RP: 188604 [Skeleton Ensemble] Program 2; Shattered Stones

Cyborg Pyre

A light tinkling sound echoed the smouldering halls, until out of the flickering gloom, a renewed crab drone urgently approached. Bricklot, the large box-on-dog-legs machine that had accompanied Phase, was following behind them obediently.

"...I... I don't know what to say..." Jack remarked simply, regarding his two comrades lying broken within the devastated scene. Where there was once a bombastic and incandescent voice emanating from the crab shell, there was now only a hushed shame and guilt. "...Please... Please forgive my... misguided optimism... I did not mean for things to turn out... t-this way..."

The loyal dog-drone popped open at the front, revealing a drawer with all sorts of medical equipment crammed inside. Bandages, medical tweezers, anaesthetic... The skeleton's entire stockpile, in fact. Lacking in either guns or hands that could hold them, it was the only think that the type five could think of doing to help.

A small sideways glance, observing the now-motionless form of the large deer-headed automata.

"Excuse me... Organic miss, with the laser rifle?..." He didn't sound any more enthusiastic, but just wanted to save all the lives he could, at this point. "Are... Are you aware this person is a full body cyborg, and not an automata?... Their oxygen system seems to be failing, and... Well, could you please use your rifle to cut off their head? It... It would be best to take them to the medical bay... Either here, or on our ship, quick-sharp..."

Cyberspace Pyre

Gemini managed to get inside of the system's virtual interface without too much trouble, but the internals were an odd mix of messy and minimalist. These people did not apparently know much about programming, but had either copied from who hired somebody who did. To the untrained eye, the inside of the system looked like a virtual can of worms, filled with all sorts of semi-sentient viruses designed to infest and kill anyone directly trying to mess with the settings of the security system directly... The visualizer made it look like a cluster of transparent green centipedes, crawling all over a low-poly red box.

The type three girl in question was not an untrained eye, however. The box had a little string-line connecting down to a different red box, completely unprotected. It looked like a power relay, but remained unlabelled.

Inexcusably sloppy work, or an obvious trap?...

With no kind of system registry available, the only real way to find out was to access it.

Cyberspace Pyre

Gemini was ready to get off of this junk heap. Even the systems were junk. She rolled her eyes. "These fools are more Nepleslian than Freespacer," she muttered under her breath. The single unprotected system threw up all kinds of red flags. She pursed her lips in thought. An argument went on in her head.

What are you waiting for?
What if it's a trap? These people don't deserve to die.
Who cares?
I do. And you should too.
Do I need to remind you why we're here?
No, Six. But no one else is getting hurt.

Apparently, she came to a decision, because her fingers started tapping away at the air. Thousands of little spider-shaped creatures descended from above the centipedes on webs of code. The centipedes struggled against the spiders, but they were vastly outnumbered. Every spider they killed split and became two smaller spiders. A smirk lit up the little hacker's face as her army of spiders wrapped the centipedes in webs, rendering them useless.

While they worked she bit the bullet. She crossed her fingers and opened the little box, virtual scissors floating in the air ready to sever the connection between the two boxes if something bad happened.

The Ruins

After tightly tying off the improvised tourniquet on Kiver--she could leave that alone for a bit, presumably saving the person was more important than saving the leg, especially without an actual medic present--Ziggy turned and examined Hollowpoint. "I'm... not sure that's safe." She skipped the proffered supplies for the moment, having already decided a delicate touch wasn't going to help either of them immediately.

She was stunned for a moment before her mind got into gear and she plugged herself in to communicate. "Permission to cut off your head, ma'am? It seems we need to evacuate." Speaking aloud, she added, "I'm going to need some details on that medbay. Whichever's closest. And a technician, preferably."

Cyber Realm

Something a little strange happened as Gemini broke down the defensive virus, rendering the central core of the security system completely undefended...

The control unit on the power module took on a life of its own, and began a chain reaction that unfurled the larger, upper box into a vast tree of exposed files. Something amazingly fast was redirecting power not just away from the security system, but actually using maintenance drones already within the room to hardwire those cold storage files straight to the polysentience.

How was that-!?... It was using Gemini's own mindware as a through-port!

It was like a blue scarecrow, ethereal, transparent, hanging above them. Just a blur, a globe of head with countless tangled wires hanging down as 'hair'. Massively complex, but also blindingly fast. It was a Type Five with processing speed perhaps even on par with planet-spanning Cinereal themselves.

To say it turned to Gemini when they were done was a bit of an understatement. It bled the system dry in mere milliseconds, and then merely nudged at Gemini's passing connection as a total afterthought.

oh. you aren't codebreaker grimgorie at all, are you? i suppose they must be dead... A text file, no vocal stream. two of you?... no... some kind of failsafe program? ha! that's very cute...

thank you for the assistance, through. i'll give you something nice in return.

Gone just as suddenly as they appeared. True to their word, however, they did put a singular file back into the system. '/17.08.38.vri.'

...Well, there was a trap, and then there was whatever the hell that was...

Either way, it did seem like they had complete, unprecedented control over the space station's facilities, now.

Real Space

"Go ahead and try. Looks like I'm done for anyway." Hollowpoint responded through the direct line connection. "Cybersurgery unit is one floor up. Get to an elevator and take a... tak- a.. a..."

Unconscious. Well, hopefully. It was hard to tell with mecha-anatomy as complicated as this.

"The med bay is upstairs. I'll pull the crane arm out a little, and we can climb up right in front of it, from the armoury we broke into." The pocket junker completed the sentence even without hearing what was going on, through it was no mere coincidence. Only slightly slower, Ziggy could sense the polysentience terminals on the actual station coming back online one by one. Apparently her jailmate was doing something drastic downstairs. "Sorry about the head thing, but they'll be okay! Honest! I used to have a body, too... However, theirs looks a little heavy for any of us to carry. We most likely do not have much time, either."

"My name is Soulnomad Jack-o-Lantern Seven Six, by the way. Our ship is the Skeleton Ensemble."

Matter Material

"I think we all have our hand in this pot, Jack." Six-Three keyed over to the Skeleton Ensemble's polysentience. "Don't worry about any of this, alls well that ends well? Isn't that a saying that gets said at times like this? Though, we'll have to talk about where you were looking for missions if these are what we're going to be taking on. Maybe something a bit quieter, or less shooty next time. But one step at a time..." As he said the last sentence, he started to make his way towards Ziggy and took their offer to establish a link.

"Thanks for speaking to me here. It'd probably take forever to converse otherwise. Shall we head to the med bay? I'll be able to handle my own cybernetics just fine, but," He reached up and tapped a finger at the side of his head that was metal. "I might need a couple of extra eyes to replace and repair what's going on up there. Everything else seems functional, but my eye is on the fritz. Hopefully we can at least tape it enough that it'll work properly again."

Junk Heap

"I'm not really a technician, but then, I'm not really a medic, either."

Ziggy ended the connection, and focused on Hollowpoint first. She pushed her over with one foot, and rushed behind the huge cyborg to break the fall by putting her other in place. It was much easier that way, even using both of her arms, she probably would have been crushed.

Her laser rifle was a bit more destructive than she'd have liked for such a delicate task (relatively speaking), while her zweihander didn't have the edge it needed to cut through so much heavy metal. She also had her throwing blades, though, and holding one in each hand between two fingers, she was able to make enough mess of the situation to feel confident pulling out her enormous two-handed sword for a traditional execution blow to finish the 'surgery', aiming low enough to avoid the brain stem. Whoever knew that training would come in handy today?

She must have been less hardened than she'd thought, since she still had to fight the urge to retch after picking up Hollowpoint's head. Unable to speak and at some risk of embarrassment, she hurried along the suggested route to the medical bay, deciding to save the introductions for later.

Cyberspace

The hacker thought she might know what a bacteria feels like after that encounter. She sighed. I hope whatever's left is worth it, she thought. Before she opened the file, she deactivated the laser grid and opened the doors to the vault. She doubted anything was left after that Type Five rode her brain like a starship, but it wouldn't hurt to check. As a sort of thank you to the real Hollowpoint, she restored power to most of the station's systems.

Checking in with everyone else in the meat world was probably a good idea. She was too curious about the .vri file left behind to care at the moment. Gemini took a deep breath to prepare herself and opened /17.08.38.vri.

Ruined Security Corridor -> Medical Chamber

"Genesculptor..." Jack spoke with a hushed voice, and approached Kiver with signs of regret. Phase's pet walking toolbox followed diligently behind, apparently tied the syntelligences' remote systems now. "If you are not feeling up to carrying her, can you please put our pilot on Bricklot's back?"

Even through the helmet was heavy enough to be reinforced boron mesh, Hollowpoint's neck was rather light on metal, instead exposing grey-pink synthetic material as it thudded to the floor. Only the smallest seeping of pink blood, and the crackle of severed wires. Ziggy was saved the indignity of hacking away more than once, at least. The antlers even served nicely as a pair of carrying handles for the hefty brain case.

Inner-empire spacers... They still looked like a spacery mess on the outside, but they really weren't built the same as traditional brethren...

Jack did as he said and withdrew the skeleton's claw about half way, causing a notable drop in atmospheric pressure as it audibly grinded around, but not quite enough to cause an explosive decompression. As the old spacer saying goes, 'If you can hear it, you can breath it!'

The slopped armoury shelves made the climb a simple affair from that point, after which the map information turned out to be correct. Beyond the air sealing bulkhead, there was a fabulously stocked medical room with all sorts of Origin Industries and Nepleslian equipment. Green-laminated metal panels decked a twenty-by-twenty foot square chamber, with a complete yammie-style organic fabrication tank (albeit it an older model) and two multi-limbed cyborg maintenance beds, all hooked up to a gleaming new computer mainframe with several orange-hue touch screen monitors. There was even a medical-retrofitted junker in the corner, albeit it deactivated and apparently not connected to the main control software.

In fact, aside from the apparent lack of a functioning medical AI, the place was fantastically equipped for a freespacer facility. The modified hypolathes in the armoury must have come with a batch order bonus.

And, hey in the corner, there really was a roll of duct tape for Six-Three, too!

Cyberspace (17.08.38.vri)

The file that Gemini opened was a virtual reality interface, but not a particularly complex one. Six desks floated in empty space, in fact a perfect mesh of the exterior camera feeds. The parent asteroid of this base looked dauntingly close in such high res, subtly orbiting Gemini at quite an impressive pace, from their perspective. Other than that, there didn't seem to be any gravity at all, with the user simply floating there.

Each of the desks in the hexagon had drawers, containing a number of photograph stills, videos, and text files. Moreover, the names seemed distinctly familiar. The Sky Brute, Ogre One, The Anastasia, Great Nimbus... Countless starship designs, schematics, weapon diagrams. Some of them were distinctly IWL era, YE30 tech thrown together during the desperation of the genocide. Others were completely new to her eyes, and seemed radically different from even current Spacer tech, even accompanying Nepleslian tech that was normally prohibitively expensive...

And evidently was outright impossible with their current resources, judging by the insane amounts of zeros in some of the material agendas. Half of this stuff was practically make believe, even, using Locksmith portal tech to do things like shatter moons with immense gravimetric shears... The Viridians didn't even have access to that sort of thing, they were direct political enemies of the blues!

They were hoaxes. The entire program was a simulation created to fabricate warship hoaxes. Just real enough to sap funding from eager planet-walker capitalist pockets, before disappearing back into the aether without leaving any strings to lead the warmongers back to the true conspirators.

Not only was the Viridian Array directly responsible for the scams mentioned on the Debug Funk radio show, but they were apparently not being puppeteered by the Nepleslians as much as was publicly thought. Rather, they were using the empire's corruption to surf the current crime wave, and secretly gouge out as many resources from private military groups as possible!

But that still left open the question... Who was behind the hacking here? And why was it left for Gemini to find?... Would it be better or worse for the Freespacers as a whole, should this information get out?...

Medical Chamber

Ziggy looked around at the equipment, both her natural and artificial eye staring at it just as blankly. This was the part where having some medical knowledge, or even technical skill, would have come in handy. There was no time to fret or do research, though, and if someone had written a helpful how-to guide for this particular task, she wasn't sure how to ask where to find it.

Instead, she took a guess, and moved to the fabrication tank to work out how to open it and set it to some sort of life support mode while she tried to look up how to give someone a full body replacement... or at least some more portable life support. It was made a bit harder by being unable to talk to her patient. She needed to talk to someone, at least, who wasn't in the same predicament she was in.

Remembering the sort of reception she'd received when she reported upon being kept prisoner, earlier, Ziggy decided to look further afield in her search for commiseration, contacting her daughter. Near was still in her first year at medical school, but had treated her friends' overdoses and wounds from drug wars before, so that was better than nothing.

"Are you busy right now? I could use a little help with something..."

Ruined Security Corridor -> Medical Chamber

Gemini was stunned at the amount of information actually left behind. She couldn't figure out why the SI had given her this. There was no internal debate this time. She would have to give this information to Cinereal and let her decide what to do. As long as the information didn't reach the Nepleslians she would be happy. The thought of all the resources they were stealing brought a smile to her face.

She couldn't send this over the Polysentience from here. Well, she could, but she didn't feel comfortable on this station. Gemini copied the information to her datapad and deleted it from the local network. Then she reluctantly shifted her consciousness back to the real world.

She looked around the room with a frown. The conversation that she hadn't been paying attention to before played in her head. "Medical." She said. The little hacker skipped to the medical chamber using the local Polysentience to find her way.

"Zigzig! Need some help with our body challenged former captor?" She asked although she had no idea what to do.

Make-shift Ramp onto the Medical Center

Six-three nodded before he knelt down and scooped up Kiver then placed her ceremoniously on Bricklot's back. His labored breathing all that he could hear as he looked down at Kiver, Jack's tone resonating with him. They had completed the task, but it got way worse before it got any better.

Moving on from the Bricklot and the battlezone, the Genesculptor moved on to the Medical Center. He did so in a daze. The events of the last hour playing over in his head as the adrenaline had worn off and he felt adrift in his own body, going through the motions. It was Six-Three's first fight, first real combat beyond those that were metaphorical dilemmas with computers or chemicals. His own organic brain was trying to sort through all of the events he had just experienced trying to figure out what to do next.

Ignoring Ziggy and Gemini, he went around the center, found some medical and repair supplies, then sat down on one of the beds and set to work on repairing his cybernetics. Starting with the railing along his ribcage, he attempted to undent the damage caused by the superhuman kick. Once completed, he would move over to the touch-screen computer's hoping to be able to use it to repair the cybernetics in his head since he can't see up there as easily. One of these damn things must have a camera or an auto-repair tool, or something he could use to get the chip working again.

Medical Chamber

Through the static of distance, Ziggy established only a limited connection with her daughter. They were probably somewhere on a planet where the polysentience relays weren't really up to scratch. A juddering -"H-llo?"- Still got through, regardless, complimented by the girl accessing her mother's camera feed. -"Maker's mercy, w-at did yo- do to that guy?..."-

With a viewpoint like a pinhole, and not really that much time to explain the situation, it could only result in the poor girl being confused and flustered.

Observing the connection as if they were some kind of back seat occupant, through, Jack's newer crab drone just walked over to one of the medical units and plugged themselves in. It was all standardized tech, so naturally, there were cracked versions of the operating systems available on the poly. Within just a couple of moments, the screens were blinking back into life again, with all sorts of capitalist cooperate logos.

The medical junker burst into life. It wasn't really clear if it had its own AI, or if Jack was controlling it, but it urgently moved over and grasped the head out of Ziggy's hands. A couple of tiny arms with all sorts of wires and hoses burst out from a compartment at it's front, interfacing with the severed cranium and apparently offering some kind of temporary life support. One of the automated cyborgisation tables, on the other hand, began reaching underneath the tabletop with it's six robotic hands, pulling out a bunch of apparently hap-hazard synthetic components, and rapidly assembling what appeared to be a cyborg circulatory system.

Soon enough, the head was connected to both support systems at once, and sort of synaptic visualisation program was displayed on one of the monitors. Biofabricator tank was slowly accumulating particles to construct something, but what the rather grizzly organ-blob was supposed to be wasn't really clear to untrained eyes.

Six Three didn't really get much attention during all of this, probably because of the urgency of the station-guardian's injuries, but the software operating the bed he was lying on did come back to life somewhere along the way. The fantastically equipped servicing station gave him a great degree of control in repairing his own problems, as well as a wealth of spare parts that were likely superior to his old hardware, if somewhat incompatible in a couple of cases. Regardless, the autobed seemed to know what it was doing, administering painkillers and popping out a couple of dents in a rapid, efficient fashion.

Medical Chamber

Seeing that the medicine was all taken care of by someone else, Ziggy just watched, while trying to explain herself. "Uh... Assuming this all goes well, I'll say I just saved this one from respiratory arrest. The battle was one of your classic Pyrrhic victories, although there was less fire this time. I should probably stop expecting these quasi-abandoned station investigations to stop ending violently." After a quick intake of breath, she decided it was time for an awkward subject change. "How is school?"