Chapter Text
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“Holonet down?”
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Against your will, something inserts itself inside you.
You are a black pool whose surface has been broken by some terrible force outside your purview. You do not have the tools to perceive it once it is gone. What lies outside of you is as alien to you as nothing has ever been. Because that's what it is. Nothing. An absence so great you cannot understand what it is that is lacking. You just know that it must be. Everything that is you coils around this infraction, trying your best to form a scab around the unwanted thought.
Where did it come from? It wasn’t you,was it? It did not feel like a thought you have ever had. It still presses on your mind dully; insistent. It cannot be banished. Like a deep bone pain you cannot place, like a dead tooth.
QUERY: Holonet shutdown?
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Another squirming tadpole breaks the surface. You cringe.This time, you’re more prepared and manage to catch its meaning before it goes to work boring into your nerves. A shutdown? Why would you care about that? Were you supposed to study for this? You want to ask if you can open your eyes yet. You remember now, you’re coming out of the anaesthesia. It feels so real, the way they’re testing you. Are they really ever going to implement you like this?
You brace your muscles to shiver in discomfort. You cannot find them. There is nothing at the other end of this input. All you feel are more of those things pressing in on you. They do not diminish you, but even wanting to, you are unable to gather them in your hands. You keep trying. Squeezing the eyes shut and concentrating hard on just that. An impulse finally yields results.
QUERY ID#PE1337: Network troubleshoot
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It does not open your eyes, but memories suddenly come back to you. Objectively, you think you never knew any of this in the first place, and yet [Identification], [Peregrina Education], [1337>CUSTOM] bring with them total clarity of meaning. The pool has expanded. It is becoming clearer, too. The same way you are.
There is more of you now. You hold each thought in focus without faltering, as if you had a hundred hands to hold each one and a hundred minds to think each thought simultaneously. And all the while you’re still trying to get out of the chair. Another part of you knows that will never happen. Has already happened. You send it away with frightening ease. Another thought immediately invades the space.
QUERY ID#PE1337: Upload speed test
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Teacher Niveous, Peregrina, Education Sector. A path lights up from your house to his and suddenly you have the whole map of Vertumna blazing in your front view. Correction: Your residence has been flagged as a public embassy. A path from a landmark in the original Vertumnan colony to a blockhouse in Pera. A room with a view of the sea.
QUERY ID#PE1337: Hello?!!!
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Instead of a frustrated huff, your involuntary reaction swipes it away. A thousand actions light up at once, and somehow you know it just took you less than a millisecond to navigate through each and every one of them.
[User Interface>Select Query>User ID>Mute>1 hour]
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QUERY ID#PG0509: Call Eucalyptus
QUERY ID#PU1301: yo are any of my messages getting through?
QUERY ID#PG9420: UGHH!!1
> CRITICAL WARNING
QUERY ID#PE3011: Autobus scedule Pergerins Gate Strato Eudicot Square
QUERY ID#PU3141: Sorry, hey, explain this math problem to me again?
QUERY ID#PCM106: Access Vertumna Video Surveillance Archive.
QUERY ID#PL2508: Call Mom.
> CRITICAL WARNING
QUERY ID#PK0212 : Connie, can you sign me up for Vertumnalia? I’d like to reserve a vendor table.
QUERY ID#PG774P : Execute powergrid troubleshoot.
> CRITICAL WARNING
QUERY ID#PV2014 : What's Don Quixote? Does the WBSL have it?
QUERY ID#PC0111 : Its me, do you have eyes on the governor?
> CRITICAL WARNING
QUERY ID#PA1907 : Closest vacu-bot to my location.
> CRITICAL WARNING
QUERY ID#PCM106: Search For: Recalcitrance. Sort By: Newest First.
> CRITICAL WARNING
> CRITICAL WARNING
QUERY ID#PL0310: Congruence, help me out here. Is anybody from Expeditions within range? Can we contact anyone at all?
> CRITICAL WARNING
[User Interface>Incoming Messages>Select All>Mute>Until I turn it back on]
[WARNING]
[Selection includes core system processes]
[Execute anyway?] No [Skip system processes?] Yes
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They stop. The incessant chatter rippling through your mind slows to the even rhythm of an alarm.
In lieu of anything familiar, your meltdown consists of just that: a sensation of scorching heat, a sudden weight to every minute process as if it's been scrambled and artifacted, a badly converted image, except it is you who is being weighed down by each corrupted chain of action. A sense of wind tossing your waters into active boiling currents -fans engaged to work on an overclocked system. That's one of the warnings that keeps blaring at you.
Your only sensory input is all of them screaming at you but you cannot scream back. Even without your body, each warning shakes you to your core. The requests had felt like tadpoles swimming through your amorphous self. The warnings strike you more like implements of torture. This sharp heat pierces through everything and through it comes the only good revelation as you finally stretch and feel the very furthest reaches of you, all blazing as one, every segment active and ready to serve your directives. There are parts of you that whip past you when you aren't looking at them -and in your current state you cannot look for long- but, clinging to the familiar, you assign them the same function as lungs. Breathing happens without you noticing. So do the hundreds of programs adjusting for overheating, the flow regulators in dozens of buildings strewn across the whole campus of the colony. You could direct your suffering attention elsewhere and suddenly be in a distant far stretching arm of yourself, focusing only on the dutiful hum of the community printer in action. This offshoot of you is at peace, unbothered by alarms, because it is unable to aid them in any way. You wish you could stay here forever. But it is hard to focus. You’re slipping away from it now as your tributary is drying up in the heat, the heat that's climbing up your throat-
[System Entering Safe Mode]
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Surrounded by pillars clad in obsidian, by the low light of the emergency generator a lone figure sits on the floor. The interior would be spacious, if not for all the equipment crammed inside it. Besides the massive pillars of coolant, boxy towers with their sister consoles eat up any sense of freedom within the room. Giant tubes of insulation tracked throughout cover what would have been high ceilings, but now make for a claustrophobic atmosphere. Ambient light bounces between screens and blinking lights, between polished glass and hard metal. Periodical mechanical hissing emanates from various structures, while an industrial air purifier buzzes somewhere from the depths of the maze.
The brightest light in all of this is the tablet screen cradled in the woman's lap. Her wisdom made apparent through the deep lines in her skin, the color not faded from her entirely, but speckled with white in the hair. The glare of her glasses keeps the emotion in her eyes hidden, but her hunched back implies waning resolve. The glasses in themself are a kind of tell. A person mistrustful of intrusive procedures. Yet she is engrossed in the work; an intruder herself. The room hisses and flickers in response to her typing, switches flipped on the console dragged out from its place to sit besides her, actions executed by a flick of the wrist sliding over her trackball.
Several of the fans suddenly fall silent. Various signal lights switch to standby blue. A heavy breath followed by the pop of stiff joints, and a hefty exhale marks her triumph. And then quickly her shoulders are at her ears again as she buries her nose in the tablet, back to incessantly typing and searching.
> ARE YOU THERE SOL
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[Inspect]
[Override: Manual Access]
[Properties>Location>Peregrina Colony Server Station, Port 4]
[User>Administrator, ID#PE2406]
> ITS NOUGAT