Chapter 16
Organo-Tech
(Misha)
It was gone, well muted was a better way to put it. Misha’s mind, once her sharpest tool, was heavily worn down. Well worn down by her standards at least, as she could still feel herself slowly gaining control over the alien operating system that was in control over her body. Well not in control of, altering her body was a better way to put it, again this all seemed odd.
If she had to put the exact process into words, it would be that her body now seemed to be actively impeding her true Psycher abilities. As if she was constantly surrounded by a dampening field.
As for the last few days she had seemingly been at war with her own body. Forcing her mind to work overtime to get past the limitations that her body was now imposing on her with its recent organo-magnetic changes that were wreaking havoc with her normally indomitable control.
Before she needed to wear a modified helmet and gloves to avoid constant over stimulation and feedback. Now it almost felt like she had lost the ability to feel, as her senses were dull.
Even simple machines, something that even a moderate technomancer could control with ease, proved to be overly difficult.
For a moment she thought that it was good that she was not part of the fleet, as at this rate she would have easily lost her position. A technomancer that couldn’t interact with machines was worthless to the fleet. This would also be her own fault as she was the one who had assigned her own task of trying to take on the enemy coding into her host body.
Still the overall process had been a success, first of all she had survived. The fact remained that if her current body died, she was certain that her psyche would still remain and be able to take the gained information about not only this fourth class, something that was previously unknown. While also being able to be a proper technomancer in her next rebirth.
There was also a proximity issue with her powers. Now she had to be extremely close to technology to get it to operate anywhere close to the way she wanted.
Even without her innate technomancer class related skills working, she was still able to easily diagnose potential errors with the machinery that her granddad was using. Though it annoyed her to no end that she couldn’t fix the noted errors herself.
For a moment, she had given up hope on this seemingly broken piece of technology.
Her last record from the system that had violently attempted to take control of her own psyche was a message from the system.
Reboot required.
Of course, that had been nearly a week ago at this point. During that time her mother had removed her from school, gotten her records transferred here. Then Misha as a last act scrambled the forwarding records from the school and other local subsystems about the address that they would be moving to. This was of course to hide her trail from the family of ruler class individuals, or mages as they were more commonly referred to as.
That was the full and final extent of Misha’s psychic capabilities, at least for the moment. Any further attempts to use her powers were met with intense migraines and bouts of dizziness.
Then tonight, she got the message that both frightened her and set her mind ablaze with future possibilities.
System Reboot Complete.
That was also when she learned about her class’s true purpose.
Alternate-1 Hunter Mode Activated. Alternate-1 Primary Purpose Identified: Find unacceptable candidates from the Worker, Warrior, and Ruler casts and eliminate them to improve the overall quality of planetary resources.
Initialization baseline commencing.
With her mind processing these messages, her tiny body began to feel an intense tingling sensation all over.
The tingling quickly went from a deep ache that one would get from sleeping in the wrong position for too long, to an intense burning sensation over most of her body.
Rustle.
As she did, her body kicked and spasmed from under the sheets. Instantly, Misha realized that she had been sleeping, and had allowed both her mind and body to enter into a forced meditative state.
Now though, now she was wide awake with pain coursing through every fiber of her body. As she could feel the full limits of her body being recorded.
Physical Baseline Characteristics Identified:
Strength: 4.3
Dexterity: 7.1
Agility: 6.2
Stamina: 7.7
Alternate-1 Candidate identified as being woefully inaccurate towards culling resource abusers. Initiating Advanced Life Growth Model.
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That was all the information that was feely given. Fortunately, for Misha, she still had her backdoor access to what the growth files actually meant.
The coding was a bit basic, and as was noted earlier, there was no clearly defined evolutionary path for her class. Each other class had certain thresholds of power that once obtained the candidate would be able to do more, and eventually evolve their overall growth pattern.
For Misha, she was given two primary paths of evolution, at least at first. With this first part of evolution, she could improve her Attributes in one of two ways; the first was through direct physical activity, basically anerobic workouts that constantly pushed her body to its limit. The second was through the use of a Reaper system.
There was no further information available about what exactly the Reaper system was, though she had her guesses with the fact that she was given the Hunter system, and that her system clearly wanted her to take away resources from members of the other classes that were deemed to be unworthy.
Of course, after seeing how these feeder planets would ultimately evolve into primary resource nodes for the Bakshee, Misha knew exactly how her judgement would fall for most of the indoctrinated class holders she found.
Relief.
With the system finally alive within her mind, it took Misha a moment to realize that the pressure she had been feeling in her mind was finally relieved. No longer was her body producing constant waves of feedback that made using even the simplest of Psycher-related abilities all but impossible. Now, after having to fight through such conditions, she almost felt that her control had improved, mainly due to intense strain she had been put through over the past week.
This gave her yet another way, she felt she could improve herself. With the awakening of the system within her mind she found that she now had two main goals. The first was to improve her overall hunter abilities of her current class, the second was to work on ways to force her control to improve as well.
Misha even had the targeted goal for her first physical transformation, if the system within her mind was anything to go off of. According to the rating profile recorded for her current species, her baseline Attributes were listed as ten for an average healthy adult. While the maximum required for her first-class evolution was at twenty attribute points. Only then would she fully awaken the resources available to her Reaper system.
Unfortunately, this whole awakening process had left her parched.
That was why Misha found herself drinking glass after glass of water, all while watching her granddad try to sneak out the back door as quietly as possible.
Misha finished two more glasses, and found herself sitting there in the dark, which felt oddly comfortable given her current condition.
Finally, just when Misha was about to head back to bed, her granddad re-entered the house. Seeing him, and somehow able to feel the fact that the machine would somehow run properly even from here.
Clearly this whole reboot had been better for her than she had expected. For her past twelve rebirth cycles her distance had remained the same. Now after one week of intense feedback and forced bodily evolutions, her effective range had seemingly doubled.
This was why she was certain to speak to her granddad, once he got in.
“You fixed it.”
“What the?” Phil shouted.
Click.
The light came on, momentarily blinding Misha, but within two blinks her eyes adjusted from being able to see clearly in the dark, to being perfectly okay in the light. Again, a small change, but one that was easily noticed by Misha’s highly adaptive mind.
From her earlier memories, this was easily four times faster than her body used to be capable of, in adapting to such situations.
“I had to check on something in the barn.” Phil replied.
“Good.” Misha said, getting up from her chair, and placing the empty cup directly into the dishwasher.
Phil gripped his chest, and was apparently still showing signs of being frightened by her sudden outburst. Honestly Misha, never intended to scare the old man and had assumed that he had seen her both times exiting and entering the house. As she was almost certain that their eyes met in the dark this last time.
Realizing that granddad needed a moment to calm down, she spoke.
“Goodnight granddad, see you tomorrow.”
***
(Dr. Grier)
Dr. Lauren Grier sat in the room with her mother. To say that it had been a Hell of a week would be an understatement. First the week began with Lauren finding out that her mother had been admitted to the burn ward, as there had apparently been a fire related accident on a school field trip that she was hosting.
Then there was the fact that while doing routine blood work to make sure there were no extraneous conditions, it turned out that her mother, a person who has never been sick a day in Lauren’s life was suddenly diagnosed with cancer. Not just any cancer either, but the type that you normally only suffer after being exposed to high doses of radiation.
“Are you certain that you are not aware of your mother or any of her co-workers working with plutonium, or any other rare earth metals?” Deputy Grimes asked, as he wrote words into an actual pad of paper.
“No,” Lauren said, but then added, “I have to say it has been a while since I saw people use pen and paper to take notes.”
Hearing that Deputy Grimes seemed to be a bit flustered by the comment, but he quickly recovered.
“You’d be surprised as to what details you can get from the simple methods of recording.” He responded, finally.
“Ah, server errors?” Lauren asked, remembering the times when she lost all her progress on a thesis paper, thanks to a computer glitch that lost all her work. Fortunately, it had been early on and she was easily able to recover, but still that had been a heart breaking experience that caused her to record things in triplicate after that.
“Something like that.” Grimes said, then quickly changed the line of questioning. “Can you tell me who else was part of the staff that your mother usually spoke to?”
“The fellow staff members, well there was Dr. Rodriguez, Dr. Howick, Dr. Thurman, and Dr. Li.” Lauren stated.
“I see.” Grimes said, having apparently already put together the pieces all the doctors that worked on a recent program were all now coming down with the same fast acting form of cancer.
There was an awkward silence that fell over the room, as Deputy Grimes flipped through a few pages of his notepad, before finding something.
“All right, one last question, it was said that the last person in the room with your mother was one Misha Collins.” He began.
“That is correct.”
Nodding his head Deputy Grimes continued, “based on my notes she is a patient of yours?”
At that Dr. Lauren Grier felt a strange pit of fear, “she might be, at least she was for a case where she was referred to me on, but she is no longer my patient as of a week ago.”
“Do you happen to have a way to contact her mother?”
“I, I should? But can I ask why?”
With that Deputy Grimes shook his notepad, “well we did have a few files get corrupted and purged from our network recently, most somehow involving cases related to this girl.”
“Okay, is there any reason you need to contact her?” Dr. Grier asked.
With that Deputy Grimes just stared at the lady that was roughly his own age and stared her in the eyes for a moment, before speaking. “Your mother, and all her coworkers who were working with this space rock have all been diagnosed with advanced forms of cancer. This girl was found under that very rock, where it had to be physically peeled from her somehow, and you don’t think we should warn her about the possibilities of having been exposed to radiation.”
“Shouldn’t that be something the CDC is involved in?”
At that Deputy Grimes once again locked eyes with her for a second. Once he was certain she was clearly missing the bigger picture, he spoke.
“Do you really want the CDC, and all that entails to get involved with whatever your mother was doing here? Also, would you really want that to happen to a little girl?” Deputy Grimes asked.
With that Lauren dropped her shoulders, as she realized that she would easily be dragged into a federal probe if that happened. As it was, she was already expecting to be drawn into something similar, but it might look more favorably on her that she was willing to work with law enforcement from the very beginning, as there were very few ways to look good with everything that was going on around her.
***
(Deputy Grimes)
Little did Dr. Lauren Grier know, but the good deputy had other reasons to try to speak to Misha Collins’ mother, as apparently before all this, there was an incident at Ms. Collins’ place of work the week prior to this incident that involved Dr. Pamela Grier stalking the place of work where Ms. Collins and her daughter were both staying. This was of course after that same Dr. Grier gave a class presentation to Misha’s school, where she invited everyone to an all expenses paid tour of her place of work.
Everything added up to there being too many coincidences in one place to let Deputy Grimes rest easy, until he made sure both the mother and her daughter were safe.
Oddly enough, he found out all of this by going back to the location that his notes provided. See he had the case number, which involved an altercation where the police were called upon a motorist who was in a restricted parking area taking pictures of the cars on scene. When he went back to the place of the crime to re-ask the questions, that is when he found the details that had originally gone missing when both his notes and original case file involving the incident were somehow deleted, with him losing hours of time.
In fact, he had just regained his notes on that missing incident, when he was called to do the follow-up about the university. That is when he came across the names being tied to both cases.
With this, he felt he was truly on to something. Missing hours of time, files randomly getting deleted, an entire department being mind wiped, and now a melting space rock. This had everything needed for a Men in Black movie. Most people would stop at that, realizing that if the most likely connection other than a sad stream of coincidences had to be aliens.
Deputy Grimes himself even realized that this entire thing was so far fetched that he almost didn’t believe it himself. Yet, he promised himself he would quit, as long as he found out that Misha and her mother were not being held at some secret government black site. As that was the other part of this case that was also concerning, namely the fact that every record involving Misha and her mother had also been corrupted and deleted, even from her former place of employment, where she had just worked last week.
He promised himself, he would find out that this little girl was safe, and then would call it a day, lest he too get caught up in this strange web of missing persons and extraterrestrial generated cancer.