Trending to Rimward
Trending gently sat, apparently in mid-air, as the rooms walls vanished and a augmented reality workspace filled the view, a morass of flickering files outlined across the where the physical objects had been. Faces, designs, outlines, many with flickering black boxes appearing to cover certain sections with orange text stating “Citizen Right”, “Security Directorate” or even ‘ZMSF”.
“Okay business it is. Accessing list for the citadel core systems during production and use, Charybdis class, ZMSF SCC 0082, twenty eight remote individuals during research, design and development, six on Noor Anchorage and only three in flight with two being required to open the cores secure room itself, of all of these only Kamenev had access before and during flight and only one megacity aerospace engineer was involved in both research, design and production.”
A mousey haired woman appeared something about her engineering ship suit said fussy.
“Moulson, Patrice , Human, within two percent of baseline, standard type six universal citizen shareholder gene mods, just the normal medical gumph, single, never married, no children, seventy eight, born on the Indigo orbital industrial node, Caselllio system. Magda, mother was a united mining citizen representative to the Casellio Concilium, got pretty high up in united mining’s hierarchy, ran for UM system head rep and failed in the 329th Concilium, now retired to Azure along with the father. Father, Philip, head of engineering for the Indigo OIN, family background has AAB economic ratings from both from the Cassellio system office of statistics and central socio economic prediction.”
Facts and figures appeared, write ups and justifications.
“Int-Sec work up puts Patrice’s reliability/loyalty combined score 5.9 out of a possible six, Office of the Security Directorate Psych department rate her at seven point eight on the Bourne,Boons Ransom sanity scale, very level headed, if anything almost overly outwardly sane. High on the biological roulette wheel for smarts, exceptionally skilled in Lobachevsky-Bolyai-Gauss geometry, er non Euclidean, lady could with time probably plot a transit jump in her own head. Three accredited if classified major breakthroughs in partial phased spatial topographical analysis, one major paper when she was forty two that led to her being involved in Project Jackknife leading to the development of the radial inserted position drive. Fourteen major degrees, six doctorates and held a teaching position and tenure at the Oscott Marker star drive institute in Luytens for twelve years.”
A complex star map appeared with dozens of crisscrossing lines.
“Has to our knowledge never left IS space, only major interstellar non work related travel is back to Azure to her family annually”.
A display clearly from a news network, a young girl in a luridly yellow and blue affair that was for the IS of a definitely older style, huge sets of letters marching down it slowly and puffed in odd places, a backpack and hair in disarray.
“No correlated incidents of any note save when she was sixteen, was a passenger aboard the northbound in the Maksik-Langdon blue line crash on Azure and interviewed post incident on Walls System News”
A dozen social networks and dating applications appeared.
“Public and private social feed data shows no sign of extremism, theocratic leanings, or encrypted messages. Moving on to her medical records it indicates that …”
Several hours later..
The footage was grainy, and sometimes wire framed, the figure shaking from position to position as if snapshotted and then occasionally coming into view. A caption on the bottom showing it was interpolated from a dozen sources. The figure slowly made there way along a catwalk in a helmet closed shipsuit, huge structural members visible before it vanished into the bulk of the growing mass of cylindrical forms at the heart of the space.
“And that’s when we think Kamanev pulled the first active move, height, weight and kinaesthetic mapping all match. Whatever it is he’s holding utterly blocked him from every sensor in the entire construction bay so this is all external. We have still no idea of what that something is, to be that wide area and multi-faceted, half the sources that should have picked him up aren’t even networked, and one of those was the latent metal and magnetic stress on the catwalk itself, so we think it is entirely possible it may be a man portable state change device with an effect in excess of a six cubic kilometre general engineering bay. Which puts it well outside anything within our shared technological norm and further it did so with an exceptionally and untraceably light hand. The upside is that its actual effects are physically minimal, the downside is the extrapolated cognitive and real time processing required push the thing well into the medium rated SI scale.”
A number of laws now appeared alongside graphs.
“Legally the thing is very probably sentient if of very fixed purpose, its an abomination, violates every one of our SI laws, the equivalent of a gene slave and something that Int-Sec, as an organisation has rather fixed opinions of, violates one of our founding tenets. Much less my own as an SI citizen or a serving agent.“
Trendy stood at that and gently rubbed her elbows.
“Im physically hardened as an agent, expected to do close EWar or worse, way above civilian or normal mil ship SI norms, internal shielding and shear points and all sorts of other little toys, but so was she as a strat boat rated core. Different methods used by the SSC but same sec rating as I have. Which is the highest available for anything that's not a static planetary, system admin or megacity core or the Gestalt itself. They went after her core while it was still being installed, so some active gear would have been off but the passive .. some of it should have caught it under almost any other attack vectors. That damn ..predator sat there, invisible in her own most personal sanctuary passively watching her learn her new body and then it just ..took over or influenced her on his command. Hell I'm an agent, I'm expected to do the same sort of op end result in some extreme situations but it gives me the heebie-jeebies to see it actually practiced like that and by that stars bedimming thing rather than anything that could be called a person."
She sat cross-legged on the floor now seemingly staring at the Nav plot.
"The Gestalt gave me one hell of a booster shot before we went out but that thing scares the waste parity checks out of me.”