RP: Cirrus Station [Episode 2] Little Problems

"I'll go to with Cyril, Sir." Ozz added. Heck, If Cyril had some experience, Ozz could just follow his lead. Plus...his brother always used to call him "Meat Shield" anyway.

Shyly, Keziah reached out and placed her hand on top of Flower, beside the sensor track. She had never dealt with an automaton like this one before. All of her experience was with the big, man-sized and -type units, and those ones she could just simply talk to. A lot had been the control units for stevedore teams.

But nothing that had the brain of an insect.

"I'm the mother of a robot," she muttered to herself, unable to hide the grin sneaking across her face. It was just too absurd.

"Basically, yes." Explained Dream, standing back up. "He has a clean dataslate now, since it's the first time he's been activated. So, since he doesn't have other colony members to learn from, he'll default to the standard behavior of following us and learning from us. Since he's an independent unit and not part of a hive, he'll probably grow more and more intelligent than a standard Junker, in time."

She patted the droid again, lovingly. The sensor lens spun to face her.
"Eventually, he might develop partial sentience by his own, much like the Savant constructs used in military hardware, to guide missiles and stuff. Anyway..." She motioned to Flower to follow her. "...let's get back to the armory."

Serra, who helped in the meager means she could, was squatted on her heels and knees just looking at the spheroid with interest. She didn't really help directly in it's assembly, mearly providing some tools that she carried to assist.

Though, watching the junker's actions and the responses from the others present, made her feel better then she did before this all happened. True it was a machine, bus Serra felt she was witness to life anew.

Tweak watched, mostly, handing pieces to Dream and occasionally installing a piece here and attaching an appendage there as they built the Junker. She smiled a bit when it came to life, the smile growing when Dream explained that it was somewhat sentient. The freespacer neko took a tentacle in her hand gently, shaking it a little. "Nice to meet you, Flower," she whispered to the machine.

After Dream finished the assembly, Tweak stood up and followed the blue-haired 'Spacer out of the bay, walking beside the 'newborn' Junker.

Flower was a... strange machine, to say the least. Easily the second-most-colorful being in this little group. It happily followed Rainbow (if that were the right word. Who knew what kind of emotional index the little, tentacled robot possessed). She hadn't learned much from helping build the thing, as she had mostly just provided muscle for Rainbow, and followed her instructions. But despite its bulk, it had probably been manufactured very, very cheaply.

She followed slightly behind the group as they wended their way through the station back towards the armory, desperately trying to maintain some kind of military patrol pattern.

And so, the small group, now more numerous than when they left, returned to the armory. "We're back!" Greeted generally Dream.

The tentacle-waggling arachnoid multicolored robot was with them, obviously.

Noticing that there was some movement, the 'spacer raised an eyebrow. "Wha? Huh? What are you guys doing?" She asked.

Cyril stood up and placed his now detached arm on the shelf, next to his beret. Making sure that the now empty sleeve of the body suit was folded away, he began to buckle on the suit's armor plating as he responded to Dream.

"Get'n ready to go below ma'am." He said fumbling one of the breastplate's seals with his tail. Normally, for maintenance work like this, he would have preferred to just wear the body suit and leave the armor piled up next to his arm. But the helmet sealed to the breastplate, not the undersuit, and the life support pack was attached to the same thing. And Cyril wasn't keen on going down that hole without a breather.

Piling the armor plates from the suit's left arm on top of, well, his left arm, he glanced at the little droid curiously peering around the room.

"So tha's our 'elper?" He squatted down in front of the droid, cocking his head to the side slightly. "Ugly little bogget, ain'tcha." He said somewhat endearingly. Patting it on the caseing with his tail, he looked up at Dream, and the Sergent as well.

"Wha's the orders?"

Ozz chuckled at Cyril's comments about the junker.

"It looks beautiful to me." He said with a smile as he continued to fiddle with his armor.

Almost in unison with Cyril, Ozz addressed Lucius and Dream and said, "Whats the orders?"

Dream pondered. "You know, I was thinking about sending Flower down there on his own... buy looks like you're ready to go down there as well, ain't it?" She wondered at the two soldiers. "If that's the case, I'll send him with you for support."

She glanced sideways, at one of the omnipresent small wall-mounted terminals. "We'll wire up to the network from here, look through his eyes, follow you around and help you to the best of our abilities." It wasn't very clear what she meant with "we". Probably the Wonderful Gorgeous Techie Team (Serra, Tweak, Keziah and herself).

"The assignment is quite clear," Kess interjected on Lucius' behalf. The raven-haired Savtech stepped forward to address the room. "Our squad is to, essentially, find out the problem with the processing systems below and attempt to fix it. Seems like all your complaining about being engineers and not soldiers got you somewhere after all."

"Mimi and I will not be able to bring our visual representations down there, as there are no volumetric emitters...but we are connected to the surveillance systems monitoring the processing pipeline, and we can see and comment to you all about what is happening. Since only a few of your are needed down there, the rest of you can give advice from afar...our orders don't specific having to patrol this area while we work, but it's to be assumed we at least need to keep an eye open for possible security risks."

"Please be careful down there as well," Mimi added with a smile. "Miss Cassefin has slated the station-wide hyperspace jump to begin in a few minutes...but I doubt the effects will be felt by anyone on the station. We shouldn't even notice them at all!"

"Good!" Dream smashed her fists together, pumped up. She ran up to the wall terminal, pulled a couple of connection cables out of the small hatch hidden behind her ear and jacked in.

"Serra, Tweak, Kazy, can you link up to either me or the net as well? The more we are, the more likely we are to notice things when they go wrong."

No one failed to notice that dream used "when", not "if". Freespacer habit of always planning for the worse, everyone hoped.

"We'll direct Flower from here. He has a high power cutting and welding laser, and a variable-caliber, coil gun-powered bolt driver, so if there'll be need for some heavy-duty repairs you can count on him."

"Sir," Keziah answered simply. She peeled off the armor from her right arm, and rolled the skinsuit up past her elbow. "Should I just link up to you?"

Once she said it, though, the prospect of actually connecting her brain to a 'Spacer's brain was unnerving. She knew they had a communal neural network. But, would that mean joining that entity, even for a little bit?

She shook it off, and slid back the small covering in the crook of her elbow, exposing the neural jack.

"All right then, it settled, Cyril, myself and.....errr..... Flower.....will go down." Ozz began.

He stepped closer to the hole and knelt down. With a keen and sharp eye, he examined as much as he could from his angle with his weapon in hand.

"Looks clear. When Flower is ready send it down. I'll follow.....and then you." Ozz added addressing Cyril.

"Sound good to you, Cyril?" Ozz asked.

Cyril shrugged, joining Ozzy at the hatch. "Works fer me."

His eyes began to glow a slightly brighter green as he turned on his light amplification. Because the only thing worse then a stench ridden cesspool was a dark stench ridden cesspool. Not that he could see much more then a lovely crust of stagnant sewage.

Stepping aside for their new robotic squaddy, put on his helmet, making dead sure that the seal was tight.

"Oi, Jimmy-Boy. Make sure no one steals me fookin' arm." He added to James before sealing his helmet.

Reviewing her capabilities, Tweak found that she needed a hard-line to connect to any external devices...but what was this frequency-hopping "telepathy"? Did that mean that the telepathy was just a different type of radio?

Turning this over in her mind for a moment, she decided that it would be best if she was not connected at all. "I think I should go down with them," she said, turning to Dream. "I can't connect, and I might be more use in person anyway." The distaste she felt for slushing around in sewage was well-hidden...but that was her only option.

Meanwhile, if Dream accessed the Polysentience (even, say, while doing research on Tweak before Cassifin locked down the Station), she would see that Tweak might well be the only Freespacer to have never been connected to the race's shared virtual world.

"Oh, ok. Might be a problem for you to connect, in fact." Dream pondered. "Yeah, you'd probably be far more useful down there." She agreed while pulling other two cables out of her head (how many wires did she have in her skull, anyway?!), offering one to Serra, and jamming the other one in Keziah's elbow jack with a casual motion...

...and it didn't fit.

"...oh. Yeah. Wait." She reached into her sleeve and pulled out a small adapter. She fitted it on the end of her cable, and repeated the process.

It was a strange experience to say the least.
When connecting to another terminal or network, there are always safety checks, security routines, firewalls, password-protected areas, and the like.

This time, there weren't any. Bam! She was in. She could access directly Dream's mind if she wanted to, there wasn't any kind of protection.
Just "nearby" (from a virtual reality point of view) she could "feel" a massive flow of information, sorta like standing nearby a rapid, roaring, confusing river. And not even that river had any amount of protection, not even the bare minimum for the sake of privacy. If she wanted, she could probably tap into the mind of any freespacer on the station.
The opposite was also true, probably.

Just a bit further, there was Flower, waiting.

"Ok, Flower. I want you to go down there. Cyril, Ozz and mama Tweak will follow you. Yes, they're real people, even if you can't hear them over the network." Dream calmly explained to the simple AI. "Activate your audio sensors, too, and give us a constant data feed."

They weren't directly maneuvering the droid, more like standing on his shoulders and whispering in his ears.

And, following their suggestions, Flower switched on a couple of lights, one on his main, spherical hull, and another in the tip of one of his tentacles, and whizzed down the passage. His movements were noisy, but, all in all, quite agile. His legs stuck like a spider's to the metallic wall, allowing him to climb down with ease.

Ozz watched as Flower dropped down and disappeared into the floor.

"Alright Tweak, take up the rear. Everybody be safe and stay in communication." Ozz stated. He pressed the touched pad on his helmet and his visors closed.

He secured his weapon and said "Let's Rock N' Roll!" and he lept in after Flower.

The rush and flood of information was disorienting. An odd kind of vertigo slipped in at first. Her vision didn't shift and tilt, but her body acted, responded, like she had just done a triple aerial flip in high gravity. She had to focus to keep her body under control, but once the sensation passed, it was marvelous.

There was information. Everywhere. Not the meager kind usually available to her on computer systems, but much more. Her own mind, still mostly human and without barriers, was probably open to every 'Spacer. They could probably freely access her memories, her thoughts. But for once that didn't disturb her. Barely aware of Rain-- no. Her name's Dream. A tiny dip into the rush of information, and she pulled up more than she could have with a database trawl and an hour. But that was all she allowed herself. Just because there were no protections didn't mean there weren't customs about how to access peoples'... minds.

She directed her virtual-self away from the datastream, and up to the node that represented Flower. And Dream. "This is incredible," she whispered.

Following an immediate drop into sudden darkness, those entering the open grate would suddenly find themselves thudding harshly against another large cross-hatched walkway, dimly lit by small lights near the floor. The only direction they could travel would be forward, or back up the ladder-like protrusions that led to the armory.

A short distance down the corridor opened up to the main pipeline, in all its grandeurs. To simply call the complex a "pipeline" would be an injustice...apparently, instead of dedicating an area of the central station to sewage processing, the architects simply integrated the processing equipment into the pipeway itself. Hanging above the security team members on the ceiling of the pipeline were numerous mechanical wonders and intricate machines, all of which apparently were meant to process the refuse flowing below...but at the moment, they didn't appear active. Luckily, the intense odor was completely nullified to those wearing their CSS Suits and helmets...to those whom were not, however, it's safe to say the smell wasn't pleasant.

The room, or perhaps tube if one wanted to be precise, itself they security members would find themselves in was fairly large, and a tad better lit than the previous corridor through more welcoming sets of fluorescent fixtures lining the upper areas of the pipe. The cross-hatched grate walkway they security members entered on became a catwalk path, suspended above the bottom of the pipe. The catwalk broke into a T-junction, one path leading left, the other, down the right.

To those observant enough to notice the pattern of the stains on the surprisingly clean flooring of the pipe below them, it would appear the direction of the flow would normally be from right to left. However, there was no flow, and the masses of machines not moving was also a clear sign of malfunction.

A bit farther along the right-side path revealed the source of the blockage; a mound of unidentifiable mass has situated itself in the center of the pipe, effectively damming up the waterworks. The accumulated refuse has begun to spill onto the suspended catwalk even. Above, lit dimly by a distant lamp, was a gap in the countless mechanisms attached to the ceiling...a rather large, unsightly gap, unnatural in its appearance when compared to the tightly-packed masses of machinery before that point.