“You ready?” He asked. At s,ome point she had quit crying and had used the rest of his gauze to cover the bottom half of her face.
She looked shaky, not good. “How. How am I supposed to find the rest of my family?” Her voice had a definite lisp. Probably because she doesn’t have any lips. He tried to remember what her lips had looked like, way back, before the Medjel even.
He pushed the unhelpful thought aside and moved to stand and barely managed to hold his feet as his chair crumbled underneath him.
“How old is this place?”
“Old, I don’t know how old, no one does but, OLD.”
It was still weird to hear her speak, he had been growing used to talking to himself and then after that, used to asking rhetorical questions to himself since answering anything conceptual with hand signs worked poorly.
“What?” He hadn’t realized he had been staring at her.
She continued, “Why are you smiling like that? It’s creepy.”
“Hey, it’s not creepy! and I’m not,” he brought his hand up, “smiling.”
There was a pause after that, not a comfortable one. He needed this to go better, “Well it’s just, uhhh, nice to hear someone else’s voice,” his eyes dropped to his still brain-splattered hands, “well someone whose brain I wasn’t inside of.”
“No offense,” he added quickly afterward.
He didn’t truly care but he’d try and be sympathetic. It was much better to have her than not. Low EQ didn’t mean no EQ, it just meant it took a lot more active concentration.
“So hearts and chest cavities are fine.”
“Well that’s different, it’s easier to do that stuff when it’s cold.”
She had been trying to gently pry but had little idea what that meant. She blamed her own low IQ Allo.
“Look ok l don’t want to fight, at least you can talk now.”
“This isn’t quite what I had in mind when you said we would find a solution.”
“Yeah, me neither, but at least I don’t have to suffer through your hand signs anymore.”
In response she flashed him the only hand sign he was capable of making with his right hand.
“I want to ask you questions but I don’t think we can stay here.” He reached out towards her, a Magno-Tube in his hand. He had found them by the fistful in her old homestead. Plenty had been shattered open, presumably those that had contained Nano-Traces. Even so, he managed to stuff his pockets full of the things.
She was looking at his outstretched hand equally horrified and unimpressed. He really wasn’t good at this and he wasn’t much interested in getting better at it.
“Well better than the crabs getting to him,” his left eye flashed a twitch as glanced down at the stomped brain-crab. At the mention of crabs, he finally noticed her face twist in hate. Good, it seemed like she hated the crabs as much as him. Considering her dad was just brain-crabbed he thought it was unlikely she was a crab double-agent. Unless it was some matter of elaborate ploy… No, that’s stupid. Or would it be stupid to not consider that possibility? He shook his head, that way lay madness. She had been solid so far, if she was a crab agent then he was a crab agent and he would deal with it at the time. He needed to have some trust in her.
More thoughts seemed to seep through his newly formed block and bounce in and out through his head; he ignored them.
She snatched the Magno-Tube and he backed off giving her some space. “Do you know how to find any other people?”
She was staring down at her dad, tears slowly leaking, “yes but it would take a lot of time, especially since you know nothing.”
Yuma seemed talkative and, for the first time, he felt like he might be able to take action instead of just responding to problems. He found out both more and less than he hoped.
The crabs weren’t always like this, they have always had some capacity to swarm but their attacks have become more targeted. According to her they had always been a problem, ever since she had come out of Cryo when she was young. They were opportunistic hunters. The only time they would swarm would be when the smaller groups of scout crabs picked up a scent and called for a swarm.
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It was honestly more than he wanted to know about past crab behavior, he wanted to know about now-crab behavior and also future-crab behavior. He didn’t want her to shut down so he let her keep talking. There were only occasional crabs scouts to destroy. After taking out the scouts they would always keep moving to avoid the swarm retaliation.
That was just their standard behavior, it always had been. Sometimes the crabs would seem to get a little more clever. This had been going on for as long as she had ever heard of. The real point of interest regarded the increased “Random Hordes,” her words. These are what had been most visibly increasing for them. The crabs were known to be dangerous but their hunting was always seen as opportunistic. Unless it was over a newly discovered Cryo-Bay, those were apparently giant free-for-alls.
She also recounted stories she'd heard of the SI cutting deals with Humans. With limited resources in, what she called, the “Labs,” groups rarely worked together, the occasional Cryo-Bay raid notwithstanding. Some groups even resorted to cannibalism. His subsequent joke about her being a cannibal did not land.
Allegedly, he was hesitant to believe her, you could also eat crab but you had to cook it all the way through, she wouldn’t elaborate on what happened if you didn’t do that. It also wasn’t the first time she had been chased by a crab swarm although the man-crab was a new concerning development as well.
With her home having been raided and cleaned out, the greater number of crabs, AND the individually more dangerous man-crabs; no, it’d be too risky to try and set up camp somewhere and farm the crabs for Nano. He needed to solve this thing now and get out of here. He needed to know what was going on in the rest of the ship. He had originally thought he was moving along at a good pace but who knew what other hells he'd encounter aboard this ship? Better to solve each problem as fast as possible, otherwise he might find himself out of time halfway there.
He stood in silence waiting for her to finish her goodbye and continued to process what he had learned. His eyes drifted around the room and caught onto something next to the door, it was slightly protruding from the ceiling.
“What about those? Can we use the intercom system to send a message out?”
She looked startled at the thought, she looked to him then to the speaker on the ceiling.
“We can… but only once per speaker and we would need to hack into the lines themselves.”
“Why only once?”
“The Cryo-Core SI is 'NonStandard' as your AI likes to say. It can sense the aux lines being used anywhere in the Labs. You can get a message out once but after a bit it will completely fry the line.”
She would lead him to where a mass of this section’s lines were located.
He left the room ahead of her, guard raised. She would either use the Magno-Tube or not; the thought of the crabs growing stronger, he couldn’t afford to let himself get trapped in here. She followed out shortly after. He nodded to her and she took off. It was definitely not as easy a job as their first journey to her home. This was further, much further. Sometime into their journey he noticed that she had been flagging for a while. He called for a break. They crouched, back to back inside one of the walls they had been traveling through.
She was instantly asleep. He had no way of knowing and no way of telling the passage of time in the Labs. He was about to ask her but then rethought it when he heard soft snoring. It was honestly a bit surprising that she was able to go this long without rest with her Endurance and Energy penalties then dismissed the entire concern as he remembered her Electric Constitution and her Energy being based on her heart’s charge, dexterity, and agility instead of Endurance. It was tough for him to fall asleep here, his own voice echoed in his mind, analyzing, raging, and thinking coming to the forefront as he closed his eyes. He couldn’t sleep but he could think.
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She had woken up, and woken him up, by gasping for air and thrashing around until he faintly felt electricity starting to flow through her body. So that would be tough for her, sleeping meant not moving, no moving meant no heart charge, no heart charge… well that was an easy conclusion.
As they moved through the walls and through different halls and service corridors they had been pausing so she could tap into several lines with her custom handpad she somehow had in her hands. He still hadn’t managed to catch where she stored it.
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Nothing again. Dammit. The lines that were fallback positions for her family were either already fried or empty of any regrouping allies. She had aligned her and Jack’s route to pass by the corresponding meeting spots. She knew that Jack wasn’t going to follow her around by the nose forever.
“Hey, is it me or do all of these go, more or less, in the same direction?” Yes he was right, but there was no way to access that door, no one had ever been able to access that door. It needed direct SI contact to unseal it. She paused and looked at him then at his chest, that's right, he had an AI that, while strange, hadn’t gone crazy. “Yes they go to a repeater control room. Follow me.”
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Finally some progress. They managed to stumble across a group of 7 or so crabs going at a Human corpse. Jack kept his cool as he and Yuma swept cleanly through the group. To think he had struggled so hard against one of them. He sliced off a bit of the least disgusting part of the meat, looking to Yuma. She grimly nodded and then flash-fried the chunk in his hands with her zapp. He blanched at the look of it, if his stomach hadn’t been about to collapse in on itself he would have just skipped the entire process. He managed to eat it but refused to bring himself to taste it.
Something he was excited about thought was his future Level Up, he had 8 full, or nearly so, Magno-Tubes at this point and another 5 or so to fill. He grinned as they continued down the hallways and corridors.
He was expecting a fight, there was none. It was quiet. He strained his Senses and got nothing, then Yuma did the same and got nothing as well. The room was simple. Across from the door there was a panel that spanned across the width of the room. Another valiant effort of a chair was parked in front of it. The room felt like it had been frozen in time. She instantly went to the panel and after removing a panel underneath it started to rummage around. Jack walked up and looked for a place to put his Local AI disk. He remembered what happened to the computer that wasn’t a Terminal. Either she would burn the connection by searching for her family and if no one was able to respond he would still be at square one but now without the comm system. He found a disk insert somewhat larger than his own disk and plugged it in anyways.
The single screen in front of the chair started to scroll.