//------------------------------// // Chapter 3 // Story: Outside Context Problems // by Ponisattva //------------------------------// Diziet Sma stalked through the woods uneasily. Her surroundings were both strangely familiar, but had just enough uncanny queerness to them to be deeply off-putting. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was. Probably multiple things about this alien landscape were just as wrong as the cosmology of the spatial volume the planet inhabited. Skaffen-Amtiskaw for the most part kept quiet while she slipped through the lush, vibrant foliage of the forest undergrowth. When he did choose to talk to her, it was entirely non-audio, opting to signal by encrypted radio transmission directly to her neural lace. Thankfully, the cybernetic implant still worked properly. Even so crippled, her security conscious drone companion remained ever vigilant. Sma dashed across what she presumed was an animal trail, used by some four legged woodland creature. Even with her enhanced senses, she hadn’t seen any animal life yet, intelligent or otherwise, but it was better to be safe than sorry she supposed. After working with that militant drone for so long, it seemed part of it was rubbing off on her. She pressed up against the trunk of a large leafy tree, and listened intently for any reaction to her bold move. Nothing but tree branches, gently swaying in the wind. “It’s too quiet,” she subvocalized. “Not unexpected,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw replied, “Even finessing the landing like the Ship did, it was still a major impact event. Running away was a wise choice on their part.” “It still feels wrong.” “Dizzy, we’re falling behind. As much as it pains me to say this, I’d say it’s time to throw caution to the wind and pick up the pace. While the Ship’s avatar doesn’t appear to be in any immediate danger, we shouldn’t be too far away from it.” She tutted agreement, and dashed off through the forest. Eleven millennia of genofixing hadn’t completely removed the old animal instincts that governed the passions of Culture humanoids. Somewhere, in the deep recesses of her genetically enhanced, cybernetically augmented brain a little voice told her that the silence meant she was being hunted. And with the sense of urgency that only prey can summon, she soldiered on. Intellectually, she knew the real threat was the advanced technology that they had brought with them to this strange planet. But on a deeper, preconscious level, it was the environment itself that screamed alienness and danger. She stopped for a moment at a trail. She noticed the wagon tracks in the packed dirt instantly. Drinking in the air, she caught a strange scent. Just a whiff, but it was enough. With a quick moment of focus, she activated one of her drug glands. The mind-altering cocktail edge rushed through her, honing her senses to a razor sharp perfection. The rush of new sensory data was intoxicating and brilliant. Colors, sounds and smells became more vibrant and more varied than they had before. What had once been a single uniform splotch of color became a rainbow of thousands of distinct shades. She honed in on that scent, like a perfume mixed with lab chemicals, and rushed after it. “You seem to be adapting to stone-age living quite splendidly, Dizzy,” the drone commented, “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were having a good time.” “Sometimes it is fun to be challenged, to be tested when you don’t have the easy way out. Any old GCU like the It Belongs In a Museum could have scanned the entire surface of this planet down to the molecular level from a light-year away with its effectors had it not been in its own pocket dimension.” Skaffen-Amtiskaw tutted in protest, but otherwise remained silent. Regardless of how well it fit, this talk of pocket-dimensions was pure poppycock. It silently wondered what would come next; talk of time travel? “Speaking of, how is our fine, furry friend holding up with the natives?” she subvocalized. “Its gamble (bordering on pure reckless madness, I might add), seems to have not blown up quite yet. The locals haven’t caught on yet, and they’re making a good pace towards a settlement that it informs me is called…Ponyville.” Sma skidded to a halt, nearly tripping over a fallen mossy log. “You’re joking, right?” Across a vast, glittering gulf of stars, a ship from the Culture’s Contact section was carrying out the drudgery side of its habitual moral busybodying. Around this pathetically average main sequence star orbited a clutch of thoroughly unremarkable planets. Regardless of the dullness of the details, the procedures had to be followed, if only for posterity’s sake. The (d)ROU Safety Not Guaranteed moseyed its way through the system, carefully attenuating its engine fields to leave the only tiniest ripples on the skein of realspace. Skating along the boundary with hyperspace was a delicate dance, especially if you wanted to have any grace in doing it. Done well, it was like tip-toing across fresh powder snow leaving only a delicate pattern in the surface, but failure meant making a royal mess of your drives. It had to remind itself consciously that there was no such thing as a detail too small to care about when you’re a Culture Mind. Well, for most of them anyway, it was sure it wouldn’t lose any figurative sleep over what would be irrelevant minutia. It’s not like the natives in this system were in any position to care anymore. Hell, that’s why the Safety Not Guaranteed was here in the first place. At least the view was nice. The ship bathed in the distant light emanating from the yellow-orange star. It surface churned, and the occasional tendril wisp of plasma sprouted from the sun-spot freckled surface. The million kilometer long solar flare that could have swallowed a whole planet began to cool and dissipate, and the ship briefly wondered whether it might be more worth its time to play hooky from this assignment, and go sun-diving for photosphere dwelling plasma creatures. But it had some dignity left, so it refrained for the time being. It felt excessive to take such keen interest in the planets and other celestial bodies of the home system of a species that have never managed to properly explore them and now never would. The ship amended that thought to the forensic report it was preparing as it turned its sensors the mostly lifeless ball of ice and dirt second nearest to the star. It took only a few microseconds to confirm what its home MSV had suspected when it noticed an abrupt end to radio emissions from this star system: the natives had gone and nuked themselves to extinction. Based on the rate of fission by-product decay, the big show must have been 52.14 (+/- .05) years ago. The ship wasn’t surprised, but still disappointed. It seemed to always expect a little bit too much from organics. Apparently someone was calling to say “I told you so.” [swept-to-tight beam, M2, tra. @n4.91.614.0115] xMSV Live Slow, Die Whenever oVFP Safety Not Guaranteed How goes the forensics, old chap? [tight beam, M2, tra. @n4.91.614.0120] x(d)ROU Safety Not Guaranteed oMSV Live Slow, Die Whenever Doesn’t matter how much you try, I’m not going to pretend that I’m anything but a temporarily demilitarized Psychopath-class warship. And before you start, let me just get this out of the way: you’re not my real dad, It’s my life let me live it, I’m out of the house now, you can’t tell me what to do, etc. I’d appreciate it if you stopped with this picket ship nonsense. In response to your question, it’s going just as well as you’d expect. The kids went and played with matches while daddy was away, and now the whole house is burnt down. They seemed to have perished of hunger, disease and radiation sickness in the next few decades. And if you could pass this up the informal chain of command, tell the gang that while I’m happy that they pass morsels my way, I am a little tired of getting all the Contact assignments that the GCUs find unsavory. It had expected to obtain a fairly quick response. But the Live Slow, Die Whenever was taking an uncharacteristically long time to message. It couldn’t have been because it was contemplating changing its mind. The old Desert-class was as old and well-travelled as the Safety Not Guaranteed. The pause was probably deliberate and calculated, part of the social “game” played by the Minds. To pre-empt whatever inane gibber-jabber that its old friend might feel compelled to engage in, the Safety Not Guaranteed sent a preliminary report as a quick amendment to its previous transmission. Live Slow, Die Whenever seemed to enjoy dragging out social encounters, having an almost organic fascination with chit-chatting out questions rather than just going for the hard-data itself. It had been cute once upon a time, but now it just bored everyone to tears. [tight beam, M2, tra. @n4.91.614.0139] xMSV Live Slow, Die Whenever o(d)ROU (most certainly not a VFP) Safety Not Guaranteed You’ve been out alone too long, old friend. I think the constant drone of the cosmic microwave background radiation is starting to drive you mad. Anyway, thanks for the report. Disappointing, but sadly no way surprising. But I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that. Or that Contact thinks that Idiran War survivors have more of a stomach for dealing with gigadeaths than the average ship Mind. Or at least that’s what they say. Personally, I think it’s because they think we’re already damaged goods anyway, so it’s no use spoiling some young innocent Mind with the horrors of the galaxy… Actually, better table this for now. I’m picking up something pretty interesting, and you should be too in a few micros, better put your ear to skein so to speak. The old warship puzzled over the last transmission for a moment. It was abrupt and out of character enough to warrant dropping everything. Everything about it screamed that this new development was “interesting” in the “Interesting Times Gang” sense. It awaited the next few microseconds with bated breath. It was faint, and this far down a planet’s gravity well it was very hard to pick up the signal. Had it not gotten the alert, even an old soldier like itself might not have been able to pick up enough of the transmission to read the message. Let alone read the encrypted message within the standard Culture SOS signal. [skein broadcast, M32, tra. @ n4.91.613.9154] xGCU It Belongs in a Museum o ??? I seem to have landed myself in a bit of jam, and I’m going to try to cram as much info into this message while I still can. I’m crossing over some sort of strange topographical defect in space-time, and it’s like nothing else in my data banks. To make a long story short, I couldn’t see it, and once I hit it I might as well have been a bug on a windshield. I’m being torn out of hyperspace, my drives are dead, and I’m moving to lower level back ups, and all I can think of is that physics isn’t working the way it is supposed to be. In other words, sounds like an outside context problemmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm……………. The message degenerated into garbled scrap code before going silent. It recognized the ship in distress almost immediately. A venerable old Contact workhorse, the It Belongs in a Museum was already considered ancient during the Idiran War. But that didn’t make it any less effective of a ship. Like nearly all Culture ships, it had constantly modified and upgraded itself over the years. The Safety Not Guaranteed practically purred with frustration. A ship as old and as cautious as the It Belongs in a Museum wouldn’t carelessly stumble into anything. Whatever brought it down had to be serious, and well beyond present understanding. Its duty to its passengers and crew required an open broadcast distress call, and the old Mind fulfilled that duty quickly and efficiently. But anything that could bring down a Culture ship was of interest to anyone and everyone in the galaxy, it noted grimly. A whole horde would come bearing down on that distress signal; concerned friend and opportunistic vulture alike. Well, what interesting times we’re living in.