Day Two
Monitoring Station05:25
The coffee this close to the action was significantly better than that on the Frontier, somehow. Too many confounding variables to draw a distinct conclusion: logistics mix up, artificial sweeteners called adrenaline and boredom, maybe Miyer really was just a cut above when it came to getting the right amount of burn into the roast. Garuda, as always, liked her coffee black as Finch probably thought her soul was. Hers stayed on the pot the longest before she took a pour out of it.
She didn’t even particularly need caffeine to stay awake- not when there was this much work to be done. Drink was just a force of habit, her hands committed to the usual ritual of pot and mug before she could consciously think of it. Said consciousness was elsewhere, though not necessarily far away.
Photos of Vermiculus’ two acquisitions spread out over a spartan table- the sort of fold up that could be got in a WalMart for a couple dozen dollars- that occupied the middle of the room otherwise choked over with equipment. Varying degrees of esoteric, from graduate student to never heard of outside of clandestine military use. The room hummed with a spirit of its own, cold and mechanical heartbeat that only the senior most personnel assigned to the frozen wasteland could interpret- today, Garuda, doing the rounds for her project and happily ignoring everyone else as she usually did when possible.
Not even Flint, currently at her side staring idly out one of the three-sixty degree panorama of tinted, bulletproof windows, really understood how to make heads or tails of the holistic picture unfolding in cryptic beeps and flashes of light around him.
He could, of course, understand it in the more traditional sense. Playing out before his own two eyes, broadcast to anybody who cared to pay attention aboard the Frontier.
“Doing the best with what they had available to them.” Flint contemplated the stills on his device- similar to what the test subjects had, but far more of a security vulnerability if it got into the wrong hands. A ramshackle building, a slowly gelatinizing puddle of lubricant, a corpse only gently putrefying with how it was immersed in Arctic temperatures. Legal name not Jane Doe, but one of the students had elected to start calling it that and it had stuck in the official post-mortem.
“Points for having a pressurized tank available to them now.” Garuda nodded. “I doubt that it can do anything to Vermiculus or Chimera but it might take out a Revenant or two if they get a bit lucky or a bit clever. Not a bad showing- the accidental deaths and the murders aside.” She glanced at the after action on Chimera’s second confirmed kill, what little bits of it were left anyways. Another strong swig of her coffee as she idly contemplated what she could clearly identify by coloration and shape- even bloated and shredded as it was- as a lung.
“At least some in this batch have some guts- they already look like they’ll last longer than the last one.”
“Was that a pun?”
“A negative space one, given that hers are mostly out of reach.” Flint nodded, unamused but at least satisfied. His sense of humor even before this particular doozy of a job had been not having one.
“Helps that they’re a generally smarter crowd. And not necessarily softer too- military experience, gun handling, they might actually all in all be a tougher crowd than the last batch.”
“Minus that one older mother. Annoying bitch.”
“She struck a nerve? I wasn’t aware you were jealous of people who get to live a normal life.”
“Not in that way.” Garuda’s displeasure generally did not make it to the surface, not even into the vulnerable softness of the eyeball. When she’d requested relocation for everyone who’d worked with her before Flint she’d said it each time with the same bored leer. “I just don’t have patience for people who should already know better.”
“I figured that was why you liked this batch more. Younger. The mistakes and dramas are refreshing.”
“Almost adorable.” Garuda’s pen briefly flickered- whatever she’d written down, right on top of one of the deceased student’s extensive files, was already lost to a flip of the page. “All this time, I’ve unironically enjoyed being a professor. Even if I have to teach Americans.”
“You don’t like giving people who aren’t your countrymen more information than you have to.”
“I literally sold my soul to the Chinese.” Garuda thought about it for a moment. “Well, in a manner of speaking.” She swallowed her coffee, finishing it off before the cold from outside started to settle. “It’s more that I’m more likely to be exposed to students who don’t really want to be there. You’d think people at the graduate level would already be dedicated but somehow… a bit too much freedom in the water, in my opinion. There’s a lack of discipline I find pervasive to things on this side of the Pacific.” A cold smirk. “Generally in most schools I taught in when I worked in Asia, those who didn’t deserve to be there stayed out of the way. Where they belonged.”
Flint nodded. Approval, awe, mild disgust, whatever it was he kept it to himself behind the inertness of his brow. He waited a moment as his boss took a few more notes that seemed throwaway as she immediately abandoned them to the pile, then he pointed out two particular photos on the too-small and too-flimsy table between them.
Vermiculus, in the form of two young women.
“Exceeding our wildest expectations.” Flint raised an eyebrow. The way he looked at the two young women. Both pictured as fairly healthy seeming, with Vermiculus filling in the cracks where they had snapped and splattered, already seemingly enough of a walking medical dictionary to guess how to rebuild bodies to look mostly whole.
Mrs. Bonifacio’s shattered hip bones, Mrs. Rennes’ torn up trachea- Vermiculus had proved far more brutally invasive going in when the subject was still alive- were still very much like a jumble of unbuilt LEGO and gore, even. Both deemed unnecessary to devote resources to repairing when Vermiculus could cart them around without the need for skeletal integrity or breathing.
Garuda had briefly interpreted the readings from Vermiculus’ sensors- both corpses were still definitely feeling pain. Whether they still had the humanity to comprehend that pain was an entirely different question.
“Kind of awesome, really. I imagine this was what you felt like when your daughter graduated middle school at the top of her class?” Garuda threw that at Flint as casually as if the context were in any way appropriate for family-related small talk. Flint in turn, engaged as if an air control tower in the nearly literal middle of nowhere was the bleachers aside a junior soccer game.
“Mariah said it was the happiest day of her life that day and I guess I had to agree. Almost a compulsion, really. You don’t have children, if I recall.”
“I’ve heard people on this side of the Pacific say I’m married to the job.” Garuda held up her hand at that, gloveless despite the air traffic control tower being less than up to the job of keeping everyone within warm, a bit of rigidity already settling into her knuckle where the blood vessels strained and flushed under the pressure of maintaining homeostasis. Around her ring finger was some little bit of rock easily worth an entire mercenary’s monthly fee. “Not true, strictly speaking, but I haven’t seen the man in years. Political arrangement to keep my parents cushy with the last administration.” The genocidal and authoritarian one- but there had been several of those. They blended together indistinguishably.
“That another reason you don’t like Mrs. Markovitz?”
“As if I’d be caught dead wanting affection. Please give me some credit, Flint.” The two of them exchanged ice cold glares- their version of warm, almost familial smiles.
“I’m sure Sycamore has that somewhere in his file on you.” Flint mimed opening one of the files in front of him- a Cascadia enrollee alive, but probably having no right to be- and searching, face scrunched up the exact way Sycamore’s did when he was being edgy.
“He won’t need it. I don’t intend to live longer than he does.”
“Have you considered retiring and fucking off to some low key tropical island to live out a quiet life?”
“Hand me a gun and one bullet with that resort brochure, sure.”
“Is that your out for if shit hits the fan out here?” Flint nodded, business-like. Like shaking hands over a signed check, dispassionate respect in the barely-there curl of his upper lip. “Let me know if you need anything from the lab. If you want to leave a cleaner corpse.” He nonchalantly amended his sentence by passing her another file.
“When. When shit hits the fan.” Her proof of evidence was apparently what he’d just passed her, as her eyes scraped it with the same thoroughness as dishes left to rot in a sink. Garuda’s expression remained impassive, but there was a certain subtle mote of satisfaction, the sort reserved for only the most confident who didn’t feel the need to celebrate victory when it was inevitable.
“Vermiculus rate of development’s even faster than we thought. We lacked imagination with our fifth gen predictions.” Garuda offered her second hand a cool thumbs up.
“Did you see the prioritization matrix? Not quite humanoid at this point, but that’s not exactly the goal. We’re not the Chimera team.”
“Leave it to Finch to try and anthropomorphize her creation.” Garuda frowned briefly, as if considering for a moment that she cared for a fellow, a peer and her equal if not superior in intelligence. The moment passed as such- brief, forgotten. “Or however Sycamore would phrase it with that… whatever it is he’s on now. But Finch could well be the smartest person on this expedition. Most likely to die, but that’s not a point against her.” Flint shrugged, a bit more overt with his sympathy for a fellow. He wasn’t so absent a father that he didn’t feel empathy for younger women at least on principle.
“I feel like she’d be the most likely to survive if things spiral out of control.”
“In an ordinary sort of FUBAR situation, sure.” Garuda’s hands briefly met. Thoughts of warmth, like two sticks to tinder, then she shrugged aside the thought and went back to sorting through data. A table’s worth of paper- a highly primitive form, but also highly secure. “Maybe she could fight off Chimera. I doubt Revenant or Vermiculus wouldn’t have trouble tearing through her once all the failsafes inevitably collapse.”
“You really do take a dismal view of our security measures.” His wayward glance the way of their quote-unquote bodyguard was duly ignored.
“I expect great things from this particular experiment, is all. Great and terrible. I already have my dead drops good to go, I’ll put it that way.” Flint nodded, once again in simple terms of understanding and uncertain terms of agreement. “Did you see this in the prioritization matrix? Subtle, but Vermiculus’ neural pathways have a particular shape… here, and here.” The pause was for Flint’s benefit more than her own, her finger had found the shapes in the three-dimensional visualization of data- a yarn-like jumble of static, but a bit more colorful- and traced them out before she’d called them out loud.
“... Some form of nascent mental percept. Self-directed, capable of creating further means of self-prioritization and agenda formation… if I’m translating the topology into the algorithm of consciousness right. Looks familiar to certain regions of the brain but I’m not the biologist here.”
“Gender identity.”
“Ah. Because it’s absorbed two women thus far.” Nothing more needed to be said. The implications were as radical as was the mundane idea that Vermiculus wished to go by she/her… insofar as that made sense, given the not-quite-human structure of its mind even when it shared the memories of two people proven very, very definitively mortal and fleshy.
“I can make out clear images that Vermiculus is actively trying to process. It’s accessing memory the way a human would now. Connection and inference, formulating patterns, losing raw data but with what’s left after the noise is discarded, creating something, well. Emergent.”
Flint, for a second, was slow to react, slower than she. She searched his eyes and saw nothing as he looked inward. She supposed even he hadn’t expected their capstone project would go this well.
“You’ve outdone yourself, Dr. Frankenstein.”
“With the help of yourself. Of my peers’ contributions, of Janus. I will not take the sole credit. Nor the sole blame for what is to come.” Garuda’s eyes alighted on something outside. Through a bulletproof window, across a permafrost-crusted plain… someone, something, was evolving. Likely, fully out of control.
“And if Finch nukes it?”
“It’d be a smart decision. But the cat’s out of the bag now, as they say.” Her face briefly scrunched up, eyebrows folding as she faced one of her few mortal weaknesses she deigned to acknowledge. She calculated- yes, she’d gotten the metaphorical language right. A moment passed.
“Flint.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s not too late to go MIA. It’s a big island. One missing personnel member is going to be the least of their worries soon.”
Flint nodded stoically. Garuda’s penchant for prophesying the fire-and-guts end of the Janus Hayes SOTF experiment Trial 2 was her most outstanding character tic. The other one was being an overly exacting boss and otherwise disregarding talking to her peers in exchange for helping grade her thesis student’s drafts. That’d been the last thing she’d done with her phone before they’d confiscated it- one last communication detailing her thoughts on the poorly structured several paragraphs of a metastudy of abnormal brain structures.
He was unsurprised by her apocalyptic dourness- rather, he was a bit taken aback that she cared enough about him to offer to flee.
“And go where, Garuda? I’ll die of exposure before anyone comes out here. And if anyone does make it in time it’ll be Janus, and I’ll be a liability to them.”
“It was just a thought. I’m sure you didn’t think the last time you saw Mariah would be her leaving you an email asking for you to help cover her DUI fees.” He smiled sourly at that. Largest and loudest smile he’d had since they’d left the mainland.
“What better note to leave off as a father on?” A brief shake of his head. “Whatever happens happens. I’m here to do my job and to get paid and to get out. In that exact order.”
“We’ll see how far we make it through that sequence. But it doesn’t look promising.”
She silently contemplated her life’s work one last time, the one out there murdering and learning. The closest thing she’d ever have to a child, and she supposed she was proud of it. A gifted child, truly. In the messy web of inferences and connections it had weaved- machine learning turned to emergent consciousness, she saw one little note that reminded her that she still had a job to do.
It was looking for her, after all.
Hiya folks! Here's the mid-day announcement for Day 2. The second set of Day 2 rolls is posted below, as well as a bit of a heads-up regarding the next announcement.
The Rolls:
P026 - Esther Ježek(Dr.Adjective) P18 - Dusty James (Polybius)
P008 - Chevy Gallagher (Deblod100)
The Prototypes continue to maintain the death flags that they may have rolled at the beginning of Day Two.
The Second Announcement will be posted on February 15th, 2023, which is the death deadline for the above rolls.
The additional days will give us a bit more time to get back on schedule, as the U Staff have collectively been working to handle some real-life monsters as well. As always, if you have any issues please reach out to us individually over discord or through the Help_U profile.
Happy Hunting!
