Chapter One: Exquirere Cognitionem

Chapter One: Exquirere Cognitionem Of everything I would have guessed to get in my way, I should have supposed that the language would be the first. "Ordis, can you decipher a thing they're saying?" Ordis's answer is anything but comforting. "I do not have enough data, Operator. From my preliminary assessments the language they're speaking has elements of a sort of proto Grineer, but it's quite far removed. I need more to work with-- and freeing up resources from the combat HUD for analysis would make this much quicker." He pauses. "Operator, we may still extract and do a preliminary data survey from orbit, prepare ourselves better. The information and sophistication density of the {savages} inhabitants of this era's Earth are higher than previously anticipated." Invisibility is the reason for the unmatched infiltration power of the Loki; it makes hard missions easy and impossible ones merely tedious. "We continue on, Ordis. It's a nice bit of no-risk stealth practice. And before you say it, no, I'm not being reckless; I still want full combat HUD available in the extremely unlikely event something actually does go wrong. You can devote full processor cycles to untangling everything after we finish gathering intel." The trickle power of my frame's generative matrix is supplying me with just enough energy to perpetuate my invisibility cloak as long as I take care to stick to the shadows and find a good spot to hide every few minutes. My excuses aside, I like this. After a little time to think about it, the possibility of time travel takes most of the pressure off me. Either I can't get back, and it doesn't matter, or else I can, but because of time travel it doesn't actually matter when I leave, only when I get back. No pressure, no obligation or overarching goal, just an invisible stroll on a safe planet where nobody wants to kill me and nobody needs to be killed by me. It's almost like... what was that Orokin word? A vacation. I can hear the disapproval in Ordis's voice as he replies, "Of course, Operator." It's a good thing I'm invisible, too, because I've never seen such variety of clothing. The plain protective coveralls of the Corpus, the drab and unisex Ostron garb, the ugly but functional armor of the Grineer, even the elegant but unimaginative gowns and robes of the Orokin pale compared to the wild cuts, patterns, and styles of the ancient past. How is it that these barbarians have so wide an array of things to wear? "I almost wish I could ask them how they know what tribes they belong to at a glance," I murmur to myself. I watch through Loki's eyes as a woman walks by wearing a dress that only stretches to mid thigh, low cut enough to clearly see both the valley between her breasts as she approaches, and the span of skin between her shoulder blades as she passes. She's pretty, despite the thin layer of dried, almost skin colored mud she wears, accented by several tones of reddish dust and a greasy, bright red film smeared across her lips. Many others wear similar concealing materials to hide flaws but Loki's eyes are well augmented enough to tell that she doesn't need them. The structures of the buildings are likewise as unfamiliar to me as the clothes. Blocky shapes filled with right angles, made of stone, wood, clay, and other minimally processed natural materials, including barely refined pigments suspended in things like rubber, acetone, and other crude and impure chemical concoctions. Disparate pieces attached to one another by threaded and unthreaded bits of metal, walls laced with threads of copper wrapped in primitive plastics to serve as carriers for one of the most primitive forms of electrical transport imaginable. Which itself is only a step above raw fire. What surprises me the most is how few of them seem... well, like I'm used to seeing. Hungry. Lean. A handful are outright massive, like unarmored kuva warriors but without the kuva borne strength, just rolls of flesh seeping over the sides of barely self propelled seated scooters. I watch, morbidly fascinated as one creeps down the sidewalk to his destination, before laboriously heaving himself out of the machine to retrieve a stack of folded sheets of dried wood pulp with writing and monochrome pictures on them. This-- literature? --acquired, he settles his weight back into the scooter and continues on his way. Still more fascinating to me is the woman with a small satchel of some sort, made of decorative-cut cured animal hide with metal studs dotted on it at varying places. Inside the satchel is what looks like a mutated kubrow pup. The most amazing thing to me is that almost everything is mechanically joined. It shouldn't be a surprise to me; they're clearly long before the advent of widespread solid state construction. Without it, truly interlocking parts are impossible to create, and solid state devices a complete impossibility. Yet, looking around, I can see a thousand examples of them making do. I'd think that they're content because they don't know what they don't have, the barbarity of what they live under, except from them came the Orokin, whose lusts, desires, and ambition had no limits. Or was it simply that, with the removal of all limits, they developed those lusts, desires, and ambitions to match? Which was cause and which effect? Seeing the precursor and knowing what resulted-- or will result-- it's plainly obvious to me that the Tenno way is better for all involved. Power must be tempered with discipline and training. The ability to grant life or deliver death must be personal, not delegated. The Lotus made us what we are because we already had great power. Greater, really, than the Orokin. There really could be no other choice than to ensure our wills were like fersteel, to keep us from blindly engaging in excess. And even amongst us, there are those who exercise their power questionably. "How is that translation coming, Ordis?" "I've already assembled a lexicon," he replies. "Of course, new words are coming in constantly, and some of them appear to be a completely unrelated language based on the pronunciation of different phonemes as well as their dominance in used conversation, although the subset of users that make use of the secondary language tend to speak the first language with the phoneme balance-" "Is that a 'yes' or a 'no'?" I interrupt, feeling a bit impatient. "It is not ready to use, Operator. I still need more {experimental subjects} data." "Then recon will continue," I say. I enter a large, flat structure where many people appear to be going, apparently a commercial building of some kind. It becomes almost immediately apparent that it's a market place, not unlike the Ostron market near the exit leading to the plains of Eidolon, except much more organized. Containers and bags made of plastids hold what appear to be breads of varying shapes, sizes, and colors. I remain out of the sight of the various cameras dotted along the ceiling any time I need to recover energy, narrowly missing being spotted by a child as I return to invisibility just before they turn their head to look in my direction. I'm too distracted by all the bright colors and pictures on the packaging; I need to be more careful. It takes a little under twenty minutes, but I manage to digitize samples of not only foods, but some of the colored muds, lip smear, and colored dust from one of the rows of shelves despite multiple overlapping cameras. I'm tempted to plant castanas on them to simplify things, but first, I'm not fighting Grineer or Corpus. I don't want to leave a bunch of property damage here, especially as I imagine most of these machines are probably made by hand, a much more laborious and tedious process than simply programming more of them into a nanofoundry. And second, as I'm trying to make this a pure scouting mission, it matters if the damage is discovered later. Third, in this day and age it's not possible that standardized omnimunitions for weapon classes exist yet. If I have to escape hostile pursuit I'm going to need those castanas.  Wandering through the aisles, the crowd is thinning out, and a fast peek through the sliding doors shows that the dusk of my arrival had long since faded into night. A voice announces something tinnily across a public address system of some sort, and the other occupants of the store begin hurrying, getting a last few things before hustling to the front of the marketplace. Lights in other businesses in the area are already out. "How's that translation coming, Ordis?" "Spoken translation is nearing ready for use. I will need more samples of the writing, though." I think back to an aisle I passed earlier, with colorized imagery printed on the front of stacks of wood pulp sheets, more of the possible literature. "Might be able to help you there." --- I take one copy of everything, escaping the marketplace just as the last of the venders leave, by replacing myself with a wandering not-kubrow. Its confused noises readily distract the person locking up, and I make my way back to the abandoned lot I arrived in with no-one the wiser. Except the lander isn't here. There's a bunch of raggedly dressed people burning small encapsulations of some kind of pungent smelling leaves wrapped in pieces of wood pulp sheets. They're speaking back and forth at one another loudly, drinking something that smells sharp and unpleasant. "Translation software is ready for testing, Operator!" announces Ordis cheerfully. The babble of incomprehensible sounds resolves into something that has meaning. "-that verminous insect around! Don't bifurcated toe ungulate the unwelcome plant, man!" "Yeah, billow billow pass, you know the rules!" ... Sort of. "Who has the sipping tube? We've got the mirror and the fine edged flat blade, but nobody is taking action lines without the sipping tube!" "What, you don't have a currency exchange note five denomination to fold cylindrically?" "Ordis, does any of this make sense to you?" I ask helplessly. "It's... nonsense. Completely devoid of anything resembling meaning." "I apologise, Operator, but... within a point zero seven percent margin of error, I believe this is what they are saying." He pauses. "I fear the difference is idiomatic, but we somehow lack the cultural context needed to derive the intended communication." "... Great. Just great. On top of being some kind of proto Grineer hodgepodge, they also speak in archaic riddles." "Less riddles than vestiges of heritage and shared superstitions," Ordis responds. "There are no touchstones, no common points of indisputable reference to our time. The digitized copies of literature you provided has allowed me to deduce they have approximately twenty six phoneme derivative symbols to their writing system, but their spoken language-- if it truly is their spoken language, and not a separate language entirely-- consists of forty four." "So you need something to bridge writing with speech," I finish for him. "Exactly so. Without this, conjecture and semantic error is unavoidable." I look back at the group of scruffy looking people, still burning and inhaling their herbs. "They do have electronic traffic, though. Have you patched into communications yet?" "No, Operator," he responds with a definite bit of annoyance, "I have not had time to devote the necessary computing power to do so. Even if the local computing resources are crude and slow, I still need to analyze and decrypt security measures, crash firewalls, decompile copies of local operating systems for interface conversions, install back doors, and do all of it at speeds that their horrendously primitive equipment can operate because of the appalling limitations of silicon based processors." "The Liset can't do all of that at once?" I ask. "Even with whatever security measures they could muster in this time, this should be like dusting a shelf." "All processor cycles have been devoted to HUD, IFF, data gathering, and translation," Ordis answers. "I believe your word were, 'You can devote full processor cycles to everything after we finish gathering intel,' but I {am completely correct} may be mistaken." I groan. "In other words, I made impulsive demands and did this to myself." "You felt you needed to seize the initiative," Ordis says defensively. "Decisive action is frequently an appropriate response to dire circumstances." I feel annoyed with myself. "Where's the Liset?" A waypoint marker pops up in my HUD. "Forty meters ahead between the two-- Operator, I'm detecting an unusual phenomenon." I see it too. It's a billowing black cloud ahead of us, looking like a particulate haze but with absolutely zero albedo or transparency. "What kind of..." The haze disperses, and our conversation is drastically derailed as a trio of what at first glance appears to be a cross between infested chargers and very small juggernauts bursts from the darkness, charging down an alley and smashing through a ground floor door on a nearby structure. I don't need a translator to understand the panicked screams from inside. As the collection of scraggly looking people in the dirt lot scatter in the opposite direction of the disturbance, I have time to register the presence of four figures nearby in bizarre clothing even compared to the others I've seen today. But I don't have time to think about that; the presence of any infested means I need to kill them before they get the chance to spread spores. "Infested!" I snap out, grabbing my primary. Ideally, I'd have my souped up Penta along for an anti infested strike. Unfortunately, I'd anticipated only humans, maybe some primitive vehicles and equipment, so I elected to bring my Stradavar instead, counting on its high penetration to be able to deal with metal plates and armor on the unlikely event I had to fight. Still, I trust my Stradavar against technocyte monsters over my short supply of Castanas or my rapier. All of this flashes through my mind in an instant. The reflex to fight and kill bypasses thought, a reflex borne of thousands of slain enemies on one mission or another for the Lotus and the Tenno Council. From behind me one of the four figures whistles and shouts something but I'm more concerned with stopping the lead Not-Charger as it dashes towards a startled looking man who's just beginning to scream out; I replace him with myself, spinning in place and squeeze off a quick burst point blank into the thing's face. Whatever this was, it wasn't an infested; nothing technocyte in nature dies this easily. The large, serrated teeth scatter wildly as the gaping jaw and appointed head both splatter explosively. I don't waste time; I fire several more rounds into each of the other two, their bodies likewise unresisting to the penetrating rounds. The last staggers a few steps and snarls at me in a fashion vaguely reminiscent of a kubrow, but I toggle the gun to semi automatic and fire two more shots into it. The man I swapped with is sitting huddled against a metal pole, presumably for utilities, while the four people from outside are frozen in place. Then, the one wearing a full face mask charges forward in my direction, her posture betraying rage as loudly as her screams. "Operator... I do not believe revealing yourself was a wise decision," Ordis says belatedly. "I'm detecting no trace of infested DNA profiles on my sensor readings." I'm already fading back into invisibility and clinging to the ceiling, ready to leave.  One of the others in the alley, wearing a black helmet and black dyed animal hide grabs the woman and wrestles her backwards as a smoke screen of some kind envelops the four of them. The rest of the occupants of the ground floor are now scrambling around, some away from the smashed in door, while others in matching black and white clothing rush to the doorway and begin firing guns into the alley. Analysis of the muzzle velocities and projectile weights of the weapons is much as I expected, with the strongest of them having approximately a third of the stopping power of a Lato. "Any idea what they were, then? And even if they weren't infested, those teeth certainly weren't for show. I may have saved a few people here." "They appear to be a genetic modification of an ancestor species to the {filthy animal} kubrow. The translation matrix is tendering the word, 'dog'. As for saving lives, you may be correct, Operator. Still, I cannot help but wonder what we stumbled onto here." "You and me both," I mutter. I glance to the HUD terrain map. "Maybe coming down here first thing, in person, was a bad idea. I hate not knowing the language." Ordis does a passable job of not implying 'I told you so' with his tone. "Very good, Operator. Shall I prioritize gathering more data and deciphering writing and speech?" "Yeah. Thank you Ordis."