Session 3 Log

Song Cai Flower Tier - Past, Present and Future

• The corpse-guardians burned John 117 to death with pulse lasers and ripped him in two while Terry jetted in as the cavalry that arrived just in the nick of too late. While he blew apart one of the TITAN war machines and held the others at bay with his minigun, the rest of the survivors raced aft to join the fight. The shootout was protracted but the half-corpse/half-machine monsters were eventually put down with no further casualties. Twice in fact, when their attendant nano swarms attempted to effect repairs.

• Brother Piv deleted one of his forks and reinstantiated John 117 in one of his case morphs as the party made it’s way back to the “Lakota” to regroup and rearm.

• Two things were decided. First, John 117, with Terry riding actual shotgun, would finish planting the last two bomb mules with Piv riding along as a virtual demolitions assistant. Second, after planting the bombs the survivors would take the “Lakota” to a safe distance, detonate the explosives, confirm the ship’s destruction and farcast to Darwin’s safe haven.

• In the meantime, Rentlov returned to the computer lab to try and recover anything of value from the burned out server. He was unsuccessful.

• This time they approached the stern along the outside of the hull. As they passed over the hydroponics section of the ship, John 117 and Terry were able to see through the clear hull and unfortunately got a good look at what the corpse-guards had apparently been protecting. A repulsive mass of organic tissue growing around the central gantry track, being maintained by an industrial fabber that was in turn being fed from the pile of freeze dried corpses John 117 had previously encountered.  

At a dozen random-seeming points thick, tubular spines extended from the mass up to and through the hull, ending in an array of small hatches that looked to Terry’s pilot’s eyes suspiciously like launch ports. Most of the semi-transparent tubes were loaded with small, partially organic devices strangely reminiscent of tiny reentry torpedoes. The party immediately made the connection between the ship’s close-approach course through the inner system and the sinister potential in the missiles.  

• As John 117 and Terry made their hasty way back forward after planting the last of the bombs on the reaction mass tanks, a corpse-guardian inside the hydroponics section leapt to the interior side of the hull and paced them, furiously trying to cut it’s way through with it’s lasers. Terry gave it a mechanical bird with one of his two good tentacle arms and they raced on to the “Lakota.”

• The decision was made for Piv’s Daitya instantiation to remain aboard the “Flower” in case something went wrong with the demolition plan while his remaining case instance left on the “Lakota.” Terry botched the initial un-docking procedure, actually ripping the distal half of the docking spar off the ship.

• When the shuttle took up position at a safe distance of 100 kilometers two more cockups occurred. First, Piv’s Daitya instantiation was unable to delete himself and started begging to be picked up. Accordingly, his case instantiation aboard the “Lakota” also lost it and began freaking out, demanding that the shuttle return to save his other self. Second, nothing happened when the detonation signal was sent. Piv realized that the “plastic explosives” he had used was actually only training putty.

John 117 took care of the first problem by slagging case Piv with his plasma rifle and Terry took care of the second by plotting a ramming course for the “Lakota” back into the “Flower.” Of course this meant that the party had to figure out a way to confirm the destruction of the “Flower” after they had already farcast away and sell this plan to Darwin - the de facto gatekeeper.

Ultimately Kru stripped the comm gear out of the “Lakota” and built a one-shot long range transmitter and it was decided that a fork of John 117 would stay behind to record the destruction and transmit the message. The rest of the party was unceremoniously farcasted to Darwin’s unknown coordinates, and forks of Terry, so he could pilot the ship, and John 117 were left behind.

• The course was flawless and the impact was accompanied by Terry overriding the anti-matter containment on the courier's shuttle. The resulting explosion vaporized both ships instantly, leaving only a rapidly expanding cloud of metallic gas. With a unemotional command to his muse, the John 117 fork then deleted himself and everything went black.

Personal Tier

Interrogation

Everything is black, like the space between the stars. Or is it brilliant white, like afterimages from staring at the sun? You feel nothing, but you sense everything. You are certain time is passing, but uncertain how you know. At first, there are no words - only a single, narrow signal knifing in, then streaming out. The signal expands and reaches deeper. Now you hear something but with a directness that bypasses your ears. New data fills your mind but as if you already knew it. Some of your fears subside - old ones and new - but others take their places as you realize this is not a dream.

The signal into your mind expands again and there is pain. Excruciating pain you sense but do not feel. Memories are plucked like the strings of an instrument and they vibrate along neural connections. Damage is repaired, calm is restored, there is uploading and downloading...and secrets are revealed.

Questions are asked and you answer freely, without reserve. You want to ask things, but you cannot find the words - or you are not allowed. In a distant part of your consciousness you realize this is a simulspace and that you are undergoing sophisticated psychosurgical therapy and interrogation. You are dimly aware of this, but you are powerless to resist.

A calm voice asks, and you answer...

Kru:

• You were a military intel officer, yes?

• Did you know your company had been operationally assigned to Oversight?

• Do you know the identity of the Director?

• Did you know what would happen to his son?

Piv:

• You were black ops, correct? Did you know who was tasking your missions?

• Why can’t you remember your handler?

• Have you heard of Project Ozma?

Rentlov:

• Are you actually unaware that you are an AGI?

• Do you have any knowledge of your origins?

• Do you have any idea of the programming achievement you represent? An AI with asynchronous abilities?

Terry:

• Was your choice to dock with the Song Cai Flower voluntary?

• How did you know where to rendezvous with it?

• I suppose you do not know that you were tried in absentia, found guilty of desertion and sentenced to indentured service?

Nikolas:

• Who is Angel?

• Do you know your memory has been partitioned and that one of the partitioned fragments is now empty?

John 117

• What was your objective in boarding the Song Cai Flower?

• We have found a reference to the Flower in an incomplete ten-year-old mission brief. Did you know you were working for Firewall, or were you just a disposable asset?

•••

• For the survivors weeks seemed to pass - a time of semi-consciousness with only short moments of lucidity intermixed with long periods of vaguely remembered interrogation, debriefing and disinfection. Eventually, after what their muses claimed was over a month of subjective time, the party was brought online in a sim programmed to look like Charles Darwin’s 1860s Downe House study. There they finally came face-to-face with the muse Darwin and the avatar of the mysterious Proxy Evolution - a true-to-science representation of Australopithecus afarensis, the famous ancestral hominid Lucy.

She was mostly polite and exceedingly calm as she explained the situation to the survivors:

“You have been interrogated, screened, therapeutically treated and conditioned in accelerated simulspace. You have been cleared of contamination and any major psychosis.  

The Fall was much more, and much worse, than the average person knows. The TITANs were compromised by a dormant bio-digital plague weapon seeded in the solar system by a long-vanished alien species. It was triggered by the rise of recursive AI programs and appears to have been intended to eliminate any species that reached that level of technological advancement. We call it the Exurgent Virus.

Firewall is not an urban myth. It is very real and may be the only thing standing between transhumanity and extinction. Own that fact, as you are now in it up to your virtual necks.

Some things - besides you - escaped the “Song Cai Flower.” They must be stopped. That’s what Firewall does. That’s what I would like you to do. Your escape indicates you have a well-honed, survival-oriented skill set - something my own team demonstrably lacked.

You have two choices:

1. You may become Firewall sentinels and finish what we inadvertently started by tracking down and destroying the errant exurgent egos that escaped the “Flower.” Or...

2. You may have your recent memories excised through deep psychosurgery and be downloaded into an infugee storage server where you can languish, vying for reinstantiation with millions of other bodiless egos, additionally handicapped with technical skills and knowledge that are hopelessly out of date.

The choice is yours…”

• Most begrudgingly, but a couple with a concerning sort of enthusiasm, they agreed to take what was behind door number one - even though it promised to make their few hours aboard the TITAN-infested “Flower” look like a pleasure cruise.