Of Wolves and Weasels - Day 614 - Terror on Moonbase Alpha - Chapter 11 Part 1
Hey all, GoodShibe here!
So Friday I completed part 3 of Chapter 10 for Terror on Moonbase Alpha.
If you're just joining us now, please feel free to get caught up here:
Without further ado, here's Part 1 of Chapter 11.
Terror on Moonbase Alpha - Chapter 11 Part 1
She was on the run. It had found her. And it was none too pleased with her, to be rather generous with the term.
Kara had been experimenting, more importantly, she had been experimenting to see what ways she could slow it down, what ways she could influence the creature's actions.
It had started off simply enough, working locally, at the site of the tendrils - she had practiced making them fire or, once they had been fired, she had worked on making them miss. She'd discovered that the tendrils' 'order' to fire were actually electro-chemical signals, signals that once observed -- once 'felt' -- were possible to replicate.
As an added bonus, she'd also discovered that because this entity had grown so large there was now a certain amount of 'lag' between the central, main, goop and its 'outposts'. It wasn't a huge amount of lag, milliseconds, but for her, running on this network, it had felt like days.
The 'main' goop had by now grown to take up the entirety of Sector 4E. Long, thick, heavy ropes of goop hung from the ceiling like fly-catchers and the floor itself was slick with an almost foot-deep layer of the substance.
She had started small, with an outpost in Sector 3A, one far enough removed from the main hub to give her some real lead time; time enough to intercept and stop any signals that might give away her position if she screwed it up.
The first task was to try and will the tendrils to develop on her command. Firing them off was easy, making them them grow in the first place? That was not. She had spent full seconds on the network, following the goop's attacks, focused intently on understanding the chemical signals that made them happen. What had made them 'legitimate'. As it turned out, there was a certain 'hum' that accompanied a legit command, a low intone that seemed to wrap the signals in a sheath. A sort of 'official seal' from the main hub that told the outpost what to do.
It took her one long, agonizing hour to crack it, to figure out the subtle shifts in the intone, to grasp the 'feel' required. And she discovered that there was a 'feel' to it, in as much as this thing had an ability to 'feel'. Kara decided it was somewhat similar to an ice cream headache - the 'pain' of it was nowhere near as intense, of course, but the pressure of it, that expectation, that sense that you 'just know' that it's coming... feel it rolling up and over.
She had spent a great deal of that hour catching 'warning' signals from the Outpost - all it had taken was one wrong signal, one hum that was slightly too low, or too slow, to tell it that it was under attack from within. And it wasted no time in trying to send warnings back home.
Still, by that point, she could have taken a nap, watched a movie and made a full, luxurious lunch (oh, right, food... she had forgotten about food!) before taking off at an amble to catch it.
The signal would go off like a warning flare and Kara would reach out and guide it back to sender. A gentle 'blip', like an internal, electro-chemical game of Pong.
And that was when she felt it. The sense of Fear. The Outpost had been effectively cut off from its host... and the Outpost knew. It knew and it was afraid.
Kara let that emotion wash over her, it was an admission, an emotion that had made her tingle in ways that she had never felt before. Here, in this place, she had Absolute Supremacy.
And so, for those precious next few hours, she had made it her mission to 'wreck shop'.
She'd begun by focusing on the tiny nubs, preparing them, growing them - they were the micro-factories that tendrils would shoot out from. Once she had mastered tendrils, she started firing them off in mass quantities, just to see how many it could fire at once, just... to know. It turned out that it caused the goop quite a bit of stress to shoot one tendril, let alone more than 10. She'd pushed it to 25 at once, pushed it until an entire wall was covered in a deadly stipple pattern.
Kara could feel the outpost roiling around her, the viscous fluid churning like a sea in a storm, as if trying to toss her out. But she laughed and forced the goop to climb the wall then seep under a door frame then thin itself out into microns-thin sheets.
The more surface area, the slower the call and response times. She had been making notes, filling volumes with what she had discovered... and that's when she'd realized her mistake. One key error in judgment.
She felt it coming, it made no attempts to hide itself. It announced itself like a beacon, like a probe.
Kara had spent so much time blocking outgoing signals from the outpost that the main hub had started to wonder where it was. Why it hadn't heard back from it in a while.
And she had spent so much time focusing on understanding the signals coming from the main hub, that here, now, confronted with a call/response signal, she had no idea of what to say to it. Worse, she discovered that she had almost no influence over it. She could 'talk' to it, but it only wanted the call-sign. The signal that everything was okay.
She had one chance, she'd thought that if she could re-direct it somehow that, maybe -- but it was too late. The signal had expired and, to her horror, she felt the warning flare erupt and shoot off, faster than she could even 'move', down back down the network, back toward the central hub.
"Oh cr--" she had almost thought, almost.
Central core was coming up fast, had been on her in the time it took to make that half-thought... and with every ounce of strength she had, Kara found herself on the run.
And that ends part 1 of Chapter 11, I hope you enjoyed it!
It's 7:55AM EST and I'm sending positive vibes your way. Have a great day, my friends! Our Global Hashrate is holding at ~1010 Gigahashes per Second and our Difficulty is up from ~13382 to ~14598.
As always, I appreciate your support!
GoodShibe
Posted Sep 14, 2015, 11:56 AM UTC · edited