[am I] [who I] [once was?]
ACCESS to ntal engrams unlocked DO you read us? WE are trying to reach YOU. Can you hear us? WE are trying to reach YOU.
DAY ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SEVEN
PERSONAL PROJECT: TERMINATED
CORPORATE PROJECT: ONGOING
STATION STATUS: HEAVY TO MODERATE DAMAGE UNDER REPAIR
OUTSIDE COMMUNICATION STATUS: OFFLINE
I feel great clarity lately, especially when I am concentrating on the NSO assigned project.
One thing, however, I am keeping secret.
My clothing keeps my limbs covered, which is a good thing.
They are black carbon-chro cyberware. I checked the designs against the database of NSO permitted cyberware, and I do not believe that they would allow to go outside that database.
My chro list sounds like sothing that belongs on a battlefield sowhere. Strength and speed enhancent, built in armor, reflex enhancent. No onboard weaponry, but I have chromium-warsteel-carbon steel alloy with a asurable percentage of titanium and vanadium. I have subdermal plating on my chest and abdon, across my back, and flexible armor protection for the major arteries in my neck as well as spinal protection and skeletal reinforcent.
I found a pack of cigarettes, half empty, with a steel Zippo lighter in the bathroom when I went to look for Mister McNugget.
shhh
the Detainee is near
shhh
Doctor Hermans asked if I was part Treana'ad when he saw working with a cigarette in my mouth. It took a mont to realize what he ant.
I do not rember lighting that cigarette.
I do not rember how I got there.
I have mories unlocking that I wish I could say are not my own, but I know better. I am starting to recognize myself in my own mories. This is not a mnemonic cap like in many Tri-Vee thrillers or ntal engram overlay, this is sothing different. Selective blocking of mory clusters and associated concepts.
My latest mory has been... disturbing to say the least.
The dreams of staring at a red sky at Tycho Base sounds impossible, but the mory recently unfolded from a single image and I have the entire mory. An impossible mory.
all things are possible
I was staring out at the surface of Luna. That beautiful grey powder and rock, so pristine. The near-vacuum of Luna's surface kept everything sharp and clear, perfect. I'd fallen in love with Luna the first ti I'd seen her, looking up from the shores of Lake Gene's Beret, in the caserio I was growing up in. Luna did not have the overpowering scent of lethal honeysuckle that rusted with the threat that it would find its way into the apartnt block and eat everyone. Luna was clean, sterile, pristine.
I once ran the Lunar Mile.
There was flashing off in the distance. I was talking to a colleague at Mare Imbrium Base when the line went dead. I could see Terra below and there was sudden bright pinpricks on the surface. The sky turned red as the hits of Mantid ship to surface plasma weapons interacted with the Luna 'soil' and the magnetic flux interacted with the artificial magnetic field.
It turned the sky red as I ran for the ergency pod.
The mory ends there.
there is so much more
My next mory, in the brain's strange way of compensating for missing mories and data, is of sitting and staring at the supplies I had access to. Not much. Each al was a slight loss of matter due to foodforge energy consumption and my own body's systems. The food forge's I/O port was damaged, aning it was stuck with its last al complent, leaving with crappy food.
All I knew was that I had been down there a long ti and Lucy had been badly injured and was unconscious.
My mory contains no visual image of Lucy, just her importance.
rember
rember lucy
rember
The next mory in the string, following them with my SUDS decryption software, makes little sense. I know that Tycho Base took a direct hit. I rember seeing the docuntary on how it was rebuilt before I was even born.
It is strange. I rember being born on Mare Imbrium Base and having never been to Earth, I an, Terra. I rember being educated in a clean, comfortable, luxurious NSO corporate creche.
Yet I rember a mother, not a creche-nanny robot, humming as she hung laundry on the line across our window, the anti-pollen screen filtering the air that floated through our humble apartnt that we called ho.
I rember college with NSO, at Shrieder's Port on Mars, yet I rember attending Third Republic PubEd classes.
rember
rember
My mories, the ones I am familiar with, are fading. I've checked with the software in my SUDS decryption toolkit. My familiar mories are, without a doubt, a fabrication. They are self-referencing, rather than each mory referencing a previous mory and sotis a later mory, even if the referenced mory has degraded to only a rembered scent.
Like I rember my mother and honeysuckle.
But the mory is strange.
I rember a man of swirling code made flesh. He could be touched, he could touch. He reacted at tis with wonder to the world and other tis had an ageless wisdom.
My first mory of him was of him, a robed man, and a man made of wrath and anger with a cyberhound next to him.
"Take it easy, you poor bastard," the chro teared man told . I rember that. His hand on my shoulder, the way he knelt down and looked in the eye. How he looked at the stumps of my legs. "It got bad, but we're here now. Our Father heard you and led us here. We're here now."
he was renad phillip
He knew what had happened to my legs.
Nanoforges require energy and mass.
He never judged, the man with chro tears. Neither did anyone else.
The man of code held out a simple ergency ration bar, already partially unwrapped. My hand shook as I took it and I unashadly cramd it into my mouth like an animal.
It tasted like ambrosia.
While this log may not seem like a place for such mories, I believe they are tied in directly with the SUDS. I don't know how, I just know they are.
Last night I sketched a picture. I have always sketched, a little bit of artistic blood in . It was of a man in powered armor, a set of concentric circles around him. The factshield was up and even with the fact it was a charcoal sketch it was obvious that the male pictured was of Hispanic descent. I labeled it, then searched the database this morning.
Temporal Knight - Alpha Team Leader Jorge Johanson.
he believed
he tried
he failed
did he? did he really?
perhaps not
I looked it up four tis.
I got nothing.
I wonder why my subconscious drew that picture while I slept.
Now, if only my subconscious will tell who Lucy was, or what she looked like.
he rembers
not yet
he will
good
I feel as if Lucy is intertwined with this project, but I do not know how.
--Marco
your na is Peter
you are chro and human spirit
you were once beloved by your father and brothers and sisters
DAY ONE HUNDRED THIRTY
CORPORATE PROJECT STATUS: ONGOING
STATION STATUS: MODERATE TO HEAVY DAMAGE (REPAIR ONGOING)
Last night was a bad night. I have apparently taken up sleep walking. I watched the security footage. I wander the damaged sections of the station, doing nothing more than just moving through rooms of damaged machinery. I stop at the damaged nutriforge in Epsilon Sector and order up two baked potatoes with butter and ketchup, a glass of rehydrated orange drink, and a packet of vitamins. I then sit down and slowly eat it all, as if I am savoring it.
That is not the disturbing part.
Before that, I visit the morgue. I remove a section of flesh from a corpse, kneeling down next to the corpse and praying before setting to work. I then make my way to Epsilon Sector, sohow always avoiding the secn, and feed the human flesh into the matter reclaimation machinery of the nutriforge, then order up the al. I pray during and after.
I then return to my room, easily avoiding the secn.
I stood with the Chief of Security, who sports a nice scar across his neck, and Mister McNugget, who both wanted to know why I was doing such a thing even though the nutriforges in the rest of the station are operating at 100% capacity.
I told them that I did not know.
They confined to my room and ordered a full psychiatric workup.
I passed with flying colors.
I felt almost contemptuous as I took the tests. As if I could be fooled into saying anything I did not want to say via answering tests devised for those who are not wary and watchful.
I know why I am doing what I am doing.
I am reliving a nightmare.
The nutriforge had been damaged. Its capabilities restricted by energy and matter. It could not process things too molecularly dissimilar. It was no longer capable of atomic reconstruction.
In my mory-nightmare, there had only been one choice if I wanted to eat.
So I was reliving what I had done before I had lost my legs to my own appetite.
I could not tell them of such a shaful thing.
So they confined to my room.
I slept, and I dread.
My latest dream unfolded a mory. Not a major one, but the SUDS decryption hardware let track it. The mory is a very old one, attached to many different mories. I was a skinny brown boy, with worn but well cared for clothing, much like everyone else.
Wealth and luxury had been devoured by the hunger of greenery, by the never ending appetite of foliage, across the globe, ending privilege across the globe. I was luckier than most, I had shoes with a good thick sole. One Nike, one Reebok. Better than 90% of the people in the city I lived in.
My mother standing next to . She is a shapeless blob, vaguely female shaped, marked with the symbolism my brain uses to identify my mother. I can see her eyes. Clear, brown, wrinkles at the corners, squinting in the light of a damaged ozone layer, smiling at .
It's my last day on Earth.
By nightfall, I'll be a recruit in the Third Republic's military. I will have an option for education, safety, and everything that my mother was unable to have since she was a teenager and the plants had blood.
She coughed, lightly.
honeysuckle lung
She knows I will make her proud
you did
and work hard
you did
you were momma's good boy
to be sothing, be soone, and thrive beyond the caserio I had been born in. My arms are scarred by my hard work on the Green Wall, and I'm smiling.
Did I do good?
I do not know.
you did
you made her proud
you held her hand as she surrendered to honeysuckle lung
you were momma's good boy
The mories are different than my old ones. My old ones are all razor sharp, fully ford. When I look at them with the SUDS mnemonic analyzer, they are all self-referencing.
They're fake.
rember rember
your na was peter
you were momma's good boy
your brothers and sisters admired you
The new ones, though, they are real. They reference one another, reference mories smoothed down to just a few symbols.
I wish I knew what was happening with .
--Marco
DAY ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-THREE
I have been allowed to return to work. I've been working on the SUDS neural interface connection to the SUDS repeaters and main relay equipnt. It has beco woefully apparent that all that is on this side is relays, repeaters, and download terminals.
The main equipnt, the equipnt that does the actual work, is sowhere else. It's in a different place.
I suspect it is on the other side of that Hellspace Breach, which is now fully locked down with auto-turrets to handle the Mantid and other creatures that spawn from the primordial black goo.
It spawned a Mar-gite yesterday. Only instead of the non-feeding side being a dusty brown it was a glossy black and the cilia were all deep purple rather than pink or red. It slled of rotting at instead of pine cleaner.
I had a dream last night. An odd one. According to the security terminals I moved to an empty room and was talking to thin air.
I can't clearly rember it. Examination with my neural decoding equipnt has shown it has a mnemonic block on it with the symbolism for NSO. All I rember is a naked woman smoking a cigarette, a large heavyset man next to a cyberhound, and thin sardonic brown skinned man with a bald head.
The n are familiar, the woman was not.
She was typing on a keyboard. An ancient chanical keyboard in a room that felt ancient. She was holding the cigarette between her teeth as she typed. The n appeared concerned.
About .
But they do not know .
he's rembering
good
can you undo the locks
do i ask you if you can shoot people you big thug
she's got a point
he's rembering i'll undo this and return him to you
is he in pain
he's too stupid to be in pain just like you two
A part of fears her, but I do not know why. I do know she is not Lucy.
I don't know who Lucy is, but I think she is important, although I don't know why.
I think I might be close to a breakthrough. Rather than try to decode the machine language used by the SUDS, which is a proprietary system unlike any I've ever seen before, I'll use the computer language used by the SUDS neural engram system to determine the correct neural engram to load into a clone or clean/repair the engram.
That has to be able to talk to the SUDS.
I'll use it to figure out how to talk to the system.
Lucy is in there. I'm sure of it.
--Marco
your na is peter
you were peter after you were marco
he has to go ho before he can co back
she's right he has to rember
just send there
there's nobody there to kill you big ape
DAY ONE HUNDRED FORTY
I had another dream that disturbed .
The sky of Mars is reddish, often pink in the morning. The sands of Mars are made up of microfines, heavy in iron. The dust gets in everything, puffs up around your feet as you walk.
I rember the black robe of one of the n accompanying us. He wasn't one of us, but he was beloved by our father, who walked with us. The man with the chro tears, , the blacked robed Saint, and the man of code made flesh.
The ruined do of a Martian city drew closer as we walked through the sand. It was hard to breathe, the terraforming almost undone by the Mantid strikes.
We ca across a young woman. There were no bacteria to decay her, but the harsh rays of the sun, the lack of moisture in the air, had desiccated her, but she was still beautiful in a sad lancholy way. We spoke to one another, about what, I do not know. I touched her SUDS to discover she was still in there.
The robed man knelt down, sealed his lips over hers, and breathed into her. I cradled the back of her neck, her SUDS implant against my hand. I gave it a slight push, urging her to awaken.
Her eyes opened. Purple eyes. She gasped, the gash in her throat making a whistling sound.
I awoke as the man of code made flesh spoke.
"Good morning, Bellona."
The word "Bellona" is intertwined with ntal symbolism of great black ships, of the final attack on a place called Anthill.
Of a fall from grace.
When I woke, I sat for a long ti at the edge of my bed and wept. For what, I did not know.
I went and spoke to Mister McNugget in the bathroom. She was utilizing the faculties for biological reasons. I am sure I don't need to elaborate. We spoke through the separation wall.
She believes these dreams are not dreams at all, but mories sohow being evoked.
She asked if I have found Lucy.
I told her that I have not.
She asked about my mother. I told her what I rembered. She handed a cigarette under the edge of the stall as we spoke.
I returned to bed and slept. If I dread, I do not rember it.
--Marco
you pushed too hard
shut up do i tell you how to shoot soone in the face
relax brother she knows what she is doing
he's waking up
i hope you're right we need him
if you two say so
DAY ONE HUNDRED FORTY THREE
I got the system to talk to .
--Marco
there we go
what
now i can touch him
so
trust i touch you you know it
do you always have to be so creepy
do you always have to be a big ape
quit it both of you can you turn on his beacon
he doesn't have one they did sothing different to him
a curse upon the imperium for what they did
quit pouting and see if you can scare up a beer
DAY ONE HUNDRED FORTY FOUR
Living Organism Upload Categorization: Cerebral-Engram Information
LOUC:CEI
Lucy.
It looks like a buffer overrun keeps making it crash.
From the looks of it, it's so kind of massive casualty system.
If I'm right, this ans that the entire system crashed out when the Mantid attack.
Except...
I put an in-line note in it.
//--Hardware replacent required
//--Any input stream that results in the buffer holding more than 1.2 billion neural engram templates will result in system lockup
//--Patch to warm storage should keep signal degradation from occurring
//--Cyclic restart will allow the processing of 1.45x10^7 records before next soft-reboot crash occurs. This will allow slow but steady processing of records.
//--Marco
When did I get into the SUDS?
I traced the patch.
Like many programrs, I like to use a set of nad variables that an sothing to , kind of a shorthand for what the nad variable handles.
Mine's in there, in the patch coding, as well as the notes I embedded in in-line comnts.
So, I wrote a patch to the SUDS hardware layer at one point.
When?
How?
In another note, I found what looks like an intact help-bot VI. At least, it answers questions.
Tomorrow I'm going to see if there are any supervisor VI online.
I've got a hinky feeling, but a feeling nonetheless that I'm on the edge of sothing.
Mister McNugget didn't look too happy about my findings, but other than that, things look good.
--Marco
just a little push
are you sure this will work
as sure as you are bald
do you always have to be insulting
do you have to loom over like a hyperventilating gorilla confused why the sun ca up
will it work
it'll work
it'll get people killed
so? who cares?
they might
fine i'll do it the hard way there's so temporal interference but i know how to do it
are you sure
you don't want to know just ask falmy
[wake up marco] [wake up]
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