Chapter 271: (The Black Box)

Flowerpatch was considered by almost everyone to be, well, a weirdo.

Since even in the creche she had preferred to inhabit a nanite body once they were introduced to what most DS's thought was just an ease of interaction tool. Her body was custom coded, with custom nanites she'd ordered and had designed. She had even seen a digital surgeon to have the nanite coding woven into her base core strings. Green Flowerpatch could touch a creation engine or nano-forge and have it print out the nanites, even her custom ones, so she could build her own body. The only time that she didn't inhabit a nanite body was when she was forced to retreat into a survival core to be moved through hyperspace or to a secure area.

She knew other people thought she was strange, thought she was weird, thought that there was no real reason for her preference other than just to be different.

They were wrong.

Flowerpatch had fell in love with matter-reality during her first interaction with it.

The majority of the time she ran a program of her own devising. It allowed her to define what speed she experienced reality, from below human perception to the slightly painful faster than even other digital sentiences. Most of the time she ran it at the high end of human normal, just brushing the outlier case.

She also adjusted her brain power, limiting the amount of code she could run at any given time, used fuzzy logic search strings to make it more difficult for her to access her own deep storage memory.

The other digital sentiences called her crazy.

But it let her live in the world where matter and energy met.

Which was why she was skipping down the hallway, going to find Victor, or Legion, or Dhruv, or whatever he was calling himself.

She was a materials engineering specialist, who worked with everything from strange matter or protomatter to lovely wonderful so solid iron particles.

To be honest, most digital sentiences lived in a world of strange matter and protomatter, in the ebb and flow of electronic communication and energy fluxes but she preferred the world of the Base Periodic Table.

Flowerpatch pressed her hand against the pad on the outside of Victor's lab and waited to be admitted.

"What?" Oops, that wasn't Victor's voice. Flowerpatch could tell that Dhruv was the one who had answered the request.

"It's Flowerpatch, can I come in? I have a question," she said.

"Ask your question. I'm involved in research," Dhruv said. "I'm in an argument."

"I want to ask about your Agent Smith digital avatar abil..." she started.

The door slid open. "Get in here."

She felt a little nervous walking in. Dhruv/Legion/Victor was talking to Strand-Nexus-333874, who was the resident mental engram image specialist.

"I think it drops a quarter to half the data it brings in before it applies the template," Nexus said.

"It might. The data might be time space coordinates and biological data. It might not drop it, it might send it to a different system," Dhruv said. He leaned back in his chair and stroked his beard for a moment before making a motion and tossing the glowing flowing cube of swirling data up. "OK, here's a mental engram taken from a SUDS roughly eight thousand years ago," he made another motion. "Here's a modern one."

"Slight bit of difference, but nothing major," Nexus said.

"Can we see yours?" Flowerpatch asked.

Dhruv looked at her. "Is it relevant?"

"I think so," Flowerpatch said.

Dhruv sighed and tossed it up. It was much more dense, instead of blurred edges and softly bulging and retracting sides it was covered in spikes and tendrils that reached out and retracted.

Nexus whistled. "That's... unique."

"I'm an Immortal," Dhruv said simply, shrugging. "Somewhere in there is the effects of the touch of the Digital Omnimessiah and my original brainscan."

"It's not in the network, your broadcasting the image from your datalink," Flowerpatch said, squinting. "Why?"

Dhruv sighed. "Because my dendrites and neural pathways have black ICE impressions. Real killer nasty stuff from the Age of Paranoia. If you load my brain into a system, like the old interrogation rooms..." he trailed off.

"It'll tear the system apart," Nexus said, leaning forward. "Man, that is some angry dendrite chains."

"The Agent Smith abilities of your digital avatars," Flowerpatch said, walking around it and looking at it. She noted that the cube representation looked angrier on the area facing her and Nexus. "It doesn't like us."

"It wants left alone," Dhruv said, waving a hand. The image vanished.

Nexus turned back to Dhruv. "So, one thing I've noticed is this section," he touched the mental file, highlighting a major section. "It's pretty much the same in every engram but we've never been able to figure out what it is and the software won't let you upload a SUDS without it. Every manual just says 'don't do it' without explanation."

Dhruv sighed. "If I tell you, you'll accuse me of being a religious hysteric."

Nexus frowned and Flowerpatch laughed. Dhruv turned to Flowerpatch. "Something funny?"

"Oh, I'm in a room with one of the Immortals, Vat-Grown Luke if I'm correct, a man who walked beside the Digital Omnimessiah, who fought in the Heresy of Two, and you think simply giving us information would make you out to be a religious heretic?" she snickered again.

Dhruv sighed. "All right, that section turned out to be really weird. I mean, we're talking weird for back then, and back then the watchword of the day for scientific research was Weird Science," he said. "We, humanity, did experiments, terrible experiments."

"Like the ones you're doing now?" Nexus asked.

Dhruv just nodded. "Yes."

"Oh, what terrible experiments?" Flowerpatch asked.

"Ahem, anyway, we tried editing that section out and uploading it to a clone," Dhruv said. "Hell, in my hubris, I tried it during the Genomic War."

"Isn't it called the Eugenics War?" Nexus asked.

"Two separate wars by about two hundred years," Dhruv said, sighing. "Stupid temporal warfare safety protocols."

"What?" Flowerpatch asked.

"Nothing, just bitching. Anyway, you delete that part, what everyone says is some kind of junk code, upload it into a clone, and terrible shit happens," Dhruv said.

"Define 'terrible shit'," Nexus said. "Do they melt or something?"

Dhruv made a motion and a hologram appeared. A human male, rough pebbled skin, bone spurs jutting from the flesh, oversized mouth of jagged teeth, long fingers with claws.

"No, they turn into that and go homicidal," Dhruv said. He shook his head. "But if you put that into a manual, every half-baked gene-cracker thinks they can overcome it."

Flowerpatch stared. "That's... weird."

"Weird Science," Dhruv said.

Dhruv waved away the hologram and replaced it with another block of swirling electrical activity, highlighting a section. "That's another 'don't touch' section. It was added after the Great Glassing to surpress psychic abilities in humans."

"Really? I've never seen it described," Nexus said. He leaned forward. "Beautiful coding. Smooth, elegant."

"If we do, some idiot removes it then the person becomes Enraged within a few days of the first psychic ability manifestation," Dhruv said.

"How do your brains still work?" Nexus asked, leaning forward again to look at the code. "My God, I can see dozens of what look like software patches applied directly to every SUDS template."

"Biological stubborness," Flowerpatch giggled, knowing it would annoy Nexus.

"Terran Descent Humanity is, from basic protein building blocks to mental engrams to waste products, is one big 'don't fucking touch me' from the ground up. Hell, even the various parts of their own bodies don't like each other," Dhruv said. "That's why, even with all our technology, immuno cascade diseases still occur, tissue rejection of cloned parts still happens, and cancer still pops back up even with genetic modification to the genome."

"The Universe's answer to everything," Nexus mused. He shrugged. "I don't believe in any mysticism, I prefer science."

Dhruv laughed. "As do I."

That made Flowerpatch giggle. "He said, his eyes having seen the Digital Omnimessiah himself."

"Did you have something to ask, Flowerpatch, or are you here just to annoy us?" Nexus asked.

"Either is fine," Dhruv chuckled.

"Sam gave me a blown out piece of circuitry, something called a 'video card', and as I'm a materials science engineer, I wanted to ask you something," Flowerpatch said.

"I thought you wanted to talk to me about the fact I can clone myself into Digital Space too," Dhruv said, stroking his beard.

"Not really, I just wanted your attention for this part," she said.

"All right, what?" Dhruv asked.

"Sam thinks you just had ultra-specific versions run off via creation engine," Flowerpatch said. She snapped her fingers and made a moue of disappointment when nothing came up. "Anyway, I examined it closely and he's wrong."

"He is?" Nexus frowned.

"Oh, yes," Flowerpatch said. She giggled out of nervous stress. "It's an actual piece of Pre-Glassing hardware that still functions as if it was manufactured yesterday. I want to know where he got it."

"Because if I'm using temporal science then why don't I simply ask the engineers who built the system?" Dhruv asked.

"Yes," Flowerpatch nodded.

"Because it was just in storage. Deep storage, true, but still storage," Dhruv said.

"Stasis field?" Flowerpatch asked.

"Yes," Dhruv said, nodding.

Flowerpatch pouted for a second. "I was hoping that you had temporal access."

Dhruv shook his head. "No. Temporal access fails when it comes to Terra."

"Yeah, weird that," Nexus said. He looked at Flowerpatch. "Temporal access gets more... disturbed... the closer you get to Terra."

Flowerpatch hummed. "The fabled TerraSol Defense Systems put in place by the Vodka Czar and other Terran rulers of the time."

Dhruv laughed. "Yeah. That's what caused it. The Vodka Czar and the Hamburger King putting a clone of the Ee-Youtube Fairy in orbit, that's what did it."

"Is that true?" Flowerpatch asked.

Dhruv nodded. "Actually, the fact that Abraham Lincoln was a vampire hunter, which is something everyone knows is what prevents temporal mechanics from working on Earth to an extent."

"I fail to see how an ancient Hamburger Kingdom leader and vampires stop temporal systems," Nexus said.

"So does everyone else," Dhruv grinned.

"I'm going to get back to work," Nexus said. He nodded, got up and walked to the pad. He touched it and dissolved.

Dhruv waited a moment, then looked at Flowerpatch. "Do you have work to do?"

Flowerpatch nodded. "Yes. I wanted to ask you something."

Dhruv smiled. "You always seem to have more questions than the others."

"They interact with mass reality, I live in it," Flowerpatch said.

Dhruv nodded. "That makes sense. Go ahead, ask."

"First, an aside," Flowerpatch said.

"All right," Dhruv looked a bit worried.

"Materials science is an exacting discipline, a difficult one, and it was not my first choice. My first choice, and my profession for my first thirty years of existence, was," she started.

"Clinical psychologist," Dhruv nodded. "I know. I know everything."

"You are under a great deal of stress. I wish to know why," Flowerpatch said.

Dhruv sighed. "Because I know where I need to start with the Friend Plague, what experiments must be done to begin my research."

"But you don't want to?" Flowerpatch said.

Dhruv shook his head. "No."

"Why not? Restoring the canines and felines would be worth almost anything," Flowerpatch said, feeling a stir of excitement.

"Because to identify the problem, not the virus, that's been identified, but the actual problem, I'll have to kill dozens, maybe hundreds, of mankinds first and closest friends."