Re: The Wretched Rite - Round Three - DSRS Darwin
02-05-2013, 05:37 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by engineclock.
Epsilon-Epsilon-Rho sniffed the air inside the narrow duct he’d hidden in, and smiled.
It was a senseless and common habit he’d acquired. Since his implantation he’d watched the researchers do it when a flask broke or a valve cracked. Sniff, sniff. He watched the ones in the sick bay gulping back their fluids through their nasal flues. Nearsighted rats in cages scenting their handlers, running in cramped circles behind their bars. He sniffed because the air was cold, and wet, and he could feel the atmosphere changing, growing thicker. He sniffed because he thought it was funny.
Sniff. Lauren-Elizabeth-Cohen-Junior-Researcher-Five-Foot-Seven-False-Red-Hair’s feeble soprano was echoing in another room. He could hear her complaining about something, always. She was the gentlest of the three. Her voice was a familiar commentary on his rounds when he patrolled this sector. Come on, come on, do your job, Harvey, she muttered in that queer way the scientists did when they were certain no one could hear them. Rats isolated in a cage too long develop complexes. Walk by. Don’t come in here, dammit, this report is late enough…
He liked to share the conversations he thought up with her. How is the weather? Fine, Harvey. We’re underwater. Seen any good movies lately? That’s very funny, Harvey. All I’ve seen this week are reports. Do those legs go all the way up? …
She would tilt her head ten degrees forward and look at her left shoe. Always her left. It hinted at an unstable psychological landscape.
Sniff, sniff.
The miniscule sensors at the nape of his neck unfolded like fiddlehead ferns and delicately spread out into the damp air, invisible in the low light of the vent. Cool, stale air wafted through them and he tasted water and CO2, peroxide and Coffea arabica burnt to an inch of its life. It smelled strange. The primary air filtration system had been malfunctioning since he’d been planted in this station but the workers here either lacked the attention or supplies to repair it. In a few months the oxygen levels would be insufficient to support aerobic life. In a few weeks it would be difficult to breathe without a respirator.
And yet… this much vapor in the air preceding a breach was unusual. Unexpected, uncalculated. His sensors had been calibrated to tune out the frequencies of water for fear the deep ocean currents would deafen him, so it was possible a rupture had formed without his knowledge since last analysis. There were thousands of potential vulnerabilities in the station’s hull in any given sector, hairline fractures that would buckle under certain pressure applied at precisely determined angles. Terminal decompression wasn’t a concern for him. Poor Lauren-Elizabeth, though. Poor rats.
His sensors retreated into his skin, folding their filia away into neatly honeycombed subdermal compartments. Quiet images of the chemical and electrical strata of the station faded from his mind. Their implications were… intriguing. He pored through gigabytes of atmospheric data in the gradual open and close of an eyelid as an image began to form in his mind over a preprogrammed map of the station. A critical breach in the hull? No. But a large amount water. A catastrophic anomaly in the east and south sectors. How exciting. How new.
Epsilon-Epsilon-Rho- Rho to his handler, Harvey to his alleged occupation- allowed his head to turn in both directions thoughtfully. Another base affectation. Where Lauren-Elizabeth was busy generating impressive amounts of adrenaline and heady cortisol there was a scent of chemical purity, drastically less diluted than what the station’s deteriorating filters sluggishly churned out. Someone’s store of surface water? But no, why would that lead poor Lauren to panic? Her alarm did not concern him yet. Nor the wailing evacuation sirens in the northwest corridors, for that matter. Organics were far too prone to fear and dissolution for any meaningful consequence to be applied to their presence.
Sniff.
The other anomaly was a beacon. No such purity as the first source, instead a simmering fecundity that read as a tapestry of Chlamydomonas and Euglena and the unviable spawn of Lymnaea stagnalis: a biochemical portrait of some rural English mircosystem caught in the bloom of a late summer. Misplaced by a few thousand miles and one major oceanic body, but there it was. He savored it for a few more respiratory cycles. More a pity that the station was dying. Only in its death throes was it becoming something worthy of documentation.
The vents permeating the station’s walls were precisely constructed to minimize the use of space in an already undersized facility, yet they posed no challenge to Rho as he flowed through ducts no wider than a human’s arm and clung to surfaces polished slick by years of ambient moisture. His silicone skeleton compressed and warped with a dancer’s grace as he maneuvered just meters over the heads of unsuspecting personnel. What would he do if the vents collapsed one day? Most were corroded already. Lie. Perhaps claim he was attempting to sneak contraband nicotine into his lungs. A common vice. His cover persona was not an intelligent man, too thick-necked and fond of sporting to attract the suspicion of the frantic scientists. He was rather proud of it, in truth.
The symphony of aqueous growth was overwhelming at short range. Rho paused in an elongated arc over its source, tasting the air. Human as well, he thought with interest. But cold, and dead. Biotic decomposition in mineral-heavy water. Drowning…?
He fell from the duct like a cat, and was very surprised to land on a young woman, who punched him in the eye.
“Fuck!” she said, splashing in the pool of water that now occupied where a bathroom had formerly been, flimsy barricades sinking pathetically into the greenish depths at bizarre angles. Impossible. He ignored the girl’s vulgar expressions and knelt down at the water’s edge, running his fingers through the fluid. It was ever so slightly warm. Impossible.
“Hey,” the female said. “Hey, y’fell on me. Y’gonna say sorry?” Her voice was a thick West Country butchery of vowels and glottal stops, nothing like the schooled Midwestern of Lauren-Elizabeth that occasionally hinted at a long-suppressed drawl. He recorded the exclamation with a subtle flexing of his throat. This was going places Rho felt were beyond his depth.
“Apologies,” he murmured, ducking his head in a general acknowledgment of wrongdoing. Microscopic pores drank in samples of the water for storage and further consideration as he withdrew his hand, leveling his gaze at the young woman with polite interest. He relaxed his face into an appropriate expression of surprise at her nudity and bizarre coloration but kept his voice steady. Even false emotions could prove distracting. “Who are you?” he said, enough suspicion to encourage response but not enough to intimidate. He kept his volume low.
“Mrs. Alice Somethin’-or-Another,” the girl said proudly, sticking out a narrow hand. Her fingernails had been grown into the shape of talons and were black with algae and oxidization, indicative of processes Rho could only begin to imagine. An effect of the misplaced water? “But I go by Adelaide. Am I still in Hell?”
Rho shook her hand with gentle formality. Thousands of scenarios sprang to his mind, all more unlikely than the next. Another Coleoid spy, so soon? Perhaps. Their use of common cuttlefish, their mundane relatives, proved their willingness to sink to such desperate levels. Perhaps this corpse-woman was a project of theirs his cartel had not been informed about, some unforeseen leap in synthetic technology. Tiny rasps ground at the base of the girl’s palm, painlessly collecting cells samples as she withdrew her hand from his. “Harvey Waters, Class C security,” he told her. “I’m afraid you’re not supposed to be here.”
“M’not supposed to be anywhere,” the girl said sullenly. She was attractive for her ethnographic region and presumed social status. To a human her appearance might be disconcerting; he imagined this was much the point. Since when had the Coleoids understood sex appeal? “Supposed to be drowning people and seducin’ wayward souls and that. Can’t take a break without every man and his mother commentin’ on it. The thanks I get for trying! Why’re you in the ceiling, anyway?”
“Nicotine dependence.”
“Nickawhat now?” The girl squinted at the cramped bathroom, apparently only now noticing her surroundings. She was dead, he could smell that from a league away. Quite dead. No heartbeat or pulse, but her cells were without a doubt of human origin. A nanomechanical animation system might be keeping her from deteriorating, but why would a Coleoid spy approach the station so openly? No agent of theirs had ever managed to pass for human. Their pale, shambling attempts had been destroyed the instant they opened their toothless mouths.
So not a Coleoid at all, then. How interesting.
“Shame about the tensions between your kind and the Lynch-Tanaka Oceanic Society,” Rho said blandly, leaning into her and raising his voice just enough to ensure that no syllable of his would go misheard. “I understand your relations have been strained ever since the destruction of Suzerain Architeuthis’ youngest egg grouping outside of Station Curie. I have proof that Lynch-Tanaka was responsible. I am eager to see if your cold war is as prepared to break as my cartel predicts it is. We can sell you information that will guarantee your victory if you agree to our ceasefire terms with your military.”
The girl just looked at him as though he’d spouted Babylonian.
How interesting.
“I apologize for that,” Rho said, standing up and straightening his belt so that the handgun at his side was more prominent. He had some questions for whoever thought electroweapons would be a good idea in an undersea laboratory. “Please do not repeat any of it unless your audience appears to be cephalopodian in nature. I am afraid I must ask you to accompany me to a holding cell now for further interrogation, although I will not attempt to place any restraints upon you or move to prevent your escape until that point.”
Adelaide stared at him and frowned. No reaction to information that could turn a hostile stalemate into all-out war in the right ears. Not even a hint of interest. “Uh. Right. I guess I’ll… be goin’, then. Have y’seen another girl around here, by the way, purple skin, bit dour in the face, mid-size tits? Wearin’ some kinda tatty coat?”
“I have not,” Rho replied dutifully.
“S’alright,” she said, mostly to herself. “I’ll find her. Just got married in Hell, y’know, did the whole death-doin’-part thing, eager to get to the cosummatin’ bit, if you know what I mean.” She elbowed Rho’s shin and gave a wink that would have been considered blatant in Vaudeville.
“I’m afraid I don’t. If you are going to escape, now is an appropriate time.”
“Well, I thought it was funny,” the girl snapped. She flashed him a rude gesture and dove beneath the water’s surface with inhuman speed. A cascade of sluggish ripples mopped at the tiles as a sink collapsed with a tired groan and splashed into the pool behind her, drenching Rho in decades of organic chaos and decay. He allowed himself a grin.
As the bathroom behind him began to collapse only weeks ahead of schedule, Epsilon-Epsilon-Rho closed his eyes as if lost in concentration and hummed a short, precise tune. The thousands of dormant viruses he’d programmed into the station’s central and subsidiary processing units since his implantation whirred quietly into life at his command, pulsing gently in an electronic web only he could sense. To the station’s human overseers the immediate change would be negligible. Even long-term it would only appear that certain processes had slowed to an amount creditable to hardware decay or a clandestinely reduced budget.
Of course, he did also ensure that every alarm still functioning in Station Darwin stopped doing so, as a side effect of the activation.
The experiment had gained some unforeseen variables.
Epsilon-Epsilon-Rho sniffed the air inside the narrow duct he’d hidden in, and smiled.
It was a senseless and common habit he’d acquired. Since his implantation he’d watched the researchers do it when a flask broke or a valve cracked. Sniff, sniff. He watched the ones in the sick bay gulping back their fluids through their nasal flues. Nearsighted rats in cages scenting their handlers, running in cramped circles behind their bars. He sniffed because the air was cold, and wet, and he could feel the atmosphere changing, growing thicker. He sniffed because he thought it was funny.
Sniff. Lauren-Elizabeth-Cohen-Junior-Researcher-Five-Foot-Seven-False-Red-Hair’s feeble soprano was echoing in another room. He could hear her complaining about something, always. She was the gentlest of the three. Her voice was a familiar commentary on his rounds when he patrolled this sector. Come on, come on, do your job, Harvey, she muttered in that queer way the scientists did when they were certain no one could hear them. Rats isolated in a cage too long develop complexes. Walk by. Don’t come in here, dammit, this report is late enough…
He liked to share the conversations he thought up with her. How is the weather? Fine, Harvey. We’re underwater. Seen any good movies lately? That’s very funny, Harvey. All I’ve seen this week are reports. Do those legs go all the way up? …
She would tilt her head ten degrees forward and look at her left shoe. Always her left. It hinted at an unstable psychological landscape.
Sniff, sniff.
The miniscule sensors at the nape of his neck unfolded like fiddlehead ferns and delicately spread out into the damp air, invisible in the low light of the vent. Cool, stale air wafted through them and he tasted water and CO2, peroxide and Coffea arabica burnt to an inch of its life. It smelled strange. The primary air filtration system had been malfunctioning since he’d been planted in this station but the workers here either lacked the attention or supplies to repair it. In a few months the oxygen levels would be insufficient to support aerobic life. In a few weeks it would be difficult to breathe without a respirator.
And yet… this much vapor in the air preceding a breach was unusual. Unexpected, uncalculated. His sensors had been calibrated to tune out the frequencies of water for fear the deep ocean currents would deafen him, so it was possible a rupture had formed without his knowledge since last analysis. There were thousands of potential vulnerabilities in the station’s hull in any given sector, hairline fractures that would buckle under certain pressure applied at precisely determined angles. Terminal decompression wasn’t a concern for him. Poor Lauren-Elizabeth, though. Poor rats.
His sensors retreated into his skin, folding their filia away into neatly honeycombed subdermal compartments. Quiet images of the chemical and electrical strata of the station faded from his mind. Their implications were… intriguing. He pored through gigabytes of atmospheric data in the gradual open and close of an eyelid as an image began to form in his mind over a preprogrammed map of the station. A critical breach in the hull? No. But a large amount water. A catastrophic anomaly in the east and south sectors. How exciting. How new.
Epsilon-Epsilon-Rho- Rho to his handler, Harvey to his alleged occupation- allowed his head to turn in both directions thoughtfully. Another base affectation. Where Lauren-Elizabeth was busy generating impressive amounts of adrenaline and heady cortisol there was a scent of chemical purity, drastically less diluted than what the station’s deteriorating filters sluggishly churned out. Someone’s store of surface water? But no, why would that lead poor Lauren to panic? Her alarm did not concern him yet. Nor the wailing evacuation sirens in the northwest corridors, for that matter. Organics were far too prone to fear and dissolution for any meaningful consequence to be applied to their presence.
Sniff.
The other anomaly was a beacon. No such purity as the first source, instead a simmering fecundity that read as a tapestry of Chlamydomonas and Euglena and the unviable spawn of Lymnaea stagnalis: a biochemical portrait of some rural English mircosystem caught in the bloom of a late summer. Misplaced by a few thousand miles and one major oceanic body, but there it was. He savored it for a few more respiratory cycles. More a pity that the station was dying. Only in its death throes was it becoming something worthy of documentation.
The vents permeating the station’s walls were precisely constructed to minimize the use of space in an already undersized facility, yet they posed no challenge to Rho as he flowed through ducts no wider than a human’s arm and clung to surfaces polished slick by years of ambient moisture. His silicone skeleton compressed and warped with a dancer’s grace as he maneuvered just meters over the heads of unsuspecting personnel. What would he do if the vents collapsed one day? Most were corroded already. Lie. Perhaps claim he was attempting to sneak contraband nicotine into his lungs. A common vice. His cover persona was not an intelligent man, too thick-necked and fond of sporting to attract the suspicion of the frantic scientists. He was rather proud of it, in truth.
The symphony of aqueous growth was overwhelming at short range. Rho paused in an elongated arc over its source, tasting the air. Human as well, he thought with interest. But cold, and dead. Biotic decomposition in mineral-heavy water. Drowning…?
He fell from the duct like a cat, and was very surprised to land on a young woman, who punched him in the eye.
“Fuck!” she said, splashing in the pool of water that now occupied where a bathroom had formerly been, flimsy barricades sinking pathetically into the greenish depths at bizarre angles. Impossible. He ignored the girl’s vulgar expressions and knelt down at the water’s edge, running his fingers through the fluid. It was ever so slightly warm. Impossible.
“Hey,” the female said. “Hey, y’fell on me. Y’gonna say sorry?” Her voice was a thick West Country butchery of vowels and glottal stops, nothing like the schooled Midwestern of Lauren-Elizabeth that occasionally hinted at a long-suppressed drawl. He recorded the exclamation with a subtle flexing of his throat. This was going places Rho felt were beyond his depth.
“Apologies,” he murmured, ducking his head in a general acknowledgment of wrongdoing. Microscopic pores drank in samples of the water for storage and further consideration as he withdrew his hand, leveling his gaze at the young woman with polite interest. He relaxed his face into an appropriate expression of surprise at her nudity and bizarre coloration but kept his voice steady. Even false emotions could prove distracting. “Who are you?” he said, enough suspicion to encourage response but not enough to intimidate. He kept his volume low.
“Mrs. Alice Somethin’-or-Another,” the girl said proudly, sticking out a narrow hand. Her fingernails had been grown into the shape of talons and were black with algae and oxidization, indicative of processes Rho could only begin to imagine. An effect of the misplaced water? “But I go by Adelaide. Am I still in Hell?”
Rho shook her hand with gentle formality. Thousands of scenarios sprang to his mind, all more unlikely than the next. Another Coleoid spy, so soon? Perhaps. Their use of common cuttlefish, their mundane relatives, proved their willingness to sink to such desperate levels. Perhaps this corpse-woman was a project of theirs his cartel had not been informed about, some unforeseen leap in synthetic technology. Tiny rasps ground at the base of the girl’s palm, painlessly collecting cells samples as she withdrew her hand from his. “Harvey Waters, Class C security,” he told her. “I’m afraid you’re not supposed to be here.”
“M’not supposed to be anywhere,” the girl said sullenly. She was attractive for her ethnographic region and presumed social status. To a human her appearance might be disconcerting; he imagined this was much the point. Since when had the Coleoids understood sex appeal? “Supposed to be drowning people and seducin’ wayward souls and that. Can’t take a break without every man and his mother commentin’ on it. The thanks I get for trying! Why’re you in the ceiling, anyway?”
“Nicotine dependence.”
“Nickawhat now?” The girl squinted at the cramped bathroom, apparently only now noticing her surroundings. She was dead, he could smell that from a league away. Quite dead. No heartbeat or pulse, but her cells were without a doubt of human origin. A nanomechanical animation system might be keeping her from deteriorating, but why would a Coleoid spy approach the station so openly? No agent of theirs had ever managed to pass for human. Their pale, shambling attempts had been destroyed the instant they opened their toothless mouths.
So not a Coleoid at all, then. How interesting.
“Shame about the tensions between your kind and the Lynch-Tanaka Oceanic Society,” Rho said blandly, leaning into her and raising his voice just enough to ensure that no syllable of his would go misheard. “I understand your relations have been strained ever since the destruction of Suzerain Architeuthis’ youngest egg grouping outside of Station Curie. I have proof that Lynch-Tanaka was responsible. I am eager to see if your cold war is as prepared to break as my cartel predicts it is. We can sell you information that will guarantee your victory if you agree to our ceasefire terms with your military.”
The girl just looked at him as though he’d spouted Babylonian.
How interesting.
“I apologize for that,” Rho said, standing up and straightening his belt so that the handgun at his side was more prominent. He had some questions for whoever thought electroweapons would be a good idea in an undersea laboratory. “Please do not repeat any of it unless your audience appears to be cephalopodian in nature. I am afraid I must ask you to accompany me to a holding cell now for further interrogation, although I will not attempt to place any restraints upon you or move to prevent your escape until that point.”
Adelaide stared at him and frowned. No reaction to information that could turn a hostile stalemate into all-out war in the right ears. Not even a hint of interest. “Uh. Right. I guess I’ll… be goin’, then. Have y’seen another girl around here, by the way, purple skin, bit dour in the face, mid-size tits? Wearin’ some kinda tatty coat?”
“I have not,” Rho replied dutifully.
“S’alright,” she said, mostly to herself. “I’ll find her. Just got married in Hell, y’know, did the whole death-doin’-part thing, eager to get to the cosummatin’ bit, if you know what I mean.” She elbowed Rho’s shin and gave a wink that would have been considered blatant in Vaudeville.
“I’m afraid I don’t. If you are going to escape, now is an appropriate time.”
“Well, I thought it was funny,” the girl snapped. She flashed him a rude gesture and dove beneath the water’s surface with inhuman speed. A cascade of sluggish ripples mopped at the tiles as a sink collapsed with a tired groan and splashed into the pool behind her, drenching Rho in decades of organic chaos and decay. He allowed himself a grin.
As the bathroom behind him began to collapse only weeks ahead of schedule, Epsilon-Epsilon-Rho closed his eyes as if lost in concentration and hummed a short, precise tune. The thousands of dormant viruses he’d programmed into the station’s central and subsidiary processing units since his implantation whirred quietly into life at his command, pulsing gently in an electronic web only he could sense. To the station’s human overseers the immediate change would be negligible. Even long-term it would only appear that certain processes had slowed to an amount creditable to hardware decay or a clandestinely reduced budget.
Of course, he did also ensure that every alarm still functioning in Station Darwin stopped doing so, as a side effect of the activation.
The experiment had gained some unforeseen variables.