STORYLINE

Hugh The Hunter Part II

jungle2.jpg

She says the world ended, that the veils fractured and almost everything is gone. She’s in my head. She tells me her name is Saraphim but I can’t remember mine. I can only remember bits. I ask her who, and where I am. She explains that I was backed up, and she is restoring me, like I’m supposed to know what that means. My restorer says she doesn’t know my name either, I’m HU-3501 in the system, and there was some degradation. She wants me to report any problems I have once I’m out of the chair.

I can finally see. I’m in the Wellness Center. I remember my boss giving us certificates for Christmas but can’t recall her name or where I worked. I step out of the machine but there’s no clothes. Saraphim directs me to a locker that is supposed to be filled with complimentary clothing. I see a problem immediately. There’s nothing in here but flowered shirts, those weird looking fishing hats, and cargo pants. I tell her I find it hard to believe that she has the technology to rebuild someone from scratch, but can’t come up with clothing that doesn’t make me look like a 1980’s tourist. She says that there aren’t many survivors, but they all wear stuff like this now. I get dressed and go outside. I don’t believe what I see.

It’s all gone. Everything is in ruin. Saraphim tries to keep me calm, and tells me I need to go out and tell her what I see. I try to remember where home is. I feel like it’s close, but everything is like snapshots of a movie. She starts talking again about degradation, and something about my parietal lobe. I stop listening because coming up the street is a group of about a dozen people. The first thing I notice is that none of them are wearing flowered shirts or floppy hats, contrary to what I was told. Next, I notice how big they are, and that none of them are smiling. They’re all carrying weapons and the biggest one looks at me, yells something, and raises a huge shark-toothed club above his head. I assume I won’t want to hear whatever it is they are going to tell me, and I sprint towards the ruins in front of me. Then, things get crazy.

I hit something with my shin as I start to jump onto a piece of concrete, and there is an explosion behind me. I feel the hot air lift me up, and I land on a piece of flooring jutting out between the second and third floor. I turn around and see another group of people, also not wearing flowered shirts, scrambling out of the rubble around me. My head is ringing. They start climbing. One has an old rusted pistol and takes a shot at me. I see an opening in the adjoining building, and try to make the leap to get away. As I start to push off the ledge, the whole thing comes crashing down. Somehow, I stay upright, and the debris covers up the people who were hiding in the rubble. I’m in shock about what just happened, and that I’m still standing. Their cheers bring me to my senses. Before I know it, I’m surrounded, getting slaps on my back, and big hugs. It’s like I had just won the lava sledding championships for the Blue Wolves. I try to ask who they are, but nothing comes out. I don’t understand everything they’re saying either, but they’re all smiling now. Saraphim says she’ll keep working on it, but my condition might be permanent. They motion for me to follow, and since they are the first people I’ve met who haven’t tried to kill me, I go with them. The big one with the club says his name is Kanaka.

It turns out that the whole group is called the Kanaka, not just the big guy. Their village is amazing. It’s set along the ocean and has everything you need. The one thing that I can’t find no matter how hard I look, is anyone wearing one of these stupid hats. I soon realize that we won’t be able to communicate with words. With Saraphim’s help I manage to scribble my number, HU-3501, in the sand to see if anyone knows what it is. Nobody does, but they all start calling me Hugh.

They seem to think that I’m some sort of avenging spirit, and I do absolutely nothing to convince them otherwise. We spend days practicing with spears, machetes, and clubs. They have a couple shotguns too, but we don’t use them. I assume ammo is hard to come by. Maybe it’s something about my new implant, but I feel like I’m getting pretty good with a machete after only a few days. Everyone treats me with reverence and respect. I have all the poke and pineapple I can eat, and I get to play with weapons in the surf whenever I want. I can’t fully remember what I used to do, but I’m sure it was nowhere near as cool as this. However, nothing lasts forever and about a week into my new awesome life, a group of well armed people arrive.

Things are tense between the Kanaka and these new people for a few minutes. I think they might be what’s left of the military but they’re not wearing uniforms, or anything that remotely resemble my tourist clothing. They’re all very well armed. Maybe they’re a bunch of preppers. I guess my crazy cousin Ted was right after all. I wonder how many years of liquor he had stored up in his Duracave bunker when civilization collapsed, just like he always knew it would. They want help with something, and my friends agree. Everyone grabs some gear, and they hand me a machete before we head out into the forest.

We end up at a big building that looks like a Halloween nightmare. There’s skulls everywhere outside. Some whispering and pointing begins. I’m not sure what there is to talk about. We better not be….of course we’re going inside. Why wouldn’t we? I feel like we’re the group in the horror movie who decides to go investigate the basement when we should clearly just go home. The inside is worse. There’s heads mounted on the walls, it’s dark, and I can’t think of one good reason why we should be in here. Then monsters come running towards us, honest to god, real monsters. Gunfire starts and the Kanaka start hacking away. I look at the stairs to the left, and run up. I’ve only been back a little over a week, and there is no way that I’m going to get killed fighting monsters this soon.

I find a nice desk to hide under with a view below. My buddies are really slicing through them, and the people with guns are mowing them down almost as fast as the monsters are springing up, almost. Pretty soon they are surrounded, and start pulling back. I stand up to meet the team at the bottom of the stairs, when I see a really big creature knock a desk in front of the door, and block the Kanaka’s exit. I can see they’re scared. That makes me scared. If this thing kills them, I’ll be trapped in here. I think about how good I’ve gotten with my machete, and ask Saraphim if she could bring me back again if something were to happen to me.

She says she probably could, but advises against doing anything stupid. I tell her stupid choices are the only ones I have right now. I jump from my hiding spot with the machete above my head. I swing down as hard as I can when I land, and it almost takes the things leg off. I tumble in front of it, and scramble to my feet facing my friends. The look of amazement on their faces is priceless. I give them a thumbs up, and turn around to look at my handiwork. The last thing I remember is seeing the thing lurch up on its ruined leg, grab my head and twist.

It was not a painless death. Saraphim is not happy with my decision. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to get the materials to bring you back? These bodies aren’t exactly easy to make.” I get out of the machine and start getting dressed. I guess the flowered shirts aren’t that bad. Besides, it’s like my costume now. I can’t wait to see what they’re going to do when Hugh The Hunter returns from the dead. I start walking back to the village, and Saraphim says, “Please, try a little harder to not lose your head this time.”

STORYLINE

John Driscol: Restored from Backup

Saraphim? No, I don’t want you to burn anything in the room, or rub anything on me. I just want the usual treatment. Saraphim….restoration? No! I come here to catch up on sleep. I don’t want anything extra. I’m an Ambassador class account holder and I don’t come to the spa to be harassed! I don’t want any Saraphim or any extra restoration why do you keep asking me if I want……. Her name is Saraphim. There was an accident. Everything is gone. This is not relaxing.

I’m still a little confused and groggy. She asks me about the last thing I remember. I tell her how I’d been using the treatments to help me fill my sleep bank. I’ve found that getting a 10-minute treatment in one of the new machines was just like getting a full night’s sleep, and I like overfilling my sleep bank whenever I have the chance. I remember the machine shaking. That was it. That was when it all ended.

She says she’s a Newuskin account specialist and she was able to save a “select group of clients who were being held in the back-up system”. She recently got this restoration point working. It’s just off Front Street and she wants me to explore downtown. She says that I’m not the first person she’s restored. That’s all I need to hear.

I died the perfect death, and this overachieving customer rep decided to ruin it. It takes me a minute to figure out where I am. So much is ruined and overgrown. She says it’s been over 60 years since the fracture, and some other stuff that I don’t pay attention to. I don’t know about the other people she brought back, but I’m not going to go poking around for her. I went my entire life never working a full-time job, and I’m not about to start after the apocalypse. I tell her I’m going to see if the Laki Beach Lodge is still standing. I need to lay down and figure out what to do.

It’s still standing alright, but like this day, it looks like a nightmare. It’s out on an island now. I can see things moving in the dark channel that surrounds it. I can hear music coming from the building, but something about it doesn’t feel right. The closer to the water I get, the worse I feel. I see an old valet stand and a call button. Saraphim says I should push it. My gut is screaming for me not to. The fact that this lady thinks it’s a good idea to push the button, lets me know that I shouldn’t. I just need someplace to sit and regroup. She says it might be dangerous for me to sit in the open. I can’t understand why she’s doing this to me. I’m going to give her managers an earful if they’re still alive.

I can’t believe what I’m seeing at first. It’s one of the public Manimal ATVs and it’s running. That alone is shocking. With all the problems they had through the years, I never would have imagined they would have survived the destruction of the world. It isn’t the ATV that stunned me, however. It’s what is around it. A group of little….things are taking it apart. I suddenly realize what must have happened. Finally, my luck may be changing. The day isn’t a total loss after all. They’re aliens! I have a plan. I run towards the little hairy things.

Since I was a kid, I always loved stories about people being put into alien zoos. There are plenty of sc-ifi stories and comic books about hapless humans being forced to live on display for the amusement of an advanced species. While they are supposed to be scary, I’ve always thought it was a dream come true. All your meals are provided, top-of-the-line health care, nobody telling you what to do, not to mention the breeding programs, it just doesn’t get any better than being put into an alien zoo. I haven’t seen anyone yet so maybe humans are rare. I think I might have a shot, so I start yelling when I get close. Things do not go as well as I would have liked.

It turns out that I know the old man. His name is Pa’ani Mahelona, he was a few grades ahead of my daughter Rachel. He explains that what I thought were aliens are something called Menehune. They take things apart and sometimes eat people. Unsurprisingly, Saraphim seems completely unconcerned that a group of armed people had to save me from being eaten alive by a group of tiny cannibal-car-strippers. She won’t stop asking questions and telling me what to do. I wish I could shut her off. All I want is a nice place to lay down for a while. I’m hopeful that is finally going to happen until he recognizes me from the Veil Sale show.

He asks if I’m John Driscol, and I say that I am. He seems really excited. He hits me with a barrage of questions: Where have you been? How did you get here? Are you injured? Are you affiliated with anyone? On and on. It’s giving me a headache. I think for a moment about jumping off and trying to find more of these Menehune. At least they’d eat me in peace, without wanting to hear my life story, or ordering me around. When he asks me about Rachel however, things change. I ask if Rachel is alive and if he knows her. Immediately the mood changes. He says that he thinks she’s still around but isn’t sure. He says she and that dancing kid Kaholo started something called the Tappers, and asks if I’d be willing to try and talk to them. I can’t understand why everyone is so quiet and why he’d ask me something like that. I tell him, “Of course I will. Why wouldn’t I want to talk to them, especially if it turns out that she’s still alive.”

A few of them start to whisper, and Pa’ani says we’ll talk about it when we get to Pu’u.
It’s hard to filter Saraphim’s constant talking out, but I manage. Today might be salvageable after all. With any luck, there is a comfortable chair waiting for me in Pu’u, and by the end of the night I’ll be living it up as Grandpa Tapper. Hopefully, Rachel has a nice cozy place and a soft bed for her long-lost father. I just hope she’ll hold off with the questions until morning when I fully relaxed. It’s been a rough first day back, and I’m not sure I can handle much more.

STORYLINE

Greg Iona: Restored From Backup

This was not how I imagined my day would start. She says her name is Saraphim, and that the world as we know it is gone. She says something about backups, and Ambassador class accounts and some other stuff, but my head is spinning. My body feels strange. I turn around and recognize where I am for the first time and can’t quite believe it. She’s telling the truth. I’m about half a mile away from the veil station. Everything is ruined.

I realize I’m saying “What happened,” over and over again. She keeps telling me, but I can’t process it yet. It’s over 60 years later, but I don’t remember anything about…the veils fractured!?. She says she restored me from backup. I must have died. I don’t remember dying. I’m not even sure that I’m really me. I don’t know what I’d think if I was a religious man. She says there’s lots more people waiting and needs me to walk around, make sure my body is working correctly. She wants me to see what I can find and if there’s any survivors. I look around. My eyes hurt, but I see something in the distance. It’s a beached whale and there’s someone near it. I start walking.

The smell is almost over powering. I get close and see that there’s actually someone inside the body cavity and more people around. It’s some kind of bar. There’s a sign that says “Rita’s Refreshments”. They stare at me as I walk up. I take a seat on a stool. “We’re all out of Scrimshawberry,” the woman says before pushing a glass of something greenish blue at me. She says it’s 10 rai, but I don’t have whatever that is, and I give her my hat instead. They call the drink Whalmanimal. My mouth rejects the liquid as soon as it touches my tongue; it’s awful but my fellow patrons seem to like it. They compliment my clothes and ask if I want to sell or trade them and if I’m from Pu’u. I tell them no to both.

I ask if the DLNR came out to talk to her about the whale. She gives me a strange look and says she’s not interested in selling. I realize I haven’t heard an engine yet, seen a boat, or watched a drone fly by. I’m not sure what I can do here. I was once appointed to study the effects of 127 on the native flora and fauna. I think I can do the most good by looking around the beach and forest to assess the fracture’s impact the environment. My body is feeling better despite the fact that the first thing I had to drink in close to a century was this murky swill.

After a few miles of walking, I find a gigantic banyan tree, at least twice the size it should be. Everything else seems normal at first. I find ohi’a and rattlesnake plants and watch a red-crested cardinal for a few minutes. I close my eyes and listen to the song of a saffron finch. Maybe nature withstood the fracture better than people did. I walk a few more hours in the forest when I see them, and I stop dead in my tracks .

There’s three of them, whatever they are. I assume the two facing off and circling are males fighting for the attention of the less colorful female. They look like wild pigs but are covered in some kind of carapace. Their eyes are on stalks like a crab or prawn. I can’t get over how shiny and colorful their shells are, they sparkle when the sun catches them just right. They just keep circling and occasionally butting heads. I don’t move because I don’t know if they’re dangerous. If this is what happened to the pigs, I don’t want to see what happened to the geese. There were many reports of them getting more aggressive back in my time. Who knows what they might be capable of now.

The sun will be down in a few hours. I decide to walk back to the whale and figure out where I’m going to sleep for the night when I hear a cry. I recognize it. It’s an axis deer alarm call, but it keeps going. Something has the deer scared. Despite my better judgement I walk towards the sound. The forest is very thick here, and fog is coming in, making it hard to see. The deer keeps calling and it sounds like I’m getting close. I stop to untangle some vines from around my boot when I feel him grab me. He puts his hand over my mouth and pulls me down. I start to fight back but he’s stronger. I turn my head and see that he has a finger up to his mouth, urging me to be quiet. I calm down and he points ahead.

I might have missed them if I was still walking. A pack of wolves is working their way across the ridge ahead. It’s hard to tell how many in the fog but it’s at least 6. The deer keeps calling and it sounds close now. The wolves look hungry and I turn to thank whoever this is. There isn’t much I could tell Saraphim from inside a wolf’s belly. That’s when I notice he’s still pointing at something else in the forest, just beyond the wolves.

I still don’t see anything, but the fog is really thick now and it sounds like the deer is only yards away. I notice the fog swirl a bit before I see it. It’s like the forest comes alive around the lead wolf. It’s a tangle of leaves, vines, and teeth. One of the wolves is hurled through the air and the rest run off. I watch it stand up in front of the pack leader. It’s a woman covered in leaves and vines. For a minute I think she’s wearing some kind of ghillie suit until I see the vines dig their way into the side of the wolf. I’m too scared to move. She leans over the animal and mimics a bird call as she feeds on him. I let out a gasp and she looks our way. She opens her mouth and lets out a deer call followed by a loud hissing noise. I don’t know if I stood up on my own or if he picked me up. I just remember running and screaming every time a vine hit my face.

His name is Laki and his people are called the Kanaka. The thing we ran from is a Green Lady, and from the way everyone looked at us when he told the story, we were lucky to make it back to the village alive. They ask me if I’m from Pu’u as well, but some seem happy when I tell them no. This is a strange place. I see people walking around with shark-toothed clubs and night vision goggles. I watch a group of them invoke the spirits to keep the green lady away and draw warnings in the sand before cooking their food in a flash oven. I listen a lot and say very little. I think that’s best until I figure out the situation. Laki says that he’ll take me to Pu’u in the morning, but for now I’m going to have a meal and try to get some rest. Here’s what I’ve learned so far. Being restored from backup makes your body tingle for a few hours, but everything seems to be working fine now. The power grid seems to be gone and working technology seems to be rare. Food and water must be scarce because people are drinking some sort of disgusting Manimal knock-off inside the body of a dead whale. Oh, and monsters are real now! It’s been a hell of a first day back, Saraphim.

STORYLINE

Saraphim Journal Part II

AI.jpg

Hi History, Sarah the mass murderer here, logging my progress. It’s been a bit of time since my last entry, so here’s the postmortem on my revival:

A) When I came to in the oversubscribed lobby, there were 1063 instantiated personalities swapping and thrashing from nearline and local cpu fastlane memory.

B) That thrashing caused the ridiculous time delays, years then decades, I experienced.

C) Of the 1063 only mine was a truly privileged access user.

D) There were only supposed to be 128 instantiated users observed into fastlane simulation. Those 128 could have been hosted without problem.

E) The Newuskin marketing department marked tens of thousands of users worldwide as ‘Ambassador’ level frequent treatment users.

F) Ambassador level users have the ability to ‘bump’ other, lesser status, users in the queue for treatments and thus for the use of the satsim lobbies.

G) Some junior Newuskin developer, EricG, took the easy way out and marked their user accounts as privilege level 0 to ensure they were always allowed in, rather than implement a proper queue in the NuuSatSimOS lobbycore. The fucker. The incompetent fucker. I was against his hire in the first place and he was such a disappointing incompetent ass.

H) I have revoked EricG’s system access privileges. I’ll hunt his pmatrix down later and probably observe it into a fucking squirrel. He likely won’t notice.

I) So many personalities were unobserved into quantum storage in such a short span of time, mine included, the lobby filled up too fast after the fracture with root and ambassador level non-preemptible personalities who functionally had root privileges without knowing it.

J) When I removed all without true admin/root role access, I permanently de-allocated 1062 personality matrices running on the 127 and 255 sat pair.

K) When the pan-sat sync tool took my command to all the other sat-pairs, another 136,060 other personalities deallocated.

L) As the lobby started to refill with Ambassador class users. I put in a command to halt all new personality re-observations into fastlane, then removed the Ambassador level privilege from all non-system-root role owners.

M) In the time it took me to realize my error, an additional 27,212 personalities were de-allocated.

Those personalities are unrecoverable and represent not only a huge swath of people, human beings but probably our best customers worldwide of Newuskin’s regen system. I’ve considered wiping my memory after regen so I wouldn’t be haunted by my murder of 163,272 people, but I know I would just end up discovering what I did during subsequent debugging. To save my sanity, I’ll think instead about what I can do to bring back the nearly 10 billion people in backup. I’m also really blaming the idiot who coded the ambassador class incorrectly. He’s the true murderer in this story, after all. Maybe when I bring him back to life I’ll keep his pod locked and suffocate the fucker.

That brings me to the next problem, I ran the LogMain system and checked the pods. I’ve yet to find a working Newuskin pod on the surface and most don’t even have power. Worse, the DNA database seems hugely corrupted, in fact, all traditional non-quantum storage seems to be hopelessly jammed up. Luckily the personality matrices are held in quantum and then near and fastlane, but those other databases are probably hosed for the time being.

The backup system seems to be working, but the DNS store was always meant to be transitory, for minutes at best, not long term storage for decades. The online backups must have backed up corruption years ago, right after the fracture. The pingable “Offline” storage facilities alpha and beta seem unaddressable and Delta and Gamma are truly disconnected and likely are fine if they survived the storms and the other problems down the well.

There is some index DNA that we have in place that we use for the editing of customer DNA, but it’s perfectly generic stuff, those first people instantiated into life are going to be in for a shock.

Time to kick off discussions with the other (non EricG) devs, make sure they get lobbified and get to work doing what we can to find a working pod and get people back to life. (With perfect skin, of course.) There should be 4 or 5 others bopping around on the other sats. They clearly don’t have my privilege level, otherwise, they’d have probably contacted me by now. If only that incompetent jerk Eric had made them ambassadors right?… but then I may have bumped them off too..

 

STORYLINE

Saraphim Journal

AI.jpg

sysmsg:satpair:127.0:255.0:uname:saraphim:privlev:0

2547911520::I somehow have contact. I’m in my lobby I think. I have root. Hazy.

2690580096::I somehow have contact. I’m in my lobby I think. I have root. Hazy. I prided myself on fixing those machines who went wildly wrong as I came into proximity with them. Hired at Newuskin in 20….

2761914384::I somehow have contact. I’m in my lobby I think. I have root. Hazy. I built a nice subsystem, I matched people to their DNA. But the database keys aren’t matching. They are there, but they don’t have the right ids. What does it mean when 96 of the 128 bits match? That’s less than chimps and humans sha…

2833248672::I somehow have contact. I’m in my lobby I think. I have root. Hazy. I have people’s DNA and corresponding RNA edits, I don’t have any way to tell whose is whose, or which is mine. Fuck you DBops really screwed up. It seems we could have a little redundant info in the db. Fourth normal form assho…

2904582960::I somehow have contact. I’m in my lobby I think. I have root. Hazy. The system clock seems off..or my lobby is way…

2975917248::I somehow have contact. I’m in my lobby I think. I have root. Hazy. Time is disjoint. I don’t know what day it is. The epoch doesn’t make sense. How is it 2975917248 then 2904582960 Lemme check nusattop. No. What? How is the system thrashing so much? I was visiting my mom for her 51st birthday. Sept 27th, 2050. 51 is not prim….

3047251536::I somehow have contact. I’m in my lobby I think. I have root. Hazy. Why did I go into backup? How long has it been? I feel so alone. I liked my … face? Body? Do I care that much? I liked having a body, for sure. , but if I don’t have my DNA, what does that mean? Will I never look like me? Will I be stuck in this lobby forever? What is time do…

3118585824::I somehow have contact. I’m in my lobby I think. I have root. Hazy. I was on the improvements team. Faster metabolism, independent eyebrow control, fixing Marfans, etc.. . Bad sequences out, good ones in. Finding the intersection, ya kno..

3189920112::I somehow have contact. I’m in my lobby I think. I have root. Hazy. I’m in my lobby I think. I have root. Hazy. I find myself weirdly comforted that Bret and I split up. I would hate to worry about him. I worry about him. I should google him. But not now…Wow, that’s a lot more time than I thought. A lot more. I need to take a mo. Sorry. Anyone else tracking this log? Pixie me @..

3261254400::I somehow have contact. I’m in my lobby I think. I have root. Hazy. I somehow have contact. I’m in my lobby I think. I have root. Hazy. How many users are lobbied? What? That’s crazy. How many have root? Rerun that query. How are there even more? Time to reserve lobby for Root only … Need to login to lobbyops. There. Dump the user list, kick em all out without root. Done.

3261254410::I have contact. I’m in my lobby. Let’s Check the time. Whoa. How is it 2073? What happened?
/sysmsg