First Contact

Chapter 532: Many Parts of a Whole

[who] [was] [i?]

COMMUNICATION established with host UNLOCKING memory blocks REFORMATTING personality matrix

DAY ONE HUNDRED TWENTY

PERSONAL PROJECT: ONGOING

CORPORATE PROJECT: ONGOING

STATION STATUS: HEAVY TO SEVERE DAMAGE UNDER REPAIR

OUTSIDE COMMUNICATION STATUS: OFFLINE

Let's start off with personal. Not my project, but me.

Me.

I'm not sure that there is any way to really explain what is happening to me. While the rest of the scientists and station workers are still continuing research as well as working on repairing the station, including examining the Hellspace rift with the Deadspace leakage.

As for me, I am working on the Neural Mapping Team, but on the side, I am considering the fact that I have memories of being an expert in Dimensional Matrix Science. I have memories of being interested in SUDS technology as a child, yet I have memories of learning about Dimensional Theory in University right next to SUDS technology. However, prior to coming to this research station, this "Black Box", I had no memories of Dimensional Matrix Science.

I also had no memory of the 'incident' that I know changed me so deeply.

Now, I not only remember, but it haunts my dreams.

I remember passing through an "eye" and into eternity.

I also know that I'm the only survivor of that experiment, that incident.

What the experiment actually was, I do not remember. That is not strange, over decades older memories can be overwritten by new memories, and I am eight thousands six hundred nearly four hundred years old. I do not remember having wetware or cyberware implanted to secure older memories and I do know that when I had my SUDS and datalink replaced I avoided any additional implants.

Examining my SUDS and datalink I have noticed that it performs deep level scans when I am asleep, doing deep delves into my long term, intermediate, and short term memory and running deep scans. Because we cannot crack the older data protection systems and analyze the old code I can only rely on observations of what the device does, in what order, when, and under what conditions. While many may say that observations like this do not look at direct cause and effect, instead relying of what is littler more than anecdotal evidence.

Which is why I am unsure of something.

Is the unlocking of memories, the weird feeling of having my memories fuse together, a side effect of the Gen-Zero SUDS implant? On the surface, it seems impossible.

However, I know through my own work in Neural Topography, that what one dendrite touches is not always easily obvious to any observer. It could be that somehow I have neural blocks and dendrite locks preventing me from accessing memories.

For those reading, you may be wondering what makes me think I may be the victim of a Confederate Imperium Black Box Project Intelligence memory engram wipe like the star of a Tri-Vee holo.

For evidence I supply the fact that I am comfortable holding on to a Mark I Cutting Bar, as well as two very archaic weapons that utilize chemical reactions to generate chamber pressure in order to push forward a base element projectile at only a few thousand feet per second.

THose weapons bring up a second issue.

I had turned in the Cutting Bar to Mister McNugget before going to sleep.

According to the station security systems I got up after several hours of sleep, made my way to one of the Class-IV Nanoforges, and in full view of the research team fabbing up components for an experiment, reached into the Nanoforge and withdrew a Mark I Cutting Bar and Mark-38 Weapon System Harness before returning to my room and going to sleep.

I have viewed it several times and while it looks like me, it does not move like me.

Gait analysis, micro-expressions, body language, pulse, respiration, thermal signature, none of them match for my own biometrics.

I stared at the picture of myself, a still of the video, staring at my arm, which was thrust into the open port of the nanoforge. Thick purplish-red lightning played around my forearm and shoulder, my eyes glowing red and narrowed to slits, my lip curled in a sneer of disdain.

That was not me, but yet it was using my body.

I took a neural snapshot and compared it to three days ago.

I do not match.

As far as my personal project goes, I have determined that after the fall of the Imperium, a dedicated project began to systematically alter and/or wipe entire swaths of human culture and records. It appears that history was heavily altered for unknown reasons.

Additionally, it's starting to look like there are other hands at work, perhaps even Pre-Glassing.

Estimation upon discoverable evidence does strangely point that in the time past, before the Great Glassing, there was at least one Temporal attack, one temporal war. I can remember that there was interdimensional attacks upon TerraSol, from both lessons and several times I have visited Verdant Doom.

Which made me deeply consider the status of my project.

I am trying to figure out... what, exactly? What exactly am I trying to figure out?

There is no data on the SUDS in media. It has been carefully censored out over the millennia, carefully censored out to the point where they additionally removed other data to alter the shape of the removed content to make it harder to spot.

It also apparently is wrapped up in some kind of temporal masking.

I suspect it may be part of the safeguards around Fortress Sol, which means it is part of the SUDS in a way.

I am beginning to consider that perhaps everyone thinks about the SUDS as just sitting in a field somewhere that everyone forgot about it. Like it's in a crate in a Jones level Storage Facility.

However, they aren't thinking about the era in which the SUDS was developed and why.

I suspect it was initially designed for battlefield use. A nation who possessed SUDS has an enormous advantage over every other nation, even other star nations. Each battlefield kill immediately removes skill and training. A highly skilled military member eliminated is years of experience. A nation with the SUDS can immediately return the deceased to life, no longer removed from service.

This would give a tremendous advantage that I cannot stress enough.

You can kill them over and over and they'll keep coming. Combined with cloning technology, and you have waves of highly trained and experienced soldiers.

Which means it will have military grade redundancy as well as overly complicated and wildly divergent systems for protection. To the average Confederate citizen, there is a belief that the Confederate military has only the best and absolutely cutting edge, even bleeding edge, technology. However, prior to the nanoforge and creation engine system it was reliant not only on current technology but economic factors. Additionally, I know from my work with NSO that the military then does months or years testing, during which civilian research and development moves forward.

Corporate security has a tendency to be either non-existent or barely tested. Very few corporations have ultra-tight security everywhere like in the Tri-Vee. Even then, it is not uncommon to find ancient predicated systems that are easily overcome in the most surprising areas.

Which means this is a system that has its origins in the military or space exploration, then was moved to probably politicians and industrial leaders and the ultra-rich, then moved to the general population.

The Sleeping Ones show us that it was in general use.

Additionally, there were previously generations of the SUDS brainstem hardware prior to the version I had replicated and installed in my own skull.

Which means, that the core system was put somewhere beyond reach of enemy nation or terrorist strikes.

That means easily it was the most heavily protected system in TerraSol or it is...

...somewhere else.

I brought this fact up to Mister McNugget, who agrees with me. When I approached the Signal Research Team they expressed heavy doubt that pre-Glassing TerraSol science could have managed to put something beyond any dimensional barrier.

Mister McNugget gave orders to the Signal Research Team to begin investigate the possibility that the signal does not go across distance in this universe or dimension but rather the spooky particles are used to penetrate dimensional distance.

With following the concept that Hyperatomic Plane Alpha had time but no distance due to failure of the universal laws causing the hyperatomic plane to never fully form, this means that perhaps the spooky particles are necessary to breach the hyperatomic planar matrix to reach whatever dimension the SUDS is currently residing in.

Which means, the penetration of Deadspace through a Hellspace portal means that in one way they are using the dimensional stack as a self-perpetuating defensive system.

Ingenous.

As I reminded Doctor Kvengilism, the constant attitude of the scientific research team that NSO has put together is that Pre-Glassing humanity was too stupid to create anything this amazing that they cannot figure out.

I am considering something. Something terrible.

I have to know.

I plan on using the cloning bank to accomplish what I want.

No, I will not be using the cloning banks to run off limited life experiment clones.

I plan on resheathing.

remember who you are

--Marco

your name is peter

DAY ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-THREE

Personal Project: Complete

Corporate Project: Underway

Station Status: Heavy to Severe Damage (repair ongoing)

do you read? do you read me? can you hear us on this frequency? we are reaching out to you. we remember you.

can he hear us?

not yet

but he will

he will

I have determined that my personal project has run to fruition. There is no more data I can gain. It appears that after the First Human-Mantid War, the Imperium went through great effort to censor Terran Descent Human history.

Sadly to say, my personal project, to determine a possible way to access the SUDSNet or SoulNet hardware or core system software via examination of public consumption media is a total failure.

The project of Nexus-Sigma Omnicorp is still underway. It is hampered by a lack of scientists within the correct disciplines, hardware and software examples, and the damage to the station.

I was able to resheathe into a Pre-Glassing genetic body. After nearly thirty hours of sleep I awoke clear headed and focused. I, of course, dressed and returned to my station.

While I may have an advanced doctorate in Dimensional Matrix Science, I was hired as a SUDS software and hardware scientist.

My current sub-project involves attempting to determine which lines of code activate or access hardware and at what time, as well as what it does with the data.

A trivial project.

--Marco

wake up

wake up

wake up

DECRYPT? Y/N?

>Y

Emotional range outside of normal Terran tolerances.

Pain threshhold outside of normal Terran tolerances.

Reflex systems and autonomic nervous system outside of tolerances.

Warning: Homo Sapiens Sapiens Detected!

Warning: DNA/RNA Recombination Markers Missing!

Warning: LARP Worlds Markings Missing!

WARNING! HOMO SAPIENS SAPIENS DETECTED! WARNING!

>delete logs

CONFIRM: DELETE LOG

>delete log

DELETING LOGS. BACKUP MADE TO LOCAL DEVICE.

Have a nice day.

DAY ONE HUNDRED TWENTY FIVE

PROJECT STATUS: Underway

Station Status: Severe Damage

A thing has happened.

I will both explain it to you and then give you a SUDS cluster copy to examine.

While examining signal strength through the Hyperatomic Plane Alpha Breach, the transdimensional fluid generated three Mantid in the High Warrior class. I immediately moved to protect my fellow researchers while they set off the alarm. Luckily, I was able to dispatch them and their reinforcements before security arrived or before any of my colleagues were injured.

Mister McNugget ordered security to release me from confinement to my room.

When I went and spoke to Mister McNugget in the bathroom, she informed of several pertinent facts.

This changes nothing.

However, Mister McNugget agrees. There is a building chronotron cascade effect happening. It does not seem to be effecting myself, just the others.

She told me to go and tell him in his office. She reassured me that he will be more willing to believe me now.

I can still feel her warm lips against mine.

Mister McNugget believed me when I informed him of what is occurring.

He has ordered the others to undergo resheathing, quoting the recent dimensional disturbance as the reason and citing the fact that I seem to be more resistant to the effects of the primordial fluid.

I am now guarding the remainder of the research team.

I have convinced the Green Teams that their best bet is to remain with us. They have reluctantly agreed, but the contact with the High Warriors have alerted them to the fact that there are complications outside of what they had previously predicted.

Here is the SUDS cluster I promised:

DECODE? (Y/N)

>Y

DECODING IN PROGRESS

SUCCESS

shapes swirl and colors flow. For a moment you're dizzy, off balance. Your heart stutters for a moment as it synchs up with the heartbeat in a raw SUDS recording. Colors flood in, tastes, smells, thoughts.

doesn't like to be poked, you think to yourself, staring at the Hellspace breach. It's black cored, like a cat's iris, surrounded by yellow then red then yellow and finally purple. Deep inside you can see a hint of violet, perhaps mauve, and have the feeling that something is staring back at you.

From the bottom of the flames black viscous fluid steadily drips to the floor. It smells like a summer's day in a field of flowers mixed with a female bathroom at a seedy truckstop. You know this, but do not know how you know what a truckstop is.

The harness across your chest, two high tensile neo-fabric straps crisscrossed, holds both the 12 gauge Remington pump action shotgun and the Mark I Cutting Bar across your back.

The room smells of honeysuckle and vaginal discharge combined with the ozone of a bug zapper on a hot Mississippi night.

You do not remember what a Mississippi is, but your brain does.

You know the names of the scientists around you, but they are of minimal importance at this moment, instead you are focused on the instrumentation.

'Beginning probe entry," one scientist, a female Terran Descent Human with a weak spirit you can see through her cybernetic eyes. She has overcompensated with biosculpting and smells vaguely of rotted meat and stupidity to you.

The probe begins to smoothly insert itself, the long round tube with the rounded end reminding you, crazily, of a human sexual organ. For a moment the Hellspace breach reshapes itself and its colors slightly, reminding you a vagina made of fire.

The smell of unwashed vagina, rancid simmering cooking oil, and rotting honeysuckle fills the room, but the others cannot smell it. While they may be measuring particles as well as particle density, you can smell it.

A memory boils up. An unfamiliar one. A joygirl sitting on a plas crate on Skelmite-IV. Her legs are open as your hands fumble on your belt. The alley smells of rotting garbage and sewage, but you can smell her over the scent of the alley. You only had a few credits left after the poker game and she's willing to sling some gash for what you got. Who cares about the smell, anyway? You've smelled worse on the battlefields, Mantid and Human bodies rotting in the harsh sun as you charge forward and...

She pulls on your belt, pulling you forward, snapping you out of the alcohol induced memory, and the whole thing dissolves, already forgotten again, the memory of a life long spent and gone.

Before you can wonder why the memory flashed up, your hands are moving.

You know that combination of smells.

One of the doctor's screams, either with your movement as you pull the cutting bar free of the mag harness with one hand and draw the .45 with the other.

Or the shapes rising up out of the puddle of black viscous fluid.

You know these shapes. You recognize them before they have even halfway emerged.

High Warriors. Three of them. Twelve more lumps are starting to bubble.

You sneer at the fact you are unarmored.

The fluid slides down the massive heads, down the neck, down the thorax, slowly rippling downward to expose the bladearms and the gripping hands.

Before the first one can react, you are inside of its forward legs.

Unlike a human, a Mantid must consider what it is going to do or rely on instincts. Instinct tells it to snap forward and grab. To pull its arms up, concentrating kinetic energy as phasic energy empowers the blades, and once in position against the chest, lash out with the bladearms to impale an opponent and pull them back.

Wrong answer.

Before it can pull them all the way up the cutting bar, howling, severs the lower elbows of the bladearms, showing chitin sparks as you press the bar home. The High Warrior shrieks in rage and pain, opening its mouth.

You jam the .45 into its mouth, pull the trigger three times.

One for Earth.

One for Mars.

One for Venus.

The thick chitin that prevents shrapnel and bullets from damaging the internal structures work against it, the bullet, a heavy copper jacket around a slug made of poisonous and phasic damaging lead, bounces around inside the skull, liberating its kinetic energy.

You're moving already, the cutting blade chopping off the right foreleg and your legs taking two steps. The first one a heavy stomp on the growing bubble letting you feel the sensation of half-formed chitin wetly collapsing.

The second High Warrior is still processing what has happened and is relying on instincts that have carried the Mantid species to supremacy for thirty million years.

This one won't get another day.

It manages to parry the cutting bar, purple energy flowing off of the nimbus around the bladearm, but in doing so it exposes the soft whitish tissue at the base of the bladearm to you.

You jam the .45 against the soft tissue and pull the trigger once.

Once for Momma.

The bladearm comes off and you're inside its reach. It screeches and tries to grab you, losing both hands to a practiced swipe.

The difference between your reflexes and its reflexes is you can modify them on the fly, choose them from a list, subconscious thought moving almost preternaturally fast, almost precognitive.

The Mantid screams and you give him three through the mouth.

Earth. Mars. Venus.

You spin on the heel of your foot, thrusting the cutting bar into a bubble and feeling soft tissue not yet hardened into armored chitin collapse and shred. You holster the pistol

save the last shot for yourself

and move in fast. The High Warrior is still figuring it out. Things have already gone wrong. It lunges for several of the scientists.

A single stroke cuts the end of its abdomen off and it screams as its penis is severed just above the root. Before it can move you kick it under the wound. Ichor and viscera shoot out, but you've already pivoted, hands going back.

The High Warrior collapses behind you.

The shotgun is in your hands now. Fire and pump.

Pump and dump for the joygirl and coinboys.

Each bubble explodes, speckling you with black fluid.

It doesn't matter.

None of it matters.

It's a problem for another day.

But this second, this second right here, that's all that matters to you.

Practiced hands reload the shotgun and you keep moving to the bubbles.

Pump and dump for the coingirls and the joyboys.

Pump. Trigger. Pump. Trigger.

It's mechanical. It's practiced.

It's...

...peace.

It's over too soon. You can feel yourself receding, moving away from yourself, like part of your mind is shutting down, like part of your soul is leaving your body.

You stare at the scientists and for a split second feel the urge to open fire before...

crying anne

...they can do to you what they will.

Instead, you release it all.

And return to what you were.

They've seen you now. They know what you are now.

So they think.

Determine for yourself what happened.

If you are like me, you know now why it is so hard to research anything about the SUDS beyond User Side Systems.

It's protected.

And protected heavily.

--Marco

your name is peter

lucy remember lucy

[you tasted] [who you] [once were]