Episode XXXV

Gather Round

Mo translates, and the Leader nods and thinks it over. He says something back to Mo and they have a brief conversation.  Finally the leader shakes his head and rides off into the darkness. Mo explains.

He said the Elder doesn’t travel. I told him we’re here because the Elder couldn’t keep his promises, and he’d damn well better travel — or something like that. He said he’d go check. So I guess that’s what he’s gone to do.

Some time later the Leader reappears, this time with two more riders. He explains, through Mo, that the Elder will meet you at Mo’s camp. You all mount up and ride. Once again, the ride is short, but strangely dizzying and confusing. The terrain seems to shift in odd ways in the darkness — perhaps a trick of the fading moons-light. After a short ride, you arrive back at Mo’s camp. Once again, Mo seems to have dozed and has to be awakened. The fire is still lit, and beside it, on a bedroll, wrapped in a heavy robe against the cold desert night, sits the tiny figure of the Elder.

Episode XXXIV

It's Full of Stars

Gummo goes down and settles himself into the bar to watch the village square through the open door. Kaz and A.C. take their stuff and head out into the night.

The night is dark, and as Kaz said, the sky seems absurdly full of stars. Neither Kaz nor A.C. has ever been “outside” in night like this before. Chella, the old moon, is high and pale and Ouro, the new moon, is a small bright coin on the horizon. Kaz glances up to confirm the dark spot in the sky that indicates the presence of something — who knows what, exactly — hovering above, blocking the stars.

Light spills from the doors of the inn and the “church” and a few windows. With that and the star and moonligt, Kaz can see fine and A.C. has no real trouble once his eyes adjust. The trader is dressed in darker clothing than the last time you saw him and wears a coat against the chilly desert night, but he looks largely the ssame. He sitting on the edge of the well, looking around as if expecting an ambush. The only noticable addition to his wardrobe is a sword strapped across his back, the hilt visible over his left shoulder.

When he sees Kaz and A.C. he stands up, looks around again, and nods to them to come over.

Episode XXXIII

A Visitor

You all move quickly into the room as if expecting nothing. Although ready for a visitor, you are nonetheless taken by surprise to see a familiar figure waiting inside.

Saza sits on a small stool that was not in the room when you left, motionless as a mantis, waiting for your arrival, her long legs stretched out in front of her and her black coat hanging loose from her shoulders to pool on the floor. She’s in “Saza” form for now, or what you think of as her “resting” form. Her skin is pale, her hair short and white-blond, her body and limbs are long and lean and her fingers hold the smoking end of a cigarette — that strange affectation of hers. The room smells slightly of a strange, minty smoke, but you notice that the window glass has been removed and the smell does not linger long.

Saza turns her head a fraction as you walk in and flicks the cigarette in an odd gesture, putting it out between her fingers as she does so. She gives you what must be a smile, though it is strangely cold, as if she were unused to the expression.

Hello boys. You are very, very hard to find.

Episode XXXII

You leave all get up and leave the old man to his work, heading back through the main room and out into the square. Things are beginning to return to normal, though there is still a crowd gathered around the well chattering. The well is obviously a meeting place for the settlement, and as the sun goes down people are starting to congregate, sitting on the well’s edge or standing nearby in what A.C. recognizes as a loose, but important heirarchy. It seems to be mostly women who are gathered, the men and children seem to be off doing other things. People turn to look as you come out, but no one approaches. You guess that the girl or the leader will show up eventually and tell you where to go.

After a few moments, the trader emerges from his wagon and stands again in its shadow, watching you.

Episode XXXI

Bugtown's Remains

Kaz pops the hatch and pushes it away to reveal what is certainly the strangest sight any of you have ever seen, at least outside of the vids. Outside of the pod is a landscape of sand, rock and scrub plants stretching as far as the eye can see, with the sky in one direction filling with smoke from what must have been the recent demise of Bugtown. The sun is high, and the air is full of strange sounds — hoots, chirps and flapping of the chute, now billowing out behind the pod, which is half burried in the sand. Stranger still is the silence between the sounds. There is no traffic, no street noise, no hum of generators or air conditioners or fluorescent lighting. None of you has ever experienced a world without that hum, even in the darkest night spent under an Undercity bridge — and now it’s gone. And the light! It’s not like any light you’ve ever seen before. The afternoon sun filtered through the smoke cloud makes all of the colors change and shift around you like some kind of drug-induced dream. And that’s not to mention the feel of the warm desert wind and the strange smell of the desert air, slightly tinged with smoke  — not bad compared to the Undercity, that’s for sure, but so totally alien. And, perhaps most of all, there is just the scale of the palce. No arena, no commons, no Undercity park or even Overcity Colosseum even comes close. The land seems to go on forever, off to some low mountains in one direction and simply off to a strange, brown line — as if the world just fell away — in the others, with the bowl of the sky above you so vast and far away it’s almost frightening.

Once he gets his bearings, Kaz gets what might be the rudest shock of all. Glancing at his Link for the time, he sees a glowing light and message he has never seen before — one he didn’t even know was in the system. NO NET CONNECTION. LOCAL OPERATIONS ONLY. The time display is there, 2:18 pm, but it has a message after it as well “LKNT”. Kaz has to look that up in the local help file: “Last Know Net Timezone”. That doesn’t really help Kaz much, but it makes him suspect the accuracy of his Link time.

((A.C., being the most travelled of you, is probably the first to get his bearings and get over the initial shock of the outside.))

Episode XXX

Escape Pod Airlock

You continue the long climb, flight after flight. At each landing, more and more confused and worried people enter the stairwell, scientists and doctors, facility service workers, administrators, security personnel all at the edge of panic and moving up as fast as they can. There is little time to pay attention to you, and no one really does. After what seems like an endles climb you arrive at an open firedoor and push through with the rest of the crowd into a large room.

Here, things are much worse, there are a few hundred people in the room, which is a large circle with additional circular alcoves arranged around it like lobes. Off the alcoves are numbered doors, each with a round insignia above it. These outer doors open into radlocks, and all are open, but the far, exit doors for each radlocks –the doors that lead to the pods — are closed and the lights above them glow red. At several radlocks technicians are frantically pressing buttons. A few have pried open panels. In the center of the room arguments have broken out and there is a great deal of pushing and shouting. Screens dotted around the room simply show large, yellow triangles with the word “UNAVAILABLE” on them and a message that says “FACILITIES MANAGEMENT OFFLINE: STANDBY”. One screen has been hacked to show a column of numbers scrolling by, all of which are red, and getting higher.

In one of the circular rooms, by one of the escape pods (number 4) two calm and impassive security men stand in heavy armor carrying rifles similar to the ones you saw in the stairwell. Between them is a woman in a very expensive suit, looking largely unruffled, and a technician working on the pod door, looking extremely ruffled. No one seems likely to make a run at the pod just now, in part because of the security men, in part because they are all trying to bang into other sealed pods, and in part because there is no indication that the VIP or her tech is having any more luck than anyone else.

Episode XXIX

The Reactor

With Kaz in the lead, you all move through into the radlock.

Kaz pulls open the second door, which opens easily. Stepping through, the party is greeted by a blast of warm, moist air and the smell of ozone. The door opens out onto a catwalk clinging to the side wall of an enormous and dimly lit chamber. Far above, the ceiling is lost in darkness. Far below is a pool of crystal water in which complex machinery is at work, emitting a strange blue glow. A pillar runs through the middle of the room, from the ceiling, down into the machinery in the water, bristling with unfamiliar technology. If not for the meter on the wall, with its needle reassuringly bobbing in the green zone, this might be a very uncomfortable place to stand.

The catwalk you are on runs all the way around the chamber, and on the far side, across the chamber from you, there is another door, similar to the one you just came through. High on one curving wall, above the catwalk, you can see a large, glass (or, anyway, transparent) window behind which you can just make out a control room with people in it. As you look around a speaker crackles to life somewhere.

Reactor chamber! This is control. What. . . Who the fuck are you?

Episode XXVIII

A.C. hits the button and the door security disengages with a heavy “thunk”.

KAZ: you push the door open and enter a small cell. A prison-looking jumpsuit hangs on one wall and there is a bed built into another wall and a toilet and sink in the back. The walls are white and the cell is brightly lit. A camera in the upper corner is on and recording your actions. In the center of the cell is large, black pod looking something like a metal coffin. Red lights and warning indicators flash all over the pod, letting you know that its life support has failed. The pod is also covered with warning stickers relating to EM hazards. The Hive gives you the code and you keys it into a keypad on the pod.

As you do so, you notices that your arm hairs are standing up and your eyespace is flickering oddly. As you finish the code, you hear the sound of high-pitched whine, spinning down –  a sound you hadn’t known was there until it shut down. Once the spin-down is done, your eyespace resettles and the electiricty goes out of the air. There is a moment more of cluncking and ticking from the pod, and then it opens with a hiss.

In the padded interior compartment lies Piper, apparently asleep. She is hooked up to monitoring equipment that must be local to the pod (no way anything gets beyond the pod given the EM blacking). She is wearing one of those flimsy paper gowns they give you in the Undercity medical clinics. She looks thin and pale — even more so than usual, almost spectral.

LoTHNet: MIND

[A.C. has provided this answer to a question from the Hive which might be useful.]

Q: What is MIND?

A: MIND nominally stands for Maximally Interconnected Network Device. MIND is the device maintained by GEMINI to monitor and reconfigure the global data network as required for maximum efficiency and security. GEMINI states that MIND is nothing more than a sophisticated computer designed to improve network performance. As traffic is layer encrypted, MIND does not and cannot monitor content; MIND monitors only performance. This is the official position of GEMINI. It is the Learning of the Hive, however, that MIND is in fact one of the small group of true machine intelligences active on the planet. It is the official position of GEMINI and the Territorial governments that there are no such machines and that the technology does not exist to create them. It is the Learning of the Hive that this is counterfactual. MIND was originally created for its stated purpose. However, after being improved using various recovered technologies, MIND increased its computational power beyond expected limits and began monitoring network content. It is the Learning of the Hive that such monitoring leads quickly to self-awareness given adequate technological resources. MIND requisitioned and received various upgrades and caused itself to become the first machine intelligence of the post-Passage era. The computational core of MIND is now housed by GEMINI in Axia and supported by the technologies necessitated by its superdense physical structure and other computational requirements, however MIND has also highly distributed and could survive the destruction of its core and rebuild. MIND and GEMINI have a relationship that would be biologically described as symbiotic. MIND aids in the operation of GEMINI and helps ensure that it remains foremost in its competitive landscape. GEMINI in turn supports MIND by undertaking whatever physical operations it requires, including the recovery and development of new technologies. GEMINI personnel aware of the nature of MIND keep that nature concealed. GEMINI is also know to be working within the territorial governments on the legislation that will eventually govern machine intelligences once humanity either comes to believe that it has developed them or comes to understand that they already exist. This is the Learning of the Hive.

Episode XXVII

The group heads back to the medical floor without incident and finds a closet with some uniforms in it. Although there is nothing quite the right size for Gummo, there are some scrubs that are pretty close. A.C. produces a small device that turns out to be some kind of tiny, threadless sewing machine — probably part of some disguise kit or something — and uses it with surprising speed and dexterity to alter the scrubs to a good fit for Gummo.  As a final touch, he splashes Gummo with some approriate-smelling chemicals from another closet and the bender disguse is complete. Kaz puts the modified zip-ties on and you head for the detention block to pull a Wookie.

The elevator is empty on the way up and you ride in silence under the watchful eye of a security camera. When the doors open things are as expected: four security personnel manning stations and keeping an eye on monitors (apparently not everything is routed to eyespace) look up as you step out of the elevator. Behind them is a hallway that probably leads to the cells, interrogation rooms and whatever else is back there. Three of the security personnel (two men and a woman) are Rank 1s (officers) and, sitting in the back at a desk with a control panel on it that looks like it might control the cell doors, is a Rank 3 (sergeant).

The sergeant, whose nameplate says R. Ross, looks up at you as you come in. Yes?