So, after a considerably longer interval than I intended (there was an incident with my desktop and an errant mug of tea), here's the second part of
this. Oh, and don't worry about Shadow's therapist, after hearing what Edward saw and heard when the Wild Nor'Westers liberated that camp he's pretty desensitised...
"Okay, so Professor Gerald must have had some ideas for getting you back
out of the computers again, right?" said Shadow, once he'd calmed down enough to think about the practicalities. "Because I don't want to alarm you, but the ARK's been abandoned for a while and I don't have the SMART data for whichever drives you're actually on -damn that's a weird sentence- but I think we should start working on that like now."
"Yeah. Short version? We were supposed to implant another datalink prototype in a vatgrown clone made from my DNA, spoof the MAC address and... Well, at that point we'd just kinda hope that worked. If it didn't... Well, maybe some of Ivo's robotics projects would be mature enough by the time my NIDS got to end-stage? Honestly, we only had about 10% of a plan at the time," Maria replied.
"On the plus side, I know where the spare datalink prototype is kept and I'm pretty sure it hasn't been disturbed. Can't tell if the tissue printer and the cloning tanks are still intact from here though."
"We can check. Feedstock might be a problem though, even with cryostorage it's been... Ah." Shadow paused, wondering how best to address this.
"Is this to do with the internal clock thinking I've been in here for over fifty years?" Maria had always been one to get directly to the point.
"Yep. I spent most of that in cryo myself, then got let out by your cousin Ivo, who decided it would be a good idea to gaslight me into helping him wreck GUN's shit to avenge your death and then help him take over the world. Also, there were some extremely fucking weird aliens who had some kind of arrangement with Professor Gerald to exchange scientific information but
also wanted to take over the world. Sources are unclear whether your grandpa was in on that, but I'm choosing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But anyway, GUN eventually talked me around to the idea that they're the least shitty faction in all this mess and I ended up working for them. Pay's not great and the hours are antisocial as hell but their medical plan covers a hypnotherapist for the cryo-amnesia and a trauma psychiatrist for the everything else, so I can't complain.
"Anyway, I had a breakthrough with the hypnotherapist not so long ago: Something I overheard Professor Gerald say about how Ivo was up to something skeevy and he was keeping notes. I figured that information might be useful, so here we are."
Maria was silent for a moment.
"There's... kind of a lot to unpack there. Ivo...?"
"I can't say he's improved with age. Ditched the ponytail and the soul patch, but that's about the only good choice he's made since you last saw him."
Rouge, who had been checking the server racks for fault warning lights or other signs of imminent failure and giving the two of them some privacy, looked round sharply. "The what now?"
"I have pictures!" Maria added helpfully.
Rouge walked over, and took a long look at
the photo that had popped up on screen. "Couldn't decide between an emo phase or a cybergoth phase, huh?"
"Something like that. And someone who looks that much like Shou Tucker has absolutely no business bullying furries."
"Even if we don't find proof he set Professor Gerald up to get arrested, we have
definitely achieved our original mission objective," Shadow chuckled. "Anyway, back to the topic of getting you out of there... Tails, this is Shadow. How's it looking in Life Support?"
"Surprisingly good. One oxygenator is still in working order and I think I can get at least one more back up if I pull some parts from the others. Some of the blowers are dead but enough are still working that we'll have breathable air stationwide soon."
"Good work. Leave the second oxygenator for now, we have something more time-critical to deal with."
"Maria's exit strategy, right? Yeah, roger that. Consumables for the cloning bay're gonna be way past their expiration date, though."
"That's why job one is figuring out if the biomatter reprocessor is still working, or at least fixable." Shadow snorted. "If it is, I guess we finally found a use for all that creamed corn."
"We're building a new body to download me into out of the consequences of you pulling a Black Hat Guy. Great. You ever wonder what it would be like to have a normal life?"
"Really, really boring, probably."
"Fair."
The four of them met up in the biolabs, and Shadow found a terminal hooked up to a large wall-screen so Maria could participate in the conversation. As soon as he started the call, the video chat window popped up. Shadow set it to fullscreen, then immediately doubled over in a fit of helpless laughter at the sight of
a lightly stylised, vaguely anime-like avatar of Maria sitting behind a desk in a room that was instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with classic visual novels.
"Okay, that's just kinda weird," Sonic muttered.
"Just be glad you don't get the reference," Tails replied. "If she starts calling him 'Sempai', head for lifeboat stations."
"Wrong game," Maria pointed out.
"Pretty sure I can dig up some stream backgrounds from Yandere Simulator though-"
"I'm questioning whether we should even be letting you out of there now. And you know Yandere Dev was a sleaze, right?"
Shadow sighed in fond exasperation. "Maria, if you scare him too much then I have to fix all this stuff myself. Speaking of, how are the self-tests looking?"
"Cloning Tank 4 is looking like the best of the bunch. I've only got two amber warnings and one red, probably some seals gone bad. Biomatter reprocessor looks like it might be okay. Tissue printers are trickier because, you know, printers. Can't really test those without feedstock anyway."
"We'll check those manually while the processor's running then. Sonic, Rouge, can you grab some stuff from Storage Bay G? That's the one where most of the non-perishable food was stored so it shouldn't smell
too bad, but keep your respirators handy in case there's some weird mutant flu that makes your hallucinations become solid or something in there." He saw Sonic's expression and sighed. "Relax, it was a joke."
"Oh, I got that part," Sonic replied. "Im just... Kinda having trouble processing the idea of you making references."
"Contrary to popular belief, I
do have both a sense of humour and hobbies besides brooding darkly. I mean, you didn't think it was Rouge's idea to steal Blaze's phone and change her ringtone to "Never Set The Cat On Fire" that one time, did you?"
Sonic's mouth opened and closed a few times as he tried, unsuccessfully, to formulate a coherent response to that. "Oh, screw this," he said at last. "Let's just this done so I can get off this station and go find a bar."
"Didn't figure him for a Red Dwarf fan..." Maria remarked, as the hatch closed behind Sonic and Rouge.
"She kinda has a point there," Rouge added.
Sonic shrugged. "Share an apartment with Tails long enough and you pick this stuff up. Which probably explains why
Shadow knows it, come to think of it. I mean, you grow up on a space station devoted to scientific research and you're gonna end up hanging out with nerds a lot of the time, right?"
"You'd be surprised. We did enough military research that he got to meet plenty of jocks too," Maria chimed in helpfully.
"Gah!" Sonic jumped an inch in the air. "Can you
not do that, please? It's kinda creepy."
"All part of the haunted space station experience, my dude."
"How do I get myself in these stupid situations?" Sonic muttered, raising his eyes heavenwards.
"So, anyway, moving on. What's the deal with your buddy with the two tails? I got the vibe you two are kinda beefing with each other right now."
"I don't want to talk about it-"
"hey're best buddies, but Tails put the moves on Sonic's sister and he's sulking," Rouge said helpfully, utterly unaffected by the glare Sonic gave her.
"Ah, okay. Shame, he's kinda hot. I was almost gonna ask if he's got two of anything else..."
"Not as far as I know," Sonic replied slowly. "Wait, why am I discouraging this?"
"Because even if you aren't happy about him seeing Tanya, encouraging him to cheat on her would be a dick move of epic proportions?" Rouge suggested archly.
"Yeah, okay, that's fair," Sonic admitted.
"Shame. I mean, it's not like Shadow's ever shown any interest..."
Sonic and Rouge shared a look. "Sooner we get this done, sooner we can
both go find a bar," he whispered.
Maria spun around in the surprisingly detailed and accurate rendition of an office chair, staring up at the beige Artex ceiling. "If this doesn't work, I have
got to redecorate in here," she said to herself.
The neural datalink's interface took the desktop metaphor to an extreme: Interacting with the Ark's systems happened through a virtual computer terminal that for reasons best known to the development team resembled an all-in-one G4 iMac from the early 2000s, although they had mercifully provided a two-button mouse instead of the one its real-life counterpart had shipped with. Files and folders in her personal network drive space were represented by large rotating caddies of data disks that Maria had to "physically" slot into the computer terminal to access them, which even came with a little whirring noise as they loaded, unless she wanted to play some music in which case she could use a separate virtual device on the desk that resembled an iPod in a dock. Other fixtures and fittings included a noticeboard that she could pin notes and image files to (using an app on the terminal, which was mildly immersion-breaking but this
was only a beta) and a large window that could be set to display a static image, animated GIF or live webcam feed. Maria wasn't sure who had set it to display the classic "Bliss" desktop wallpaper from Windows XP by default, but they probably didn't get on with whoever picked the design for the computer terminal and music player.
The rest of the virtual office environment was the most blandly inoffensive and generic office decor imaginable: Beige walls, dark blue carpet, light wood desk and a leather chair. There was a plastic succulent in a white pot on the desk and a photo of a beach with a sailing boat in the distance in a slate grey frame on the wall by the door, which Maria would have to open in order to log out. She'd been told there were settings for personalising the environment a bit, but she hadn't had the opportunity to experiment with them before everything with GUN and her grandfather and whatever the fuck Ivo had said or done happened. There didn't seem to be any provision for changing her outfit, which defaulted to whatever she'd been wearing at login, or for removing it either: She'd found time to try
that out of amused curiosity, because a girl had needs after all, but apparently the team were only considering fully safe-for-work applications at the time.
Idly, Maria brought the app for accessing the Ark's internal radio network back up. "Hey, do you think I could get Internet access in here?" she asked.
"Not without having to install way more security patches than I'm comfortable attempting until you're out of there. And I have bad news about MySpace," Shadow replied.
"Aw, crud. I spent
months getting my page just how I wanted!"
"And it was gloriously tacky. Anyway, good
news, we just fired up the reprocessor and it looks like it's working fine. You wanna do the honours and plug your DNA profile into the printers? I figure you probably have more recent memories of Professor Gerald letting you mess with it than I do, and you're the one who's gonna be living in it, so..."
"Hell yeah!" Maria replied. "Gimme like ten minutes to make some tweaks and we can get started."
"I can hardly wait," he replied.
Maria opened another app, one that controlled the fantastically complex molecular synthesiser that provided the genetic information to be fed into the tissue printers and cloning tanks. She knew where the profile Grandpa had made from a sample of her own DNA was stored, only slightly adjusted to remove the faulty genes that caused her NIDS and replace them with healthy ones.
But a thought occurred to Maria, and she turned away from the terminal to look for something in her personal files. Something she'd made using a copy of that gene profile, modified extensively from several alternative sources, most of which she should
not have had access to.
For a moment, she hesitated. Could she really do this?
Should she, when there were so many unknown variables already? And how would Shadow react?
"Oh, what the hell," she said at last. "If it doesn't work it doesn't work. And if Shadow doesn't get the goddamn hint after
this..."
She firmly grasped the disk labelled
"Fursona" and stuck it in the slot. "Heh. I wonder if Furaffinity's new UI is finally out of beta yet?"
(All the images were drawn for me by my very good friend
The Fluffy Dino.)
