“So, Sulfurflame.” The intrepid certainly-not-a-jumpchain protagonist studied what he was—correctly, as it happened—assuming to be the bridge computer of a space station’s Personnel officer. “Presumably named after some kind of underwater vent, I heard that’s a thing. And also there’s a bunch of art here that’s, you know, that… and with explosions? Well, whatever, where was I? Right! Alright, Sulfurflame. Let’s see what’s up with your terminal.”
Nathan ignored as irrelevant, which it certainly was, the vast range of information he had never learned about the hydrothermal vents which some have hypothesized are the original source of life, of abiogenesis. The supercriticality of their emissions would certainly have been of intellectual interest to him—but he had never been exposed to that particular fact, nor would he have wished to dwell on it in moments of practical import.
Spacesuit-gloved hands on the sides of the three-cube stack of metal that was the object of his inspection, he waited patiently while his PROTEAN PRIMORDIAL LIVING SOULBOUND GLORIOUS ETERNAL ULTIMATE GROWTH WEAPON, SHIELD, ARMOR, AND UTILITY CHEAT ITEM extended a probe and tickled at the edges of a tentacle groove. The probe slipped into the groove in question, questing for something—though what, Nathan was not aware of—and wiggled back and forth.
Then it darted forwards, pressing itself against the metal, hugging it as it extended farther and widened to fill the space available.
There was an electric shock, an actinic flash and its associated crackling snap, and then a moment of silence.
“Well?”
Saucer retracted the probe from Nathan’s left glove. The movement was almost sheepish, which was very well deserved, since the computer was a complete ruin, a total write-off. It was in three parts, which would have been perfectly reasonable if the split between the three parts hadn’t been completely unrelated to the topography of the three cubes and the various grooves. Instead, one piece was a small diagonal slice and the other was a jagged twisted chunk that looked like someone had ripped off an irregular third of the terminal.
Without any message or visual indicator, a new probe extruded and began to consume the fragments and the bits and bobs which were floating about. Each of them blinked blue as Saucer went to work cleaning up its mess, with an appropriate emotional affect to its movements that might or might not have been entirely put upon.
“So, did you learn enough to make sure that won’t happen again?”
Nathan’s HUD developed a blinking green icon over three of the other computer stations and a yellow icon over two others. The Caretaker’s station remained unlit, and Nathan nodded firmly at that.
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“Yeah. Okay, we’ll start with… let’s see. The ones you tagged as green are… Sensors, Comms, Logistics. Let’s start with Sensors. I mean, everything other than hopefully Personnel is mission-critical, and I’m trying to live for at least a day here, but if anything is actually around in the current solar system it’s not like we’re going to be able to do anything about it when it shows up. And why would anything be waiting here? Would it be, like, the ancient sleeping terror that killed everyone on the station, and that’s why it’s abandoned in the first place, and whatever I start doing wakes it up? That would be absurd.”
As he talked, he drifted his careful way, always a hand on the bars keeping him in contact with the ship, towards the Sensors station. As he approached it, the name and rank popped up onto his HUD as though he had a targeting bar in a reasonably typical Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game of the early 21st century, perhaps a couple decades into it. And it read as follows, in a yellow that would have indicated in many of those that it was interactable and not something which he was expected to pick a fight with:
Seeker in the Shadows—Eightfriend Vindarre—Sensors
“I have no idea what Vindarre means,” he said to himself as he traveled. “I mean, Vindarre. Darre. Dark? Seeker in the Shadows? That can’t be it and I’m done guessing. Does Seeker in the Shadows even mean anything other than the obvious, with the Shadows being space and the act of Seeking being using the sensors and whatnot? Who even knows.”
His logic with regards to Vindarre’s name was precisely as nonsensical as he had rapidly decided it was, but his speculation with regards to the purpose of the rank was almost entirely correct. There was, there had been, a further Shadows which the Seeker operated on and in, but it did not exist, at least in the local space which the station was floating in—and whether it could be created again, whether the subspace network could be re-instantiated in that Solar System, he would never wind up finding out.
“Alright, Saucer. Over to you.”
This time, instead of a thin wire for a probe, it was a set of… tentacles. They arose out of Nathan’s shoulders, wrists, and knees as he held himself loosely to the duty station, and then slotted into the various grooves.
There was a hum and then a different kind of hum, followed by a pause and a third, intermittent, somewhat halting kind of him. That paused as well, and the first and second hums resumed in a kind of subtle, very soft harmony.
The screen flickered on.
He hadn’t been sure that it was a screen, but it had made too much sense for it to be otherwise. The people who had lived on the space station, octopus-shaped though they might have been, were very obviously strongly inclined towards visual stimuli, based on the extensive murals that made up the diorama and the flawless integration of the entire duty stations themselves into that artwork. They had different optical ranges, but it was still visuals.
So when the screen booted up, his primary thought was not surprise—it was anticipation.
And the first screen that loaded was simple and deeply fulfilling to that anticipation.
System Check Commencing. Do not turn off computer.