<+++Carrier Signal Corrupted+++>
- Thread starter DrNoesis
- Start date
Most pilots around here call them blankets.I've heard them called dirt bars, joycamps, zen stations and at least half a dozen things besides.
Every station has at least one, typically somewhere between the passenger lounge and the air filtration systems. Obscenely bright, with a putrid stink of artificial mud and vegetation, where there's no real music, just repeated holo-fac adverts, corp news and whatever trashy propaganda is currently popular planet side. A simulation of the sights and sounds of life on the ground.
They serve as comfort blankets for new pilots and travellers up out of the gravity well, those that can't cope with the cognitive dissonance between the reality of being out in the void, and the government approved postcard sentiment they've been sold on all those years before it. Paris syndrome, they call it, based on some ancient kind of culture shock or homesickness or something.
As usual, some bright spark, way back when, saw an opportunity to capitalise on other people’s misery, and built a small fortune on renting out the artificial experience of being back home, a drink or a meal at a time. Eventually every station was doing it, some even advertising it like they were doing people some kind of service, extorting their patrons with an extra percentage on top of the cost of a beverage for the sake of selling it in a themed mug.
Despite the attempt at piping synthetic joy into such places, comfort blankets the galaxy over are typically miserable places. People that are struggling to cope with the world around them don't make for the most scintillating company, tainting the atmosphere in them so that you could almost feel yourself being drained.
Not the kind of place you wanted to find yourself waiting on a contact who was already nearly a quarter of an hour late.
The blanket at McAuley is a modest affair. Not so many customers this far out, and in a system with no settlements of its own, it was almost entirely frequented by young inexperienced mining crews out on their first couple of paid excursions to the belts.
It didn’t turn over enough revenue to have been decorated like some of the blankets I'd seen, where great effort was taken to simulate the theme of an old wooden lodge or the spartan, Kafkaesque lines of a concrete lined settlement dining hall. The patrons were typically workers, instead of wealthy travellers and sightseers, so there wasn't much profit in it. The management of the place hadn’t even gone to the expense of thinking up a name for the place, and the name above the door matched the name listed in the station schematics, 'Bar'.
To be honest, the only thing different about the blanket at McAuley from any of the other bars was that the holo-fac screens were tuned to a news feed from a settlement in a local system, and that with the exception of myself, none of the other patrons in the place looked like they'd spent much time off world.
Well, that’s not entirely true.There was a fresh faced entrepreneurial looking type that I'd noticed alternating between watching the other patrons and attempting to pull some kind of con on unsuspecting customers, and a pair of what I quickly concluded were the usual kind of flesh workers you'd find in places like this, offering to sell a different kind of solace to the stressed out and weary. None of them paid me any interest, I wasn't the demographic they were looking for.
I bade my time, sat at a table overlooking the room, impatiently tapping my fingers on the hard casing of the data storage unit I had brought with me and sipping at the overpriced mug of coffee I had ordered when I’d first arrived.
A couple of people entered, a couple left.Blankets were never that busy any way, save those rare times that the synthetic panacea that was on offer wasn’t enough to help someone out of their funk and they needed to be sedated and dragged away for medical treatment.It was like sitting in a church, with a holo-facs for a pulpit and a wedge of half-truths, lies and propaganda for scripture.
Entrepreneurial type found themselves a mark, sat themselves down and started working on their pitch.I didn’t like that it meant that some stranger was going to get conned when they were already on a low, but everyone’s got to eat somehow, and it’s not me that has to find a way to sleep with it.
A few more people left, and as I signalled the staff to refill my mug I realised there were more holo-fac screens in the room now, than people left to watch them. The atmosphere was dead, and my contact still hadn’t made an appearance.
The flesh workers left next, with a drunken woman wobbling in tow. As she passed my table she locked her bleary eyes with mine briefly and smiled, rolling her eyes, and I did my best to smile back. Then I let my eyes drift over her companions for the evening and hoped that whatever service she was paying for, she'd enjoy them and still wake up in the morning with all her internal organs in the right places, because you often heard stories about such things.
And I waited.
As my contact drew near to half an hour late, an argument broke out between the entrepreneur and their mark. Their voices raised, but unintelligible from where I was sitting, the display of rage was over as quickly as it began, as the mark stood up and away from the table, upsetting the mugs upon it, and then stormed out of the place. The con man, made as if to chase their mark out of the room, then had a visible change of heart and slumped forward to lean heavily on the table, no doubt chastising themselves over blowing the con as they finished their drink.
"You kind of want to be happy the con didn't work, don't you. But the fact they struck out this time just means they're going to double down on the next one." Came an odd sounding voice from under my table.
I froze, feeling suddenly vulnerable in the near empty bar, and the air around me began to feel like treacle.
"Easy fella," came the voice again, "I don't need biometrics on this thing to know your blood pressure just spiked. You're safe. I'm here about the job, well, not exactly, but... look, just look under the table already"
I released a breath I hadn't been aware I was holding, and slowly sat back in my seat, before covertly dropping my eyes to look underneath the metal table top. Once my eyes recognised what they were actually seeing down there, my shoulders slumped with relief.
"You hijacked a custodial drone, just to see me?"
"No, I hijacked all the custodial drones, and now one of them happens to be seeing you."
"Custodial drones though? Surely the security drones would be more useful. At least they're armed."
"Security companies invest a lot of money in making sure their drones can't be hijacked, otherwise there's no point. And who says anything worth hearing in front of a clearly marked security drone that’s guaranteed to be streaming your entire conversation back to some fat, sweaty, ham faced goon in an office somewhere? No one gives a damn about the custodial drones. No one even sees them. You didn't. They're everyplace, self-propelled little vacuum cleaners, access all areas, full sensor package, built in storage, living in the same part of our collective blind spot as electrical outlets and lego on carpet."
"Clever, but what do you need them for?"
"Smuggling, information, raw processing power, whatever's needed. Plus, sometimes it's just really nice to have a clean floor."
"So?"
"So, look, I belong to a collective, people looking for answers, on the fluctus, the waves. Everything that's known is out there somewhere or another, in some signal or some computer. We get around, listen to the signal, collect the answers. Gives us a certain expertise, like the kind that your company man, Varsas, is paying for now."
I had to give the guy a little credit. The setup he appeared to have was pretty ingenious, giving him the ability to access almost anything he wanted, and the ability to transport anything small enough to fit inside a standard drone. There's no security perimeter to worry about getting past when you're already inside the perimeter, using a trusted, and largely ignored, part of the overall mechanism.
The problem with information brokers like this though, is always communication. Either they were harder to get a noise out of than a broken stereo in a vacuum, or, like this one, once they had started talking, they just wouldn’t shut up.
"So about the job Varsas hired you for, he briefed you on what I'm looking for?"
Despite cutting him off mid flow, the odd electronic, under the table voice didn’t sound more than a little peturbed.
"That’s right, dig into a cloned data core, try and recover shipping data for one of the holds, and anything else I can find about what was taken, who it belonged to and where it was going."
"And you're up to it?"
From the earnest tone to the guys synthesised voice, I knew there was a story there I'd have to ask Varsas about some time. Probably wouldn’t answer mind. I scooped the data core up from the table top and dropped it, to be rewarded with a slight thunk and a near imperceptible whirring noise.
"Thanks, Mr Cranshaw, I'll begin as soon as I can, and I'll patch anything through to you as soon as I have it. I've got your ship details here, if you're off the platform, I'll get it through to you there."
"A lot of people died because of what was on that ship. A lot of them deserved better. Get me what you can."
"Null sheen, Varsas made it clear, get you anything I can, help you as much as possible. Speaking of which. The other contact he got for you? Look, I know some stuff ok. That contact, they've been paid to see you right. That’s a done deal, not gonna change. They will take the money and see you till you decide to leave the room. If you want him to actually talk to you, you're going to need to..."
Definitely need to ask Varsas about the story behind this one, I thought to myself, as the information broker carried on.
Every station has at least one, typically somewhere between the passenger lounge and the air filtration systems. Obscenely bright, with a putrid stink of artificial mud and vegetation, where there's no real music, just repeated holo-fac adverts, corp news and whatever trashy propaganda is currently popular planet side. A simulation of the sights and sounds of life on the ground.
They serve as comfort blankets for new pilots and travellers up out of the gravity well, those that can't cope with the cognitive dissonance between the reality of being out in the void, and the government approved postcard sentiment they've been sold on all those years before it. Paris syndrome, they call it, based on some ancient kind of culture shock or homesickness or something.
As usual, some bright spark, way back when, saw an opportunity to capitalise on other people’s misery, and built a small fortune on renting out the artificial experience of being back home, a drink or a meal at a time. Eventually every station was doing it, some even advertising it like they were doing people some kind of service, extorting their patrons with an extra percentage on top of the cost of a beverage for the sake of selling it in a themed mug.
Despite the attempt at piping synthetic joy into such places, comfort blankets the galaxy over are typically miserable places. People that are struggling to cope with the world around them don't make for the most scintillating company, tainting the atmosphere in them so that you could almost feel yourself being drained.
Not the kind of place you wanted to find yourself waiting on a contact who was already nearly a quarter of an hour late.
The blanket at McAuley is a modest affair. Not so many customers this far out, and in a system with no settlements of its own, it was almost entirely frequented by young inexperienced mining crews out on their first couple of paid excursions to the belts.
It didn’t turn over enough revenue to have been decorated like some of the blankets I'd seen, where great effort was taken to simulate the theme of an old wooden lodge or the spartan, Kafkaesque lines of a concrete lined settlement dining hall. The patrons were typically workers, instead of wealthy travellers and sightseers, so there wasn't much profit in it. The management of the place hadn’t even gone to the expense of thinking up a name for the place, and the name above the door matched the name listed in the station schematics, 'Bar'.
To be honest, the only thing different about the blanket at McAuley from any of the other bars was that the holo-fac screens were tuned to a news feed from a settlement in a local system, and that with the exception of myself, none of the other patrons in the place looked like they'd spent much time off world.
Well, that’s not entirely true.There was a fresh faced entrepreneurial looking type that I'd noticed alternating between watching the other patrons and attempting to pull some kind of con on unsuspecting customers, and a pair of what I quickly concluded were the usual kind of flesh workers you'd find in places like this, offering to sell a different kind of solace to the stressed out and weary. None of them paid me any interest, I wasn't the demographic they were looking for.
I bade my time, sat at a table overlooking the room, impatiently tapping my fingers on the hard casing of the data storage unit I had brought with me and sipping at the overpriced mug of coffee I had ordered when I’d first arrived.
A couple of people entered, a couple left.Blankets were never that busy any way, save those rare times that the synthetic panacea that was on offer wasn’t enough to help someone out of their funk and they needed to be sedated and dragged away for medical treatment.It was like sitting in a church, with a holo-facs for a pulpit and a wedge of half-truths, lies and propaganda for scripture.
Entrepreneurial type found themselves a mark, sat themselves down and started working on their pitch.I didn’t like that it meant that some stranger was going to get conned when they were already on a low, but everyone’s got to eat somehow, and it’s not me that has to find a way to sleep with it.
A few more people left, and as I signalled the staff to refill my mug I realised there were more holo-fac screens in the room now, than people left to watch them. The atmosphere was dead, and my contact still hadn’t made an appearance.
The flesh workers left next, with a drunken woman wobbling in tow. As she passed my table she locked her bleary eyes with mine briefly and smiled, rolling her eyes, and I did my best to smile back. Then I let my eyes drift over her companions for the evening and hoped that whatever service she was paying for, she'd enjoy them and still wake up in the morning with all her internal organs in the right places, because you often heard stories about such things.
And I waited.
As my contact drew near to half an hour late, an argument broke out between the entrepreneur and their mark. Their voices raised, but unintelligible from where I was sitting, the display of rage was over as quickly as it began, as the mark stood up and away from the table, upsetting the mugs upon it, and then stormed out of the place. The con man, made as if to chase their mark out of the room, then had a visible change of heart and slumped forward to lean heavily on the table, no doubt chastising themselves over blowing the con as they finished their drink.
"You kind of want to be happy the con didn't work, don't you. But the fact they struck out this time just means they're going to double down on the next one." Came an odd sounding voice from under my table.
I froze, feeling suddenly vulnerable in the near empty bar, and the air around me began to feel like treacle.
"Easy fella," came the voice again, "I don't need biometrics on this thing to know your blood pressure just spiked. You're safe. I'm here about the job, well, not exactly, but... look, just look under the table already"
I released a breath I hadn't been aware I was holding, and slowly sat back in my seat, before covertly dropping my eyes to look underneath the metal table top. Once my eyes recognised what they were actually seeing down there, my shoulders slumped with relief.
"You hijacked a custodial drone, just to see me?"
"No, I hijacked all the custodial drones, and now one of them happens to be seeing you."
"Custodial drones though? Surely the security drones would be more useful. At least they're armed."
"Security companies invest a lot of money in making sure their drones can't be hijacked, otherwise there's no point. And who says anything worth hearing in front of a clearly marked security drone that’s guaranteed to be streaming your entire conversation back to some fat, sweaty, ham faced goon in an office somewhere? No one gives a damn about the custodial drones. No one even sees them. You didn't. They're everyplace, self-propelled little vacuum cleaners, access all areas, full sensor package, built in storage, living in the same part of our collective blind spot as electrical outlets and lego on carpet."
"Clever, but what do you need them for?"
"Smuggling, information, raw processing power, whatever's needed. Plus, sometimes it's just really nice to have a clean floor."
"So?"
"So, look, I belong to a collective, people looking for answers, on the fluctus, the waves. Everything that's known is out there somewhere or another, in some signal or some computer. We get around, listen to the signal, collect the answers. Gives us a certain expertise, like the kind that your company man, Varsas, is paying for now."
I had to give the guy a little credit. The setup he appeared to have was pretty ingenious, giving him the ability to access almost anything he wanted, and the ability to transport anything small enough to fit inside a standard drone. There's no security perimeter to worry about getting past when you're already inside the perimeter, using a trusted, and largely ignored, part of the overall mechanism.
The problem with information brokers like this though, is always communication. Either they were harder to get a noise out of than a broken stereo in a vacuum, or, like this one, once they had started talking, they just wouldn’t shut up.
"So about the job Varsas hired you for, he briefed you on what I'm looking for?"
Despite cutting him off mid flow, the odd electronic, under the table voice didn’t sound more than a little peturbed.
"That’s right, dig into a cloned data core, try and recover shipping data for one of the holds, and anything else I can find about what was taken, who it belonged to and where it was going."
"And you're up to it?"
"Depends. If it's there, I can recover and rebuild it, same as any regular legal outfit. I can root around private systems and help you join a few more dots than a legal operator might, and I can keep it off books and just between us, which they can't. But only if the data's there. Only option you got either way, no matter how you slice it."
"I see. I'm guessing the deal is I just throw the core into this drones' bin and hope to hear from you again?"
"Yeah, something like that. Cāo wǒ. You'll hear from me though man, Varsas has seen to that alright, just leave it with me and I'll get you what I can."
"I see. I'm guessing the deal is I just throw the core into this drones' bin and hope to hear from you again?"
"Yeah, something like that. Cāo wǒ. You'll hear from me though man, Varsas has seen to that alright, just leave it with me and I'll get you what I can."
From the earnest tone to the guys synthesised voice, I knew there was a story there I'd have to ask Varsas about some time. Probably wouldn’t answer mind. I scooped the data core up from the table top and dropped it, to be rewarded with a slight thunk and a near imperceptible whirring noise.
"Thanks, Mr Cranshaw, I'll begin as soon as I can, and I'll patch anything through to you as soon as I have it. I've got your ship details here, if you're off the platform, I'll get it through to you there."
"A lot of people died because of what was on that ship. A lot of them deserved better. Get me what you can."
"Null sheen, Varsas made it clear, get you anything I can, help you as much as possible. Speaking of which. The other contact he got for you? Look, I know some stuff ok. That contact, they've been paid to see you right. That’s a done deal, not gonna change. They will take the money and see you till you decide to leave the room. If you want him to actually talk to you, you're going to need to..."
Definitely need to ask Varsas about the story behind this one, I thought to myself, as the information broker carried on.
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