"What The Hell Are You?"
A collaborative post between Azereiah and Crossfire
After all the delays, Stryker had finally arrived outside the door to the Storage Room door. He found that the door wasn't responding when he touched the panel to slide it open. A few more tries, and still it didn't budge. Finally, he took out his datapad and hit the override controls to force the door open.
Stryker walked inside to witness a mass of wires spread and strung around the small room like a complex spider's web. The 2 androids on standby nearby.
"Ok, here to talk, first you have to explain what the fuck all this is about" Stryker said in a commanding tone and his gestured to all the wiring.
In response, the Tower's frontal hatch swung upen to reveal a console and screen. Some various bits of hardware were scattered about inside of the machine, suggesting that it had its own manufacturing capabilities of some sort. The screen turned on and, after a few moments of boot-up time, a very generic face appeared, which began to speak. The voice was broken -- with a lot of background noise of various sorts and difficulty maintaining pitch and playback speed, but it was perfectly understandable with some light concentration.
"Survival, sir. I am not a fa&/fa&/&segfault.01xff11 -- I am not fond of exposure to lethal doses of debris, bullets, and energy bursts," it said. The generic face on the screen broke into a slight smile as it continued. There seemed to be some bugs with the voice control systems.
"...So I made some minor upgrades to the ship."A small scrap of paper flopped out of an old-style receipt slot, listing the infected systems. All RCS thrusters, the engines, a number of doors, and a number of cameras freshly mounted externally were present on the list. Stryker was taken aback at the sight before him, he'd never seen technology like this before. He reached out cautiously to take the paper and scanned down through it quickly, before tucking it into his pocket.
"Right" he said, still not sure if this was even real "So what the hell are you, and how were you able to access my ship's systems without setting off an alert?"
An extra pair of cables wiggled out of a port and waved around in the closest equivalent to 'jazz hands' that Ren could manage, and the face on the screen shifted to a shit-eating grin.
"Magic, of course! Though, in all seriousness, your ship has only standard design features in terms of security. It would not adequately stand up to any nanotechnologogical attacks, for example. Those are a thing now, right? I forget how far along that tech has come."Shortly after speaking, the screen flipped again, this time to a 3D diagram of the Revenant, slowly rotating. Red dots were regularly scattered across the entire image with blue, snakelike lines representing the cables spreading out from the position of the Tower. If Stryker had read through the schematics of the ship at all, he would recognize the positions of the red blips as damage sensor packages, all of which were spaced no less than two meters from the cable indicators.
"As for what I am... Would you believe me if I said that I was hu/hu/hu/hu/&FATALERROR.f2xfb14/[Debug Report Sent to Manufacturer]--", it said, complete with a Windows XP era error sound. The screen went black for a moment to return to the bootup screen and Renli, standing in the corner, completed the Tower's statement for it in almost jarringly unbroken speech.
"...If I said I was human? I can show you after my brain finishes rebooting." Renli seemed rather annoyed by the crash.
"I don't as a matter of fact" Stryker said, arms folded "I think that you
think you're human, wouldn't be the first bot to have a few screws loose," he continued. Renli's eye twitched annoyedly in response, but he held his tongue. Showing would be better than telling.
"You do what you have to do, but I'm on a bit of a time limit, so let's get right down to it. I've told the Alliance that we've picked up a couple extra hands, but I've left the details out. As far as they're concerned, these two" he cast a glance at Renli and Rento "came from the Mining Station.... unless someone recognizes them, and scrolls back through the security feeds of the cameras mounted everywhere in the ship to see the truth. She already told us they had to get away from the Alliance, so what's stopping me from turning you over... in short, why should I let you all stay?"
"You should let me stay because removing me from the ship would require more firepower than your internal hull can handle without long-term repair work. My shields are up and it's not worth the effort of setting off explosives in the central storage area. And then there's this..."The tower came back online and, as Renli had said, the Spherical structure sitting on top opened up along the central seam to reveal a number of easily identifiable repulsorplates, a small shield module, and some
very unique hardware - specifically, what appeared to be a dark grey and black human brain sitting within a dome of transparent aluminum oxynitride. The brain was softly pulsating under an artificial heartbeat, with off-white 'veins' spread across it. It could be safely assumed that heavier-duty hardware was present underneath in the main tower. Renli went inactive again for the Tower to speak.
"I strongly believe that I am worth more to you on this ship than in an Alliance laboratory. This ship does not have a built-in intelligent computing system and I am willing to work as such in exchange for not being fucking vivisected. My avatars are available to work as parts of the away team and ship crew as necessary." At the mention of vivisection, images of lab rats split open on a surgical table flashed across the Tower's screen in rapid succession, and there was a hint of fear in its voice.
"Ok, I can see your point.... I have one last question. And this is going to be pretty important.... can your systems access the Alliance's surveillance system? Like I mentioned, this ship is wired to the brim with cameras and microphones, and the footage gets automatically transmitted out when we're in range of an Alliance network link. It'd be extremely beneficial to our mutual interests if you could get in and mess around with.... certain aspects of the footage"
Stryker tried his best to hide the shock and surprise he felt of seeing the brain. This thing was totally unlike anything he'd ever dealt with before, and worse yet, if it turned hostile, they'd be completely subject to its will. Everyone on board the ship was a potential hostage to this strange being.
"Let's put it to the test" Stryker said "If you can, access the camera in this room, right above my head... show the feed on your screen, and then erase yourself from the frame."
The machine responded cheerily while closing the lid on its spherical portion.
"Of course. I hadn't considered it, but I suppose I could give it a try. Let's see here..." One of the cables slowly rose across the room and quickly melted its way into the wall above the doorway, just beneath the camera. A quiet snipping noise could be heard as wire insulation was stripped away and clamped, followed by a louder 'pop', indicating that the wire had been severed. The tower's screen switched to a bright smiley face for a moment, then started importing the camera feed. It was a top-down view of the room, and from the angle, it didn't appear as though it would've been able to see under Ren's 'skull lid'.
"Oh, now that is delicious. Modern video feed, hm? I haven't seen a picture this smooth in years. Maybe I'll use something like this for my next modification... Oh, but the camera feed needs to be modified. I'm not the greatest with data editing, but I can put through a dummy image, if I'm understanding this thing's output format right."The image on the screen flickered for a moment, then wavered, and in a few moments it had morphed to a video feed of Stryker standing in a mostly empty storage room, checking a crate and ticking off boxes on a clipboard.
"If they're recording images and audio, then you may need somebody else to go in and tamper with the ship's memory at the first available opportunity, as I am mostly unfamiliar with modern data storage methods. I will however provide falsified footage and recordings to fill any erased data."The machine sent out another bundle of cables to search out the remainder of ship cameras before adding one final note.
"Before you leave, Captain, I figured I should introduce myself. My name is Ren."
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