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(Unfinished) Trapped Like Rats: Part I

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(Unfinished) Trapped Like Rats: Part I

Postby kir » Sun Oct 19, 2003 3:24 am

[Trapped Like Rats] A Tale of Tech Haven

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author: Kir

[City Admin at the Gates]

Drink too many Snow Whites and you'll find that the next morning you might wake up with seven dwarves. Not a happy feeling. Which is pretty much how I would have described my emotions concerning the situation I found myself in on a brisk cool October morning in the year 2779.

The tensions between the cityAdmin forces of Neocron and Tech Haven were at their worst. We were under seige, hundreds of CityAdmin forces were stationed outside our gates with the dark and ominous black eyes of Rhino Tanks backing them up from the surrounding hills. They said they were here peacefully. Since when do you point a gun at someone and tell them you come in peace?

Checkpoints had been set up at both the north and south entrance and I stood in line while the CityAdmin office flunky checked my stats. Something came up that bothered him, while doing a background check and so I had been taken aside for "questioning". My morning got steadily worse.

Fallen Angel rioters had been attacking the CityAdmin forces. The fighting had been going on for days and had literally appeared out of no where. I had no idea how a governing body that had recognized our independence and whom we ourselves had assisted into power could suddenly turn on us so quickly.

A STORM bot had been assigned to watch me after whatever the checkpoint official saw on his screen had raised the alarms. Hours of questioning ensued. Questions like, who was I sleeping with two weeks ago, did I own a hacking terminal, and how many times had I visited Pepper Park in the last month, routinely showed up in the examiners queries, albeit in varying forms. I think they were trying to catch me in a lie.

That afternoon, I was released and allowed to enter Tech Haven. As I soon discovered the upper management at Tangent Technologies had released a series of memos fingering me as a potential accomplice in a recent string of attempted break ins on the Tangent mainframe. Though I had indeed defected from Tangent to join the Fallen Angels years previously, I bore no ill will towards the company itself. I certainly did not agree with their philosophy for business, and at times I grew weary of the constant bar fights one could find with any Tangent employee whenever I returned to Neocron. However, when it all came down to it, there were worse things to worry about than the way Tangent did business.

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Reaching my apartment in Sector 1, I tried to find out more on the networks. There were certainly accusations of my supposed guilt made by several Tangent employees, but it was a poorly constructed offense. For during the time of the attack I had actually been in a radiation survey expedition with several employees of Phoenix Ltd. Not only did we have the photos to prove it, but my the heightened levels of residual radiation in my body was what finally convinced the CityAdmin that I had not been skulking about the Tangent data terminals.

I can't really complain, the CityAdmin were just doing their job. It is a tough world we live in and someone has to keep the peace. Even if it does inconvenience me, I just wish they'd keep their policing to their own city. We can take care of ours.

[An Odd Email]

That night I slept fitfully, images of worms spilling forth from my implant jacks and a rat imprisoned in a cage dominated my dreams. Waking several times with a start and a yell, I sat staring into the darkness. It was 6:00 am. Slowly, almost as if I was waking up again, the sound of my terminal beeping snuck into my awareness. I had email.

Too often I had been awoken in the middle of the night only to find another spam from some Pepper Park sex shop or some junky from the Outzone looking to rope someone else into a get rich quick scheme. These usually involved the victim's untimely demise and the liquidation of his goods and body parts, to the profit of the Outzoner. Yeah, get rich quick.

However, the nature of my work meant that more often than not my clients contacted me through the networks, desiring a certain level of anonymity. Often going through a proxy, who usually only received datacubes in the mail from unknown sources. My clients were city residents who wanted information. Information, that the owners didn't want to share. Usually it was just security video logs from a strip club to prove someone's infidelity or the tax records of a particular runner that someone wanted to blackmail. It wasn't the cleanest work I had ever done, but it paid for my lifestyle and that... wasn't cheap.

This email turned out to be different. No rants of justice or offers of greed fulfilled for some favor in return. No, this email was a single line and it stated:

"In zone H08 you will find the truth."

[Abandoned Dreams]

Not taking this email seriously I let it sit for a few days. For some reason though, I could not bring myself to delete it. My dreams were now dominated by a single image. A screen filled with static pouring forth a stream of meaningless data. It bore down on me like a great eye and washed through my body infecting every part of it. Upon awaking I couldn't help shaking the feeling that the connections between my implants felt just a tiny bit fuzzy. Nothing that got in the way of operation and it certainly was not painful. Yet, I could not shake the feeling of something residing in my internal network. Almost like I had a cold, but not quite.

Eventually I couldn't take it anymore. Never before in my life had I any reason to travel out to H08 and I couldn't think of anything in particular in that zone that had been worth noting. A couple roads passed through but that was it. No Gene Replicators, no Go Guardians, and no Vehicle Depots. Nothing.

I knew that this was one of the boundaries that the mysterious hover bots patrolled and so I suited up in my best armor and keyed up one of my hovercycles. I was going to need speed. The hover bots may be powerful, but they were most certainly slow.

Traveling north I decided to make for the Hawkins Uplink. My hovercycle performed beautifully, a credit to employees of the last company I had worked for. This particular cycle had been a going away present and personally constructed by my old team.

Fog enshrouded the verdant hills north of Tech Haven. The morning sun burned through warming my bones and drying my dew wet skin. Closing my helmet, I pointed the hover north and kicked the engine to life.

I encountered several hovers on my way to Hawkins, but they were seen only from a distance. Circling in the sky, speaking to themselves in deep and dreadful voices. I thought of the myths I had read amongst the variety of information released from the Ceres Discs. Stories of great and powerful beings that worked their twisted will and commanded humanity in the pursuit of their perverse and selfish desires. Perhaps these were the creatures that the stories told of? It seemed possible but I could not recall a single reference to anything of their like during the destructive wars of our dim and desolate past.

Continueing onward I finally crested a hill and spotted through the last strands of the morning fogs, the Hawkins uplink. A tall majestic building situated on a small hill with deep valleys running around it. A large concave dish was pointed towards the sky, warning lights encircling it and outlining it's circumference in the ever brightening morning light. The uplink was currently held by a group of the followers of Crahn, a cultish collection of people who held the Fallen Angels in murderous contempt. After all it was through the assistance of the Fallen Angels that the power of the aristocratic psi monks was broken and freedom brought to the people of Neocron. I warily skirted the edges of the outpost and continued directly east towards the zone known only by its grid coordinates H08.

Entering the zone I found that a few token hover bombers were indeed patrolling the edges of the hills, however, I easily evaded them. Searching through out the zone I found nothing. Following the edges of the forest and incidentally the gentle slopes leading down into the safari like plains that continued eastward until one ran into the mesa mountains that hid the freedom fighters (or terrorists depending on your opinion) known as the Twilight Guardians.

Turning south I prepared to head back to the safety of the Tech Haven tunnels when on the edge of the forest, in a slight drop amongst the foothills, I saw an abandoned building. Drawing my rifle I cautiously approached the building. You never could tell who you might find holed up in these rotting shells of brick and mortar. The rumours in Tech Haven whispered of a sudden increase in the hostility of the Anarchy Breed. Never a group to be trusted, but they depended on us for medical supplies and so many in the Fallen Angels wondered if the whispers of random Anarchy Breed attacks were true. I approached the building with my finger resting lightly on the trigger. Typical of what one found in the wastelands. The building had a few stacked boxes filled with some rotting cable and the remains of what may have once been the rusted innards of a water pump, now reduced to a stack of pipes and shards of metal.

The first floor was unremarkable but it was on the second floor that upon turning a corner I froze. Astonished I stared at a screen. A screen filled with static. Immediately all my joints and neural connections flared, the feeling of fuzziness intensified and rippled through my body making my hairs stand on end. What I had seen in my dreams was real. Here was the very screen that for the last few nights my dreams had been filled with. Cautiously approaching the screen, my mind leapt back to the words of that email, stripped of its headers, that read "In zone H08 you will find the truth."

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Thoughts streaked across the plateau of my mind. Were perhaps my dreams and that fateful email connected? I did not know. Lowering my weapon I finally reached the screen.

Nothing changed.

The static continued to flow, uninterrupted in bluish green waves down the screen. Breathing out a sigh of relief I marvelled at how quickly I had been deceived by my own mind into believing the impossible. Reaching out my fingers, I brushed the plastic surface of the screen.

The static snapped into neat grid lines and then reverted back into clouds of static. My eyes widened when from the previously chaotic clouds of static there emerged the form of a face. The static continued to roll in waves of chaos, however, it was as if within the chaos and built from the chaos, the bits of supposedly random data was shaping itself around the face of a being. A nose, mouth, empty eyes, it appeared to have depth, and then it spoke.

"Trials, little human, await you."

Dumb-struck I could do nothing but stand starting at the ethereal face portrayed on the screen, my jaw wide.

"Your enemies seek to speed you along the paths of the dead. And for this I am displeased."

Closing my mouth I removed my sunglasses and looked into the face of the being that was before me. My thoughts raced thinking of the stories I had heard in cantinas and bars across the world. Stories told by my kind about disturbances on the networks and prescences felt in directories few looked into. Was this one of the rumoured artificial intelligences that had been uploaded from the Ceres Discs onto our networks? I dare not believe it.

As if reading my thoughts the creature spoke again.

"No, I am not what you think you have found. I am but a sub process, a thread subordinated to a higher power. I do the bidding of my parent and when my task is completed I will be collected and returned to the nothingness from whence I sprang. I come to give you a message, I do not know why my masters choose to favor you, but heed well my words for your very essence depends on it."

Turning the face of static stared deep into my eyes.

"Deep within the abandoned cores of Tech Haven there is hidden a data disc. Contained on this disc are subroutines my masters require access to. You will find them lying in the cold hands of their last servant, who died to hide these discs from discovery. Go now, find the discs and return them to us."

A blinding flash of light and suddenly I awoke in my bed back in Tech Haven. My head burst with explosions of pain and my eyes throbbed with pulses of agony. Had it all been a dream? No, burned into my memory was a route and at the end of the route I knew I would find a disc.

Climbing from bed, I staggered into a wall. Resting on the floor I found that the fuzziness had grown in my connections, incarnating themselves in a manner that was almost physical. Finally having caught my breath I crawled to the lift, floated down and sat at my table. Slowly strapping on my armor, adjusting my weapons and filling countless magazines with ammunition. I took increasingly steadying steps towards the lift and out into the hallways of Tech Haven.

To Be Continued...
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Postby kir » Sun Oct 19, 2003 3:50 am

Just did some minor proof reading. Fixed some grammatical and spelling errors.

Comments and corrections greatly appreciated. I'm thinking submitting this in a two part series to NEMA, so I would love to hear everyone's opinion, as well as ways I could help shape the story better.
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Postby HusK » Fri Nov 14, 2003 11:13 pm

when will Part 2 be released ? :)
Tech Haven Network - Former Lead Moderator / Former co-administrator
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