w5 curfew: dog park

[applebough]

Sometimes, you just have a ruff day or twenty.

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[solesuccess]

[ making note of that, though he frowns a little since...well. she's obviously gone now. ]

Was she helping you with your research, too?

[dropoffs]

[ hesitates unhappily, just staring at the paused moment in time. we are just going to block out the horrors of what they were witnessing for the moment... ] Mmm-hm. We were working round the clock...

[solesuccess]

[ ...tries to nudge the log a little ahead so the screen isn't as horrifying, perhaps. ]

What...is space madness, do you think?

[dropoffs]

[ it's fine. there are worse horrors like what he saw happen to someone else in a log earlier this week. this is tame by comparison. ] I've met with diseases before, ones that have a mind of their own. The Sand Pest wasn't unlike that. It thought, it plotted, it devised ways to improve it's own survivability... it's why I considered that maybe this madness could be driven by such a thing. It's violent, spreads in such a way where it flies beneath the radar, hides itself until the time is right... maybe I'm wrong. But.

[solesuccess]

I don't think you're necessarily wrong, just that we might be missing finer details. This is similar to what I've been thinking, too. For a little while I thought it was a ghost or something but before that, I thought it was nanites. And then after I gave up the ghost I went back to thinking it was a virus that's able to detect and pinpoint certain factors in us to choose a new host. It has to have some level of intelligence to know when to be active, when to be dormant, and when to control our friends to say and do certain things.

That doesn't mean its perfect. If someone tries to fight back, it could become unstable. [ ... ] I guess what I'm saying is...I don't disagree in the possibility. At all.

[dropoffs]

Dramatic as it may sound, consider the concept of something that feeds from misery. From anxiety. From paranoia. [ a low voice ] Plenty of that when you're trapped aboard a tin can hurtling through the stars.

[solesuccess]

Sure. You create a situation in which this thing can survive, send them off without means of contacting anyone for help, and let them fight for survival of the fittest. But the question is...why?

[ ... ]

Callisto told me he was surprised the Eudora was allowed for clearance to depart when so much of it was still closed off and non-functional.

[dropoffs]

[ works jaw quietly. hmmmmm. ] I'd be surprised, too. It's like any vessel, even a train can't have too much wrong with it before leaving the station if the journey is so long and arduous. A ship travels long distance, to many different places. Combine that with whatever that log was that Yura found and you have something that's methodically evaluating a "food source" and... needs "fuel" in order to reach further. Far and beyond. [ looks very long at him. ] It's like burning fuel for a locomotive... Pace your intake. Then you would feed your fire when you need the fuel the most... when the ship makes a jump to its next destination...? I don't know.

[solesuccess]

...[ give him a second to think. ]

The ship goes into lockdown and different functions gets disabled to sustain power into other things. For all we know, this thing is also draining some of that power to fuel itself and that's why it strikes on Thursday nights during the period we're all asleep. It reaches max capacity and has to "expel it", so to speak. [ but yeah there sure is the log from yuri. ] Yuri's log is weird because it's all the planets we're currently seeing on this tour. Most of the stuff we've been finding is from winter tour. So...where did that come from? And what are we really on this tour for?

[dropoffs]

[ gives a very slow lift and lower of the shoulders while the cogs turn in his brain. ] Could be smart, like we've thought. Might be able to form coherent thoughts and evaluations if that's the case. I don't want to give it too much credit, but at the same time. Could be using something else to do that for it... the ship's AI...? Ganymede might be able to help more with sorting that kind of thought process out perhaps... [ that's something that can think, right? he's actually not sure about that guess. he sounds Uncertain. ] I believe maybe we're just a means to an end. What that end is... [ slowly rubs temples and leans on his leg a little. brrrrrrrrrrr. blegh. brain. ] A cycle...?

[solesuccess]

This has happened before. We know this. But it's entirely possible that whatever this is got a taste for power and wanted to use us to continue. If it's able to make its way around the ship, who knows where its gotten into. [ but hrgh. ] ...it could also explain why it's too difficult to stay in engineering for too long, if we think maybe it's impacting the ship's AI.