Katare has learned three things. The first thing she has learned is that digital communication is largely bullshit.
She has had enough time to form a solid opinion on this topic by now. She has been able to pluck all the whispering, random information, and other data from the datasphere around her due to her Magical Interfacing skill. And what she has learned while suffering the Grandmaster’s rambling speech, is that digital communication is just a lot of copies of copies of copies being shuffled around.
She also realizes that instead of the constant stream of data, digital communication really looks like some freaky, elongated rain. Instead of raindrops falling down one by one, in neat little spheres, they act like some elongating snakes. One moment, a packet of information is sitting in one place, nice and small and readable. Then, it has stretched out towards its destination, before slinking back into a neat package once again.
And the vast majority of these packages of information are the same. Streams of sensor data that is virtually similar, orders and orbital data that is being sent time and time again, and more. Then, there is the storm of confirmation packets being returned. Back on the ship, she managed to pull some relevant and useful data from the datasphere around her. Now there is just too much going on. Each piece of data that she would like to know is buried in trillions of data points that are useless.
The second thing she learned is that the blue box system - something she has started calling the System, capital’s’ - is truly pulling stuff out of its ass. For example, her class skills are all at their maximum level. But whenever she asks for the classes she now should be able to choose or evolve, this is what it comes up with;
[ Tier 1 classes available: ]
[ Official ]
[ Vendor ]
[ Monk ]
[ Tier 2 classes available: ]
[ Associate UNKNOWN ]
[ Associate UNKNOWN Technician ]
[ Associate UNKNOWN Mechanic ]
[ Associate UNKNOWN Maker ]
[ Associate UNKNOWN Engineer ]
[ Associate UNKNOWN Engineer ]
[ Associate UNKNOWN Engineer ]
[ Associate UNKNOWN UNKNOWN ]
All that Katare knows is that she is not willing to lock herself into an UNKNOWN path. She has done a lot of cursing and yelling at the System, telling it to hurry up and get its shit together. So far, there has been no marked increase in its speed, so Katere tells herself once again to stop wasting her mental energy on the tirade.
And finally, the self-acclaimed Grandmaster of the Order is a true ass-wipe. She stopped listening to his rant what feels like hours ago, and every time she resumes listening to his speech, it’s gotten worse.
“…unending vigil. Four eternities, eight endless nights, sixteen enduring symphonies of anguish have I endured in order to safeguard this pit of stagnation. Yet still, even the most miserable of laboratory clone slaves, bred and born in captivity, never to see the light of day, never to gaze upon anything but the miserable walls that imprison them, have a better life here. For at least when they die, their soul can be free. Their incorporeal form can go where it pleases, free from the wheel, free from the shackles of mana. So it’s with these reasons that I had thee-”
The little respect Katare had left for the bearded freak is lost when an annoying and childish melody starts playing. The glowing man of white mana stops waving his arms about as it fumbles for what seems to be a pocket. Katare still can’t perceive anything but mana, so she is still looking at a glowing hologram of a naked man. She is also still avoiding a certain clearly visible region on the man’s body, but as she is located at around the same height, this is rather difficult. Katare is not in a great mood.
“What?” asks the man into his open hand, which presumably holds some form of a communication device.
Katare has a lot of experience with people. If there is one lesson she has learned, it’s never to trust people that leave their ringtones on default. People that can’t be bothered with changing the ringtone of a unique one usually treat other aspects of their life with the same lack of attention and effort.
“So, a stack of papers… is The Enemy?”
This sentence catches Katare’s attention. The Grandmaster has made earlier remarks alluding to this ‘The Enemy,’ but so far, all of them have been in a more figurative manner. She can actually hear the capitals on the two letters of that name every time Grandmaster says it.
“Is it The Enemy, or are they a product of The Enemy? You know that this is my private time, and I do not appreciate being interrupted. Especially for nonsense like this.”
Katare listens in fascination at this exchange. She can only hear one side of this conversation, but the body language of the mana person shifted from imperious monologuing to attentive listening the moment he picked up the phone.
“Well, it’s not a source, it’s paper! Just put it on the storage transport… Yes, the rest of those people can stay in the stasis cells… No, I do not know what to do with the Shmee duo yet… You found a crystal with... How high are those The Enemy levels? Are you sure it isn’t a Histaff Mastercore?”
The mana ghost starts pacing at this point, one hand nervously stroking his beard.”
“No, you will forget I said that,” he commands, and Katare feels a wave of mana flowing over her. She feels like forgetting what he just said, but as if noticing the effect cancels it, she remembers. “Just double down on security, for now. Half the personnel spans… Yes, of course… No, that’s not a problem. I’m staying low on juice. You know what? I’m just going to come back up. The mood is gone now… No, this isn’t your fault. Just…”
Katare wants to say many things as the large man walks away from her, but she can’t find the words to describe what she is feeling right now. She mentally shakes her head at the strangeness of everything. Ever since she woke up on that warp-damned space station, thinking that she was playing some kind of entertaining scenario, the universe made a lot less sense. She still holds a certain dumb skeleton responsible for that, but as he is nowhere to be seen, she will have to bottle up that frustration for later.
So, with the massive distraction of a naked and well-equipped manly mana hologram gone, she resumes thinking of what to do.
She has figured out a couple of things about her current situation and status. First, there are her class skills. Magical Interfacing is just what it sounds like. Through mana and magic, she is somehow able to interface with technology instinctively. This doesn’t have to be the magical kind, either. Actually, she suspects that the magical technology is the only tech that she can’t interface with, for reasons unknown to her.
Then there is Magical Integration. One aspect of this skill - she thinks - allows her to get a feel for her implants. As her biological body is reduced to her brain and a short length of her spine, she doesn’t know if that skill includes bodily implants. She just knows that she can feel the FullBrain Neural SuperVisor woven throughout her grey matter.
Secondly, it allows her the same instinctual control over her implants. She also suspects that this extends to the android head her brain is still wearing. It’s just a shame that the disembodied head is designed for comfort and has zero utility. She cringes as she recalls that this is why she chose this body in the first place. She’d wanted to forget about everything, and as a result, she is now stuck inside a massive Histaff cleaning ship without any way out of here.
Then she suddenly remembers that her implant has a small transmitter. She is sure that she should be blushing in shame furiously right about now, where she still the owner of her original body. She honestly totally forgot about that, even though the integrated piece of tech is likely the reason she can sense the datasphere in such a manner in the first place.
Now knowing what to look for, it doesn’t take her long before she gets a proper grasp on the things she had been doing on an unconscious level so far. The tech inside her brain is made up out of two large components. First, there is her brainstem implant, the Neural SuperVisor that every sapient receives just after birth. This has a central component, an integrated circuit with more than enough processing power to handle a full sensory simulation. This part of her implant had been hard at work while she was remotely controlling bodies during her slog through the Histaff infected space station. Now, that part of the processor is doing nothing, and it has been idle this entire time.
The second part is the ReQuit FullBrain extension, which is a secondary processor, as well as a very extensive web of wires throughout her brain. All of these wires are composite constructions, each stand containing millions of nanoscopic fibers. All these fibers connect with at least one neuron nucleus, thus keeping tabs on her entire brain. The ReQuit part of that name stands for ‘requital,’ as in, giving something in return.
This means that her neural implants can sense, take, and give. The scanning means that they are passively sensing. Giving and taking stands for adding or removing neural impulses.
All in all, it means that she can now influence the entirety of her own brain, add in fake sensory data, or cause certain parts of her brain to black-out.
The moment she puts all this information together is the moment she puts a hard lock on all of that functionality. She immediately seals the stimulation and deprivation, or the give and take, options. Her current mental state is already tenuous at best. She suspects that she will go absolutely ape-shit the moment she starts interfering with her own brain in an uncontrolled manner.
Shutting those functions down, she finds that she now has a lot of processing power to play with. The two main processing cores in her implants had been fairly busy with logging and analyzing her brain activity. Shutting that functionality down freed up a lot of space.
Katare then has a long and hard look at the mind-bogglingly massive amount of data that is flowing around her. Even the simplest of items on the ship around her have hard-wired links to computer systems. From doors to lamps to singularity generators, every single item is connected to the ship’s net. Finding the useful information in this gargantuan maelstrom of data will be like finding a needle in a planet-sized haystack.
So she sets about identifying, sorting, and filtering the hay as best she can. Despite only knowing the basics about computer programming, adaptive self-learning networks, and programmable gate arrays, she starts working with the concepts of these fields with impressive speed and alacrity.
As with most things in life, the majority of the traffic around her is cleaned up easily. All the repeating sensor data, myriads of repeating handshake protocols, and simple polling packets are filtered out within minutes of beginning this task.
Very quickly, she has over ninety percent of all the data around her marked as unimportant. She then looks upon the remaining ten percent, and despair starts setting in.
Ten percent of a near-infinite amount of packages is still near-infinite, just a little less infinite.
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Slogging on, she quickly finds out that another ninety percent of this remaining part can be filtered easily. The majority of these packages are filled with random stuff. All the packages seem to be covered in a sort of opaque film, which forces her to look into each one. It takes her an embarrassingly long time to realize that she is actually breaking through a layer of encryption.
Her implants seem up to the task, and Katare suspects that Solan might have bent some technology guidelines and laws with the particular model inside her brain. A lot of the remaining information packets seem to be encrypted by strong protocols. She finds that this data is usually of a more private sort. These encrypted packages contain intergalactic mail coming in on long-range comms, GalaxNet searches, or sensitive news. Katare filters these out too. Sorting through them costs too much time, as she needs to decrypt every single one before finding out its contents.
Yet despite those probably illegal cracking routines in her head, a large portion of the remaining unfiltered packets remain illegible. Filtering those too, she is left with under a percentage of all traffic around her.
Combing through that remaining stream of data is still an insurmountable task that will probably take years. Looking around, Katare once again confirms that she is just a brain, stuck inside a disembodied android body head, stuck inside some unknown container, inside an unknown ship.
Giving a very deep mental sigh, she sets about identifying the remaining one percent.
What feels like a small eternity later, Katare feels like she is going crazy, again. This isn’t another case of literally losing sight of reality, though. No, this time, she sees things.
Once in a while, at seemingly random times, something directly under her makes a very small, nearly imperceptible packet. All of the previous ones were basically invisible in the storm of digital information going on around her. Now that the vast majority of that stream is being filtered, she can occasionally catch bits of information originating right from under her nose.
Just as her attention is about to switch back to the packet stream she still has to sort; it happens again. This time, she is quick enough on the uptake to catch a good glimpse of the thing. This allows her to grab a copy to study. Opening the small bit of information, she sees a few named variables.
The headers show that it’s being sent from an item called ‘50x50x50VoidSluice000189437’. There is very little information in this bit of data, but its name allows Katare to make some solid assumptions. The thought that she is inside a void sluice - a form of airlock - is pretty concerning but does potentially open up a lot of possibilities.
She then finds a variable called ‘Space,’ and an idea pops into her mind. Acting more on magically powered instinct than anything else, she carefully crafts a new packet. Reversing the sending and receiver is rather easy. Changing the binary bit indicating true or false on the ‘Space’ is equally easy. She makes sure not to touch the ‘NuclearDisintegration’ variable, as she has no desire to be turned into loose atoms anytime soon.
She then tries to send this packet back to the piece of equipment right beneath her. First, she attempts to make the packet appear inside the electrical wiring leading to the void sluice. This turns out to be impossible, she finds out after a good hour of trying. Once again not really sure why she insists on trying the most complicated solution first, she puts a copy of the packet in her Neural SuperVisor’s transmitter and sends it into the atmosphere. She then realizes that what she just did might have been a really stupid idea.
Despite not seeing a thing, and although a lot of the sensors in her bionic head have stopped functioning, she still manages to figure out what happens next.
The floor that her severed stump of a neck is laying on vanishes. Two sliding half doors beneath her open up to a vacuum, which proceeds to suck her head downwards at speed. From the several impacts and faceplants the various sensors in her synthetic skin register, she realizes that she is bouncing around in a rather narrow tube. Then, the near bone-crunching impacts lessen in frequency, and the processor embedded in her head tells her that the tunnel she is bouncing inside must have widened.
Then she sees the faintest hint of light, spinning by in a blur. Another faint explosion of pain - this one telling of yet another widening of the pipe she is careening through - slows her mad spin. That’s when she sees the light at the end of the tunnel. Apparently, a lot of pipes similar to the one she is in feed into this one. And now she is shooting towards a fucking sun, so that’s cool.
Katare wonders what is wrong with her mind. Of course, that’s not cool; being tossed into a sun is the literal opposite of cool. Seeing the small sun shining at the end of the tunnel is a nice break from the long stretch of darkness she has been in, she must say. Her implants telling her that her current course will put her inside of the sun within hours is not cool at all.
Then, while she is still processing this latest development, she shoots out of the pipe. She wonders why a ship like the Purgatory would use normal pipes for this kind of purpose. The fact that she is being launched into a sun stops that train of thought quickly.
She is slowly spinning around, so the first thing that happens to her after emerging from the dark pipe is that she gets a nice look at her surroundings. All the rumors about the CHCS Purgatory, all the factsheets she has read and all the briefings and lessons she ever receives turn out to be false. From those sources, she merely learned that the segmented ship is enormous.
The excellent look she gets at the thing puts it downright into the gargantuan, fucking enormous, and mind-bogglingly massive category.
A metal monstrosity that reminds her of a spider’s nest hangs in the void of space. A central sack, bulging and pulsing with lights and life, is suspended in space by an impossibly thin and bright network of fibers, ropes, and tattered shreds of lacework mesh. Then, she realizes that the fibers are support structures, the clusters of random fluff and fine weave are actually hangar bays and housing areas. Looking around - which happens automatically as she slowly tumbles - she spots the edge of the impossible construct.
Seeing the stupendous sphere that’s supposed to house the entirety of the CHCS Purgatory, Katare is dumbstruck. She has seen capital ships aplenty. Wonders that can only be created by the most modern of technologies are also a dime a dozen for the woman. The number of space elevators and planetary rings she has seen rivals the amount of asteroid-turned-space station and other megaprojects she has helped engineer.
But this, this is something different. The scale of the entire ship is nothing new, but Katare wonders how she seems to be the only one to recognize that the CHCS Purgatory is impossible. Even with the most advanced materials, with the most power-hungry of covalent bonding processes, this tangled weave of struts and structures shouldn’t be possible. Tapping into her Mana Sense, the entire weave of spider web-like struts lights up with pale mana. The egg-sac like construct in the middle is a blazing point of magical power. The milky white is so concentrated; it rivals the sun in terms of the power that Katare feels emanating from it.
Then her head is turned around again, and she is once again staring at the sun, which is coming closer at an alarming rate. She continues her slow tumble through space as she makes her way out of the Purgatory’s skeletal reach. The entire ship is supposed to be a sphere; she knows from the promotional and educational material she once consumed. This is the most efficient shape to warp with, but Katare only recognizes this shape after she drifts out of the Purgatory’s web of branches. It takes her a little more distance to recognize the shape for what it is.
It looks like some citrus fruit, all of the juicy bits removed, only the white fibrous matter remaining. The ship is nothing but a weave of supportive structures, logistical channels, power lines, and other resource supply lines. She sees one particular ship about to dock, a massive wedge-shaped vessel with bulky mining lasers folded into its hull.
And it’s while she is staring at the ponderous docking maneuver of the mining rig, that her eyes freeze over. Trying to blink the blurry film from her vision, she wonders how that is even possible. The body she’s in should be able to hold out for years.
Except for the fact that the majority of the power generation in her particular model is located in the torso. And Katare’s torso is located half a galaxy away, she remembers belatedly.
She then tumbles face-first to the sun again, and her frozen eyes start smoldering and bubbling from the stellar wind.
The power levels continue to lower, the few capacitors in her head dipping dangerously low. All kinds of alarm bells are going off now, both in her mind, her implants, and in the processor in her head that’s been slowly elevating its internal alarm levels. Katare makes a hard and fast decision, disabling the external coolers. Shutting down all the non-vital processes, the effects are immediate.
She can’t see it, but the damage modeling software function inside the FullBionic iSleeve starts yelling directly into her Magical Interfacing ears. Her synthetic hair is the first thing to go. For some reason, the Purgatory is located relatively close to the sun, probably for refueling purposes. This does mean that the stellar wind given off by the star is literally a constant stream of plasma. Seconds after cutting power to her non-essential features, her hair has flaked off, smoldering as it burns from her scalp. Her skin is the next layer to fry, the cooling mesh woven through the bio-simulated tissue no longer soaking up the plasma damage.
A deep part of her ego cries out at the fact that she is slowly turning into a charred metal skull. Yet Katare knows that this is yet another do or die moment for her. The numbers take up all of her attention now, the ticking clock counting down the seconds and light-seconds to her inevitable incineration. She will plunge into the surface of the sun in a few hours, but she probably won’t have to worry about that. Her brain will be steam-cooked before she’ll even come close to that ball of fusion and plasma.
Once again wondering what’s wrong with her mind, she starts looking around. She is starting to feel a numb kind of giddy towards this constant stream of extremely dangerous situations she keeps finding herself in. If there is one thing to be thankful for, it is the fact that the void of space around her is a lot less distracting. Instead of the pulsing weaves of mana that were flowing through the Purgatory alongside the ocean of data, the blackness of space is much more relaxing. Also, there is no annoying god-complex character monologuing to her.
This is all counterbalanced by the fact that she is floating towards a fucking sun, however.
And the fact that her eyes are now smoldering bits of synthetic material isn’t helping either. It takes her a bit of frantically poking around inside her own skull, but she manages to tap into some kind of mapping function. This piece of functionality seems more designed for getting around a city, however, and forcing it to keep track of stellar bodies and massive spaceship takes a bit of work.
Despite the fact that she can’t see, and the fact that the mapping process won’t zoom out further than city-level - useless when the closest thing to her is a drone thousands of kilometers away - she does kind of see things. The Purgatory for one. It’s a shining weave of mana a constant light in the visual darkness. Then there are the digital signatures, friend-or-foe signals given off by the spaceships around her, and the myriad of drones.
The sun is this massive void in her perception. The only way she can keep track of the thing is by checking the status of the last remaining external sensor on her skull. One temperature sensor partially covered by her metal jawbone still gives her a reading. Then that sensor spikes, the temperature exceeding its operating conditions, and the datapoint winks out.
That’s when Katare realizes she needs a plan. Her entire life, she has had plans, of course. But until now, her main goal had been just to get by, just to live and do nice things. Many people have remarked on this before, but she has not really had a larger goal to pursue, no dot on the horizon to move towards. She’s had short term goals, of course. But those flights of fancy aways ended when she managed to implement a new law, or finished with designing a new range of spaceships.
But it seems that things are happening that she has no control over, and these events seem intent on dragging her along. Willfully ignoring everything and relaxing hasn’t worked. Far from it, actually. Hoping the situation will resolve itself has only managed to put her in a worse position. That stubborn streak has lost her access to an entire vault planet at her disposal, the substantial remnants of the Tomat empire hers to command. Now she is a brain-in-a-jar in a disembodied android head, floating towards a star.
For the next few minutes, Katare’s head is a perfect blank. Instead of some brilliant idea appearing or a sudden epiphany showing her the way she can’t really come up with anything. The only thing that sticks out in her mind is the fact that out of her entire contact list, only a disgruntled teacher whose life she ruined picked up the phone.
All of her other contacts, friends, acquaintances, and family members had shuffled her off to some no-name subordinate. Yet this person she had sabotaged out of spite had spoken to her.
Then, as if knowing where to go shows her the way, Katare formulates a plan. Reaching out to the probe a couple of thousands of kilometers away, she starts to study the thing. It seems to be a relatively simple construction, a low-power mass-less driver meant to ferry cargo around.
Luckily for the spinning bionic skull, she has actually had a hand in the production process of these things. She might not know their every in and out, but she does remember looking over the spec-sheets of models similar to this one.
Carefully crafting another digital packet, she sends it to the drone, the transmitter in her brain barely managing to reach it.
Half an hour before the plasma would have gotten strong enough to pressure-cook her brain in her braincase, she gets the packet right. A combination of the correct encryption protocol and spoofed hardware addresses allows her to take control of the drone. She immediately commands it to drop the large chunk of processed ore and to speed towards her.
No longer having to ferry many tonnes of heavy matter around, the drone’s ability to accelerate transforms from sluggish to insane. Within minutes, it crosses the void of space between itself and Katare. Then, it mechanically clamps Katare’s head between its massive industrial jaws. Her head squeezed near its breaking point, Katare frantically starts looking for the drone’s clamping pressure setting.