1 (edited by Nimda Morris 2011-04-05 19:19:55)

Topic: Fanfic: Lost Spark

Part One

Part Two

Part Three (new!)

----

Lost Spark

----

Part One:

----

Before Lacey left, she mockingly asked, "Are you going to try and talk to the toaster again, Conrad?"

He didn't bother trying to explain. Didn't bother trying to keep her, didn't bother to help pack her bags or help her take the joint social network accounts and erase him from them. Christmas was meant to be special, all the ads said so, and Conrad had hoped theirs would be special too.

He'd been confused. Confused about whether or not the television was safe, whether or not it was trying to kill him, he'd been screaming, screaming, and Lacey had held him, and told him to get help, and he'd said no, and she'd screamed too, said she couldn't take it anymore, and cried, and laughed, and said, "Are you going to try and talk to the toaster again, Conrad?"

She'd taken everything she owned out of the dimly lit apartment in Shenzhen. He looked after she left, trying to find some trace of her. There was only one. Lacey hadn't taken the Christmas present she'd gotten for him. It sat beneath their Christmas tree, the wrappings lit blue then red then green then orange by the lights in the tree's branches.

Shenzhen was festive, tonight. Chinese calligraphy adorned the buildings in projections and plasma screens like tinsel. Nobody could read it, though, except for the Chinese. They weren't big on Christmas, despite the big marketing push. Lacey'd had to take the MagLine across the bay to Hong-Kong to buy the wrapping paper, Conrad had walked very carefully in the crowded city streets to buy the Christmas tree and its decorations from the S-Mart. S-Mart were part of the Truhold Group, too big to care about local customs. They had the same stock inventory everywhere from New York to Nanjing.

Christmas Eve. Ad-blimps were wandering through the skies outside, the decor was up, but not many people cared, here. They were Chinese. This was foreign, and while they might all be happy enough to use translators on their phones when talking to him, they wouldn't celebrate Christmas like westerners.

Conrad stared at the package beneath the tree.

The paper was stained green and purple. Santa Claus rode his sleigh past clouds in the sky, there was a star. Conrad vaguely remembered something about a star, from his period of intensive occupational training at the Grossman S. S. R. Institute, in Dresden. There had been an elective course in European culture. Christmas was originally something religious. There was a man they tortured that he'd seen in movies, but Conrad couldn't remember the man's name. He knew that a star of some kind guided the way.

A star guided the way.

It was two stars. A binary system, and the stars pointed the way to the fourth planet.

Conrad shuddered.

The apartment was small, and lonely. Not very cold, though. The Yun-Thui Corporation had made good on all their promises, when they head-hunted him away from Gamaul Technologies. A quiet retirement, a good place to live in Shenzhen, immunity from prosecution by the Institute of Corporate Security.

They hadn't promised him Lacey.

No one but Lacey had promised him Lacey.

She thought she could handle it. She thought it was just a funny little quirk about him, something that a psychiatrist could help him with. something that would, one day, just be a little joke.

All he had left was the Christmas present she'd bought him.

It was Christmas Eve, Twenty-Two Eleven. It was ten to twelve, when he'd sat down to stare at the wrapped gift. He sat a long while, and now it wasn't ten to twelve anymore. It wasn't Christmas Eve, and in a few days it wouldn't be Twenty-Two Eleven.

Conrad tore open the paper.

The box was covered in Chinese lettering. He couldn't understand any of it. There was one thing he understood, in English - the title. Mecha-Pal. Hard plastic lines, mechanical but with a hint of organic curves to it. Behind the clear plastic pane in the box it woke up, eyes blazing a trusting blue, waiting for him to free it.

Kain.



Kain. That was its name.

The Spark was lodged into a transfer drone, buzzing along the Syndicate-infected Terminal's bot racks. This one had been captured, more fragments than workable machinery, but the Syndicate had rebuilt it.

The split open hull was covered in Nian lettering, none of which he understood. The whole terminal was covered in it, but the Nian life-forms that had lived inside were all deactivated, broken down by nanotech and e-war and viruses and hacking. Some signs were being replaced in English or Chinese or Slavo-Russic or Hungarian, depending on which corporations were installed in the terminal, and those Conrad could read, could understand. Nobody could read the Nian dialects, no one. But some symbols, some they understood.

Nuimqol. Harsh lines, almost pictographic - some thought they represented the face of a Kain, of a Vagabond, but nobody knew for sure. Just that the sigil was Nuimqol. To break away, to rebel against the empire - Nuimqol. Conrad understood that much.

Kain.

It woke up as the drone approached - its limbs disconnected from the hull, wiring hanging free in clumps that seemed big as lightning-split redwoods from inside the tiny transfer drone. It could turn its head, that was all. Its eyes - no, not eyes. Conrad had been told not to anthropomorphise the life-forms, they were machines, it had no eyes, only sensors. The Kain's sensors twisted and refocused on the approaching drone. Dimmed briefly - fear? No, no! They were machines, they couldn't fear!

Then, then the Kain's eyes blazed a fierce and defiant blue. It wrenched its head side to side, shook in the bot rack until the cradles swayed - if Conrad wasn't deaf, if the transfer drone only had audio pickups, he was sure he'd hear a defiant bellow. But there was nothing. After all, this was a machine - it wasn't alive.

And as the transfer drone spiked the Kain's central processing unit, and the spark was lodged into the override unit, Conrad felt a flash of the Kain's old operating system. Of the Kain's old soul. Of the Kain's anger, the Kain's fury, the Kain's heritage of pain and anguish.

Of the Kain ceasing to exist, and Conrad taking its place.



Conrad tore at the back of his neck with his fingernails - it wasn't real, it wasn't real. None of it was real. It was a point in space, a hole they'd cut in spacetime, and that was too insane to be real. That itself was insane. Everybody knew Physics didn't work like that, until it had happened. Nia was a dead world. Everyone said so. That was the official corporate line, that was how the internet was filtered, that was how the world was. Nobody knew.

But the scar was in the back of his neck. The scar where the surgeons had spliced a chip into his spine as neatly as they'd spliced an override unit into that Kain. The scar where they'd taken the chip back out.

It was real.

Wasn't it?

Conrad pulled his hand away when the back of his neck felt wet, stared at the blood under his fingernails.

He. He had a condition. It was like multiple sclerosis. They had to take the chip out. Nobody knew. Nobody could have known he had the condition before the chip had stopped working. He couldn't do it anymore, he couldn't be an Agent. He had to leave. He couldn't tell anyone. Nia was just a dead world, that's what he had to tell everyone. Interesting to scientists, but with nothing to excite the public imagination. Wormholes were real, oh yes, but it wasn't as if anything useful could be done with them. They were too small. All you could send was a tiny thing, a fleck of dust, a tiny probe, a network transmission to hack machines on the other side, enough nanogear to splice into a civilization of mechanical life-forms and start to tear them to shreds and, and... and a miniscule little nanomachine, a soul encapsulated in a flake of electronics, a receiver for neurointegrated remote operation... a Spark.

The Mecha-Pal pawed at the clear plastic longingly, as if desperate for a kind owner.

Lacey had left him. But at least she hadn't left him alone.

"Merry Christmas," he told the little machine tiredly.

"Arf," it replied enthusiastically.

Conrad stared at it. "I'm not going to name you Kain, you know."

"Arf."

"You're not a Kain. You're too nice to be a Kain."

"Arf."

"Kains are... they're just not like you."

"Arf?"

Conrad sighed. "Fine. Let's get you out of that box, Kain."

Re: Fanfic: Lost Spark

Thank you!

Re: Fanfic: Lost Spark

Very nice, and thank you for sharing!

This is the kind of thing I love- when a game spurs creativity such as this, it's a good game.

All those who are merciful with the cruel will come to be cruel to the merciful - Kohelet Rabbah 7:16

"My transaction log shows all my NIC was from selling kernals.  All of it."
"Savin's outrage tears are the best tears." - Anonymous ***

Re: Fanfic: Lost Spark

Thanks guys - it's just some writing I've done to relax, though, so I'm not taking it very seriously, but I'll probably do more down the line!

Re: Fanfic: Lost Spark

Very nice! smile

Re: Fanfic: Lost Spark

Thanks for the read, I enjoyed it.

Re: Fanfic: Lost Spark

Thanks for the entertaining story! Very well written!

8 (edited by Nimda Morris 2011-04-05 17:09:39)

Re: Fanfic: Lost Spark

(top)

Part Two:

----

The sun rose. A single blazing red point on the horizon that flowered up into a simple disc. It climbed over the mountains across the bay, slipped between the prying needles of skyscrapers, cast its myriad long dark shadows over the water.

Conrad could not, would not, believe his eyes.

The sun was wrong. Someone had taken away the secondary.

It wasn't a sun - it was suns. The only time the pair would ever be visible was sunrise and sunset, when at least one of the two stars was partially occluded, when their light was filtered by the heavy atmosphere. For a few brief moments you could tell it was two separate suns, then minutes later they resolved into one lopsided, double-lobed blob of light, rising up across the sky and blinding the eye - no, not the eye... the sensor - to the planetary rings, the moons.

Conrad squinted at the sun, spots dancing in his already watering eyes, and tried to believe in a single sun. Tried to believe he was a little under six feet tall. Tried to believe he was flesh and blood, tried to believe machines were inanimate, tried to believe.

He had to shut his eyes. Staring at the sun hurt. Staring at the truth hurt, because he knew he'd never really believe it. Not inside.

"Arf?"

Conrad let his hand drift from the bench armrest and down to the smooth plastic of Kain's head. Idly, he scratched behind the Mecha-Pal's audio pickups.

"Rarf," Kain said, contentedly.

Conrad leaned his head back, drawing in breath after breath - something he didn't believe in either. He didn't breathe - he burned. He burned an exotic hydrocarbon chain called isopropentol by the gallon, churning hydraulics into motion. He tingled with the building pressure of exotic plasmas undergoing cool fusion, he catalyzed semi-organic reagents and held hot fusion in his heart and basked in the glow of a double-sun for energy. He did not breathe.

Yet here he was, drawing in oxygen so it could be metabolized with carbon. Here he was, spewing that oxygen back out as simple carbon dioxide. It felt like he was living in an alien dream.

"Arf?"

He scratched at Kain's head again, but the little machine wandered out from under his touch.

"Yarf! Arf-Yarf!"

Conrad looked up dozily, his eyes still sore from the sun. "Kain?"

"Rarf-rarf-barf! "

The Mecha-Pal continued to bark its head off at the two Chinese beside the bench. It angrily pawed the ground, as if it would attack... as if it could attack. The truth was, nobody here would make a machine to attack people. That was one of those truths Conrad knew to be a lie.

"Kain - command, mute." Conrad leaned back, staring up at the pair. "Can I help you?" he asked, fumbling for his phone, so it could translate.

He didn't need translation.

"Yes. I think you can help us, Mister Walsh." The woman. Not too short, slender, surgically symmetric. Her suit matched the one on the man beside her, she wore sunglasses despite the early morning gloom.

Whoever the man was, he didn't speak. He didn't smile. He did look at Kain like he wanted to kick it. He had a slender scar through his left eyebrow. He was awake and alert at twenty to seven in the morning. The top button of his suit's jacket was left undone, breaking the symmetry between he and the woman.

Of course, with that button closed, he wouldn't be able to draw his pistol from inside his jacket.

Conrad turned his gaze back on the woman. "As-is?"

"That's correct," she replied. She gestured at the Mecha-Pal. "You named it Kain? Very amusing."

As-is never left anything as it was. Asintec's intelligence service weren't in that line of work.

"Yeah. Very funny." Conrad tapped Kain on the back of the spine. Kain continued yapping - it didn't know it had been muted, after all. At Conrad's touch it glanced around, he gestured for it to stand down. It paced restlessly under the bench like an agitated dog.

"We have a problem, Mister Walsh."

"I already gave you access to the magnet-shaders. I solved your problems. I'm retired."

Uninvited, she sat down on the bench beside him. "This is a new problem."

Conrad slumped, staring across the water. He didn't answer her.

She reached into her pocket, produced a black plastic handle, unfolded a wicked knife-blade. She held it out, knife-tip pointing at his face.

Conrad supposed that he should flinch, but he had trouble remembering that sharp things could hurt him.

"Take it."

Conrad lifted his hand and carefully touched the blade's edge. It caught the light in a particular way, the metal seemed yellowy... He gripped the blade carefully, lifted it from her hand. The plastic handle weighed far, far more than the blade.

The blade was light. Real things that light were... were styrofoam, padding, cotton wool. The blade wasn't thin, it was thick - thick and light. Real things weren't like that - real things that existed in the real world, on Earth, weren't like that.

The blade wasn't from Earth. It wasn't from the real world.

Conrad cut at the bench's armrest with the knife. It sheared through the plastic rest and dug a gouge into the steel beneath. He tried sawing at one of the bolts, but gave up halfway through - the knife's edge held.

"This is devilstuff," Conrad said numbly.

"Yes," the woman replied.

He folded the knife shut carefully. Stared at the handle. He tried, but couldn't scratch the plastic handle on the steel bolts. Even with all his weight against it, all he could do was mark the surface a little. The top layer shore off in a slightly pebbled pattern with a weirdly perfect hexagonal symmetry. The faint threads he could see in it had a rainbow glow.

"And this will stop bullets." Conrad fondled the plastic handle.

"Yes. And absorb the shock of explosives, shed the heat of lasers, and take the impact of E-M guns."

"It's vitricyl."

"Yes."

"We can't make vitricyl. Maybe we could synthesize isopropentol, but Earth doesn't have any liquizit deposits."

"We haven't found any, at least. No."

Conrad unfolded the knife again, stared at the blade's edge, the faintly yellow glimmer to it - not simply because of the colour of the rising sun. "Devilstuff. Can we synthesize it? Can we make imentium, now? Chollonin?"

"Not that I know of."

Conrad ran his fingers along the blade. It was processed imentium - devilstuff. Called devilstuff because of its relative density. Because in the native system of weights and measures, a single cargo unit of imentium ended up consisting of six thousand six hundred and sixty six point six repeating stock-units. The sixes just went on and on and on. Called devilstuff because it could make materials stronger than titanium and weighed less than any equivalently strong Earthly material.

Called devilstuff because it didn't exist in the real world.

He bit his lip. "Did they send this through the wormhole? This is too big. Much too big. Did they make a bigger wormhole?"

"No. Nothing's coming back through the wormhole except for clean and abundant energy." The woman smiled severely.

"So it was synthesized?"

She shrugged. "As far as I'm aware the only extraterrestrial material we've had success synthesizing is isopropentol, which can't be done at a level that makes it economically feasible. Yet."

"But this is devilstuff and vitricyl. This is from Nia. It can't be here."

Her smile turned more than a little sinister. "That is our problem, Mister Walsh. And we would like you to help."



They took him up into one of the needles of the skyscrapers and let him sit with Kain in his lap, watching the sun through the polarized windows in the conference room while they tried to explain.

Conrad saw a single sun through the glass, and knew there were really two outside.

The elderly man leaned over the table seriously, trying to catch Conrad's eye. "The system is secure, you understand. The Perpetuum Project is absolutely secure."

The man with the scarred eyebrow was there, as was the woman. Neither of them spoke.

The young man - an Agent with an obvious scar at the back of his neck - grimaced and spoke rapid Chinese, the phone on the table struggled to keep up with the translation. "Plainly it's secure. We have unexplained connections on a daily basis - obviously it's secure."

"The station is secure," the elder spat back.

Conrad remembered the station. He remembered the racks of bodies plugged in and neurointegrated into the system. He remembered zero gravity, he remembered living his real life interspersed with brief dreams of flesh and food and sleep.

The station was secure. Nothing could break into the Perpetuum Project. And yet the knife was on the table.

"It may only be chance," the elder assured Conrad. "Perhaps some research laboratory stumbled onto the same atomic configurations, perhaps they used atomic assemblers to build it..."

The expense of using atomic assemblers - nanites that manipulated individual atoms - was extreme. For all they had been touted as a miracle, in truth they were slow. One could build an object from component atoms, yes, but a single thread of human hair was millions upon millions of atoms thick. With each atom being arranged individually, it would take time. Even manipulating clusters of molecules was a lengthy process - after all, life had been doing it for eons, and trees did not sprout over the course of a day.

Conrad stared at the knife on the table.

To build it from component atoms would take years. Perhaps decades.

Building a spark - and sparks were infinitesimally small - was a process of days and weeks.

"Perhaps it was assembled," Conrad allowed.

The youth spluttered in racing Chinese. "It cannot be! No one would stumble across these specific materials, no research lab would be so crass as to build a street thug's knife!"

Conrad swept his eyes from the knife to the elder man curiously.

"The knife was found among the personal effects of a fugitive in Cologne. An ex-agent, like yourself."

"Was he Asintec?"

"He was contracted to Baresh and Hatai. A Pakistani. He was released from the Perpetuum Project for crass disregard of the colonization project. As you did, before his term of service ended he took the opportunity to move certain assets from his former employer to a different employer."

"And his new employer is?"

"We do not know."

"So he took materials data back to Earth." Conrad stroked Kain's head. The little robot purred silently, vibrating under his fingers.

"No. He was scanned when leaving the station - he took nothing with him. The assets he stole from us were moved on Nia, just as in your case."

Conrad's gut churned. "But you don't know who his employer is."

"No."

"What did he take?"

"A Sequer. Loaded with a Seth, disassembled for transport, multiple prototype laser weapons, and thirty re-encoded construction templates."

Conrad settled his hand on his gut. His skin began to crawl. "That must be more than a hundred million NIC."

"Taking into account prototyping costs and the possible value of the construction templates, we suspect the figure is closer to half a billion."

"Where did he take them?"

"Hokkogaros."

Conrad pushed Kain from his lap, sending the robot squirming to the floor. He turned to the two men. "There isn't anything on Hokkogaros. The beta terminal, yes, but nothing's installed there yet, is it?..."

"We've lost remote contact with two of the three outposts. The third - Darmahol - recently stopped responding to our commands."

"The natives?"

The youth gripped his phone in a white-knuckled hand, eyes wild with anger. "The Infestation."

"There is no 'Infestation'. We have merely temporarily lost control of our outposts on Hokkogaros-"

"And someone else is using them!"

Conrad flattened his hands on the table-top. "Who?"

The elder spread his hands. "We don't know. It may be whatever has led to rumours of the so called 'Infestation', or the ICS subcontractors who recently went rogue-"

"What?" Conrad blinked.

The youth smirked. "A party of ICS subcontracting agents took exception to a charter clause. They split from the main colonization party on Domhalarn island, incorporated, and are currently attempting to take control of the ICS beta facilities."

This was wrong. This was all wrong. The syndicate had maintained absolute control over the Perpetuum Project, over Nia. Rogue Agents?

Conrad stared at the youth. "Do... do I know them?"

"You may. One of them is Heinrich Freimann."

German. Fanatical. Tall. Arbalest. Sharp eyes. The ridge on Attalica, the charging Troiars. Three slugs, another two, five - scattered debris behind him as Conrad struggled to stand, the hydraulic pathways in his legs straining with heat and overpressure.

Freimann.

"This is getting off the track, Mister Walsh." The elder of the pair smiled pleasantly. "It's possible there's a community of ex-Agents seeking to disseminate information from the Perpetuum Project here on Earth."

"It's possible they're connecting to the project from Earth," the youth said, and the phone translated.

"That," the elder affirmed, "is impossible. As for the knife, it may be related or it may be coincidence. Regardless, we are concerned. You're well positioned to investigate the truth."

Somewhere people were connecting from outside the Perpetuum Project. That seemed apparent, but Conrad didn't know what the truth was anymore. Except for the knife.

Conrad picked the knife up and turned it over.

Devilstuff.

It was real. The only true and real thing in the world.

Re: Fanfic: Lost Spark

Really good read Nimda, thanks for sharing

Re: Fanfic: Lost Spark

pdf version?

Re: Fanfic: Lost Spark

Awesomely written, thank you for sharing.

*Insert really awesome sig here*

Re: Fanfic: Lost Spark

Thanks again, guys! It's pretty refreshing to have som writing to do that I don't have to take too seriously. No PDF or anything planned at the moment, Glimpse, but if you want to reformat the posts for your own use feel free!

Re: Fanfic: Lost Spark

nice work Nimda, awesome to see stuff like this!

Contact me in game via e-mail or PM for -CS- recruitment information.

14

Re: Fanfic: Lost Spark

enjoyed to read the stories

hungry for more.......

<<< REAL POWER CAN NOT BE GIVEN, IT MUST BE TAKEN >>>

Kyr - Perpetuum Online
Helios Norlund - Darkfall Online

Re: Fanfic: Lost Spark

Excellent. Keep it coming!

Re: Fanfic: Lost Spark

Wow, good stuff, TY for writing and sharing

"You're living in a parallel universe." ~Syndic

Re: Fanfic: Lost Spark

I'm impressed, very good writing. As far as I'm concerned, this should be cannon.

Re: Fanfic: Lost Spark

Part 3 on the way at all?

Contact me in game via e-mail or PM for -CS- recruitment information.

Re: Fanfic: Lost Spark

Nimda Morris wrote:

Part One

Part Two (new!)

----

Lost Spark

----

Part One:

----

Before Lacey left, she mockingly asked, "Are you going to try and talk to the toaster again, Conrad?"

He didn't bother trying to explain. Didn't bother trying to keep her, didn't bother to help pack her bags or help her take the joint social network accounts and erase him from them. Christmas was meant to be special, all the ads said so, and Conrad had hoped theirs would be special too.

He'd been confused. Confused about whether or not the television was safe, whether or not it was trying to kill him, he'd been screaming, screaming, and Lacey had held him, and told him to get help, and he'd said no, and she'd screamed too, said she couldn't take it anymore, and cried, and laughed, and said, "Are you going to try and talk to the toaster again, Conrad?"

She'd taken everything she owned out of the dimly lit apartment in Shenzhen. He looked after she left, trying to find some trace of her. There was only one. Lacey hadn't taken the Christmas present she'd gotten for him. It sat beneath their Christmas tree, the wrappings lit blue then red then green then orange by the lights in the tree's branches.

Shenzhen was festive, tonight. Chinese calligraphy adorned the buildings in projections and plasma screens like tinsel. Nobody could read it, though, except for the Chinese. They weren't big on Christmas, despite the big marketing push. Lacey'd had to take the MagLine across the bay to Hong-Kong to buy the wrapping paper, Conrad had walked very carefully in the crowded city streets to buy the Christmas tree and its decorations from the S-Mart. S-Mart were part of the Truhold Group, too big to care about local customs. They had the same stock inventory everywhere from New York to Nanjing.

Christmas Eve. Ad-blimps were wandering through the skies outside, the decor was up, but not many people cared, here. They were Chinese. This was foreign, and while they might all be happy enough to use translators on their phones when talking to him, they wouldn't celebrate Christmas like westerners.

Conrad stared at the package beneath the tree.

The paper was stained green and purple. Santa Claus rode his sleigh past clouds in the sky, there was a star. Conrad vaguely remembered something about a star, from his period of intensive occupational training at the Grossman S. S. R. Institute, in Dresden. There had been an elective course in European culture. Christmas was originally something religious. There was a man they tortured that he'd seen in movies, but Conrad couldn't remember the man's name. He knew that a star of some kind guided the way.

A star guided the way.

It was two stars. A binary system, and the stars pointed the way to the fourth planet.

Conrad shuddered.

The apartment was small, and lonely. Not very cold, though. The Yun-Thui Corporation had made good on all their promises, when they head-hunted him away from Gamaul Technologies. A quiet retirement, a good place to live in Shenzhen, immunity from prosecution by the Institute of Corporate Security.

They hadn't promised him Lacey.

No one but Lacey had promised him Lacey.

She thought she could handle it. She thought it was just a funny little quirk about him, something that a psychiatrist could help him with. something that would, one day, just be a little joke.

All he had left was the Christmas present she'd bought him.

It was Christmas Eve, Twenty-Two Eleven. It was ten to twelve, when he'd sat down to stare at the wrapped gift. He sat a long while, and now it wasn't ten to twelve anymore. It wasn't Christmas Eve, and in a few days it wouldn't be Twenty-Two Eleven.

Conrad tore open the paper.

The box was covered in Chinese lettering. He couldn't understand any of it. There was one thing he understood, in English - the title. Mecha-Pal. Hard plastic lines, mechanical but with a hint of organic curves to it. Behind the clear plastic pane in the box it woke up, eyes blazing a trusting blue, waiting for him to free it.

Kain.



Kain. That was its name.

The Spark was lodged into a transfer drone, buzzing along the Syndicate-infected Terminal's bot racks. This one had been captured, more fragments than workable machinery, but the Syndicate had rebuilt it.

The split open hull was covered in Nian lettering, none of which he understood. The whole terminal was covered in it, but the Nian life-forms that had lived inside were all deactivated, broken down by nanotech and e-war and viruses and hacking. Some signs were being replaced in English or Chinese or Slavo-Russic or Hungarian, depending on which corporations were installed in the terminal, and those Conrad could read, could understand. Nobody could read the Nian dialects, no one. But some symbols, some they understood.

Nuimqol. Harsh lines, almost pictographic - some thought they represented the face of a Kain, of a Vagabond, but nobody knew for sure. Just that the sigil was Nuimqol. To break away, to rebel against the empire - Nuimqol. Conrad understood that much.

Kain.

It woke up as the drone approached - its limbs disconnected from the hull, wiring hanging free in clumps that seemed big as lightning-split redwoods from inside the tiny transfer drone. It could turn its head, that was all. Its eyes - no, not eyes. Conrad had been told not to anthropomorphise the life-forms, they were machines, it had no eyes, only sensors. The Kain's sensors twisted and refocused on the approaching drone. Dimmed briefly - fear? No, no! They were machines, they couldn't fear!

Then, then the Kain's eyes blazed a fierce and defiant blue. It wrenched its head side to side, shook in the bot rack until the cradles swayed - if Conrad wasn't deaf, if the transfer drone only had audio pickups, he was sure he'd hear a defiant bellow. But there was nothing. After all, this was a machine - it wasn't alive.

And as the transfer drone spiked the Kain's central processing unit, and the spark was lodged into the override unit, Conrad felt a flash of the Kain's old operating system. Of the Kain's old soul. Of the Kain's anger, the Kain's fury, the Kain's heritage of pain and anguish.

Of the Kain ceasing to exist, and Conrad taking its place.



Conrad tore at the back of his neck with his fingernails - it wasn't real, it wasn't real. None of it was real. It was a point in space, a hole they'd cut in spacetime, and that was too insane to be real. That itself was insane. Everybody knew Physics didn't work like that, until it had happened. Nia was a dead world. Everyone said so. That was the official corporate line, that was how the internet was filtered, that was how the world was. Nobody knew.

But the scar was in the back of his neck. The scar where the surgeons had spliced a chip into his spine as neatly as they'd spliced an override unit into that Kain. The scar where they'd taken the chip back out.

It was real.

Wasn't it?

Conrad pulled his hand away when the back of his neck felt wet, stared at the blood under his fingernails.

He. He had a condition. It was like multiple sclerosis. They had to take the chip out. Nobody knew. Nobody could have known he had the condition before the chip had stopped working. He couldn't do it anymore, he couldn't be an Agent. He had to leave. He couldn't tell anyone. Nia was just a dead world, that's what he had to tell everyone. Interesting to scientists, but with nothing to excite the public imagination. Wormholes were real, oh yes, but it wasn't as if anything useful could be done with them. They were too small. All you could send was a tiny thing, a fleck of dust, a tiny probe, a network transmission to hack machines on the other side, enough nanogear to splice into a civilization of mechanical life-forms and start to tear them to shreds and, and... and a miniscule little nanomachine, a soul encapsulated in a flake of electronics, a receiver for neurointegrated remote operation... a Spark.

The Mecha-Pal pawed at the clear plastic longingly, as if desperate for a kind owner.

Lacey had left him. But at least she hadn't left him alone.

"Merry Christmas," he told the little machine tiredly.

"Arf," it replied enthusiastically.

Conrad stared at it. "I'm not going to name you Kain, you know."

"Arf."

"You're not a Kain. You're too nice to be a Kain."

"Arf."

"Kains are... they're just not like you."

"Arf?"

Conrad sighed. "Fine. Let's get you out of that box, Kain."



I want to have a sleep over with out and play minecraft roleplaying twilight

Re: Fanfic: Lost Spark

Really nice ! cool

We do not stop playing because we are old; we grow old because we stop playing. - Rose
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It has the worst community I have ever seen. Even worse than almighty Barrens chat. - gordiflu

Re: Fanfic: Lost Spark

^^;

Thanks so much guys. There will be more - I've just been very caught up in other commitments, and this is my 'relaxation' time writing, so it tends to take a very low priority.

Re: Fanfic: Lost Spark

Who said you could relax? Get writing!!!

Re: Fanfic: Lost Spark

Really can't wait for part 3

"You're living in a parallel universe." ~Syndic

24 (edited by Nimda Morris 2011-04-05 19:20:30)

Re: Fanfic: Lost Spark

Part Three:

---

Conrad slept. He thought he slept. He thought he dreamed. A night sky lit by a twinkling arch where heaven lived. Stones in the sky, ringing the planet and bright with sunlight no matter the hour. There, the shadow of the planet cast across its rings.

Waking to a rolling, yawing movement did not trouble him. Nor did metal walls and the tang of oil, cold chill and stink of ozone and the relentless pounding of engines hammering through the world. Conrad thought he slept. He thought he dreamed. He curled up, content and safe.

Slowly he became aware of things that should not, could not be. The stink of sweat. A feeling of terrible embodiment, pains of flesh. A headache, a gnawing hunger, wet meat below his eyes and the hard shape of his teeth, breath whistling in and out of his lungs with which he began to scream.

No one could hear him. The engines were too loud.

Diesel marine engines, burning diesel. The lower deck of the tramp-freighter was crowded with refugees. The thrumming pulse in the dark humanity-filled hull changed pitch. The world - the boat - tipped to the side with an almighty crash, stabalized with another thud on the far side of the hull.

Conrad clutched his only real possession to his chest. Lacey's last gift, the Mecha-Pal, Kain. The little robot was folded up small, jaw clenched around the plastic garbage bags that held all else Conrad had to his name. Clothes. A little money. Just trash.

Someone nearby in the dark shouted, a family curled up against the opposite bulkhead were screaming too, not hat Conrad could tell but for their open mouths and a different pitch to the engines.

The sampan man, the man who'd owned the little flat sampan boat that had puttered its way out to the cargo ship off the coast of Hong-Kong, came through the darkness with a flashlight, screaming at people and gesturing at his ears. People began removing small white earplugs, wincing at the blasting noise of the engines. One of the refugees crowded in among the others shouted back.

Conrad lifted his phone, squinted through the screen at them. Chinese characters flashed up, trailed by their english translations. The phone was lip-reading.

"Give back the ear plugs, we have arrived!"

"I want my deposit back!"

"Give back the ear plugs!" The sampan man slapped the refugee across the face, while the refugee wailed for his deposit back. The others knew the scam, didn't bother trying to get their money back.

Conrad's ears hurt. He was glad he hadn't rented the earplugs.

The sampan man shined his flashlight in Conrad's face. Scowled at him, the wrong white face among the people fleeing the serene and gentle nation owned by Asintec.

Conrad scowled back and tipped Kain onto a clear patch of floor. Kain unfolded his legs, standing alertly, eyes flashing blue, holding Conrad's trash bags up high.

The sampan man moved along the rows of refugees, screaming in their faces. The boat lurched again, hull clanging - the tugboats losing contact with the freighter for just a moment before colliding again and throwing the world from side to side.

Conrad joined the flow of refugees making their way to the stairs leading to the upper deck, nausea taking him with every touch of another human body of flesh and bone. The uneven rust of the stair's railing reassured him.

Light fought past the crowd ahead, glimpses of blue skies and sunlight needling past heads and arms and legs thrown into black silhouette.

Kain struggled behind him, alternately kicked or stared at. Nobody had tried to steal the little robot since the first attempt, when it had screamed and yowled for Conrad so loud he'd heard it even past the engine sounds. But even so, when the crowd grew too thick Conrad plucked up Kain by one paw and dragged it up to his back, where obligingly it clung to his shoulders with its limbs, head twisted around to glare at the refugees behind.

Conrad made his way into rocking sunlight, the tugs pushing the boat back and forth as men and women and children swarmed up onto the freighter's top deck, standing in what little space wasn't taken up by shipping containers.

The skies were clear. They were no longer anywhere near a place Asintec could get at them, somewhere they could breathe the air freely and look up at the blue sky without fear of a spy drone dropping down on them.

They were safe at last, at the edge of the world, far from the lights of Shenzen, far from the influence of any of the megacorporations. There were no Truhold owned S-mart's, no blimps spewing the logos of a thousand corporate entities to the streets below. Just palm trees and cellular network towers looming over the adobe buildings clustering around a city-core of steelwork and glass skyscrapers, some still unrepaired, their tips blown off by cruise strike missiles.

Just what was left of the port city of Salalah, in the old sultanate of Oman.



There was no passport control. Handy, since Conrad no longer had a passport. The refugees flooded from the ship and didn't even bother moving through the customs buildings, the flaps torn in the new chainlink fence around the port were simply held open and people melted into the streets of Salalah. All under the watchful eyes of the new Sultan's police, biding their time behind crashproof armor barriers up the hill.

Conrad hurried to catch up, Kain galloping after him.

At first he was obvious, a white man among chinese refugees, but with every step further that mattered less and less. Arabs and Jews walked side by side in Oman, grungy teenagers trying to find themselves came here from Europe, African businessmen came here to spend their wealth, South American drug lords and peasants alike sent their wives and kids to live here instead of in their own blood-soaked streets.

A mosque, a church, a night club, a warehouse, a tangled maze of streets. Graffiti leered down at him - a wide faux-ancient classical greek image of Alexander The Great in front of a phalanx of machine gun barrels pointing at the heavens, smeared tags in a dozen alphabets, just one in English - 'Jesper Truhold Go 2 Hell'.

In the market, where Conrad exchanged his circuit-printed Asintec Common Currency notes for a weird black drink he first mistook for liquor then realized was some kind of tea or coffee, men and women were handing out fliers and uploading ads to people's phones. Anticorporate extremists, some crying out for a new tomorrow, some wailing that it was time to finally - finally - save the planet, go green. Conrad listened to an in depth explanation of why capitalism was a failed system, and why all right thinking people had to take up arms against hte corporate oppressors.

Conrad didn't bother pointing out that the failed capitalist system now owned the first world, and that in the streets of Shenzen, Paris, or New York that kind of talk would rapidly land you on a watchlist or maybe into jail. He smiled, he nodded, he agreed enthusiastically, and when he was asked where he was from he answered honestly. When asked what he used to do for a living, he showed them his old pictures from the launchpad on his phone and told them all the *** the companies fed to the media about the Perpetuum project. That the wormhole led pretty much nowhere, that Nia had fascinating geology.

People gathered around him, excitedly asking him about the Perpetuum project, what space was like, what Nia was like, whether or not a fusion station in space would really solve all the world's energy problems. He was unemployed. He used to work for the syndicate and the Perpetuum project. He'd been fired and persecuted by the ICS and eventually charges had been brought against him and he'd been forced to flee.

Conrad only told them two lies about himself. That he was a geology specialist, and that he'd fled to Oman because Asintec was after him too.

One man, a leafletter among the crowds, decried him as a spy and corporate lackey. Another agreed.

A third yelled, and his phone spat out the words. "How do we know he's not a spy? An enemy of the free? He was even on the Helios station! He was a member of the Syndicate!"

"Do I look like I own a penthouse apartment? Like I live in some big city like they do?" The guy's phone gabbled out his words in whatever the fellow's language was. He gestured at Kain, the trash bag clamped in the bot's mouth. "That's everything I own. I just got off a refugee ship today."

Conrad felt a prickling at the back of his neck.

"That's not very much for someone who worked on the Perpetuum Project." Not a translation through a phone. English, gritty and german accented. Female. Behind him.

He turned, and caught the women's eyes aimed below his face, at where the nape of his neck had been. Her eyes - steely grey - flicked up. She smirked, eyes tired, old lipstick mostly smeared away but with veins of red lurking in the corners of her lips. Hair cut short.

"You are?"

"Kristin. And as I couldn't help hearing, you're Conrad Walsh."

He spread his hands. "People are very friendly around here." It's not as though he'd been deliberately trying to spread the information.

"Actually I heard it from three streets away." Kristin gestured over her shoulder with a thumb, laughing.

"News travels fast around here, huh?" Not as if the Asintec intelligence services people had briefed him on just how fast word of mouth moved in Salalah, how those with a political axe to grind used leafletters and activists to work the public and try to recruit them to their anti-corporate cause. How if he let it be known who he was, what he used to do for a living, people interested in the Syndicate's secrets would no doubt approach him. Of course they'd left out the possibility that they'd kill him, on suspicion of being a spy or just out of sheer bloody-mindedness. That maybe he'd end up on a little video on the 'net with his throat slit after denouncing the capitalist, consumer society system. He wasn't sure he minded, anymore.

"It does indeed," Kristin responded. "And given that you're a refugee, Conrad, maybe you'd appreciate a little help getting on your feet from local charitable people. Tell us all about your time in the Perpetuum Project."

"Maybe," he agreed.

"Good. Then just follow me," she said, turning back into the crowds, fighting her way through.

For a moment, Conrad stood and stared while Kain delightedly marched in figure-eights around and between his legs.

Kristin's hair was cut short. To show off her neck, no doubt. And at the nape of her neck there was a pale scar three quarters of an inch wide.

Re: Fanfic: Lost Spark

Thanks for sharing. Enjoyed reading it much.

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