Alecto Q4 Interlude/Gloom Broadcast

[Daniel]

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How to do your Q4 Interlude in Gloom

Go for it! Have Fun!

[Icosa]

[dice]0[/dice]

Tragedy! Do androids cry electric...tears? Hm. Title needs work.

[Icosa]

The fireteams spread out through Gloom to do their work, and Alecto chose the one farthest from the city. Perched on the high ground to the north, the relay tower boasted a little light at the tip that winked on and off. Vasquez, from the mercenary band that had signed up with the Black Company, accompanied her. The two made good time. Alecto was pleased to see that her squadmate had some skill at keeping a low profile on the move.

They went prone on a ridgetop overlooking the rise that led up to the radio tower and Alecto zoomed in a little to see what security was like before they started their approach.

"So what's your story?" Vasquez wanted to know, holding up a little pair of field binoculars to her eyes as she did likewise.

"My story."

"Yeah. You seem relatively normal compared to most of the others in your outfit. How'd you get mixed up with them? Sentry, eleven o clock."

Alecto nodded. "I served with Hans in another mercenary unit. The Hammers."

Vasquez blew a puff of air, a kind of quiet whistle. "I've heard of 'em."

"Then you have some idea why we chose to leave."

"Yeah, guess so." Vasquez lowered her binoculars.

Having identified the sentry, and noting the heat source of what was almost certainly another person inside the small building at the base of the tower, Alecto turned to make sure there were no unexpected patrols coming from up the gully that dipped past into a sprawling lowland beyond...and paused.

"Looks like just two guys. I don't think Giest's expecting any trouble in this direction."

Vasquez looked at Alecto when there was no response. No one would call the girl 'overly expressive,' but she always said something to acknowledge when she was spoken to, even if she didn't add much elaboration. And now she wasn't even looking the right way.

"Hey. Everything okay? You see something?"

"...yes."

Something in the tone of Alecto's voice sent chills down the other mercenaries back. It was a soft whisper, a syllable spoken with shock underlaid with a kind of dazed horror. She pulled her rifle up into her arms. By this time Vasquez was pretty sure Alecto was cybered up a good amount. If something rattled her that bad, it was something Vasquez would be much happier with one less of in the world. She followed Alecto's gaze but didn't see anything.

"I don't have eyes. What've you got?"

"...I remember those rocks."

It took a second for Vasquez to downshift. "...what?"

And now Alecto was standing up, moving across the ridgeline...with enough presence at least to stay low and avoid being profiled but away from the target! "Over there, by the stream."

There was a stream, emerging from some hole in the ground and running down the bottom of the gully. Probably from a spring fed from aquifers or some...whatever thing streams did. Vasquez wasn't a hydrologist. Was that even a thing?

"Hey," she hissed, hurrying after Alecto. "Where're you going?! The tower's that way!"

"I need to investigate," was Alecto's response...placid and calm, completely unruffled by the urgency in Vasquez' voice. Which only made it more infuriating.

She tried to catch hold of Alecto's arm. "The rocks will still be there when the tower's captured. We can come back for it. Mission first!"

Despite her being considerably smaller than Vasquez, trying to hold her back was very difficult. She nearly brushed the hold off immediately, but when Vasquez kept her grip Alecto wheeled around to stare at her. Not even glare. It was a little creepy actually, how few shits Alecto appeared to give.

"This will benefit the mission," she said. "Return to the ridgeline and keep the sentries in view. I will return within ten minutes, and we will commence the operation."

Vasquez grimaced. "Uh uh, this stinks, Al. This is a shitpie in July. What the fuck is going on here?"

"You have your orders."

For a few seconds, Vasquez was tempted to do something...maybe not stupid but arguably extreme. Knock her out maybe. Or just get the fuck out. But in spite of every fucked up thing the world ever threw at her, Vasquez was a soldier. Her jaw clenched, but she nodded. "Ten minutes. After that, I'm coming after you." Or leaving you here. Not sure which yet.

Alecto nodded, then returned to her previous course, leaving Vasquez to backtrack to the ridge and bust those field glasses out again.

==

Not long after Alecto recovered awareness, she detected corrupted data most likely resulting from physical damage to her memory structures. She'd followed standard procedure and isolated the corrupted sectors to prevent them from damaging other stored memories. As such, she had no concrete sensory data preceding her awakening; only hardcoded information and data that had been stored in other locations like kinesthetic and linguistic engrams. Except...it wasn't really no data. It was almost no data. A few isolated frames of uncorrupted sensory input. Nothing she'd ever expected to find, because a sloping streambank with a rock that looked vaguely like a double-humped headless camel was too specific to find in historical records but too anonymous to expect to just stumble into.

Yet she had.

It didn't tell her anything though. Why had she seen this place before being incapacitated and buried? The only way to be sure would be to try to analyze the damaged information left behind in her brain. That had risks Alecto had previously determined not to outweigh the potential rewards. By this time her concern was not so much that further corruption was risked. It was that embedded in that old code could be fragments of programming that would...conflict...with the self-programming she had done since awakening.

That was still a risk, but now the possible rewards were far more immediate. Discovering why she had been nearly destroyed, but left to recover, was something she wanted. She'd been here. She'd stored the memory in an unusual sector, as if to try to preserve it.

Why?

Standing there, by the rock rounded by floodwaters, Alecto looked around. Nothing seemed unusual or out of place. There were no transmissions or signals from the area that didn't originate from Gloom. No strange heat sources. So.

Alecto loaded the suite of enhanced tools from the 'skillchip' she'd put into the slot Hans installed. Decryption algorithms, exploit catalogs, co-processor emulations that were intended to run on an independent computer, but which Alecto was perfectly capable of running on an isolated 'echo' of her own mind. She turned these black-ops hacking programs upon herself.

There was something existentially horrible about seeing the condition of the firewalled data. Fragmented and nonsensical, most of it so damaged as to be completely unreadable even in part. A healthy 20 year old human might feel something similar if catapulted forward in time to speak to himself when 100 years old and riddled with dementia. This is me?

Immediately Alecto realized that, in this sector at least, her fears were unwarranted. Almost nothing survived here, let alone code or programming that could supplant her. Using the codebreaking interface she filed the fragments and floating segments and marked them for deletion. She would at least be able to re-use these sectors, even nothing useful emerged.

Then the decryption suite discovered patterns, data that could potentially be recovered. Alecto set those aside in another index, still isolated. When it was done she set her echo up to begin the recovery process. Perhaps it was sheer fortune, or perhaps because she had attempted to shield more of this memory than others, but the first results related directly to that image.

...reserve power had been depleted; camouflage offline...her own power reserves would be compromised...water, cold, quickly dissipate residual heat...mud...dark giving way to light...run run...

It was disconcerting. The remnant was almost raw sensory data, with only a thread of contextual processing attached. With the context though, she thought she understood it. Her eyes lifted to the mouth of the stream, farther up the gully. The water trickled from a muddy hollow. There'd been more water then. Warmer. The spring runoff fed the underground water source.

She'd left it there.

Alecto waded up to where the water came spilling forth, and pushed the heavy hanging sod away. Chunks broke off and plopped heavily to the streambed, revealing that the opening was bigger than it looked; hollowed out by heavier seasonal flows. Even so, it was a tight fit, but Alecto ducked down and pushed into the cold, wet, cloying darkness within. She wasn't far in before her hands met something hard and smooth.

"Alecto."

She paused, midway through attempt to haul whatever it was out, to respond to Vasquez. "Yes?"

"You're overtime."

"I know. However, my efforts have been successful. I will be joining you shortly."

Now it was Vasquez' turn to hesitate, and Alecto knew she'd have some explaining to do to maintain good relations.

"You'd better."

The connection clicked off. Alecto looked down at her mudstained hands, and the pair of black, armored legs that they were pulling out from the ground. Another few tugs were enough to pull it completely out; a full humanoid figure, female in aspect but composed of smooth charcoal-dark grey interlocked plates of armor. Blank-faced. Almost no features at all; certainly no insignia.

As she cleaned muck off of it, looking for clues, she detected a faint ping; a handshake request. Alecto hesitated, assessing risks, then returned it.

The plates hissed and unlatched, opening to either side to reveal a hollow interior. Within, set along the neck, was a small 'plug.' Perfectly positioned to match the location of her interface port. Slowly, almost in a daze, she removed her Huntsman armor and bundled it up, then laid down inside the hollow. It fit snugly, molding precisely to her body. Then there was a whir from the plug, and...

Alecto's senses expanded. The armor's systems integrated with her operating shell seamlessly. Moving it felt no different from moving her own arms and legs. Its senses were her senses. Feedback returned on the status of its systems...fully operational, but depleted of power. She realized however that her energy supply was compatible with the armor. She could drive it for a little while, until she could recharge them both.

The plates closed over her, covering her entirely, and she sat up. From inside, the eyeless helmet seemed to melt away...it seemed to her as if she wasn't wearing one at all.

==

At the ridgeline, Vasquez heard on her comm, "Take the one higher up. I'll take the building and begin the operation."

She closed her eyes and muttered, "Finally." Then over the comm she adds, "Understood. Tell me when you're in position."

"I already am."

What?

Vasquez got up and moved in towards the sentry outside the structure, rifle at the ready. She got in closer, staying out of his sightlines until he started moving...at which point she opened fire. The first salvo of shots took his left leg and abdomen, knocking him over. She finished him with another burst.

There were no gunshots from the radio building. Rifle held ready, Vasquez advanced on it. Inside was the remains of a soldier, his weapon arm severed in the corner with his weapon, and lying in a growing pool of blood. A little ways away was Alecto's railgun, leaning upright against the wall. At first he seemed to be alone, but then something moved near the control panel. Something in the air, like smoke. Only smoke with a shape?

"Vasquez." The voice was Alecto's. A moment later the 'smoke' shimmered, and she was standing there. Or...something was.

A sleek, armored figure, dark grey and black, with no hint of feature or who or what was within, materialized in mid-typing motion. It looked up at the mercenary's stunned silence, and the smooth curve of its faceplate broke in half and slid to either side to reveal Alecto beneath.

"I'm ready. Cover the door, in case they react faster than we expect."

"...yeah. Was this...what you were..." Vasquez waved a hand vaguely out the door.

"Yes."

"It's, ah, nice. Looks good on you."

Alecto stared fixedly at Vasquez for a moment, and the mercenary nodded and quickly got to her work watching Alecto's back.

A thin optical cable came out of the suit's wrist; connected internally to Alecto's interface port. She plugged it into the universal I/O on the controls. The codebreaking suite she'd used to decrypt her own fractured mind was now turned to its intended purpose; gaining illegal access to secure systems.

One by one, each relay tower responded to the network's ping requests and fell in line.

And over Gloom, radios and televisions experienced a quick burst of static, and then Alecto's face appeared in them.

[Icosa]

"Citizens of Gloom. You know something is wrong here. It has been wrong for some time, and is getting wronger every day, but for many of you it was hard to put a name to until recently. Giest invited a band of musicians to perform a concert. The money from this concert was to be donated, in full, to the orphanage. This is what you were told."

Alecto paused then, allowing time to process. Then she started playing the footage from the Black Company's fight with Volt as she continued to speak, her calm methodical voice playing over the images.

"The money was stolen. This crime...an insult to the generosity of the people of Gloom, and a vicious act against suffering children, demanded justice. You were told that the theft was the doing of a group of mercenaries."

"You were lied to."

The image froze on an image of Volt, braced behind a squad of his CEAL troopers, just before the final push.

"This man, named Volt, took the money. He and his accomplices betrayed the Tomorrow Legion and went rogue in exchange for the 'gifts' of necromancy Giest offered. This was the plan all along. Giest never intended that money to get to the orphans. It was all a lie, all along."

As she spoke on, the playback resumed. Volt was consumed in fire and bullets, holding onto a semblance of life long after his body should have fallen to pieces. It showed Volt finally fall. And a gauntleted hand reached down to open his pouch and produced the credit chip. On screen, a readout displayed the stored amount of cash coded onto it. As the speech continued, more footage played showing helmets being removed, showing the undead faces of the CEALs and Volt himself.

"The Black Company has returned the money to the orphanage, but this is not over. Something is still wrong in Gloom, and now you can clearly see what."

"Do not listen to her lies. Help is coming to Gloom."