Discovery Gaming Community

Noam Fourfall unlocked and opened the door to his quarters. He let out a sigh of
relief. Home again - he liked that feeling. Most people would not share his warm
thoughts about the place, however - it was a mess. On one wall, there were three
pin-boards ripe with an abundance of notes, pictures, blueprints, and printouts,
all annotated with tiny, hasty letters in violet ink. For a hacker, Noam did not
use computers a lot - at least not at the *planning* stage of his projects. Next
to the same wall stood a long, sturdy workbench, housing a vast, if chaotic, set
of tools and half-created inventions. A few emptied mugs and similarly exhausted
tubes of Synth Paste could have been singled out in the heap. The workbench also
featured a few cabinets, which were in similar disarray. A book-shelf was placed
against another wall, bending slightly under its load. If there was any order by
which the books were arranged, it was known only to Noam. And finally, against a
third wall, there was a table, a chair with wheels, three computers, and another
set of books. Somewhere in the corner, under a layer of dust, there was a ladder
leading to the bedroom, but Noam usually slept on the chair, working. Good thing
it was the most comfortable chair on the whole Mactan base. With auto-reclining.

A landing craft could have been heard. Noam sighed, again, entered the room, and
locked the door behind him. Silence. He scratched his head, made a decision, and
approached one of the computers. A burst of keystrokes filled the room with rock
music. Almost instantly, a group of devices activated on his workbench, clicking
away at different paces. The devices were cubic in shape. Each one of them had a
small, rectangular window in one side, through which swinging pendulums could be
seen. The devices were labelled: “engine (X)”, “engine (Y)”, “engine (Z)”, which
seemed to shift slowest of all; “thrusters”, spiking from the centre to the hard
right, and back, both often and swiftly; “torpedo”, rarely making a fast turn to
the right side of the box, taking longer to reach the centre again; “laser (I)”,
“laser (II)”, and a few others, violently swinging back and forth. Noam examined
the devices carefully, listening to the music. Getting a hold of that particular
piece of music cost him a small fortune and a few weeks of persistent inquiries,
but it was well worth all the hassle - it was worth triple the hassle, and more.

Noam hammered at the keyboard to summon another piece, examined the devices, and
repeated the process a few more times with more kinds of music. Classical music,
Jazz, Blues, some electronic compositions, more rock-and-roll, heavy metal... it
went on for a while. Finally, he switched the music off with a smile. All ready.
He sat down at the workshop, fished around a while, and finally located the note
he was looking for. Eventually, Noam also found a working pen and ticked off #4.

Noam looked at the workbench. The principle applied, the hardware worked. It was
just a matter of burning some integrated circuits, which was trivial - a perk of
being a hacker at Mactan, and practically living on the engineering deck. Later,
he would need those placed in suitable shells, but it was hardly a problem, too.
He submitted his blueprints to the engineering section, and the ETA was one day,
which gave Noam one day to get the bomb and some sleep. Seemed fair enough - and
after that, he would need to hunt down that AI one more time. All fun, fun, fun!

All was going so well. And now, his plans were going to bite the dust. Artless,
dog-hearted minnows!, he screamed at the top of his lungs. It did not, it could
not make him feel any better. The AI drone he had been tracking for the past few
days was destroyed. His equipment was as ready as it was useless. All the plans,
all the designs, all the blueprints, all the notes... they could just as well be
burned at this point. His brilliant idea would never take flight. The blueprints
were still in his possession, but so what? An AI is - roughly speaking - the sum
of its experiences, and the blueprints did not include any configuration details
for the electronic brain on-board. It was as if the world was taunting Noam - he
could re-create the shell, but the mind operating it was beyond his reach. Damn.
If only he could get to the AI core - it had an ejection mechanism, sure enough,
and those Goatish, ill-breeding Xeno bastards! probably missed it... Again, so
what? He had no idea where the event took place, the only information he had was
that it occurred. Double damn. Noam punched the wall until his knuckles bled. It
did not make him feel better, either - but it did take his mind off the project.

By one definition, Noam was in love - at least, he got the emotional yo-yo thing
down pretty well. Only a day had passed and he was as happy as can be. Salvation
came in the form of a news-network article about his pre-selected AI host. Sure,
it was only a rough outline of the location, but he found more elusive wrecks in
his time, did he not? Two planets on a picture were more than enough to fuel his
hacker-meets-junker dance, and after a quarter of a deafening keyboard crescendo
he had a destination ready and punched in. He had a slim chance to find any kit,
in all likelihood scarred beyond recognition by laser fire, but for some reason,
he remained hopeful - AI cores were usually pretty well secured for exactly this
kind of thing. It would not be much, but it would do - well, for the time being.