First Contact

psst do you hear it listen listen do you hear it

Doctor Igwe stared at his monitors, looking over the reports from the battlefield where he had dispatched warbots to take out the androids that were beginning to infest the far side of Alpha Layer. The casualties were mounting up quickly and the telemetry was showing that the warbots were taking it as bad as they were giving it.

The warbots were retreating, their self-adaptive code morphing into nearly a full rout.

Doctor Igwe went to edit their code to force them back into the fight when his hand froze.

your name is marco

His hand moved instead to the holographic mouse pointer, shifting the terrain. Ordering the warbots into cover and a full half of them to retreat. He activated two more divisions and sent them in at the flanks and another division to send them in through the rear.

His pinkie trembled for a moment then he reset the monitors.

Doctor Igwe watched as the warbots moved past the rubble and took cover, taking the time to recharge their capacitors and reload their weapon systems.

A beeping caught his attention and he shifted to another monitor.

Hyperatomic Plane Alpha was kicking slightly, energetic particle release into the lower bands of Layered Hyperatomic Plane Beta AKA jumpspace. Doctor Igwe tagged it for observation and moved to the next beeping.

The processing and memory farms on Iota Layer were down again. A quick check showed that it was shut down for cycling and maintenance. A quick scan through the cameras showed only the strange robotic maintenance systems moving around.

No sign of androids.

More beeping caught his attention and he checked it.

The mat-trans system was back offline and not responding to requests or orders. The mat-trans facilities had gone to full DEFCON mode, with warbots patrolling the perimeter, aerial drones up, and auto-turrets deployed. The sites were data holes. Nothing out, although a few of the facilities were pulling down thick bandwidth for data.

Doctor Igwe sighed and went to put an annotation to the Detainee about the mat-trans.

Another beeping caught his attention.

The maintenance teams had not shown up to the high security areas after leaving several days ago. There were millions of maintenance pulls listed with nearly a half-million maintenance pulls in various states of completion. The high security areas were pinging their priority maintenance status and demanding that SUDS Local Union 4587 return to their scheduled maintenance tasks.

Doctor Iqwe made a face of distaste and went to type.

Another beeping hit.

Three of the fusion generator 'suns' on Sigma Layer had shut down. They'd entered fuel reclamation status then just shut down and refused to restart.

Another breakdown.

He tagged it for maintenance with a level one priority and went to see if there were any bots he could assign when his screens had popups cascade across it.

Report after report of hardware failures.

It took him nearly thirty minutes, constantly dealing with interruptions, to find that the hardware failures were due to a H3 line closing and the valve not correctly reporting the status. He loaded up the software and firmware from the cold storage WORM libraries, overwrote it, and the hardware failures started to clear up with the introduction of H3 back into the system.

His eyes feeling gritty and a slight headache at his temples, Doctor Igwe your name is marco got up and moved to the vending machine, grabbing a fizzystim and swallowing down half of it in a convulsive swallow.

By the time he got back to his work station there were another thirty alerts.

He sighed and rubbed his forehead.

"Doctor Igwe?" a voice asked.

He turned around, wondering who the unfamiliar voice was.

One of what he had begun to think of as "The New Crew" was standing there, a hologram projecting up from her palm.

"Yes?" he asked.

"We have managed to locate and begin to debug the old firmware encoding for the processing queue," she said.

He remembered that the software had been completely slagged down by SAM-UL in the last days of the insane Digital Sentience's control of the system.

"There's a slight management problem," she said.

"Which is?" Doctor Igwe asked.

She sat down on a chair. "Well, the system was originally designed with a 'first in - first out' mindset. However, that was before the Glassing and eight thousand years of life cycles being brought into the system," she said.

Doctor Igwe just nodded, ignoring the trill of another priority alert from his console.

"Older templates are not meeting current template release and rebirth standards," she said. "Most of this has to do with chronology and the older templates are from a time period thousands of years ago, meaning their culture shock levels are off the chart."

Doctor Igwe nodded again as the console gave off another priority alert.

"My team examined the software and we're beginning to believe that some of it needs taken back to code. The programming language is not a proprietary language developed for the SUDS architecture, but a common use programming language that was predicated thousands of years ago. If we update the languages, rebuild the code, we believe we can go from 'first in - first out' to 'cleared for release' on an individual basis," she said.

"How long will it take?" Doctor Igwe asked.

The woman nodded slowly. "If we did it up here, at Atlantis, it would take us about fifteen years. That's on the fast end. However, if we moved the job to the coders at the programming center in Iota Layer, to the compression layer areas, here it at Atlantis it would only be a few days."

"And test runs?" Doctor Igwe asked.

"The rebirth hardware on Iota Layer allows for test runs. It's directly hooked up to the Traumatic Life Cessation Recovery System though," she said.

"To Hell."

She nodded. "To Hell."

"Did you consult with the Detainee?" he asked.

Another nod. "We asked the team over at the Communications Section to do some pull requests with the Detainee and the Digital Sentience overseeing the Traumatic Life Cessation Recovery System has agreed to provide a sampling of recovered templates across multiple time spans for the testing," she stated.

"I should check with her," Doctor Igwe said.

The woman nodded. "That's your prerogative as Overproject Manager. I just wanted to let you know that the Detainee was informed and has agreed to assist us."

A small part of him was irritated that the scientist in front of him had gone around him to contact the Detainee. He was busy trying to handle all the

your name is marco can you hear your name do you remember do you remember marco remember the smell of dust and scorched metal and vaporized blood remember marco remember your name is marco

He felt relieved that the scientist in front of him had shown the initiative to get together with another team to make sure everything was catalogued and done according to standard operating procedure.

your name is marco remember remember who you are remember Tycho remember marco remember your legs

Doctor Igwe watched the female scientist

she has a name can you remember it can you remember your own name

walk away and turned his chair around. He tapped a mag-tapped enclosure, which popped open and dropped a datalink cord out. He moved his hair out of the way, had the cyberport open, and plugged in.

Data streamed by. He pinged the Detainee and got a reply. Loading up the interfaces and the translation programs, he felt it tingle at remember remember who you are remember Tycho remember Anthill remember remember your name is marco the base of his skull as his mind synched up with the system.

He closed his eyes. There was a moment of dizziness and his vision cleared.

He found he couldn't move. He was stuck inside a flat screen 2.5D display.

The Detainee, in her matronly appearance, was moving between groups of people on their knees, their faces covered with metal cage masks, their arms held tight to their sides by leather belts, their eyes covered with bloody cloth wrapped with barbed wire. Their legs were bound together, their feet and hands covered with mittens and slippers made of woven barbed wire.

They were all trying to scream past the bits in their mouths.

The Detainee moved up to the 2.5D screen Doctor Igwe was inside and reached up to it, putting her hand on it.

She appeared next to Doctor Igwe, then closed curtains over the scene.

"You did that," she said softly, lighting a cigarette.

"I did what?" Doctor Igwe asked.

"Them. You did that," the Detainee said. "You shattered their minds. You edited a SUDS template by resetting the time pointer and cropping out their last hours," she exhaled smoke that smelled of blood and brimstone. "Now I have to put them back together."

Doctor Igwe your name is marco remember remember anthill remember phillip remember the black armor remember the screaming remember the white flash remember tycho frowned. "I did it? SUDS template editing is straight forward."

"It was thought to be straight forward eight thousand years ago. Now, they know better," she snorted. "Hell, even me, with my primitive science that might as well have been banging rocks together compared to modern science, knew that human memory wasn't the cut and dried 'brain cells equal photographs' that your template editing assumed."

"All I did was remove the last few hours of their lives," Doctor Igwe protested.

"And then they didn't understand why a sudden white flash made their hands shake and their limbic system respond as if they'd been punched in the face and gut," she snarled. "You can't edit out every white flash symbology in their memories, but every white flash symbol was attached to a panic and life and death fight or flight response due to the Glassing," she exhaled smoke in an angry snort. "You fucked them up, Pete."

Doctor Igwe reached for the curtain.

The Detainee stopped him, her hand on his wrist abnormally strong.

"Don't," she warned.

"So you killed them," Doctor Igwe tried. "You flat out told me you lined them against the wall and shot them."

"Yes and no," she said. She walked to the other side of the strangely flat yet wide room and opened a door that revealed a bright white rectangle. "I did a hard reset of their SUDS links. Instant. Almost painless if you discount the sudden feeling of bees and fireants in your skull. Then I moved them to Recovery to start processing them."

Doctor Igwe stepped through the door, coming out on a blasted plain of lava fields, black ice, twisted trees, and jagged rocks. He expected to see a throne and was surprised that none were around.

The Detainee walked up to a pillar of black ice and brushed the frost from it.

Inside, Doctor Rogstad was frozen in mid-scream. Her skin was blue, she was completely naked, and her eyes were wide open, crystalline tears frozen on her cheeks.

"She had family on Earth. Family that died between the thirty and fifty second mark. They had long enough to know what was happening when they died," the Detainee said softly. "They reached out to her, pushed by the Speakers and the Queens, through the datalink, through the psychic buss array," she cleaned the ice around Doctor Rogstad's head. "She would sit at her terminal, trying to work, but only able to think about her family. She would get irrationally angry and didn't know why."

The Detainee turned and looked at Doctor Igwe.

"Because you edited out why what was wrong with her was happening, but you didn't stop what was happening," she snarled.

Doctor your name is marco Igwe opened his mouth to protest, then stopped for a moment.

"You're speaking to me across some kind of linkage, aren't you? Like when you and Daxin found me in the Omnicorps research station," he accused.

The Detainee shook her head. "No. Anything I whisper in your ear, it will be in person," she said. She turned and walked over to a gap between the twisted and irregular columns of black ice. "Why?"

Doctor Igwe moved up near her as she used the smoke from the end of a cigarette to draw a rune in midair.

"I keep hearing someone telling me to remember that my name is Marco, to remember things from the past," he said. "What are you doing?"

"Drawing runes in mid-air," she said.

"Are you whispering in my ear? I keep hearing whispers."

She nodded slowly, reaching out with one hand while drawing a rune with cigarette smoke with the other. "Do you consent?"

"Yes," Doctor Igwe said.

The Detainee put the back of her hand against his forehead like a mother checking the temperature of a child. He felt a twinge in his brain.

"Yup. Just like Legion warned me," she said softly.

"What? Warned you of what?" Doctor marco your name is marco make her say it your name is marco Igwe asked.

"You're unraveling. The templates are stacked on top of one another and neural scorching is starting to set in," she said gently. She stepped behind him, making him turn around, and started etching another rune in mid-air with cigarette smoke.

"Maybe I fix it? I've done live real-time editing on my template before," Doctor Igwe asked. "Maybe Dhruv can fix it? I feel remember anthill remember Nyson-Signus Omnicorp and the nerve stapling program just fine."

The Detainee stepped next to him, reaching out and drawing another rune.

"You're part of the Immortals Project. There are certain problems about it," the Detainee suddenly laughed. "The only person that could fix you, aside from Sam-UL, is you, and to fix you, you'd have to take yourself offline and do the repairs manually."

"What are you doing?" Doctor Igwe asked as she stepped to the other side of him and begin drawing runes in mid-air.

"The band broke up, but they left one last track in the studio," the Detainee said softly.

"What..." Doctor Igwe started to ask.

Ice solidified around him, freezing him in place.

In Atlantis his brain filled with the burning of fireants and the buzzing of bees before he slumped, his eyes open.

"Your siblings love you more than you would ever believe, Pete," the Detainee said softly, staring at the ice imprisoned man. "They told me this would happen. They told me what to do. They made me promise thrice."

She shook her head sadly.

"Never live-edit your own SUDS template."

remember remember