Chapter 533: Lucy (2/2)

you were momma's good boy

your brothers and sisters admired you

The new ones, though, they are real. They reference one another, reference memories smoothed down to just a few symbols.

I wish I knew what was happening with me.

--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 equipment. It has become woefully apparent that all that is on this side is relays, repeaters, and download terminals.

The main equipment, the equipment that does the actual work, is somewhere 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 smelled of rotting meat 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 remember it. Examination with my neural decoding equipment has shown me it has a mnemonic block on it with the symbolism for NSO. All I remember 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 men are familiar, the woman was not.

She was typing on a keyboard. An ancient mechanical keyboard in a room that felt ancient. She was holding the cigarette between her teeth as she typed. The men appeared concerned.

About me.

But they do not know me.

he's remembering

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 remembering 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 me 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 name is peter

you were peter after you were marco

he has to go home before he can come back

she's right he has to remember

just send me there

there's nobody there to kill you big ape

DAY ONE HUNDRED FORTY

I had another dream that disturbed me.

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 remember the black robe of one of the men accompanying us. He wasn't one of us, but he was beloved by our father, who walked with us. The man with the chrome tears, me, the blacked robed Saint, and the man of code made flesh.

The ruined dome 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 came 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 melancholy 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 mental 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 time 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 memories somehow being evoked.

She asked me if I have found Lucy.

I told her that I have not.

She asked me about my mother. I told her what I remembered. She handed me a cigarette under the edge of the stall as we spoke.

I returned to bed and slept. If I dreamed, I do not remember it.

--Marco

you pushed too hard

shut up do i tell you how to shoot someone 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 me.

--Marco

there we go

what

now i can touch him

so

trust me 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 something different to him

a curse upon the imperium for what they did

quit pouting and see if you can scare me 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 some kind of massive casualty system.

If I'm right, this means that the entire system crashed out when the Mantid attack.

Except...

I put an in-line note in it.

//--Hardware replacement 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 programmers, I like to use a set of named variables that mean something to me, kind of a shorthand for what the named variable handles.

Mine's in there, in the patch coding, as well as the notes I embedded in in-line comments.

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 something.

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 me like a hyperventilating gorilla confused why the sun came 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 some 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]