[PLOT THREAD4.3] DR: Three Lock Box

[Nina]

Temple's brow furrowed at Deezy's suggestion as she looked past the older woman into the dark corridor beyond. and just wear would I be keeping sunglasses, she thought, in this get up. Trusting that the suit would give her whatever protection she needed she raised the helmet back in place and followed the two novas into the corridor beyond.

 

Almost immediately after stepping into the corridor they heard a high pitched humans the floor vibrated slightly. The humming was rising in volume and as they each took defensive stances and drew on their powers incase of an attack, when an off white ball roughly the diameter, or actually a little smaller, of the corridor, hurtled down toward them to stop with swoosh at their feet!

[Shameless]

Ryan looked at the ball, and his words slipped out.   "Well, Someone saw Temple of Doom."

Before anyone else could act, he reached out to touch the ball, and an opening appeared beside his hand, large enough for them to enter, and revealing that the sphere was indeed hollow.   He looked back at the other two, and nodded.  With that, he climbed inside.  "Come on in, I think it wants to show us something."   In the face of his curiosity, and the fact it hadn't disintegrated him, Deezy and Temple followed suit.  The opening vanished, sealing them inside, and the sphere began to move.   if it wasn't for his own unique senses, he'd have missed it, but they were moving quite fast, though there was no real sense of motion someone without his senses could measure.

When they came to a stop, the sphere opened again, and before anyone stepped out, he motioned for them to wait.  "Just for the sake of reference, We're now 275 miles inland of where we were, and five miles down.  That would put us beneath Richat Structure.   Given that we just traveled that distance in a minute, we reached a speed of about 16 thousand miles per hour.  That's astounding in and of itself, but There was no sense of movement whatsoever, which I find even more amazing."    It was a staggering achievement, and something he knew would intrigue Deezy.
  
He stepped outside the sphere, and found himself at the center of a vast Machine.   He had no idea what it was, and he let out a chuckle.   "The Hidden wonders of the world, buried beneath our feet, unknown until now.  The time has come to awaken, and reveal to Man,  that which he does not know."   For the first time in a very long time, Ryan couldn't remember where the words came from.  A comic from his youth, or any number of novels. It was strange but he couldn't tell, that was how in awe he was.

 

[Nina]

"Deezy," Temples voice carried a hint of fear, "what does this thing do?" The young girl stepped to the edge of the bridge or catwalk they had found themselves on and peered over the edge into the depths below. The machine went down and down deep into the earth, a glance up raveled a dome about a hundred yards above them. 

 

Deezy approached the edge more cautiously than temple had, there was no guard rail, and looked down. "I don't know, but..." 

 

Before she could finish her thought Ryan called a warning. Looking at him they saw him pointing at the far distant end of the bridge thy stood on and a glow which was growing brighter as the watched.

[SalmonMax]

Deezy was a little distracted at the moment, of course. The operation of the 'shuttle ball' was greatly on her mind. The specific speed it moved at was fascinating. If you could technologically compensate for that kind of sudden acceleration, why stop at 16,000mph? Was it a limit of the technology? Perhaps they couldn't completely evacuate the cavity the ball traveled through and going faster would be dangerous? Or there was a practical limit on how much momentum the system could absorb? What did they do with all that energy as well? For that matter, where did the energy to propel the ball come from? Under any other circumstance she'd be peeling the vehicle apart in her mind to exhaustively detail every rivet.

 

But then there was the thing she was already calling 'The Great Machine' in her head. Five miles down. That was interesting. Energy perhaps? Geothermal tap? A convenient source of reliable energy on a planet with as much tectonic activity as Earth, for sure. More pertinently, what would engineers of science on the scale they'd witnessed so far need a device of this magnitude to do? Good engineering was not necessarily BIG engineering. The best engineer built a machine to be as small and simple as it could be while still getting the job done.

 

So what was the job here? Big machine...big job.

 

"Seems like the answer, one way or another, might be coming," Deezy observed. "Lets get our guesses in before it's too late. I think it's probably some kind of terraforming equipment. Geoengineering on a large scale. If we were close enough to figure out how old it was, that'd be a pretty big clue though. If it IS terraforming, then it's either much older than we thought these beings were active for, or...or maybe it hasn't been turned on yet." Then she paused. The Storm?

 

"...or maybe it has."

[Shameless]

Ryan nodded.  "Could be, let's just hope it isn't spinning up for round two."  he looked at the light, which was still there, and nodded.  "Massive Terraforming engine, Could be some sort of Geothermal energy converter, hell it could be a doomsday weapon left by an otherworldly race."   He shrugged.  "There's alot of things it could be.  Whether it was the cause of the Storm, or was turned on by it, if that was the case, shouldn't we be feeling something from it?"

He moved to begin walking towards the light, along the interstate-wide bridge/catwalk.   "Hopefully the answers are this way."

Edited January 22, 2022 by Shameless

[Nina]

Ryan began walking toward the light after a glance at each other the teenager and the genius followed. Ryan had walked perhaps ten meters when he noticed that the there was aa brighter center to the distant light, and it was then he noticed that that center was moving toward him. After a brief hesitation, Ryan continued.

 

The center or the light took form as the Humans moved closer. It was a broad sphere, slightly flattened top and bottom, about two meters tall slightly larger at the sides due to the flattening. The sphere itself was incandescent, inside it pulsed and roiled as if it were filled with gas or liquid, with the light-shifting toward the blue spectrum. Deezy with her super science filters could see much more of the light and saw dozens of frequencies of light invisible to the human eye which she had no name for. It was unknown light.

 

It stopped at a distance of sixteen and a half meters. Ryan stopped when it did, the women likewise followed suit. Immediately a vertical plane of light shot out and ran over each of the humans in turn, they tensed but they felt nothing.

 

“I think it’s scanning us,” whispered Deezy.

 

The light played over Deezy and Temple several times, ignoring Ryan after the first pass over him. Suddenly the sphere began shifting form, slipping from one shape to another in a blink, dozens, no hundreds of shapes, all alien to their senses, things of nightmare and science fiction. Then the shifting slowed and the thing which had been the sphere had now taken on the form of a primate. The sphere was gone but the Primate continued to shift form one Homonid shape to another all primitive, unevolved. As it shifted the light still shown from it and played alternately form temple to Deezy and back.

 

“Its confused,” Temple whispered like Deezy had.

 

“What do you mean, what is it confused about, why doesn’t it say anything,” asked Ryan?

 

“I don’t know,” replied Temple, “I just feel its confusion, but there is a mind shield  there I don’t want to try penetrating it, not yet it’s not like any shield I have felt before.”  

“But it is alive them, you can feel it’s emotions, right?” That was Deezy

 

Then, before Temple could reply, the light was gone. So too was the glow which had emanated from the sphere. Standing before them was a Hominid, an Ape. It was about two and a half meters tall, slender and wore a tunic, which resembled a simple dress, made of a shimmering gold-silver fabric. Its stance was upright with no slump of back or shoulders and no crouch at he knees like other apes. Its features suggested it was female.

 

“Who are you?” It spoke with a voice that was not what one expected from an ape. And it spoke English, perfectly, with no hint of accent.

 

"I do not recognize your species, but I surmise a 97.98% probability that you are an evolved representation of this form. Please clarify. Who are you?"

 

 

[SalmonMax]

Hoo boy, this is really cool! AI? Alien? Or maybe it doesn't even matter?

 

"Well, my name's Deezy," replied the inventor, "And I'm no expert in paleoanthropology, but that form does look like it could be a distant ancestor of our species! So...good job! It's been probably...at least a few hundred thousand years since then, maybe even a million or more. I get the feeling you've been out of the loop for awhile!"

 

She nods at the others with her. "She's Temple, and he's Ryan. We're hoping to learn more about you and this place. Given the time you were last updated, I'm guessing this installation wasn't quite so far underground back when you were active, yeah? And definitely not under a huge desert."

 

"Are you related to the space station in orbit over the planet, by any chance?"

[Shameless]

Ryan watched intently with a certain level of awe.   Twice now he and Deezy had made what amounted to first contact with an alien entity, now Temple was added to the mix, giving the enemy a broad spectrum of life experiences if it were capable of scanning their minds.   He realized how likely this could be, considering he was liistening as everyone spoke to whatever this entity was, as it took the form of a female ape-like human, and it spoke back in perfect english.    He vaguely recalled seeing some of the forms the entity went through on a history of man program he'd seen one night.  

"We call our species Homo Sapiens, or humans, commonly.   If you could tell us just how long it has been since you were last active, we might be able to offer more information.   Who created you, and left you here on this world?"

[Nina]

The being looked from one human to the other (this time it included Ryan) and blinked. And by blinked, i mean the whole form flickered into insubstantiality  and then became solid once again.

 

"Space...Station..." the being said the words slowly as if tasting them. "Space station. Orbit." It blinked again. "There are 19,878 artificial objects occupying orbital tracks around this planet. How is this possible? They are not Empire Technology. They are not Empire. This is not possible."

 

<guys it getting very stressed out> Templs thoughts formed whole in Deezy and Ryan's minds, <i think it's starting to panic>

 

"Homo Sapiens. This means nothing. Evolution....malfunction... time lapse whathashappenedwhereisempireinititatesecurityprotocals..."

 

 

[Shameless]

That's bad.  Ryan thought back, and moved to the forefront.  I'll try to buy time, and get a portal ready just to be safe.
 

He looked at the entity, and decided on a more honest track.  "The objects in orbit of this planet are things we humans made, sattelites for communication, global positioning, and weather prediction.  None of us know who or what Empire you speak of, but we'd like to know more.  We are not here to fight or loot, or anything like that.  We seek knowledge, to learn and understand."
 

Ryan meant every word of it, and it was fairly easy to discern that.  He was curious, if not just due to the translations he'd made, the wonders he saw around him, but everything that they didn't know they didn't know.   Were he alone, he'd remain likely no matter what, but he wasn't.  He began gathering power to create a gateway back  stateside, a way out for Deezy and Temple at least to escape should things go that badly.

[SalmonMax]

"Temple, can you calm it down a little?" Deezy asked quickly out of the edge of her mouth, not quite daring to look away from the odd construct as she tuned the defenses on her suit a little.

 

Then she held her hands out open and addressed the...the...whatever it was.

 

"Yes, homo sapiens! Hi there! We are going to help you, so just...slow down for a second. I can tell you have a lot of questions, and we can totally empathize with that. I think you've been offline for a little while, so maybe we can help fill you in on what you missed?"

[Nina]

Temple opened her eyes even wider if that was possible, "Its a machine I don't know how to do that!" She was so flustered that she had spoken out loud.

 

the artificial being switched its attention from Deezy and Temple again, rapidly back and forth, and again it seemed to be ignoring Ryan.

 

Suddenly it once again locked focus on Deezy. "Offline? Define por favor?"

 

Ryan notices four light blinking into existence beyond them down the tunnel in the direction the being had originally come from.

 

[Shameless]

Ryan remained where he was, but went into a combat mentality, ready to do what needed to be done to defend himself and his comrades, in order to buy time for their escape, should they have to.  .  "Deezy, you're up, it looks like we've got company coming behind us."  He readied himself, to either spin up a portal, or offensive energy attacks to defend the three of them with.   "Temple, see if they're more constructs incoming, or something physical."   

Clearly this alien race thought they were inherently superior, seemingly to the point they wouldn't even acknowledge that another race might one day rise up to try to hold a conversation.   "Let's try to avoid starting a war with aliens..."  he muttered softly.

[SalmonMax]

"Define offline? Okay!"

 

She gave Ryan a roll of her eyes when he told her she was 'up.' Hadn't she already been up? No matter!

 

"When we three first entered this..." Deezy swirled a hand around, indicating the entire cavern and the machinery around them, "...this place, it was almost entirely inactive. No visible damage or anything. It looked like the power had been shut off. As we moved further in though, that started to change. Lights came on, there was the sound of machines starting up in the walls...and we eventually came upon a transport device. It brought us here."

 

"I think at some point in the past the systems that govern this installation went into a kind of power-saving mode. A standby. That means that you most likely haven't been aware of the passage of time since that moment, up until now. When our presence was detected, it must have signaled the system to come back to full power. And here you are."

 

"I'm Deezy, by the way. This is Ryan, and that's Temple. We are homo sapiens from this planet, and from the sound of things we may have...evolved a bit since the last time you saw our kind."

[Nina]

The three lights bore down on them rapidly,  Temple closed her eyes and looked like she was straining, Deezy was looking as unoffensive as possible and Ryan, Ryan was drawing energy to either fight or flight.

 

The Caretaker finally noticed Ryan.

 

Scanning beams shot from the AI’s body played over Ryan outlining the his body and the quantum energies he was channeling. “Unknown energetic force; Countermeasure unknown; Origin of force Unknown; Threat Probability 100%. Solution immediate Irradication.”

 

The lights split and forms took shape, three Drone like Robots with obvious weapons two swept to the sides to flank the group one came directly toward them the Caretaker backed away rapidly its feet floating an inch off the floor.    

 

Temple screamed in pain as the AI threw a bolt of psionic force directly at her unprepared mind. The young girl collapsed to her knees holding her head in her hands as her body convulsed.

[SalmonMax]

"Aw, man," Deezy sighed. She checked the readouts on her suit's protective features, then focused on the drones.

 

"On the other hand...those look really neat."

 

Her eyes narrowed slightly as she trained the unique senses of her power on a drone, interrogating its atoms to their most fundamental quantum states and measuring their interactions over time to build an insane detailed mental map of exactly what they were, and how they worked.

 

And how to make more.

 

(8 successes, with mega-int 6 to sense and comprehend the drones)

1.  
   Spoiler

   1. SalmonMax Roll: [10, 10, 9, 8, 8, 7, 7, 7, 3, 2, 2, 1] Result: 74

       

       

       

       
   2. 

      SalmonMax — Today at 12:50 PM

      !roll 2d10

       

       

       

       
   3. 

      Dice MaidenBOT — Today at 12:50 PM

      SalmonMax Roll: [4, 3] Result: 7

    

2.  

Edited March 21, 2022 by SalmonMax

[Shameless]

"Dammit."  Ryan cursed as Temple went down and these new sentinels seemed prepared to attack.  Maybe it was due to his activating his powers, maybe not, but they'd attacked, and he was going to answer.  Stacks of infintesimally thin infra-black discs formed above his hands, arcing with purple, almost ultraviolet lightning, and he grinned, as he put forth his hands a stream of hard spatial discs shot forth spraying the area where the three new drones were.

The deadly stream of spatial energy discs sliced the drones to ribbons.  They fell to the ground in perfectly sliced pieces, as though sliced through cleanly by a blade.  In a single attack he took out all three, leaving only the original unscathed.  "Eradicate that."  it almost seemed like he was gloating, but that wasn't his style. The only reason he'd left the original AI was in hope that Deezy would be able to stop this, before it got further out of hand, but he prepared to do the same again.
 

Spoiler

Ryan activates quantum weapon paying 1 extra for the beam tag, allowing him to make a spray attack on all three of the new drones.   this lowers his defense by 1.

4+1 successes to attack
Weapon is Scale 5
 

the drones are destroyed by the attack

 

[Nina]

In a split second the four drones were eliminated but before their remains could fall to the floor there was a burst of blinding light as dozens of new drones appear not in the distance but right here!

 

Their sudden appearance barely registered before thy opened fire with deadly accuracy.

 

Dezzy’s sensors were screaming, they detected a tremendous power surge in the Machine as it drew on the geothermal power of the planet. More power than it had used in millions of years. Perhaps more power than the aged Machine could safely handle after so much time…..

 

Solid bolts of incandescent energy speared toward the heroes from every direction. Temple screamed again this time in fury! The energy bolts blasted at them, but none found their target as the waves of bolts shattered on an invisible barrier of psychic force in their hundreds.

 

“Hurry,” Temple shouted, the strain apparent in her voice, “I can’t hold this…much…longer”

 

Spoiler

!roll 10d10t7e10

Dice Maiden
BOT
 — Today at 10:00 AM
nina_blain Roll: [10, 8, 8, 8, 7, 7, 6, 5, 2, 1], [2] Result: 6

 

[SalmonMax]

Deezy flinched back from the barrage of weapons fire instinctively, but felt a growing sense of disconnection within herself. It seemed like she was floating just above her own head, or maybe that her head was just...getting bigger, expanding into the space above her. The space was filled with the drones at first, their strange metal and alien electronics breaking down and yielding their secrets even as their control systems and programming revealed themselves in the quantum states of supercooled crystal structures. But it kept growing. Time was slowing for Deezy, at least as far as her perceptions went. And her body was slowed as well, but mentally she kept up; processing an ever-increasing sum of data in an ever-decreasing sum of time.

 

The needs were extreme though. Under normal circumstances, just 'digesting' these drones would be a task of potentially hours to really grasp it all. She needed it in seconds. Moreover, the drones weren't the real problem. The central computer that controlled the great machine could seemingly create or summon more drones at will. Any direct combat was a holding action at best. The drones gave her essential clues though...their breakdown revealed the operational principles of the alien computer technology, and the means by which it was programmed. The patterns encoded into their molecules were encryptions that she shredded even as she prepared to create more...essential to ensure the new drones would be loyal to herself.

 

She needed more though. How to control them beyond their initial programmed state? More, how to get to the main computer? It didn't have an access terminal; the complex was designed to be self-sufficient, completely automated. Even if it did, there was no time to decipher an interface, a control panel, an operating system. She needed to interact with the Machine directly, at the core machine language it was built from.

 

There wasn't a way to do it though. No machine, no power at her disposal. The barrier would fall, and she and Temple would be cut down. Ryan would survive longer, using his abilities to dodge the assault while counterattacking. But more drones would come, faster than he could destroy them, as the manufacturing facilities came online. He would be forced to retreat...or more probably, the central computer would decide it was hopelessly compromised and execute a procedure to destroy itself; killing Ryan and wreaking unfathomable damage to the world above.

 

And Deezy couldn't have that. Deep in her head, in her mind, there was a feeling...a sound...the roar of wind, and lightning.

 

Her head exploded.

 

Ryan felt it immediately. Deezy was standing there, not moving, her face frozen in an intense expression of concentration. Her eyes widened, and then woosh. A pulse of crisping heat baked off from her...but as quickly as he felt it, he realized it wasn't actually heat. His head throbbed sympathetically with an etheric pulse emanating from Deezy. It reminded him, just a little, of how he'd felt during the Storm itself.

 

For Deezy, the significance of her eyes and ears and skin dwindled as she turned her attention to far more subtle senses. The ebb and flux of electromagnetism influenced the human body in several ways; from neural activity to blood flow. Tiny but, for her, measurable. It took less than a heartbeat to isolate those influences...and in the process of doing so, her nervous system adapted. A network of electrical potentials, the product of biochemical processes, her nervous system was diffuse through her body; the perfect antennae. And with just a bit more wattage at its disposal, it could not only receive transmissions, but transmit them as well.

 

Her skin prickled; the thin hair on her arms and neck standing up. Like she was standing near a van de graff generator. Like she was standing in a storm. Deezy could feel them now, the drones; each one a patter of signals being exchanged, like birds chirping. They knew what to do, but kept checking in at intervals to reassure the central computer that they were still functioning, still obeying. The central computer sent back an affirmation that they should continue. It happened many times each second, for each drone. The signals were complex, beautiful, but the patterns made their meaning clear to Deezy. It was probable that they were deeply encrypted, but she barely noticed it. After decoding the drones themselves, and rewiring her own brain and nervous system, encryption was barely a garnish at the dinner of data.

 

Ryan and Temple saw something terrible happen then. More drones started appearing. Five...ten...twenty...over two dozen in all. They appeared in ordered ranks, surrounding Temple's dome like a halo. Enough that their added firepower would almost certainly overwhelm the young psychic. The new drones swiveled in midair, and began firing.

 

At the first groups of drones.

 

Deezy stretched her hands out in front of her and cracked her knuckles. "Just a little longer," she said, her eyes open but unfocused and unseeing. "I think I've just about got this."

 

In the world behind her eyes she followed the drone transmissions, using their handshake protocols to worm her way into the central computer itself. It detected the extra, unauthorized, contact but despite being based on technology humanity wouldn't grasp for centuries, it was slower than whatever Deezy's mind had evolved into. Her awareness of it's system spread virally, branching throughout its network as she bounced from node to node, corrupting or destabilizing systems as she went to delay its overall responses. Setting fires it would have to put out, in effect, diverting resources and concealing her true goal. There would be a sort of core substrate, based on what she'd seen of the drone architecture. A programming layer akin to terrestrial computers' BIOS that determined fundamental system attributes. Change there would radiate back up through the layers stacked on top, influencing high level system behavior. Even something as simple as adding a line to the 'friend' category, and removing a line from the 'foe' category. Metaphorically speaking.

 

Spoiler

Okay. Power maxed to spend 10 pool and get 3 Edges with 1 success each. Digital Scan, Telecommunication, and Digital Manipulation. Rolled...a cataclysmic number of successes to split actions between creating some drone backup for us, and to use Digital Manipulation to attempt to gain control of the machine's computer systems. This leads to Deezy making 25 drones, and gaining 'fundamental' access to the computer. Her goal is to have the computer consider us as either 'owners' or 'allies,' or whatever designation it would have assigned to its original users/creators. Beyond that she'd prefer to interfere with it as little as possible, except as necessary to keep us safe. What that means as far as narrative goes is of course up to you.

 

Deezy has gained 1 point of flux from the power max, and spent 3 momentum as well as 14 quantum pool. She has 20 pool remaining.

 

Edited March 22, 2022 by SalmonMax

[Shameless]

"Wow."   the single syllable escaped his lips as he felt what Deezy did, adding a layer of drones to their defense and their attack. It wouldn't be enough, they need a way to take them out even faster, in greater numbers all at once.    Still he knew her, that this wasn't the only thing she was likely doing, and she asked them to buy her just a little more time.
 

"Roger that."   he answered with a darker gleam to his eyes.   What he'd done before wasn't going to be enough, he'd have to reduce their numbers in a massive way, and keep doing so to buy her time.  The visualization of an attack began in his mind, one he didn't yet possess, even as Deezy could feel the same potent energies she had harnessed moments before surge and roil within Ryan.  Internally he Wrestled with the forces that fueled his powers, and bent them to his will.  This would work because it had to, but more than that, Because Ryan was the master of his Power, and would make it so.   With that thought, the fully formed new power came into being and for the first time, Ryan revealed it to those he had to protect.
 

Calm and Cool as Ice, ever the Ace pilot he was, He crafted a thick dome of roiling and incredibly destructive spatial energies around them, one that was careful not to destroy any part of the actual facility, but would indeed protect them from harm by destroying anything that interacted with it.  Within the inner surface of the dome, Deezy's drones could move and fire outward, further reducing the numbers of enemy drones that weren't destroyed by Ryan's attack. It took a level of mental precision and spatial awareness that only Ryan really had. Between the inner surface of the dome and the outer, space folded and unfolded upon itself countless times, creating a loop of constantly roiling and massively destructive spatial energies, the sort that no one on earth could possibly survive interaction with.  
 

For Ryan it was satisfying to see the drones threatening them disappear as the roiling storm of spatial energies rent them assunder, and then vanish from the world.  He let out a soft chuckle.  "Hell Yeah."

 

Spoiler

power maxing  4 successes total qp spent 8

adding 1 to quantum score, 2 to warp, new technique quantum weapon 6  which has 11 tags. Area 6 (medium)  Range 2(medium) Duration 2 (maintaining)  Disintegrating
 

actual attack roll  spend 3 momentum 3 successes+ 4 enhancement form q attack and mdex

 

[Nina]

The display of raw energies was enough to overwhelm any mind, artificial or natural, The Caretaker reeled under the assault on the facility and under the direct assault of the aberrant mind trying to invade and overwrite his programing.

 

Outside the mental battle, drones kept appearing to fight on both sides, the dome of destructive force advanced driving the AI drones back but they had learned to stay clear.

 

Temple felt the pressure ease and vanish as the battle moved away from her protective field. Without asking permissions s time was of the essence their energies finite compared their foes, Temple brought both Deezy and Ryan into a shared mind network.

 

For Deezy, this network gave her access to additional computing power, increasing her RAM so to speak, as she pulled mental resources from her two companions. As for Ryan his spatial sense could tell him where the enemy was, but not where he would be. Temple could tell him that. Suddenly with Temple seeing ahead and sharing her clear sight with Ryan, he could see where the drones were going and where new ones would appear. He pulled vast amounts of Quantum Energy and his destructive dome twisted and streched destroying drones as they moved to where they though it was safe and others as they materialized with the destructive fore where the destructive force wasn't supposed to be.

 

The Caretaker realized it limitations, The masters had not foreseen this, had not prepared it for such a turn of events. How was this possible?

That one moment of self doubt was enough for Deezy as her boosted mind slipped past the last defenses of the caretaker AI.

[SalmonMax]

In the end, the battle within the machine's computer was as doomed as the one outside it. Buoyed by Temple and Ryan's minds, Deezy pinned the Caretaker in successively smaller areas of the network, rebuffing its attempts to regain ground in between slow and inexorable advances. Of course 'slow' was in relative terms. The optical and quantum systems processed close to the speed of light. Deezy was just...a little closer. Of the two of them, Ryan and Temple, it was probably Temple who was closest to guessing at the potential of Deezy's mind, via telepathic contact. It was only now that she realized she'd only ever glimpsed her in moments of comparative relaxation. Pressed to her limits, she was juggling multiple concurrent threads of dizzyingly complex calculations to simultaneously decrypt the firewalls that the AI kept throwing up, while also jamming outgoing channels with packets of deviously encrypted junk data AND overwriting viral packages the AI left behind in sectors it had evacuated. The flow of information was almost nauseating, and that was just the slight 'overflow' that Deezy was relying on them to help her handle; to give her the necessary edge to beat the machine.

 

Finally the Caretaker was hemmed in, well away from any important operations, and Deezy paused in her assault. She took a moment to take in and analyze the system, interrogating every nook and cranny...and from this effort much was gleaned. Of particular note was the immediate activity of the AI itself; it was attempting, in vain for the moment, to trigger a self destruct command in accordance with its programming in last resort of system compromise. Further, the Caretaker's technology was not entirely 'software,' it seemed...certain central processes could not be altered without physically changing its components. It couldn't be shut down in a way that would allow it to be restarted either; once stopped, it became crippled and unable to start again. Fortunately, Deezy gleaned that the facility as a whole would remain functional if the Caretaker was gone. For a time at least.

 

Considering the AI was attempting to destroy all of this, and them, and it couldn't be safely contained permanently, Deezy scanned the Caretaker's memory engrams for some basic instructions on the operation of the machinery, then forcibly shut the AI down. The alerts stopped, the materializing attack drones stopped...the facility was entirely within Deezy's hands then.

 

"This is going to take a hot minute to work through," she said, both verbally and through Temple's mind link. "The machinery is complicated and...well, alien...but I'm pretty sure I can work out what it's for and maybe get some details on who built it. One thing's for sure though, that artificial intelligence was SPOOKED by Ryan using his abilities. It had no idea what was going on, and that's what kicked off the whole defense system activation. Definitely not the same aliens that made the space station."

 

"Still, there's one thing I wanna check with you on, Temple. Just before the drones attacked, it looked like you got hit by something. Didn't look like an energy discharge, and I didn't sense any kind of 'quantum' manipulation going on. Was that..." Deezy tapped her temple. "...your kinda thing?"

[Shameless]

For his part, Ryan had manipulated the spatial shell thanks to the additional perceptive abilities from Temple, managing the safe zone and striking out until Deezy had taken control of the system.  It was an amazing feeling, working together as one, and for someone who'd guarded his thoughts and emotions, There was  no hiding his happiness at their success, and how good it felt that they were all okay.  

"Great so it was my fault.   Sorry, but at least we were able to stop it before things got truly out of hand."   The fact that him simply preparing to either fight, or ensure their escape spooked the alien AI enough to send it into active defense gave him pause.

"Deezy, I guess this would mean the Object and this facility were made by two different alien races.   One that utilized power similar to what you and I do, and this facility by a race that was unaware of it.  If I had to guess, this facility is older."

"Is there anything I can help with?"

[SalmonMax]

Temple, still a bit shaky, nodded at Deezy then found her words, "Yeah it was, I don't know, I didn't know that was something we could do. It was psi but not like anything I've ever done. I don't know how it did it. Sorry."

 

"No, you're good," replied Deezy absently, most of her mind still preoccupied with the fresh carcass of the installation's computers. "Just wanted to confirm." She looked at Ryan then and shook her head. "Not with what I'm doing. Maybe explore the place on foot a bit. I need a minute here."

 

Then Deezy's eyes focused on middle distance again, and her head slowly tilted to one side as her pupils sightlessly tracked things invisible to everyone else in the room. The process of decoding the massive amount of data went more quickly as she increasingly mastered the alien technology involved. Even so, there was a formidable amount of it. Making things even more complex was the fact that the more she worked out, the more Deezy realized this system had been hopelessly compromised for a long time. How long?

 

The first clue came from the fact that she was scanning terabytes of data per second, had been doing so for several minutes, and was still nowhere near the first entries in the index logs. The number of logs showing erroneus entries did grow fewer in number as she went back in time though. Finally Deezy reached the first entries; records kept of planetery environment changes during large scale geoengineering for the purpose of 'encouraging' a particular type of climate change...in the aftermath of a planned extinction event. Specifically, an asteroid dropped onto the planet from space.

 

"Oh, you have to be kidding me," she said out loud. Then she sent a message to Ryan and Temple, asking them to come back to her, if they'd left at all.

 

Once everyone was in the same room again, Deezy managed to refocus her attention on the other two.

 

"There's still a lot of specific data to go through, but I've done a sort of...thumbnail search of the big picture, and I want to clue you guys in because we have, um, a BIG decision to make here. It's like this."

 

She cleared her throat.

 

"The aliens that built this killed the dinosaurs. Like...literally. The dropped the Chicxulub asteroid on Earth, just over sixty-five million years ago. This place was built in the aftermath. At first it was managing the ecosphere, trying to encourage a cooler, somewhat lower-oxygen atmospheric mix that wouldn't favor megafauna. They wanted smaller, social animals to have more of an opportunity to flourish. Over time, the geoengineering module kept nudging things up and down, tweaking gas mix, temperature shift, that kind of thing, in pursuit of that goal."

 

Deezy took a deep breath at that point and plowed on.

 

"Aaaanyway, the facility eventually zeroed in on early hominids as the most promising life for their purposes. At THAT point some new modules in the facility became active, managing populations more directly. Again, the aim was always to try to push our ancient ancestors to be smarter, more social, and branch out into other environments. They did that by carefully influencing our predators and prey, and local environmental effects like rainfall and temperature that affected our food supplies." Deezy winced a little then added, "Also some genetic manipulation."

 

Here she hesitated, trying to decide how much detail to get into...and decided to be brief and let them ask questions if they were interested.

 

"Long story short, they sort of...bred us. Except also kind of not. See, okay. Um...there's a BIG part of all this that generates an exotic energy field that encompasses the entire planet. Or...it used to. The energy field acted on the specific exotic particles that Stormers like Temple use and manipulate. Noetic is how I'm translating the alien term for it. Noetic energy. Their field destructively interacted with noetic energy generated by MOST life on Earth...but not with hominids. They let us grow that way, let it become a survival strategy so it would evolve into us. Over time, and I mean like...geological time...they slowly but surely ramped the field up on us as well though. Sort of like, they wanted us to grow the ability to resonate with noetic energy, but didn't want it to get past a certain point. There was a sweet spot they were aiming for."

 

"AND THEN," Deezy declaimed with a sweep of her arms, "It all went to sh...to shoot. I mean. It didn't work. The programming code that the computers running this place work off of has these errors branching through it, getting worse and worse over time. It's possible that there was a problem in the system design from the beginning...a tiny error that even they couldn't detect built on itself over millions of iterations and finally destabilized the system. It's also possible that it was somehow sabotaged at some point in the past. I can't tell just yet. What's IMPORTANT is that somewhere around ten million years ago, the pre-human hominids reached the sweet spot. When that happened, the final stage of this machine's operation was supposed to turn on."

 

"That's when we were supposed to have been harvested."

 

Again, Deezy paused, looking at Ryan and Temple and gauging their reaction.

 

"The noetic dampening field can be modified, to influence the noetic 'semi'-particles associated with living beings in a particular range. Basically, to sort of direct them, like using magnetic fields to direct how charged particles move. It was supposed to sweep everything up into a storage facility and signal for a pickup. The aliens needed it for some big cosmic war they were having...might still be having for all we know...with some faction they only termed 'The Foe.' Um. That process would have wiped us all out, by the way. Humankind would never have evolved."

 

"INSTEAD what happened is that the harvest stage never turned on. It just kept a sort of 'containment' protocol in place, low level dampening that allowed us to continue developing noetic potential, but unable to do much with it besides...like...subconscious atemporal awareness or subliminal mental context transmission. Things we write off as intuition or other normal things...I guess..."

 

She trailed off for a moment, distracted by several new branches of investigation opening themselves up to her. Then she snapped back.

 

"Anyway, this thing caused the Storm," Deezy concluded. "About a year ago the amount of noetic energy the sum total of the human race was generating overwhelmed the system's ability to suppress it. There was a catastrophic collapse of the dampening field, and it was like...a dam bursting behind literally millions of years of accumulated water. There's still a lot of questions hidden in the data, like why the Storm didn't affect EVERYONE, and why it's not just noetic energy that got affected by the release. Like I said...this is just...skimming the surface."

 

Deezy heaved another breath and said, "Hoo! Anyway! Questions? I know it's a LOT."

[Shameless]

In what seemingly was becoming a habit, Deezy left Ryan speechless.  While not the genius that Deezy was, Ryan was still far more intelligent than any normal person.   He was capable of deep thought, and for nearly thirty seconds after Deezy stopped speaking, he was silent, pondering exactly what to ask.  

"First off, you keep talking about Noetic energy, and how that is what's more fundamental in the human species.   What exactly differentiates that from what you and I use?   Do the Errors have any correlation to increases in Quantum energies like what we use?"

"Clearly we've seen that the two energy types can work in tandem, though from the sound of things, Noetic energy is somewhat more fundamental, which essentially makes it a whole new energy type, at least as far as human science is concerned,  unless I'm mistaken.  Why set what seems like it would be a very low, almost unrefined harvest level?   Why not wait until the species had matured, maximizing the yield of this noetic energy,  but before they discovered what truly made them special and how to use it?"

Perhaps not the most pertinent questions, but they were ones that he was curious about.