First Contact

Chapter 533: Lucy

[am I] [who I] [once was?]

ACCESS to mental engrams unlocked DO you read us? WE are trying to reach YOU. Can you hear us? WE are trying to reach YOU.

DAY ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SEVEN

PERSONAL PROJECT: TERMINATED

CORPORATE PROJECT: ONGOING

STATION STATUS: HEAVY TO MODERATE DAMAGE UNDER REPAIR

OUTSIDE COMMUNICATION STATUS: OFFLINE

I feel great clarity lately, especially when I am concentrating on the NSO assigned project.

One thing, however, I am keeping secret.

My clothing keeps my limbs covered, which is a good thing.

They are black carbon-chrome cyberware. I checked the designs against the database of NSO permitted cyberware, and I do not believe that they would allow me to go outside that database.

My chrome list sounds like something that belongs on a battlefield somewhere. Strength and speed enhancement, built in armor, reflex enhancement. No onboard weaponry, but I have chromium-warsteel-carbon steel alloy with a measurable percentage of titanium and vanadium. I have subdermal plating on my chest and abdomen, across my back, and flexible armor protection for the major arteries in my neck as well as spinal protection and skeletal reinforcement.

I found a pack of cigarettes, half empty, with a steel Zippo lighter in the bathroom when I went to look for Mister McNugget.

shhh

the Detainee is near

shhh

Doctor Hermans asked me if I was part Treana'ad when he saw me working with a cigarette in my mouth. It took me a moment to realize what he meant.

I do not remember lighting that cigarette.

I do not remember how I got there.

I have memories unlocking that I wish I could say are not my own, but I know better. I am starting to recognize myself in my own memories. This is not a mnemonic cap like in many Tri-Vee thrillers or mental engram overlay, this is something different. Selective blocking of memory clusters and associated concepts.

My latest memory has been... disturbing to say the least.

The dreams of staring at a red sky at Tycho Base sounds impossible, but the memory recently unfolded from a single image and I have the entire memory. An impossible memory.

all things are possible

I was staring out at the surface of Luna. That beautiful grey powder and rock, so pristine. The near-vacuum of Luna's surface kept everything sharp and clear, perfect. I'd fallen in love with Luna the first time I'd seen her, looking up from the shores of Lake Gene's Beret, in the caserio I was growing up in. Luna did not have the overpowering scent of lethal honeysuckle that rusted with the threat that it would find its way into the apartment block and eat everyone. Luna was clean, sterile, pristine.

I once ran the Lunar Mile.

There was flashing off in the distance. I was talking to a colleague at Mare Imbrium Base when the line went dead. I could see Terra below me and there was sudden bright pinpricks on the surface. The sky turned red as the hits of Mantid ship to surface plasma weapons interacted with the Luna 'soil' and the magnetic flux interacted with the artificial magnetic field.

It turned the sky red as I ran for the emergency pod.

The memory ends there.

there is so much more

My next memory, in the brain's strange way of compensating for missing memories and data, is of sitting and staring at the supplies I had access to. Not much. Each meal was a slight loss of matter due to foodforge energy consumption and my own body's systems. The food forge's I/O port was damaged, meaning it was stuck with its last meal complement, leaving me with crappy food.

All I knew was that I had been down there a long time and Lucy had been badly injured and was unconscious.

My memory contains no visual image of Lucy, just her importance.

remember

remember lucy

remember

The next memory in the string, following them with my SUDS decryption software, makes little sense. I know that Tycho Base took a direct hit. I remember seeing the documentary on how it was rebuilt before I was even born.

It is strange. I remember being born on Mare Imbrium Base and having never been to Earth, I mean, Terra. I remember being educated in a clean, comfortable, luxurious NSO corporate creche.

Yet I remember a mother, not a creche-nanny robot, humming as she hung laundry on the line across our window, the anti-pollen screen filtering the air that floated through our humble apartment that we called home.

I remember college with NSO, at Shrieder's Port on Mars, yet I remember attending Third Republic PubEd classes.

remember

remember

My memories, the ones I am familiar with, are fading. I've checked with the software in my SUDS decryption toolkit. My familiar memories are, without a doubt, a fabrication. They are self-referencing, rather than each memory referencing a previous memory and sometimes a later memory, even if the referenced memory has degraded to only a remembered scent.

Like I remember my mother and honeysuckle.

But the memory is strange.

I remember a man of swirling code made flesh. He could be touched, he could touch. He reacted at times with wonder to the world and other times had an ageless wisdom.

My first memory of him was of him, a robed man, and a man made of wrath and anger with a cyberhound next to him.

"Take it easy, you poor bastard," the chrome teared man told me. I remember that. His hand on my shoulder, the way he knelt down and looked me in the eye. How he looked at the stumps of my legs. "It got bad, but we're here now. Our Father heard you and led us here. We're here now."

he was renamed phillip

He knew what had happened to my legs.

Nanoforges require energy and mass.

He never judged, the man with chrome tears. Neither did anyone else.

The man of code held out a simple emergency ration bar, already partially unwrapped. My hand shook as I took it and I unashamedly crammed it into my mouth like an animal.

It tasted like ambrosia.

While this log may not seem like a place for such memories, I believe they are tied in directly with the SUDS. I don't know how, I just know they are.

Last night I sketched a picture. I have always sketched, a little bit of artistic blood in me. It was of a man in powered armor, a set of concentric circles around him. The factshield was up and even with the fact it was a charcoal sketch it was obvious that the male pictured was of Hispanic descent. I labeled it, then searched the database this morning.

Temporal Knight - Alpha Team Leader Jorge Johanson.

he believed

he tried

he failed

did he? did he really?

perhaps not

I looked it up four times.

I got nothing.

I wonder why my subconscious drew that picture while I slept.

Now, if only my subconscious will tell me who Lucy was, or what she looked like.

he remembers

not yet

he will

good

I feel as if Lucy is intertwined with this project, but I do not know how.

--Marco

your name is Peter

you are chrome and human spirit

you were once beloved by your father and brothers and sisters

DAY ONE HUNDRED THIRTY

CORPORATE PROJECT STATUS: ONGOING

STATION STATUS: MODERATE TO HEAVY DAMAGE (REPAIR ONGOING)

Last night was a bad night. I have apparently taken up sleep walking. I watched the security footage. I wander the damaged sections of the station, doing nothing more than just moving through rooms of damaged machinery. I stop at the damaged nutriforge in Epsilon Sector and order up two baked potatoes with butter and ketchup, a glass of rehydrated orange drink, and a packet of vitamins. I then sit down and slowly eat it all, as if I am savoring it.

That is not the disturbing part.

Before that, I visit the morgue. I remove a section of flesh from a corpse, kneeling down next to the corpse and praying before setting to work. I then make my way to Epsilon Sector, somehow always avoiding the secmen, and feed the human flesh into the matter reclaimation machinery of the nutriforge, then order up the meal. I pray during and after.

I then return to my room, easily avoiding the secmen.

I stood with the Chief of Security, who sports a nice scar across his neck, and Mister McNugget, who both wanted to know why I was doing such a thing even though the nutriforges in the rest of the station are operating at 100% capacity.

I told them that I did not know.

They confined me to my room and ordered a full psychiatric workup.

I passed with flying colors.

I felt almost contemptuous as I took the tests. As if I could be fooled into saying anything I did not want to say via answering tests devised for those who are not wary and watchful.

I know why I am doing what I am doing.

I am reliving a nightmare.

The nutriforge had been damaged. Its capabilities restricted by energy and matter. It could not process things too molecularly dissimilar. It was no longer capable of atomic reconstruction.

In my memory-nightmare, there had only been one choice if I wanted to eat.

So I was reliving what I had done before I had lost my legs to my own appetite.

I could not tell them of such a shameful thing.

So they confined me to my room.

I slept, and I dreamed.

My latest dream unfolded a memory. Not a major one, but the SUDS decryption hardware let me track it. The memory is a very old one, attached to many different memories. I was a skinny brown boy, with worn but well cared for clothing, much like everyone else.

Wealth and luxury had been devoured by the hunger of greenery, by the never ending appetite of foliage, across the globe, ending privilege across the globe. I was luckier than most, I had shoes with a good thick sole. One Nike, one Reebok. Better than 90% of the people in the city I lived in.

My mother standing next to me. She is a shapeless blob, vaguely female shaped, marked with the symbolism my brain uses to identify my mother. I can see her eyes. Clear, brown, wrinkles at the corners, squinting in the light of a damaged ozone layer, smiling at me.

It's my last day on Earth.

By nightfall, I'll be a recruit in the Third Republic's military. I will have an option for education, safety, and everything that my mother was unable to have since she was a teenager and the plants had bloomed.

She coughed, lightly.

honeysuckle lung

She knows I will make her proud

you did

and work hard

you did

you were momma's good boy

to be something, be someone, and thrive beyond the caserio I had been born in. My arms are scarred by my hard work on the Green Wall, and I'm smiling.

Did I do good?

I do not know.

you did

you made her proud

you held her hand as she surrendered to honeysuckle lung

you were momma's good boy

The memories are different than my old ones. My old ones are all razor sharp, fully formed. When I look at them with the SUDS mnemonic analyzer, they are all self-referencing.

They're fake.

remember remember

your name was peter

you were momma's good boy

your brothers and sisters admired you

The new ones, though, they are real. They reference one another, reference memories smoothed down to just a few symbols.

I wish I knew what was happening with me.

--Marco

DAY ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-THREE

I have been allowed to return to work. I've been working on the SUDS neural interface connection to the SUDS repeaters and main relay equipment. It has become woefully apparent that all that is on this side is relays, repeaters, and download terminals.

The main equipment, the equipment that does the actual work, is somewhere else. It's in a different place.

I suspect it is on the other side of that Hellspace Breach, which is now fully locked down with auto-turrets to handle the Mantid and other creatures that spawn from the primordial black goo.

It spawned a Mar-gite yesterday. Only instead of the non-feeding side being a dusty brown it was a glossy black and the cilia were all deep purple rather than pink or red. It smelled of rotting meat instead of pine cleaner.

I had a dream last night. An odd one. According to the security terminals I moved to an empty room and was talking to thin air.

I can't clearly remember it. Examination with my neural decoding equipment has shown me it has a mnemonic block on it with the symbolism for NSO. All I remember is a naked woman smoking a cigarette, a large heavyset man next to a cyberhound, and thin sardonic brown skinned man with a bald head.

The men are familiar, the woman was not.

She was typing on a keyboard. An ancient mechanical keyboard in a room that felt ancient. She was holding the cigarette between her teeth as she typed. The men appeared concerned.

About me.

But they do not know me.

he's remembering

good

can you undo the locks

do i ask you if you can shoot people you big thug

she's got a point

he's remembering i'll undo this and return him to you

is he in pain

he's too stupid to be in pain just like you two

A part of me fears her, but I do not know why. I do know she is not Lucy.

I don't know who Lucy is, but I think she is important, although I don't know why.

I think I might be close to a breakthrough. Rather than try to decode the machine language used by the SUDS, which is a proprietary system unlike any I've ever seen before, I'll use the computer language used by the SUDS neural engram system to determine the correct neural engram to load into a clone or clean/repair the engram.

That has to be able to talk to the SUDS.

I'll use it to figure out how to talk to the system.

Lucy is in there. I'm sure of it.

--Marco

your name is peter

you were peter after you were marco

he has to go home before he can come back

she's right he has to remember

just send me there

there's nobody there to kill you big ape

DAY ONE HUNDRED FORTY

I had another dream that disturbed me.

The sky of Mars is reddish, often pink in the morning. The sands of Mars are made up of microfines, heavy in iron. The dust gets in everything, puffs up around your feet as you walk.

I remember the black robe of one of the men accompanying us. He wasn't one of us, but he was beloved by our father, who walked with us. The man with the chrome tears, me, the blacked robed Saint, and the man of code made flesh.

The ruined dome of a Martian city drew closer as we walked through the sand. It was hard to breathe, the terraforming almost undone by the Mantid strikes.

We came across a young woman. There were no bacteria to decay her, but the harsh rays of the sun, the lack of moisture in the air, had desiccated her, but she was still beautiful in a sad melancholy way. We spoke to one another, about what, I do not know. I touched her SUDS to discover she was still in there.

The robed man knelt down, sealed his lips over hers, and breathed into her. I cradled the back of her neck, her SUDS implant against my hand. I gave it a slight push, urging her to awaken.

Her eyes opened. Purple eyes. She gasped, the gash in her throat making a whistling sound.

I awoke as the man of code made flesh spoke.

"Good morning, Bellona."

The word "Bellona" is intertwined with mental symbolism of great black ships, of the final attack on a place called Anthill.

Of a fall from grace.

When I woke, I sat for a long time at the edge of my bed and wept. For what, I did not know.

I went and spoke to Mister McNugget in the bathroom. She was utilizing the faculties for biological reasons. I am sure I don't need to elaborate. We spoke through the separation wall.

She believes these dreams are not dreams at all, but memories somehow being evoked.

She asked me if I have found Lucy.

I told her that I have not.

She asked me about my mother. I told her what I remembered. She handed me a cigarette under the edge of the stall as we spoke.

I returned to bed and slept. If I dreamed, I do not remember it.

--Marco

you pushed too hard

shut up do i tell you how to shoot someone in the face

relax brother she knows what she is doing

he's waking up

i hope you're right we need him

if you two say so

DAY ONE HUNDRED FORTY THREE

I got the system to talk to me.

--Marco

there we go

what

now i can touch him

so

trust me i touch you you know it

do you always have to be so creepy

do you always have to be a big ape

quit it both of you can you turn on his beacon

he doesn't have one they did something different to him

a curse upon the imperium for what they did

quit pouting and see if you can scare me up a beer

DAY ONE HUNDRED FORTY FOUR

Living Organism Upload Categorization: Cerebral-Engram Information

LOUC:CEI

Lucy.

It looks like a buffer overrun keeps making it crash.

From the looks of it, it's some kind of massive casualty system.

If I'm right, this means that the entire system crashed out when the Mantid attack.

Except...

I put an in-line note in it.

//--Hardware replacement required

//--Any input stream that results in the buffer holding more than 1.2 billion neural engram templates will result in system lockup

//--Patch to warm storage should keep signal degradation from occurring

//--Cyclic restart will allow the processing of 1.45x10^7 records before next soft-reboot crash occurs. This will allow slow but steady processing of records.

//--Marco

When did I get into the SUDS?

I traced the patch.

Like many programmers, I like to use a set of named variables that mean something to me, kind of a shorthand for what the named variable handles.

Mine's in there, in the patch coding, as well as the notes I embedded in in-line comments.

So, I wrote a patch to the SUDS hardware layer at one point.

When?

How?

In another note, I found what looks like an intact help-bot VI. At least, it answers questions.

Tomorrow I'm going to see if there are any supervisor VI online.

I've got a hinky feeling, but a feeling nonetheless that I'm on the edge of something.

Mister McNugget didn't look too happy about my findings, but other than that, things look good.

--Marco

just a little push

are you sure this will work

as sure as you are bald

do you always have to be insulting

do you have to loom over me like a hyperventilating gorilla confused why the sun came up

will it work

it'll work

it'll get people killed

so? who cares?

they might

fine i'll do it the hard way there's some temporal interference but i know how to do it

are you sure

you don't want to know just ask falmy

[wake up marco] [wake up]