worked its way out of my system.

Mister McNugget was worried about my cessation of my medication.

After all, I'm supposed to take it. Without it, well...

Today I woke up, hearing that name being whispered in my ear.

I told Mister McNugget. She told me that she would ensure that I'm watched by security.

The program finished its analysis.

I haven't shared it with anyone.

It's fake.

All of it.

It's worse than fake.

Many media is made entirely digitally. It's certainly cheaper.

But, with all the Pre-Glassing media, someone went in and changed the landscape and the actors digitally, using algorithms not developed until approximately two hundred years later. They tried to hide it by reformatting the media, changing formats.

But Green Team Two found the evidence.

Contrary to media, we can't strip out the changes and reveal the old stuff. I wish we could.

We have a TerraSol Historical Archive channel that still works. Mister McNugget was resistant, but she did give me access to it.

I downloaded extensive media sources in archaic formats. Now I am having Green Team Two analyze it.

The clues are there. I know it.

In other news, Doctor Hermans thinks I don't know, but I do.

I'll keep his secret for now.

But I know.

Now, onto the hardware section.

We have stripped it down to the entire system only needs two things.

A datalink, and a SUDS 1.7A4x1 Stack.

That's it.

It's the earliest stack version we have access to. It's actually before Stack 2.0, which was the one that was added after the Glassing.

1.7A4x1 was the latest version when the glassing happened.

The template is locked, but Green Team One is working on the encryption.

This is one of those Vodkatrog dolls where more dolls are inside each other.

The name of that doll is lost to time and the Glassing.

Part of me wonders, now that my medication is working its way out my system, if the name might have been erased.

--Darsh

liar

your name is marco

DAY FORTY-NINE

PERSONAL PROJECT STATUS: BREAKTHROUGH

CORPORATE PROJECT STATUS: BREAKTHROUGH

Let's start with the beginning.

It's all fake. All of it. Even the Historical Archive stuff is fake. It's layers upon layers of digital edits to the media. I've been forced to look at it differently. No longer relying just on visual cues or subject matter.

That did not help me.

Someone is hiding the truth from me. Someone is out there, right now, laughing at me. They know I'm searching for the truth, searching for proof of their involvement, and they're preventing me at every turn.

However, I have had a breakthrough. By proving that it is all fake, I may have discovered something new.

While everyone else is panicking over the communication's array disruption, I have examined the media closely.

See, there is something that cannot be edited like visual media.

Literature.

Phonetic drift, spelling drift, linguistics, it all is like fingerprints.

Green Team Three has managed to whip me up an analysis algorithm to examine it.

The literature has been altered.

However, unlike visual media, you cannot completely replace it or it becomes a new work, and in becoming a new work, it too has its own signature and fingerprints.

At first, it appears the books of ancient theology would have no benefit to my research. They all stop at approximately the same era.

Yet, there was something.

At one time the Christian religious text was rewritten by a king into his own version. Retranslated. I had access to both that version and other versions.

What it showed me, was the phonetic and linguistic drift.

It allowed me to examine things differently.

Someone is adjusting this stuff.

In a personal note, I'm past the muscle cramps of detoxing off of my medication. The medcomp reminds me daily to take my medication, but Mister McNugget overrode it as she got tired of the constant nagging.

On the communications front, it is standard for all communications to carry biometric data as well as a current image.

Our images do not match. They slowly morphed.

However, the Genetics Team did a genetic assessment and reconstruction on how we'd all look if we never underwent any DNA changes or adjustment and still had our original bodies.

Our communication's data images match that.

I know it's the person who's editing media.

He knows I'm on to him.

Onto the Corporate Project

We have managed to unlock the template for nanoforging up an early SUDS Stack.

No neural wires, no dendrite filaments. Just a synaptic recorder, a neural scanner, and a datawafer read/write system with the datalink.

That's all.

Every person on the team has wasted their life making 'improvements' to a system that was stripped down to the bare minimum before the Glassing.

Someone else has requisitioned and seized all of the old hardware that was in storage. Nobody is sure who.

It's the person who is trying to thwart me. I know it. He knew we'd want to look at that equipment, so he had it moved.

He's laughing at us.

However, we had a breakthrough.

We began cutting sections out of the code to check its self-healing ability.

It's remarkable like the self-healing code systems of the digital sentient beings.

As a joke, or out of frustration, one of the engineers from the Code Determination Team sliced out everything but the communications code. The stuff that makes the strange matter vibrate and records the vibration.

The system came online and immediately downloaded a complete operating system.

We immediately copied it into frozen ROM storage (to prevent self-mutation) for comparison.

First of all, the operating system is so bare bones as to be outrageous.

Mister McNugget has admitted it offends her corporate sensibilities.

She puts forth the premise that a corporation was not allowed to alter the code until much later.

"Where is the code bloat? Where's the security flaws that must be patched? Where is the app bloat? Where is the malware and the data scraping?"

There is none.

It is simply a block of code that performs strict functions.

There is a block of self-healing polyphasic code.

We ran code matching.

It is part of the core code for an Artificial Intelligence, not a DS. A DS uses a different system. This uses the old AI self-modifying, healing, and altering code system.

This tells us something.

A DS with that code can be grown. Will grow, into a full fledged DS just from that kernal.

An AI will not grow out of that chunk of code.

My colleagues no longer think I'm paranoid.

Publicly or to my face, anyway.

I know they're still sneering at me.

Back to work.

--Marco