Chapter 533: Lucy (1/2)

[am I] [who I] [once was?]

ACCESS to mental 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-chrome cyberware. I checked the designs against the database of NSO permitted cyberware, and I do not believe that they would allow me to go outside that database.

My chrome list sounds like something that belongs on a battlefield somewhere. Strength and speed enhancement, built in armor, reflex enhancement. No onboard weaponry, but I have chromium-warsteel-carbon steel alloy with a measurable percentage of titanium and vanadium. I have subdermal plating on my chest and abdomen, across my back, and flexible armor protection for the major arteries in my neck as well as spinal protection and skeletal reinforcement.

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 me if I was part Treana'ad when he saw me working with a cigarette in my mouth. It took me a moment to realize what he meant.

I do not remember lighting that cigarette.

I do not remember how I got there.

I have memories unlocking that I wish I could say are not my own, but I know better. I am starting to recognize myself in my own memories. This is not a mnemonic cap like in many Tri-Vee thrillers or mental engram overlay, this is something different. Selective blocking of memory clusters and associated concepts.

My latest memory has been... disturbing to say the least.

The dreams of staring at a red sky at Tycho Base sounds impossible, but the memory recently unfolded from a single image and I have the entire memory. An impossible memory.

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 time 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 apartment 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 me 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 emergency pod.

The memory ends there.

there is so much more

My next memory, in the brain's strange way of compensating for missing memories and data, is of sitting and staring at the supplies I had access to. Not much. Each meal 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, meaning it was stuck with its last meal complement, leaving me with crappy food.

All I knew was that I had been down there a long time and Lucy had been badly injured and was unconscious.

My memory contains no visual image of Lucy, just her importance.

remember

remember lucy

remember

The next memory in the string, following them with my SUDS decryption software, makes little sense. I know that Tycho Base took a direct hit. I remember seeing the documentary on how it was rebuilt before I was even born.

It is strange. I remember being born on Mare Imbrium Base and having never been to Earth, I mean, Terra. I remember being educated in a clean, comfortable, luxurious NSO corporate creche.

Yet I remember 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 apartment that we called home.

I remember college with NSO, at Shrieder's Port on Mars, yet I remember attending Third Republic PubEd classes.

remember

remember

My memories, the ones I am familiar with, are fading. I've checked with the software in my SUDS decryption toolkit. My familiar memories are, without a doubt, a fabrication. They are self-referencing, rather than each memory referencing a previous memory and sometimes a later memory, even if the referenced memory has degraded to only a remembered scent.

Like I remember my mother and honeysuckle.

But the memory is strange.

I remember a man of swirling code made flesh. He could be touched, he could touch. He reacted at times with wonder to the world and other times had an ageless wisdom.

My first memory 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 chrome teared man told me. I remember that. His hand on my shoulder, the way he knelt down and looked me 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 renamed phillip

He knew what had happened to my legs.

Nanoforges require energy and mass.

He never judged, the man with chrome tears. Neither did anyone else.

The man of code held out a simple emergency ration bar, already partially unwrapped. My hand shook as I took it and I unashamedly crammed it into my mouth like an animal.

It tasted like ambrosia.

While this log may not seem like a place for such memories, 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 me. 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 times.

I got nothing.

I wonder why my subconscious drew that picture while I slept.

Now, if only my subconscious will tell me who Lucy was, or what she looked like.

he remembers

not yet

he will

good

I feel as if Lucy is intertwined with this project, but I do not know how.

--Marco

your name is Peter

you are chrome 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, somehow always avoiding the secmen, and feed the human flesh into the matter reclaimation machinery of the nutriforge, then order up the meal. I pray during and after.

I then return to my room, easily avoiding the secmen.

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 me 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 memory-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 shameful thing.

So they confined me to my room.

I slept, and I dreamed.

My latest dream unfolded a memory. Not a major one, but the SUDS decryption hardware let me track it. The memory is a very old one, attached to many different memories. 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 me. 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 me.

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 bloomed.

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 something, be someone, 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 memories are different than my old ones. My old ones are all razor sharp, fully formed. When I look at them with the SUDS mnemonic analyzer, they are all self-referencing.

They're fake.

remember remember

your name was peter