Chapter 245.5 (The Black Box)

The news of not only who Victor was being confirmed but also the news of what he had accomplished, in retrieving both extinct species and bringing back the Sleeping Ones raced through the Black Box. The only ones who didn't show any signs of shock were the Confederate Agents, who simply nodded and stared at the being speaking to them as if they were looking at a particularly bright rock.

For the first few days everyone avoided Victor, who seemed content to merely stare at the Sleeping Ones and the cats and dogs in stasis cubes in the dimly lit chilly room, idly playing with a dataslate. Delta noticed that he had a still image of Osiris the Immortal Warsteel Flame on the datapad, staring at the heavy duty combat chassis version and the flesh and blood version.

Then came the questions, which either Victor ignored, told the questioner to mind their own business, or answered reluctantly.

Yes, he'd brought them back. No, he didn't remember how. Yes, being planet-cracked had a tendency to affect one's memory.

It was a week later that a ship docked with the Black Box and a single crate was offloaded before the ship detached and jumped into hyperspace while the Black Box shifted stellar position and reengaged the security protocols.

Everyone was called into the "Family Meeting Room" when the box was brought it.

It was old, battered, made from heavy duty plas over tempered steel, with locking hatches on the sides and heavy duty hinges. It was marked with scratched and faded logos that could no longer be read.

"What's in it?" Flower asked, moving around it, examining it with her senses. "Wow, organic petroleum plastic, organic and synthetic paint, magnetic resistant stainless steel, Faraday caging protection for the contents. It's old. What is it?"

Victor waited until everyone had a chance to look at it.

"I wanted you all to see the box. What you're about to see is a secret," Victor said.

"There's not even a classification code for a secret this big," one of the Confederate Agents said.

Victor moved up and undid the latches, opening the box to reveal shock protection cradling six small boxes of white plastic.

"There are twelve of these in existence. We now have six of them," the agent said. "More could be made, but the powers that be determined that Overproject Eagle Beak needed original manufacture versions."

Victor picked up a plastic box almost reverently. He placed it on the table and opened it, revealing two complex pieces of cyberware.

Flower, of course, was the first one up, walking around it twice to let her senses examine it. The others leaned back and watched.

Nelson Castle-633821 got up next and walked around it. "Cybernetics. Pre-Glassing tech. Oh, a SUDS interface. Read only. The two are linked, the smaller one looks like it's paired to the larger one," he looked at Victor. "A new version that was never put into use?"

Victor shook his head.

Flower moved up and looked again, then jumped back, staring at the Confederate Agent and then Victor.

"They're for a Treana'ad!" she exclaimed, pointing at it. "Treana'ad have two brains, one in their head and one in the upper third of their abdomen, in between their forward legs!"

"Exactly," Victor said.

Torturer moved forward, examining it. "Never put into full production. These are the prototypes," he looked at Victor. "Did they work?"

Victor looked at the Agent, who nodded slightly.

"Yes. They worked. We have that in records," Victor said. "The problem was mapping two brains in the same split second. The Treana'ad split their memories between their brains, their personalities are split between the two. A Treana'ad without his head will live for up to an hour and, as we saw during the war, can fight those two hours based on tactile sensation."

"Right. Sexual drive and responses as well as locomotion and reflexes are in the lower brain," Violet Fields said, bringing up a hologram of a Treana'ad. "There's a dedicated nerve fiber between the two, which is why a Treana'ad has to actually think about its actions outside of bare bone reflexes and sexual responses. Since they breathe through their legs and abdomen, pheromone sensing in the lower brain takes up more neural space than in the primary brain, which handles antenna, eyes, and taste."

"Why weren't the Treana'ad added to the SUDS network then?" Vanish asked, sounding slightly offended.

"Because Terra got Glassed, which probably destroyed the active ones," Flowerpatch said. "Which means we don't have the particles that it would have used for transmission, which means that..."

She went suddenly still, then slowly got fuzzy.

Everyone held still, the Agent almost vanishing from the senses.

"No. It can't be that simple..." she breathed, so distracted her voice came from almost three feet from her mouth.

"Yes. It makes sense though..." she said softly from one of the room speakers.

"If... then... but... oh my Unholy Chocolate Rave Mouse... that's why..." her voice came from the nanites in the room usually reserved for announcements. She was little more than a colorful smeared cloud. "Of course!"

She suddenly snapped back into high resolution before turning to Victor. "Of course! That's why what you did was such a big deal!"

"Explain?" Delta asked.

Flowerpatch turned around. "It's so blindingly obvious I want to die," she said. She turned back to Victor. "Did you have the bodies or genetic samples of the two you brought out of the old SoulNet?"

Victor shook his head. "No."

"Did you have their master-ID code so you could get it from the system?" she asked, leaning forward slightly.

Again, Victor shook his head. "I had a picture. Of Daxin, his daughters, and his wife along with their vital statistics that Daxin could remember, like birthdays, system identification numbers, blood type, place of birth."

She turned and looked at everyone. "Don't you see? He didn't just walk up to their bodies in their stasis boxes," she smiled. "He accessed the system and retrieved the data!"

Delta jumped up, rezzing badly for a second. "How did we not see that?" he blurted out. He turned to Victor. "How? How did you access the system?"

Victor stared with his mouth open. He shuddered and shut his mouth with an audible click. "I... I don't remember."

"You must have," Flowerpatch said. "That's the only explanation. You accessed the system, put in the identifying information, downloaded everything from their current genome to their mental engrams, then stripped out all the agony and pain and memories that weren't theirs, then restored them."

"I... I don't remember," Victor said.

"Wait, we have the repeaters and the other cyberware, we're already talking to the SUDS system," Vanish said.

"No, no, no, we aren't," Delta said.

"Then what are doing?" Vanish asked.

Delta moved over and brought up another hologram of blocks. "OK, data comes in, gets translated, gets stored, the old data is probably backed up, which is probably how Victor managed to restore them, then the data is streamed out. None of that involves what Victor managed to access."

"I don't understand," Violet said.

Delta sighed. "OK, everyone here is familiar with a CAD program, right?" Everyone nodded and murmured they were. "All right, just using the CAD program doesn't mean we're accessing the operating system, it doesn't give us access to say, the video settings and the hologram resolution settings," Delta said.

He looked at Torturer. "We're looking at the eyes and ears of the SUDS system and thinking that it's going to let us figure out how the broodcarrier song is getting into the Gestalt system and into the SUDS system. It's not."

Flower had started to drift again, perfectly still.

"The Gestalts use up about eight percent of the bandwidth, and nobody knows where the hardware is located. I checked. There was a Gestalt system in use on pre-Glassing Terra, most people assume it was rebuilt after the Glassing," Delta said. "It wasn't. As a matter of fact, the current Terran Gestalt..."

"IT WAS THE DIGITAL OMNIMESSIAH!" Flowerpatch suddenly blurted. She whirled around on Victor. "How long after the Digital Omnimessiah was killed did the Terran Gestalt come back?"

"According to the logs, it came online roughly thirty Terran Standard Days later," Victor said, sitting down in the chair. "You're right."

"The Gestalts get their data from the SUDS system, somehow," Flowerpatch said.

"I thought they got it through datalinks?" Violet said.

"The data moves through... how could we have been so blind," Torturer said. "It moves through SolNet, which is built on the foundation of the original, which was tied into SoulNet."

"We need to access the root level software, down in the hardware application layer," Delta said. He looked at Victor. "Somehow, you figured out how to access the system itself, not just request data regarding SUDS or Soulchips."

"And either the dogs and cats were a byproduct of that, or restoring the Sleeping Ones was a byproduct of that," Herod said, stepping forward. "You're an Immortal. What happens if the Black Box got planet-cracked? Do you go away? What?"

Victor shook his head. "No. It's hard to explain. I drop out of a portal wearing Combine Era armor, my memories intact as if no time had passed."

"Hellspace, huh?" Herod said. He threw up particle interactions. "Why Hellspace? How did they keep the facility from being dissolved?"

"It isn't Hellspace," the Confederate Agent said.

Herod looked at her. "What is it?"

"Deadspace. I come out of Deadspace," Victor said, shrugging. "Daxin comes out of Hellspace."

"What in the name of the Unholy Chocolate Rave Mouse is Deadspace?" Violet asked.

"Someplace terrible," Victor said.

"Could they have stored the SUDS backbone there?" Herod asked.

Victor shook his head. "No. Well, maybe. I mean, the place is weird. The Big Bang was more like a Tiny Whimper, and time itself didn't exactly form."

"No, no, you'd..." Herod stood still. "You'd need time, but not distance. Someplace you can access from within a stellar gravity well consistent with Sol, maybe even accessible from a planetary or orbiting body gravity well. Particle interactions would be more about the rules on the receiving end, where the SUDS array is located, not ours."

"You'd just need a form of binary data transmission," Delta said. "Between this dimension and the other dimension."

"There's seventeen catalogued dimensions, excluding Hellspace and Deadspace," Trifold Carthage said. "I'll need to look at the mathematics for all of them."

"Look between the Treana'ad/Human War and the Mantid Strike, that's the era that the SUDS was developed," Violet said.

Flowerpatch was still perfectly still, blurred as the nanites drifted apart with the loss of processing power dedicated to holding her together. She suddenly snapped together in a puff of bluish-black dust.

"It explains all of it. The miracles, the Apostles, all of it. A massive supercomputer that would make a Digital Sentience Creche look like an abacus, with massive energy reserves normally reserved for stellar masses," she said. She looked at everyone. "You know what we're actually looking for? What we're trying to do?"

Everyone shook their head then looked at Victor when he started laughing.

"What's so funny?" Herod asked, feeling his digital flesh crawl.

"We're looking for the Digital Omnimessiah's body so we can commune with his spirit," Victor laughed.

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MANTID FREE WORLDS

Has anyone seen TerraSol lately?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

I assumed he was off doing war things.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TELKAN FORGE WORLDS

Do you need me to go looking for him?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS

Would you? I need to talk privately with him.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TNVARU GESTALT

Our new home is beautiful.

We had forgotten what beauty was.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

OK, that was weird. Did anyone else feel that?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS

Oh, thank the Digital Omnimessiah, I thought it was just me.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

CYBERNETIC ORGANISM COOPERATIVE

No, I felt that too. What

soft blanket warm blanket nappy time for good podlings sleepy podling happy podling cuddle podling nighty night brave podling sweet podling dreams

ALL>YAWN

CYBERNETIC ORGANISM COLLECTIVE

What was I saying?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---