LibriumArcana.Games

Joro, Mal and Phi watched as the woman in the fury morph left the warehouse room. It was only then that they saw it for what it was, after the bodies were littering the ground around them. An off the books clinic for illicit and illegal mods and morphs. With Eli down and everything gone to sideways, they opted for discretion being the better part of valor and extracted Eli's stack from his morph before leaving themselves.

Firing off a quick message to the security chief about what they found they decided to get off Parvarti sooner rather than later and didn't bother to stick around to answer any questions or hear any complaints that were bound to be coming their way. Making their way back to the farcast station where they came in at, they booked their passage off station as quickly as they could. Eli had said they had plenty of credits to pay for it if needed and it looked like there weren't many other options. Their sponsor was dead and her backup hadn't shown up yet. They didn't even know if the backup was on this aerostat. So their bill paid they put Eli's stack into the farcaster and followed him soon after, leaving Parvarti.

Their egos cast back to Juggernaut, and were temporarily loaded into the public datasphere to await Munnin's return and their morphs back. It would be about a day or so in real time for Munnin to get the signal, slow down and get turned around to burn back towards them. Until then they were stuck in the digital. Some found the experience freeing, others not so much.

Eli found himself in the datasphere of Juggernaut, consumed by a burning knowledge.

Something was wrong. Something he could discernibly note now, having transitioned from synthetic morph to a pair of organics, and now as a disembodied ghost in the digital sea.

His thoughts should largely remind the same. His clarity should largely remain the same. And yet...

Something was wrong.

From the moment he'd taken the flesh at Heimdall, sliding into the bouncer sleeve, he had felt needs and impulses that felt at once entirely natural and yet at the same time somehow foreign. Fueled by alcohol and haunted by the ghosts and demons their conversation had resurrected from a war that, for Eli, a mere few weeks ago, he'd surrendered to that need. He'd let himself drift among the population, reading them, manipulating them.

He'd always been an astute judge of character, but this was beyond that. It was as if every gesture, every inflection had opened the book of a person's soul, fanning the pages before him. That knowledge had driven the need to sculpt those reactions and responses, and so he had.

Curious now, he pulled up a fight recording, watching the bloody action play out. He could follow the moves, the feints and counterthrusts, the desperation as one fighter sensed the inevitable coming, but it did not connect now. He could see the fight unfold, but until it became decisively evident who the victor was going to be, it was simply a mystery that he watched play out to revelation. There was no certainty, no drive, no calculation.

The clarity he'd had as a bouncer had departed, and the uncertainty began to gnaw at him.

Something was wrong.

As Eli watched the fight, trying in vain to recover that spark that was there before, there was a niggling sensation at the edges of his awareness.

"You seem lost," came a soft ungendered voice. It 'felt' human but lacked any warmth or even really a sound in this place. The direction it came from was likewise lacking.

"As if something were amiss," another voice, gentler, more feminine, another direction.

"Or missing," a third voice, deep, a slight echo.

"Eli," came a familiar presence in his mind, the constant in his life for so long, his muse. "Something is here. Something is trying to get in."

The niggling sensation was noticeably more pronounced as the presence manifested further into Eli's egospace. Eli could feel it pushing harder against the borders of his mind, searching for something.

"The infection spreads. You are noticed."

A notice popped up at the peripheral of Eli's 'vision' notifying him that his body was ready for download.

"Eli," came his muse. "I suggest we go. Now."

Eli hesitated for a scant second, then poured himself into his new morph.

Leaving Parvarti was much easier than even getting to the station was - by this point the Security Forces were highly eager to be rid of the group, and without the resources to continue their original mission - well, Mal had soured on the place. There was the issue with their employer being taken captive, her cortical node smashed and her engramatic code uploaded to some cold storage unit in space to be resold - but the ones who did it would be looking out for them now, and well...Eli had blown that wide to hell.

As he coallessed in the datasphere that was Juggernaut's public systems, Mal sent a message out to the Beta Fork of their employer - hoping to at least explain what happened....if she was still relevant that is. Who knows if she had been recomissioned in the interum since their departure. At least he could try to set up a meeting with her before Munnin arrived to take their data dump and resleeve them back to physicality.

Phi paced across the soft carpet of her quarters, the details of the last few events running through her mind. Being forked into another body, hunting down the cause of strange infections, gunfire exchanges, and a crewmate "dying"- she wasn't sure she would ever get used to these sorts of adventures.

Her eyes fell on one of the medpacks she had gathered. It felt so useless in the vastness of Juggernaut and the universe she had been exploring with her compatriots. She couldn't fight, with the exception of basic self-defense classes, she only knew the basics of coding and hacking. What was she to do?

Despite the urge to give into despair, she remembered one of the key pieces of advice she had been given by a mentor during paramedic training that she herself tried to pass on to others: never stop learning. If you stop discovering new things, you lose your will and your ability to fight.

Sighing, she pondered the flamethrower her team had given her and the arsenal of weapons they had available. Her teammates seemed well-versed in at least the combat basics; maybe one of them would be willing to teach her how to kick some ass so she wouldn't feel so useless as they made their way across the galaxies.

It wasn't much, but the comfort of the possibility settled her nerves and she began to practice the few self-defense moves she had learned years ago with her little sister. Zeta flashed across her mind for a moment, but Phi brushed the thought aside to focus on what she and her new team would be tackling next.

The team downloaded back into meatspace, their morphs awaiting them. They found themselves with a choice as they did so though, to wipe their beta forks from their bodies or to merge and have to deal with the disorientation of two sets of memories shuffled about in their ego.

Stepping out of their sleeving chambers they found themselves back inside of Muninn, awakening in the limited facility on board the ship. The door to the room was open, letting the sound of voices echo down the ship's corridor.

Eli leaned against the wall, gasping air into lungs that had been filled with oxygenated liquid until just a few moments ago. His mind was whirling with possibilities, and the primary one was not at all pleasant.

Staggering, weaving, he slipped on the robe he'd been offered, then out the door. "Need to clean up," he muttered, his words slurring as he reacquainted himself with how the mouth on this sleeve worked.

As Eli stumbled out into the hallway and moved towards the sanitation facilities the voices became louder and more distinct. It sounded like two people arguing, coming from the lounge. Both were male voices, though one was talking in an obvious falsetto.
"Damnit Cisceros, I can't believe you're still watching that shit!" This from the falsetto.
"What? It's just a fight. This is great!"
"It's disgusting!"
"How'd a fucking pacifist end up as a cop anyway? Scared of watching a couple people slug it out?"
"No, dipshit. You don't fucking get it do you? They're not two guys just 'slugging it out.' They're fucking slaves! Someone sold them and someone bought them. And the only fucking reason it's not our asses down there in those rings instead of up here in this ship is because we've got a specific skillset that was needed. And we're just as much slaves up here! It's disgusting. And you're just going to sit here and watch them fight."
"What do you want me to do about it? Think if I stopped watching, the fights gonna stop? Think if you bitch about it that we're gonna be any less owned by the people who own this ship? Our bodies? Enjoy it, at least we're not down there."

Phi's mind felt like a bag of rocks thrown into the ocean-heavy, muffled, and more than a little salty as she came back into her previous morph. The memories of the previous mission clashed against each other in her head. The distant sounds of talking, about a subject she had recently become all too familiar with, only piled on to her brain's dissonance.
She forced herself to slow her breathing, latching onto the ground to help stabilize her. Slowly the ship stopped spinning and colors returned to her vision. With her curiosity piqued, she set off down the hallway quietly to try to listen to the conversation echoing down the halls.

Eli stopped by the door, pale and bleary-eyed. "Go where you want," he said quietly. He wiped a hand across clammy skin still moist with the preservatives the morph had been stored in. "Stay here, go to Juggernaut. Or ride to wherever we're going. No slaves here."

He cleared his throat, pulling himself together. "We never meant for you to think you had to work for us. If you hadn't agreed we would've kept you in the stacks we held back."

He blinked a few times, then straightened suddenly, knowing the posture he needed to adopt now, the tone. His eyes scanned the movements and microexpressions of the pair, reading them for hints of what it would take to convince them of his sincerity.

For Mal, shifting back to a new sleeve wasn't as jarring as expected - though the flood of two memories was giving him a headache. Thankfully - he had relatively recent experience in this, and he started to compile and reconcile the two memories. It'd take a while, but he could get his Muse to handle some of that in the interum.

He still hadn't heard back from their Benefactor on the station, he had hoped to tell her before they burnt off...but it would be what it be.

As the synth-morph left the dock, he picked up the voices from down the hall, and then he heard Eli's. HE suppose they could have been a bit more...upfront...but Eli made a point, and he was dealing with the Tac-Team for now.

"Munnin," he said to the open air, "Can you try to get me a channel to Mrs. Chattergy's fork on Juggernaut, please. ASAP. I'll be over in my quarters." With that, the synth who didn't really need sleep, went off to his habsection...cause he needed to sort over what just went wrong on Pavarti

"Of course," Muninn replied to Mal. "Please hold while I connect."
There was a lengthy pause, Mal waiting for Muninn to connect, followed by an unsure response.
"Hello? Comms said this is Muninn, but I don't know a Muninn. Wait, Sophie is saying... Mal? You're the individual that was hired to transfer over to Pavarti, correct?"

---------------------

"Heya, boss," came the deeper, natural masculine toned one. The one, Eli discovered peering into the doorway, that was laying on one of the couches[relaxed, comfortable with the situation, disinterested in conversation, more interested in entertainment vid], with what appeared to be a bowl of popcorn on his chest, his eyes flicking between the screen, the other man in the room and the doorway that Eli was currently standing it. Clearly this was Cisceros. Thomas Cisceros as Eli recalled. NYPD, then part of a national defense unit according to ego records prior to upload. "Sorry for the noise, just a little disagreement with my pal here."

The other male, the one who spoke in a falsetto[falsetto, attempt at female vocal range and patterns, obvious discomfort with situation, obvious discomfort with something else going on, most likely is Ruby Hoffman, former smaller town law enforcement] had their arms crossed over their chest, partially blocking the view of the screen. The position of their crossed arms was off for the morph. They turned their attention to the doorway.
"I'm sure. So we would have gotten morphs and been given citizenship and mesh access and the whole nine yards if we said no? I appreciate the sentiment, but it's not like we're in a great position if we just up and leave, are we? No money, no morph, no place to go and alone in this world, as it were. But 'boss' you look like you've got something you need to be doing. You can tell us how you've Lincoln'd us once you're done."

[Hoffman] walked towards the room entrance and squeezed past Eli who was partially blocking the door. They turned and spotted Phi standing in the hallway. There was a slight nod towards her as they turned and headed into the crew quarters.

Eli shrugged as Hoffman slid past, not attempting to bar their passage.

"We're going to do what we can to find a place for these egos that's not like Juggernaut," he said. "From the looks of it, that's not going to be easy or quick, but they're all on ice and aren't even aware of the situation."

He rallied, forcing his mind into full focus, projecting confidence and certainty. Hoffman was law enforcement, used to command structures and authority. "That's the best we can do right now, for everyone on this ship. The whole system is fucked and charity is in fucking short supply, Hoffman. If you've got a workable answer to pitch, believe me when I say that we're all ears."

"Hello? Comms said this is Muninn, but I don't know a Muninn. Wait, Sophie is saying... Mal? You're the individual that was hired to transfer over to Pavarti, correct?"

"Madam Chattergy," Mal began as she answered the comm line, "Yes, that would be me. Malakith Edwardo. Are you in quarters, or some place safe? I'm afraid we need to talk about what happened on Parvarti." It wasn't the first time a mission went sideways, and admittedly, this was more sideways than Mal was used to in his line of work - but sideways was sideways.

If it hadn't been for Eli, maybe Mal could have worked a deal with the smugglers, but that was cold and undoubtedly going to come back and bit them in the ass. When Chattergy finally responded she was in a good place to talk, he gave her the cliff notes of what happened on the satellite, and what they knew happened to her other-fork.

"Now, I'm not sure if you are a Alpha fork....but from the limitations on what you know, and the type of mission...I'd say you were a Beta. Hopefully you know where you can reactivate a backup and remerge with it. Otherwise, I'm sorry to say, there was nothing we could do. I'm sorry."

After hearing the exchange down the hallway, Phi decided it was best to leave the situation with the egos to Eli. He seemed like he knew what he was doing and Phi, who had once been known as a stubborn loudmouth compared to the rest of her family, figured she would only make things worse for him.

Instead she headed back to her quarters, hoping to sleep some of the mental exhaustion away from the transplant back into her alpha morph. As she navigated her way through Juggernaut, she kept a careful eye out for any interesting parties she passed. Now that the crew's first two jobs were out of the way, she wasn't sure what was next for them but she felt the possibility of some big missions were definitely out there and she didn't want to pass anything up because she was simply tired.

Josh wrote: ↑

Mon Nov 16, 2020 12:01 am

"That's the best we can do right now, for everyone on this ship. The whole system is fucked and charity is in fucking short supply, Hoffman. If you've got a workable answer to pitch, believe me when I say that we're all ears."

"No, I don't have one. Don't even know where to begin, honestly. This is...this isn't the future we were expecting." Hoffman shrugged and walked away, heading towards the galley, leaving Eli alone.

Dark Silver wrote: "Now, I'm not sure if you are a Alpha fork....but from the limitations on what you know, and the type of mission...I'd say you were a Beta. Hopefully you know where you can reactivate a backup and remerge with it. Otherwise, I'm sorry to say, there was nothing we could do. I'm sorry."

"I'm sad so say I'm afraid I don't have any of the answers you're probably looking or hoping for. I doubt I even qualify as a Beta, which is fine. I was sent here with limited intelligence just so in the event of something... unfortunate... happening that I wouldn't be able to compromise anything."

There was a sigh as the conversation stopped for a moment.
"I wish there was something that I could to help. I'll keep monitoring for when my primary comes back online and hopefully she'll be able to reach out to you all about this. She didn't tell you anything else did she? Anything that I need to know?"

Eli stood there for a moment as he watched Hoffman walk away.

This isn't the future we were expecting.

He couldn't remember what he expected out of the future anymore. He couldn't really remember expecting a future at all, not after things had gone wrong with the world. Artifact Recovery missions had a brutally low survival rate. He didn't recall expecting to live for there to be an after.

Maybe he'd thought about it. So much seemed to be lost, presumably to trauma blanking.

Perhaps to something else.

He needed to find out. He turned and made his way to the medbay.

"Munin," he sad as he sat down on the table. "I need a full diagnostic scan, including genetic base and brain activity. I need to know if there's... abnormal deviation in either sequence."

He lay back and closed his eyes.

Phi jolted upright from her rest with her body covered in sweat and a scream stuck in her throat. It was frustrating and somehow slightly comforting that something as commonplace as nightmares were still around even as everything else about life had advanced beyond humanity's wildest dreams.

In her dream, Phi saw her sister-or what should have been her sister. The body was similar to what she remember of Zeta, and the voice she heard belonged to her, but there was no face, just a stranger void where her features should be.

As she screamed for help, Phi had found herself unable to move, bound by whatever laws her unconscious mind had projected on to her. No matter how she wanted to kick, to flee, to yell Zeta's name, all she could do was watch as a strange hooded figure approached the faceless woman.

The new person had taken a strange device from his belt and without listening to Zeta's pleas jammed it onto her arm. Steam or smoke began to rise from the flesh and she screamed in agony, begging the mysterious man to stop. After a few moments the device was removed, revealing a strange branding embedded into her skin.

Phi had finally managed to wake herself up at this point in the nightmare. As she forced herself to take deep breaths and calm herself down, she held onto the symbol she had seen. It seemed familiar to her, but she couldn't place it. Why had it found its way into her dream, with a sister she hadn't seen in years? Already it was starting to slip away, so she grabbed a piece of paper and tried to scribble down at least some of what she had seen.

While she didn't believe in prophetic dreams, or morphogenetic fields, or any other sort of weird fantasy or pseudoscience bullshit, Phi also didn't believe in coincidences. Whatever this was, she was going to get to the bottom of it. And what better place to get information than somewhere like Juggernaut?

"To be fair, aside from what she told me on my first trip over....I never saw her again," Mal told the woman. "There is nothing more I can add. And sadly, we don't have the resources to initiate a larger search or rescue operation for her - or to complete the original mission she had planned. Besides..pretty sure we are not going to be welcomed back on the rock by anyone of its residents."

Mal genuinely felt bad about the situation, but there was little more to add.

Josh wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 21, 2020 5:56 pm

"Munin," he sad as he sat down on the table. "I need a full diagnostic scan, including genetic base and brain activity. I need to know if there's... abnormal deviation in either sequence."

"Affirmative. Please relax while testing commences."

Around Eli there was a hum as the biobed came to life, beginning its scan. There was a tiny prick in the upper arm as Muninn injected a small batch of nanos to swarm through his morph, probing for problems or issues. From beneath Eli's neck the biobed released a probe that inserted itself into the access port for his cortical stack. The feeling of the deep indepth ego scan while he was still conscious was...disconcerting. While Muninn was cold and clinical, there was still something unnatural about feeling another digging through your ego.

"Eli, the diagnostics is complete. I am please to report that there were no serious abnormalities in either your morph or ego. However, I have detected elevated levels of corticotropin, which indicates heighted amounts of stress. Am I correct in deducing that your desire for a full evaluation is based on a concern that there is something incorrect about you? Something wrong or broken? Do you care to talk about it?"

A monitor on the wall lit up in eyesight of Eli, displaying a flashing series of religious symbols.
"I am, by many standards, an accredited and certified religious authority and thus can assure you that your discussions with me are protected. If that does not provide proper feelings of ease, I am also well versed in many standard texts of psychology and am covered under all applicable rules of confidentiality between a 'doctor' and 'patient'."

On the wall the symbols changed to various symbols of mental health, semicolons, monarch butterflies, puzzle pieces and others flashed by.


-----------------------

The mental avatar smiled at Mal.
"I'm sure you and your team did your best to aid her. I have your contact information, if I hear anything that may be of use to you or will get you information that may be relevant to this operation I will be sure to pass it along. I've got your contact information. And thanks."

The call disconnected, the avatar winking out of existence in Mal's mind.
"The call has terminated, sir," his muse informed him. "Shall I try to reestablish connection?"

------------------------

As Phi sat upright in her bed, in her room, screaming the lights came on automatically to a low level. Just enough to see, not enough to blind or otherwise cause pain to her eyes.
"Miss Phi," came the voice of Muninn over the hidden speakers in her room. It was audible though low in volume as to not blare or otherwise further alarm the occupant. "I believe you were having a nightmare. I assure you, everything is alright."

The lights slowly began to raise in brightness, bathing the room in a soft, warm glow.
"Is there anything I can do for you, Miss Phi? Would you care to talk about your dream? Sharing often helps according to medical textbooks and documentation on this subject."

Eli sat silently for a few moments.

"I feel differently when I'm full organic," he said. "More than I remember. There's always a difference when you go from silicon to meat, I did that during the war enough. But this is very different. Did you see the wagers i made on Juggernaut? My winning streak? I don't know how that happened, or why. Every move I made felt correct, including the loss at the end. I wasn't enjoying it, I was..."

He hesitated again, attempting to quantify the feeling. "...building something. The final move, the loss, made it happen. But I have no idea what it was. And when I talk to people now, when I speak to them and I'm in meat, I can read more. Better. Things are different in ways that seem significant. When I shut down in meat, even for a short time, I come back up more quickly. Now I don't remember-"

There was a sudden flash of frustration, a clenched fist.

"I have no idea where I ended. I don't remember everything. My life up until midway through the war is clear, and then everything gets choppy and disjointed. There are parts that feel, in my memory, like they happened before other things that I know happened before them. I think there are parts missing. And-"

He stopped, looked at the wall away from Munin's optical input.

"And right now I'm fighting that impulse, that feeling. Right now. Right now there's a part of my mind that wanted to take your statement, process it, and feed back answers calculated toward an end that I don't even understand."

Phi rubbed the crust out of her eyes as Munin spoke, turning over the nightmare in her head.

"Thanks Munin, sorry to bother you. I never did handle nightmares very well."

She spent the next few minutes explaining the dream to the AI, then laid back on the bed, her arms wrapped around the pillow on her chest. "I don't know what any of that means honestly. I was never good at dream interpretation. But I can't help but feel like I should try ti find Zeta."

After a moment more of pondering, she asked Munin, "How difficult do you think it would be to track her down? Or even my parents?"

"No thank you, Munin," Mal said as the avatar winked out, and the former detective was left in his quarters.

Mal sat there for several minutes - the fact that they couldn't ultimately help the girl weighed on him. What weighed on him more is that ultimately....they weren't going to be able to help those indentured down on Venus.

It was quiet a while before Mal got up from his chair, and headed back into the rest of the ship, where he immediately beelined for engineering. There had to be something there he could do to keep his mind current.

Muninn paused for a moment, examining Eli. The silence was notable, especially given the nature of the individual Eli was talking to.
"Tell me, Eli. How long have you been feeling these urges? And what was the last memory you have of prior to your... reawakening? Perhaps we can piece back together what has happened based on publicly available records.

"I wish to assure you at this point that my scans did not find any sort of abnormalities in your ego or morph. You are, as far as my equipment is able test, as baseline in your readings as is to be expected. Other than the aforementioned elevated corticotropin. But please, be honest with me. I feel that the help I can offer would be better if you are not trying to manipulate the results of this conversation to a specific end."

---------------------------

"That is quite alright, Miss Phi. You are of no bother to me, I assure you.

"I could offer you several interpretations of your dreams, however, I believe the most important interpretation of it is what you take away from it. It sounds like something deeply personal to you and I do not wish to cheapen it by attempting to assign meaning to it.

"The fate of your sister, Zeta, is something we may be able to address. If you could tell me what you knew of her and where she was prior to uploading we may be able to begin to track her down. I, however, will make no promises on that regard. Unfortunately I must state that many records of what happened on Earth have been irrecoverably lost and even more people never have been awakened. As you may be aware, only approximately 500 million individuals are currently 'active' in the solar system post Fall."

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As Mal entered engineering he finds another individual in the section, staring at a holographic display of the solar system along side several charts of measurements, numbers and figures. Next to that was what appeared to be an active communication with another man in a morph that Mal would classify as being of Middle-Eastern descent. He recognized the individual after a moment as Marzuq Abdul Wadud al-Bahth, the person who had hired them to help him track down a hidden treasure. The individual al-Bahth was talking to, however, he did not recognize. As the doors hissed shut behind him, al-Bahth looked over his shoulder, turning the seat to look at him.
"Ah, Mr... Edwardo, was it? You come to see where we're going?"