Carbon was just about to say something, probably to the tune of ‘we need to stay focused on the problem at hand’ when Alex spotted what was obviously a Human made dispenser tucked away in the corner, the screen all lit up and operational.
“Oh shit, is that a Berkmann?” He departed from the group and made a beeline for it - as much as he could with all the furniture and strategically placed planters in the way. Sure enough, it was a Berkmann. One of the higher end dispenser manufacturers, their units started at a full meter wide and twice as tall, making them unusually large. The extra space was actually used for a larger, self-calibrating forge matrix and more matter injectors. The other hallmark was the dark blue color with a faint hint of green, in a striking translucent gloss finish that gave it an internal glow from the overhead lights.
This one a bit scuffed and dented, and an older model, but obviously functional. Yes, it was weird that it was here, but he wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to use a Berkmann. Someone had just made a chicken marsala, the scent of it still heavy in the air despite the door to the print area being sealed tight, so it must have been in great shape mechanically.
He tapped in a quick order. Just a cup of coffee. The screen was nice, real finished glass that felt like paper under his fingertip... Which just sort of encouraged him to dial through the selection for a couple extra seconds to make it a caffe macchiato. Today felt like it was going to take forever, so why not get started with espresso now? His finger hovered over the start button as he glanced over his shoulder, not wanting to be rude. “Anybody else want something?”
Carbon sighed, somewhat resigned to this being how he was. She also likely saw that they were at the start of a very long process, and not something to flip a switch and fix.
“Actually, you know what, hang on.” he tapped through the screens and added to the order - another feature generally only found in high end dispensers, this one could make several things at a time, before hitting start. “This will only take a minute.”
The Berkmann hummed, an accurate progress bar filling at an impressive rate compared to how the unit in his childhood home had managed to turn out beverages - a single cup of coffee would have taken nearly as long as this entire order. It played an elegant series of chimes and the door slid open, the dense scent of espresso wafting out. A single tiny cup of coffee and a pair of champagne flutes sat inside.
Alex picked up the stemware first, turning to hand one to Carbon, flaunting as charismatic a smile as he could muster. “We were just talking about them, and I know this thing will make a good one.”
“A Mimosa?” Carbon inquired, with yet another sigh. She still took it, shaking her head with the faintest hint of a smile, eyes rolling in as affectionate a manner as one could imagine.
“Exactly.” He extended the other to Eleya. He didn’t trust her, no. But he did need her and the technological prowess of the Empire, so he’d schmooze a little bit. “It’s orange juice and Champagne, probably a little weak compared to what I’ve seen you drinking, but it is still before noon.”
Eleya took the orange concoction, looked into the flute and held it out to one of her guards. The wavering form stepped up to it, hovering over it for roughly the time it took to run a scan on consumables, then stepped away. Eleya gave it a sip and made a quiet comment.
Carbon picked it up for him. “Interesting, and yes, very soft.”
He gave her a little nod, picked his tiny cup - scarcely more than a shot glass - out of the machine and gestured towards the stairs. “Shall we be on our way?”
“We should.” Carbon walked over and slipped her empty flute to the recycler slot on the side of the Berkmann before heading towards the stairs.
He hadn’t even seen her drinking any of it. “So what’d you think?” He asked, picking up the pace for a few steps to catch up.
“The light alcohol and bright taste would lend itself well to breakfast- ah, brunch?” She replied quietly, trying to keep their conversation between them despite the whole entourage they’d picked up. “It was also very sweet.”
Alex turned his head just a little towards her, half a grin hidden from view. “So just like me?”
She hadn’t been expecting a reply like that, and it got a laugh out of her that she quickly tried to hide in a scoff, her ears flattening and then rising back to a relaxed posture. “Sometimes.” Carbon said, a little smirk crushed as flat as she could manage as she stopped before a plain door and hit the button to request access.
It was basically just a doorbell. A muffled reply came from within and the door opened into an expansive office. The walls lined with shelving save for nearly floor to ceiling windows looking out over the common area. A nice desk, repeating that dark wood and silver metal motif that seemed prevalent, faced the windows. There was still ample room for a conference table of similar design that sat eight. The owner of the office was crouched over in a corner and rooting around in a drawer built into the wall, a pile of small boxes on the floor beside him. He didn’t look up, speaking to them in an old but energetic voice and waving a graying hand at the table.
Eleya took the seat at the head of the table, of course. Carbon in the next seat to her right, and then Alex beyond that, setting his macchiato on the table next to the bundle containing his powered-down translator. All the Guard stood close at hand, their numbers split between inside and outside the office.
Alex sipped the foam off his coffee and glanced over his shoulder, the guy they were there to meet still looking for something. He was dressed in what Alex had come to think of as normal clothes for the Tsla’o, his jacket blood red and not sporting a particularly wide cut neck. Alex leaned over to Carbon, keeping his voice down as they had outside. “Alright, so who is...”
He petered off as he noticed that several banks of the shelves had been set up like a curio display, and smack dab in the middle of one was a model of the Apollo spacecraft sitting among Tsla’o items. Not just the Lunar Module, like everyone has, no. It was the LM attached to the Command and Service Module, like it would have been on the outward bound leg of the trip to the moon. It floated, whether on magnets or some tiny antigravity device was unclear, above a little display base that stated it was the Apollo 11 flight.
A few shelves down there was a signed baseball, and a maneki-neko that had seen better days. Come to think of it, the potted plants that sat on either side of the window were both Monstera.
All of the plants in the common room had been from Earth, too. Palms, mostly, dark green and providing a nice screen to break the area up, and the broad, striped leaves of snake plants. Some sort of vines he didn’t recognize off the top of his head as well. There was an arrangement of cacti in a shallow dish sitting in the middle of the conference table.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Carbon elbowed him in the arm, eyebrows raised.
“Oh, sorry, uh... Surprised by how much Human stuff is in here.” He gestured at the cacti. “Unless Schoen has plants like these too.”
“Those are from the desert, correct? They had them as decoration in The Mothership.” She leaned over, inspecting miniature representations of their respective species. “We have something similar, yes, but none with spines I am aware of.”
“I’m pretty sure all the plants here are from Earth. It’s a little weird.” He almost continued, but the guy whose office they were monopolizing joined them with an armload of old equipment, laying everything out in a neat row on the far side of the table before sitting down.
Some of the stuff Alex recognized, to a certain extent. A wireless power cable, for instance, was pretty obvious - it was just a cable with a node to get power from a wireless source, usually used when converting from battery power or a traditional wired plug. The very old, gray male plugged that into a box Alex did not recognize at all, a series of lights coming on before he plugged a headset into it and held it out to Alex.
It was designed for Humans, at least. A very straightforward single-sided unit with a very conventional looking earpad over the speaker, a slender arm holding the microphone just next to his mouth after he slipped it on.
The fellow who’s name Alex still did not know spoke, rapid and excited Tsla turning into perfectly understandable, if not a bit digitized, English. “Does it still work? If it does not we may have to rely on less expeditious methods of translation.”
“Yeah, I would say it does.” He hadn’t done it in awhile, but he cleaned up his speech to avoid contractions. This thing was old, it probably wouldn’t handle them as well as a modern translator. In turn, Alex’s reply was broadcast in Tsla from a small speaker on top of the box. “And uh, who are you?”
“Dena Amara, Administrator of Xenotechnology Resource Integration. At your service.” He positively beamed, grinning from ear to ear. “This is one of the translators from the first formal meeting of our races, I could not be more happy to see it still works.”
The translator did little to convey his visually obvious enthusiasm, but Alex was picking up on that. “Glad to meet you. Have you been made aware of the situation?” It took him a second to process that the Xeno in Amara’s statement meant alien to them, not to him. Explained all the Human stuff, but not how he’d gotten ahold of it.
“Only what the Empress has told me. I suspect there is more?” He said, silver fur glittering in the bright overhead light as he leaned in towards Alex. Dena was, based on how much his fur color had changed, much older than Eleya. Probably older than the Colonel, as well.
Alex launched into a rehash of the explanation he’d given Eleya when they arrived. The Administrator nodded along, and Carbon verified the translation was accurate to what he’d said before.
“That is an interesting chain of events. I am not sure about how much help we could offer.” Amara picked through his words carefully. He had his gaze directed towards Eleya the entire time, not wanting to overstep what he was actually allowed to talk about.
The Empress had spent this entire exchange leaning back in her chair, one arm crossed over her lap, still holding the champagne flute in the other. About half done with her drink so far, she took another sip before giving him a little nod. “Do not feel restrained, Administrator. He is seen and trusted, and in turn he trusts us.”
Amara grinned again, excitement back in his gray eyes as he looked at Alex. “As that is cleared up, I believe we can be of some help. The scans of your hardware have been instrumental in accelerating the development of our own machine-brain interfaces. It is fortunate that we have begun work on an implantation suite already. It is not prepared for an actual surgery, but one of the arms has been set up with a PIN driver already - more than enough to take a look at your diagnostics.”
The industrious nature of the Tsla’o had consistently impressed Alex so far - it’d been a couple of days since they had scanned him, and they were already setting up a surgical suite. Getting the hardware setup was easy enough from a scan, but the software side would be more onerous, no doubt. They might have been able to pull some of it from operational RAM, but likely not the whole operating system thanks to encryption. “Keyed PIN?”
“Keyed?” He asked, eyes searching as he tried to figure out what Alex meant. “We had noticed that the access points associated with your internal implant had randomized, recessed contacts. They are intentionally scrambled?”
The Physical Interface Needle was the only way to gain access to the implants, without popping his skull open. It was a tiny little needle, a couple of centimeters long and if his memory served, a whopping 30 gauge. Almost impossible for even the most steady living hand to install, and that was just the plain version. “Yeah, the keyed variants have subsections that need to be rotated into place after the zero pin makes contact. Standard on Amps, but not the Whisper or any of the wireless points.”
“Oh! We have been wondering about that. So, we do not have a Keyed PIN yet, but I believe we should be able to fabricate them with this information. While that is underway, we could begin diagnostics on your other systems we do have PIN’s for.”
“You’ll need a driver that can actuate the keyed sections, as well.” Alex really didn’t want to do this. He wanted to just... He wanted to go home, but a glance over at a surprisingly nervous looking Carbon reminded him that she already felt like an integral part of what home meant to him now, marriage or not. “Maybe you could help them with that while they sort out some of the other systems? I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have working on things that are going to be poking around near my brain.”
“I could, yes.” She gave him a resolute nod, a bit of direction getting those nerves cleared up a little already.
“Alright, great.” He smiled, for her alone, before turning his attention to the jacket bundle. He unfolded it, the machine sitting inert within. “Do we have someone who can take a look at my external? Would be nice to have it back, if it’s not part of the problem.”
“Of course, dear nephew.” Eleya’s reply came first, as she gestured for one of her Guard to retrieve it. The vague form walked over and folded it back up, the entire package disappearing when lifted off the table. “It was given a quick scan at dinner the other night and came back clean, but I will turn my intelligence apparatus loose upon it this time.”
Alex was sure he was never going to get used to cloaked people doing things around him. Or being related to someone who could order an intelligence agency to do their bidding, for that matter. “Thank you. Shall we get this show on the- should we get started?”
Everyone else agreed. Eleya downed the rest of her Mimosa and left with her Guard. Alex did the same with his coffee, then Amara escorted them over to the surgical suite.
“He says he wants it to be clear that this is still early in the conversion of this lab room into a surgical facility.” Carbon translated for Alex again, the 60 year old translator unable to run without the cable sitting on a power-enabled surface, and thus useless on the trip over.
“What’s that supposed to-” The doors opened and the room inside was alive with activity. The far wall was covered with racks of servers, and U shaped ring of workstations set up around the center of the room, nearly all of them currently occupied. Amara gestured for them to follow and lead them around to the open end.
It was a surgical bed in the most strict sense of the term. Literally just a flat surface with some padding on top, and a padded hole to rest your face in at the far end. Not so much as a sheet or surgical drape present. Above it they had bolted a half-dozen robotic surgical arms to the ceiling, with an admittedly impressive looking sensor array centered above where the head would go.
“It’s like something you’d put in a haunted house. All it’s missing is the pools of blood and a guy with a chainsaw.” He was pretty sure that he spoke low enough that only Carbon, standing immediately next to him, could hear.
Administrator Amara was still jazzed about this entire endeavor. His smile was just a little bit too wide to be charismatic, but it was very eager. He said something Alex didn’t recognize any of.
Carbon exhaled through her teeth, eyebrows raised as she glanced over to Alex. “He asked you to take your shirt off and lay face down on the table.”