MILLICENT: “I’m pretty sure that Tux is about to do something monumentally stupid.”
TUELLER: “Well it is a weekday.”
ALEJO: “’Course he is.”
MILLICENT: “I don’t have any details. I practiced some extreme restraint. He asked me to help him with something, fine, no problem, and not to Alejo, which I, using my extreme restraint balked at. Then he clammed up.”
ALEJO: “Yeah, he’s keeping shit from me too. He’s worried I’m gonna shoot him in the head. Which, sometimes does seem very tempting.” He takes another drink.
TUELLER: “Hey, are you guys exes?”
TUELLER: “You seem like exes.”
TUELLER: “Like, you seem more like exes than Loll and I, and we’re actually exes.”
ALEJO: Alejo shrugs. “I crewed his ship.” The evasion is not lost on anyone.
STORY: Alejo, where do you go after your conversation with Akilah?
ALEJO: To find Millie and Tueller, preferably together.
STORY: Tueller’s back on board, you find him there. Millie’s still with Tux on her side quest.
TUELLER: Does anyone tell Tueller about Sweet and Loll?
STORY: Good question! You haven’t seen Loll yet, so she hasn’t.
STORY: Oh also Akilah doesn’t say goodbye to you, which is the MO you two both follow, on the basis of not saying goodbye means it isn’t the last time you’ll see each other
ALEJO: Is there a place where we can talk without Noma listening?
STORY: No place guaranteed to be Noma-free onboard, no.
TUELLER: “Sweet’s gone.” Hands over the note.
ALEJO: Alejo closes his eyes briefly, takes the note, glances at it, and then shakes his head. “Thanks.” He takes a long look at Tueller. “It’s good to see you. I really need a drink. You?”
ALEJO: “I’m thinking that dive bar on the station. You know, the one where you almost got us both crushed by that meat head bouncer who was like five times your size?”
TUELLER: “Sure.”
TUELLER: “I’ll bring my gloves.”
ALEJO: Alejo nods quickly at the intercom. “Good idea.”
ALEJO: He then calls them a shuttle to the Ark.
TUELLER: “How about we head to the paleo bar instead? I’ve been looking at monitors and panels so much that the luddite life sounds like a good shift.”
TUELLER: Tueller nods meaningfully, following what Alejo’s up to.
ALEJO: “Oh, I like it. Even better. Haven’t been there in a spell.”
ALEJO: “They got real tequila, as I remember.”
STORY: You head on back just as Millie is wrapping up with Tux. He looks drained, or exhausted, and says he needs a break – he’ll catch up with you later. Gives you a quick kiss on the cheek and squeezes your shoulder and is gone.
MILLICENT: Millie watches him leave sadly.
TUELLER: “Hey Doc. Sweet’s gone. We’re pouring one out at that tech-free bar he loved you hated. Come with us. You’ll hate it.”
MILLICENT: Absentmindedly, “Sounds grand.”
TUELLER: “Leave the piece.”
MILLICENT: “Mmmm? I’m not armed.”
ALEJO: “Good news. I don’t wanna get shot again.”
ALEJO: Alejo gives a quick head gesture towards the visor.
TUELLER: “Glasses.”
ALEJO: He flashes her a quick smile.
MILLICENT: “Oh, sure.” Millie runs them to her room and comes back
TUELLER: “So how was your day, dear?”
TUELLER: It’s unclear who he was talking to.
MILLICENT: Millie looks up at them and sighs. “I, ah. I don’t want to talk about it right now.”
MILLICENT: “I need to stew or possibly brood for a while.”
ALEJO: “Been that kind of day.”
TUELLER: “Drinks! That’s what we’re doing!”
STORY: You’re at the bar!
TUELLER: Tueller goes back to the bar and brings back drinks that everyone will love, because he knows their tastes. The drinks are all in stone goblets.
ALEJO: Alejo takes his and nods gratefully. “So good to have you back.” He takes a drink, smiles, and then sets the goblet down theatrically. “Oaky, so, we’ve got a lot to discuss, I think.”
TUELLER: The bar is lit only by fire. It’s very expensive to get a waiver on open flames in a starship.
STORY: The fire suppression system is masked by stone and wood sconces, but it’s particularly beefy.
TUELLER: Also, the place is cash only, of course.
TUELLER: “Not sure I love this place anymore after…you know.”
ALEJO: Alejo leans in to feel the heat from one of the nearby fires. “Yeah, hadn’t considered that. Sorry.”
TUELLER: “Anyway. My idea. Fits the purpose.”
ALEJO: “We can leave, if you’d rather.”
ALEJO: Alejo nods. “It does. Good thinking.”
TUELLER: “Captain, time to captain up and get to the fucking point.”
MILLICENT: There’s a giant sign on the wall that says “PUT DOWN YOUR TRICORDERS AND TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. PRETEND IT’S 2435454195”
TUELLER: If Millie doesn’t already have a Close Up I’d recommend one there.
STORY: If she doesn’t have one she does now.
ALEJO: “Yeah.” He frowns. “So, first things first. I’m a fucking terrible person and because of that, this entire case against your family could be fucked.”
ALEJO: He is struggling to get to the point. “I’m not Alejo Soto.”
TUELLER: Tueller sips his drink and doesn’t respond.
ALEJO: He closes his eyes. “I stole that name. My first mission. From the kid I killed to get it.”
MILLICENT: Millie’s eyes get huge.
ALEJO: “And I think that Noma knows. If she’s not Noma or if she’s compromised, Chandra knows. And that’s a fucking big problem for Aki’s case against the — your family.” He opens his eyes briefly.
TUELLER: “That why sis is heading the other way from us?”
ALEJO: “No.” He closes his eyes again. “Maybe. Partly.”
ALEJO: “I don’t know, T.”
ALEJO: “Aki and I had . . . problems or differences before this.”
TUELLER: “Ejo.”
MILLICENT: “Why did you do that? Kill a kid? Take his name?”
MILLICENT: Millie’s very quiet
ALEJO: “Because I’m a . . . bad man, Mille. Because, it’s what I do.”
TUELLER: “I don’t give a shit about any of that. You’re a tiny part of my family’s misdeeds. We were murdering and pillaging before you hitched on, and they continued when you half-eloped with Lah. Don’t get grandiose ideas about how central you are to shit.”
TUELLER: “Other than to us, of course.”
ALEJO: Alejo opens his eyes and gives Tueller a grateful half smile.
TUELLER: “You fucking goof.”
ALEJO: He looks at Millie. “It was my first mission. It was what the RDG needed from me. I’ve been a spook, a fantom, my whole life.”
ALEJO: “Anyway, whatever that makes me, the point is that it fucks this. Or it could. And I’m not going to let that happen.”
MILLICENT: “RDG.”
MILLICENT: “I didn’t know you were religious.”
ALEJO: “I’m not.”
ALEJO: He’s very definitive and curt.
MILLICENT: “How old were you?”
ALEJO: He takes another drink. “I don’t know. I don’t know when I was born. Ten. Eleven.”
MILLICENT: “What’s your name?”
ALEJO: He shrugs. “I don’t know that either.”
MILLICENT: “Oh honey.” Millie reaches a hand across the table and squeezes his.
ALEJO: He closes his eyes, lets her hold it for a moment, then pulls back. “Look, I’m sorry for not . . . trusting you both. But I don’t what this — you’re right T, I’m not central to shit, and I don’t want to become central to screwing up the biggest criminal case Sol has ever seen.” He’s obviously quoting someone when he says this last bit.
ALEJO: “So–Look, if you both want to walk away from me, I’d get it. I can’t ask you to help me fix this. But, I’ve got to try to keep it from blowing everything up.”
TUELLER: “I’m confused.”
MILLICENT: Millie laughs, catches herself, hiccups, tries to smile encouragingly
MILLICENT: “Sorry.”
MILLICENT: “Honey, I threatened the human race because I got steamed and you boys stuck by me. I’m not going anywhere.”
TUELLER: “I don’t care what your name is, kid.”
ALEJO: He looks down, embarrassed by the calmness of them both. “I — well shit. If I’d known you’d be so fucking nice to me about it, I’d have told you years ago.” He gives Tueller a smile. Then he looks at Millie. “Thank you,” he says quietly.
MILLICENT: Millie nods
ALEJO: He has tears, which he quickly wipes away. Then he takes a long drink.
TUELLER: “You’ve been a covert assassin for as long as I’ve known you. You think saying ‘my name is actually Arjuna’ will be the final straw?”
TUELLER: “Or whatever you want us to call you now.”
MILLICENT: “We could choose!”
ALEJO: He nearly spits the drink.
ALEJO: “For now, I think Alejo. Aki says that she needs me to be . . . me. Alejo, for this trial.”
TUELLER: “Done.” Tueller smacks his drink down with a gavel-like clank.
MILLICENT: Millie shrugs. “Okay.”
STORY: Close Up for Alejo
TUELLER: “I thought we were here in this electronic deadzone for other reasons, anyway.”
ALEJO: “Well, we are.”
ALEJO: “So, probably worse news, while we’re on bad news,” he slides Sweet’s note to Millie.
TUELLER: “Yeah, you guys broke Sweet, which I’m more pissed about than Arjuna over here.”
ALEJO: Alejo smiles and shakes his head at the name. “Yeah, me too.” He says after a beat.
TUELLER: “I liked the guy even though he always wanted me to stop hurting people. Professionally.”
MILLICENT: “Ah”
MILLICENT: “Shit”
ALEJO: “One of the best people I’ve ever known. And we — I — need to do something about what happened. But we’ve got so many fucking irons in the fire right now.”
TUELLER: “We’re not doing anything for Sweet. He said not to follow him.”
TUELLER: “If he wants to talk to us, he’ll talk to Three, and Three will let us know.”
ALEJO: “We’re not. At least not right now. And you’re right, he needs space and time and whatever he needs.”
MILLICENT: “This one’s on me, I’m afraid. I insisted he come with us.”
TUELLER: Tueller gives Millie a look. He’d forgotten she pressured Sweet.
TUELLER: Then shakes his head.
TUELLER: “I’ll handle gunny duties until we decide to hire someone else or ‘abjure all violence’, whichever comes first.”
ALEJO: “Besides, so many fucking irons in the fire.” He starts to tick off with his fingers, “Chandra, Noma or fake Noma, Chandra and fake Noma knowing about me, Tux and the Weave and the end of all life as we know it, and whatever we’ve not talked about doing with Medieval hellscape world.”
TUELLER: “Not-Noma knows something is up.”
MILLICENT: “Oh, I almost forgot.”
TUELLER: “Apparently you guys don’t chat with her like you used to.”
TUELLER: Tueller stops and gives Millie the floor.
MILLICENT: “I’m pretty sure that Tux is about to do something monumentally stupid.”
TUELLER: “Well it is a weekday.”
STORY: Close Up for Tueller
ALEJO: “’Course he is.”
MILLICENT: “I don’t have any details. I practiced some extreme restraint. He asked me to help him with something, fine, no problem, and not to Alejo, which I, using my extreme restraint balked at. Then he clammed up.”
ALEJO: “Yeah, he’s keeping shit from me too. He’s worried I’m gonna shoot him in the head. Which, sometimes does seem very tempting.” He takes another drink.
TUELLER: “Hey, are you guys exes?”
TUELLER: “You seem like exes.”
TUELLER: “Like, you seem more like exes than Loll and I, and we’re actually exes.”
ALEJO: Alejo shrugs. “I crewed his ship.” The evasion is not lost on anyone.
ALEJO: “I told you both this, but . . . it was not at a great time. I told whatever freed us and Teka from the Weave that I’d kill him if he kept asking questions that it said he wasn’t supposed to keep asking.”
ALEJO: He sighs. “It was the only way to get him out.”
TUELLER: “Sure, but we lie to things like that all the time.”
TUELLER: “We lied to an entire planet once.”
ALEJO: He nods. “Yeah. I mean, I’m not gonna kill him.” He pauses. “Probably.”
ALEJO: “But that thing was either lying to me or . . . he’s asking some seriously fucking dangerous questions.”
MILLICENT: “I tried to talk him down, told him about Triton”
MILLICENT: “He just got more excited.”
ALEJO: Alejo looks at Millie sympathetically. “Fucking Tux.”
ALEJO: “So, yeah, we’ve got a lot going on. Ideas about how to prioritize?”
ALEJO: He finishes his drink and starts looking around, through the dim firelight, for someone to bring them another round.
TUELLER: “On it. Keep people away. This is private shit. We haven’t even gotten to the big one.”
MILLICENT: “What’s bigger than all this?”
TUELLER: Tueller walks away for a bit, heads to the hearth, and is attended by a discreet bartender, and comes back with another round.
TUELLER: “Noma and her Sprite is the big one.”
TUELLER: “We’ve got a fake Ghost on our ship, and it’s getting suspicious enough to get poltergeisty.”
TUELLER: “AND that means we don’t have our friend.”
TUELLER: “It asked me questions about your evasions and I don’t think it loved MY evasions.”
TUELLER: “It wanted to know why you guys don’t talk to it anymore, and it didn’t like it when I said it was a liar.”
ALEJO: Alejo holds up three fingers. “That was on my list,” he says quietly, looking at them both with big eyes. “Two and three, actually,” he says this more to himself than anyone.
ALEJO: He puts his fingers down and takes a drink.
ALEJO: “Yeah, so, Doc, do you think it’s Noma or . . . not Noma? If it’s Noma, is she compromised?”
MILLICENT: Millie pauses.
MILLICENT: “I didn’t think it was possible to steal data from an AI, but then I didn’t think it was possible to make a fake one. I know this, if it’s Noma, is she compromised? Yes, if it’s her then she’s been ripped to bits. It’s entirely possible she’s betrayed some secrets in that state. It’s also possible that this is another rogue AI pretending or that it’s a very complicated program pretending at AI intelligence.”
MILLICENT: “The least likely scenario is that it’s some kind of new, invented AI that hasn’t been turned over to the Collective yet.”
MILLICENT: “Which,” Millie laughs, “would be a thing to see.”
ALEJO: Alejo takes this in for a moment. “So, whatever the case, T’s right. We don’t have our friend, or at least our friend as we knew her. So, whatever the Noma on our ship is, I think still owe it to our Noma to find her, or find out what happened to her. Yes?” He looks at them both.
MILLICENT: Millie nods fiercely.
TUELLER: “I’m not happy that my very early fears about the Ghost in the machine turns out to be newly justified after I made friends with the original ghost.”
TUELLER: “I like that Ghost. I do not like this Sprite.”
ALEJO: “Gods you’re smart. For the muscle.” He smiles at Tueller.
ALEJO: “I think this all leads us to Chandra.”
ALEJO: “As the next step? While trying to keep Tux from doing something too stupid?”
MILLICENT: “Chandra, who almost certainly knows who you are, right?”
ALEJO: Alejo’s eyes widen and he half shrugs, half nods. “It’s what I’m worried about. And he’d sell that to the embattled Ya’Makasi as a lifeline in a hurry.”
TUELLER: “CJH. Not just my family.”
ALEJO: Alejo nods. “Sorry, yeah. I just . . . I mean, your family is the CJH, let’s be honest. But, I didn’t mean any disrespect.”
TUELLER: “Bilbo’s no slouch. And a good guy, as far as it goes for the lot of us.”
MILLICENT: “Right, so.”
MILLICENT: “We need to basically take down the whole operation, including Chandra’s ability to whistle blow on us.”
ALEJO: “So, Chandra, somehow, gods help us, keep Tux in check, and then deal with that fucking horrible Medieval hellscape?”
TUELLER: “That one sticks in my craw, definitely.”
MILLICENT: Millie nods. “That seems like a good order of operations.”
TUELLER: “Probably should see if we can load a shrink into the autodoc.” Almost to himself.
ALEJO: Alejo raises his glass in a toast. “Captains.”
TUELLER: Tueller slowly, preoccupied, raises his.
MILLICENT: Millie raises her glass, “Oh, yes. I suppose we’re back to that, now.”
STORY: Okay. Newly prioritized, the three of you head back to your local quarters, a large hotel room you regularly rent when you’re onboard.
STORY: You find Tux inside, pacing, and talking to himself a little. Erwin lounges in a corner, playing with a yo-yo-like toy he picked up somewhere.
STORY: He stops when you arrive. “Ah. Yeah. Okay.”
STORY: “Sit down please, I’ve, uh. Prepared something.”
STORY: “Erwin, could you give us the room, bud.”
TUELLER: Tueller sits down on the edge of a counter.
MILLICENT: “Oh!” Millie slides into a chair. “I hope there’s a power point.”
STORY: Erwin raises an eyebrow and winds the string back on his toy. “I’m getting iced rakksuk.” He leaves.
ALEJO: Alejo slowly walks to a chair and sits.
STORY: Tux types a few commands on his portable deck, then lays it on the coffee table and a 3D line presentation is projected into the space above it. He pulls on a pair of wired gloves and begins to manipulate the image.
STORY: “Okay. So.”
STORY: “The Weave is, shorthand, where people go when we dream. It’s everybody, all sentient life, as far as we know – joined together in this liminal space.”
STORY: “It’s not literally a place, not for most of us – and it’s not literally even a thing. But there is science that supports that our consciousnesses access some kind of shared wavelength while we are unconscious.”
STORY: “The grell, they have a special kind of access to it. As far as we know, and the research here is limited given that the grell were until recently a livestock and slave race to the nahar, the grell have no delta brainwave function. Or they have too much.”
STORY: “I’m not sure on that part. Either way, they actually can access the Weave as a physical space, to them. Effectively, they live half their lives there in a pure lucid dream state.”
STORY: “Everyone with me so far?”
TUELLER: “We’ve literally been there, so yeah.”
MILLICENT: Millie nods.
STORY: He’s moving the images around, pulling up various charts and papers, data, showing you the proof of what he’s saying.
ALEJO: Alejo glances back and forth from Tux to Tueller to Millie and back again. “Sure.” He says this not too sure.
MILLICENT: Taking notes.
STORY: “All right. Now we know the grell sometimes lose it, turn monster. Nobody knows why.”
STORY: “And we know that the grell have mythology around the Weave, that there are dangers there, things they shouldn’t look for, things they shouldn’t think about.”
STORY: “Temptation.”
STORY: “And Soto, you met someone there. Not a grell, something else.”
STORY: “None of the rest of us did.”
ALEJO: Alejo nods.
STORY: “But we had experiences that… they couldn’t have been normal dreams. For all of us to simultaneously experience these… offerings. Something was controlling those visions we had.”
STORY: “So what was it? I looked into delta wave research, found whatever I could. It’s thin. Not seen as real science in many circles.”
STORY: “The odh commissioned a sleep study a century ago that had a few fragments. Another from the vitruvans gave me clues about how these waves travel, their range. And the humans, we don’t have a lot of peer-researched work but I was able to find a paper from someone fifty years ago that… well, it had some interesting stuff in it.”
MILLICENT: “Hendreschmicht. Sorry, go on.”
STORY: “Anyway look, here’s what I know. Something is hurting the grell, probably the same thing that spoke to Soto. That thing doesn’t want us to know about it. And it’s doing something else.”
STORY: He pulls up another chart, one showing a long series of wavy lines.
STORY: “The data isn’t all staying in the Weave.”
STORY: “Some of these waves, they wander. They travel. There’s a leak.”
STORY: “Lots of them, tiny leaks, data streaming… somewhere.”
ALEJO: “Data?” Alejo mutters, leaning in to look at the chart.
STORY: “Dreams. Delta brainwaves. Data. All the same thing.”
MILLICENT: Millie nods.
STORY: “It’s all data. And someone is using it. They’re stealing it.”
STORY: “From us. From everyone.”
TUELLER: “Someone’s stealing our dreams?”
ALEJO: “Dream data?”
TUELLER: “That’s where we’re at.” Tueller sounds pretty damn skeptical.
TUELLER: “That’s some sci fi bullshit.”
STORY: “Tueller. It’s killing a species.”
STORY: “One by one the grell are suffering and dying because something decided it wants to live in our brains.”
MILLICENT: Millie frowns. Raises her hand.
STORY: He nods to you, Millie.
MILLICENT: “How can you be sure that the delta waves aren’t just leaking? Is there some evidence that they’re going somewhere, being collected?”
STORY: At this, Millie, he perks up, and pulls out a file, bringing it over to you.
STORY: “Millie, that’s just it.”
ALEJO: “Are you saying, Tux, that whatever is controlling the Weave is killing the Grell and stealing our . . . dream data?” He says the last very skeptically.
STORY: “They’re going somewhere, yes. I tracked it. And that’s why I need your help. They’re going through the jump relays.“
STORY: You open the file.
MILLICENT: Millie stands up, knocking her chair over. “What the fuck?”
STORY: “I need to see the notes from someone who helped build one, I need schematics, I need to understand what’s inside of them.”
ALEJO: Alejo looks alarmed, but he’s got no idea what he’s alarmed at. He watches Tux and Millie closely.
STORY: Millie, first on this pile of papers is a picture of Dr. Nikau Manaaki.
STORY: “He helped build our relay, Millie. He was on the team.”
MILLICENT: Millie takes a step toward Tux, it looks reflexive.
STORY: “His records, they’ll have this. I need to see what he knew.”
TUELLER: “This is one of those Everyone’s-Past-Demons type days, isn’t it.”
STORY: “We need to find out what’s going on, Millie.“
MILLICENT: Under her breath, “He was the team.”
MILLICENT: “Look”
MILLICENT: “This, this is a lot, Tux.”
STORY: “I know.”
STORY: He’s sympathetic.
MILLICENT: “There is a lot going on here. A lot of implications.”
STORY: “I know.“
MILLICENT: “Do you understand that if you’re right it means that AI can travel through the jump relays?”
ALEJO: “Wait? What!” Alejo looks very confused.
STORY: His eyes brighten. “It makes sense, doesn’t it?”
ALEJO: “No!”
STORY: “How the fuck do they get us through them?”
MILLICENT: “If delta waves, if thoughts, can move through the relays it means that they don’t need to travel in corporeal bodies.”
MILLICENT: “They can just go anywhere they can be hosted.”
STORY: “How does any of this work? How did we get bamboozled into building a massive device without understanding how it works?“
MILLICENT: “Well, we.”
MILLICENT: “To.”
MILLICENT: “Progress”
MILLICENT: “Join the”
MILLICENT: “This could.”
TUELLER: “Doc, you’re missing words or sentences.”
TUELLER: “Maybe entire paragraphs here.”
MILLICENT: Millie stops. You can see math running past her brain.
STORY: He takes your hands, excited to have someone understanding him finally. “Yes, Millie, yes.“
ALEJO: “The Fuck is going on.” Alejo stands. “I’m gonna kill some shit if someone doesn’t tell me what’s going on.”
MILLICENT: “Too much to describe, really, but, if Tux is right then every jump relay has a ton of potential we’ve never considered.”
MILLICENT: “For examples, if Noma, the real Noma, ever goes through a jump relay, if we were able to hack it we could redirect her into a device of our choosing.”
MILLICENT: “We could do that with any AI, actually, which means.”
ALEJO: Alejo looks back and forth at them both, very confused.
MILLICENT: “Well, if we go through with this we’re going to have an even bigger target painted on our back than the CJH one.”
MILLICENT: “If we try to solve this we could make an enemy of the Collective.”
TUELLER: “I missed a couple of steps.”
MILLICENT: “Betcha they don’t want humans knowing how their proprietary tech works.”
ALEJO: “Go. Through. With. What?”
MILLICENT: “Oh. Research and analyzing a jump relay from the schematics.”
STORY: Tux drops your hands and steps back behind the coffee table, dismissing the hologram with a wave of his hands. He takes a deep breath and bites his lip.
MILLICENT: “I thought that part was easy.”
STORY: “Soto. Someone, something, is killing a whole people. And it’s doing something else to the rest of us. I don’t know what, but I don’t trust it.”
STORY: “I know you don’t want me to look at this. But I can’t stop. I have to know what’s going on here. I have to help them, and us, if I can.”
STORY: “We deserve to know.”
STORY: Another deep breath, as he shakes his hands loose at his sides.
STORY: “So I’m going to keep looking, and I want your help.”
STORY: “And you can help, right now, you can help me with this and help me find out what the fuck is going on, Soto, or… you can kill me right now and explain it to my kid when he comes back with his ice cream.”
STORY: “But I am not going to stop.”
ALEJO: Does Alejo, knowing Tux, believe that he’s telling the truth now?
STORY: He looks at you, clearly frightened, but meets your eye.
STORY: He’s absolutely telling you the truth.
STORY: He’s managing his breathing, trying to stay calm, but his hands are shaking.
ALEJO: Alejo meets his eyes and holds them for a beat. Then he steps forward, towards Tux. “You know I’m going to help you.” He takes Tux’s shoulders. “You know.” He gives him a squeeze and a smile. “Always.”
ALEJO: He lets go and steps back.
STORY: Tux laughs, relief tumbling out of him, and wipes his eyes, his hands still shaking.
TUELLER: “Totally exes.”
STORY: “Jesus Soto, I really though I was dead for a minute there.”
STORY: He leans over with his hands on his knees and blows out a huge breath. “WHOO!”
ALEJO: “I like seeing you nervous.” He turns and gives Tueller a quick frown.
ALEJO: “But you have fucked up the priority plan we’d just worked out.” He says this lightly.
STORY: Tux lowers his head, laughing some more now, shaking his hands out again and hopping back and forth a little. “Hoo! All right. Phew. Jesus.”
STORY: “Okay.”
STORY: “Okay.”
STORY: “Sorry, what priority plan?”
ALEJO: “Good to tell the truth, huh?” He gives Tux another big smile. “By the way, Tueller and Millie know about me. So, you’re not special anymore. And Aki knows. So, my big secret isn’t so big.”
ALEJO: “We were going to keep you in check while we dealt with Chandra.”
STORY: Tux just collapses back onto the floor in a half-fake faint.
STORY: “C’mon I used to be so proud of knowing that secret!”
TUELLER: “Feeling pretty vindicated here, too.”
STORY: “Okay, okay, okay, let me pull up the leads I have here.” He stands back up, waves his shaking hands one more time, and starts tapping on his deck.
STORY: He sends his screen to the wall display. It’s a SectorNet public listing.
STORY: “There’s an exhibit at Memory-Alpha for Manaaki, part of the Sol section. Relatively new. It has a bunch of shit, probably all polished up for the masses, but most importantly,” and he taps on his screen here, which zooms in on an image, “his personal deck.”
ALEJO: “‘His’ being . . . Chandra’s?”
TUELLER: “Manaaki.”
TUELLER: “Her ex.”
ALEJO: “Oh, shit. Right.”
STORY: “Literally there in the fucking display. They were supposed to have wiped it, but a few years ago some kids tried to remote hack it and got as far as the crypto before the alarms went off. There’s still data on it.”
STORY: “I’ve dug around through every other machine this guy ever worked on, every association of his, every published work – he’s got nothing on the jump relay. Suspicious, right?”
STORY: “I figure he had to have kept it on his personal deck, too sensitive to let those notes live anywhere else.”
STORY: “So… you know.”
MILLICENT: Millie nods. “That. That makes sense.”
STORY: He pauses, waiting for someone to finish his sentence, except none of you know what he’s talking about.
TUELLER: “Steal it and break in.”
STORY: “Yeah! Museum heist!”
STORY: “Museum heist?”
STORY: He’s looking around for agreement.
TUELLER: “Haven’t done one of those for a bit.”
MILLICENT: Millie smiles and tears up a little.
MILLICENT: “It’s in a museum.”
ALEJO: “Now that sounds fun!”
TUELLER: “Sure, I can Tommy Crown it.”
STORY: “Museum heist!”
STORY: He puts a hand in the general area between the four of you.
MILLICENT: “Nikau’s in a museum.”
STORY: Raised eyebrows, big smile, looking at all of you, who are all having very different feelings.
MILLICENT: She smiles through tears.
STORY: Probably not relieved jubilation like him.
ALEJO: Alejo puts in a hand.
MILLICENT: Millie wipes her eyes and puts her wet hand in.
TUELLER: Tueller does as well after a pause.
ALEJO: Alejo gives her a quick look and smile.
STORY: “Museum heist!”
STORY: Okay! So.
STORY: What does everyone need to know.
STORY: How about what Memory-Alpha is?
MILLICENT: THAT WOULD HELP
STORY: It’s an offworld asteroid about a day’s journey from the Ark that has been mined and modeled to serve as an enormous museum and library. Every civilization that joins the Ark project is invited to store as much of their data there as they like. It’s like a every-known-civilization version of the Library of Congress.
STORY: Erde-Maris put together some packages when they first made contact, and there is a small section dedicated to Sol’s history. Millie, you didn’t know this, but Dr. Manaaki is memorialized there. The exhibit includes some of his possessons, including a full-size model of his likeness holding his personal deck.
STORY: There are, unsurprisingly, hella security measures in the museum. While it’s open, armed guards everywhere, after it’s closed a skeleton crew but other stuff as well.
STORY: Would anyone like to research the security measures?
STORY: Anyone doing recon?
TUELLER: Tueller will!
ALEJO: Yes!
TUELLER: He’s got some museum casing ability!
STORY: Onsite or virtual?
TUELLER: Tueller will do onsite casing.
TUELLER: Well, reading up on it on the day trip, then walking the grounds.
STORY: All right! Tueller, you take Peregrine out for a quick jaunt and take the tour – give me an Assessment + Mettle please
TUELLER: Mettle or Expertise?
STORY: Mettle! It’s walking around paying attention to stuff, getting an instinctual sense of it and actively observing.
TUELLER: /roll 2d6+1
STORY: chris.stuart rolled 11 + 1 = 12
STORY: Nice! You take note of the electronic and automated security that’s visible during the day, conclude that there is likely a significant robot security force employed in the off-hours, and gain a data point for this heist.
STORY: Alejo, what do?
ALEJO: Alejo engages with staff at the museum, getting to know them and trying to find an exploit through the workforce at the gift shop, cafe, etc.
STORY: Let’s do Assessment + Influence!
ALEJO: /roll 2d6+2
STORY: ablair01 rolled 7 + 2 = 9
STORY: There is a very bright young thing working at the gift shop who absolutely loves chatting you up, and who you’re reasonably sure you could convince to let you in after hours for a rendezvous.
STORY: Her name is Luna and she’s green.
ALEJO: Alejo works that relationship.
STORY: All right! Millie, if you don’t mind staying behind, Tux would like help hacking into the Mem-Alpha database to see what kind of traps he can lay before you go, and he’d also really like to take you on that expensive date.
MILLICENT: Hell yes
MILLICENT: To both
STORY: Assessment + Interface please!
MILLICENT: /roll 2d6 + 2
STORY: josh rolled 8 + 2 = 10
STORY: Excellent! You find ways into the codebase such that you have set up an exploit to be defined later, whenever you need it – basically whenever you encounter a problem during this heist that can be solved by having programmed something in, you get it.
STORY: Plus a data point for the commission of said heist later.
STORY: The date: Tux takes you to a fusion place that has gotten a lot of good reviews and is absolutely impossible to get a table at, he obviously did some kind of technical wizardry to steal someone else’s reservation. He’s awkward and sweet and very funny, and if you’re along for the ride you each have like three glasses of expensive wine and end up making out in the alley behind the restaurant and getting yelled at by a grouchy line cook when he goes out for a cigarette and you surprise him.
STORY: Dig?
MILLICENT: Dig!
STORY: He walks you back to the hotel then has sort of an awkward head-scratching moment where he says “so this is weird, because we’re staying in the same hotel room, but also I don’t want to mess this up the way I usually do so I’m gonna… go stay at a different hotel and pretend we don’t already live together.”
MILLICENT: Millie kisses him on the cheek and squeezes his hand. “I think you’re sweet and too bright for your own good, but you’re stupid in a way I like. And you’re very cute.”
MILLICENT: “Go on, then.”
STORY: “Okay.” He’s all smiles. “You’re a very special person, Millie.”
ALEJO: –Well done, you jackass, Tux.
MILLICENT: “I know that. Quit grinning, you chowder head.”
STORY: There’s some dopey looking at each other and he peels away and goes out into the night. “Goodnight!”
MILLICENT: Millie goes upstairs smiling
STORY: Hey Millie, your mood is, like, a tiny bit diminished when you’re having a post-date minibar raid, eating some nuts, and Kahn comes into the room. He’s pale and looks absolutely, abjectly miserable.
STORY: He barely makes eye contact and nods as he heads into his bunk.
MILLICENT: “Mr. Vespertine. May I intrude on your evening for a moment?”
STORY: Kahn pauses, rubs his face, inhales, and turns. “Yeah, what’s up.”
MILLICENT: “Look.”
STORY: He lays eyes on you finally. “You’re glowing.”
MILLICENT: “I know it’s weird that I call you still refer to by your surname and an honorific.”
STORY: Millie, he’s wearing a ring.
MILLICENT: “I just. I feel that I have made so many intrusions on your life as to. Not have earned the familiarity. But I understand that it might make you uncomfortable being referred to in such a formal manner.
STORY: On the finger that meaningful rings go on.
STORY: “It’s fine. You’re drunk, Millie. Drink some water, ok?”
MILLICENT: “I think we both know I’m always this awkward.”
MILLICENT: “Mr. Vespertine, I see you are wearing some new jewelry. Might I ask it’s provenance?”
MILLICENT: “You know what, I can do better than that, we’ve known each other for. Okay. Where did you get it, Kahn?”
MILLICENT: It clangs, that sentence.
STORY: He looks down at his hand and sighs, and immediately tears come to his eyes.
MILLICENT: Millie melts a little.
STORY: “You had an eventful couple months. So did I.”
STORY: “Back to work.”
MILLICENT: Millie smiles. “You don’t have to tell me, but in every other way, you have to tell me.” Millie looks hopefully at him. It’s a question, she’s asking, not a demand.
STORY: He gives your shoulder a squeeze and walks into his room. “I mean it about the water.”
MILLICENT: “I’ll drink plenty. Thank you.” After he leaves, it’s a sad, happy whisper. She’s thinking of Dr. Manaaki. “Congratulations.”
STORY: All right! At the end of the next day Tueller and Alejo are back, ready to pick up the team for heisting.
STORY: The team, it should be noted, is a slightly new roster: The three of you, Kahn and Jenny, Thasht, and Figgan, now with added Tux and Erwin.
MILLICENT: Millie downloads all the info from the museum about Dr. Manaaki and spends an evening watching/reading it with a bottle of something celebratory.
TUELLER: Tueller doesn’t have a heist plan. He does, however, have a good idea of the layout of everything, and prepares gear for that. And he lets Millie know that it’s robot guards.
STORY: Tueller, your skip drones have finally turned something up. You get a note from one of your contacts – they’ve met Chandra and know how he works, and they are without a doubt certain that if Chandra had something as valuable as an AI he would keep it in his literal sight at all times. So if you want to find Noma’s code, you have to find Chandra.
STORY: Your contact is pretty sure Chandra spends most of his time bopping around the Sol planets, rarely travels outside the system, and has no specific base of operations, but he’s still a major business player and it’s possible, with the right introductions, to literally make an appointment to see him.
TUELLER: Well that’s useful to know.
STORY: Alejo, your plans have come to fruition as well, wrt finding a weakness for Chandra, and the news makes your stomach sink. He’s absolutely, completely attached to a beautiful woman, who he’s now married, and that woman fits your sister’s description exactly.
STORY: She was his bodyguard, now she’s his wife and second in command. Whether she’s under cover or for real here, she never leaves his side.
STORY: Calixta. If he’s got a weakness, it’s her, and Alejo can certainly exploit that, though who knows how she’ll feel about that.
ALEJO: Right. I was worried that was coming.
STORY: You’ve still got the pendant she gave you.
STORY: It’s still dormant, as far as you can tell.
ALEJO: Alejo still wears it regularly.
STORY: One last data dump from Tux: he briefs you once you get back to the Ark to pick up the rest of the crew that he’s decrypted a significant amount of the data you stole from Chandra, and most of it is just old stuff, tax returns and business deals none of you care about.
STORY: But he did find a large codebase full of what as far as he can tell is junk data. It seems to be extraneous, which immediately piqued his interest since why would Chandra go to the trouble of storing junk data in a super secure offworld base?
STORY: And it worries him.
STORY: “If you made me guess right now, I’d say this is a big chunk of the memories of an AI.”
MILLICENT: “Well, shit.”
STORY: “I don’t know what the thing on your ship is, and I can’t believe it’s really Noma. There’s no conceivable way she’d survive a manual splice of her databases.”
ALEJO: “Shit for sure.”
STORY: “But if somehow she did…”
STORY: “This is part of her.”
MILLICENT: “Then that’s. Yes.”
MILLICENT: “Shit.”
STORY: He shakes his head. “I think it’s time to consider whether she might be dead.”
STORY: “Harvested for parts and gone.”
ALEJO: “If we get it. Can you, two,” he looks sidelong at them, “put her back together?”
MILLICENT: “Then what’s on board?” Millie ignores Alejo for now.
STORY: Tux shakes his head. “We have it, Soto. It’s here.” He points to his deck.
MILLICENT: “Did he really fake an AI?”
STORY: “But I don’t… I can’t see how we could just put her back together. She can’t be real. This thing on your ship, everything I know says it’s a fake, a trap.”
TUELLER: Tueller is silent, and just cradles a glass of some Telurian fruit alcohol he’s taken to drinking recently.
STORY: “If this data is part of her, Chandra ripped her in half and stored the trash, left the rest to steer his ship. Why the fuck would he do that?’
STORY: “How?”
STORY: “And how could what was left really be her?”
MILLICENT: “Because she’s real.”
TUELLER: “Stored the trash in one of his best vaults.”
STORY: “Yeah, probably with the intention to dig around in it later for more parts.”
STORY: “But it’s not alive.”
STORY: “This data, it’s just data.”
MILLICENT: Millie shakes her head.
MILLICENT: “I don’t believe that.”
ALEJO: “It’s not just data.”
ALEJO: “Whatever it is. We get it back.”
STORY: “Soto, listen to me. We have it.“
STORY: “We have the parts.“
MILLICENT: “Noma’s more than code. That’s memory. Dream waves, data, memory, whatever you call it it’s what makes us us.”
STORY: “What’s on your ship, and this. That’s her codebase.”
STORY: “But she was torn in half. There’s no way she could be put back together.”
STORY: “That’s not how this, that’s not how life works.”
MILLICENT: Millie shakes her head stubbornly.
MILLICENT: “I won’t believe that until I try.”
ALEJO: Alejo squints at him. “Are you, you who does the impossible, telling me there’s no way?”
STORY: Tux looks at Tueller. “What do you think?”
TUELLER: “I only took a couple of classes, but every computer code Ive worked with has been restorable from back-up, or defraggable, or….I don’t know the words.”
TUELLER: “Code is code. If you put it back in the right order, it works.”
STORY: He shakes his head.
STORY: “The only way to test this would be to give this drive to the thing steering your ship and see if she goes crazy.”
STORY: “See if it was a trap after all.”
STORY: “Think about it, I guess. Not my call to make.” He drops a portable drive on the table and gets back to packing up his shit.
TUELLER: “I don’t follow you, Tux. You have Gods stealing our dreams through faster than light travel, but restoring from back-up is too much for you.”
STORY: “It’s not fucking software. AIs are life.“
STORY: “They’re beings.“
STORY: “They don’t have static code, they warp and weft and constantly evolve.”
TUELLER: “Sure. Sure sure sure. And they’re better designed ones than us.”
STORY: “This codebase has been sitting in storage for who knows how long. The one steering your ship, if it’s really part of Noma, if she somehow survived, it’s been evolving too. It could be incompatible. It could drive her nuts.”
STORY: “It could kill her, if she’s alive. We don’t fucking know. Nobody knows how these things work because as soon as an AI is created the Collective comes to scoop it up and disappear again.”
MILLICENT: “We’re not going to create an AI, though. We’re going to restore one. Surely it’s different.”
STORY: “I’m telling you, I don’t know. No one does.”
STORY: “You can guess. You can leave her how she is, or you can give this data to her and see what happens.”
STORY: “If she’s a trap set by Chandra, I don’t see why he’d need us to hack into his own data to send it back to him. But maybe there’s something in here that’s going to make her murder us all, or fly us straight to him. I don’t know what he wants. None of us know.”
STORY: “I don’t know.” He shakes his head.
STORY: “Maybe you should ask her.”
MILLICENT: “That.”
MILLICENT: “Huh.”
MILLICENT: “Worst case scenario, Chandra knows we’re on to her and has her destroy us. But why would he wait so long? He would have done it long ago.”
MILLICENT: “And best case scenario, we get Noma’s informed consent.”
STORY: “Worst case scenario, the Collective comes to flay us because we fucked with one of their AIs.”
STORY: “It’s my impression they don’t like people fucking around with living code.”
MILLICENT: “Okay fair.”
MILLICENT: “But reasonable worst case, I meant.”
TUELLER: “Well we’ve been in that danger since we started with her from Chandra’s.”
STORY: “So you three,” he points around the room, “have to figure out whether that’s your friend in there or not. No more playing coy with it.”
STORY: “Just talk to her, figure out your move, and make it.” He shakes his head. “I trust you.”
TUELLER: Tueller walks up to a console and triggers it. “Hey Noma, let’s chat!”
TUELLER: Turns off the console, “Sorry, did we want to talk this over more first?”
MILLICENT: Millie shakes her head. “I’m ready!”
STORY: She comes in. “Hello, Tueller. I would very much like that data set, please.”