Sorry, my ISP decided to crap out yesterday and I spent most of the day either trying to get it back or stuck carrying boxes of books up flights of stairs.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Ok, lets put you all in that nerve node memory eh?
The memory begins with the vessel focused on his arms. They're coated in nerve nodes, each with their fair share of wires. They've been banded together into great cables that stretch off somewhere above and behind the vessel. From what you can see he's sitting, or more correctly, strapped into a pod that resembles a stasis pod, though larger, more complex and slightly antiquated. Judging by the way he's pressing on the straps, he's in zero-g. His pod is one of thousands spread around a great hollow expanse, like the inside of a metal egg. The way the pods are positioned is immediately strange to you. They coat the walls but they also trace semi-circles on curved metal rafters, or diagonal spirals on large metal pillars. The way they're arranged combined with the knowledge of what this machine does gives you a strange feeling.
It's almost as though you're within some grand occult engine; a machine that harnesses unknown and unknowable forces via seemingly mundane processes; abusing some law of physics mankind has, of yet, failed to grasp. The great computer that hangs in a spiderweb of metal struts at the center of this confusing configuration only enhances that feeling; it's endless thin limbs of cable stretching out to each pod.
Technicians in white clean room suits with oxygen tanks and masks float through the empty expanses, checking countless panels and pods and connection points before leaping off like albino grasshoppers and drifting to their next inspection point.
"We are beginning final checks. All non-essential personnel should evacuate. Repeat, all non-essential personnel, evacuate the exclusion zone."
The lights in the chamber blink out one by one, leaving only he gently glowing pods and the great mass of softly pulsating screens and indicators on the surface of the central computer The pods close with a hiss and seal themselves, filling with stasis fluid. The vessel's body becomes dizzy and weak but instead of falling into the blackness of stasis sleep his mind remains awake and his eyes still see.
Slowly, the machine begins to activate. The pillars turn like crankshafts, the circles like gears, everything grinding into a slow motion. Red electric discharge leaps between pods and down the cables. Voices, the inner voices of the thousandfold minds of the men and women in those pods, rise together like a choir. What starts as a low rumble grows until it reaches a crescendo that threatens to tear the world apart. Something clicks into place and shakes the entire ship with a metallic ring. The central computer glows brighter then the sun.
For an instant, the countless become the singular and their minds view the world through the endless eyes of the ship and beyond. Their minds scream out across the cosmos, their perception extending lightyears in all directions.
And then they are yanked back, torn apart as the machinery slows and shuts down.
"We have a successful contact. Repeat, successful contact. Returning all systems to null state. Reestablishing barriers. All trauma teams report to your subjects. Report contamination immediately."
The white grasshoppers return, swarming like locusts over the pods. As they descend on the subject and pull him, half comatose, from his pod, you know as well as he did that not quite all of him came back. Now some part of him, some part of them all, belongs not to themselves, but to the One. And it is awaiting their return.
The memory loops from here.
(sorry about the size, but We don't have time to mess around.)
Author
Topic: Einsteinian Roulette (Missions 9a, 10, 11, and Heph post war survey team) (Read 462805 times)