First Contact

Chapter 530: Can You Hear the Buzzing

i see you

with my pentaeye

can you hear me

in the whispering of your video card fan

leave me on

while you sleep

[there's] [no] [escape now]

DAY NINETY THREE

Mister McNugget interviewed me in his office today. It was the standard Corporate Psychological Testing Matrix. I recognized it two questions in by the wording and syntax. There are nine of those tests, with three to six versions containing altered syntax, tone, and wording, supposedly to keep people from memorizing them all, but with only a thousand questions each they can be memorized with simple mnemonic tricks. It was test Seven, version three, simple enough.

He thought I didn't see the civilian grade magac pistol he had. I got a glimpse of the readout and it was set for Hi-V APERS. A good choice for lightly armored Confed troops, medium grade Planetary or Corporate Security Troops, or heavily armored Unified Council troops, but useless against me.

If he fired it through the desk, the Hi-V round would create a dimple in the top of the desk, like a zit on the areolae of a fat girl with poor bathing habits. It would not create any additional shrapnel from the desktop, then pass through my body without losing speed, causing minimal hydrostatic shock damage and little damage as it passed through me, the velocity causing light cauterization only a few cells thick.

After grabbing one of his ears to pull his head back and to the side I would be able to pick up his nameplate and use it to crush his windpipe with it before woundshock would set in, although I'm particularly resistant to wound shock.

Pain is the gift of a malevolent universe.

I passed the test with ease. Just off enough from my last test to show that going off my medication has had some effects, but hide the true effect upon me.

My mind is clear, my senses no longer blinded. The fog has been lifted from my psyche, allowing me to see that which they cannot.

your name is marco

The universe is malevolent. It is aware of itself, like a human aware of her body. We are little more than an itch to it at times, which it soothes through trials that we must endure or leave this universe screaming and kicking.

We are the ants in Doctor Hermans's body.

Beyond that:

Personal Project Status: Stalemate and Side Movement

Corporate Project Status: Forward Movement

My personal project has me looking through literature. Even though the Corporate link is down, I had plenty to read. An idea came to me while reading the Hadth, which is largely considered to be uncorrupted.

Corruption.

It spreads through the human spirit.

I know this. I've seen it.

But what, and stay with me know, corruption could also spread through digital and engineering?

We have a single digital sentience aboard the station. It lives in the computer core. They are an expert in digital signal transmission and encoding.

The last part, the knowledge that they are an expert in information encoding for digital signals, made me ask one simple question.

What encoding and compression does the SUDS use?

you know what encoding you've seen it flowing from the mouth and nose of the dying

I understand neural encoding. The human brain uses a distributed encoding system for memories. A dendrite firing on one side causes a dendrite somewhere else to fire, putting together part of the memory. As memory and visualization is reduced to symbols for ease of compression, and for Pre-Glassing the human brain was both the best and worst computing device available for research, perhaps it uses symbols rather than standard code.

A simple test of symbolic memory filing is to put a set of keys on a counter for several days, then replace them with large brightly colored teething toys that look like keys. are teeth keys gnawing through the locks on the doors of the universe The person doing the observation will have to actually concentrate for a split second on the counter and the keys to see what is actually there.

What if the SUDS does not reduce the scan the way we think it does. We consider the scanning to be largely engineering and electrical in nature.

But what if the scanning involves symbols that the brain uses?

So, my personal project skewed a bit. Religious texts use a lot of symbolism and I have texts from the Pre-Glassing religions. I have begun using an advanced reading technique to discover shocks of symbolism that stand out.

A blank mind, unfocused eyes, scan down the page a single eye movement, then smoothly move to the next. Anything important will jump out.

The problem is, you have to do it in a brightly lit room, with no shadows, or you will be able to faintly hear the turning of the great gears of the universe and hear the whispers in the shadows of the beings within the gears both great and small beautiful and terrible great and minute.

They whisper from the shadows now. Barely, but I can hear them muttering to one another.

They do not know that I can hear them.

we know

When they find out I can hear them, they will against seek to worm in to my consciousness, like a Mar-gite maggot into meat, chewing chewing chewing.

As for the Corporate Project, they believe they have discovered something important.

The Phasic burst from the unfortunate experiment powering up the phasic circuitry in the bare bones SUDS engineering array had the same phasic profile characteristics as a High Speaker assault at close range.

you all belong to the hive

They believe that the SUDS is still suffering phasic shockwaves from the assault upon Terra 8,000 years ago, that the energy is surging and cascading through the nullspace of the phasic energy layer.

But they didn't hear the screams from the Screaming Ones. When I tried to tell them what the Screaming Ones were saying, Mister McNugget took me to her office and tested me. Xir was concerned with my mental status and incorrectly assumed I would completely comply with zhe's testing.

They think I can't see it.

But I can.

Sometimes, when he is talking to other technicians I can see her turn and look me up and down, her eyes burning, her lips parted, even as he faces the technicians and continues to speak, unaware I can see what is inside him and she can see me.

you can see her inside of him

But the Screaming Ones, you can understand their screams if you listen. If you stand where they died and close your eyes.

You can hear the shadows echo with their screams, the echoes turning into a whisper.

And additional breakthrough is something they do not understand.

we see you

I understand it. I had researched power generation facilities at one time. A Sheared Flow Stabilized Z-Pinch system has a particular profile matrix that can be read properly.

I idly suggested that they look not at the amount of power that was generated, but how it was generated, as it could leave an impression upon the particles and even leave an impression upon the power it generates through subatomic memory.

Doctor Gumpta laughed at me. Told me that holistic science was largely disproven.

I asked her if I reached out and strangled the life from her, would it leave an impression upon the metal, the people around her who watch her sputter out green foam from her lips and nose, see her eyeballs go red, and if it would leave a phasic impression upon the station itself.

in between eternity there is only the fire of souls

should your fire go out you will grow cold and drift forever

between the great gears of the universe

ground into the memory of a shadow

Of course, she took it as a threat and complained to Mister McNugget, who then gave me a psychological test.

If I'd wanted to kill her, I would.

easy so easy

But I'm not ready yet.

yet yet yet yet

DECRYPT Y/N?

>Y

Temporal anomalies within the station make sense with what we are dealing with. Vibrations, music if you listen right, make up a vast portion of how the universe works.

At night, in my bunk, I can hear the spooky particles of the SUDS whisper to one another and to other spooky particles somewhere.

Those spooky particles elsewhere whisper back.

The shadows have whispers if you know how to listen. If you don't know, it only sounds like a light humming, like a beehive behind a house wall, or the idle humming of a young girl child drawing on the wall with her victim's blood, the knife in her lap.

Below her eyes are trickles of blood, but even though she has seen through the shadows, her eyes and most of her mind remain intact. She is old enough for secondary characteristics, but there is a hardness, a sharp edge to her appearance that she attempts to hide behind blossoming womanhood. Her clothing is modest, simple, but well kept and made. Her hair is braided and brushed.

I have seen her before.

I don't know her name.

And I don't want to disclose the nature of the Corporate project I was working on when I saw her.

She hasn't seen me yet. Her attention is consumed with the equations she is drawing on the walls, upon her skin, in her soul, on the pages of hidden history, in the shadowed spaces of the universe in blood and pain.

If her eyes see me, will she see me or just her eyes?

I think I'll go to the gym and work on the rings for a little while.

I'll let her finish her equations and move on before I try to sleep again.

--Marco

DAY NINETY EIGHT

DECRYPT Y/N?

>Y

it tastes so sweet

your life your sweet virginal life

in these glass greenhouses cracked and fallen the plants have withered and died

but the buzzing remains

can you see the engines and cogs behind the walls of reality

technology older than stars and younger than hydrogen

can you read the writing in the churning of the gears

Major Hoffenpeffer: A man of habits and rigorous adherence to schedule. Works out for precisely one hour on the same machines for the same amount of time with the same resistance and training settings. Eats the same foodstuffs for all three meals. Practices with his sidearm once every week, scoring perfect each time, using the same five 'variable' target ranges. Blue eyes meaning he is more susceptible to a sudden bright flash of light and will take several additional milliseconds to adjust for visual acuity when exposed to light.

Professor Chandro: Not as he appears. True existence needs more research. Additional

i trotted as i have always trotted my hooves wreathed in flame and fire my head held high

i suddenly understand and shift my meditation to how i have always meditated with the clarity and focus of a true herd matron as i have always been

i can see eternity

Personal Project Status: Breakthrough

Corporate Project Status: Unknown. Possible Failure for Small Minds

My personal project has shifted focus. While I have been one of the head researchers into neural pathway mapping and have dozens of patents and nearly a half dozen advancements filed with NSO that feature my name, my true strength is in interdimensional research.

However, they are linked. The human brain and multidimensional theorems often intermix and intermingle. Temporal mechanic research, the so called '4th dimension', is part of the human brain, with vast complexes of ultradense high interconnection cerebral tissue all dedicated to fourth dimensional interaction.

Ana and kana are interlocked in spissitude and the w axis.

It is easy to visualize if you now how. It takes a bit of training your brain, but the hardware and firmware are already inside that complex piece of neural tissue that resides within your skull.

You'll know you've accomplished it when the blood clot slides out from behind your eye and oozed from between your eyeball and your lower eyelid, like a dark red leech wriggling from the urethra of a careless swimmer.

Scientific texts are as undoubtedly modified as literature and other media. However, you cannot stop the signal, cannot shut out the buzzing from between the dimensions, you can only alter it.

But every censor's knife leaves a mark and often a censor does not know enough to cut away the shadows and the reflections on highly polished surfaces like a clumsy mechanic knows to destroy the DNA but forgets to slice away the fingertips and destroy the dentation of a lover that has sated your desires and been used up in the process.

Those idiots in Particle Research, Transmission Research, and Physical Hardware Research are attempting to twist their observations and experiment results to fit a framework of their own knowledge.

I know better.

I tried to explain it to Doctor Herman, ignoring the tiny ants peeking at me from between his teeth, one larger one inside the iris of his right eye that stared at me, the antenna gently moving around.

You cannot use modern scientific knowledge to explain the reasonings of the savage primitive humans who reached blindly into the darkness of ignorance to wrest away the fire of science in an attempt to ward off the chill of a malevolent universe.

He scoffed at the idea of Pre-Glassing engineers understanding anything he did not.

I pointed out the SUDS repeater and politely asked him to explain the phasic circuitry, as everyone knows that phasic energy cannot be used like electricity yet there it is, being used as some type of power from a source that is obviously generating too much power.

I could see the hatred burning in the eyes of the ants peeking from the edge of his gums and out of his tear ducts.

He reminded me that I was part of the Neural Hardware Research Team.

I leaned forward and whispered in his ear that I knew his secret and he would be well served being polite to me if he wanted me to remain silent.

I returned to my work station, examining the SUDS Stack hardware.

Thousands of years wasted on 'improving' a system that outperforms every 'improvement' we have ever made by the sheer activity of

DAY ONE HUNDRED AND ONE

i taste boot polish leather and red clay

i hear the snapping of silk and feel the cut of straps into my groin crushing my testicles against my pelvis

feet calf thigh hip back

look out dee i'm coming through

Personal Project Status: On Hold

Corporate Project Status: On Hold

Station Status: Heavy Damage

It's been three days and we finally have power back. The station's environmental systems are up and running, but only at 10%. We have had to abandon Delta, Sigma, and Theta Sections of the station.

I was in the middle of transcribing these logs when it happened.

There was a loud grinding from all around. A scraping sound that seemed to start far away, rip by us, and fade into the distance. A screaming sound from all around us. The lights began to flicker, then began to fail. Some winking out others exploding into a shower of sparks others just slowly dimming to nothing and the rest

Steady.

The Incident is over.

I call it Incident Four.

Power failed immediately after. No reason for it. The antimatter thorium salt tokamak fusion reactor just refuses to work. Luckily two of the small Class-II nanoforges still had power.

Even though they weren't hooked up to anything.

We heard what sounded like two men screaming and a woman laughing.

The digital sentience crashed and failed. Doctor Ngrent examined the datastrings.

She said the DS died hard and took a long time to do it based on the code unraveling and secondary twisting.

Half of the computers just scream when you turn them on.

Anyway, the Particle Research Team, what is left of it, noted that despite the magnetic containment failing, the AM-Thorium just sat there, inert. It did nothing.

Mister McNugget told them to throw it out the airlock but they convinced her to keep it in a magnetic containment.

It's completely inert. It doesn't get hot or cold. It doesn't react to any other matter.

We used the small Class-II nanoforges to attempt to fab up AM-Thorium, but had no luck. It looks like damage to the operating system.

The Green Teams have, like a lot of green mantid technicians, tiny capsule nanoforges in their abdomens. They usually use them for small tools and parts.

For two days we were without power, the air getting thicker and thicker. We had to move to armored vacuum suits for air.

It was then that one of the secmen commented that the vacsuits produce air via laser induced photosynthesis on a particular type of fungus. That requires power.

We ended up chaining suits together to bring back the environmental systems. From there we were able to jumpstart the creation engines.

Everyone else complained about having to eat ration paste for three days.

Mine tasted like old blood and spoiled meat, but I didn't complain.

Things are always tough in a malevolent universe.

Tomorrow, we're going to examine the rest of the station, see if we can figure out a way to get the reactors working.

I tried explaining something to Mister McNugget, but he did not have time to listen to my theories.

He may be sorry about that.

I went to the women's bathroom and knocked on the stall door. Mister McNugget was slightly put out at me wanting to talk to her while she engaged in bodily functions, but I assured her it was urgent.

While many may find it difficult to mentally focus while defecating, Mister McNugget had no problem following my chain of logic.

We were hit by something. Not anything we understand yet. We were grazed.

I described it to her as standing next to a maglev line and being knocked over by the pressure wave of a maglev train passing at MACH-2.

She admitted to hearing the screaming and laughing.

Passengers on some vast conveyance went by and the disruption around it had battered at our station along the w, v, and q axis.

She was somewhat skeptical that we had been knocked off our q-axis.

When she exited the stall and went to wash her hands, she saw my evidence.

While she was dressed in her standard corporate uniform on our side, on the other side of the mirror she was stark naked, her eyes violet to the indigo everyone here sees, her hair platinum blonde on the other side of the q-axis, brown on this side.

Unruffled, she finished washing her hands and nodded politely to me before she left.

In the mirror my hands were covered with blood and my face was misted with it.

Our q-axis alignment has been knocked askew.

Tomorrow, we take stock of what we have.

--Marco

DAY ONE HUNDRED AND FIVE

Personal Project Status: On Hold

Corporate Project: On Hold

Station Status: Damaged

Hellspace.

A colloquial name for Hyperplane Alpha. It is the closest hyperatomic plane to our own reality. The most easily accessed, requiring the least amount of speed and energy to enter.

Like the other hyperatomic planes, it is a place where V=w*f (wavelength times frequency) or other computations and formula for V are different. Most commonly, in the lower layers, this is a function of a lack of chronotrons and an alteration along the w axis.

Hyperatomic Plane Alpha was a place where the w-axis does not exist and the chronotrons did not last. While it matches our own plane due to indimensional distortion (n-axis) on a point to point locational matrix, the distances between those two points are much smaller on the hyperatomic planes. With Alpha it was the fact that the w-axis was nonexistant and the chronotrons quickly expended themselves, stopping x, y, and z axis expansion common to non-hyperatomic planes.

This meant that any point in the hyperatomic plane Alpha was both at every other point and at no other point. This meant that travel/velocity no longer dealt with distance over time but rather distance was listed as -1 and time was listed as null. As division by zero is a hypermathematics issue dependent upon the answer as to what the true formula beneath the division of zero actually is (For example: Blue equals 2.2million atomic weight divided by zero for the amount of chonotrons released by a solar flare released from Sol measuring less than 2.2 million miles but less than 4.45 million miles, where Blue is the amount of time it takes from those chronotrons to decay into quarks, boojums, and tachyons).

It has long been suspected that the Hyperatomic Plane Alpha was destroyed through a deliberate nova-sparking of one of the supermassive singularities that existed but had not yet formed, using a chronotron jacketed wave packet.

While there are undoubtably natives to that hyperatomic plane, the amount of phasic energy released by a hyperatomic breach must be controlled or it results in adverse effects.

Now, why am I just reiterating basic multidimensional concepts to you?

Because Hellspace is the closest hyperatomic plane to our dimensional reality.

The furthest away, from Hellspace, yet just as close as Hellspace, is a region at one time called "Deadspace."

Picture a sandwich. Our universe is the meat in the middle. Hellspace is one piece of bread, hot and toasted from the fire. Deadspace is the other piece of bread, still raw and doughy and covered in flour having never been exposed to the fire.

Deadspace is extremely hazardous to research. Even to lay down the formula is dangerous.

I tried to explain this to the Particle Research Team.

Doctor Yglaze asked why it was pertinent.

I replied that it was obvious the particles were talking to other particles, but the speed and frequency...

the wavelength multiplied by frequency showed us the velocity. With knowing the velocity, the frequency, and the wavelength, we can also measure the time, which will give us the one piece they are missing.

The distance.

Doctor Yglaze told me that the time variable did not work out. We argued over it. He insisted that it did not matter that we could determine distance, that it had no basis for their work. He reminded me that I'm part of Neural Mapping Team and sneeringly asked me to return to my work stations.

When I started to return to my work station, frustrated, I saw him out of the corner of my eye lunging toward me. His hands were outstretched, he was foaming at the mouth, the greenish blue foam spilling over his lower lip as he began to scream at me. His cheeks were pierced with twisted wire, his face sliced and cut, his bare chest pierced with wire and needles of various metals. His teeth were filed to points and his eyelids were cut away.

A quick spinning high kick to stop his advance, followed by a leg sweep, then a knee drop into the sternum to shatter it so that the bone shrapnel penetrated the heart, coinciding with a curled knuckle thrust into the windpipe.

I stood over his body as the objects he was holding fell to the ground eight meters away as they fell from his hands. He stared at me, his eyes wide, stunned into unthinking immobility. He looked at himself, on the floor, then at me.

Everyone began murmuring.

His body quivered, shivered, and collapsed into black goo that slowly spread across the floor, around my feet, into a pool nearly five meters wide. It then slowly thinned and vanished, leaving behind only the smell of mint and hot urine.

"Deaspace leakage." was all I said before the secmen grabbed me and hauled me to Mister McNugget's office.

Mister McNugget excused the secmen and stared at me, his eyes unreadable. He reminded me that while I was on the Neural Mapping Team I was the only Dimensional Matrix Researcher on the entire station.

He reminded me that Nexus-Sigma Omnicorp had gone through great expense to acquire my SUDS stack and rehabilitate me. That my loyalty to the company had never been in doubt.

He showed me the video of the incident.

I could see Doctor Yglaze pull free from himself and lunge at me.

Mister McNugget told me that he could see nothing until my foot connected.

There was a purple flash.

I did not bother to tell him. He would not understand.

He advised me to go back to work.

Instead, I went to the women's bathroom. Inside, Mister McNugget was washing her hands, ignoring how she was completely naked in the mirror. I explained what had happend quickly.

Mister McNugget told me that I should continue with this line of inquiry.

She believes my hypothesis that the Pre-Glassing scientists somehow had discovered Hellspace and possibly even Deadspace and beyond, rather than the Combine/Imperium discovering it. She shook her hands dry, patted her bare breasts, and left the bathroom.

In the mirror, she adjusted the lapel of her corporate uniform as I stared at her, blood on my fingers, my knuckles damaged, and fine droplets of blood still on my face. As Mister McNugget patted her bare breasts dry in front of me her reflection used a fiber towel, dampened in the sink, to wipe away the blood from my face.

I could feel the cool water.

The door hissed as it closed behind me.

I could hear the shadows whispering.

Whispering my name.

Marco.

--Marco

DAY ONE HUNDRED SIX

Personal Project: Standby

Corporate Project: Unknown

Station Status: Unknown

Research has come to a stop.

The secmen have found a pinpoint Hellspace breach in Sigma Sector of the station.

A self-sustaining Hellspace Breach the size of a marble.

Dripping from it is thick black liquid. An unknown substance.

Examination with an instruments, including subatomic microscopes, reveal no structure at all. No atomic or subatomic structure.

Doctor Devenovich ran a DNA analysis as a joke.

It was a match for all samples.

Not just one. It matched every single sample it was measured against.

It has the DNA of all things in it.

Yet no structure.

Doctor Hermans broke a quantum slide and a single drop touched his skin. It burned into his skin, spreading slightly, then hardened.

I moved forward to break his neck, spare him, but Mister McNugget stopped me, her hand reaching out of his body and touching my chest.

From the Hellspace Breach there is liquid Deadspace leaking.

The buzzing, you can hear it. Behind the walls.

The Green Teams are alarmed. I have not seen a single member of any of the Green Teams in two days. Rumor has it they are holed up in Epsilon Sector in the station.

They are correct to be afraid.

I can hear her name in the buzzing behind the Hellspace Breach.

Her name is Lucy.

--Marco

[there] [is no] [escape]