Even from this distance Greg could see that Deimos wasn’t among the dozen people milling around the base of the amphitheater. Hopefully he was okay, and the punch to the side of his head didn’t do permanent damage. Greg decided to walk around the top of the amphitheater, looking into the handful of doors still open. He had made his way around three quarters of the loop when he saw the door next to his original room open. He picked up his pace, jogging to the entrance.
Deimos lay limp in the center of the room, eyes blank and staring at the ceiling. Greg rushed to his side, but when he was halfway there something slammed into him from the front. Disoriented, he slowed to a walk. Greg pushed his hands out in front of him, but the pressure didn’t relent. Something softly slapped his face, and Greg’s eyes grew wide. He closed his eyes and let his digital awareness wash over him. Before him stood a translucent grinning Deimos. A connection request was delivered as he began speaking.
“Look at this Greg! We shall be unbound from mortal chains in no time.” Greg moved his translucent hands to rest on Deimos’ shoulders. His hands tingled at the contact, as a stream of data passed back and forth between them. Much of it was superficial, since all the interesting data was locked behind permissions.
“Deimos! Are you okay? How’s your head feel? That priest really beat the shit out of you.” Greg’s physical eyes were drawn to Deimos’ body, which continued to stare unmoving.
“Tretch repaired all the damage my brain received from blunt force trauma. He replaced my damaged grey matter with a substitute, leaving my brain 6% inorganic material. In order to integrate that section with my inoculation port, he also gave me some localized broadcast capability.”
“Is Tretch…” Greg glanced up at the motionless tentacles hanging above them. “… Him?”
“Yep. Tretch! Come say hello!” Deimos’ code construct shot another communications request towards Tretch and Greg. Greg accepted, and soon he was notified that the user Tretch joined as well.
“Hey there brudda. How’s it hanging?” All the tentacles in the room wiggled. “Get it, hanging?”
Greg chuckled, more from anxiety than humor. “Hi Tretch. It was nice of you to fix Deimos up. I’m surprised you went out of your way considering…” Greg looked for a way to finish his sentence that didn’t use the word kidnapping. “How we met.”
“Oh, that was no trouble. And technically, it helped me out too. I get graded on the quantity and efficacy of those I operate on, and then rewarded accordingly. Your brain-damaged friend over there would have brought down my average, and we can’t have that!”
“So, why don’t you just upgrade everyone that passes through your doors as much as you can?”
"Well TECHNICALLY I have to get you to spec, not above it. I could lobotomize you and still get full credit, so long as you could still pass some intellectual musters. Well, not you then, but probably some of your smarter compatriots. Speaking of, the transport ship of initiates just set down outside. Scooch your asses, I'll be needing this bay."
Greg stooped down and helped Deimos to his feet. Deimos sent an odd request to Greg as he staggered behind him. [Transpositional Slaving: Chain User Deimos' virtual projection's position to User Greg's virtual projection position] He assented mentally, and Deimos' virtual form began following Greg’s own, aping his movements and replicating his position in space, albeit delayed by several seconds.
"Want to go say hi to the other new deacons?" Greg asked.
"Hell no. I will not spend all day talking about how glorious this is, when I can just be glorious!" Deimos said.
Greg and Deimos took a seat near the middle of the amplitheather and dove into the digital world. It felt like floating in an ocean of inputs, where distance between two objects was dictated by the flow rate of data, not physical separation. The cyberspace hung diffusely in the air of the temple, while heavy throughput cables ran like capillaries through the walls, floor, and seats. Deimos projected his consciousness away from this body and sank into the cables in the floor. His presence shrunk in size as he occupied the much more information-dense material, while his senses bloomed outward. He popped back up after a minute, ballooning back up as he filled the much sparser cyberspace diaphora, and sent a communications link to Greg. A tendril snapped in place between the two as Greg accepted his request.
“Come friend, explore this with me. You can feel… Everything.” Deimos disappeared back into the floor.
Greg bookmarked the BIOS page he was perusing and followed Deimos into the floor. He had no broadcasting hardware, so had to leave a tendril of himself connected through the cyberspace to his implant. Even though he had to store more and more of himself into the tendril as he moved away, he should be able to project his virtual self a couple hundred feet through the wireless cyberspace and several miles through a cabled connection. As he shrunk into the cable next to Deimos, the ocean engulfed him.
“Woah.” Greg rode the stimulus for several seconds, letting it wash over him. He pressed backwards into Deimos, pummeled backwards by information flow. Deimos flowed around Greg, cutting off all external stimulus as he did so.
“Yeah, it took me for a ride too. Here, copy my packet filters. It will help.”
A shiver went up Greg’s spine as he felt Deimos’ words from the communication link be echoed by the vibration of Deimos’ consciousness all around him. It felt intimate, even more so than his yoga routine. Greg shook himself, then froze as his consciousness emulated the gesture, vibrating against Deimos.
Greg copied Deimos’s filter settings into his own. It looked like it filtered everything but header information. “Thanks, let’s try that again then, yeah?” Greg pushed forward against Deimos’ consciousness, and it folded away, exposing part of his consciousness back into the data stream. It was much less overwhelming this time, the violent hailstorm calmed to a heavy drizzle. He began reading the headers of the data that zipped past and was able to get a sense of the flow of traffic. The vast majority indicated an extraterran origin, and most of them came from the Pantheon. This made sense, since Ouray’s temple was sponsored by that organization. The Pantheon referred to the community of ascended gods living in superstructures inside of Mercury’s orbit. They collaborated loosely on several communal projects, one of which was providing accessible inoculation and communion facilities through temples scattered across the Earth. They also supplied a constant stream of information, covenant offers, and bounties to each communion site, and Greg was looking at all that information. Or rather, he was looking at traces of that information as it flew past.
“Where’s this all going?” Greg said.
“Let’s find out.” Deimos’s consciousness burbled in anticipation.
Greg extruded a series of webhooks and wobbled them at Deimos. “Grab on then. Let’s see where this current washes up at.”
Deimos connected to Greg’s webhooks, also forming his own, until they were tightly locked together and sharing sensory information. “Three, two one… Kowabunga!”
Greg and Deimos simultaneously released their hold on the edges on the cable and were swept downstream by the information torrent. They tumbled end over end, pushed back and forth by the endless stream. Greg’s body link trailed limply behind them while his digital footprint was slowly siphoned away into the connection. Cable branch after branch whipped by.
Behind them, travelling with the flow of data and catching up, they sensed a massive file approach. Packets of all sizes were shunted to the side. Greg braced as it drew near and Deimos let tendrils of himself drag along the edge of the optical fiber, pulling them towards the cable’s worn edge. Despite this, the corner of the priority package still clipped them as it flew past. The edge plowed through Greg’s side, compressing 20% of his state memory to gibberish instantly. Most of the webhooks holding Deimos and Greg together were obliterated on impact and the last few became sluggish under the strain of parsing anomalous data. They pinballed back and forth between the cable walls twice and then tumbled into a small offshoot.
Deimos slowed them down until they were just drifting. He looked at the damage done to Greg and shuddered. Cracks ran through the left half of his consciousness, and several chunks were floating freely altogether. Permanent damage could have been done. A person was their brain, but they were as much the current state of travelling impulses as they were the actual neural configuration. The Inoculation implant allowed that neural state to extend into and explore virtual space, but disruptions to that state while in virtual space had very real implications. Worst case, Greg would simply cease to exist, leaving Greg’s body an empty shell.
“Greg, are you okay?” Deimos’ message sat expiring in the webhook queue as Greg’s virtual consciousness drifted there, unresponsive. Deimos probed the area around Greg’s webhooks and found no resistance; his firewall was completely static. Deimos pierced Greg’s least damaged webhook, located the configuration data, and began replicating dozens of his duplicate webhooks with the same signature. He sifted through all the messages queued for Greg as fast as he could, simply discarding for speed. Once he had processed all but one, he was finally able to diagnose the problem. The message was a simple status update, but the impact had garbled its header’s closing symbol, and Greg’s webhook was clogged waiting for the rest of the message that would never come. A conscious user would have cleared the clog without a second thought, but since Greg was out incapacitated, the webhook hung while idling. Deimos cleared it for him, then sent his message through the now clear channel. “Greg, are you okay?”.
Deimos received a response packet indicating that the message was successfully received, but Greg didn’t respond. He sent a new packet, this one a directive.
[GET: /webhook/E474BA38/58E1/4544
USER-AGENT: Deimos Augustus Sneede
REQUEST: System Status Update]
The directive bounced and a response came immediately. ACCESS DENIED. Deimos snarled internally, braced himself for what he had to do next, then pierced Greg’s firewall again. This time he dug much deeper, skirting around the segments of functioning code when he ran across them and trying to keep the ripples of his intrusion from breaking anything of significance. He read static object states, internal messages frozen in transit, presumably open files frozen in place. He found what he was looking for at the edge of a broken tmp directory. Neighboring logging routines were trying to write to a nonresponsive file structure every couple seconds, and ignored commands were piling up in queue. Importantly, the logging routines were monitoring core processes and had corresponding permissions. Deimos grabbed one of the messages in transit and dissected it, pulling it apart until he found its permissions authentication.
He pulled his consciousness back out slowly, trying not to disturb Greg’s broken consciousness. He sent his previous directive again, this time including the stolen authentication.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
[GET: /webhook/E474BA38/58E1/4544
USER-AGENT: Deimos Augustus Sneede
USER-API-KEY: 90B649F2-70F2-4180-95BC-951F5D832F0D
REQUEST: System Status Update]
The response came back swiftly again, much longer. Deimos read through it until he found the pertinent data.
[…
System: Offline
Storage: Online
Longterm Memory: Offline
Random Access memory: Offline
Storage Stability: 97%
Longterm Memory Stability: 68%
Random Access memory Stability: Not Available
Security Procedures: Partially Offline
Central Processing: Intact
Core Processes: Unresponsive
Peripheral Processes: Partially Intact
…]
Greg’s consciousness state was divided into two halves. The first was stored data. Memories, sensory data, information recall, and encoded instinct were all stored data. In the human brain, this would be stored through differential static charges in neural clusters. When exploring virtual space, the Inoculation device translated this to a file system, with storage being used for long-term data, longterm memory for data intended to be kept for several days, and random access memory for transient data stored for moments. Greg’s storage was still completely intact, the last 3% nothing to worry about. In fact, any of Greg’s systems could reconstitute themselves from anything above about 85%. Human brains evolved to be fault-tolerant, not fault-resistant, and were continuously error correcting. His longterm memory and random access memory scores were more worrying, but Deimos had seen many frozen files as he plumbed Greg’s consciousness, and he was confident that those scores would improve once they were unhung.
Greg’s second half was composed of active processes, his thoughts, problem solving, emotions, and sense of self. Deimos was hoping that the reason Greg’s core processes were unresponsive was a logging issue. If not, Greg would truly be dead. Deimos sent a series of new directives with his elevated permissions.
[Purge All Incoming Queues;
Purge All Outgoing Queues;
Set Available Process To Repair Mode;
Verify Available File CheckSums;
If Messaged_Queues == NULL -> Messaged_Queues = [];
Send Directives 0:6 to All Outgoing Queues not present on Messaged_Queues;
Messaged_Queues = Messaged_Queues + All Outgoing Queues;]
First the directive cleared out all incoming and outgoing messages of Greg’s webhook 4544. Then it switched its attached process to repair mode, triggering a variety of automatic self-check subroutines. It verified all the files in its vicinity; webhook 4544 was furthest away from the impact, so none of its local files were corrupted. It then forwarded those directives to every connected queue it had. Greg’s consciousness began smoothing out as the recursive directive propagated, cleaning out the junk clogging up his system as it went. Some of the cracks pieced themselves together, and Deimos finally saw activity start to light up Greg’s brain from one end to the other.
Greg’s conscious processes booted back up, and his awareness returned. He was immediately flooded with a wave of errors. He dismissed them all and looked around. He was drifting next to Deimos in an unused peripheral cable, attached to him through two webhooks. There was a message for him sitting in the queue.
“Greg, are you okay?”
Greg sent a message in response, “I… Think so. What happened to me?”
…
Greg looked around. He was drifting next to Deimos in an unused peripheral cable, attached to him through two webhooks. Greg looked inward and saw that his random access memory was completely shattered, crushed and jagged pieces floating around inside and around him. FUCK. He reached out to the largest internal piece and pulled it back into place.
…
Greg looked around. He was drifting next to Deimos in an unused peripheral cable, attached to him through two webhooks. There was a message for him sitting in the queue with a file attached.
“You got hit by a file in transit. Don’t know what it was, but just making contact with it really fucked you up. This is what it looked like.”
Greg pulled up the attached file. It was a half-second recording of Deimos’ senses. Greg clicked play. [He pulled himself towards the edge of the cable, desperate to get out of the way of whatever was approaching. It wasn’t enough. The huge structure caught them, crushing the edge of Greg. He made out seven structural shadows embedded behind a wall of indescipherable code, then it was past them.]
…
Greg looked around. He was drifting next to Deimos in an unused peripheral cable, attached to him through two webhooks. Greg looked inward and saw that his random access memory was completely shattered, crushed and jagged pieces floating around inside and around him. Goddammit. A large memory cell block was barely misaligned – He realigned it and integrated it into his directory structure.
…
Greg looked around. He was drifting next to Deimos in an unused peripheral cable, attached to him through two webhooks. Greg looked inward and saw that his random access memory was almost completely shattered, crushed and jagged pieces floating around inside and around him. Tits, man. He reached out to the largest internal piece and pulled it back into place, then integrated it into his directory structure.
…
Greg looked around. He was drifting next to Deimos in an unused peripheral cable, attached to him through two webhooks. There was a message for him sitting in the queue.
“Greg, you there? What’d you think?”
Greg responded, “About what?”
A message came from Deimos almost instantly, with a file attached, “The thing that sideswiped you, brother.”
Greg pulled up the file. It was a single instant of data from Deimos’ senses. It showed a massive active-defense mesh wrapped around seven file structures. It reminded Greg of a spiky echidna storing its eggs in a pouch. The moment captured Greg’s consciousness crumpling impact. “Holy shit, I don’t remember that at all.”
…
Greg looked around. He was drifting next to Deimos in an unused peripheral cable, attached to him through two webhooks. Greg looked inward and saw that his random access memory was mostly shattered, crushed and jagged pieces floating around inside and around him. Holy Shitballs. He scooped up the small memory blocks floating inside him and organized them. He got a message notification from his webhook and dismissed it, deciding to give each memory block an entry in his directory first.
…
…
Greg looked around. He was drifting next to Deimos in an unused peripheral cable, attached to him through two webhooks. Greg looked inward and saw that his random access memory had half of its directory wiped, with four large memory chunks completely disconnected and drifting around him. Donkey cock. He rebuilt the missing directory entries. A message notification came from his webhook, with a second on its heels. He pulled up the messages, as well as a third that he hadn’t remembered muting.
“Greg, you’re having memory issues, I ran some diagnostics while you were out. Let’s make our way back to our bodies. Maybe we can get Tretch to take a look at you.”
“Hello there? Think you can move?”
“Answer me, god dammit.”
Greg responded, “My memory’s fine, it seems like it was mostly broken in place, pretty easy to fix. I still need to grab the pieces that drifted away though. What did this to me?”
“Fine my ass, you keep leaving me on read. We were travelling down a cable, and you got hit by a monstrous file-thing. It knocked us into this tributary. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
“Give me a minute or two, I don’t want to move with these repairs incomplete, my whole being feels fragile and tingly.”
“That’s what you said twenty goddamn minutes ago, and twenty minutes before that. Fine, you got 10 minutes. I’m going to go poke around, but I’ll stay close enough for communication.”
“Than—”
“You’re welcome, again. Now get back to fixing your shit.”
Deimos drifted down the small cable.
…
Greg looked around. He was drifting alone in an unused peripheral cable. Greg looked inward and saw that his random access memory had a minor configuration issue. He corrected it, then ran some internal diagnostics. Everything checked out. Where was he? And why? Greg let his focus drift back through his umbilical. His body still sat motionless, but the amphitheater’s occupants had changed significantly. What was once a small crowd had become a crowd of hundreds of people. More distressing was the empty seat next to him, for Deimos was nowhere to be seen. Greg grabbed his umbilical and yanked, travelling back to his body as fast as he dared.
He shuddered as he reentered his body. Every muscle ached as he moved it. Apparently sitting motionless did a number on him, at least when he did it for… How long had he been sitting anyway? Greg pulled up his internal chronometer. 2:52?!?! It had been three and a half hours since his surgery was completed. Where the hell had the time gone? The last thing he remembered was following Deimos into the latticed cables running through the floor. Greg jumped to his feet and began shoving himself through the crowd, head whipping back and forth as his eyes searched for Deimos’ tall frame. There. Deimos was across the way, talking with six other deacons, all identically clad in grey-black jumpsuits.
Greg ignored the hard stares and muttered words churned up in his wake as he shot straight for Deimos. Deimos and the six deacons all turned toward him as he burst into their circle. Now that he was closer, he pegged them as floats. They towered over Greg, each the exact same height, and their features all bore the too-symmetrical marks of vat grown gestation. Their jumpsuits appeared to be made of the same smart fabric that composed his own jacket. The two closest floats squared up to him and brought their hands to their thighs. Gray material flowed into their palms from their suits, wrapping around itself while extending outward, until they held fine needlepoint daggers. Deimos’ eyes flicked down to their hands and his jaw flexed, a small spasm running down his right arm as his hand curled into a fist. His eyes moved back to Greg, and Deimos’ body untensed. Plastering on a wide grin, he stepped forward and wrapped Greg in a hug.
“You have come to say hi, I see. I am glad.” Greg felt a tiny zap just behind his ear as Deimos pressed his head close. [POST: /webhook/E474BA38/58E1/4544; MESSAGE: “Got hurt while in tubes. RAM memory had to be put back together. Took long time. Will show recording later. New friends not local—not scared of Dad. Play nice.”]
Greg pulled back from the hug and said, “I just wanted to catch up with you before they started the ceremony. It should be starting any minute now. Now who are your new friends?”
Deimos gestured to the floats. “Very well. This here is Leonna, Afrit, Harod, and Samsara. Folks, this is my good friend Greg.”
The woman Deimos indicated as Leonna stepped forward. She was unnaturally pale, her skin almost entirely devoid of pigment. Her limbs were ungainly and thin, elongated be the low gravity lunar environment. Her short hair was dyed a mixture of burnt orange and charcoal red. She exuded the nauseating vibrancy of blood sprayed upon freshly fallen snow. “It is well met, Greg of Earth. I am first among equals of the Mare Frigoris creche. I serve as voice for my companions.”
“Nice to meet you Leonna. What’s a group of floaties doing in Ouray? Aren’t there temples on the moon?”
“There are many sites of worship scattered upon the lunar surface, but none perform inoculation ceremonies. Our creche drops potential initiates onto the Earth, and we may only return once we can stand upon the surface of Mare Frigoris unaided. Through this practice our creche has compiled many strange and exotic augments.”
Greg took a small step forward, gaze flicking between Leonna’s eyes. “Interesting. Have you been told how you actually get augments, then? Our local elders have always been silent on the subject.”
“Such sacred religious secrets have been held from us as well. Before we left, however, we were told to earn them as quickly as possible, but were not informed why.” Leonna said.
Deimos reinserted himself into the conversation. “Probably related to whatever’s happening in the trojan asteroid cluster along Jupiter’s anterior LaGrange point. Most major denominations have been mobilizing for months. It’s widely theorized to be the Pantheon coalition’s next building project, and everyone’s getting set to jockey for a piece as soon as contracts open up.”
Leonna and Greg stared at Deimos, surprise written on their faces. After several seconds, Deimos shrugged and said, “What? You try living in the HQ of an archbishop of Omniwatch. You pick some stuff up.”
Leonna’s face wrinkled in disgust, and the expression was mirrored on the faces of her companions. “I did not realize you were the spawn of a spymaster. Will your master be pleased with the information you have gleaned from us?”
Deimos’ face turned hard. “I serve no one. I would be willing to introduce you as a favor though, if you’re interested. Omniwatch is always happy to get another Loonie agent. Your society is always so tight knit, it’s probably been weeks since the last successful infiltration.”
Leonna snarled as she stepped into Deimos’ personal space. Her hand hovered over her thigh as she spoke “I would never betray my creche, and I refuse to hear any implications otherwise.”
Greg stepped forward and placed one hand on Deimos’ shoulder and the other very lightly on Leonna’s hand. “I’m sure no one here would ever doubt your loyalty to your own, Leonna. And I’m equally sure you would never disparage Deimos through his lineage. None of us chose our parents, after all.”
Greg began pulling Deimos away. “Looks like the ceremony’s about to start, we best be going. It was great to meet you Leonna, hopefully I run into you again.”
Deimos was quiet as they made their way to their original seats. They had to squeeze past a handful of folks on their way, their previously empty section of stands had a dozen people nearby. As they sat, Greg decided to broach the uncomfortable silence. “So… I thought you wanted to avoid pissing the floaties off.”
Deimos grunted. “She started it.”
“Still… Maybe next time we try de-escalation first?” Greg gave up when he saw Deimos’ stormy expression and decided to change the subject. “Hey, got that recording? I’m still kinda in limbo after losing 3 hours.”
----------------------------------------