Session 8 Log

Pontes Station Tier

• Dr. Syn transmitted the egos he recovered from the viable cortical stacks he found at the site of the explosion on Iapetus. Four from the team and seven from the sack of grapes John 117 collected from the tech team. The party members - John 117, Terry, Piv and Rentlov - were all instantiated into simulspace. The scientists and technicians were put directly into secure cold storage. Terry was initially furious with Rentlov, but after faulty memory merges, he and John lost much of their recall of the mission.

Mars Tier

• Kru’s kinesics tracking program alerted him to the presence of at least 11 Song Cai Flower egos disembarking from a planetary shuttle onto Progress Station. Forty minutes later the team had flown from Pontes to Progress and were themselves disembarking. The nearest target was a neotenic morph on one of the garden levels of the axis tower above the shuttleport where they had just landed.

• Upon reaching her level, the party saw she was about to launch off the tower with a group of tourists in zero-g wing packs. The team flanked her while Kru spoofed surveillance and law enforcement and Terry grappled with her. As they tussled she attacked Terry with some kind of prehensile, secondary jaws that extended from inside her throat.

• As her buzzing fairy wings lifted them both into the air Nikolas grabbed hold and kept her from flying them all out into the void by virtue of his magnetic boots. He towed them into a secluded part of the hanging garden and shot the neotenic twice in the head. They then fled the scene followed by the shouts and scream of tourists and the high-pitched whine of incoming security drones.  

Mercury Tier

• After rousing Kru back to consciousness the party sent Piv up the crater wall to be a communications relay point and then dropped one after the other into the narrow “Jeffries tube” they had found inside the roof hatch. After some long crawls and tight squeezes the party came out onto a catwalk overlooking a large room dominated by a complex nano-factory. From this vantage point the party variously noted a number of increasingly horrifying elements in the tableau.

• The machinery in the room hinted at strange purposes and was dominated by large waldoes and manipulators on tracks that gave them access to all parts of the bay. Much of it moved in short fits and starts and some twitched in place - as if the programming were faulty or being shorted or interrupted. 

- On the far side of the room, in the background, the steel morph the party had followed to Caloris 18 seemed to have integrated itself with a bank of servers and controls - ostensibly those that controlled the machinery. It seemed to be fully, irrevocably occupied by whatever it was doing.   

- In the foreground a large open space below them, ringed with enigmatic machinery, featured a ring of more than 50 crude, headless, human morphs. Each was hunched over and instead of attaching to heads, their shoulders were fused with the pelvis of the next morph in the ring - as if they shared a single central nervous system via one continuous, circular spinal cord. And the aberration was alive - moving, twitching in time with the machinery. 

- At one point the ring of fused morphs was interrupted by a pair of door-like armatures laden with unidentifiable equipment and connected to numerous data cables and large power conduits. There was an empty three meter gap between the portals but the abomination snaked into one door and out the other without anything existing in the intervening space of the gap. 

- And, as if this was not terrifying enough, as they watched the ring of bodies it took an awkward, shuffling, slinky-like step forward. The mind-boggling realization was not however, the fact that the ring could move. It was the fact that the portion leaving the exit portal moved first, followed approximately 6.3 seconds later by the portion at the entrance portal shuffling forward. As if the portals represented two different access points in space-time. As if passing through the portals somehow moved one 6.3 seconds back in time. As if whatever inconceivable sensory perception the spinal ring monster was capable of, it was experiencing it across time.

• As the party gawked at the madness below them a weak signal pinged them through their tactical network. Rentlov - or apparently a previous instantiation of Rentlov - was calling. He drew their attention to where his morph was slung within a kind of makeshift organic fabber that was quickly turning him into one of the fractal tongue centaur sentries. His words made it clear he had suffered some kind of psychotic break as he tried to convince the party - and Terry specifically - that he was fine and they should come down and join him. Ewww.

• As the sentinels stood staring at the horror Rentlov was becoming, another tongue centaur emerged from a side passage and came charging down the catwalk. The party’s withering fire dropped it before it could do much damage.

• During the skirmish, John 117, in his tiny scurrier morph, lept down from the catwalk and bounced across the bay to the stationary steel morph. He climbed up its back like a squirrel up a tree and as it turned it’s head slightly to focus its optics on John, John started to cut away the cables and connections that linked the target to the base’s control system.

• As the connections failed, the shuddering and twitching of the vast array of machinery erupted into frenetic activity. Waldoes, manipulators and articulated limbs blurred as they racing along rails and tracks towards the catwalk, cutting torches, laser welders, diamond drills, acid etchers and nano-grinders promising painful death as they powered up.