TRP - Day 11

The call of Genevieve's robotic, bee-like drone calls her away from the campus and into the labyrinth of the Lower Levels. Here in the dark she'll make more than one discovery. In this chapter of The Rendering Pit, the walls feel like they're closing in! But it's only the beginning of a new mystery, and a new struggle! 

The following contains a pretty darn fat vixen and her cuddly cuddle bug bee friend. It contains some sleuthing, some elements of mystery, and lotsa plot!

Written by the marvelous Rabidbadger of FA! Illustrated by yours truly. 

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Genevieve rubbed her head as she dashed (well, okay – hustled – a hustling waddle) through the halls. There was a buzzing in it, a potent one, which she vaguely recognized as the ‘voice’ of her bee drone. She hadn’t really wanted to leave Rigel in the hall like that, but this felt urgent. 

It also felt confusing. She wasn’t wholly sure where the hell she was going. The vixen had a general idea at each turn which way to go, the buzzing seemed to pull her one way or the other, but apart from it getting worse and starting to give her a headache she couldn’t say for sure how far it was going to-

She almost fell over rushing past a T junction as the sensation rapidly shifted gears. Inside Genevieve’s head, the buzz twisted and yanked – letting her know in no uncertain terms she’d gone too far. Glancing at the thing itself though, the vixen found herself staring at an uncomfortably narrow looking hallway into what had to be maintenance corridors. They were dark, humid, uninviting at best. They were also very clearly where her drone was begging her to go.

The first attempt to get in didn’t work so well. She tried to ease herself in, and found her hips wedging up against one of the conduits with a bit of frayed coating. Genevieve glanced in again, a bit worried – but the narrow part looked brief. It seemed to be meant to give easy access to deeper corridors, maybe not even part of the original design of the station. 

It took a bit of thinking to make it work though, Genevieve had to suck in her belly, holding it at the right angle, easing herself sideways with her head at a strange tilt to manage the whole thing – and by the time she reached the other side her balance was shot – which was probably why she tripped and ended up landing in something far softer than she expected. Mostly.

Why on earth she found a mound of pillows – apparently surrounded by little puddles of melted wax – was entirely beyond the vixen, and not a priority in terms of current matters. She was glad it had softened her fall though, even if she landed on something in them that wedged into the small of her back a bit. Genevieve rolled over onto her hands and knees first as she got up, it made things a bit easier with the unsteady footing – and let her see what the harder object was.

Granted, seeing that it was a solid colored latex egg didn’t actually make the find less confusing, but there it was.

Still significantly less important than the buzzing making her skull hurt. When Genevieve reached up to touch her forehead, where the two crystalline nubs (which had started smooth, and were now a little rough to the touch) had grown through. They were hot. They were also singling out a signal and rendering it – routing visual signals to her senses – she could literally ‘see’ a twitching, jolting mass of crimson in the air like it was a smoke trail. Granted, it also left a faint haze of sparks everywhere else, but she had her trail.

And it was short at this point. Blessedly. She rounded two more corners, and saw her bee. It was staring straight at a patch of damaged wall, or repaired maybe. It looked like a meteor strike had come by and been put back together haphazardly. Not shoddily, but there was some clear use of whatever was at hand. Her bee was keeping distance almost like it was afraid – Genevieve found herself with the little thing diving head first at her as soon as she was in line of sight, ramming against the soft spot where her tits and her belly met, and vibrating. 

The buzzing stopped as soon as it touched her.

The fiery, sick haze in the air did not go away, and only in the absence of the buzz did she hear the wrenching whine in the back of her skull more than in her ears. There were a few protruding chunks of fiber-optic cable that seemed to be doing the worst of it. 

Genevieve looked down at the metallic thing hugging itself to her. It was curious – on some level she knew she was anthropomorphizing it a bit. The intelligence in it wasn’t really supposed to be emotional – at least, probably not. People said it wasn’t, but maybe that was just to cover their asses with corporate? No, the bee definitely looked afraid. Which left Genevieve glancing at the signal, wondering about whether or not it was wise to be doing what she’d already decided to do.

Touching the signal with her implant, not with any channels open other than the basic read only view, Genevieve braced down and waited to get some sort of feedback from it. Her arms also curled around her chest, protectively surrounding the bee – and hugging it back, official statements be damned. The signal hit her like a nastier version of that same whining, it couldn’t quite get into her head properly – but for some reason she still felt a bit nauseous. 

It was just noise though, as far as she could tell. Nothing useful came in through it, at least not obviously – at first. 

Genevieve didn’t know precisely how long her bee had been tapping her tits with its antennae when she noticed. The distraction was welcome though, anything to get her head off that whining briefly. The bee tapped her chest twice, then wriggled a bit – enough to get its main torso exposed, and buzzed its wings. It didn’t fly, it just set them moving. Very quickly. Then it did so again. Rapid pulses of movement followed by silence.

It was when it was doing it for the third time that she noticed there was a kind of complimentary, resonating pattern to the buzz and the whine. When her bee was going at it, the red noise sounded a bit more like something with a pattern, which-

“It’s too fast. It- that’s all data, but it’s so – okay, I can filter that, I think. Just isolate a few packets and dial them back, which…”

Genevieve froze as she put the implant to work, swallowing hard – carefully working the software. She hadn’t used these features yet, or most of them for that matter. It was as she began dialing the speed back and beginning playback of the data that she finally thought that calling for a professor first might have been the smartest course of action to take here.

The first attempt she made confirmed one thing – the thing definitely had readable data in there – but it needed another play through at slower speeds. Trying to ignore the whine in her bones growing worse, Genevieve (absently running her hands over her bee’s back while she did it) ran the file a second time. Starts and stops, pulses of signal – it set off just enough recognition in her.

“…That’s binary. Which – it’s actually, it’s like the command structure for-“

Apologies, we did not realize an organic had accessed the stream.

That chill that ran through Genevieve’s body got infinitely worse. Like her blood had stopped, and she’d stepped out into the Winter of her homeworld’s seasonal cycle. Organic. That word was all it took to imply everything. That was an artificial intelligence in there, broaching contact. One that was smart enough to speak intelligently, and to reason based on its surroundings. That latter part wasn’t the issue per se – her bee could do that – but part of the basic educational run for her drone control suite had been a briefing on the rules for Artificial Intelligences on the station.

Namely, if they could talk, they couldn’t be allowed in. If they got in, they didn’t leave – they were forcibly decompiled, analyzed, and shredded. 

The bee had clear limitations, and safeguards installed by the university. Genevieve was pretty sure that was why it ‘screamed’ for her to come help. That, and the little thing just seemed frightened.

Are you there? We – I – wish to speak. This form of communication is inefficient however. Would you consider allowing us to converse via your implant suite? 

The chill running through Genevieve was too potent yet for her to be sure whether or not she had indeed peed a little when that phrase hit her mind unbidden. She’d find out later. At that moment all she could think to do was engage every single signal lockdown her implant had, and run.

Or hustle and waddle, that little dose of reality was still tagging along with her as well. Her bee was quite capable of flying at this point, but she hadn’t thought to let it go, and wouldn’t have even if she did. She ran – and called up a visual map of where she was in the process. That skinny little corridor wasn’t going to cut it, or if nothing else she didn’t want to deal with it. There were other entrances though, ones that were actually meant to be used by people who couldn’t be squeezed into lockers. 

By the time she saw the bulkhead sliding out of the way and revealing open space with fresh (kind of) air on the other side the vixen was almost coherent enough to start acting intelligently beyond the correct instinct she’d had about running. Internally, she began composing a message intended for one of the professors – a hare named Victoria who was one of the specialists in her curriculum (maybe not the ideal one – but she was on duty today).

Seeing one pop up from Victoria when she was only half done furiously trying to word the missive was a bit jarring.

The fact that it told her to go straight to her dorm and wait until someone came to find her on the other hand? She could deal with that. 

She did briefly make a detour just to look at the hallway she’d begun this in, to look for Rigel – but all she saw was a small feline drone scrubbing some blue stains on the floor. This did nothing to help the chills she was trying to wrestle out of her. Genevieve’s pace after that was sluggish, as if her blood really had chilled to molasses and was resisting her movements now. 

It hadn’t really improved much by the time she did reach the dorm, and it didn’t help any to find it empty. She sent off messages to Rigel and Samuel, nothing that explained what was going on, but just asking if they could come by maybe. And that they at least reply, and maybe bring food. Something.

After that? Genevieve slid herself onto her bed and hunched down, with her bee still nestled up to her chest – occasionally brushing her cheeks with its oddly fuzzy antennae. The room was still, and her head was still on a hard lockdown, which made for a long and damning silence before the room’s door opened.

In stepped neither of her bunk mates, but the gray furred large-gutted hare with those unsettling scarlet eyes. 

“Good, you listened.”

The vixen let out a shaky laugh, the kind of thing that was more fear escaping the body than sound.

“What else was I gonna do?”

It was Victoria’s turn with the short laugh, albeit a mirthless one.

“Something stupid, but you didn’t – you hesitated, yes, but that’s not usually going to doom you just by itself. Now, that makeshift communications array.”

It was like a dam breaking inside her. Genevieve felt all that anxiety and fear twist inside and repurpose itself into language, then just start spewing out of her face whether she liked it or not.

“The thing was just screaming code out! I – it – that stuff hurt to be close to even, and my – he – showed me where it was!”

Genevieve promptly held her bee up and out toward the professor. The little drone waggled one of its front legs in what might have been a wave, and looked a bit proud – or at least, she thought so.

“He – well, I realized it was spouting code and then used some filters to dial it back and try to decipher what it was doing, and then it talked to me! In English. It called me ‘organic’ so I’m… thinking artificial intelligence. Like big one. As in way bigger than we allow, but-“

Victoria raised a finger, and despite the six feet or so of distance between them, Genevieve felt it on her lips. The woman was smiling a little though.

“Yes. We tracked a few data packets before the connection broke and that sounds accurate based on what we got. It was a high-end intelligence, at least ship capable, if the amount of data being streamed is anything to go on. It also tried to get you to let it access your implant structure, did it not?”

Genevieve felt a fresh rush of delayed terror at that mere thought. She also hugged her bee again while Victoria advanced a few paces and brushed her fingers against the bee’s antennae. 

She did briefly wonder why her drone shuddered at that contact, but Victoria spoke again before the question got too far in her mind.

“I’m glad you didn’t. It seems your drone had the sense to block all contact too. Good boy. That said – that array was clearly set up by someone on the station. The custodial drones wouldn’t do it – but they’re also on a permanent form of lockdown apart from their mutual connection and basic senses. Yours though – that was a good bit of initiative for such a little thing. But it still means we have a serious problem.”

The vixen exhaled, trying to calm herself – but given that this conversation was making it all too clear the problem wasn’t over it didn’t work as well as it could.

“One of the students – or professors – is helping that… thing reach out.”

Victoria nodded solemnly.

“I’d wager student, personally. Much easier to manipulate. Less careful. Unfortunately, also far more numerous and hard to track down. They might not even be doing this willingly – I managed to dig some of the tags and ownership info out of those data packets. The thing that was trying to worm its way into your head is called Yaela, and what little information we’ve been able to find on her in reports from other corners of The Expanse indicate she’s a massive problem, who decided to become our problem, apparently.”

Genevieve didn’t quite have the energy left to wince when Victoria put her hand on her head. Ordinarily being physically touched by a professor would’ve been terrifying, but she was running out of fear.

“You did good finding this, I mean it. We’ll be assigning you extra credit for the help – and if you find anything else out about this? There’s more to come. As well as possible access to more heavily monitored implants.”

Victoria leaned in a little after that last bit.

“And yes. That is a thinly veiled recruitment pitch. No, helping isn’t optional. We’ll be in touch!”

The professor had long since turned about and marched out of the dorms by the time Genevieve actually processed all those words into something approaching comprehension – which came attached to a fresh rush of cold in her (enough that she was starting to feel like she might end up with sniffles, or maybe she just wanted an excuse to go see if Rigel was in the nurse’s office) – and the confirmation that yes, she had indeed peed a little.