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(Source: youtube.com, via myampgoesto11)
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ASTEROID CAVERN - VIEW OF DEEP SPACE
WHIRRING AND LOW RHYTHMIC BEEPS
ZOOM OUT:
Window. Blue light. Reflection reveals a woman sleeping. An object that looks no more impressive than an external hard drive is hovering toward her. They are in:
A SMALL POD
Interior lights come on.
WHIRRING BECOMES BUZZING THEN A STEADY, LOW HUM
HOVERING OBJECT
It is morning. Somewhere.
OFF SCREEN:
WOMAN
(With delay, sounds sleepy.)
I never programmed you to be funny.
HOVERING OBJECT
I was not intended to be your alarm clock either.
Hovering object projects three dimensional image of three large, heavily damaged spacecrafts. Woman slowly sits up, skin lightly colored red by the projection.
WOMAN
(Still gaining consciousness analyzes projection.)
Infected?
HOVERING OBJECT
Grotesquely. But supplied. They were not infected long ago. The heavy damage suggests friendlies might have tried to destroy the ships before they turned on their crews. Something on these ships enabled the virus to spread quickly.
WOMAN
(Thinking.)
How much time before they are in our orbit?
The projection switches to a dasboard showing multiple graphs and gauges. This projection is a faint blue.
HOVERING OBJECT
Their trajectory will put them in our orbit in 27 hours. Given our status, no rendition of supplies is possible until they are at C9. 31 hours.
WOMAN
Assuming they do not deviate.
Brief pause. Projection changes to a neon orange O-B-V-I-O-U-S-L-Y, then shuts off completely. Woman smirks and stands, wincing slightly, revealing her body to be a biological and cybernetic form. The hovering object moves up to her eye level. She steps to a pile of clothes, equipment and spacewear, and begins to dress.
WOMAN
I am not going to hold up a sign, but another obvious fact is that while the infected ships may attempt to kill me once I am inside, they cannot infect me, nor the pod since it does not posses artificial intelligence or processing advantages. You, dear µ22, possess both.
µ22
And more.
WOMAN
I doubt they have need for an alarm clock.
µ22
A service to which I now regret compliance.
WOMAN
Did I hear you say “appliance”?
CRISP POPPING SOUNDS.
A small magnetic field around µ22 becomes agitated. Small, rapid pale red snaps of light.
µ22
It is too early to cross that line, Dvosara.
DVOSARA
Early where?
µ22
Somewhere.
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How to know, and what to do when being followed
1: Is there someone who wants to know what you are doing or information you might possess, and either capable of following you or paying someone else to do so?
NO: Goto 1N.
YES: Start to reduce your movements to strict, predictable paths. Take into account your surroundings as you do and note recurring body types, faces and clothing. In most systems, all probes and surveillance devices must produce a signature.
If you see a probe that does not come up on an enviroscan: Goto 1Yc.
If you notice unusual or adaptive behavior—or the extreme opposite; often tails will try too hard to fit an unstudied routine: Goto 2.
2: Your tail will become easier to distinguish when you minimize noise as much as possible, and it is easier for it to make a noticeable mistake. Notice a peculiar routine, oddly recurring body signature?
NO: Make a random move from your strict, predictable paths; in a direction or toward a location of which you are reminded when looking right then looking ahead of you; brain maps are common, causing your decisions to be less random than you might think. Goto 2a.
YES: Goto 1Yc.
2a: Keep your deviation, or meet your random location. Idle for 15 minutes, watching for any erratic appearances or behaviors out of context. Do you notice any such phenomena, or similar observations you made on your strict predictable path?
YES: Goto 1Yc.
NO: Goto 1N.
1Yc: Reverse direction, following the same route or a practical alternative. At this point, your tail suspects it has been burned, but if you have kept your posture behavior, and heart rate stable, then it is likely only suspicion and the tail’s first reaction is to withdraw slightly, but will keep some drones and surveillance devices active, and possibly armed.
Go home. Goto 3.
1N: Ease your suspicious mind by rescheduling your duties for the next possible date, and see your neurophysician, or if stress might be the cause then consider seeing a neurophysician or, I suggest, quiet the flesh at the Orange Glow tavern at spaceport Ø°—I am here.
3. Calmly accept the plausible reality that all non secure communications have been intercepted, and all secure are either decrypted or in the process thereof. Assume the extreme scenario that games have been planned based on brain maps, rendering your actions highly predictable.
At this point, any actions you take, besides assuming your normal routine, will alert your tail that it has been burned. There is no immediate danger; in most cases the tail will disappear and be replaced in less than three days, but with a more intense campaign.
Goto 4.
4. Are you prepared to alert your tail, initiating the next phase of the game?
NO: This is a sensitive moment, one that will not likely recur in this game: Your tail is only moderately sure it has been burned, but has not yet started the next phase, waiting for more awareness data from you.
You can, of course, ignore this, or you can start thinking of embarrassing moments in your life, scenes from a frightening movie, or anything that will spam the amygdala, causing the chemical reactions that produce fear and reduce problem-solving activity.
This will create similar effects of panic or heightened awareness, altering your conscious state, consistent with the effects of discovering an intruder; but you will have not actually compromised any surveillance devices or drones, or in any obvious way behaved in a manner that would suggest you have detected your tail.
Your tail, the one or many, will be watching your scans and for a while be stuck in a paradox, unsure how to respond. Have a good laugh, this will throw them off completely, but only for a short while.
Since you have accepted the reality of being followed, and have elected not to initiate the next phase of the game: Goto 4N.
YES: Cease all non secure communications; do not use subspace channels. Remove all communications devices from all public nets and grids. If you use any physical imaging devices remove them from the grid but do not power them down.
Now that all communications and imaging is local, run a security scan. In most cases, you’re going to get a call from system administrators in thirty minutes asking why you’re not on the grid.
Meanwhile, physically search your clothing for marks. Think of small objects you might have picked up or borrowed in a public environment, a stylus or liquid imaging pen; these can likely have been conveniently placed for you to take and be tracked.
Arm your self.
Your tail will know before the system administrators that you have gone off the grid, and will try to call you before they do. Do not accept the first call from SysDisAdmin. Ignore it and call back. Even basic security will tell you the encryption is not a match: end call.
Your tail will not have enough time to secure another line. In most cases, you can accept the next SysDisAdmin call, or run the same security check.
Tell your system administrator you are being followed and assume civilian hacking and brain mapping. The administrator will notify protective agents.
At this point, the tail is aware it has been burned. Assume you have less than five minutes to upload your security scans and do so immediately, then power down all communications and imaging devices.
Now it is time to find out who you are really up against. A low score will back away immediately; since you your self did not notify protective agents, they can not render you and most likely you will not see them. They will draw back their campaign for a few weeks to do damage control and rethink their strategy.
A high score is a professional and on its way to render you immediately. In this event, whatever you have is worth a lot to someone much bigger than you.
4N: Go about your normal routine. Tell no one that you are being followed.
1 note
The god genre
It has promoted assurance of your real existence that you have documented conflict and fallout resulting from your understanding of one another, and where you all fit as a species in the universe; for, given your wild diversity, conflict is assured.
It is especially these conflicts that are consistent with such high disparity in cultural systems, and the proximity wherein you find one another, almost confined, on your earth planet makes such small ongoing and large, abhorrently deadly and short wars among you almost inevitable; for it’s elementary deduction on my side that among you there is great disagreement on the utility, meaning and implication of the existence of certain resources and planet attributes.
But what is perhaps most intriguing, at least to your distant observer, is your tendency to narrativize your experience of your planet (and this I can only assume has led to the near catastrophic diversity among a relatively small and isolated population such as yours). As a result, I cannot clearly, yet, distinguish between your fiction and reality; though I can surmise some of your alleged physiological character, your wetware, I am spending (estimated) hours discovering the life of one Bruce Wayne never did possess the same physiological character, and is fiction, born of your earth literary dialogs.
More profound to me is the spawn to which many amongst you have submitted as your very own creator. I am confounded by this consensual hallucination, especially from a species that evidently has developed some mastery of its physical environment, and find it more consistent with your literary dialogs than documentation; though admittedly, as already stated, I am not skilled at telling the two apart.
It appears to me that not only are you self-aware, but self-conscious; self-consciously distraught, perhaps maddened, by your insignificance in the universe; something all advanced species go through. Chaos is just outside our obedience to social code, and our level of access to the universe. But I have never observed a stronger, meta (and I can only suspect imaginary) force of an almighty god you call a creator. Does believing this make you feel better in the face of a complex and unforgiving universe?
I am of course distant, and have only your web as evidence of your existence, and so I assume for the time being (a lovely expression) that there is a signal unavailable to me, something not resolved on your web, that tells you you were created by a universally potent force that as such could sympathize and even reward your plights.
I have seen awesome power, humans, over life as miniature as quarks and complexity as delicate as solar systems, and neither care too much for beings of our size; whole civilizations, or what of them was to be transported, have had to evacuate planets much larger than yours to evade the clumsy and nonchalant whims of sentient beings of galactic potency. You must tell me what it is you are aware of, that I am not, that has you believing that you are not a lone, isolated species, but the objects in a wager for ultimate good.
