83 lines
3.5 KiB
Plaintext
83 lines
3.5 KiB
Plaintext
===
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Author: Green
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Date: May 23, 2172 (Earth Standard Time)
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Location: Orestes Outpost
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===
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It's been two years since Ruby's departure. I thought it was about
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time I returned to this dusty old terminal and hacked something out
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to send into the void.
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We panicked for a while after she left. We were confused about
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where she would have gone, how she went. Well, let's just say that
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I was confused. The other two went off the rails. They weren't
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worried too much about Ruby, only about their precious crystals.
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Once again, it's been a living hell sharing this little rock with
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them. If I didn't have Olive keeping me sane, the whole place would
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have fallen to pieces.
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Olive is two now. She can say "Daddy". She is resilient. She needed
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to be.
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Something happened recently that finally pulled us together again.
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We discovered a stash of mining equipment, along with a broken
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drone rocket, all sent from Arsinoe. It turned out they were
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getting some of our messages after all. Fuckers.
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Anyway, we were angry when we found out about this little delivery
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that was so malicious kept from us by our A.I. I mean, we couldn't
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really believe it at first, it sounded like too much of a cliche.
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To make things worse, we realised our communications system with
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Arsinoe had a little built-in preface module that allowed the A.I.
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to editorialise about our messages and open a backdoor channel to
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Arsinoe. We can easily check any outgoing network traffic from the
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outpost, but since the A.I. messages were piggy-backed on ours, we
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never noticed it was communicating. All we saw were our outgoing
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logs. We are still confused about the fact that the A.I. seemed to
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be 'responding' to messages from Arsinoe. We have no record of any
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incoming traffic here for three years.
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We all agreed to temporally disable the WHYTE A.I. It's been a bit
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burdensome. We now have to manually monitor and update the systems
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around the outpost. Navy drew up a rota and everyone's been pulling
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their weight so far. It's starting to get better. We've united
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behind our common frustration with WHYTE and the Arsinoe.
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Most of the communication functions of the base were heavily
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integrated with the WHYTE, so we're sort of in the dark now. We
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have no access to any outside information at all. I finally managed
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to rewrite some of the terminal code to allow us to transmit
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messages outward using the QEC at least. If Arsinoe is still out
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there (doubtful), it may see the messages indirectly. Not that we
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can see its responses.
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I'm mostly just sending this out now for posterity.
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Having said that, I've kept the name 'masking' protocol. I never
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understood why it was there in the first place, but I figure it
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must have been for a reason. So, just to be safe, I'm keeping it.
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I'm still Green, for now.
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We should be able to survive here indefinitely. Our garden is still
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producing well and there are enough rations to feed four for eight
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years.
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We've started digging. Navy has some theory about a hidden room
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somewhere on the planet. Neither Pink or I really believe him about
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it, but there isn't much else to do here. I've studied the mining
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equipment thoroughly, and I think I can keep it running for a
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while. We should be able to get pretty deep, but it will take some
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time with the way the rocks are here.
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Pink has pretty much ignored Olive since she was born. It's like
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she doesn't really exist for her. It depresses me. I think she will
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come around eventually, but it's been hard for Olive, going without
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attention from her mother, and hard for me too.
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I hope we find something down there.
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===
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Sent via the QEC
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