“Emergent Protocols… On-On-On…Online. Security Personnel Protocol Engaged. Primary Security Detachment activating… failed. Cause… Unknown. Secondary Security Detachment activated… failed. Cause…*&@$*%*^&@#. Tertiary Security Detachment activating… failed. Cause… Cryo-Lab not connected to Ship.Net.” The cold voice went on.
A woman’s soft voice cut through the series of failures, she had heard the cycling alerts before, “Terminal Off-Line Activation Code: Tribe 42-Alpha-four.” A soft beep echoed through the small room in response.
The voice over the speakers perked up, “Attempt FailSafe Procedure: ‘Shattered Sentient’ Emergent Code: Alpha-four-six-two-two-Theta-1.” At the end of these words the Terminal against the wall lit up and lines of checks and tests scrolled over its screen.
The room sat in near complete silence as the Terminal worked. It took some time letting out occasional beeps and series of 8-bit sounds. The room looked semi-abandoned. It contained a door and across from it was some sort of Pod structure resting halfway into the wall. A large locker was against the wall to the right of the door. To the left of the door was a Terminal screen with lime green text running across it. The slightly-protruding speakers in the corners on either side of the door provided the only sound, currently a faint buzz of static.
An unknown amount of time later the Terminal finished scrolling obscure text and output:
Remote Activation Code = True
FailSafe Procedure… Possible.
Running check…
Ship.net… Unable to Connect…
Local Control Engaged.
Emergency Local Terminal AI Flash... Installed.
FailSafe Check Finished: Procedure… Activated.
[https://i.postimg.cc/LXzpsb2M/Screen-Shot-2022-10-10-at-7-48-24-PM.png]
The Pod whirled to life.
----------------------------------------
Sometime later, a man wearing a perfectly fitting pair of overalls dropped out of the Pod in the back of the room. He fell onto his face, seemingly unconscious.
When he woke, the first thing he noticed was the scratchiness of the “carpet” below him. He opened his eyes slowly and tested his fingers, both hands responded. Before him was a metallic gray carpet. He could faintly hear something over the speakers but it was difficult for him to make out. He pushed himself up to his hands and knees as he looked around and took deep breaths, in-and-out, to center himself.
“Where am I?” He surprised himself with his own voice, unfamilliar.
Faintly coming through the ceiling he swore he heard someone, “Hello? Hello! Hello? Please answer.”
“Hello? I can barely hear you, who is this?”
The voice pitched higher bringing along with it an ear-piercing whine of a failing speaker. He flinched when he heard this, both annoyed and relieved. It seemed the voice on the other side shared similar feelings when he heard the voice start again with a sigh. He wasn’t sure if it was from relief or annoyance.
“Julia. I’m part of the Bridge. You just woke up out of cryo. We… We’ve had some problems on board and need you to activate.”
“Ummm,” he seemed to search for something, looking around the room. The room was about 10 feet by 10 feet and lit by an acidic-green orb halfway poking out in the center of the ceiling. There was a door with a single diagonal window that stretched from the top right to halfway down to the center of the door. He took in the metal cabinet to his left with a small keypad on its front and the computer screen slowly flickering to his right. Behind him, he saw what he supposed was the CryoTube, old and complicated machinery spidered across the front of it with a small, clear panel where for a second he imagined his face to be.
Suddenly aware that he hadn’t responded yet, “So, I’m not sure what you mean by ‘activate’. I’m not sure what I’m doing here. How did I get here? I don’t, I can't. Remember.” He didn’t really remember anything he clarified in his mind.
He continued the train of thought, he knew he was on a ship, how did he know that? He came from Earth, he thought? He didn't know where he was nor did he remember anything specific about 'Earth'.
Where was he from? He glanced at the Pod behind him, well maybe he could answer that one.
“You are on the Human Spirit’s Voyage 33, you are Security Personnel who was activated from Cryo just a little while ago. We… have had a problem, well more than that, a series of cascading problems on our ship and are currently floating blind. We needed help a long time ago but the Security Protocols were activated during a mutiny. I remotely activated the Terminal AI of your room. We got lucky that your room had a Terminal AI, Cryo... most Cryo rooms don’t. I managed to activate a few others but have lost contact with them. What’s your name?”
That made sense he guessed. The voice seemed nice, beyond the static and squealing, but it was a lot of information for him to process right after waking up. He figured she had probably been alone for a while.
My name? he thought, “I am. My name is… I’m." He stopped. "To be honest, I’m not sure.”
He started patting his sides and over his uniform for some reason he couldn’t quite place. He looked down at himself. When had be put this on? He didn’t remember doing that. Odd.
He awkwardly tried to read the tag sewn upside-down into his left breast. He then thought better and awkwardly tried to flip around the tag itself. Before he was able to read, “his name” he guessed, he noticed he was wearing a gray-blue jumpsuit. It was a long-sleeved, single-piece, with pockets on the sides of both hips, a sewn-in heavy-duty belt, and 2 very small, nearly ornamental pockets on both the right and left side of the chest.
So he knew what a jumpsuit was, he knew that he was Human, just as he knew there were other beings that weren’t “Human,” he knew that the carpet was probably made of metal although he didn’t know how it was so soft or how it formed carpet. He knew that Julia was talking to him over an intercom that was probably very far from where he was. What he didn’t know was his name, where he was before this, or anything about his life. He knew what a book was but he couldn’t ever remember actually reading one of them or even seeing one of them.
----------------------------------------
“It says my name is… Security Personnel EP:3? Ah, I don’t think that’s my name.”
He boldly continued anyway, “So it’s Julia right? What’s going on? Am I stuck in here?”
Her voice was noticeably quieter, “I don’t have much time left…”
What?? Is he just going to die, trapped in here? He felt the panic and anxiety start to creep tight up his chest in a hot wave. He had no idea how to help her either, he'd rather do something than nothing if he had the choice.
“…to talk.”
Oh thank God, he started to sigh in relief as the speakers squealed and popped, a wet banging sound like a giant sack of flesh slapping against a wall came across the speaker. It mixed terribly with the static. His sigh stopped halfway and caught in his throat as a language he had never heard before was faintly picked up.
His panic was only slightly mitigated when he realized it was coming through the speakers. Then the panic swiftly rejoined as he thought of Julia on the other side of the speakers, with the sounds. He was worried for her and somewhat selfishly he thought, for himself as well since she seemed like the only person who knew anything about what was going on. For all he knew maybe she was the only person, period.
He didn’t dare make a sound.
As the seconds ticked by, he slowly moved to wipe the sweat off his forehead.
Finally, the sound passed and a subdued voice broke through the squeal-filled silence, “hey, are you still there?”
“What was that?” he tried to keep his voice down.
“I don’t know when Them are going to be back, or worse. Listen it’s all analog up here and guesswork inside the Bridge Core. Them have somehow locked out my Terminal and, therefore, I can’t see what is going on in the rest of the ship. So something, or somethings…” He didn’t miss her drawing out the “s.” “Has happened to the ship and I need your help. I can’t talk for too long and I need to tell you a lot, is that ok?”
“Um yeah, yes, sure fine, whatever you need to say I’m listening.” Had he not been listening? He shook his head, patience.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
He was a bit nervous so he knew his mind was spiraling a bit and in the calm corner of his mind he knew he was only half thinking on what she was now saying, the other half was focused on what the hell that sound had been.
How didn’t he even know his name? Woke up from cryo early? It didn’t seem like it was early. It seemed pretty late if the only person to wake him up had done so remotely, from the Bridge. It seemed to him that some real bad shit had been moving or crawling or whatever for quite a while if “somethings” had happened on here.
“…and that’s why I need you to put your hand on the pad to finish activating the Terminal.”
His head quickly swept back and forth, “Huh? Hand pad? Ok yeah, the terminal, the screen?” He looked over at the terminal, just above waist height, and to its right was the handpad that flashed on to highlight a thin outline of a handprint.
“Were you listening when I just explained?”
“Yes. Definitely yes. It’s just a lot to take in.”
A long but quiet sigh sounded over the intercom.
“Please, it’s important, and it’s Terminal.”
“That’s what I said?…”
“No, you said ‘terminal,’ it’s called a “Terminal.” Ok but that’s not important, please listen. I don’t want you to get hurt, but it’s dangerous on the Ship and I really need your help. There are things I can do if my Terminal was still working but, it isn’t. So I don’t even have the whole picture. The mutiny cut off a lot of important Terminals and I think they may have fried the Ship SI as well but I can’t be sure. It’s all analog connections on my side, I’ve rerouted the speaker system to your part of Cryo and voice-activated your Terminal. You need to register as a Security Personnel to be able to access areas of the ship as well as Allocation. You heard what I said about us needing to decelerate and enter a proper orbit to land right?”
“Yes, remind me how much time we have.”
“Approximately 6 months. There seems to be something speeding us up as the internal compensators haven’t been compensating for what, I’ve roughly calculated, as the last couple of hundred years, our speed is entirely too fast. You should notice the increased gravity.
"Once you register you should have some help from the Local Terminal AI. It’s a new instance of the Terminal AI, and it’s not connected to the wider Ship.Net. It should have basic knowledge as well as access to resources that it can find in any accessible storage compartments or anything it can salvage but it won’t know much about present conditions on the rest of the Ship. I would try to find and activate other Security Personnel I’ve activated if you can find any. It’s not only the mutineers out there, watch out for Them.”
Hundreds of years? Wait, who’s Them?
----------------------------------------
“! Jul-” the static popped and whistled then left the room quiet as a grave, “ia….”
His eyes turned towards the hand pad. On the pad, there was a solid, green outline of a hand that calmly and rhythmically pulsed in a light, but not bright, forest green.
She’s been measuring the gravity for over hundreds of years? Or was it hundred? How long have I been in Cryo? The gravity seemed fine for him as well, comfortable. Even though he was committed to not thinking of things as “strange” for the time being, this was all quickly approaching that conclusion.
He looked around the room and didn’t see anything else. He walked over to the door and checked it, it wouldn’t budge but outside the window he could see a narrow hallway that was lit by a harsh blue, low-intensity light placed just outside of his sightline. The blue, ozone glow was somehow able to cast shadows in the empty hallway making his peripheral vision itch.
Off the edge to the right, pressing his face against the window he could faintly make out what he was decreasingly sure was a faint acidic green light similar to the one in his room. The more he looked the less he could see it.
The locker was closed and the keys' backlight turned red after he punched in a random series of buttons. He turned toward the ter... Terminal, he mentally corrected himself. He resettled in his mind that he should find out what counted as "normal" before thinking of anything as "strange."
“Nowhere but forward… I guess,” he grumbled as he walked back to the right side of the chamber and placed his right hand in the green highlighted handprint.
Analyzing...
Analyzing...
Analyzing...
[https://i.postimg.cc/PNnttvC2/Screen-Shot-2022-10-10-at-9-14-49-PM.png]
It took a while. And then a while after that. He didn’t have anything else to do at the moment but scan his hand and so he waited there calmly.
Even the tide eventually comes in. He started to get impatient.
Analyzing…
Ana!*&#$^…
[https://i.postimg.cc/c47Kvddr/Screen-Shot-2022-10-10-at-9-14-55-PM.png]
He didn’t see any more “analyzings” populate the screen after the glitched one, so he had the thought that maybe the Terminal needed to restart. As he mentally commanded his hand to lift up and off the pad, the action did not follow to its natural conclusion. He added his left hand’s strength and grabbed his wrist and started to pull it back. Nothing, not a millimeter.
“What the hell?!” he really started yanking his hand and, as he considered bringing his foot up to get better leverage, the screen refreshed.
Security Personnel Detected.
Granting Security Tier !A Authori... Augmentation Not Detected.
Non-Standard Material Detected.
Syntho-Organic Material Required for Authorization:
Choose Delivery Method.
[https://i.postimg.cc/6qzDDDQs/Screen-Shot-2022-09-01-at-8-55-23-PM.png]
Above and slightly to the left of the Terminal screen and his trapped hand two transparent windows appeared. Behind the larger one was a massive container that had at least a gallon and a half of a thick-looking gray liquid that possessed an internal light that shifted from green to blue to red.
Below it, horizontally in a much more narrow alcove window was a needle that would still look painful if he was twice his current size. Attached to the back of the needle was a mechanism he couldn't figure out and a transparent sack attached to that the size of his fist. It contained a liquid metal that was also glowing with faint light. As he looked over both of them, neither looked particularly appealing.
In the moment he verbalized his thinking to see if it would help it sort it better in his mind.
“How bad can the liquid taste?”
Suddenly he saw the P1 phosphor text start to scroll across.
Reports Amongst Humans vary. Many Report that Consuming it Colder than room temperature is Preferred.
“So it’s cold then?” He asked as he pressed his left hand against the glass to try and tell.
Syntho-Organic Refrigeration Status… …Offline.
It looked like a lot of liquid if he was being honest. The needle looked bad, really bad, but he’d probably have time for a hundred of those if he had started drinking the liquid yesterday.
“Do I have to use the needle on myself?”
Auto-Administer…
…is… Functional.
“Ok, I choose the need…”
Before he could even finish the word, the needle shot out on an retractable metal arm and stabbed through the side of his neck. The unknown mechanism split in two and wrapped two metal clasps around the other side of his head. It locked his head and neck in place relative to the needle.
It felt odd that his first thought was that he was pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to stab in through one side of his neck to reach the other. He was too shocked to do anything, especially with his hand still trapped on the pad. His left hand eventually got the signals from his brain and he grabbed and tried to do something, anything, to the needle buried in his neck.
After too long the needle finally pulled itself out with a wet suck and retracted back into the wall. He tried to gasp as he wrapped his left hand around the entry point, he saw the pulsing red and bright through his fingers.
This piece of crap is going to kill me before I can even get out of this room? Bullshit.
Subject Scanning… Self-Inflicted Injury Detected: Blood Volume 95% and Falling… Accelerate Augmentation Induction Process…
As his blood pulsed through his fingers, now slower and thicker, his vision narrowed towards a pinprick and he felt his mind speed up. Quick enough to catch the fact that “self-inflicted” did, in fact, conflict with the fact that the Terminal was the one who stabbed him in the neck.
Regardless of any realization he wasn’t in a position to argue with the text scrolling across the screen as he caught a building whine at the edge of his hearing. Nor did he get the opportunity for further debate as he noticed, in a half-second stretched to its utmost extreme, visible quantities of electricity rolling from the handpad and up his right arm.
----------------------------------------
He became aware of his surroundings faster the second time around. He put his hands to his neck to check the wound but the action was half unfinished as he was stopped short by a sudden pulling sensation on his right hand.
Oh no, his hand was still trapped. he felt ter… well actually, he felt pretty good considering his neck was stabbed almost completely through by a giant needle followed by some extreme levels of current ripping through his arm. He reached up to pat his neck with his left hand expecting a nasty wound but there was nothing, no holes, no gushing blood, just his neck.
While he checked himself over the screen softly flashed.
Input Name:
[https://i.postimg.cc/DZ24hZWr/Screen-Shot-2022-10-10-at-9-35-21-PM.png]
Talk about kicking a man when he's down.
As he looked at the line next to the text he took a chance and asked the Terminal, it seemed like it responded well before.
“Show possible, no. Show potential names.”
*Well it went well minus the near decapitation, he thought as he looked down at the fountain of blood still wetting the left of his uniform.
Name Values Available:
Aaron, Adam, Andrew, Anthony…
[https://i.postimg.cc/XYzsXRKB/Screen-Shot-2022-10-10-at-9-35-56-PM.png]
He reached out, almost instinctively, and scrolled his finger down the list in increasingly fast flicks. Eventually, as the names scrolled by in a blur he pressed his finger down.
Name Inputted. Welcome Jack.
[https://i.postimg.cc/GpTqDXz7/Screen-Shot-2022-10-10-at-9-36-29-PM.png]
He shrugged, good enough, it felt more or less right with him.
Characteriszation and Allocation Menu.
Senior Security Personnel, Review and Distribute Allo#!*&$^
Error: Augmentation Tier Insufficient.
Scanning...
Base Allocation Points Available. Additional Allocation Points Unavailable.
Security Personnel Allocation Unavailable at Current Rating.
Rate E5 for First Allocation.
Please Distribute Current Allocation Points.
[https://i.postimg.cc/CKD9FZKs/Screen-Shot-2022-09-01-at-8-57-47-PM.png]
His eyes, starting to glaze at the green flickering nonsense, widened as to what he saw following.