Oh TENenbaum, oh TENenbaum!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"No."
"Come on!"
"No."
"You need it, I want it, let's do it!"
"Harper!" And he had the temerity to look wide-eyed at her like he could not possibly fathom why she would want to glare at him so.
"All right, well, maybe I'll go and see how my new friends are doing without me, at the large and extensive bar downstairs." By his tone, he was nothing but eager to repeat the experience which had left him making all sorts of suffering sounds until just an hour or so ago. He still couldn't look directly at the light fixtures without wincing.
Rommie pursued her lips and readied another argument but gave up before she began. It couldn't hurt, she conceded to herself, and she might even get something useful out of it. "Okay, Harper, you can do your check-up. I think I would know if I needed it, but if it'll keep you from becoming Seamus the Human Sponge again." she sighed melodramatically. An hour to be wasted. Harper might be able to down three or thirty drinks in that time, but she, even without her main A.I. network, could process an entire planet's history, develop over a trillion ways to avert every major war, natural, or man-made disaster to bring instead peace and prosperity to all, and render the entire thing into perfect haiku form (or sonnet, if she felt like a little variety) in every language ever spoken in any of the worlds or habitats of the Systems Commonwealth. After the two years with the Andromeda's present crew, she could probably do it all in dirty limericks as well. There once was a eukaryote from Chi'xian.. Definitely too much influence from the crew.
"I'm an engineer, not a doctor, but if you insist." Harper extracted a thin, needle-like tool from his belt and advanced on her like a Neanderthal hoping to skewer the woolly mammoth in his sight. She sat down on a nearby chair and closed her eyes in her android equivalent of sleep. Suddenly, she was inside herself, or inside her mind at least, something she never liked to reflect on.
She tapped a pixilated foot impatiently as Harper joined her in her neural network. As always, his projection was somehow more.perfect than his usual appearance. Typical. "Rommie, you are one of the few girls I can honestly say."
".is just as gorgeous on the outside as I am on the inside. I know. And you need to find some new clichés."
Harper bent to inspect a tangled mess of glowing lines. "Ah, you wound me, sweetheart." His habitual bantering tone was half-hearted; apparently he'd found something very much of interest. "Hey, Rommie, remember how you couldn't detect this place until we ran into it?"
Of course she remembered. She recalled what he had worn the first time he'd stepped aboard the Andromeda and told him so. She realizes she was acting rather snappish, but the engineer could always do with a little ego reduction, especially after yesterday. That such a compact person with his fragile health could consume that much Weissbrau without succumbing to alcohol poisoning astounded her.
"Yeah, well, I don't think it was that they had any shield or anything around here," something tingled inside her as Harper played with the mess of systems, "but some kind of signal emitted from--I don't know, somewhere-- interfered with one of your processing centers." An arc of blue appeared from one of her internal defenses and shocked Harper soundly.
She could immediately discern that he was unharmed but berated herself for her lax attention. She'd recognized it beginning before it zinged the young man just soon enough to reduce its charge to a less fatal level. Harper shook himself and continued working, every bit as enthusiastically as he had before the encounter with her defense system. "Whoever designed this knew what he was doing," he commented, still in that absent tone. She wondered if he meant her defenses or the disrupting signal affecting her. Probably the latter.
Her projection squatted near Harper, becoming more and more curious in spite of herself about what he'd discovered. She really should know what was wrong with her own self, after all. Peering closely at the twisted strands, she winced. "Harper, how can I not feel that??"
The named shook his head. "Whatever is keeping me from fixing you must be blocking the abnormal impulses from reaching your neural net." Cautiously, he approached the system that had zapped him earlier and lightly tapped one of the shining spheres that represented a signal juncture. "Can you feel that?"
Rommie found this very disturbing, watching Harper muck around with various bits of mind and her utterly unaware of it. "No."
Harper nodded as if he'd expected just that. "Okay, Rommie, can you disengage some of your security protocols? Actually, all of 'em. I think I can repair you, but I gotta have more access to your inner workings." The "I think" wasn't reassuring in the least, but Rommie assented. Now, not only could she not feel anything he did, she'd also given him very close to complete control over her most important systems. All she could do was watch and hope he was half the genius he claimed to be.
"Ah-ha! Found the problem." Rommie saw it too, a dark shadow dulling several of the usually brilliant, pulsing nerves (as they would be in living beings, that is) that ran throughout her A.I. and body. She glared fiercely as the obscuring mass. "You know, that reminds me of something I saw earlier when I was." He looked at the young woman's image beside him, coughed, and trailed off. "It looks kinda familiar." He hoped he wouldn't have to tell her where he'd seen it's like, and if she did, he wanted to delay that moment as long as possible. With her defenses off, he could access and disable the clouding program much easier than that at the bar's computer. He grinned at the challenge.
Several minutes passed during which Rommie neither saw nor felt any change in the slightest. Then, an extremely faint tremor seemed to pass through her, followed after a fraction of a second (approximately .0018182) by a searing bolt of agony. "Harper!!" She let her remonstration fade into silence, though she persisted in glowering at him, when she saw the misty barrier dissolve to nothing. "What did you do?"
The blond engineer's grin was insufferably smug. "Seamus Harper, to the rescue one again. It really was a simple matter for a mastermind such as myself. Just a-"
His self-acclamations were cut short as information poured into Rommie's now very active sensors. "This planet.it's run by the Dheran syndicate." Virtual brown eyes widened. "And they're looking for Beka and Tyr!"
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
"They run the entire planet??" Dylan's face was a perfect picture of shock and outrage. He knew what had happened to the universe since the fall of the Commonwealth.the Old Commonwealth, as they called it more and more these days, with the slow rise of its modern incarnation, but sometimes, he couldn't quite believe it. A whole planet controlled by gangsters?! No, probably the whole system.
"Correct. And they're desperately searching for Tyr and Captain Valentine." Naturally, Rommie did not waste time with emotions like righteous indignation and horror-which wasn't to say that she didn't have emotions at all, for he had seen her. and that was a train of thought he did not want to jump aboard at the moment.
She'd quickly located and gathered the other three, slipping innocuously past the intangible shield that monitored everything within the main city and hid it from foreign sensors. Clever, but they hadn't had much experience with Commonwealth A.I.'s; once Rommie's neural net was free of the signal, she could not only sense as well as ever, but she could also passively view the happenings of the Dheran network as well. Ever since Harper broke the block around her sensory systems, she'd learned even more that made their departure a better and better idea. "About an hour ago," fifty six minutes and thirty point two eight nine seconds ago, but "about an hour" was close enough for her companions, "one of the higher-ups suggested we be found and...gently questioned. They'll leave us in one piece...more or less."
Harper winced. That sounded way too similar to Nietzschean interrogation. He didn't know why an entire crime syndicate had turned out to search for him crewmates, but if they reminded him of Nietzscheans, they might give even Tyr a run for his money. One, two, or even a small Pride he could handle, but the Dherans were almost as infamous as the Dragans. And he didn't want to think about Beka in the hands of gangsters - she was way too loyal for her good sometimes and could be as proud and defiant as any Uber.
"They know we're here, but not that we know anything, so we should be able to leave without too much of a problem." Meaning they would blast their way free, facing only two dozen light cruisers and possibly a planetary defense system.
Trance had kept her own counsel while the rest had produced, debated, and ultimately rejected ideas for escape, but now she spoke up. "But what will we do after we're gone? Tyr and Beka don't have a Glorious Heritage class warship," understatement of the century, "and the Dherans seem to be concentrating most of their efforts on them. Even if they manage to get off that planet, how are we going to make contact with them?"
Hmph. Harper definitely liked Purple Trance better. Maybe that wasn't quite fair, but Trance 2.0 had a much more pronounced tendency to see the dark side of the things. If Original Trance saw it too, well, at least she had kept it to herself.
"All good points, but we'll worry about them when we can do something about it. For now, those two will have to take care of themselves." Dylan's voice was confidence epitomized, but he scrubbed her hand through his dirty blond hair and darted uncertain glances at the foliage around them. Clearly, he wished he could do something about it now.
Rommie nodded firmly. "And if we don't leave soon, we won't be in a position to help ourselves." They really didn't have much of a plan: get back to the Andromeda, shoot anyone who tried to stop them on the ground, fly away at top PSL, and repeat step two until they somehow located Tyr and Beka. That part was a little fuzzier.
At first, it seemed that their plan might go off without much of a hitch, the majestic forest around them silent of unnatural noises, save their own quick footsteps. Birds chirped, small animals skittered, and no large men with guns fired at the four figures ghosting through cool tree shadows. Then they reached the Andromeda.
Rommie and Dylan had to forcibly shove one of the aft cargo doors open, {{A/N I have no idea which part "aft" is!}} as the main A.I. wasn't responding to either its avatar or its captain. The moment they stepped aboard, thankfully, Andromeda recognized them, so they wouldn't have to add an invigorating jog through the gauntlet of the ship's internal defenses to the day's misfortunes.
The hologram that materialized in front of them looked distinctly annoyed that she hadn't heard them coming, which confirmed Harper's suspicions. The information barrier must affect every computer within some perimeter of the city, or perhaps it was planetwide. Either way, he'd have to jack into the Andromeda's A.I. network and purge the dampening signal. When he gallantly volunteered his services (and added a lascivious wink as he did so), Rommie turned and informed him in a withering tone that she could the same herself and faster, but she let him go anyway. After all, she had a daring rescue to plan.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"No."
"Come on!"
"No."
"You need it, I want it, let's do it!"
"Harper!" And he had the temerity to look wide-eyed at her like he could not possibly fathom why she would want to glare at him so.
"All right, well, maybe I'll go and see how my new friends are doing without me, at the large and extensive bar downstairs." By his tone, he was nothing but eager to repeat the experience which had left him making all sorts of suffering sounds until just an hour or so ago. He still couldn't look directly at the light fixtures without wincing.
Rommie pursued her lips and readied another argument but gave up before she began. It couldn't hurt, she conceded to herself, and she might even get something useful out of it. "Okay, Harper, you can do your check-up. I think I would know if I needed it, but if it'll keep you from becoming Seamus the Human Sponge again." she sighed melodramatically. An hour to be wasted. Harper might be able to down three or thirty drinks in that time, but she, even without her main A.I. network, could process an entire planet's history, develop over a trillion ways to avert every major war, natural, or man-made disaster to bring instead peace and prosperity to all, and render the entire thing into perfect haiku form (or sonnet, if she felt like a little variety) in every language ever spoken in any of the worlds or habitats of the Systems Commonwealth. After the two years with the Andromeda's present crew, she could probably do it all in dirty limericks as well. There once was a eukaryote from Chi'xian.. Definitely too much influence from the crew.
"I'm an engineer, not a doctor, but if you insist." Harper extracted a thin, needle-like tool from his belt and advanced on her like a Neanderthal hoping to skewer the woolly mammoth in his sight. She sat down on a nearby chair and closed her eyes in her android equivalent of sleep. Suddenly, she was inside herself, or inside her mind at least, something she never liked to reflect on.
She tapped a pixilated foot impatiently as Harper joined her in her neural network. As always, his projection was somehow more.perfect than his usual appearance. Typical. "Rommie, you are one of the few girls I can honestly say."
".is just as gorgeous on the outside as I am on the inside. I know. And you need to find some new clichés."
Harper bent to inspect a tangled mess of glowing lines. "Ah, you wound me, sweetheart." His habitual bantering tone was half-hearted; apparently he'd found something very much of interest. "Hey, Rommie, remember how you couldn't detect this place until we ran into it?"
Of course she remembered. She recalled what he had worn the first time he'd stepped aboard the Andromeda and told him so. She realizes she was acting rather snappish, but the engineer could always do with a little ego reduction, especially after yesterday. That such a compact person with his fragile health could consume that much Weissbrau without succumbing to alcohol poisoning astounded her.
"Yeah, well, I don't think it was that they had any shield or anything around here," something tingled inside her as Harper played with the mess of systems, "but some kind of signal emitted from--I don't know, somewhere-- interfered with one of your processing centers." An arc of blue appeared from one of her internal defenses and shocked Harper soundly.
She could immediately discern that he was unharmed but berated herself for her lax attention. She'd recognized it beginning before it zinged the young man just soon enough to reduce its charge to a less fatal level. Harper shook himself and continued working, every bit as enthusiastically as he had before the encounter with her defense system. "Whoever designed this knew what he was doing," he commented, still in that absent tone. She wondered if he meant her defenses or the disrupting signal affecting her. Probably the latter.
Her projection squatted near Harper, becoming more and more curious in spite of herself about what he'd discovered. She really should know what was wrong with her own self, after all. Peering closely at the twisted strands, she winced. "Harper, how can I not feel that??"
The named shook his head. "Whatever is keeping me from fixing you must be blocking the abnormal impulses from reaching your neural net." Cautiously, he approached the system that had zapped him earlier and lightly tapped one of the shining spheres that represented a signal juncture. "Can you feel that?"
Rommie found this very disturbing, watching Harper muck around with various bits of mind and her utterly unaware of it. "No."
Harper nodded as if he'd expected just that. "Okay, Rommie, can you disengage some of your security protocols? Actually, all of 'em. I think I can repair you, but I gotta have more access to your inner workings." The "I think" wasn't reassuring in the least, but Rommie assented. Now, not only could she not feel anything he did, she'd also given him very close to complete control over her most important systems. All she could do was watch and hope he was half the genius he claimed to be.
"Ah-ha! Found the problem." Rommie saw it too, a dark shadow dulling several of the usually brilliant, pulsing nerves (as they would be in living beings, that is) that ran throughout her A.I. and body. She glared fiercely as the obscuring mass. "You know, that reminds me of something I saw earlier when I was." He looked at the young woman's image beside him, coughed, and trailed off. "It looks kinda familiar." He hoped he wouldn't have to tell her where he'd seen it's like, and if she did, he wanted to delay that moment as long as possible. With her defenses off, he could access and disable the clouding program much easier than that at the bar's computer. He grinned at the challenge.
Several minutes passed during which Rommie neither saw nor felt any change in the slightest. Then, an extremely faint tremor seemed to pass through her, followed after a fraction of a second (approximately .0018182) by a searing bolt of agony. "Harper!!" She let her remonstration fade into silence, though she persisted in glowering at him, when she saw the misty barrier dissolve to nothing. "What did you do?"
The blond engineer's grin was insufferably smug. "Seamus Harper, to the rescue one again. It really was a simple matter for a mastermind such as myself. Just a-"
His self-acclamations were cut short as information poured into Rommie's now very active sensors. "This planet.it's run by the Dheran syndicate." Virtual brown eyes widened. "And they're looking for Beka and Tyr!"
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
"They run the entire planet??" Dylan's face was a perfect picture of shock and outrage. He knew what had happened to the universe since the fall of the Commonwealth.the Old Commonwealth, as they called it more and more these days, with the slow rise of its modern incarnation, but sometimes, he couldn't quite believe it. A whole planet controlled by gangsters?! No, probably the whole system.
"Correct. And they're desperately searching for Tyr and Captain Valentine." Naturally, Rommie did not waste time with emotions like righteous indignation and horror-which wasn't to say that she didn't have emotions at all, for he had seen her. and that was a train of thought he did not want to jump aboard at the moment.
She'd quickly located and gathered the other three, slipping innocuously past the intangible shield that monitored everything within the main city and hid it from foreign sensors. Clever, but they hadn't had much experience with Commonwealth A.I.'s; once Rommie's neural net was free of the signal, she could not only sense as well as ever, but she could also passively view the happenings of the Dheran network as well. Ever since Harper broke the block around her sensory systems, she'd learned even more that made their departure a better and better idea. "About an hour ago," fifty six minutes and thirty point two eight nine seconds ago, but "about an hour" was close enough for her companions, "one of the higher-ups suggested we be found and...gently questioned. They'll leave us in one piece...more or less."
Harper winced. That sounded way too similar to Nietzschean interrogation. He didn't know why an entire crime syndicate had turned out to search for him crewmates, but if they reminded him of Nietzscheans, they might give even Tyr a run for his money. One, two, or even a small Pride he could handle, but the Dherans were almost as infamous as the Dragans. And he didn't want to think about Beka in the hands of gangsters - she was way too loyal for her good sometimes and could be as proud and defiant as any Uber.
"They know we're here, but not that we know anything, so we should be able to leave without too much of a problem." Meaning they would blast their way free, facing only two dozen light cruisers and possibly a planetary defense system.
Trance had kept her own counsel while the rest had produced, debated, and ultimately rejected ideas for escape, but now she spoke up. "But what will we do after we're gone? Tyr and Beka don't have a Glorious Heritage class warship," understatement of the century, "and the Dherans seem to be concentrating most of their efforts on them. Even if they manage to get off that planet, how are we going to make contact with them?"
Hmph. Harper definitely liked Purple Trance better. Maybe that wasn't quite fair, but Trance 2.0 had a much more pronounced tendency to see the dark side of the things. If Original Trance saw it too, well, at least she had kept it to herself.
"All good points, but we'll worry about them when we can do something about it. For now, those two will have to take care of themselves." Dylan's voice was confidence epitomized, but he scrubbed her hand through his dirty blond hair and darted uncertain glances at the foliage around them. Clearly, he wished he could do something about it now.
Rommie nodded firmly. "And if we don't leave soon, we won't be in a position to help ourselves." They really didn't have much of a plan: get back to the Andromeda, shoot anyone who tried to stop them on the ground, fly away at top PSL, and repeat step two until they somehow located Tyr and Beka. That part was a little fuzzier.
At first, it seemed that their plan might go off without much of a hitch, the majestic forest around them silent of unnatural noises, save their own quick footsteps. Birds chirped, small animals skittered, and no large men with guns fired at the four figures ghosting through cool tree shadows. Then they reached the Andromeda.
Rommie and Dylan had to forcibly shove one of the aft cargo doors open, {{A/N I have no idea which part "aft" is!}} as the main A.I. wasn't responding to either its avatar or its captain. The moment they stepped aboard, thankfully, Andromeda recognized them, so they wouldn't have to add an invigorating jog through the gauntlet of the ship's internal defenses to the day's misfortunes.
The hologram that materialized in front of them looked distinctly annoyed that she hadn't heard them coming, which confirmed Harper's suspicions. The information barrier must affect every computer within some perimeter of the city, or perhaps it was planetwide. Either way, he'd have to jack into the Andromeda's A.I. network and purge the dampening signal. When he gallantly volunteered his services (and added a lascivious wink as he did so), Rommie turned and informed him in a withering tone that she could the same herself and faster, but she let him go anyway. After all, she had a daring rescue to plan.