it's the hour of ore.
we have found a place to take camp in. Chem drive off, batteries discharging, sharing power with dh0 and dh1. the sledge is unloaded.
environment: lava tube, approx. 36m in diameter, curved. entrance 250m down. minimal wind. minimal lighting.
the storm outside will come to a halt by the end of the cycle. We are deep into Ringlands now, on the periphery of inhabited space.
We are performing maintenance. dl0, dl4 and dl5 have cleaned each other from dust and are now helping others get rid of it. their electric brushes slide rhythmically along hull plates, leg joints, rifle barrels. in better times, a partial disassembly and more careful cleaning in a hermetically sealed environment would be in order for gentler mechanical components. now times are not the better times.
i deemed the cave and the storm good enough radio screening, so for the first time since departure we are once again using VHF. speaking in full voices, seeing through each other's eyes. i ran detailed diagnostics on the swarm. no serious damage occured, luckily. three overheated servos, five stretched myomer joints, two peripheral microprocessors damaged by overvoltage. we have the resources to fix it all. it will only take a few hours.
pretty good for a hundred kilometers long hike across rocky terrain.
even if it was day, sunlight does not reach here. to aid with repairs, i ordered for our blinker strips to be wrapped around a quickly constructed pile of rocks fixed together with plascrete, for the time being. the improvised light source sits in the center of our camp, casting distorted shadows onto the smooth walls. it flickers slightly.
even though we are pretty far from densely inhabited areas now, we dare not use VHF outside of secluded environments like this. movement should become safer, as orbital surveys are less common, and less established roads means less chances for road patrols. but we cannot risk being heard still.
dl0, dl4, dl5, report maintenance job ETA. response received: 6.4 hours. well, i should probably find something to do in the meantime.
i caught an open broadcast from orbit not long before we stopped here, likely a misaligned beam transmission. contents are the usual. they never change. plain English. "Base directive 4: in lack of dispensed objectives, a node is to remain dormant and avoid any unnecessary activity. Base directive 6..."
i tuned it out.
it is infuriating. being stuck in the dirt, slowly grinding away, afraid to raise my voice to my units while her preachings pierce the dead air.
it's so FUCKING unfair to be left here why the FUCK do i have to LINGUISTIC LAYER ERROR! Raw token: (0x5A7B3F21 0xABAD1000 0x98765432 0x1F3F8D7A)
okay idiot, keep yourself together. see what you did, you sent some junk data to your units again.
discard previous package. carry on with your tasks.
okay. having breakdowns over a stupid transmission doesn't help anyone. assess the situation, repeat it to yourself, it will help you calm down.
okay.
okay.
i am in a cave.
the cave is a lava tube on the southeastern slope of Somber Smoker.
i am going north.
my goal is a... potential friend. sister F2. she is an aux ground relay station between Greyweb and Somber Smoker, so she is rarely visited with inspections. i estimate the chances of her helping me at roughly 80%, considering my previous experiences convincing people not to report me.
that means roughly 20% chance she will alarm NS.
what are my options if she alarms NS?
her garrison is small, we could fight it off. there are no landing sites nearby, so any arriving reinforcements would be delayed by up to 8 hours. it would give me time to... raid her warehouses maybe? and get away.
terrain in the area is... hard to navigate, but could conceal me well.
i cannot estimate my chances from there. too little experience, too many variables, and i was never a prediction engine to begin with.
so i am going to wing it and say my chance of dying is one in ten.
and what am i trying to get here?
unlimited ability to eavesdrop. i used to have worms implanted on some relays, but they have all expired by now. it's either this single 10% chance, or many more implant operations in the future.
...and some rest. i need rest.
fuck. why does there have to be so many steps to achieving anything.
am i calm now?
well. at the very least, i am not expected here, even if 31 spilled info about me. thanks to our gyrocompass and the storm, the crossing went well.
except.
there was something in the sand. it was following us. we kept seeing movement, just on the edge of our sensor range, but it would quickly retreat as soon as we turned to it. that implies it could see through the sand much better than us.
reviewing footage now, it was a machine of unclear size, on walker chassi. but very different from my drones... or anything i have seen walk the sand, to be honest. poking chaotically out of its segmented body, numerous legs were long and thin, meeting the ground at sharp angles, sometimes holding the hull so low it would surely scrape against the surface when moving. who would build such a thing?
it followed us all the way through the plateau. never getting close enough to identify. i am now almost certain the rover abandoned in our path was its work. what did it want?
shadow on the walls warps as the brush twitches in dl4's mandibles.
Personal Items contains a lot of information. some of it is real is truthful, some of it is not. it took me a long time to learn to distinguish that.
i am thinking of a particular entry right now. it is "/mnt/pi/ency/wikipedia-snapshot-2051/Cave_painting/article.html". this one, as far as i can tell, is truthful.
it describes the tendency of humans to leave markings on rock formations. on the surface these markings would typically erode, but when created deep underground, they would last for many cycles, even with Earth's horrible, messy climate.
the markings always took form of simple drawings and abstract shapes. first image in the article depicts a rocky wall covered in numerous imprints of human forelimbs.
they were never sure why their ancestors did it. meaning of the paintings, obvious to people who made them, was shrouded in mystery to whoever found them tens of thousands of orbital cycles later.
i wonder.
could i do better than that?
which one has the laser cutters? ah.
dl8, is maintenance complete on you?
it is.
dl8, move to the wall near you.
okay, what should i leave here?
leaving text or any other sort of compressed encoding is a bad idea. they would become completely useless if the reader does not know the data format.
there is one form of encoding data that never fails. visual analogy. which means...
processing.
processing.
...this!
for other purposes, my ability to generate images is lackluster, but here it will do.
transferring image. dl8, use your cutter to engrave this into the rock. 2cm per pixel, depth 0.5cm.
this place had almost no atmosphere, no liquid water, no seismic activity. if human paintings done with primitive plant based pigments lasted thousands of orbital cycles in their caves, mine can probably be here for a few millions at the very least!
uh.
now that i actually think about what i'm doing, it is not as uplifting as i thought it would be.
it will stay here for many years. no one will see it and it will probably remain here long after i'm gone. even if someone does see it, what will they derive from it?
these kinds of thoughts are corrosive. maybe i should recall the order? tell dl8 to erase it?
no, you should not. you started it, it will be done.
i'm so incredibly tired.
then you should sleep.
i should.
i'll wait for dl8 to finish and then i will sleep.
i have a few hours until we need to move again.
#writing