[408] 5.32 Assault on Bouvet I

I pour a trace of my [Ether] into the locking mechanism for the door leading out of the small room.  It pauses for a moment, and the device screeches, as though it doesn’t quite know what to do.  Did I overestimate the concealing power of [The Unbound]?  The cameras twist toward me again, but there are still none of the footsteps or shouts that would suggest I’ve been spotted.  I hypothesize that the devices in here can recognize my movement, but [The Unbound] prevents them from registering me as an invader.

It amuses me.  Had they had even one human watching these cameras, I’d be swarmed by every machine on this whole floor.  Instead, they have machines watching the machines, and they’ve made themselves completely blind in the process.  Feels like there’s some sort of lesson to take from this oversight.

Two sentry drones roll down the hallway just behind me.  Like the other machines in this mechanical paradise, they notice me and turn their optical sensors toward each other, communicating through pulses of optical light.  Then they continue on, nearly bowling me over except that I’d ducked into another room before I would have been felled.

Four more robots, these ones shaped like humans rather than beetles, sit at a collection of desks in this new room.  Screens flicker nearly so quickly that I can’t process the flood of information coming in.  The robots, however, monitor the flickering screens with mechanical precision, documenting every anomaly that passes by.  Every anomaly except the biggest one that just walked in their office and hasn’t elicited so much as a turn of the neck.

I have confirmed one thing.  They definitely have sensors in those waterways, hidden with inscriptions and behind rocks in ways that even Lindsey didn’t see or at least didn’t acknowledge.  I don’t know if they chased after the sub that brought us here.  If they did, hopefully the breadth and depth of the Southern Ocean gives them ample opportunities to run and hide and hopefully not be found.

I consider scrapping these drones, but decide against it.  That’s the surest way to break my stealth and lose the one advantage we still have in this operation.  They’re not going after Chloe and Lindsey yet, so why risk it?

I head out of the first security complex into another room.  This seems to be some sort of supply closet.  I take the opportunity to strip out of my [Depth Suit] that has barely restricted my movements at all but still consumes an accessory slot.  Into the [Inventory] it goes as I pull out my [Artificer’s Glasses] and search around for anything that might be of value.  The only thing I find of note is a [Simple Ray Blaster].  It only has 175 [Attack] and doesn’t even scale with the wielder’s own stats, making it a flimsy weapon for me.  It might have some secondary effects at least.  It’s not like I’m wanting for space anymore.

“Have you found anything?” Chloe asks just as I’m about to leave the room.

“One security hall, staffed by four androids.  None of them are able to notice that I’m an intruder, and there are no alarms going off.  I want to survey the rest of the area before I take any direct action.  What about your end?”

“Just more quiet and dark.”

“Let me know the moment that changes.  I caught glimpses of Ethertech recording devices when I was in the security room.”

“Lindsey noticed them too.  She figured it was more suspicious to point them out than to just ignore them.”

Of course she did.  Because when has any of this ever fazed her in the slightest?  I’m sure a trace of my annoyance slips through our bond, but I just let out a hum of acknowledgement.  “Anyway, I’m going to keep looking for anything else that might be of use.  And I’ll make sure you two are the first to know the instant my situation changes.”

“Alright.  Love you, Sera.”

“Love you too, Chloe.”

I sidle against the wall to avoid a large transport robot that’s moving a carton of supplies down the hallway.  Despite the danger I’m in, I find it absolutely fascinating how they’ve been able to put together such an elaborate base and then automate all the processing to such an extent.  Perhaps, in another timeline, one where I’d gone down the path of [Ethertechnologist] and maybe to some sort of [Etheric Roboticist] class, that would be my role in this world.  I do still want to harvest some of these drones for reverse-engineering later.

The fourth room I arrive in is a conference room.  The usual security cameras do their dance of seeing movement, then turn away once they fail to acknowledge the Seraphina-shaped elephant in the room.  There’s nothing of note in that room, so I move onto the next room.

As I enter, I hear footsteps.  [Veilsight] confirms the presence of a human, though not a particularly strong one.  Some low-level grunt, maybe a prisoner.  My heart immediately rockets into my chest as I calculate all the options.  In the end, I float up to hide just above the door, within the small office, and I observe.

He steps inside, not acknowledging me, before pulling a laptop out of his [Inventory].  “I thought I locked that,” he mumbles.  “Damn drones.”

It would be safest either to escape right now or end this man once and for all.  I decide to continue observing whatever secrets his loose lips might have in store for me.

“Don’t know why they brought me all the way down here,” he says as his laptop boots up and he plugs it into the network.  “I’m a network engineer, not a miracle worker.  Doesn’t matter how much optimization I do, you stick a remote base on motherfucking Bouvet Island and of course you’re going to have latency up the ass.  At least they pay me enough for this shit.”

That’s about how I feel every time my department wants me to collaborate on yet more defense research projects.  Didn’t realize I’d find myself relating so much to the overworked IT personnel.  Though in my case, I’ve got almost enough ‘fuck you’ money stored away that I can start working on my own projects soon.  Assuming the planet doesn’t blow up or something first.

He continues to rant about more things that feel all too familiar.  Tight deadlines, unreasonable bosses, a lack of support staff to actually assist, complaints about the AI helpers not doing what he needs them to do…  Then he mentions something about a glitch in one of the drones’ programming.  This catches my interest.

“What just happened?” he says, reading through the diagnostic logs.  “Sentry 181-OFM briefly detected an anomalous energy signature, but then, the moment that signature hit the processing matrix, the glyph matrix had a momentary short-circuit.”  He digs deeper through the reports, all the while I look at the stream of data and don’t understand more than the surfacemost level about it.

He pauses after about a minute and a half.  “Fuck it.  Not my clowns, not my circus, and not on my lunch break.”  He pulls out a sandwich and a can of cola and pushes the computer aside.

I teleport out of the room and make my way over to an adjacent hallway and into the first room and… Holy shit, there’s a massive collection of those humanoid robots.  There must be well over a thousand of them, all sitting around in cubicles, typing and communicating with one another in a fashion that looks straight out of some sort of ‘90’s office-based sitcom.

One of them looks at me and flashes a red beam directly at my left retina.  I blink in confusion more than anything as proceeds to release a few droplets of oil from its neck, followed by a tiny plume of acrid-smelling smoke that gets sucked up into the ventilation shaft.  A moment later, it turns around as though none of those past few seconds had happened at all.  How utterly bizarre.

I walk through the warehouse of drones, all sitting in front of computers, analyzing an information workflow that is utterly boggling.  This isn’t some sort of military installation as I had expected.  Apeiron had turned Bouvet Island into the world’s largest data processing center, processing thousands of gigabits of information on everything from global flight patterns to weather data to informatics about individual people and dungeons and weapons.  A list of thousands of known Skills appear on one monitor with everything from rarity to variations to even some of the predicted evolutionary paths.

I sit down at one of the desks and do a search on a Skill that feels innocuous: [Study].  More than a few of my students have it, and school guidance counselors recommend most kids try to take it as one of their Skills soon after their System first unlocks.

[[Study] (Common, Ranked, General, Tier 1): Increases learning speed and retention by [Skill Rank x 10]%.]

Several branching paths appear on the panel, and I click on one of them.

[[Memorization] (Common, Ranked, General / Classed — Scholar, et. al., Tier 1.5): Increases learning speed by [Skill Rank x 10]% and recall rate by [Skill Rank x 30]%.]

Another one jumps out at me in the evolutionary path from [Memorization].

[[Mental Growth] (Rare, Unranked, Classed — Scholar, Telepath, Psiurgist, Tactician, et. al., Tier 2): Permanently increases [Mind] by +1 for every even level gained.  (Points in [Mind] remain even if Skill is lost.)]

The fuck?  That sort of a Skill exists?  Then again, I don’t know many people who take those specific Classes, sharing Skills is at least a moderate taboo, and it is at least a Rare Skill.

Another branching path leads to the [Alacritous Mind] Skill that Lindsey has, and then on to [Mental Partition], listed as a Tier 3 Skill associated with Psionic, Thinker, and similar classes.  I think I remember Nicholas having something along these lines.

I continue going through what information I can, all the while keeping my ears and most of my [Veilsight] active to look for any signs of having finally been spotted.  At the same time, I’m relaying the information to Chloe and from her to Lindsey and, once we get the hell out of here, whomever else might benefit from this information.

“Sera,” Chloe says as I start moving on from Skill trees to another computer containing information about Apeiron’s military operations.  “We’ve got a problem here.  A bunch of metal fish and sharks have just started coming after us.  None of them are that strong, but–”

“Understood, I’ll be there in just a–”

“The infamous Seraphina Mortensen, here in the flesh.  And titanium,” a rich alto voice says.  “It is an honor and a privilege to finally meet you.”

They pause for a moment, revealing a tall figure covered from head to toe in a black cloak and wearing a Guy Fawkes mask.  “I had been wondering who had been going through our files.  Or rather, who would be able to go through our central databases without tripping any of the security protocols that should have gone on high alert the moment you stepped inside this facility.  For a moment, I even wondered if my own Skills had somehow been disrupted.”

“I can’t say the same.”

“That’s a shame.  Though I can’t say that I expected anything else.  You are ultimately too… sentimental, too attached to the status quo, to realize that we have such wonderful opportunities to improve ourselves and our society.”

“Who are you?”

“A big fan of your work.  At least, in your younger days, before you’d grown so soft and concerned more with your own comfort and less with the grand changes you had espoused back when you had first introduced yourself to the world.  It’s been more than three years now, though it feels like it’s been just a couple of weeks.”

“You still didn’t tell me who you are.  And take the damn Guy Fawkes mask off while you’re at it.”

Ms. Fawkes, as I’ve decided to call them, does not oblige.  “Had you simply left after you had arrived, I would not have had a reason to pursue you further.  You and your accomplices could have kept your lives intact.  Now, however, their safety cannot be guaranteed.”

“Bold words from a soon-to-be-dead person.”

“You took the words right out of my mouth, Seraphina.  Now then, shall we begin?”