Chapter Text
Now you might be thinking that ART would never agree to leave me but
Okay, you know what, I’m done with my little episode of being realistic and acknowledging it. I have better shit to do. Returning to deluding myself about my chances of going home now. [Delete]
So I’m trying to decide what to talk about from New Catonca and how I’m gonna talk about it because unfortunately I do want the quality of writing for this thing to at least pass for mediocre, and I have a headache. And because it’s my stupid fucking head, I can’t control the stupid fucking pain sensors. Why can SecUnits get tension migraines. Who the fuck let that happen. They need to die.
I dunno when or how the people in charge at New Catonca got suspicious of us since I deleted those memories. In retrospect, it’d be helpful right now if I hadn’t wiped so much of my archival data related to New Catonca in favor of nabbing more of their media. (You might be thinking: But Murderbot, what about all that storage space ART gave you? And. Yes. Right. That storage space. The storage space I definitely hadn’t managed to fill up.)
(Look, having so much storage space made me greedy, and I got alarmingly bad at being smart about curation and remembering to transfer files to external storage. What was I supposed to do? Delete all my newest acquisitions that I hadn’t had the chance to go through yet?? No.)
Okay, let’s get back on topic. So due to certain unfortunate circumstances that couldn’t be helped, I dunno when or how we got made but I do know what happened after that. If this were a fictional narrative, I don’t think I’d want to skip over the multiple assassination attempts and lose all those tension building action scenes. Good thing this log isn’t a fictional work and I can just do whatever, like skip over a handful of irrelevant amateur assassination attempts. (They were seriously bad. As in one of them reached the level of stupid of the assassination attempt on Incompetent Assassins Bait (“Bait” for short) that I saw once in a memory-dream courtesy of Dumbfuck. I know this means nothing to you. For context, that assassination attempt had involved this Obviously Evil Old Dirtbag (“Dirtbag” for short, if I ever mention him again) telling his evil apprentice to go kill Bait, but said evil apprentice didn’t want/couldn’t be bothered(?) to do it himself so he sent a bounty hunter to go kill Bait, but the bounty hunter couldn’t be bothered to do it himself and sent a shapeshifter (yeah apparently actual fucking shapeshifters had been a thing) to go kill Bait, but the shapeshifter couldn’t be bothered to do it (even though they(?) could’ve just shapeshifted into one of Bait’s friends and shot her) and sent a bot to go kill Bait, but even the fucking bot couldn’t be bothered to do it itself and sent bugs to go kill Bait, and said bugs tried to poison her. And you know what the crowning moment of stupid in that transport-wreck of stupidity was? (There were a lot of deeply stupid moments so I’m so fucking spoiled for choice, but I have managed to settle on a final answer.) The bounty hunter had an opportunity to kill Bait, but instead he went out of his way to kill the shapeshifter he had hired to kill Bait, just because(???) before he escaped by jetpack. And. I need to make this very clear. He shot the shapeshifter with a poisonous dart. He shot only the fucking shapeshifter with a poisonous dart. Even though Asshole and Dumbfuck were right there too. He could’ve blown them all up to fuck or something.
Yeah.
Yes, it really was that stupid. No, I’m not joking. Okay, I’m done
Actually no I’m not fucking done complaining about that whole disaster. Because Asshole and Dumbfuck had been assigned to guard Bait and they’d sucked absolute ass at it. They’d kept taking her around to very public places and letting her lollygag around in front of an endless parade of huge sniper-friendly windows and THEY DIDN’T EVEN FUCKING STAY WITH HER TO GUARD HER. Yeah. When the assassins (their claim to that title is dubious) finally struck, Asshole and Dumbfuck, Bait’s only two guards, BOTH went off on a merry little chase and left Bait in her unsecured room (complete with those inescapable huge ass windows just begging for a sniper to come along and take advantage) to be attacked by fucking anyone, like say, that bounty hunter, who was watching the whole time. Not the would-be assassin bugs. What happened to those bugs? Asshole and Dumbfuck had ALREADY NOT BEEN GUARDING Bait (even though she was fucking ASLEEP and not even conscious enough to notice incoming danger, much less try to protect herself), which let the bot laser a hole in the window and release the bugs into her room, which then tipped Asshole and Dumbfuck off since they could sense the bugs, and they rushed in to kill them just in the nick of time. (Why hadn’t the bot simply lasered Bait to death? I don’t fucking know. Maybe because it’d already bought the bugs and had experienced sunk-cost fallacy???) Bait had survived on the grace of her would-be assassins’ sheer fucking incompetence alone.)
Also I must note that Dumbfuck had been obsessed with Bait, which, contrary to what shitty transit ring novels would have you believe, is very much not a good thing when you’re doing security work. Why couldn’t they have gotten some other monk who hadn’t been a juvenile obsessed with Bait to guard her? It didn’t even make him creepily watch her sleep, which would’ve actually been fucking helpful. For fuck’s sake.
So I got super off-topic. Oops. I should edit all that out in the final draft because it’s not actually relevant. I really, really should.
Anyway, back to New Catonca’s incompetence at staging (successful) assassinations. You’d think that people who’d experienced such extreme political turmoil that their society collapsed would be better at staging (successful) assassinations, but nope. Though to be fair to them, I guess they’ve never had to deal with their targets having competent security before. (If I hadn’t been there then…the attempts would’ve been less unsuccessful.)
Their single most successful attempt was almost poisoning Seth and Tarik during some “networking event”(?) type thing that Iris and I got out of with the excuse of being “sick” so we could snoop.
Don’t eat that, I told Seth and Tarik as I made my way into the building through the roof entrance. (Iris could’ve come with me, but she’d decided to rappel off the roof to cut through the window of the office with the info we wanted. Why? For the sheer shits and giggles of it. And because it was, in Iris’s words, “a good opportunity to practice breaking into places in a low-stakes situation.”)
Seth kept smiling and nodding at his mark, accepting the plate the mark handed him as he asked, Why?
A special delicacy they made in honor of us? I’d eat my socks if it’s not poisoned, said Tarik, who took care of the problem by pretending he was too absorbed in his own conversation to pay attention to where he was going and bumping into Seth, and both their plates wound up on the floor. Oops. They still had to deal with the rest of the dish on the table, but they were creative. They could handle causing some sort of accident to ruin it on their own. (I’d stopped each attempt so stealthily that it seemed like they’d been thwarted by accident, so we’d been able to pretend we had no idea they were trying to kill us.) (So actually even if I’d bothered to describe the other attempts, they wouldn’t have managed to be tension building action scenes. They would’ve been slapstick comedy scenes straight out of one of the Mensahlings’ animated shows instead.)
(Yeah, I consider that their most successful attempt since Seth and Tarik had to give them such a run-around to get out of eating any of the probably-poisoned dish. So you could say that I’m sparing you the cruel and unusual torture of a lethal amount of secondhand embarrassment by not talking about the other attempts.)
The ART-drone piggybacking on Iris said, Refrain from eating the socks that SecUnit’s Dr. Volescu so kindly made for you. It’s rude. Yes, the probability of poison sits at 87.4%, thus rendering it unlikely that you should have to eat them, but nevertheless.
Tarik protested, I wouldn’t actually eat them!
Why not, when they’re so delicious Peri’s eaten them before? asked Seth.
Iris laughed, choked, and started coughing as Tarik let out a dumbfounded little, “Huh, what?” (Unluckily for Tarik, the person he’d been talking to thought he was confused by their conversation and he got trapped into a longwinded explanation about…something. I dunno, I deleted that data.)
Don’t make me laugh while I’m upside down, Iris complained. She stuck a clamp ART handed her to the window pane she was hanging beside and sent a clip that she’d evidently deemed important enough to store in her augments, of one of ART’s cleaning drones “eating” a sock.
ART bopped Iris with a thin, spindly leg. Hush, you.
Shutting the door of the closet where I’d piled some guards that I knocked out with a little difficulty (at the door-shutting, not the knocking out of the guards), I transmitted the sketch I mocked up of Seth chasing after Tarik and ART’s cleaning drone, each with a sock in their mouth (“mouth” in the drone’s case), an obvious reference to the way humans would chase after their domestic fauna when they started eating something they weren’t supposed to.
Iris and Tarik both let out barks of startled laughter, making Iris choke again and Tarik’s conversational partner (for a given value of “conversation”) very confused.
Thank you, SecUnit, Seth said with a poorly suppressed smile. I’m going to print out this masterpiece and frame it.
This reminded me of the way Mensah, Farai, and Tano would hang up the Mensahlings’ drawings. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that so I didn’t reply. Actually that’s kinda embarrassing. I’m gonna just [Delete]
Anyway, I reached the office after Iris had already removed the circle of window she cut out and entered it. She paused in her inspection of the walls to open the door before I could try the handle. “Sorry, forgot to unlock this for you.”
I could’ve picked the lock (it was one of those old-fashioned, completely physical locks) (Iris taught me how to pick them so she knew I could’ve picked it), but it was nice not to have to even if it’d always creep me out a bit to have a human do polite shit like open/hold open doors for me, like I was a fellow human.
ART, who’d been deposited on the desk so it could access the ancient solid-state screen interface, waved a spare leg at me. You took your sweet time.
Shut up. The guards were slippery. As in they refused to stack and kept slipping off their fellow guards and spilling out of the closets. I released a few drones and started inspecting the walls too, knocking on them as I went.
You could’ve just…not stacked them, Tarik suggested.
SecUnit needs its hobbies where it can get them, said ART-drone, as if it hadn’t helped me calculate how to best position them so no one got crushed to death. As if ART-prime hadn’t been responsible for starting the whole thing in the first place because it thought this was hilarious.
Shut up, I said again because I have the best retorts. Very witty, Murderbot, good job. One of my knocks sounded different than the others, the variation so slight that a human probably wouldn’t have noticed it. It’s here, I announced as I ran my fingers behind the framed picture beside my hand, hit a switch, and the frame swung out with its patch of wall in tow.
How cliche, ART commented with heavy judgment dripping from both its tone and feed.
I made a face at the old-fashioned zero-tech lockable container inside the hidden space as I stepped back to let Iris take a crack (ha) at it. I always experience this strange mix of appreciation and resentment whenever targets show some smidge of intelligence and make a good security choice. I dragged a chair over before Iris could point out that she was too short to comfortably interact with the container.
Iris fell upon it with a somewhat alarming gleam to her eyes. We ran across zero-tech lockable containers like this rarely enough for this encounter to be notable, and it was even a model she’d never interacted with before. Needless to say, she found it an interesting challenge.
I went over to the windows and closed the blinds because no need to tempt trouble. Neither Iris nor (I seriously need to figure out if it’s supposed to be “or” or “nor”) ART noticed. It wasn’t that I believed a sniper would fire on us (no one knew we were there after all), but still. Better safe than sorry. Even if I’m a stupid fucking seer. God. (Yeah, that’s right, I’ll invoke a human god I don’t even fucking believe in before I make like the monks did and invoke the magic that I know exists. Why? Because fuck them, that’s why.)
Also, it’d hide the hole in the window from anyone that entered the office? Not that it mattered, since that’d only last until they opened the blinds, and we were planning to skedaddle soon anyway, which was why we didn’t care about leaving evidence of foul play like holes in windows.
A bloom of disbelief colored the feed. ART said, There’s nothing here. It must all be in the lockable container.
“Alright, no pressure,” Iris muttered, carefully twisting the container’s knob by another millimeter.
ART and I watched a show I’d downloaded from New Catonca while we waited for her to crack it open. ART was sorting through the data it’d downloaded from the solid-state screen interface and analyzing it more deeply than it had when skimming it for the specific info we wanted, but it had that on backburner and was paying close attention to the show.
I was too antsy to pay as much attention as I usually would, an after-effect from what Asshole had done to me, not that I acknowledged it at the time. I kept pulling up the map of the sector that ART had given me, thinking about the itch (the closest comparison I had to the sensation) that hadn’t gone away with our arrival at New Catonca, and then closing it. In between the very productive instances of staring uselessly at the map, I intermittently opened DreamJournal.file to the original section for my dream-inspired sketches to stare uselessly at any drawings that featured Asshole. (Outside of the dream, I could tell that these depictions weren’t 100% correct; the likeness was around 80%, give or take a few percentage points depending on the sketch.) And I did my best not to think about why I correlated Asshole with the itch that hadn’t gone away because thinking about it meant acknowledging that Asshole was real and that he’d done something to me. It meant acknowledging what he’d done to me.
ART didn’t notice this. (I’d been having issues with paying attention to media the whole way to New Catonca so it wasn’t riding my inputs, which meant it couldn’t get context from my filter but it’d been working on being able to properly process media without me (for its ongoing joint research project/paper with Seth and Martyn on AI understanding of media) anyway.) Or if it did, it didn’t make its awareness known.
I hated that I couldn’t pay proper attention, but I couldn’t do anything about it except wait it out. (And fuck Asshole again for this. Seriously. Bad enough that he’d used magic to compel me, as if he had the fucking right, as if he was my master [Delete]
I hated that I couldn’t pay proper attention, but I couldn’t do anything about it except wait it out. The last time something like this had happened, I hadn’t been able to do anything except wait for it to go away, which had taken almost an entire CR-standard month. It’d already been more than a CR-standard month since the day we set out for New Catonca and I started feeling this itch, this need to go some place I couldn’t name (where, where, where? I didn’t know), but surely it would fade? Sooner or later?
A long 19.4 minutes passed before Iris cracked the container.
Okay, I’m being unfair calling 19.4 minutes long when that’s an impressive time comparatively. Most professional locksmiths can take more than an hour to crack containers using this delicate dial manipulation method, even if they have experience with old-fashioned, zero-tech ones. I’d kept watch over Iris taking even longer doing this before without a problem. It was just that the antsiness had robbed me of any patience.
She took off the over-ear headset of the electroacoustic audio amplifier she’d attached to the container’s door and shook her head and hands out (a quirk of hers, for moments after a period of intense concentration that required use of both her ears and hands) before opening it. “Had some false gates, which made it harder,” she reported (knowing only ART cared about those details, and only ART being interested was enough for her to bother), “but it’s old and any internal sound-muffling mechanisms have worn through, so it’s louder than I expected.”
I bit down on the, “Finally,” that wanted to leave my mouth. Reminded myself of how skewed my perception was. How much ART wouldn’t appreciate that. How much Iris wouldn’t appreciate that (and I didn’t want to hurt her, and not just because of ART). Reminded myself that it couldn’t have gone any quicker unless we drilled, which we decided was too loud, and the auto-cracker depended on luck (a brute-force, automated dial-spinner like that could’ve taken anywhere from a minute to fifteen hours). And we certainly didn’t have the kind of lasers that’d be strong enough to cut through the thick reinforced metal that lockable containers were made of.
Anyway, we found a sheaf of papers inside the container (plus other various bits and bobs that didn’t interest me). Iris passed the sheaf over to me so I could take a quick look at each before splitting the images with ART to process into text files. While we did that, Iris tore up the papers and set fire to them in the metal waste-bin, so that more or less took care of any corporations trying to get access to this information in the future, unless there were any backups, which seemed increasingly unlikely when even the most secure (which wasn’t very secure) interface we knew of on this planet hadn’t had digitized versions of this info. ART and I both sent the files into the feed for the humans to download as backup before we all started to make our way out of the building, with ART, Iris and I leaving via the roof, and Seth and Tarik making their excuses to leave via the front door like the very boring, normal humans they were pretending to be.
We decided to meet up back at our rooms (our suite, more like, but that sounds kinda poncy) before doing anything else. ART, Iris, and I got there first since ART could piggyback on Iris (why is it called “piggybacking” anyway?), who could piggyback on me for expedience (is that the word I wanted?), and the buildings in New Catobit had been built closely together enough at manageable enough height differences that I could navigate my way across their roofs with no screaming from Iris, though I could hear her teeth grind occasionally from the effort of refraining.
By the time the three of us got back to our rooms, ART and I had finally finished processing the images into digital text files. This took so long (long enough that it pissed ART off) because a lot of the pages were written by hand, none of the humans responsible had neat handwriting, and ART didn’t have much experience with parsing handwriting so I could actually process that shit faster than it (hooray for my niche and unexpectedly useful expertise with parsing shitty handwriting from time spent watching over the Mensahlings??), and basically everything about the situation offended ART.
Of course we weren’t done since we had to translate those files, and that was easier said than done despite ART’s translation module. Something something the intricacies of languages, not enough exposure for comprehensive analysis so the module was still rudimentary and less able to handle slang or whatever, old-ass documents and “linguistic drift,” blahblah. While we (ART, really, since I contributed mostly just by applying the module and nitpicking through the results, but I had picked up on some shit from media that ART hadn’t???) were translating the files, waiting for Seth and Tarik to arrive, the drones I’d hidden in and around the building containing our rooms alerted on unusual activity, and I watched several hostiles set up bombs around our rooms. (Explosions involve a shit ton of collateral damage. I would’ve had to think about other casualties, but thankfully we were the only ones in the entire building.)
I could’ve tipped everyone else off immediately.
Instead, I checked my visuals from my other drones, then (just to be really safe) scooched over to a window to scan outside with my face-eyes, trying to spot (non-ally) humans with line of sight on us. Any cameras or bugs in their pitiful surveillance system were a complete joke. ART and I got control over those the first day. (They hadn’t been made to withstand a SecUnit, much less a monster super-AI. The hazards of your entire planet metaphorically blowing up to fuck and technological progress slowing to a crawl. The downsides of falling off the galactic map and not knowing what kinda technological progress everyone else made while you were busy killing each other. Though then again, even if they had known, they couldn’t have prepared for ART.) I didn’t see or feel anyone who’d be a problem for the bullshit new plan that’d popped into my head.
What was that plan? To fake our deaths.
I just realized that if you judged solely according to what I’ve recounted in this log, it’d seem like we fake our deaths a lot? This is, what, the third time I’ve mentioned us faking our deaths?? (No, I will not check if that’s correct.)
We don’t. Fake-dying just happened to convenient or events lined up that it naturally occurred on its own (and we went along with it because why not) during those particular months.
Anyway, we’d translated and analyzed enough of the files that I knew we were gonna have to go to some other place to continue our investigation, so we’d be leaving New Catobit as soon as possible. Why not let our would-be assassins think they exploded us to death if we were gonna ditch the city?
I poked ART in the feed and shared my (only somewhat stupid) idea. The hostiles had wired the explosives to blow only once they detected a certain trigger, which they’d made convoluted because why the fuck not make things complicated for themselves?
Okay, to be fair, I did overhear their discussion about their plan and the reasoning wasn’t…unsound… They wanted to be sure that they got all of us, that the explosives went off at just the right time, so they didn’t want to rely on fallible human judgment, an accident of motion, etc, but better assassins would’ve found a less convoluted and exploitable way to ensure mission success.
Anyway, the trigger depended upon the suborned(?) surveillance system detecting four human faces present at the same time on a particular camera, thus ensuring we’d all be within lethal range of the blast radius. Of course given ART and I had total control over said surveillance and we could just detonate the explosives at our leisure, this plan was dumb as fuck, but you almost had to pity just how fucking outclassed these idiots were.
ART stayed silent for six long centiseconds.
What? I asked, bleeding a bit of defensiveness that I couldn’t be bothered to mask or suppress into the feed, which rendered my question belligerent in a way my tone hadn’t.
I am simply considering the unusual frequency at which we have been feigning our demise, said ART with an air of theatrical thoughtfulness. More specifically, the rate at which you have prompted this deception. It begs one to suspect that you’ve finally acquired another hobby, with this being your new pastime of choice. I wonder how many more times you will die this year.
I made some kinda face at ART(-drone), outraged by that accusation. At least one more time, just for that, fuck you. So are we doing this or not?
ART sighed. I suppose. This strategy does have the advantage of allowing us to avoid confrontation, though it will result in the destruction of this building.
I transmitted the impression of a shrug into the feed. Sounds like a them problem.
You are not incorrect. Still, this is such an asinine enterprise. Can they not discern just how obscenely wasteful and recklessly short-sighted it is? ART whinged about our enemies’ stupid-ass plan to kill us, like I should give a shit about their stupid-ass-ness. (Don’t tell me that’s not a real word because it is now.)
Sounds. Like. A. Them. Problem, I repeated as I brought the humans up to speed.
Well anyway, we packed, escaped via a window, hijacked a vehicle, and left New Catonca (short of a building). The info we’d acquired mentioned the location of an abandoned research facility/lab(?), which we were heading towards next with the hope of digging up something of value in those ruins. What we’d uncovered so far indicated that whatever the corporates had been so interested in would be found there, and that it probably had something to do with weapons, because of fucking course. This made so much more sense than those corporations suddenly becoming history nerds invested in the opportunity to study an old as fuck colony. How those corporations had known they could obtain forgotten/lost(?) knowledge about ancient super-weapons (at least we assumed the hypothetical weapons were terrifying super-weapons, what with the way our stolen intel referred to them and the amount of currency those corporations spent in the bidding war over the data clip with the directions to New Catonca), we didn’t know for sure, but we hypothesized it had to do with them all being old as fuck. They’d passed down knowledge about New Catonca but they’d all lost the directions to it or something? That made as much sense as anything else, and the answer didn’t matter anyway, we were just passing time by speculating about it.
Then we arrived at the abandoned facility.
I don’t know how to [Delete]
We found out some new things at the facility. In no particular order:
- That our sequence of side quests had not reached the end;
- That our next destination would, in fact, have to be that horrible, terrible, no-good, very bad and suspicious station;
- I know I said we didn’t go within 100 meters of it, but I kinda sorta lied while also not lying because it’s not like we chose to go, which I will argue is the specific implication my original statement obviously focused upon, sorry not sorry;
- Actually I should really just delete the original statement out or edit that section in a way where it doesn’t seem like I lied, and then I wouldn’t have to argue my case here;
- Whatever secret weaponry this planet had been hiding had something to do with constructs; and
- The Company had originated from this planet or at least had some sort of relations with it once upon a time.
ART discovered that last tidbit when it came across an old, defunct version of the Company’s name and logo, from a couple dozen mergers back. It didn’t even need to say anything. I just felt the particular shockwave of emotions that burst from its feed, and I knew.
I butted my way into its workspace before it could decide to hide what it’d found, and I registered the name and logo (or rather, the blankness of the filtered name and logo). [Edit]
How did you know? asked ART.
I closed the file; ART didn’t open it again. I could’ve explained that it’d developed a distinctive reaction to the Company, but I didn’t need ART trying to erase that tell so I didn’t respond. Wait, maybe that gives the impression that I wasn’t okay.
I was. I just didn’t have anything to say.
Anyway, setting that aside, we needed a way up to the station. The easy answer: take our shuttle there.
Problem: as part of our endeavor to play nice with New Catonca, we’d stored said shuttle in one of their (terrible, neglected) hangars even though they clearly had ulterior motives (studying our shuttle since all their spacecrafts had suffered during the chaos of their planetary turmoil, in more ways than lack of new innovations).
And we were supposed to be dead. And we’d really rather stay “dead” instead of deal with hostile pursuit, especially hostile pursuit into space because New Catonca might not have had super functional spacecrafts or people capable of piloting them but they sure did have functional giant laser cannons (or at least one (probably) functional giant laser cannon) that could easily shoot a shuttle out of the sky.
So, new stupid plan. And this one really did feel so fucking stupid even though Tarik keeps arguing that a plan isn’t stupid if it works.
We were abandoning the shuttle.
I know. Lots of new problems with that, like the fact that an iteration of ART piloted the shuttle. And also the fact that we kinda needed a shuttle to get off the planet.
The issue of ART-shuttle was solved easily enough. It could upload over to me, no problem. Of course I had to make room for it, but
Oh hey, I could’ve just mentioned this earlier as the reason why I deleted all the data related to New Catonca. It’s even true. I didn’t need to mention the media hoarding problem at all. Ok, note to self: go back and edit that. [Delete]
As for the issue of getting off the planet: the hangar contained a number of other shuttles. Shitty old-ass shuttles, yes, but they still functioned. And guess what? Seth knew how to pilot them! …Theoretically. He’d learned how to pilot a similar (very outdated) model a long time ago on a whim and hadn’t thought he’d ever have to use that experience so he hadn’t kept himself honed in how to pilot something like it. But theoretically…he knew how to pilot a New Catonca shuttle.
Can you tell that I didn’t come up with that part of the plan by the way? Because I fucking hated it? And to be honest no one else felt all that great about it either, except Seth, who assured us he could do it (while only marginally feeling better about it himself). But ART-shuttle couldn’t really help since it’d been optimized to pilot its own shuttle body, while ART-drone didn’t have anything for shuttle piloting at all because that hadn’t been an anticipated necessary function for it. Obviously ART-prime had the capability to pilot more than just its own shuttles, but even still it lacked the necessary program(s) for such an old ass one. And then on top of all of that, there was also the issue of the old ass shuttle not being compatible with ART.
Every computer is computationally universal, whinged ART (though its tone didn’t quite qualify as “whinging,” it was still totally whinging). This is absurd.
Right, yes, technically every computer ever can run every program ever. Sure. But also interoperability isn’t guaranteed; in fact, corporates have a vested interest in seeing interoperability (particularly adversarial interoperability) die a brutal and final death. It damn well knew that, of course. It was just complaining for complaining’s sake because it fucking hated the plan and the fact that it didn’t have the time to figure out that adversarial interoperability (and also finagle a way to adapt a piloting program for that particular old ass model of shuttle). It knew that I’d put up with its whinging since I (unfortunately) had great sympathy for its pain, what with me also absolutely fucking despising the plan.
I still didn’t really have anything to say though, despite my sympathy. I just tapped my acknowledgement and continued doing my part to carry out this stupid ass plan, sending the lone, tired engineer(?) in the hangar slumping into lala land in their uncomfortable-looking chair.
“I wonder what this guy was doing here all alone at this time?” Iris wondered as everyone slunk into the hangar.
Tarik gave the engineer(?) a pitying glance. “Probably tearing their hair out over our shuttle.”
Oh, right, so we’d already sabotaged the shuttle body prior to leaving it in this shitty hangar (not in any way we couldn’t fix, of course) because like hell were we letting them study it while it was functional. It’s not that we begrudged New Catonca our technology (or at least Seth and Iris, who were really dedicated to actually seeing through their life philosophy of altruism whenever possible, didn’t begrudge New Catonca getting access to ART’s state of the (ha) art shuttle tech for free), but something something I fucking forgot the specifics of this part (why we all agreed it was a bad idea for New Catonca to learn how to build good shuttles again).
Look, I’m not sorry. I had to get the shuttle iteration of ART off that damned planet. So what if my archive of data related to New Catonca is a bit hole-y? I still have everything important, don’t I?
Everyone else got to work further (irreparably) sabotaging our shuttle, picking out the best of New Catonca’s shitty old shuttles and erasing its existence from any records, etc, while I set up a stealth field, attaching the small battery and generator on the inside of our newly chosen shuttle. (I did my best to ignore the fucking sorry state of the thing. Wasn’t very successful at that. Kept going anyway because what else could I do?)
Of course while this took care any scans, it didn’t take care of visuals; that is: we’d still be very visible and a huge fucking red flag in the sky, since New Catonca hasn’t had anyone who actually knew how to pilot a shuttle in, oh, at least fifty planetary years.
Thankfully, I’d brought along the portable hologram tech ART had reverse-engineered from the CSU’s gear. (Perks of being a seer: overpacking but in a helpful way where you actually use the extra stuff you shouldn’t have needed but brought anyway.) We couldn’t make the shuttle become effectively invisible the way it had since the shuttle would be moving, but we could cloak it in a hologram of mist (while we were still close to the ground)/clouds (once we got a decent way up into the air). But since the hologram would be massive, we’d need way more power than the gear’s own battery and generator could provide, which is where the parts we took from our sabotaged shuttle came in.
Seth, Iris, and ART-drone did their smart people thing, modifying parts taken from ART-shuttle’s engine to work for powering the holo-tech, fixing up our new shitty shuttle, and all that. Tarik kept watch over the passed out engineer(?) who’d hopefully wake up in the morning thinking they just nodded off. I finally uploaded the shuttle iteration of ART to myself, and started programming the mist/clouds/whatever the holo-tech would be projecting.
The less said about the stupid flight up to the stupid station, the better, so I won’t describe any of it. Just know there was a bit of screaming. Wait, that’s describing it. Oh, whatever. [Edit]
We reached the station without incident; scanned it without incident (we didn’t get much info); solved the minor problem of how to get into the stupid, old, broken-down station without incident; entered said stupid station without incident; and I was immediately proven right about its horror media-esque atmosphere by the corpse that greeted us in the shuttle bay.