Chapter Text
The bad news: Grace was still missing a lot of his memories, almost a dozen light years from earth, and alone.
The good news: he had found something interesting. A nice, comfortable puzzle to solve, to take his mind off the very big very not comfortable puzzle that was his life since waking up from some sort of space coma…what, a couple weeks ago, now? Since discovering the Don’t Go Crazy Room, any spare moment spent not agonizing over the strange turn his life had taken was directed towards seeing just how much had been crammed onto the computer systems: terabytes upon terabytes of movies and games and music and TV shows and books, and a working copy (backup?) of the internet. It was, effectively, a bottomless pit. The Eternal Timesink.
Out of the endless entertainment buffet, though, there was one program that had caught Grace’s attention. It looked like some sort of children’s game from the late 90’s, at least based on the menu he saw upon opening it. However, every time he tried to get it working to any meaningful degree, the same error message would pop up: Please apply the Neuroscanning Device to proceed.
Now, why in the heck, Grace thinks over a hearty breakfast of instant noodles, would a children’s game need a neuroscanner? That seemed like far too advanced tech for a program of that era, and if it was period-correct, any such device would have been prohibitively expensive - and delicate.
He’d dug around enough of the ship’s stores to know that no such neuroscanning device had been packed, and the T in STEM was very much not his bag. Hours of idly clicking around the laptop this program-game-scanner-thing was running on, and Grace did not have a whole lot to show for it. A memory clicked on like a light-switch - specifically, a term some of his students used: ARG. Maybe that’s what this was; some sort of immersive puzzle game to be solved. Maybe the answer lay in spoofing…whatever the “device” was supposed to do?
What the hell, he’s got time. Can’t be too hard, right?
Something was definitely up. It was hard to describe, but there was this growing feeling of off-ness Pomni started to feel over the past few weeks, even though the blackout must have been…what, a couple years ago, now?
It wasn’t like they really used the Internet for much outside of movie nights and picking up some odd skills here and there - as much as the outdated computer their whole world lived in would allow, anyway. It was a miracle they could get youtube to load. So, when it suddenly stopped working, Pomni didn’t really notice at first; mini-blackouts weren’t uncommon, all things as read. Thankfully, life in the circus had long since reached a sort of equilibrium; you could even argue it was fun. Lately, though, something had seemed...Weird.
Pomni’s train of thought was interrupted by Caine sliding into frame from the right. He looked a little worried, which was concerning. “Have you seen Zooble and Gangle around? Kinger’s calling for a family meeting by the stage.”
“They’re probably by the bar, so I’ll let them know, thanks.”
“Ah, r-right. Well, I guess I’ll..see you at the stage.”
Okay, so things were still awkward around Caine. He wasn’t quite back to one hundred percent wacky, and maybe he never would be (lord willing.) But having him be so…normal? It was hard to get used to, even after all this time.
Kinger had set up a whiteboard in front of the stage, the same spot Caine’s apology slideshow once was. Ragatha was the last to show, still wearing her softball uniform, and Pomni pat the spot on the couch next to her.
“I’m sure you’ve noticed things have been a little strange lately,” Kinger was starting to recover. Progress had been slow, but he was able to maintain lucidity for at least an hour at a time, now, without needing it to be dark. He still spent most of his time in the aquarium, or at least he did; lately he’d been spending more time at his desk, clacking away at his conjured computer, Caine hovering and helping where he could. “Caine and I have been running some numbers. There’s good news, and there’s…well, maybe not bad news, but definitely weird.”
“This whole place is weird,” Zooble shrugged. “But I get what you mean. It feels like…someone’s moved the furniture around, y’know?”
“What’s the good news?” Gangle asked.
Kinger and Caine exchanged a look. Kinger turned back towards Gangle. “Maybe we should start with the weird news first. Some of it, at least.”
Caine conjured a dry-erase marker and started writing an equation out on the board. “Well, no point in hiding it: my calendar is off. I think the circus was…shut down, for a while.”
“That can happen?” Ragatha leaned forward. “Oh, what am I kidding…of course it can happen. I just thought…”
“You would notice?” Caine capped the marker. “Well, I mean, you have, just not…directly. If my numbers are right, we were down for five months and seven days, with power restored about seventeen days ago.”
“So it…wasn't related to the blackout?”
“Not necessarily,” Kinger answered from the other side of the whiteboard. “Which brings us to the good news: I think our hardware was given an upgrade while the circus was shut down.” He wrote in purple under Caine's red. “I’m talking - terabytes of storage, gigabytes of ram. Processing power like…nothing I’ve ever seen. We’ll be able to expand - make new worlds, develop new NPC’s. The only question is…”
Gangle raised a hand. “We don’t know why?”
“Exactly,” Kinger nodded. “From what I can remember - and from what you all have shared - the computer running the circus should have been long abandoned. For us to have been given such an upgrade after the months of downtime, that would have to mean…” He hesitated. “Somebody must have found out about us.”
A pause.
“That is weird news.” Pomni said.
“It gets weirder.” Caine snapped his fingers, and a display popped into existence. “It looks like, whoever is out there…they’re trying to get in.” The display showed a desktop screen: the main menu for the circus, in windowed mode. Mostly obscured by an error message: Please apply the Neuroscanning Device to proceed. A mouse cursor wiggled in what was likely irritation, and closed the error message. Caine snapped again, and the display vanished.
“And that was when I decided to call this meeting,” Kinger clasped his hands together. “Caine and I should be able to dig around, maybe even find a way to…talk to them. But it could be dangerous. So, let's put it up to a vote.”
Being alone on a space ship, it turned out, meant spending a lot of time thinking out loud. Grace told himself it was for the sake of the logs. Sure, let’s go with that.
When he first dove into this freaky ARG, he was expecting to find ciphers and fake newspaper clippings and web pages that are entirely empty except for, like, a screamer, or something. He was not expecting to uncover the downfall of a tech company that was getting too aspirational too fast. If this was an ARG, it was apparently also a tech history lesson; all the articles and the wiki pages and everything were legit sources. Nary a puzzle to be found.
The code that mysterious program ran on was stupid old, and written with insane levels of precision. Grace had found a related folder labeled something like “brainscans (obsolete)” and another labeled something like “ai” but both were password protected and he hadn't been able to really give cracking the passwords a try because he had no idea where to start.
A pop-up blipped onto the lower right of his laptop screen; he clicked on one of the two option boxes without reading. Even in space, Windows was still Windows.
“I’m beginning to think,” Grace scrolled through another article about C&A and the (maybe not-so-failed) Neuroscan Project on the wayback machine. “That this may not be an ARG after all.” A conspiracy board was developing on the other side of his who am I? board. Okay, so it had become a bit of an obsession. Was he a true crime fan? This seemed like the sort of thing a true crime fan would do. It’s not like there was anyone around to judge, and it beat crying himself to sleep watching disney movies in the Don’t Go Crazy Room.
“It just doesn’t make any sense,” Grace pulled the conspiracy board into frame of one of the cameras, for the logs, even though this had nothing to do with astrophage at all. “We could barely make MP3 players in the late 90’s, and yet, I found this guy - Mike Dobby - who wrote a memo detailing the process. It looks like he was the head of the team for this...experiment, program, thing. All the articles I’ve found state that the Neuroscan Project never resulted in anything being made, but I have the program, which has to amount to something-”
“Is that…Ryan Gosling?”
Maybe the isolation was driving him crazy already. It almost sounded like that was coming from…
Grace shook his head, trying to recapture his train of thought. If the project was a success...it would probably look a lot like the program and attached folders he found on his laptop. Which would mean…
“Holy spit.” Grace re-adjusted his glasses and squinted.
The indicator light for the laptop's webcam was on.
He sure as hell didn't do that.