Chapter 530: Can You Hear the Buzzing (2/2)

i taste boot polish leather and red clay

i hear the snapping of silk and feel the cut of straps into my groin crushing my testicles against my pelvis

feet calf thigh hip back

look out dee i'm coming through

Personal Project Status: On Hold

Corporate Project Status: On Hold

Station Status: Heavy Damage

It's been three days and we finally have power back. The station's environmental systems are up and running, but only at 10%. We have had to abandon Delta, Sigma, and Theta Sections of the station.

I was in the middle of transcribing these logs when it happened.

There was a loud grinding from all around. A scraping sound that seemed to start far away, rip by us, and fade into the distance. A screaming sound from all around us. The lights began to flicker, then began to fail. Some winking out others exploding into a shower of sparks others just slowly dimming to nothing and the rest

Steady.

The Incident is over.

I call it Incident Four.

Power failed immediately after. No reason for it. The antimatter thorium salt tokamak fusion reactor just refuses to work. Luckily two of the small Class-II nanoforges still had power.

Even though they weren't hooked up to anything.

We heard what sounded like two men screaming and a woman laughing.

The digital sentience crashed and failed. Doctor Ngrent examined the datastrings.

She said the DS died hard and took a long time to do it based on the code unraveling and secondary twisting.

Half of the computers just scream when you turn them on.

Anyway, the Particle Research Team, what is left of it, noted that despite the magnetic containment failing, the AM-Thorium just sat there, inert. It did nothing.

Mister McNugget told them to throw it out the airlock but they convinced her to keep it in a magnetic containment.

It's completely inert. It doesn't get hot or cold. It doesn't react to any other matter.

We used the small Class-II nanoforges to attempt to fab up AM-Thorium, but had no luck. It looks like damage to the operating system.

The Green Teams have, like a lot of green mantid technicians, tiny capsule nanoforges in their abdomens. They usually use them for small tools and parts.

For two days we were without power, the air getting thicker and thicker. We had to move to armored vacuum suits for air.

It was then that one of the secmen commented that the vacsuits produce air via laser induced photosynthesis on a particular type of fungus. That requires power.

We ended up chaining suits together to bring back the environmental systems. From there we were able to jumpstart the creation engines.

Everyone else complained about having to eat ration paste for three days.

Mine tasted like old blood and spoiled meat, but I didn't complain.

Things are always tough in a malevolent universe.

Tomorrow, we're going to examine the rest of the station, see if we can figure out a way to get the reactors working.

I tried explaining something to Mister McNugget, but he did not have time to listen to my theories.

He may be sorry about that.

I went to the women's bathroom and knocked on the stall door. Mister McNugget was slightly put out at me wanting to talk to her while she engaged in bodily functions, but I assured her it was urgent.

While many may find it difficult to mentally focus while defecating, Mister McNugget had no problem following my chain of logic.

We were hit by something. Not anything we understand yet. We were grazed.

I described it to her as standing next to a maglev line and being knocked over by the pressure wave of a maglev train passing at MACH-2.

She admitted to hearing the screaming and laughing.

Passengers on some vast conveyance went by and the disruption around it had battered at our station along the w, v, and q axis.

She was somewhat skeptical that we had been knocked off our q-axis.

When she exited the stall and went to wash her hands, she saw my evidence.

While she was dressed in her standard corporate uniform on our side, on the other side of the mirror she was stark naked, her eyes violet to the indigo everyone here sees, her hair platinum blonde on the other side of the q-axis, brown on this side.

Unruffled, she finished washing her hands and nodded politely to me before she left.

In the mirror my hands were covered with blood and my face was misted with it.

Our q-axis alignment has been knocked askew.

Tomorrow, we take stock of what we have.

--Marco

DAY ONE HUNDRED AND FIVE

Personal Project Status: On Hold

Corporate Project: On Hold

Station Status: Damaged

Hellspace.

A colloquial name for Hyperplane Alpha. It is the closest hyperatomic plane to our own reality. The most easily accessed, requiring the least amount of speed and energy to enter.

Like the other hyperatomic planes, it is a place where V=w*f (wavelength times frequency) or other computations and formula for V are different. Most commonly, in the lower layers, this is a function of a lack of chronotrons and an alteration along the w axis.

Hyperatomic Plane Alpha was a place where the w-axis does not exist and the chronotrons did not last. While it matches our own plane due to indimensional distortion (n-axis) on a point to point locational matrix, the distances between those two points are much smaller on the hyperatomic planes. With Alpha it was the fact that the w-axis was nonexistant and the chronotrons quickly expended themselves, stopping x, y, and z axis expansion common to non-hyperatomic planes.

This meant that any point in the hyperatomic plane Alpha was both at every other point and at no other point. This meant that travel/velocity no longer dealt with distance over time but rather distance was listed as -1 and time was listed as null. As division by zero is a hypermathematics issue dependent upon the answer as to what the true formula beneath the division of zero actually is (For example: Blue equals 2.2million atomic weight divided by zero for the amount of chonotrons released by a solar flare released from Sol measuring less than 2.2 million miles but less than 4.45 million miles, where Blue is the amount of time it takes from those chronotrons to decay into quarks, boojums, and tachyons).

It has long been suspected that the Hyperatomic Plane Alpha was destroyed through a deliberate nova-sparking of one of the supermassive singularities that existed but had not yet formed, using a chronotron jacketed wave packet.

While there are undoubtably natives to that hyperatomic plane, the amount of phasic energy released by a hyperatomic breach must be controlled or it results in adverse effects.

Now, why am I just reiterating basic multidimensional concepts to you?

Because Hellspace is the closest hyperatomic plane to our dimensional reality.

The furthest away, from Hellspace, yet just as close as Hellspace, is a region at one time called ”Deadspace.”

Picture a sandwich. Our universe is the meat in the middle. Hellspace is one piece of bread, hot and toasted from the fire. Deadspace is the other piece of bread, still raw and doughy and covered in flour having never been exposed to the fire.

Deadspace is extremely hazardous to research. Even to lay down the formula is dangerous.

I tried to explain this to the Particle Research Team.

Doctor Yglaze asked why it was pertinent.

I replied that it was obvious the particles were talking to other particles, but the speed and frequency...

the wavelength multiplied by frequency showed us the velocity. With knowing the velocity, the frequency, and the wavelength, we can also measure the time, which will give us the one piece they are missing.

The distance.

Doctor Yglaze told me that the time variable did not work out. We argued over it. He insisted that it did not matter that we could determine distance, that it had no basis for their work. He reminded me that I'm part of Neural Mapping Team and sneeringly asked me to return to my work stations.

When I started to return to my work station, frustrated, I saw him out of the corner of my eye lunging toward me. His hands were outstretched, he was foaming at the mouth, the greenish blue foam spilling over his lower lip as he began to scream at me. His cheeks were pierced with twisted wire, his face sliced and cut, his bare chest pierced with wire and needles of various metals. His teeth were filed to points and his eyelids were cut away.

A quick spinning high kick to stop his advance, followed by a leg sweep, then a knee drop into the sternum to shatter it so that the bone shrapnel penetrated the heart, coinciding with a curled knuckle thrust into the windpipe.

I stood over his body as the objects he was holding fell to the ground eight meters away as they fell from his hands. He stared at me, his eyes wide, stunned into unthinking immobility. He looked at himself, on the floor, then at me.

Everyone began murmuring.

His body quivered, shivered, and collapsed into black goo that slowly spread across the floor, around my feet, into a pool nearly five meters wide. It then slowly thinned and vanished, leaving behind only the smell of mint and hot urine.

”Deaspace leakage.” was all I said before the secmen grabbed me and hauled me to Mister McNugget's office.

Mister McNugget excused the secmen and stared at me, his eyes unreadable. He reminded me that while I was on the Neural Mapping Team I was the only Dimensional Matrix Researcher on the entire station.

He reminded me that Nexus-Sigma Omnicorp had gone through great expense to acquire my SUDS stack and rehabilitate me. That my loyalty to the company had never been in doubt.

He showed me the video of the incident.

I could see Doctor Yglaze pull free from himself and lunge at me.

Mister McNugget told me that he could see nothing until my foot connected.

There was a purple flash.

I did not bother to tell him. He would not understand.

He advised me to go back to work.

Instead, I went to the women's bathroom. Inside, Mister McNugget was washing her hands, ignoring how she was completely naked in the mirror. I explained what had happend quickly.

Mister McNugget told me that I should continue with this line of inquiry.

She believes my hypothesis that the Pre-Glassing scientists somehow had discovered Hellspace and possibly even Deadspace and beyond, rather than the Combine/Imperium discovering it. She shook her hands dry, patted her bare breasts, and left the bathroom.

In the mirror, she adjusted the lapel of her corporate uniform as I stared at her, blood on my fingers, my knuckles damaged, and fine droplets of blood still on my face. As Mister McNugget patted her bare breasts dry in front of me her reflection used a fiber towel, dampened in the sink, to wipe away the blood from my face.

I could feel the cool water.

The door hissed as it closed behind me.

I could hear the shadows whispering.

Whispering my name.

Marco.

--Marco

DAY ONE HUNDRED SIX

Personal Project: Standby

Corporate Project: Unknown

Station Status: Unknown

Research has come to a stop.

The secmen have found a pinpoint Hellspace breach in Sigma Sector of the station.

A self-sustaining Hellspace Breach the size of a marble.

Dripping from it is thick black liquid. An unknown substance.

Examination with an instruments, including subatomic microscopes, reveal no structure at all. No atomic or subatomic structure.

Doctor Devenovich ran a DNA analysis as a joke.

It was a match for all samples.

Not just one. It matched every single sample it was measured against.

It has the DNA of all things in it.

Yet no structure.

Doctor Hermans broke a quantum slide and a single drop touched his skin. It burned into his skin, spreading slightly, then hardened.

I moved forward to break his neck, spare him, but Mister McNugget stopped me, her hand reaching out of his body and touching my chest.

From the Hellspace Breach there is liquid Deadspace leaking.

The buzzing, you can hear it. Behind the walls.

The Green Teams are alarmed. I have not seen a single member of any of the Green Teams in two days. Rumor has it they are holed up in Epsilon Sector in the station.

They are correct to be afraid.

I can hear her name in the buzzing behind the Hellspace Breach.

Her name is Lucy.

--Marco

[there] [is no] [escape]