Community Fan-Fic

[663bb17a28329Kolya]

Nice one. And glad to see you back in the show.
When they found the living washing machine, I thought: This must be Goggles!

[663bb17a284bd~RocketMan~]

What's left of him anyway...  I wanted to continue your little Earth thread but you really threw me for a loop with your blue-haired shodan and I was all like, WTF? so I decided to leave that alone lol.

[663bb17a2891cRocketMan]

Somebody out there besides me and K's gotta have the ability to write a few cohesive sentences and use some sort of creativity...  oh well, at least we scared away all the trolls.  They wouldn't touch something like this with a 50 foot poll.

NV, I want to see all that coding logic in your brain put to a slightly different use

[663bb17a28dc8RocketMan]

A small patch of forget-me-nots trembled sadly in a mound of Earth.  Their fragile beauty, delicate blue petals naked and wonderful, the only remaining memory of life on Earth, was about to be erased by the sterility of SHODAN.  For now though, the flower remained unaware, and James pretended he was as well.  He breathed deeply, laying on his side and caressed the soft material with his fingers, imaging himself in some meadow. 

The terra-un-forming process had begun without warning less than 24 hours ago and from its epicentre, circled the globe, transforming all matter into "potential", a new material from which energy could be extracted at unheard of efficiencies without refinement or processing.  On the front of this wave of destruction, all non-human life was extinguished.  SHODAN had left humans immune to the wave by entrapping them in a chrysalis of energy, in a comatose state.  Those who hid, were left unprotected and became potential.  Those who tried to flee into space...became potential.  The skies were her domain too.  The more potential there was on the surface, the larger her dominion.  The potential, a white, crystalline substance, was also highly volatile and the compounds released into the atmosphere acted as a gaseous dielectric material that could localize static charge.  In this way, organized circuits long since confined to wires and silicon, could exist in space by carefully distributing charge throughout the vapours of the potential.  The wave had enveloped almost 100% of the planet and James was on the very last place on Earth to become extinct.  By shear luck he had gone undetected until now but had paid the price of seeing everyone he knew and loved, desiccated only to be violated over and over again by SHODAN to serve her warped agenda. 

The wave was about 100 feet away from where he was in every direction.  Already he could feel the hair on his arms stand up as the potential crept closer.  He continued looking at the beautiful flower in front of him, refusing to pay attention to the fate that crept ever nearer.  He had seen enough of the gray, de-saturated sky.  The vast desert of crystalline death was utterly featureless except for the white cocoons of the sleepers, half buried in the ground.  All weather was gone and in its place, a wholly unnatural stillness took its place.  SHODAN's every thought could be heard for miles, all at once as the sound waves filled him to overflowing.  The only thing he could do to stay sane was to cradle and protect what mattered most.  Though futile, he felt that if he died protecting something, he didn't have to lose all hope.  He didn't have to feel as though he were plunging into hell head first.  He would hold on and let destiny contend with that rather than submit to oblivion and doom the human race with affirmation.  James took another deep breath and relaxed.  He picked at a blade of grass and imagined the meadow.  The tiny flowers smiled at him and he smiled back.  Then the forget-me-nots were gone...turned to potential.  James no longer had anything to protect.  He had failed.  He would have plenty of time to think about what he had done and to feel that guilt in the pit of his stomach.  Frozen into position, he joined the rest of SHODAN's fawn.

[663bb17a2941dRocketMan]

The "Hacker", as he calls himself, deployed another bottle of Vodka from somewhere inside his coat.  How deep are those pockets, I wondered?  The blue-haired girl who ridiculously calls herself Shodan is squatting nearby against a brick wall, sucking deeply on an old-fashioned cigarette. 

"Drink?"  The hacker gestures the bottle to me for the second time.  I grimaced briefly but then shrugged and took a healthy swig, nearly choking on the antiseptic-tasting shit.  It'll slow my racing heart, I thought, and clear my sinuses to boot.

"Alright so what the hell is going on?  Why am I here?"

"Chicken eggs", said Blue Hair from beneath me.

"Beg your pardon?"

"She's talking about how vaccines are made.  You take a virus and incubate it in a chicken egg, weakening over successive replication cycles until it becomes suitable for injection in humans.  That's what they call a live attenuated virus".

I raised my eyebrow.

"Fascinating", I said, growing irritated.  I kept quiet though, suspecting he was going somewhere with this.

"That's basically what I did with her.  That chip in her head - It's got a piece of SHODAN in it.  A clever hacker always keeps a backdoor and that's what I did on Citadel.  I made a copy of Shodan for myself... the essential code only you understand... and kept it safe all these years.  Lately I've been playing with the idea of recreating her in a safe, contained space, to better understand the pathogenesis that is SHODAN.  I designed her implant myself - took years.  I wanted to make a neural link between a human being and Shodan without putting the human at risk.  She volunteered for the experiment.  I would have done it to myself but if something went wrong I'd be unable to analyze the data so..."

At this point he looked at Blue-Hair with a sort of sad half-smile and she broke with her Goth thing for just a moment and returned the gesture in kind.  There was obviously a history there.

"Fortunately my gamble paid off.  Shodan is still contained in that chip and we can now apply the human element to our analysis for the first time in a very intimate way.  This has led to some groundbreaking discoveries about SHODAN's nature and potentially, about her weaknesses"

This was all too much to take in.  I felt myself becoming light-headed and decided to take a seat next to Blue.  As I crouched down, I interjected in the Hacker's monologue.

"So you've been growing a mini-Shodan in a human host in order to figure out how to kill her?"

The hacker took another swig of his precious Vodka and coughed a response.

"Huhhh... it's a bit more com....plicated than that but for now we can go with it."

Blue swivelled just then to peer around the corner and see if any of the agents had found us.

"We need to get moving soon", she said with slight urgency.

As the hacker put his bottle back into the abyss of his coat, she continued.

"Doctor, I can feel her.  The pain, the drive behind it... it's intense."

My express was one of bewilderment.  She looked at me with eyes of sincerity, eyes of longing.  Perhaps her own experiences allowed her to connect with SHODAN on a very personal level that most of us yuppies couldn't appreciate.  My gaze shifted over to the Hacker, who was now pacing back and forth, looking at his shoes.  He sensed my attention was on him and turned to face me as I asked,

"What's this all got to do with Xerxes?"

The hacker opened his mouth to speak, hesitated a moment and decided to go back to pacing as he replied.

"Xerxes is special.  It was designed in such away as not to succumb to the sort of unstable sentience that gave us SHODAN.  More than that it has several security loopholes by design, so that it could always be shut down if necessary."

Blue got up and dusted off her mini.  She seemed to be getting ready to move again.  However I wanted to hear this part so I remained seated.

"Frankly I'm not concerned about Xerxes going haywire.  But those loopholes allow for some interesting possibilities if SHODAN were to make a re-appearance"

A sharp pain went through my chest and I jumped to my feet.

"Re-appearance?  What aren't you telling me?  I thought you killed her!", I spat.

The hacker frowned.

"Yeah, well...  so did I but there may have been a loose end...
...
...

Take this."

He hands me a very small device the size of a hypo, with an odd looking port at one end.

"I know you have questions but just keep this on you.  If all goes well, you will never need to know what it is."

"And if things don't go well?", I pleaded to him with wide eyes.

"Then you'll be happy you have it on you", he replied in a nonchalant way, looking relieved.

"Come on.  Let's get you home.  The natives are getting restless."

He smiled and I felt a hand touch mine.  Blue feigned a tiny smile of her own and we departed silently, in unison.

[663bb17a29520Kolya]

  Whoah, a blast from the past!

[663bb17a29649RocketMan]

Yeah, does that "7 YEARS AGO" need to be so bold and so red?  Lol.

I couldn't leave your story thread unaddressed.  It was bothering me.  I feel you had a different thing going than my more space-oriented plotline so I felt compelled to marry the 2.

... but it's not done yet nudge nudge.

[663bb17a297f5Kolya]

I think my idea was that the blue haired girl is Shobecca who illegally immigrated from the moon (after the Von Braun's crash there) to find the Hacker. It's told from the point of view of a false Marie Delacroix (the woman on the train). The original Delacroix was brain copied by SHODAN before she died and then imprinted to another woman after Shobecca's arrival on earth. I thought the psychology of Rebecca, who's barely conscious of what is driving her and an unknown with false memories of being Delacroix would be interesting to figure out for the Hacker. I had no idea about an ending. But I'll gladly let you take me on another ride.

[663bb17a298f7RocketMan]

oh lol sorry then cuz I butchered your sub-plot since I didn't pick up on that.  There were elements of the setting that i had confused in my head. 

[663bb17a299e2Kolya]

Not at all! I think it's great to see you continue this and get some surprises out of it.

[663bb17a2a2e3RocketMan]

Shuttle Pilot Lorne's personal log supplemental:

A lot has happened in a short time and this may be my final log so I'll do my best to document everything that's happened.  Not sure to what end though... there may be no one left to review this.  I guess I just have that human tendency to cling to hope against all odds, so here goes.

It all started with my return from Europa.  I'd been sent there by the company to replace a faulty guidance chip in one of the submersibles used to map the sea floor beneath the crust.  It was an unpleasant trip on account to how cold and hazardous it is there but I completed my mission without any major problems.  The work took 3 days if you count landing, searching for the submersible, retrieving it, servicing it, testing, re-deployment and taking off. 

I was on my way back to the moon, which was an uneventful trip.  I spent most of my time playing Doom and staring out the window, thinking of Ayami-chan, that nice girl from Neo-Tokyo who gave me the works last time I was there.

I got within 100 thousand clicks of the moon when I began standard hailing procedures for landing.  There was no reply.  I tried again.  Nothing.  So I decided to move in for a closer look.  Everything seemed fine visually.  I saw the base and landing pad.  There was no one in sight but the landing beacons were flashing as they should.  I decided to do an orbit around the moon to check the other stations out.  They too could be visually identified but there was no human activity to be found.  Something was off.  Things were far too quiet.  I was tempted to go all the way to Luna, the planet's capital but decided not to out of laziness.  I figured I'd land manually at my own base and have a look before jumping the gun.

So I touched down back where I started, at my home base and left the shuttle on foot with my old sparq handy in case... I dunno.  It was stupid really.  I didn't really think I'd find aliens or anything but there was something eerie about the atmosphere in the base that day.  Always trust your guts I say.  And I was right.  I wish I wasn't.  God damn! I wish I was wrong.  Inside, everyone lay dead at their stations or wherever they were, doing whatever they were doing at the time.  No sign of a struggle.  Just dead.  The station was intact and everything seemed fine.  Whatever killed these men must have come out of nowhere and had lethal efficiency.

I had a sinking feeling of dread that this was only the beginning.  With no clues to go on, I left the station and boarded my shuttle.  I decided to head back to Earth.  I had to let people know what I had seen here. 

No more than 10000 feet from the surface I caught a shimmer in my peripheral vision and took a look out the port-side window.  That's when I saw the wreckage.  Some large craft had smashed in to the moon not far from where I was so I changed course to investigate.  Once I got close, there was no mistaken that this was the Von Braun!  Everybody knew about the Von Braun because of the publicity around the trip.  Of course I'd never seen it this close, this smashed up or this... empty.  I touched down in the softest patch I could find and got out to have a closer look.  It was that sinking feeling all over again.  No signs of life.  No signs of anything for that matter.  Just the fractured hull and the surrounding debris.  There were a few notable exceptions however.  For example, I did see a large pillar that surprisingly seemed to have power, albeit what little power it had was barely enough to illuminate the face on the front of it.  Another thing I noticed was the heat coming from one of the lower decks, not far from the pillar.  It registered on the infrared sensors in my helmet.  Perhaps the reactor was also semi-functional?  But this is all speculation.  I had far more questions than answers.

God, what had happened in the 3 days I was gone?

On the way back to the shuttle I accidentally kicked something that was sticking out of the ground.  I had been tripping over debris here and there but this was different.  It looked like a hypo but it wasn't.  It was some sort of electronic thing I had never seen before.  Looked home made.  Looked important.  I took it with me.

Back at the shuttle I moved calmly but with a purpose.  I set a course for Earth and departed.  I needed answers.

I was only half-way back to Earth when it got big enough in the window for me to see that things had gone from bad to worse.  The Earth didn't look like it should.  It was all white like it was covered in snow.  I can't believe I didn't see it before.  Heck, even the oceans were white.  Maybe I thought it was just cloud cover and didn't look carefully enough to see that it wasn't.  It was surreal.  Not a detail to be found anywhere.  No continents, no water, no lights on the dark side where great cities ought to be.  The feeling of dread turned to horror when I tried to imagine what could have happened to Earth and its population.  I thought these strange happenings were isolated to the moon but those poor bastards may have been the lucky ones.  Whatever was going on down there on Earth was so terrifying I couldn't even begin to imagine... what could have happened?

I wish I hadn't seen it until the last minute.  The next 90 minutes were the longest I had ever experienced in my lifetime.  I sat in the middle of the floor, eyes closed, focused only on the sound of my heart beating, the thrum of the ship, acutely aware of the distance surrounding me.  I sensed I was alone in the universe.  As the ship disappeared all around me, I was floating in a void of black.  No sound, no light, no thought.  Just the endless expanse of the vacuum.

Eventually I broke from my trance and, with a heavy heart, I hauled my tired frame over to the console to see that I had arrived at my destination.  Again I found that I was thinking reactively, as I had not figured out where or how I would land on a featureless planet.  For several minutes I just sat and stared at the surface, slowly undulating with different shades of white'ish gray.

Then I heard it.  How had I heard it?  I was in space...  Was I hallucinating?  Had the trauma of what I'd seen finally driven me insane?  It sounded almost like a human voice but it was distorted and... raging, like a storm.  It sounded like some sort of electronic hell and the call was that of the Siren but in this alternate narrative, the Siren's call was not seductive but a piercing wail that reverberated inside me.  In shear panic I grabbed the controls and turned my shuttle back towards the moon.  I rocketed out of orbit at maximum speed, my only instinct, to get me as far away from that sound as possible.

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I am here now, standing on the surface of the moon, staring at the wreck of the Von Braun, with that odd device in my hand.  So much has been lost.  All our history, our hopes, our dreams... dashed in the blink of an eye.  As I stare out into the blackness of space, my desiccated home hanging in the sky like a Christmas ornament, a cold reminder of how small we are in the universal arena creeps into my consciousness.  I push it away.  I no longer have a home, a family, a job or any social framework to which I am responsible.  I am but a man, and my purpose is now my own. 

This is Lorne, captain of the Von Braun, signing off.