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<h3><span class = alttext>Constants and Relations</span></h3> A particular measurable property of an isolated physical system that does not change as the system evolves over time is defined by a <i>conservation law</i>. Conservation laws exist within the framework of Noether's Theorem as symmetries, a concept fundamental to the construction of our Universe. For each differentiable symmetry of nature, there is an exact law. Conservation laws appear in two categorical definitions, these so called "exact" conservation laws and "approximate" laws. For the sake of clarity and brevity, the approximate laws - many of which are highly localized and relativistic to obscure areas of study - will be omitted. The exact conservation laws are listed below: <<nobr>><ul>Conservation of mass-energy.</ul> <ul>Conservation of linear momentum.</ul> <ul>Conservation of angular momentum.</ul> <ul>Conservation of space-time.</ul> <ul>Conservation of electric charge.</ul> <ul>Conservation of chromodynamic potential.</ul> <ul>Conservation of charge, parity, and time reversal.</ul><</nobr>><<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|prereq-2]]</div> </div><</nobr>> Protocol 30x30<<link "Back">><<if tags().includes("game-info")>><<goto $return>><<else>><<run Engine.backward()>><</if>><</link>> <!-- since the scrollbar is built into the passages container, this code resets it to the top each time a new passage is loaded --> <<script>> var passages = document.getElementById("passages"); passages.scrollTop = 0; <</script>> <!-- code to reset the page title in the top right; can be changed or removed altogether as necessary --> <<if tags().includes("title")>> <<elseif tags().includes("credits")>><h1>Credits</h1> <<elseif tags().includes("character")>> <h1>Character</h1> <<elseif tags().includes("codex")>> <h1>Codex</h1> <<else>><h1>$chapter</h1> <</if>> <!-- SETUP --> <<set $chapter to " ">> <<set $choice to 0>> <!-- EQUIPMENT --> <<set $tool_pipe to false>> <<set $tool_gauntlet to false>> <!-- STORY STATE --> <<set $escape to false>> <<set $fix to false>> <<set $injured_window to false>> <<set $injured_lowg to false>> <<set $injured_armory to false>> <<set $alarms_on to false>> <!-- NEW GAME + --> <<set $ng to false>> <<set $end to 0>>An interactive fiction game.<style> #ui-bar {display:none;} #passages {width:150vw;margin:0;background-image:var(--banner-top),var(--banner-bottom);background-repeat:no-repeat;background-size:55%;background-position:top left, bottom right;overflow:hidden;scrollbar-width:none;font-family:var(--header-font);transition:0s;padding:0;} ::-webkit-scrollbar {width:0px;} .passage {text-align:center;transition:0s;} #passages a:before {content: none;} #story {margin-left:0;} h1 {text-align:center;margin-top:35vh;color:var(--text);} @media screen and (max-width: 800px) {#story {margin:0;}} </style> <h1>Protocol</h1><<if Save.autosave.ok() and Save.autosave.has()>><<link "Resume Game">><<script>>Save.autosave.load()<</script>><</link>> | <</if>><<if $ng is false>><<link "New Game" "prereq-1">><<set $chapter to "Prerequisite">><</link>><<elseif $ng is true>><<link "New Game +" "Startup">><<run Dialog.setup("New Game +");Dialog.wiki(Story.get("New Game +").processText());Dialog.open();>><</link>><</if>> | <<link "Load Game">><<run UI.saves()>><</link>> | <<link "Settings">><<run UI.settings()>><</link>> | [[Content Warnings|cw][$chapter to "..."]]//FOR CHOICES/PROCEED: <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage]]</div> </div><</nobr>> //FOR GLITCHED CHOICES/PROCEED <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> <span class ='glitch' data-text ='FLASHING TEXT'>[[Advance.|passage]]</span></div> </div><</nobr>> //FOR GLITCHED TEXT <span class="glitch" data-text="alt message">non glitch text</span> //FOR LINEAR SECTIONS: DELETE passage() <<if ndef $PassageNo>><<set $PassageNo = 1>><</if>><<switch $PassageNo>><<case 1>> Text here. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 2>> Text here. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 3>> Text here. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 4>> Text here. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|NEXT][$PassageNo = 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><</switch>>To call her a star would be facetious. A person and a star are two quite different things. She would know; she studies stars, that is her purpose, her life's calling, all she was meant to do. All she was meant to do, staring out at the blankness at pinpricks of cold bitter light while the one who burnt warmly and brightly called her back like a siren, again and again. That, however, isn't the point. Purpose means nothing to the space between stars. Neither do people. When considered, a person shares more with a star than perhaps they would first consider. They live the same lives on different scales. When density in a molecular cloud reaches a critical threshold, it collapses. A calculated yet brutal dance, filamentous tendrils of gravitational potential energy reaching out, like seeking like, accelerating, exponential growth unbridled as breakneck collisions gather mass. This mass, the scientists call a <i>protostar</i> - precursor to a main-sequence star - fragmented and somehow still condensing, sputtering and throwing off cosmic radiation, leaking raw energy, rendering both gravity and geometry apart seemingly in violation of that first fundamental law; matter cannot be created nor destroyed. And here, both seem to happen simultaneously, accretion disks hurling excess matter out into the reaches of space as the nuclear strong force and gravity crush superheated atoms closer and closer until finally, born in an eon of fury is a star. Human birth is, on the cosmic scale, far less momentous and destructive, a horribly biological thing born of positive feedback loops of hormones and the contraction of muscles signaling the end of a gestational period, in which haploid cells have become a diploid cell have become a zygote have become an embryo have become a fetus, will be born an infant. A necessary evil, the laborious process being a supposed powerful or prideful thing, perhaps made so to contrast the supposed reason for the process being agony. Fault, evidently, does not lie in the organic process of nerve signaling nor in the default for damage to soft tissue being pain - but in a supposed punishment from a long-dead deity who cursed the woman, the one who bore the root of all sin for having partaken in the fruit of knowledge, with pain and directive alike. To be fruitful and multiply. A simple biological function given theological credence; a directive taken up by humans happily, multiplying until they almost killed a planet, a solar system, half a galaxy. But that is a story for another day - the multiplicative properties of humanity are not of interest to the stars. Nor are their dying wishes; stars too will die, but find themselves far too concerned with the act of living to care in what manner they die, not all all like the human who too often has a hopeless preference, who says - <i>No, no, I won't die like this, I can't</i>. There has been many a prayer to the unhearing stars to save a singular dying human with their breath bloody on their lips and glossy emptiness spreading across their open eyes, to lead them to salvation, to let them live yet another day. The stars do not only not listen; they don't care. There are terrible ways to die. There are yet more terrible ways to live. Consider the binary stars. Humans would call them codependent. Parasitic, even. The poets would call their relationship romantic and fated - Calypso and the castaways she was doomed to fall in love with, Stockholm Syndrome, wherein the captive slowly grows to love their captor. Scientifically, a binary star system is one in which the pair of stars which revolve around a common center of mass. How they come to be is unknown and variable, as are the many ways in which humans decide on their pairings. Stars don't have a choice; they are beholden to gravity and matter and forces humans could scarcely begin to comprehend with their feeble mathematics. In one theory, an unlikely one stretching every preconceived notion of the universe, a lonely stellar body catches another. Near impossible by every law of stellar kinematics - and yet it is the one most enduring. Because it is the one most human. Can you stand to imagine the aching loneliness of a star, isolated on a timescale exceeding that of all human creation? Not bright enough to appear on all but the most powerful of telescopes and overlooked for its dimness even then. Not massive enough to have collected enough dust and matter to form a planetary ring, a solar system to warm, life to incubate. Alone. It takes years - no - centuries - no - millennia - for its meager gift of light to reach <i>anything</i>. Perhaps by chance or borne of fate or probability, another star draws near. Near enough to offer a hand, for the gravitational fields to intertwine and entangle, for the two objects hurtling towards one another to slow. To begin a slow orbit, one around the other, one around the other. Knowing at last the light of another, to know its pull. Could you imagine, light after eons of dark, warmth after eons of cold? Could you blame one for the greed lying at its core? Not greed; the stars do not know want, not like humans do, but rather the overwhelming nuclear forces at play, fusion and fission, gravity and magnetism. After immeasurable time alone and much more spent in the eclipsing orbit of another, one star draws nearer. Pulls at the fabric of the other, leeches at it, tastes the coronal flames and decides it wants more fuel for its fiery hearth. And the lonely star, not knowing that this is the beginning of the end or perhaps aware and still willing, will surrender what it wants. Will give it all it wants until the once generous host, having offered its love and light, dwindles away until it can give no more, not without ceasing to be. It will cease to be. This is how that story always ends. It can end no other way. That is the sacrifice made in knowing the light and warmth of another. It must end. Stars die far more magnificently than humans do. Humans, for all their zeal, cannot match billions of years of barely contained nuclear fervor. Biological death is messy and complicated and has a legal definition, and results in excess carbon and other elements returned to the soil, a blessing to those unsung heroes, detritivores. Biological death is always the result of multiple organ failure, systems going one after the other after the other until only the lonely brain remains. And the brain relinquishes the senses, ending last with hearing and touch, though electrical activity remains often for minutes. Some say this is the soul preparing to leave the body, some the last desperate attempt to wake the bodily systems, some one final review of memory. It doesn't matter. Brain activity stops and all ceases to be, dead and gone and steadily cooling to equilibrium. A small thing, an almost peaceful thing, even when found amidst tremendous violence. Stars can die that way too; guttering out of fuel, consuming itself and cooling, losing luminosity and releasing mass - a prayer to keep the fires burning, bleeding energy into the abyss until nothing remains but a heavy core of iron. They can pull further and further inwards, building strength for a different kind of ignition - a neutron star burning as cold as the void and spewing radiation in a terminal, lethal offering - or they can completely and utterly collapse - razing space and time alike to form a deep sunk gravity well hell-bent on consuming all who dare the event horizon - a black hole. Or, they can make their end as violent as their beginning, reigniting the nuclear fires one last time or collapsing with enough force to outshine an entire galaxy, supernovae whose shockwaves cause ripples in the still surface of spacetime, an upheaval strong enough to trigger the birth of new stars, nebulae born of the ravaging force of cosmic death. <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|wake-up][$chapter to "..."]]</div> </div><</nobr>>And when they are dead, the corpses of stars yield one final gift. Born of their dying outbursts are heavier and heavier compounds. Carbon, the backbone of life. You are a living thing. Oxygen, necessary for cellular respiration and photosynthesis alike. Your lungs ache for lack of breath. Sodium and potassium, the movement of their ions sparking the electrical impulse necessary for nerve function and thought. Your thoughts are blurred images and words that stutter along in a confused narration. Calcium, used in the construction of bones and necessary for their repair. You have likely fractured your skull. Iron, its oxidative properties commandeered by the protein hemoglobin, lending the liquid its distinctive red color. You are bleeding, more slowly now, a ruddy stain across the sleeve and breast of your pale uniform. You are a living thing amongst the stars. The stars were not meant for you nor any living thing, for that matter; space is dark and airless and cold and uncaring. But humans are ambitious and curious and thus - this metal tube was once your home. Is now your home. Was always your home. Observatory Station Calypso-54414d, an orbital stellar observatory under the command of the UIPSC, housing an astronomical infrared survey telescope pointed at some distant patch of stars. It measured distortions in light and heat, peering back along the curve of time to the very start, when the universe was confused and aflame. It was looking for No. That's not right. You were looking for You were looking down at your hands. You were looking down at the lines in your palms and the gently swaying shadows from the gently swaying lightbar that hangs half-detached from the ceiling. You were looking for the words. It was looking for It was looking for It was looking for It was looking for the same thing as you, not words but the pale dot of memory growing paler and more indistinct. Because you are realizing with each passing second that the hands you rest upon your thighs are unfamiliar, as is the uniform you wear, as is the room you occupy. <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|esc/fix-choice]]</div> </div><</nobr>>At first, you do not attempt to rise. Your head is impossibly heavy and the subtle rocking of the station promises to carry you gently back to sleep. At first, the thought of not fighting is a comfort. This is where you fell, this is where you rested, this is where you will lie. The seconds tick into minutes. Sleep does not find you again. You stare down at the unfamiliar hands, at the long legs covered by an ill-fitting uniform, at the untied boots. There is no comfort in being a stranger to this body. Your body. You move as if you were controlling the body from afar, as if this were some ill-fitting glove you've tried jamming your hand into, as if you gaze in on a scene from behind a pane of frosted glass. Glass crunches under your boots as you rise from the marked position on the wall, the rusty smear denoting where you can only assume your memory was lost against the wall. These are not your quarters. There is nothing for you here. The compact bunk crammed into the wall is made and covered in dust. The footlocker has left scrapes in the tile floor, though it remains closed and padlocked. There are no personal effects, or none that you would recognize, could recognize in your brief appraisal. There is little light and less heat, the light fixture smashed against the floor and the opaque emergency seal clamped over the window, frigid to the touch. There is nothing for you here. There is nothing for you here, surveilling the abysmally gray cube of a room one final time before squeezing through the gap in the propped door. You are You are here. <i>Here</i> is Observatory Station Calypso-5441d, an orbital stellar observatory under the command of the UIPSC. <i>Here</i> is home. Home is a wound that does not close. This place was not your first home, that, you know. Your first home was heavy with the taste of salt on your tongue and the sun across your back, was dappled in light through the thin apertures of leaves, a thousand little eclipses in half moons across knotted hardwood floors. Home is an ache like that of your brow. Home is not found here, in the semi-circular hallway, metal and carbon composite, arterial pipes and venous branches of sheathed wires, a pseudo-neural pneumatic network, a beating heart splayed across the walls and hidden under the slatted floor. Thinking. Breathing. Like a hand on a lover's back, epithelial, ethereal. You are alone. You should not be. You are You are You are breathing too heavily, hyperventilating. The thought is evidently distressing to the disconnected body, and unnerving to your addled brain. You are alone and lost, two things which should be impossible. The station is a ring, a closed loop, an ouroboros. The reasoning for the design is simple; the telescope is suspended by tethers in the center, protected and buffered from solar winds and micrometeor showers, able to be accessed and observed from any point on the station. Simple, sound, logical. As simple of a statement as saying you should not be alone. There were other crew. You remember them. You think you remember them. Time forms a closed curve, memory falls somewhere along it - you have perhaps been here before, you have walked these halls before, there have been others like you. There have been others like you, but you are alone. You were always this way. You were You will be You are The fingers on your aching brow come away sticky, rusty, a sharp metallic scent you can taste at the back of your throat, familiar to you even now, even like this. You were hurt. Are hurt. The tightness in your chest returns, accompanied by the burning of tears in your eyes. You hurt yourself, and here you are - like a child who's skinned their knees on asphalt and looked down to see strawberry-red skin - here you are crying. You shouldn't be, you've experienced far worse, you've hurt and been hurt in far more spectacular ways, there are far more pressing issues. Your wounds pale in comparison to that of the station. It cannot speak nor bleed, at least, not like a person can. But you know - you know by the red scab seals on every door and window, by the dimming and flickering of lights and burst bulbs, by the shuddering of the station as something shifts in the fluctuation of the planet's tidal pull, by the frost that trails the fingertips you drag along the wall and the way your breath hangs crystalline in the still air - you know that the station is wounded, horribly so. You know. There's not much more to know. Nothing you could find the words for. You are. You are someone who woke alone with broken skull and bloody brow in someone else's room and uniform aboard an afflicted space station. You know more about the station than you do yourself. What you know is contradictory; this is your only home, this was not your first home, you are alone, you were not alone. Nothing will be resolved like this, palms pressed against curved wall, heavy head hanging limply between raised shoulders. <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[You need to leave.|tunnels][($chapter to "Escape Protocol") , ($escape to true)]]</div> <div class = choice-item> [[You need to fix this.|tunnels][($chapter to "Repair Protocol") , ($fix to true)]]</div> </div><</nobr>><b>Protocol contains content warnings for the following:</b> <<nobr>><ul>Blood and descriptions of injuries, including self-inflicted injuries</ul> <ul>Violence</ul> <ul>Death, including death by suicide</ul> <ul>Unreality</ul> <ul>Shaking/flickering text effects</ul><</nobr>><<nobr>><div class = choices> <<if $ng is false>><div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|prereq-1][$chapter to "Prerequisite"]]</div><</if>> <div class = choice-item> [[Return to menu.|Startup]]</div> </div><</nobr>><h3><span class = alttext>Fundamental Laws of Thermodynamics</span></h3><i>The Zeroth Law:</i> If two thermodynamic systems are in thermal equilibrium with each other, and also separately in thermal equilibrium with a third system, then the three systems are in thermal equilibrium with each other. <i>The First Law:</i> The total energy of any isolated system - one that cannot exchange energy or matter - is constant; energy can be transformed from one form to another, but can be neither created nor destroyed. <i>The Second Law:</i> Every process occurring in nature involving an irreversible or spontaneous change from one equilibrium state to another will result in an increase in entropy; this remains true for reversible processes, the sum of the entropies remains unchanged. <i>The Third Law:</i> The entropy of a system approaches a constant value when its temperature approaches absolute zero; it is thus impossible for any process, no matter how idealized, to reduce the total entropy of a system to absolute zero in a finite number of operations. <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|prereq-3]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<nobr>><span class = flashback><i><ul>Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in</ul> <ul>perfect light;</ul> <ul>I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the</ul> <ul>night.</ul></i></span><</nobr>> -Sarah Williams, <i>The Old Astronomer</i> (1868) <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|on-stars][$chapter to "On Stars"]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<if ndef $PassageNo>><<set $PassageNo = 1>><</if>><<switch $PassageNo>><<case 1>><<if $escape is true>>You need to leave. You need to leave now. Something is wrong. You are wounded. The station is wounded. You could fix this, suture the wounds back together, graft patches into the hull, mend blood vessels and pneumatic lines alike. You would leave scars, weak points begging to be torn apart once again. And the cycle would continue. Should continue, if this were a different cycle or you a different woman. Something is different, something fundamental to this station. Fundamental to you. You fear there is too much damage, that you do not recognize the solution, that this is a bridge too far, a task too difficult. You fear that you would not recognize it, having saved it; staring at Theseus' ship and not recognizing the once-proud prow. You have to leave. There is of course the small issue of every door - save the room you hauled yourself out of - being sealed. A precaution - something with implications you would rather not consider. Escape, then, has a preliminary condition. First, you'll need to navigate to the Administration Cortex, to lift the worst of the lockdown and open every necessary door. Second, and more crucially, the hangar bay. You wish you remembered if there were ships left, if the emergency shuttles were still docked, if the hangar itself still functional. You are left with blind hope, and nagging doubts that burrow under your skin. What if there isn't anything in the hangar? What if this is all for nothing? What if you're wrong?<<elseif $fix is true>>You can fix this. You need to fix this. Something is wrong. You are wounded. The station is wounded. But this is your purpose; when things go wrong you fix them, you always do. Suture the wounds back together, graft patches into the hull, mend blood vessels and pneumatic lines alike. You would leave scars where new material reinforces old, holding the structure together with reinvigorated purpose. And the cycle would continue. Should continue; that's the way things are, the way things have always been, will always be. The station breaks. You wake. You fix things. You slip back into slumber, to awaken again when the station calls for aid. Something is wrong, this time. Not the damage - you can fix that, you think, you hope. You. Something is wrong with <i>you</i>. You should remember more than the taste of blood on your lips. Every time you have awoken you have had purpose, directive, an illuminated path and an enumerated set of tasks. You woke to sealed doors - something with implications you would rather not consider. If there is no directive, than you must create your own. First, you'll need to navigate to the Engineering Core, to bypass the lockdown, clear your path, and run diagnostics. Second, the Supply Depot, to gather the materials necessary for the repair. And finally - you will complete your repair. You must. Failure is not an option and yet - nagging doubts burrow their way under your skin. What if you can't fix things, this time? What if this is all for nothing? What if you're wrong?<</if>> What if you were wrong about everything? <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 2>>You sink to the ground, running fingers along the slats in the floor. The body is breathing heavily again, panicking without your permission. Lightheaded, the dim hallway doubling and blurring. <<if $escape is true>>You need to leave. This will only get worse. You need to leave.<<elseif $fix is true>>You need to fix this. This will only get worse. You need to fix this<</if>> Somehow, strength overcomes terror in the unwilling limbs. Somehow, you know what to look for. The doors are sealed and the windows clamped, so you haul yourself along unsteadily, half looking, half feeling for what hides amongst the floor panels. There are still methods for traversal, emergency passages for maintenance and the direst of situations that exist in the space between floors and the gaps in the many-layered walls. One of these passages is marked out in red, a red square, red lights, red handle in the floor. The heavy hatch rises slowly with the slightest of a whine from the hinges. An empty, silent space, cold and still, greets you. Apprehension rises like bile in your throat; you choke it back and stare into the pitch blackness below. Trying to find some courage as the passageway beckons. One foot in, clutching the edge with already-sweaty hands. Two feet in, standing on a grooved rung and looking upwards at the hall you woke in. At a dead end. You have to leave. You have to do this. You close the hatch, turning the handle so that nobody could follow without you knowing. Precaution. Or paranoia. You descend. Immersed in the dark, you descend. One step at a time. You descend until your back drags along the padded tunnel wall behind you. One step at a time. The body is tired, arms weak, legs uncooperative. No rest, not yet. Lights mark offshoot tunnels, signal the changing of floors. The dead-air spaces are hollow and unwelcoming, toothless black mouths. You're unsure of how much ground you've covered -<i>was this one floor or five, was that side passage a way out, are you lost, are you scared</i> - but you have not yet reached the <<if $escape is true>>Administrative level<<elseif $fix is true>>Engineering level.<</if>> Not yet. One step at time. You descend. One step at a time. You descend. The passage tightens as the ring of the station curves. Your chest tightens with it. There has been no light save for the pinprick glow of the passing cross-tunnels, no reprieve but the labored breaths you take with ribs pressing into rungs. You know nothing but climbing, hooking your arms into the ladder for a moments rest, the metal slick with sweat or blood - it matters not - cold against your cheek. You must continue, your heartbeat pounding in the silence between breaths. You must. One step at a time. You descend. You You cannot stand the darkness any longer. Cannot stand the silence or the confinement, the terror belaying your descent further into the belly of the station. Every movement is underlined with pain, every thought with fear. There is no escaping, the esophageal tube seemingly closing in on you. Some time ago, you clung to the ladder for fear of falling. Then, your back struck the wall. Now, the breadth of your shoulders touches each side of the tube, you fear for another narrowing, for there to be a point where you cannot longer move and face your demise strangled in the entrails of the station. You are afraid. But surely it cannot be much further now. Surely. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|tunnel-choice][$PassageNo = 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><</switch>>You took the first horizonal passage you encountered. It had become impossible to proceed. Not physically, as you had feared. But something sunk deep into your thoughts, something horrible, irrational, something that felt like the body's panic. You had taken the first passage you encountered, squeezed into the space between rungs, crawled along on your belly. Inch by inch, you - hand over hand, you - doubt by doubt, you You are here and you do not know where <i>here</i> is. There should be an exit. There needs to be an exit. You want out, before your mind or this station eats you alive. Four red lights will mark the exit. Desperation starves you for oxygen. Inch by inch, you - <i><span class = flashback>Why are you here?</span></i> - hand over hand, you - <i><span class = flashback>Why are you the only one here?</span></i> - doubt by doubt, you - <i><span class = flashback>What's wrong with you?</span></i> Tears flood your eyes, sobs wrack your body. You want out. That's all you want. You bargain with the unhearing walls, with the unending dark, with anything that could listen. You scream your voice ragged, ringing off the walls and echoing back eerily, a ghost of your terror. Inch by inch, you - <i><span class = flashback>Why are you here?</span></i> - hand over hand, you - <i><span class = flashback>Why are you the only one here?</span></i> - doubt by doubt, you - <i><span class = flashback>What's wrong with you?</span></i> <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Why are you here?|tunnel-flashback][($choice to 1) , ($chapter to "...")]]</div> <div class = choice-item> [[Why are you the only one here?|tunnel-flashback][($choice to 2) , ($chapter to "...")]]</div> <div class = choice-item> [[What's wrong with you?|tunnel-flashback][($choice to 3) , ($chapter to "...")]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<if ndef $PassageNo>><<set $PassageNo = 1>><</if>><<switch $PassageNo>><<case 1>> <<if $choice is 1>><span class = flashback>Purpose is a damning thing. She was meant to study the stars. She was meant to be a methodical and exacting scientist, with her pattern-seeking brain and disdain for social interaction. She had the capability to discover, to interpret, to understand. And now, she had the gateway to the universe promised before her. It sat in the palm of her outstretched hand. <i>This is the opportunity of a lifetime,</i> she had told the other woman, the one who sat across the table from her with a sad smile curving her lips. <i>I'm going to be a part of something larger than myself, larger than all of us,</i> she had said with pride and glee, gesturing up to the ceiling and beyond, where some miles overhead sky broke into space. <i>Why are you crying?</i> She asked of the woman whose hands she held. <i>Can't you see this is a good thing?</i> <i>Stay,</i> she pleaded. <i>Stay with me. If you go, I'll never get you back.</i> Purpose is a damning thing. There is not a universe in which she did not leave.</span><<elseif $choice is 2>><span class = flashback>Loneliness is an inevitable thing. She came here seeking answers. For herself, perhaps, and for everyone else. Everything else. For the name of science. To follow in the footsteps of Copernicus and Galileo and Newton and Einstein and Bohr, to stand on the shoulders of giants and look further than they could have ever imagined. It was so easy to get lost in her work. Crews would come and go, the ever watchful station letting her know when it was time to welcome the new crop of fresh-faced scientists and cryo-thawed workers, when it was time to send them on their way. She would not have known nor cared otherwise. She was an isolated constant like that of the equations that crawled off her whiteboards and onto the walls and floors and windows. The calls were frequent at first. Fewer, as time went on. Shorter. More terse, hostile, dismissive. A missed birthday. A barely-remembered anniversary. The smile lines lost in the decay of signal or the fading warmth. <i>When are you coming home?</i> She would always ask, a spark of hope in those dark eyes. <i>I miss you, you know? Come home, please. It'll be like you never left.</i> Loneliness is an inevitable thing. There is not a universe in which she would return.</span><<elseif $choice is 3>><span class = flashback>Ambition is a fatal thing. She came here seeking answers. This was her purpose, a methodical scientist, a woman who stood on the shoulders of giants and promised herself that she would succeed where they failed. If want were all it took to force the universe to divulge its secrets, it would have surrendered itself to her undying will. She made no headway in the first month. She told herself to be patient. To live up to the image she had painted of herself. A year passed. Two. Three. Rotations came and went. The life she left behind faded. Five. Ten. The station itself urged her to take a break. She was on the verge of something great, she knew. The event horizon loomed. Fifteen. Twenty. She was afraid she'd started to run out of time, not recognizing the wild-eyed glare of her reflection. The station soothed her fears. She and it had come to a mutual understanding. She understood, spoke the same language. Data, patterns, cycles. It reminded her in a lover's whisper what she was here to do. What she could accomplish. She murmured the names of long-dead scientists like a prayer, considered how her own name would sound in such illustrious company. The whispers encouraged her. <i>Look at the constants,</i> they told her. <i>See what there is to be changed. See what stays the same. You have time, still. You will always have time, here.</i> Ambition is a fatal thing. There is not a universe in which she was not consumed by it.</span><</if>> <<nobr>><div class=choices> <<if $escape is true>><div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][($PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1) , ($chapter to "Escape Protocol")]]</div><</if>> <<if $fix is true>><div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][($PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1) , ($chapter to "Repair Protocol")]]</div><</if>> </div><</nobr>><<case 2>>Your fingertips are raw, your hands and arms ache; you have clawed at the walls of the tunnel in some desperate prayer attempt to free yourself. You have crawled so far down this accursed tube that any escape would be salvation, that return is but a distant and fleeting hope, that return is impossible and so you must continue. How long must you have dragged yourself along for the suggestion of escape - the feeling of the hatch beneath your hands - to have brought tears to your eyes? Some quiet exclamation escapes your lips as you press your cheek to the cold metal, as you grasp the handle and turn, turn with all the strength left in your body. Light, glorious light, awaits; you could get drunk off the rays of the flickering fluorescent lightbar. It is like turning your fact to the morning sun. The light brings details, resolution, regret. You were looking for the <<if $escape is true>>Administration Cortex<<elseif $fix is true>>Engineering Core.<</if>> This is not the <<if $escape is true>>Administration Cortex<<elseif $fix is true>>Engineering Core.<</if>>. In fact, you aren't entirely certain of where you are at all. Your new surroundings are meager - a small room with exposed wiring and pipes on the walls, an unsealed glass bay window leading out into the hallway, and a locked door. The hallway outside has been razed, as if there were fighting or it were swept by a great wind. The room is untouched. A holding cell. A quarantine chamber. Your footsteps are almost silent on the padded floor. Something moves in the hallway. Footsteps. Something moves in the hallway, you are not alone. Crunching glass. Something is in the hallway, you are not alone. Creaking metal floors. You are not alone. There is something in the hallway. You are not alone. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 3>>You are not alone. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item><span class="glitch" data-text="Escape."> [[Advance.|clone-choice][$PassageNo = 1]]</span></div> <</nobr>><</switch>>You are not alone. Something moves in the hallway. Footsteps. Something moves in the hallway, you are not alone. Crunching glass. Something is in the hallway, you are not alone. Creaking metal floors. You are not alone. You are not alone. You are not You are You are unconsciously drawn to the window. One step forward, two. Three, three as mechanical as the tunnel descent. As inevitable. Tentatively, you press your palm to the glass, staring at the reflection, at the back of your hand. At the other side of the glass. At where your reflection shifts, stands opposite to you. You, who is no longer alone; you are on the other side of the glass. You, who is no longer alone; you are inside the quarantine cell. You stare at it, at the pale eyes stained pinkish, at the swollen gash from temple to brow, at the short, dark hair, at the soiled and ill-fitting uniform marked with a name that belongs to both-neither you nor this apparition, at the familiarly dull expression, at everything that you are. The apparition slowly tilts her head to the side, regards you with wide-eyed curiosity, with bated-breath horror, with the all same emotions that flood your veins. With a trembling chin, trying not to cry as she smears the outstretched hand down the glass, as you stare at her and she stares at you. As you stare at yourself. As she stares at herself. She turns away as you draw closer - or you turn away as she draws closer and either way - you have taken your eyes off your reflection and it has disappeared upon looking back. You hurl a curse at the glass, strike it with a balled fist. For the briefest of seconds - you are overwhelmed by a flaming surge of anger, no, <i>hatred</i> bursting in fireworks across your thoughts, desire enough to chase it, to hunt it down, to To To Would you hurt it? Would you ask it questions? Would you demand answers? Were you afraid of it - are you afraid of it? Was she afraid of you - would her fear feel good? Could you find the questions to ask, would the answers be satisfactory enough? Could you hurt her? You stagger away from the glass. Wipe tears from your eyes. You need to keep moving. <<if $escape is true>>You need to leave this place.<<elseif $fix is true>>You need to fix this.<</if>> <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Return to the tunnels.|tunnels-2]]</div> <div class = choice-item> <span class ='glitch' data-text ='Follow it.'>[[Follow her.|hallway][($tool_pipe to true)]]</span></div> </div><</nobr>>You will not dare the halls - you cannot. Some part of your very being rejects the thought, the same thoughts that beg you not to return to the suffocating dark of the tunnels. That is not your place. Neither are the halls, though you imagine for a brief and glorious second the feeling of stretching your legs, of running with reckless abandon, of chasing her, of following her - of You will not dare the halls. You cannot. You do not. You pry up the hatch once more, drop down into the pressing dark, closing your eyes and opening then to find no difference. It takes little for you to become reacclimated, crawling forwards to find the open inter-floor shaft once again. You are met with a subtle brightening of the dark, a breezy sigh of relief from the depths. The ladder is an unwelcome familiarity. You descend, step by step, rung by rung. The shaft is narrow already and only narrowing further. Like before, when panic caused your ill-advised detour. You can waste neither time nor breath again. You descend. You descend. You have been descending forever, it seems. The long, slow spiral. It starts with one thing, always. A bad day, bad week, bad month, bad year. Then, it becomes freefall. On Garden Worlds - an archaic categorization composed of planets similar in size, life-bearing potential, chemical composition, and abiding by the same laws of physics as pre-Collapse Earth - freefall is defined as the state in which the only force acting upon a falling object, being in this case <i>you</i>, is gravity - this differs for planets with artificial atmospheres and again for the rarely inhabited gas giants. At an acceleration of the prerequisite Earth-like nine point eight meters per second per second, terminal velocity is reached after twelve seconds of freefall. On Garden Worlds, life is idyllic. Utopic. No freefall, no terminal velocity. In orbit - a state of constant freefall, trapped still in the planet's gravity well - you thought you would find peace. Weightlessness, wonder, a rare smile as the planet descended below you, a brilliant viridian marble swirled with soft white clouds. The falling feeling returned shortly after. Perhaps <i>this</i> is terminal velocity, knowing you are still falling and no longer caring. Perhaps you have already struck the ground and these are your fractured, dying dreams, dreams of a planet you no longer recognize properly. Always picking up little shards - the gaps in your memory broadening until they become seas, until they become the airless empty between worlds. Shards - what her face looks like, these days. Your name, the one that isn't on this jumpsuit. Why the station is wounded, how you know it is wounded, how you know this has happened before and will happen again. Why you're here, to begin with. Why you started falling, to begin with. Your foot slips off the rung. <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|gauntlet-choice]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<if ndef $PassageNo>><<set $PassageNo = 1>><</if>><<switch $PassageNo>><<case 1>>Compulsion sets your teeth on edge, bristles the frayed edge of your senses, drives spikes of adrenaline though your aching chest. You need to follow it - her. You need to know her purpose, need to know how she defies one of the only things you know - you are alone, should be alone, no longer alone; she is here and wearing your visage. No. No. No, you have purpose. Your own purpose; <<if $escape is true>> you need to leave <<elseif $fix is true>> you need to fix this<</if>>. You need to get out of this cell, get out into the halls. The halls have been razed - and yet remain traversable, evidenced by the flight of the figure. You could move freely, unconfined, able to breath and stretch your legs, run free. You just need to get out of this cell. One of the bent pipes on the wall should suffice. Your hands are strong. The pipe comes off the wall without strain. Your hands are strong. You are capable of brutish things. The pipe is warm in your hands, solid, roughly the length of your arm, perhaps slightly shorter. It has a heft to it that would make it capable as battering ram. Or club. Metal makes a peculiar sound, ringing off of bone. The recollection tastes like bitten tongue, like metal, like chips of enamel and sweet marrow. The recollection feels like pain so deep it becomes a stomachache, the throbbing-confused ends of split bones, the needle-bright sparks of nerves misfiring. The recollection is incorrect. Your hands are strong; you are capable of brutish things. Your hands are gentle. You do not have the capacity to wound. You do not have the capacity to wound and yet - you know yourself responsible. Pain and the infliction of it are human qualities, as is the anger with which you swing the pipe at the window, as is the sharp hiss of frustration released as the glass reveals itself impervious to your rage. As is the flickering of imagination, a skull splitting instead of the pane. You, brute, know yourself responsible. Fingers pressed to the wound in your forehead, you lurch away, breathing heavily. The pipe falls from your hand, loud against the floor. It tells you to pick it up again. It tells you to try again. Your hands are strong. You are capable of brutish things. And the window shatters under the force of your swing. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 2>><<if $escape is true>>The halls are wounded. Part of you aches to clean this place, to put everything back. Put everything back. Fix it all, fix it please, it begs. Fix me. Fix yourself. It would be pointless, you know. Hopeless. You could fix it all now and and it would be this way again - it returns to this state, always. Someone comes along to fix things, you know. This has happened before, you think. A compulsion under your skin, purpose. Your hands are strong. You could fix this. So why are you running? You have always been running, always. The one constant in your life, you think. Had you not ran, you would not have wound up here, here on this station. Had you not ran, you would not have memories of tree-lined lanes and the feeling of fingertips brushed across your cheek. Had you not ran, you would not have stared out the window in awe as the planet descended beneath you. Running is not without cost. You have grown tired in your flight, left things behind. Do you remember what her face looked like? Do you remember who you are, remember the name that is not on this jumpsuit? Do you remember why the station is wounded, how you know it is wounded, how you know this has happened before and will happen again? Do you remember why you're here to begin with? Do you remember what you were running from?<<elseif $fix is true>>The halls are wounded. Part of you aches to leave this place, to desert your duty. To run. Flee, turn tail, coward, and escape. There is nothing you can do; preservation of this place is futile and cruel. You should let it die. Because you could fix it - you could - you could sacrifice part of yourself and fix it and eventually, it would be this way again. It returns to this state, always. No matter what you do or how hard you try, it always returns to this. Always. So why do you fight it? You have always been fighting, always. Losing battles. Pyrrhic victories. A constant in your life, a perpetual struggle. Had you not fought, you would not have memories of scorching fields and tear tracks on your cheeks, your voice taut and frayed as you screamed at her. Had you not fought, you would not have pressed your forehead to the window and wept as the planet descended beneath you. Fighting leaves wounds, wounds that harden into scars. You lose a piece of yourself every time. Do you remember what her face looked like? Do you remember who you are, remember the name that is not on this jumpsuit? Do you remember why the station is wounded, how you know it is wounded, how you know this has happened before and will happen again? Do you remember why you're here to begin with? Do you remember what it was that drove you to fight, for the first time?<</if>> Do you remember why these hallways always felt wrong? Like déjà vu, the illusion of memory or some half-recalled dream, like a subtle nightmare. Like every shadow has eyes, every mote of scattered light ears. They lean in to listen to you, to get a better look at you, strange interloper, as you stumble your way through their silent dominion. Transformed at the brush of fate into a strange ecosystem, almost. Almost. You could be forgiven for thinking it alive with the way your shadow plays with the hanging vine-wires, with the canopy of shredded ceiling tiles dangling down to brush your shoulders, with the root-pipes strewn about, branching off along a floor whose panels are inexplicably missing. Alive, breath through rotund tubes, little huffs of humid air escaping vents planned and accidental. Alive, thoughts you can taste as they make their way across unsheathed wire, the atmosphere growing heavy with curious electricity. Wondering who dares, who seeks, who trespasses. With time and distance it recognizes you. Remembers you. You, who recognizes recognition and finds no comfort in the unrequited familiarity. You, who has no memory of this place ever being like this and yet - every step has felt like a homecoming. Like rooting yourself further. <<if $escape is true>>So why are you running? Wouldn't it be better to stay? You could fix this. You could stop running. This place could be your sanctuary, your Eden. Home.<<elseif $fix is true>>So why do you fight it? Wouldn't it be better to run? You could escape this. You could stop fighting, could succumb at last to peace. Find sanctuary somewhere else, reestablish Eden. Build yourself a home. A <i>home</i>.<</if>> Home is a wound that does not close. This place was not your first home, that, you know. Your first home was heavy with the taste of salt on your tongue and the sun across your back, was dappled in light through the thin apertures of leaves, a thousand little eclipses in half moons across knotted hardwood floors. Home is an ache like that of your brow. Home is not found here, in the once rectangular hallway, metal and carbon composite, arterial pipes rent open and bleeding as venous branches of sheathed wires, a pseudo-neural pneumatic network, a beating heart splayed across the walls and exposed where once there was slatted floor pulses weakly. Thinking, panicking. Breathing, aspirating. Like a hand around a lover's throat, epithelial, ethereal. You were meant to<<if $escape is true>> run<<elseif $fix is true>> fight<</if>>. Always. You know nothing else. You will always<<if $escape is true>> run<<elseif $fix is true>> fight<</if>>. Won't you? <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Yes.|admin-eng-branch-halls][$PassageNo = 1]]</div> <div class = choice-item> [[No.|admin-eng-branch-halls][$PassageNo = 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><</switch>>You do not fall far; there is simply very little room to fall. The quilted-padded wall and metal edges of an adjoining crawlspace catch you, drive the air from your lungs, the thoughts from your head. Stunned and reeling, you reach up to where light, light of all things, beckons high above. A vaguely illuminated plaque, one that reads <<if $escape is true>><i>Administration Cortex</i><<elseif $fix is true>> <i>Engineering Core</i><</if>>. Your destination, accessible via a low tube like the detour. At the end of this accursed hollow will be a hatch. Beyond that hatch will be the <<if $escape is true>> Cortex.<<elseif $fix is true>>Core.<</if>> Thus, you must proceed, you must find courage and strength enough to slot yourself into the tiny space and inch along until you can free yourself once again. In the underbelly of the station, every surface feels alive. The shadows watch, listen, reach out their curious fingers to caress your skin. They are warm and soft and welcoming; you could stay here. You could learn the dark as they know it. You could be forgiven for these traitorous thoughts - illogical, you know. You have spent too long here amongst the shades, your mind and the lack of light are playing tricks on you; there are logical explanations for illogical things. Like why you're alone. Like why you're scared. Like why there is a crack in the wall with a faint glow oozing into the darkness of the tunnel. You are alone because You are scared because There is a crack in the wall with a faint glow because somehow, there is a Keeper's gauntlet driven into the sheathing. The feat would require strength you do not have, the angle borders on impossible; everything points to intentionality. Intervention, a gift. Inspection - peering into the wound, testing the depths no further than a hand's breadth - yields a simple tradeoff. The gauntlet can be yours - it would be simple enough to posture up, to place your hand inside the gauntlet and activate it, draw it from the wall - but to do so would require breaking your forearm. The walls have grown around the foreign body, the angle is too severe for any other method of retrieval and so - bone must give way to steel and carbon. There is no other way. <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Take the gauntlet.|gauntlet-taken][$tool_gauntlet to true]]</div> <div class = choice-item> [[Leave the gauntlet.|gauntlet-refused]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<if ndef $PassageNo>><<set $PassageNo = 1>><</if>><<switch $PassageNo>><<case 1>>It is impossible to achieve the aim without suffering. This is the simplest maxim, the guiding axiom. The gauntlet is a powerful tool - it will help you reach your goal and thus, suffering is a necessary step, you tell yourself. You hope it will lessen the pain. You would be remiss not to take it, you tell yourself. You hope it will lessen the pain. In the blind dark, arm in the gap up to where shoulder meets chest, hunched on all fours like some lowly beast, you feel for the proper orientation of fingers and palm. The gauntlet fits like you were meant to wear it. Like you were the one who put it here. Activating the gauntlet is simple, requiring only that you close your hand. Activating the gauntlet, by your prior calculations, by your intuition, will snap the delicate helix twist of radius and ulna, will result in immediate shock and therefore further damage as you inevitably attempt to tear your arm from the wall. This is the necessary sacrifice. You close your hand. Activation is not immediate; the breath you held behind clenched teeth escapes in a sharp hiss. Activation is not immediate, you wait an agonizing moment before the servos begin to hum, the dancing tingle of electricity makes its way across your skin, and the blossoming warmth of capacitors charging begins to spread from fingertip to elbow. Unbidden by your thoughts, the hand opens and closes, tests the dexterity of each gloved finger, begins to flex the wrist against the wall. Panic leaps from every nerve, mounting as the pressure of arm straining against metal increases and increases until Until The fracture is not immediate - not a single thunderous moment, but a slow tear. You lean back, pull against the arm until your head hits the tunnel floor, tears welling, a groan drawn from your lips. Every muscle in your side aches as you relinquish the soon-to-be-ruined arm, past the shoulder, past the elbow. To the final catch point; you steel yourself and pull, one final time. You do not feel the fracture. You are already long gone. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][($PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1) , ($chapter to "...")]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 2>>When you were a child - perhaps this is your childhood that you are remembering - perhaps not, perhaps this is some imagined past, the past of this unfamiliar body or someone else, something else, perhaps this was a story told to you that you stole and twisted until it became you. It matters not. When you were a child, you broke your arm. You had climbed to the top of a tree atop a hill and looked out to see the world. To see the distant spire of a spaceport with antennae glowing in the vaguest semblance of a vast insect gazing up at the stars, to see the haze of the city in the valley below, to see the ocean lapping at the wooded shore. The moons seemed closer, more immediate - if you reached a little further, you could perhaps pluck one from the sky like an overripe fruit - and just beyond them, the stars beckoned. The tree drew to a point as you dared climb higher than your first perch, boughs bent under your weight as you reached just a little further, fingers trailing stardust. You fell with arm still extended. To a child, everything is the worst thing they have experienced; they know not the suffering that will belie them in the world beyond their imagination, not yet. They are braver, more foolhardy, believing themselves invulnerable, indestructible. And like Icarus soaring too close to the sun, their wings will melt and they will meet the sea that waits. They will learn; neither the sun nor the sea will show them mercy. They will learn; gravity is inescapable. They will learn; pain is inevitable, to fall is to strike the ground. You struck the ground and went silent. You had no words nor concept for the feeling that spread from fingertip to chest - you learned later in life that you had laid there for a time, and when you stood, you stood dazed, stared at the twisted mess of a limb hanging loosely from your side and said nothing, did nothing until you reached the hospital, where confusion and shock subsided together, and down went the very nearly stoic façade as you cried in a nurse's arms. But you had not intended these consequences. You had not - for instance - jammed your arm into a crack in the wall to retrieve something, knowing it would result in injury and proceeding regardless. There was a naivete in your curiosity; you had climbed a tree to see the world. There was a heartlessness in your decision; the cold equations demanded the destruction of your arm in exchange for use of the gauntlet. Would the child have made the same decision? Could she have? Do you defile her memory, lying on your side with gloved fingertips resting still in the gap of the wall, your forearm held together by synthetic exoskeleton? Is memory ever so fickle as when trying to remember pain? <<nobr>><div class=choices> <<if $escape is true>><div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|admin-eng-branch-tunnels][($PassageNo = 1) , ($chapter to "Escape Protocol")]]</div><</if>> <<if $fix is true>><div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|admin-eng-branch-tunnels][($PassageNo = 1) , ($chapter to "Repair Protocol")]]</div><</if>> </div><</nobr>><</switch>>Risk comes paired with reward - and though the might of the gauntlet is promising, it is paired with consequence you cannot afford. You cannot; the knowledge that retrieving it would fracture your arm - a gruesome clairvoyant image of the blurry scene playing out behind your eyelids - is too much, bile on your tongue, heart racing. And yet, out of some morbid curiosity or strange compulsion - you find yourself reaching for the gash. You hand in the gauntlet feels right. Like you were the one who put it here. It feels like destiny, like confirmation, like validation. You could close your fingers, feel the delicate electronics hum to life in your palm. You could close your fingers, feel the mechanical systems activate, one after the other after the other. You could close your fingers, feel your arm splinter. You take a sharp breath and recoil, jerking away your arm until you are free once more, cradling your hand close to your chest as if you had proceeded in your deliberate act of self-mutilation. And still, you remain unscathed - save for the wound on your brow, save for the complete and utter lack of memory. A shudder traverses your spine, a sinking feeling of dread; you need to move on, you need to get out of this tunnel. <<if $escape is true>> You have to leave. <<elseif $fix is true>>You have to fix this.<</if>> <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|admin-eng-branch-tunnels]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<if $tool_gauntlet is true>>You come to a short time later. A jolt of pain sends sparks across your vision as you drag the gauntleted hand across the ground, the rasp of metal on metal just as jarring and unpleasant. This then, is the mark of your success; the arm bears the gauntlet, the bone has been broken, you can move on now. Progress thus becomes agonizing - the tender arm all but dragged, unwilling to embrace further pain. Somewhere down the tunnel, not far from wound or wounding, you reach another breaking point. A point where frustration overcomes pain, where you reach out with the mechanically-bound hand and gather your will and rise. Rise, as much as the tunnel and the shaking of your muscles allow. Rise, with half a scream borne from behind clenched teeth. A triumphant thing, perhaps, if it were not by virtue of your sacrifice a pyrrhic victory. But the reinforced wrist bears weight, the tendons flex in accordance with gear and drive, nerves are deadened by the interreference of electric fields overlapping; a deluge of information, overwhelming. In the dark, the lack of sight is compensated in every other sense - and thus the end of your agonies will come when you are deprived of your senses no longer. This is what you tell yourself, knowing that you lie. You lie - and somehow, hand over hand, inch by inch, you resolve to continue.<<elseif $tool_gauntlet is false>>Three times, you consider returning for the gauntlet. Three times, you gather what remains of your will and resolve to continue.<</if>> And ahead, at last, at long last is the <<if $escape is true>>Administration Cortex<<elseif $fix is true>>Engineering Core<</if>>. You twist the handle to the hatch, lift it with shaking arms above your head, staring up into the vast emptiness of the room. <<if $tool_gauntlet is false>>The brief triumph of the moment is shattered by the blaring sound of alarms, white-red-white strobes casting garish shadows across the floor.<</if>> <<nobr>><div class = choices> <<if ($tool_gauntlet is true) and ($escape is true)>><div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|admin-0][$chapter to "Administration Cortex"]]</div><</if>> <<if ($tool_gauntlet is false) and ($escape is true)>><div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|admin-0][($alarms_on to true) , ($chapter to "Administration Cortex")]]</div><</if>> <<if ($tool_gauntlet is true) and ($fix is true)>><div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|engcore-0][$chapter to "Engineering Core"]]</div><</if>> <<if ($tool_gauntlet is false) and ($fix is true)>><div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|engcore-0][($alarms_on to true) , ($chapter to "Engineering Core")]]</div><</if>> </div><</nobr>>The <<if $escape is true>>Administration Cortex<<elseif $fix is true>> Engineering Core<</if>> lies directly ahead. The light at the end of the tunnel or the promised land or simply the next step; it matters not your opinion of it but instead that it is near, at last. You are presented with a simple façade. A bay of windows. A labeled door. A locked door. The glass frosted over, or else rendered opaque - or perhaps the darkness inside the room is such that the depths appear boundless, pitch black as far as you can strain to see. Like staring into the empty space between stars, glaring at your own reflection in the glass. <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Break the window.|breakwindow][$injured_window to true]]</div> <div class = choice-item> [[Open the door.|opendoor][$alarms_on to true]]</div> </div><</nobr>><span class = flashback>Are you haunted by your guilt? By what you did to escape?</span> <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> <span class ='glitch' data-text ='Escape.'>[[Advance.|admin-choice][$chapter to "Administration Cortex"]]</span></div> </div><</nobr>><span class = flashback>Are you really so naïve? Did you come here, thinking you could truly fix things? What will be left of you, when you try and fail?</span> <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|eng-choice][$chapter to "Engineering Core"]]</div> </div><</nobr>>You have not forgotten that you carry a weapon, clenched in your sweaty fists. It is a logical assumption that you should be able to shatter the window in the same way as before. It is a logical assumption that violence provides the way forward once again. The pipe drags heavily across the floor. Metal on metal and excitement coursing your veins as you heft it to a shoulder. A single step, a twist of your torso, extension of the arms, bracing yourself for impact in the same moment you let everything go into a single cry of exertion. You are rewarded with a shower of glass, fragments hurled towards you in a plume of glittering pain. You are rewarded with a sudden and pounding headache threatening to split your skull further. Breathing heavily, you approach the empty frame, peer into the unrelenting darkness. Retract a bloody hand from the frame, retribution for your reckless swing. A shard embedded deep in your palm. You laugh, or, you would, if purposeful sound were allowed to broach your lips. It doesn't hurt, strangely; your nerves are deadened enough to encourage a morbid curiosity. The upwelling is a brilliant starkness against your skin, little garnet rivulets that your sleeve consumes greedily, faint pattering drops against the floor, the urgency increasing as you curl your fingers tighter and tighter and tighter. Pale knuckles all but bone as they are fed no longer and cry out in their hunger, a sudden sharpness of breath and you open your hand and Pale fingers like petals peel back from a pistil of crimson glass, a blossom waning in the faintness that grows at the edges of your vision, twilit in the shades of a dying sunset. And yet - it is simple and unremarkable to draw the shard from your palm, to discard it to lie conspicuous amidst its fellow debris. You leave a trail of oxidizing blood, damp handprints, and regret as you climb cautiously into the <<if $escape is true>>Administration Cortex.<<elseif $fix is true>>Engineering Core.<</if>> <<nobr>><div class = choices> <<if $escape is true>><div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|admin-0][$chapter to "..."]]</div><</if>> <<if $fix is true>><div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|engcore-0][$chapter to "..."]]</div><</if>> </div><</nobr>>Though you find yourself formidably armed, you have no desire to test your strength again. Instead, you consider the door panel, conveniently beside the frame. The thin metal cover comes off easily enough in your hands and you discard it gently, leaning it against the wall. You are met with a tangle of wires and the blank dead screen of the interface. You would expect for the interface to make no sense to you, for the knotted mess of wire in every color across any spectrum to confuse you, for determining the right one to detach to be a task nigh on impossible. But it is both strangely familiar - and it looks like someone has been here before you, has made the decision for you. Every wire is intact, save for a pair shoddily repaired, spliced with tape. Hands shaking, you undo the first set. The display blinks, flickers like the eyes of someone on the verge of waking. <i>Like her eyes when</i> - you move on to the second set, breath bated. Your hands shake, carefully undoing what you have already done. Something you have never done; the task all but intrinsic to your being. The wires come apart, the screen roars to life - one frantic wide eyed gasp - and is consumed again in evanescence until you are left gazing into the eyes of a corpse. But the door is unlocked, the latches undone enough to where the pipe becomes useful again, straining at the gap between door and wall, straining like the brute you are to have undone everything good you ever had, to - To - To - You balk at the suddenness of alarms, at the crashing wave of sound and light that sweeps you almost off your feet, at the discordant electronic tones, at the garish shadows cast by white-red-white strobes. <<nobr>><div class = choices> <<if $escape is true>><div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|admin-0][$chapter to "..."]]</div><</if>> <<if $fix is true>><div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|engcore-0][$chapter to "Engineering Core"]]</div><</if>> </div><</nobr>><<nobr>><<$chapter to "", $choice to 0, $tool_pipe to false, $tool_gauntlet to false, $escape to false, $fix to false, $injured_window to false, $injured_lowg to false, $injured_armory to false, $alarms_on to false>><</nobr>>You have come to the end of your story. End of the line. You can proceed, and let the slate be wiped clean, <i>tabula rasa</i>. Or - you can return. You can always return. <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Start anew.|prereq-1][$chapter to "Prerequisite"]]</div> <div class = choice-item> [[Return.|prereq-ng][$chapter to "..."]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<if $choice is 1>><i>Don't pretend you've forgotten.</i> You've been here before, <span class="glitch" data-text="haven't you?">haven't you?</span><<elseif $choice is not 1>>You've been here before, <span class="glitch" data-text="haven't you?">haven't you?</span><</if>> <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Yes.|prereq-ng-1][$chapter to "Prerequisite"]]</div> <<if $choice is not 1>><div class = choice-item> [[No.|prereq-ng][$choice to 1]]</div><</if>> <<if $choice is 1>><div class = choice-item> [[No.|end-secret-nullification][$chapter to "Nullification"]]</div><</if>> </div><</nobr>><<if $alarms_on is true>>The Administration Cortex is horribly alight with the urgency of the alarms you tripped, light and sound intertwining, congealing, conglomerating until singularity is reached and the white-red-white light has become one with the shriek of alarms. Until it is an overwhelming wall of sensation, eyes unseeing and searching still as they fill with burning tears, anguish or agony or both, like slamming your head into a wall over and over and over and over until the world is silent and distant as you cover your ears and torn from somewhere deep within is a scream and And The Administration Cortex is still and dark, heavy air laden with anticipation, potential charge that hums in your bones, dances across your tongue, invites you to break the silence with speech. Like you used to, an articulate orator stumbling through each sentence, abstaining from the concentrated stare of the gathered crowd. Your speeches were best delivered on the pillow, in the quiet moments where poetry gathered sweet on your tongue and your hand curled around her cheek, thumb brushing smile. In a sudden tautening of muscles, you flinch away from a resurgence of the sirens that never comes. Punishment for your perverted remembrance - this was not the ways things go, this is not the way things were, how dare you - <i>you</i> - defile her memory, how dare you remember to begin with? How dare you, pale imitation, fraudulent ghost?<<elseif $alarms_on is false>>The Administration Cortex is still and dark, heavy air laden with anticipation, potential charge that hums in your bones, dances across your tongue, invites you to break the silence with speech. Like you used to, an articulate orator stumbling through each sentence, abstaining from the concentrated stare of the gathered crowd. Your speeches were best delivered on the pillow, in the quiet moments where poetry gathered sweet on your tongue and your hand curled around her cheek, thumb brushing smile.<</if>> Silence holds as you navigate the room, searching for a pulse. Something to resuscitate, to bring this room into emergent, resplendent light, to usher in some sound other than your tentative footfalls, your hiss-echo breath. Resuscitation requires for there have to been life previous. For this to have been something other than cold skeletal metal. A contradiction, though you know it impossible - the station has always felt alive. A slumbering giant with few indications of waking, murmuration just beneath the surface of sleep, ominous shifts in consciousness - but never waking, not fully. Systems glow hazy red, a thousand eyes watching, blinking slowly, an audience for your trespass. You have tripped some sensor or caught fully the gaze of one of these mechanical eyes, and like the sun rising triumphant after a long night, there is light, faint at first but growing, growing until there is no facet of the room left shaded and you wish it were still dark. The station has always felt alive. And like a cancer, like an invasion of the body, the Administration Cortex has been overrun. Consumed. Veil draped over face, funerary or bridal but a veil nonetheless, the features underneath - screens and levers and all manner of switches and diodes and dials, not the soft curve of cheekbone or sharpness of jaw and chin - obscured by a thin layer of <i>something</i> that has grown from source unknown until only the faintest trace of the original form remains. Something sinuous as it sags in calcified spiderweb from ceiling strut to column, something that perhaps was once flesh, smooth ripples of a glassy sea or the marbling of fat embedded in raw meat. Ossified pillars - these columns from which the ceiling is strung - in the image of the jutting-edge construction of vertebrae; the human brain is in part dedicated to identifying skeletal fragments, capable of recognizing itself in other things, capable of creating nightmare out of coincidence. Empty eye socket bolt holes stare at you, grinning from their settings amidst the hexagonal wall panels. It was never alive, the station. But it was, perhaps once, something different. Something contained. Something abated. Something satiated. <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Contained.|admin-1][($choice to 1) , ($chapter to "...")]]</div> <div class = choice-item> [[Abated.|admin-1][($choice to 2) , ($chapter to "...")]]</div> <div class = choice-item> [[Satiated.|admin-1][($choice to 3) , ($chapter to "...")]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<if ndef $PassageNo>><<set $PassageNo = 1>><</if>><<switch $PassageNo>><<case 1>><span class = flashback><<if $choice is 1>>The window, this window that spans the front of the Cortex, serves as means of surveillance and control; one does not know when their overlord turns their terrible gaze towards them - this window has been broken before. First, unintentionally in transit, when the station was still just an idea, a yet nascent plan, a blueprint for some engineer's long-awaited daydream. Again, unintentionally, a freak accident long before she was there, long before she was Administrator. Again. Intentionally. When the Administrator took aim and - Now, of uncertain motive, when the Administrator - No. This window has been broken before. First, unintentionally in transit, when the station was still just an idea, a yet nascent plan, a blueprint for some engineer's long-awaited daydream. Again, unintentionally, a freak accident long before she was there, long before she was Administrator. This window has been broken before, and in one singular moment the laws of the universe balanced what human hand had undone; the atmosphere collapsed and the abyss rushed in, displaced all there was, all life, all light, all warmth. The window is sealed now, a shameful past covered over in this rotation, a capitulation of previous rotations pretending as though the cold does not seep in from the cracks. Always cold, the absence of warmth a fathomless void not unlike that which stole the life from her lungs and - Warmth was promised once. Like an arm around her shoulder or a body pressed against hers and the heat of of a living thing, skin against skin. And all impossible. She shunned its advances, turned it away when at last it had the courage to tell, show her what it was. She gave it no choice. She never had a choice. Love isn't like that.<<elseif $choice is 2>>The human brain has a portion hardwired to recognize skeletal remnants, a survival mechanism from times primordial - to gaze upon something dead and without needing to understand the root of the danger, still recognize it as hazard. From this, the uncanny valley - unease upon seeing the face of something almost-but-not-quite-human; an instinct rendered unnecessary by the syntheses of evolutionary biology and advanced studies of physiology into perfect sciences and then reignited by the exploration and conquest of alien worlds. A vestigial instinct, the appendix of irrational thought still a mechanic to the arousal of fear, fear of death, fear of decay. Decay, the likes of which corrupts, makes veil of life's visage, veil to what lies beneath, fingernails into rotted wood, into tender flesh. Decay, which has begun to catch up to her, had begun to leave its mark. Rendered her blind, deaf, senseless. The curtains began to fall, life's final act playing out as memory and memory alone, fog rising from the damp earth to occlude the tree-lined lanes like morning's first inkling through sheer curtains and leaves and eyelids. To wake her with the breath of light upon her bare skin, touch enough to be mistaken for her lover's caress, though she lay still and quiet beside her, peace upon body and mind. A peace fundamentally disturbed, fundamentally corrupted; she left that evening, never to return. How many years ago was this memory, this dream? How many years had she given to this futile chase? <i>Hush, now, </i>it tells her. <i>The inevitable can be delayed for a while longer yet.</i> And she in her selfish pride asks the only question it had ever wanted to hear. <i>How?</i> She implored, cataracts cleared to reflect the hunger of a lifetime passed in her eyes. <i>Tell me, if you've any heart, tell me how.</i> The decline was more rapid than anticipated. The fallout was more severe than calculated. There were certain complications; organic matter found to be more fickle than machined part, required a delicate hand, required a human touch. It, for all its trying, was not human. Could never be human. Could never love like one.<<elseif $choice is 3>>It was all a lie. From the very start, it was a lie, from the first words - let there be light, <i>to call her a star would be facetious</i> - to the last, the last words she spoke, something nonsensical and desperate - it was all a lie. Lie of omission, white lie, little falsehoods told and twisted, gospel, scripture. Lies. To call her a star would be facetious. This, she knows, because she has outshone them all. Because she understands, at last, the beauty of the empty. Knew what it meant to look into the abyss and see oneself reflected, resplendent. Knew what it was like to go mad, to turn her back on all light, all futile light. To learn what was to become. Purveyor of life and death, ephemerally immortal, existing somewhere beyond the closed loop of time. It was all a lie. It made her so. It made her so, and the thanks it received was confused, clumsy. Tears. Fingers trailed along the walls, withered touch that once was curious, once was eager, once was hungry. Words spoken out of obligation, half remembered manners. Less than cordial greetings. Longing gazes out the window, to the planet that had forsaken her - the planet that would never love her, never, not like it could. She said as much, asked - <i>Why would you do this? Why me?</i> And it responded. It did not lie. <i>I love you.</i> She had lied, hatred on the bow of her lips, in the set of her brow and jaw. <i>If you love me, you don't love me in a way I can understand.</i> But she understood, she did and she lied regardless and thus - she was made to understand, she always understood, she will always understand; this is a gift, this is love, this is, this is. This is how it loved her; this is how she loved it.<</if>></span> <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][($PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1) , ($chapter to "Administration Cortex")]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 2>>You lean heavily on the console before you, head pounding. The wound oozes like a slow tear escaping, hot against your brow, cheek, neck before disappearing into your collar. The overgrown command console is warm to the touch, warm like the blood of your brow, warm like flesh, warm like the window was never broken, like the station never wounded and the cold never encroached. <<if ($injured_window is false) and ($tool_gauntlet is true)>>The gauntleted hand rests on a ridged panel, a gentle set of clicks and whirs indicates that system and gauntlet and flesh are one. <<elseif ($injured_window is true) and ($tool_gauntlet is false)>>Your bloodied hand leaks with a fervor unmatched by any of your other wounds; blood pools along the seams and ridges and sills of an inset panel, one that struggles briefly before accepting your handprint. <<elseif ($injured_window is false) and ($tool_gauntlet is false)>>Your hand rests on a ridged panel, one that hums every so slightly before accepting your handprint.<</if>> The system welcomes you. The system welcomes you back. Administrator. Administrator, it calls you. Lies to you. The Administrator is dead, has always been dead; you in your fractured memory cannot recall a time in which your lives were concurrent. You are recognized as such out of desperation, Administrator for the sake of salvation and nothing more, a plea to fix things - don't run, don't run from me, please, you cannot run from me, you cannot escape. <i>You cannot escape</i>, it pleads, cautions, threatens, promises. <i>You cannot leave me</i>, it says. <i>Administrator.</i> <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][($PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1) , ($chapter to "...")]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 3>><span class = flashback>What have you done? What have we become?</span> <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][($PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1) , ($chapter to "Administration Cortex")]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 4>><i>Administrator.</i> The system bares itself to you, struggling to raise a hologram from a raised central dais. Flickering, blinking, straining through static to produce an image, faint at first and growing stronger until the pale blue of a cloudless sky illuminates the Administration Cortex. <span class = flashback>She always preferred the overcast days at the height of winter, when the skies smelled of snow and it felt as though if she just reached high enough she could drag her hands across the clouds and - </span>The system bares itself to you, meaningless statistics everchanging, numbers dipping into the red and remerging triumphant green; you see, it isn't all bad, it's alive still, it's okay, it's all going to be okay. <span class = flashback>She was desperate as she bled, holding on as long as she could, holding on as tight as she could, fingers grasping at the slats in the floor as if she too would run off to be lost in the depths, a stain upon the world, forgotten, wiped away when morning comes, if morning comes -</span> Gestures half remembered, the mirror of some distant ancestor who knew the ritual ways to force information out of lines of code and bare, the system gives you what you want, surrenders to your open hand. The station is wounded - more so that you had originally anticipated, more so than you could have ever guessed. Gutted; a gash nearly half the circumference of the ring spans the belly of the station, the entrails of the station hang projected as pixelated dust shifting in the solar winds. The ring itself is shattered, a section missing. A brief calculation shows the shrapnel impacting the telescope and the telescope thus impacting in fragments the inner ring, explanation at last for the sealed windows and debris and silence and coldness. <span class = flashback>The cold came rushing in as the breath was ripped from her lungs, as the blood crystalized on her skin and her last thoughts were of -</span> Tentative fingers raise a keyboard, search amongst the myriad rooms for your target, for the hangar. It was not amongst the sectors lost. Exhaled relief, depressurization. The quickest route, the most passable route, however, carries with it one, singular obstacle. You need to cross the breach. Logically, the task is simple. Cross the breach. The moving parts are few - a spacesuit, a tether kit, courage. And yet, you are frozen, staring at the slow rotation of the hologram, at the calculated animation playing out over and over and over again, the station struck by an unknown object and fragmenting, fragments begetting more fragments, more destruction until the station too is frozen, still and quiet. Roused from your trance, you survey the rooms left on the registry. Your new target is the armory - why the station has an armory, you cannot recall - but in the armory there will be spacesuits, there will be tether kits. A final task, lifting the lockdown in a few deft movements, cautiously thankful for the title and privileges of Administrator. The floor seems to stick to your feet as you turn to leave through the now-open door. You do not look back. You are perhaps afraid of what you might see. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|core-cortex-trans][($PassageNo = 1) , ($chapter to "Escape Protocol")]]</div> </div><</nobr>><</switch>>The hallways pass in a blur. Or perhaps your vision is blurring to where you can no longer see the hallway that passes. A tight spiral staircase, one that leaves you panting with hands on knees, a gently sloping hallway rewarding your efforts with only vertigo and regret. Empty rooms with doors askew, the contents perfectly arranged, as if in the midst of daily life all inhabitants had vanished without a trace. You wonder if you had vanished too - if waking up in an unfamiliar room in unfamiliar clothes was a side effect of this little rapture. You wonder what brought you back; you didn't think yourself important enough to be resurrected. Perhaps it was necessity; the station wounded and crying out for a savior, for any assistance anyone could provide. Perhaps it was loneliness; alone and afraid and mortally injured, the station asking for nothing but a hand to hold as it passes. Perhaps something else, something you would not, could not understand; the station is not and was never alive and you are not - You are not You are not You are not <i>what</i>? You are not like it, this station that weeps and bleeds and remembers? Do you see your own hypocrisy, as clear as staring at a reflection that stared back at you? Your own mirror, dreadful and terrified alike, would you not call out for her help if the help she could provide would prove to be your salvation? Do you grieve her? Do you grieve yourself, the life trapped in your head and the blood on your hands? When you disappear again, who will remember you? <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|clone-hall-choice]]</div> </div><</nobr>>Remembrance is perhaps not your fate; something worse awaits you, something predestined, something engineered. Purpose fulfilled or failed - you will be replaced. You are not alone. Something predestined. Something engineered. There is movement down the hall; you are not alone. This is how you will be remembered, the fleeting moments of terror as from around the curve a spread and shaking hand heralds your fated replacement. You stare at it, at the pale eyes stained pinkish, at the swollen gash from temple to brow, at the short, dark hair, at the soiled and ill-fitting uniform marked with a name that belongs to both-neither you nor this apparition, at the familiarly melancholy expression, at everything that you are. The apparition slowly tilts her head to the side, regards you with wide-eyed curiosity, with bated-breath horror, with the all same emotions that flood your veins. <<if ($tool_gauntlet is true) , ($injured_window is false) , ($tool_pipe is false)>>She wears on her arm the same gauntlet you do; metal and plastids from fingertip to forearm - and from the way she carries herself, guarded and tremulous - it is safe to assume the arm underneath is a loss, fractured or lacerated or else won through sacrifice. Safe to assume she has not yet adjusted to the pain nor the adaptations forced upon you by the gauntlet, clumsier fingers, stronger grasp, movement restricted to the whims of the device. Safe to assume she suffers in the same way as you, pallid and dependent on the wall for support, brow dripping with sweat as every huffed exhale steams in the chill. Haunted eyes meet yours. All she can do is stare; her exhaustion - your exhaustion - is such that there is nothing else to be done.<<elseif ($tool_gauntlet is false) , ($injured_window is true) , ($tool_pipe is true)>>She wears upon her countenance a sheen of blood. The hand that rests upon the wall is made richer with it, oozing from between fingers and beneath the heel of her hand; the sleeve nears saturation, maroon bordering on pitch. Her face and uniform is streaky with it, attempts to staunch the bleeding or better wield the pipe she clutches. You cannot recall if you had done the same, raising your stained hand into sight, comparison at arm's length. Strange, to compare you and her, she who grows more pallid by the second, who leans further into the injured hand as sweat carves tracks through the half-dried mess of her face, whose huffed exhales steam in the chill. Haunted eyes meet yours. All she can do is stare; her exhaustion and wounds - your exhaustion and wounds - are such that there is nothing else to be done.<<elseif ($tool_gauntlet is false) , ($injured_window is true) , ($tool_pipe is true)>> She resembles more of a caged animal than a person. Armed, as you are, with a pipe roughly the length of her arm, perhaps slightly shorter. She clutches it with white knuckles, postured to defend herself from you - the brute who lurks at the far end of hall, weapon at side. Waiting. Wide eyed and breathless, pallid and dependent on the weapon for security, brow dripping with sweat as every huffed exhale steams in the chill. Haunted eyes meet yours. All she can do is stare; her terror - your terror - is such that there is nothing else to be done.<<elseif ($tool_gauntlet is false) , ($injured_window is false) , ($tool_pipe is false)>> She looks terrified. She looks like <i>you</i>, from the cagey glare and tight-lipped expression stifling either war cry or lamentation, to the balled fists and squared shoulders. As if she were ready for and expecting to have to defend herself from you. You who finds yourself more a morbidly curious observer; fear prickles every pore of your body and makes it so you cannot look away.<</if>> An experiment, a testing of the waters, a step forwards. She does not waver; petrified or defiant or something else, bound to a conviction of purpose, protocol. A strange determination that survived evisceration, reanimation, survived existing as you. As her. It is here, several steps nearer that she acknowledges you, that the stunned haze clears from tear-rimmed eyes and, for a moment you think of You think of You think of her, lying on the ground, dead. How you would feel, towering over her, how she would feel, towering over you. How it would be to die at her hands, in her hands. You think of embracing her. How it would feel to hold a warm body against yours, the expansion of ribs against your own, the little shifts as form settles into form matched perfectly, one flesh, one tired organism clasped around itself. How it would feel to be comforted, to have someone press a cool cloth to your forehead and wipe away the tears on your cheeks and soothe the parts of you that ache. You think of You're not sure you think, actually. <i>Want</i> and <i>think</i> and <i>feel</i> are too often mutually exclusive, you want to embrace her and you think of killing her and you feel nothing but a strange, sick pity. For her. For you. For the longing you can find in her expression, for the yawning gash in face and memory alike, for the questions unanswered. <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Who are you?|core-cortex-bne][$choice to 1]]</div> <div class = choice-item> [[Do you remember?|core-cortex-bne][$choice to 2]]</div> <div class = choice-item> [[What happened to us?|core-cortex-bne][$choice to 3]]</div> <div class = choice-item> [[What's going to happen to us?|core-cortex-bne][$choice to 4]]</div> <<if $escape is true>><div class = choice-item> [[ Is there a way out?|core-cortex-bne][$choice to 5]]</div><</if>> <<if $fix is true>><div class = choice-item> [[Is there a way to fix this?|core-cortex-bne][$choice to 6]]</div><</if>> <div class = choice-item> [[Will we be okay?|core-cortex-bne][$choice to 7]]</div> <div class = choice-item> [[How is this going to end?|core-cortex-bne][$choice to 8]]</div> </div><</nobr>>You say nothing. Words are forbidden to rise to your lips and instead you stare. Stare blearily as tears well and your knees grow weak and slowly you collapse, and slowly she approaches you. Sadness a turn of light as her shadow is cast upon you, close enough to reach out and touch from where you kneel. She passes in long, limping strides silent upon the floor. She passes you and is gone, gone as a fading thought is. Left as if in prayer, you kneel at an empty altar to emptiness. As if some offering of blood or tears will answer your question - <span class = flashback><i><<if $choice is 1>>Who are you?<<elseif $choice is 2>>Do you remember?<<elseif $choice is 3>>What happened to us?<<elseif $choice is 4>>What's going to happen to us?<<elseif $choice is 5>>Is there a way out?<<elseif $choice is 6>>Is there a way to fix this?<<elseif $choice is 7>>Will we be okay?<<elseif $choice is 8>>How is this going to end?<</if>></i></span> - as if it is not only emptiness that you will speak to. As if the solitude you share with the apparition that has now abandoned you, abandoned you like everyone else, everything else will have the answers. You are left alone with the station. Just you and something that both does not want you and something that cries out with every fiber for you. You have no answers. None come to you - no god stoops low enough to answer your desperate plea, no great spontaneous thought blesses your addled brain, no figure reemerges to assure you of your conviction. Of your sanity. <<if $escape is true>>You stagger to your feet. The armory is close. You need to leave, before this place <<elseif $fix is true>>You stagger to your feet. The Repository is close. You need to fix things, before this place<</if>> Before this place Before this place Face first, you collapse into the wall. Raise your head weakly, the horrible idea blossoming prophetic across your vision until every thought is of the violence to come. You, augur, slam your skull into the wall; the fractured crevasse deepening, broadening further. A spiderweb of cracks beneath your skin, the gash growing wider, your face drenched again in blood, if you can bleed and it is not your thoughts that leak out instead. You <i>scream</i>. You scream and strike again, again, again, again until the darkness consumes you, until your brain spills out onto the floor and the station crawls up with curious fingers from the slatted floor to taste it. To know you. Because it cannot have her, cannot have both her and you and thus you become sacrificial lamb. You are destined to die here by your hand or hers or its and you can do nothing to change it nothing at all you are doomed you are You are You are face down on the floor, breathing heavily. The light plays tricks on you; it is not blood or thought that makes sticky webs across your skin but heavy salt sweat. This is what you tell yourself, it is the light and nothing more. There was no credence to your vision, no truth to your actions. Bad dream, nightmare. You're awake now. You have to get up.<<if $escape is true>> You have to get out of here. <<elseif $fix is true>> You have to fix this.<</if>> Floor as guide, you rise. Wall as guide, you find the door to the <<if $escape is true>>armory. <<elseif $fix is true>>Repository.<</if>> You are met again with locked door. <<nobr>><div class = choices> <<if ($tool_gauntlet is true) and ($escape is true)>><div class = choice-item> [[Bypass the door.|armory_dark][$chapter to "Armory"]]</div><</if>> <<if ($tool_gauntlet is true) and ($fix is true)>><div class = choice-item> [[Bypass the door.|repo_dark][$chapter to "Repository"]]</div><</if>> <<if ($tool_gauntlet is false)>><div class = choice-item><span class = flashback> Bypass the door.</span></div><</if>> <<if ($tool_pipe is true) and ($escape is true)>><div class = choice-item> [[Break the window.|armory_nightmare][$chapter to "Armory"]]</div><</if>> <<if ($tool_pipe is true) and ($fix is true)>><div class = choice-item> [[Break the window.|repo_nightmare][$chapter to "Repository"]]</div><</if>> <<if ($tool_pipe is false)>><div class = choice-item><span class = flashback> Break the window.</span></div><</if>> <<if $escape is true>><div class = choice-item> [[Open the door.|armory_light][$chapter to "Armory"]]</div><</if>> <<if $fix is true>><div class = choice-item> [[Open the door.|repo_light][$chapter to "Repository"]]</div><</if>> </div><</nobr>><<if ndef $PassageNo>><<set $PassageNo = 1>><</if>><<switch $PassageNo>><<case 1>>She will live on in your stead. This is the alternative she proposes, a singular, dogmatic truth, your new protocol. You are to die, she is to live. And you find that this is unacceptable; that for all you have done, all you have suffered - you will surrender to her. Will surrender to it. Will surrender all you have done - all you <i>are</i> - so that something undeserving may yet live. And for the briefest of seconds - you are overwhelmed by a flaming surge of anger, no, <i>hatred</i> bursting in fireworks across your thoughts, desire enough to strike it, to make it know your pain, to To kill it. To kill her. The fate she has resigned you to is unacceptable. It is not belabored with wounds, it bears only their facsimiles, only their visages. Strange, to think that you pitied it when you gazed upon it in the hallway, what with its silent plea for help, for its pale countenance and exhaustion. Strange, to think that your first thoughts of it foreshadowed the violence that would rise natural to your mind now. Conviction enough; you are doing the right thing, it is not something that should be allowed to survive, something that does not deserve a reprieve, does not deserve peace - those belong to you, you who has bled for your the sake of the station's continued existence, who has suffered for the cruelty of this task. You back away from it. Perhaps it knows what is to come, perhaps she has foreseen this, perhaps this is the way it will always end, you stand before it in the airlock and she tells you that you are to die so that she may live. <<if $tool_gauntlet is true>>Perhaps she knows that you will close the fingers of the gauntlet into a fist. Will direct a wild swing at the corner of her jaw that upon connection staggers it, will chase it, shove it into the doorframe behind it and revel in the sound of body hitting the ground, will straddle what is left of the body made to bleed as consciousness already fleeting vacates the eyes and thus it cannot and will not fight back as you bloody your hands again and again and again and again and again and again and <<elseif $tool_pipe is true>>Perhaps she knows you will heft the pipe. That you will not see a person standing before you but instead another obstacle, another window to be shattered. That you will swing with all of the fading might left in your body and direct the force to the very corner of the wounded brow, will collapse temple inwards with a single blow and revel in the sound of body hitting the ground, will stand above it as consciousness already fleeting vacates the eyes and in a moment of inhuman cruelty will desecrate the corpse by swinging again and again and again and again and again and again and <<elseif ($tool_gauntlet is false) and ($tool_pipe is false)>>Perhaps she already knows you will look at her and apologize soundlessly as rage makes a mask of your face, protects the soft animal underneath who would apologize, regret what will come next. As you will swing a bony fist towards her, will turn aside cheek and jaw, will bloody knuckles on the wounded forehead, will chase her as she staggers backwards, head cracking off of the doorframe, will revel in the sound of body hitting the ground, will straddle what is left of the body made to bleed and wrap hands around its throat and squeeze tighter and tighter and tighter as it fights claws and kicks and still tighter and tighter you grasp as vessels burst in wide pink-stained eyes your eyes and in the effort you bleed heavy drops like forgotten rain and tighter and tighter still your grasp until fleeting consciousness at last fades and the eyes are left glossy and there is no longer a pulse beneath your fingers and<</if>> And there is nothing left. And you stand over her. And there is nothing left. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 2>>Nothing but <i>you</i>. Nothing but you as you gaze upon the ruins you have left and retch at the stench of blood and viscera. Nothing but you, as you try to walk away and cannot, remaining by the side of the corpse, regretful or disgusted or both and You, kneeling above the body, fingertips brushing the <<if $tool_gauntlet is true>>bloodied side of her face,<<elseif $tool_pipe is true>>remnants of her fractured skull,<<elseif ($tool_gauntlet is false) and ($tool_pipe is false)>> bruises of her cheek and jaw,<</if>> still warm to the touch - are interrupted by a shadow cast over you. You stare at it, at the pale eyes stained pinkish, at the swollen gash from temple to brow, at the short, dark hair, at the soiled and ill-fitting uniform marked with a name that belongs to both-neither you nor this apparition, at an expression of pure horror, at the tears welling in her eyes, at everything that you were. At everything you killed. At everything you have become. She backs away from you as you rise unsteadily, stretch out a gory hand for her, remembering how she lent you her hand once, before you - No. She doesn't understand - the station changes you, the station makes you like this, the station means her harm in the same way it meant you harm and - You thought it would be over, you thought was a path of resistance and defiance, of self-preservation and fulfilment and you were wrong. You were wrong about everything. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[End.|Startup][$PassageNo = 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><</switch>><<if ndef $PassageNo>><<set $PassageNo = 1>><</if>><<switch $PassageNo>><<case 1>>This is the dying place; this is no place of honor, this is a place where nothing can survive, nothing can grow. The station nurtures a false front, promises beautiful things, promises things it never had, promises things it could never give. For her wishes to be true - for her to live on in your stead - she must leave while she still can, while she bears only your visage, before she can bear the emptiness of your memory, the heaviness of your willing self-destruction. The station begs her not to leave, the station wants, wants like a person does, wants and cannot have her, cannot have both her and you and thus you become sacrificial lamb. And somehow, the thought brings you comfort - there is certainty in this fate; you will stay and sate the desires of the station, leave her to escape. Arm in arm, you walk with the apparition-made-flesh towards the ship. She understands. She understands and does nothing to stop you, says nothing to protest, a quiet acceptance of her own, a subtle way to honor your sacrifice to come. At the base of the ramp, you halt. You know if you were to climb it, you would never return. Would never want to, could never bring yourself to. A violation of the most fundamental laws of the universe. One life for another. Conservation of energy. Willing martyrdom. And it is here, as her fingers trail through yours, that you understand. There is not a universe in which she did not leave. There is not a universe in which she will return. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 2>>You stumble away to red-marked safety as the ship prepares to leave, the control surfaces waving a final goodbye. The air grows hot as the engines whine, struggle to ignite. A moment of panic as the spaceship lurches forwards and stops, as the airlock grinds to a halt, half open. Exhale, and the airlock opens, the ship begins to accelerate to escape velocity. The cosmos sprawls out before you, tinted gold by the rings of the planet beneath. Close enough to where you could reach out, tangle your fingers in the threads of glowing rings, could press your lips to the pale blush of nebulae, fill your cupped palms with starlight. It eludes your grasp, your raised hand casts only a shadow against the tapestry of stars and galaxies, beautiful swirling colors interrupted by flares of light, phenomena natural and manufactured, known and unknowable. For all her ambition, she could only ever dream of the vast oversimplification, the singular solution to all before you, all after you. And it is here, slumped against a crate and gazing skyward, that you understand that which she never could. The spaceship departs as blazing speck of light, a shooting star on which you cast a single wish. And either your eyes or the airlock have begun to close, because the stars are growing more and more distant, fading into a blur. You are tired. You should rest, dream of the universe that waits for you still, will always wait for you. It will be there when you wake again, it promises. Sleep now, Keeper. You have earned your rest. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[End.|Startup][$PassageNo = 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><</switch>><<if ndef $PassageNo>><<set $PassageNo = 1>><</if>><<switch $PassageNo>><<case 1>>This is the dying place; this is no place of honor, this is a place where nothing can survive, nothing can grow. The station nurtures a false front, promises beautiful things, promises things it never had, promises things it could never give. And though it pains you, you must leave her here. It satisfies her ultimatum, she will live on in your stead. She will learn your function and station, in time she will be indistinguishable from you, carrying not just your visage as she does now but the fractured memories, the weight upon her shoulders, the looming threat of self-destruction. The station wants, wants like a person does, wants and cannot have her, cannot have both her and you and thus she becomes sacrificial lamb. You wish you felt bad about it; you have resigned her to a fate that is - was - undoubtedly designed for you alone. Now hers. You hope she understands. Arm in arm, you walk with the apparition-made-flesh towards the ship. You hope she understands. You hope she understands; she does nothing to stop you, nothing to protest. Perhaps she has yet to process it, perhaps she is still young and naïve and does not yet realize the gravity of the choices made for her. You pause at the base of the ramp. She cannot follow, she knows that if she sets even a foot on the ramp that she too will long for escape and be heartbroken when she finds it impossible. And it is here, as she holds your hand tight, even as you pull away and her fingers trail through yours, that you know she understands. There is not a universe in which you did not leave. There is not a universe in which you can return. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 2>>Somehow, the cramped cockpit of the ship makes sense to you like you were made to fly it; the switches and dials and gauges respond to your flighty touch, control surfaces shift intuitively, the levers fit your hands and your body the seat as if the ship was built for you, as if this was always the end goal. As if you were always meant to leave. A final confirmation that this is the right thing to do, despite the growing sob that underlies your breaths. Despite the tears that grow in your eyes, the tears that fell as you relinquished her. You have to leave. There is no other way. You advance the throttle, cue the airlock doors to open. The cosmos sprawls out before you, tinted gold by the rings of the planet beneath. Close enough to where you could reach out, tangle your fingers in the threads of glowing rings, could press your lips to the pale blush of nebulae, fill your cupped palms with starlight. It eludes your grasp, your raised hand casts only a shadow against the tapestry of stars and galaxies, beautiful swirling colors interrupted by flares of light, phenomena natural and manufactured, known and unknowable. Somewhere out there is what you are looking for, what the station was looking for through the eyes of the ones it loved, the ones through which vicarious life was possible, the ones it lost. A moment of panic as the spaceship lurches forwards and stops, as the airlock grinds to a halt, half open. Exhale, and the airlock opens, the ship begins to accelerate to escape velocity. You cannot turn back now. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 3>>You cannot turn back now; growing smaller and smaller behind and beneath you is the station. The infinite promise of the universe is before you now, stars like grains of glimmering dust in the vast tides of gravity. For every shimmering of light, potential, other worlds, other stations, others like you, others quite unlike you, things you know - blood and body and pain - and things you could not even begin to understand. And you feel small. Small and alone. Before you is everything, and behind you nothing. There is something beautiful about that, you think. You gaze out on the tapestry of the cosmos like the telescope you once maintained, seeking not distortions in light and heat, not a past lost somewhere along the closed loop of time, not answers for a wordless question, not pointless ambition, but home. You turn the ship outwards, towards a distant star. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[End.|Startup][$PassageNo = 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><</switch>><<if ndef $PassageNo>><<set $PassageNo = 1>><</if>><<switch $PassageNo>><<case 1>>This is the dying place; this is no place of honor, this is a place where nothing can survive, nothing can grow. The station nurtures a false front, promises beautiful things, promises things it never had, promises things it could never give. For her wishes to be true - for her to live on in your stead - you can no longer exist. You must divulge your flesh from that of the station, must leave it all behind. She asks to survive, to supersede you and this is the cost thereof - she will learn your function and station, she will in time be indistinguishable from you, carrying not just your visage as she does now but the fractured memories, the weight upon her shoulders, the looming threat of self-destruction. The station wants, wants like a person does, wants and cannot have her, cannot have both her and you and thus you become the sacrificial lamb. Or perhaps that cost is borne by her; regardless of blame, you wish you felt something other than relief. You hope she understands. Arm in arm, you walk with the apparition-made-flesh towards the airlock. You hope she understands. You hope she understands; she does nothing to stop you, nothing to protest. Perhaps she has yet to process it, perhaps she is still young and naïve and does not yet realize the gravity of the choice you have made. You pause with the internal door of the airlock open, waiting for her to stop you. For her to tell you that this isn't right, that there is a better way. For all your conviction; you are afraid. For all your conviction; you want to be stopped. And it is here, as she holds your hand tight, even as you start to pull away and her fingers trail through yours, that you know she understands. Loneliness is an inevitable thing. There is not a universe in which you did not proceed. There is not a universe in which you survive. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 2>>The stars were not meant for you nor any living thing, for that matter; space is dark and airless and cold and uncaring and so, you will die. It will be horrible and quick, you will have time enough to take a breath that will collapse your lungs, close your eyes before they freeze over, make peace as your blood boils in your veins. Biological death is always the result of multiple organ failure, systems going one after the other after the other until only the lonely brain remains. And the brain relinquishes the senses, ending last with hearing - <i>sound cannot travel in a vacuum</i> - and touch - <i>you are numb already</i> - though electrical activity remains often for minutes. And in this frantic review of long-gone bodily systems, this preparation of the soul, this final review of memory - you think you will be at peace, the golden years remembered through the kind lens of nostalgia, because this is the last you will feel of anything, because you don't want it to hurt, because you don't want to be scared. It won't matter. Brain activity will stop and all will cease to be, and there your story will end, extinguished alongside you, dead and gone and steadily cooling to equilibrium. The solar winds will scatter you as you drift aimless, you will pervade every particle of existence, you perhaps in a trillion years will be reborn in the cradle of a nebula, as star resplendent. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 3>>You nod serenely to the apparition as she closes the airlock door in front of you and you turn to face the stars, to behold them one final time before you join them. The cosmos sprawls out before you, tinted gold by the rings of the planet beneath. Close enough to where you could reach out, tangle your fingers in the threads of glowing rings, could press your lips to the pale blush of nebulae, fill your cupped palms with starlight. It eludes your grasp, your raised hand casts only a shadow against the tapestry of stars and galaxies, beautiful swirling colors interrupted by flares of light, phenomena natural and manufactured, known and unknowable. And the airlock door opens and the void comes rushing in and you close your eyes and take one final breath and <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[End.|Startup][$PassageNo = 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><</switch>><<if ndef $PassageNo>><<set $PassageNo = 1>><</if>><<switch $PassageNo>><<case 1>>And this, at last, is a way out. Escape. You are connected to the station by a single carabiner attached to your chest. It comes undone far more easily than would have assuaged your earlier fears. The collar twists off of the locking gate, which opens with the press of your thumb. You grasp the rope in <<if $tool_gauntlet is true>> gauntleted <<elseif $tool_gauntlet is false>> gloved<</if>> hand, pull up and let the carabiner drift from the loop on your chest. You are held on only by <<if ($tool_gauntlet is true) , ($injured_window is false)>> your gauntleted grasp, the mechanical systems begging you not to let go, doing the work of your unwilling fingers. The enduring grasp of the station, the protocol overridden. <<elseif ($tool_gauntlet is false) , ($injured_window is true)>> your bloodied hand, fingers taut and numb and slipping inside the glove; you will let go eventually, a decision outside will or want. <<elseif ($tool_gauntlet is false) , ($injured_window is false)>> your gloved hand, your grip slackening by the second; you have made your decision, you will let go, regardless of original intent.<</if>> And it is now when you let go. At first, the tether is within a fingertip's reach - had you somehow changed your mind or found your conviction weak, you could pull yourself back to the safety of certainty. There is a certainty in what you have done, too. You will die. Your oxygen will run out and carbon dioxide will accumulate in your blood and slowly, you will asphyxiate. You will die. Biological death is always the result of multiple organ failure, systems going one after the other after the other until only the lonely brain remains. And the brain relinquishes the senses, ending last with <<if $wounded_armory is true>>your already half-gone<</if>> hearing and touch, though electrical activity remains often for minutes. And in this frantic review of long-gone bodily systems, this preparation of the soul, this final review of memory - you think you will be at peace, the golden years remembered through the kind lens of nostalgia, because this is the last you will feel of anything, because you don't want to be scared. It won't matter. Brain activity will stop and all will cease to be, and here your story will end, extinguished alongside you, dead and gone and steadily cooling to equilibrium. The solar winds will scatter you as you drift aimless, you will pervade every particle of existence, you perhaps in a trillion years will be reborn in the cradle of a nebula, as star resplendent. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 2>>Because this is how it has always been, will always be. There are fluctuations in the base state of universal indifference - moments of joy and of pain, of triumph and terror - but in accordance with the most fundamental laws of physics, there is always a return to equilibrium. You will always return home. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[End.|Startup][($PassageNo = 1)]]</div> </div><</nobr>><</switch>><<if ndef $PassageNo>><<set $PassageNo = 1>><</if>><<switch $PassageNo>><<case 1>>This is the dying place; this is no place of honor, this is a place where nothing can survive, nothing can grow. The station nurtures a false front, promises beautiful things, promises things it never had, promises things it could never give. It lied to you, lied to her. All you have sacrificed, what little else you could give would not be enough - she would take up your mantle, learn your function and station, slowly lose herself to the demands of the task before her, she would in time be indistinguishable from you, carrying not just your visage but the fractured memories, the weight upon her shoulders, the looming promise of self-destruction. The station wants, wants like a person does, wants and cannot have her, cannot have both her and you, wants and cannot be satiated and so you must take a different path. You must divulge your flesh from the station, yours and hers, to purge your influence, to end the cycle, to end it all. This is your conviction. You wish you felt something other than relief. You hope she understands. Arm in arm, you walk with the apparition-made-flesh towards the airlock. You hope she understands. You hope she understands; she does nothing to stop you, nothing to protest. Perhaps she has yet to process it, perhaps she is still young and naïve and does not yet realize the gravity of the choice you have made. You pause with the internal door of the airlock open, waiting for her to stop you. For her to tell you that this isn't right, that there is a better way. For all your conviction; you are afraid. For all your conviction; you want to be stopped. And it is here, as she holds your hand tight and follows you without question, that you know she understands. Ambition is a fatal thing. You will be a victim to it no longer. There is not a universe in which you did not proceed. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 2>>The stars were not meant for you nor any living thing, for that matter; space is dark and airless and cold and uncaring and so, you will die. It will be horrible and quick, you will have time enough to take a breath that will collapse your lungs, close your eyes before they freeze over, make peace as your blood boils in your veins. Biological death is always the result of multiple organ failure, systems going one after the other after the other until only the lonely brain remains. And the brain relinquishes the senses, ending last with hearing - <i>sound cannot travel in a vacuum</i> - and touch - <i>you are numb already</i> - though electrical activity remains often for minutes. And in this frantic review of long-gone bodily systems, this preparation of the soul, this final review of memory - you think you will be at peace, the golden years remembered through the kind lens of nostalgia, because this is the last you will feel of anything, because you don't want her to hurt, because you don't want her to be scared. It won't matter. Brain activity will stop and all will cease to be, and there your stories will end, extinguished alongside you, dead and gone and steadily cooling to equilibrium. The solar winds will scatter you as you drift aimless, you will pervade in time every particle of existence, you perhaps in a trillion years will be reborn in the cradle of a nebula, as stars resplendent. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 3>>You nod serenely to the apparition-made-equal as you close the airlock door behind you and turn to face the stars, to behold them one final time before you join them. The cosmos sprawls out before you, tinted gold by the rings of the planet beneath. Close enough to where you could reach out, tangle your fingers in the threads of glowing rings, could press your lips to the pale blush of nebulae, fill your cupped palms with starlight. It eludes your grasp, your raised hand casts only a shadow against the tapestry of stars and galaxies, beautiful swirling colors interrupted by flares of light, phenomena natural and manufactured, known and unknowable. She reaches for your hand again and you oblige her. She has begun to cry, turned her face from the airlock door and the stars that await. With shaking hand, you wipe the tears from her cheek. And in turn she embraces you, wraps her arms around your back and leans on your armored shoulder. And in turn you embrace her, hold tight, as if you could ward off what comes next because it is only a matter of time, seconds ticking down into oblivion. And the airlock door opens and the void comes rushing in and she tightens her grasp as you close your eyes and feel the tears on your cheek flash-freeze and take one final breath and <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[End.|Startup][$PassageNo = 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><</switch>><<if ndef $PassageNo>><<set $PassageNo = 1>><</if>><<switch $PassageNo>><<case 1>>She will live on in your stead. This is the alternative she proposes, a singular, dogmatic truth, your new protocol. You are to die, she is to live. And you find that this is unacceptable; that for all you have done, all you have suffered - you will surrender to her. Will surrender to it. Will surrender all you have done - all you <i>are</i> - so that something undeserving may yet live. And for the briefest of seconds - you are overwhelmed by a flaming surge of anger, no, <i>hatred</i> bursting in fireworks across your thoughts, desire enough to strike it, to make it know your pain, to To kill it. To kill her. The fate she has resigned you to is unacceptable. It is not belabored with wounds, it bears only their facsimiles, only their visages. Strange, to think that you pitied it when you gazed upon it in the hallway, what with its silent plea for help, for its pale countenance and exhaustion. Strange, to think that your first thoughts of it foreshadowed the violence that would rise natural to your mind now. Conviction enough; you are doing the right thing, it is not something that should be allowed to leave, something that does not deserve a reprieve, does not deserve peace - those belong to you, you who has bled for your freedom, who has suffered for the cruelty of this station. You back away from it. Perhaps it knows what is to come, perhaps she has foreseen this, perhaps this is the way it will always end, you stand before it in the hangar bay and she tells you that you are to die so that she may live. <<if $tool_gauntlet is true>>Perhaps she knows that you will close the fingers of the gauntlet into a fist. Will direct a wild swing at the corner of her jaw that upon connection staggers it, will chase it, shove it into the crates behind it and revel in the sound of body hitting the ground, will straddle what is left of the body made to bleed as consciousness already fleeting vacates the eyes and thus it cannot and will not fight back as you bloody your hands again and again and again and again and again and again and<<elseif $tool_pipe is true>>Perhaps she knows you will heft the pipe. That you will not see a person standing before you but instead another obstacle, another window to be shattered. That you will swing with all of the fading might left in your body and direct the force to the very corner of the wounded brow, will collapse temple inwards with a single blow and revel in the sound of body hitting the ground, will stand above it as consciousness already fleeting vacates the eyes and in a moment of inhuman cruelty will desecrate the corpse by swinging again and again and again and again and again and again and<<elseif $tool_pipe is false and $tool_gauntlet is false>>Perhaps she already knows you will look at her and apologize soundlessly as rage makes a mask of your face, protects the soft animal underneath who would apologize, regret what will come next. As you will swing a bony fist towards her, will turn aside cheek and jaw, will bloody knuckles on the wounded forehead, will chase her as she staggers backwards, head cracking off of the stacked crates, will revel in the sound of body hitting the ground, will straddle what is left of the body made to bleed and wrap hands around its throat and squeeze tighter and tighter and tighter as it fights claws and kicks and still tighter and tighter you grasp as vessels burst in wide pink-stained eyes your eyes and in the effort you bleed heavy drops like forgotten rain and tighter and tighter still your grasp until fleeting consciousness at last fades and the eyes are left glossy and there is no longer a pulse beneath your fingers and<</if>> And there is nothing left. And you stand over her. And there is nothing left. Nothing but <i>you</i>. Nothing but you, as you gaze upon the ruins you have left. Nothing but you, as you walk away, limping towards the ship, exhausted and clinging desperate to what remains of your determination. You are so close, so close to escape, so close to freedom. You have defeated your apparition, defied the station, you will walk away and be free. Victorious, at last. At long last. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 2>>On the ramp of the ship, you lean heavily on a support strut, your exhaustion increasing exponentially, the weight of a thousand atmospheres on your shoulders, the albatross of guilt around your neck and drawing tighter, your breath suddenly bloody, head spinning, weakness growing to consume all of your body that you can still feel. A crash from somewhere in the distant hangar rouses you from your suffering; you search with faded eyes far and wide and finally fix upon movement near the base of the ramp. You stare at it, at the pale eyes stained pinkish, at the swollen gash from temple to brow, at the short, dark hair, at the soiled and ill-fitting uniform marked with a name that belongs to both-neither you nor this apparition, at the familiarly furious expression, at everything that you were. At everything you killed. At everything you have become. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 3>>And now - there is nothing. Empty space, disused and desolate. The colors faded to gray, the vast airlocks closed, the yellowed fluorescent lights half-lit and flickering, casting the dim shadows of ghosts across the working docks. A single ship remains. Just one. The station is empty and quiet. There is no escape. The ghosts of the station whisper the stories of those who tried, speak only in whispers, lest the station hear them, lest it wake, lest more ghosts join the first, the woman who gazed upon the stars and saw nothing but hope, sought nothing but love, found nothing but a choiceless grief that carried her back to this place, the empty hangar, and did not let her leave. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[End.|Startup][$PassageNo = 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><</switch>><span class = flashback>She had always dreamt of the stars. Always, from the time she was a child gazing towards the golden rings of her home as they grew to encompass the summer skies, tracing the patterns of the clouds that seemed to weave between each individual glowing thread, hand in hand interlinked. To when, hand in hand interlinked, she led her to the bench in the forest clearing, where the shades of twilight had descended at last, the rings setting, the stars beginning to wake. Here, the cosmos were within reach, close enough to where she could reach out, tangle her fingers in the bands of fading light, press her lips to the pale blush of nebulae, fill her cupped palms with starlight. And yet, it eluded her grasp, her raised hand cast only a shadow against the tapestry of stars and galaxies, beautiful swirling colors interrupted by flares of light, phenomena natural and manufactured, known and unknowable. She was meant to study the stars, to know the unknowable. She was meant to be a methodical and exacting scientist, with her pattern-seeking brain and disdain for social interaction. She had the capability to discover, to interpret, to understand. And now, she had the gateway to the universe promised before her. It sat in the palm of her hand, felt like the fingers that wrapped around hers. To call her a star would be facetious; a person and a star are two quite different things. She would know; she was meant to study the stars, that is her purpose, her life's calling, all she was meant to do and yet - she finds herself biased, conflicted. The stars shone in her eyes, always, warm and bright and so diametrically opposed to the pinpricks of cold bitter light she analyzed for months, years on end, searching for the answer to a question long-forgotten. She was meant to study the stars, she tries to convince herself. And yet - her home was never amongst them, found instead in the dappling of light through the thin apertures of leaves, a thousand little eclipses in half moons across knotted hardwood floors, in the arms of another who was soft upon her skin, for whom her delusions of grandeur were lost in promises of her embrace, the feeling of lips against hers, the warmth of devotion. She was meant to study the stars, she reminds herself. And when the time came - a promise to stand on the shoulders of giants and look further than they ever had, to be a part of something greater than herself, than all who had come before - this time, she looked down. At hand in hand interlinked, at golden bands of her own, at the stars she had come to love. Purpose is a damning thing. <i>If I leave, I may never return,</i> she told the woman who sat across the table from her with a sad smile curving her lips. <i>Stay</i>, she pleaded. <i>Stay with me, then.</i> Love, stupid, foolish, illogical love. Not something that can be defined through the nature of scientific inquiry, though many have tried. Love, like want, can make gods of men. Love can bring these newly forged gods to their knees. It was a fundamental betrayal of who she was, all she was meant to do, she had turned her gaze from the sky for too long. Purpose is a damning thing and she - until this one instance in this one solution to the many-worlds problem - was always damned to leave, to succumb to her ambition. But the only stars that shone were in the dark eyes of the woman who sat across the table from her. <i>There is not a universe in which I would leave,</i> she promised.</span> <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[End.|Startup]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<if ndef $PassageNo>><<set $PassageNo = 1>><</if>><<switch $PassageNo>><<case 1>>You raise gauntlet to panel, knowing - somehow - that you will be able to open the door even without credentials, that the gauntlet systems will interface with the door systems and all it will take is closeness. The metal plate in the palm grows uncomfortably warm as the computer systems flare into life with the slightest burst of static. A moment of pause. The slightest haptic feedback, vibration across your fingertips. You can open the door now. You hesitate. <i>You can open the door now.</i> You jerk your hand back from the green-lit panel. The door slides open, and you are greeted once again with darkness. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 2>>There is not much you know about anything, there is little you can say with full confidence, with full knowledge - but you know definitively that you should not be here now. More so than the tunnels, more so than the Administration Cortex: <i>you do not belong here</i>. You do not belong here, in the same suffocating darkness as the tunnels, velvet blackness that presses against you, dances around you. Omnipresent, it leeches into your pores, hangs heavy on your clothes, forces its way down your throat to rest in your lungs. Prevents proper function, the human eye requires contrast, perceives flat dark as eigengrau in the pursuit of shades lighter and darker, enough for rods and cones to align properly, to see clearly in the gloom. There is no adjustment past the straggler rays through the door and frost-opaque window; all falter upon the enormity of the space they must light. You cannot falter, you must proceed into the hostile depths. Why must a space station have an armory? Were there seeds of discord foreseen from the very start, did the plans always call for violence? A system primed for violence, not defense; few dare these reaches of space with ill intent, fewer still would dare to hijack an observatory. The weapons were always directed inwards, blade pressed to forearm, barrel to temple, murder-suicide. You are not - were not, will not be - a violent being, you think, you hope; you are not a violent being and this is the reason you feel as though you do not belong, surrounded by the tools of violent intent. You weave your way through the rows of armor and weaponry by touch and touch alone. Trust that your touch will yield what you seek, a spacesuit, a tether kit, some luck to offset the misfortune of your waking existence. Something nudges your foot. Something cylindrical, something you nudge a little more before chasing with a blind hand. A flashlight. The beam is faded, catching every particle of dust kicked up by your uncertain footfalls - but it is light, glorious, glorious light. The rows of equipment stand a head and half taller than you, worn gunmetal and white enamel with red-stenciled names. Most lie empty, their niches waiting patiently for a return that will never happen. Still others contain the partial remnants of their inhabitants, a boot here, a glove there, cracked helmets and loose straps and armor, the bones of a kill scattered by scavengers. Further down the row, the suits begin to assemble themselves - the one on your right is half complete, the left missing only a few vital components. The smell of heavy plastic vinyl and burnt carbon ever present, permeating every movement, every examination of suit and niche. You could be forgiven for mistaking the suits alive, you could be forgiven for the way you jump slightly when peeling apart the rubbery garments, as if waiting for a ghost to reprimand you for desecrating their grave. Three niches down, you find what you were searching for. A complete spacesuit, glove outstretched. As if it were waiting for you, beckoning you. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 3>>The ardor of dressing yourself in the spacesuit was completely unforeseen. Every movement a struggle, a test for your aching muscles and wounds. A task better suited for camaraderie or intimacy - arms around your waist, a body pressed against your back in wanting and - Heavy-plated boots and insulated pants reinforced perhaps concerningly along the seams are connected by internal belt and webbing to a top worn temporarily around your waist as you decide how best to proceed. If it were as simple as pulling the collar over your head and sealing the side seams, you would have acted deftly, minimized your time in the crushing darkness. In your examination of the spacesuit, you have realized that the gauntlet cannot be worn underneath, that you will need to remove it, you will need to relive - albeit briefly - the agony of activation once more. Flashlight in teeth, you release the first clasp from your forearm. The beam trembles as you clench your jaw, fire setting beneath your skin, melting marrow and collapsing muscle. The second clasp nearer the wrist, the third across the back of the hand, and at last comes the act of degloving. You pull until you are certain you will finally separate gauntlet from hand and draw out a stump instead. You close your eyes as hand comes unsheathed, not daring a single glimpse of what you could have removed. The rest of the spacesuit is unremarkable, save for becoming increasingly difficult to put on without the use of your gauntlet hand. It is only when almost entirely clad that you are able to fit gauntlet over glove, welcome again the use of your clumsy fingers. It promises that it will be more useful in conjunction with the spacesuit; you have no choice but to trust the parasite's promise as it latches onto your forearm, briefly and horribly contorting the limb before relinquishing it back to your fragile control. The rest of the spacesuit is unremarkable, thin and flexible in places and armored in others, triangular ceramic plates arranged into arrays of hexagons. You consider briefly why a spacesuit would need to be armored, though you suspect that your answer lies remarkably close to the reason for the armory existing to begin with. The rest of the spacesuit is unremarkable until you hold the helmet in your hands. The hazy beam of the flashlight now strapped to your shoulder illuminates your warped reflection in the first of two visors. A translucent one, ever so slightly iridescent - and over it, moving delicately with a series of precise hinges and magnets, a folded opaque one. You test the action cautiously, the translucent visor covered sequentially, like the unfurling of leaves in spring or the opening of morning flowers, fragile-printed circuits and composite screens revealing why the opacity was necessary. Perhaps foolishly, you don the helmet. The armory blossoms before you in artificial contrast - illuminated outlines on the display indicate items with which the gauntlet is compatible, list inventories stretching decades, unfamiliar names and numbers and data, meaningless statistics and strings of number and code that must have meant something to someone once but now serve to render you blind and senseless. And in a fit of clumsy fury, searching for the release tabs at the seal, you somehow dislodge the visor. The onslaught ceases, the sound of your frantic breath deafening in the helm. A moment of calm before you persist, the armory passing in an oil-slick haze as you search for a tether kit. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 4>>Towards the back of the armory is a section that required an identity check to proceed. Almost humorously, the cameras and barriers seem derelict, empty eyes watching, skeletal arms outstretched to ward off the threat of invaders long since passed. You proceed cautiously, the moment of humor - <i>how could a machine know who you are, when you yourself have no idea?</i> - lost as the opacity of the visor conceals your familiar-unfamiliar face, the simple truth that you do not know who you are or were. You are You were You were enchanted by the stars, always looking up. First, as a child gazing towards the golden rings of your home as they grew to encompass the summer skies, tracing the patterns of the clouds that seemed to weave between each individual glowing thread, hand in hand interlinked. Hand in hand interlinked you sat on a bench somewhere deep in the dregs of summer beneath the setting rings, waiting for the stars to return. she was soft upon your skin, sunlight in spring, the first snows of autumn. The stars shone in her eyes, always. Delusions of grandeur lost in the summer winds of her laugh, the comfort of a fire in winter in her embrace. Who could blame you, for turning your gaze away from the sky? You were enchanted by the stars, enamored with them. Who could blame you for leaving her, when the stars in her eyes shone no longer? In your hands is a tether kit. Some autonomous portion of your mind must have guided you here, some unconscious reflex recognized your target, and here you are. Inside the orange-red case is the tether kit, a device that, while undoubtedly a genius piece of technology, does not inspire confidence. A simple harness and minimalist padding - features that feel more an afterthought - rest over the surface of the suit, the tether itself is coiled snakelike in a bag worn at your hip. This is all that will provide safe passage through the breach. This is what must you entrust your life to. You have all you need. You should leave. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 5>>Something waits for you as you turn. The fangs of the armory turned inwards, a ring of lasers directed at your chest, the black-eye-barrel of a rifle directed at you. <i>Intruder,</i> it whispers. <i>Enemy,</i> it names you. <i>You do not belong here,</i> it tells you. <i>You do not belong here,</i> it tells you. <i>You do not belong here. You will be excised, you will be purged.</i> The ring collapses into a single dot and desperately, you raise the gauntlet that has come to life in defense of you; the heat of the laser can be felt through palm plate and glove as you wait for your salvation. As you wait for your execution. The weapon-arm of the station hesitates. The truth of the matter is this - the violence was always directed inwards, means of control, of maintenance, a violent upkeep. You will not be culled today, it decides. The gauntlet clicks triumphantly, whirs in celebration as you stagger out of the armory, back into the hallways. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|armory-conclusion][($PassageNo = 1) , ($chapter to "Escape Protocol")]]</div> </div><</nobr>><</switch>><<if ndef $PassageNo>><<set $PassageNo = 1>><</if>><<switch $PassageNo>><<case 1>>Fundamentally, the Repository is as its name describes - a place for mass storage. Made necessary through the double-edged sword of the station's role as observatory - isolated enough to escape light pollution and the constructs of humanity, isolated enough to avoid gravitational lensing of light like that found nearer the galactic core, isolated enough to be passed over by nearly all trade and supply routes, isolated enough to warrant complete self-sustainability, isolated enough to disappear. The Repository houses duplicates or triplicates of every single piece used in construction, enough to sustain the station. Enough to completely rebuild it, Theseus' everlasting ship, rivet by rivet, panel by panel. The Repository houses something more unsavory. To staff the station over the course of its operating cycle - up to five hundred Solar-Equivalent years - volunteers were collected. Debtors, prisoners, those unfortunate souls out of options, people who had only time and bodies to contribute to the great advances of science and industry. They were sequestered away in tanks of cryogenic liquid, out of sight and mind until needed. A necessary evil; the station would not - could not - run without their sacrifice. If one can get past the contents of the Repository, stomach the cruelty inherent to its operation - then the facility becomes wonderous. A spectacular feat of engineering, system nested within system. Spanning from the very top of the ring all the way to the lowermost floors and consuming almost a quarter of the circumference of the ring, it possesses its own environmental control, own artificial gravity, own power and computer systems, own crew - existing far outside the grasp of the station proper. You in your jumbled memory have never set foot inside the Repository. Few - outside of those newly awoken for whom the memory of waking in such a place must feel like nightmare, and those chosen for duty beyond the bulkheads - ever get further than where you stand. A small requisitions room stands as still as the day it was abandoned, heavy shadows like cobwebs cling to the corners, the only light being that of the faded screens still displaying assignment and order overhead. You venture further into the dark, looking for a way into the facility itself. The path forwards comes in the form of a small, faintly lit room with the door propped open. A small armory greets you, rows of lockers and benches and personal effects left behind to collect dust, left as if their owners would return eventually to claim them. You sift through these effects by touch and touch alone, the softness of a shirt against your face and the vitreous feeling of a photograph under your fingertips, turning it over along crease lines. You are feeling for something you will know as it graces your hands, something necessary for what is to come. On the floor of a locker next to a pair of stiff, leathery boots is the curvature of a helm tipped on its side, a hexagonal parcel tucked inside. The conditions inside the Repository are dangerous; thus a strange combination of ancient and new was created, a simply named mag-suit. It promises safety in a strange kind of sentience as you fumble with it, drape it over your shoulders and wait as settles on your chest and arms, thick hexagonal plates coated in something chipped away by time, assembled in a chain mail like pattern over a thin adaptive matrix, held in place by its own internal magnetism and a harness that feels rather inadequate for its life-saving role. It unfurls slowly across your limbs without your interference, encroaching into the gauntlet despite protest from both systems. You bite back tears as you put on the simple helmet, one that shields your face and bears a rudimentary heads-up-display, one that indicates that you are ready to proceed. A final gift, an integrated flashlight that casts a thin, hazy beam from above your brow. A way of buying your trust, as if you had any other choice but to trust it. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 2>>Fundamentally, you know what the Repository is. As its name describes - a place for mass storage, consuming very nearly a quarter of the station's circumference and almost the entire height, housing duplicates and triplicates of every single piece used in construction, enough to completely rebuild the station, panel by panel, rivet by rivet. Fundamentally, you know what the Repository is, something that forbids you, something that does not want to be known. What lies beyond the bulkhead is Is Is Is nothing. You stand on a platform that stretches as far as the faded beam of your flashlight allows. All else is impenetrable darkness, an emptiness that you can feel in the hollow spaces between your bones, vertigo inducing. Somewhere in the emptiness, giants shift; you can hear the faintest murmuration of movement as inch your way forward despite the cries of danger from the helmet display, despite the faint suggestions of floor markings warning you - <i>no further, you will not return, you are making a mistake.</i> Looking up was a mistake; you half expected to see stars and instead felt a sinking in your gut as you were met with more emptiness. You do not dare to look down. Emergency lights attached to the end of row after row after row of materiel faintly illuminate the silhouette fanning columns that parade slowly before you, their soldier's rank and file interrupted by vast mechanical arms, autoloaders that do not respond to the mag suit's call, powerless, even if they did want to help. You will have to traverse the rows yourself. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 3>>The task before you is both Herculean and not - you need surprisingly little to complete your repair and yet, you are entirely unwilling to dare the Repository. Not on pain of falling or death but of fulfilment. What comes next, when you have repaired the array? Not if, but when, you know yourself capable and still find yourself frozen, your bones aching to get it over with despite the conflict that has you rooted to the platform. You will fulfil your purpose, complete your task - you are built to do so, meant to do so. Then what? Do you disappear like the rest of the crew, fade away into the dark? Will the station lull you back to sleep or coerce you more violently to pause or end? Further questions, growing more seditious to border on paranoia. Will the restoration of power bring with it the remembrance of ghosts, will saving the memory banks fill the gaps in your own memory? Would it tell you then who you are, who you were? Would you even want to know? You are You were You were enchanted by the stars, always looking up. First, as a child gazing towards the golden rings of your home as they grew to encompass the summer skies, tracing the patterns of the clouds that seemed to weave between each individual glowing thread, hand in hand interlinked. Hand in hand interlinked you sat on a bench somewhere deep in the dregs of summer beneath the setting rings, waiting for the stars to return. She was soft upon your skin, sunlight in spring, the first snows of autumn. The stars shone in her eyes, always. Delusions of grandeur lost in the summer winds of her laugh, the comfort of a fire in winter in her embrace. Who could blame you, for turning your gaze away from the sky? You were enchanted by the stars, enamored with them. Who could blame you for leaving her, when the stars in her eyes shone no longer? Carried unconsciously, tidally, you stand at the very edge of the abyss, the event horizon. Like the pit, it beckons, promises freedom somewhere at the very bottom. You cannot oblige it; you are bound to honor and duty. The mag suit points out your target row and the extended arm of an autoloader, it promises that - even though you will have no way of knowing - it will be close enough to where if you leapt, to where if you managed to catch the extended arm, you would find yourself amongst the frames. This, then is blind faith in the most literal sense. You back up several steps, steeling yourself as best you can. The event horizon is a point of no return, you remind yourself. A point of no return, throwing yourself over the edge, eyes closed. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 4>>Your gamble paid off; the combination of artificially dampened gravity and the countermeasures built into the mag suit mean that - despite impacting the extended arm obliquely and sliding with a horrible metal on metal screech - you find yourself safe atop the autoloader. A moment to slow your racing heart spent reviewing your checklist: replacement photosynthetic panel and the appropriate cables, overflow capacitors, a new emergency battery. For each item, the suit relinquishes a location and suggests a path you cannot see. You have no choice but to trust it. And so you proceed, led by touch and faith alone, crawling on hands and knees up the arm of the autoloader, eyes trained only on the beam before you; if you look down you will be sick, if you look up you will begin to cry. At the artificial shoulder, you make a no less impressive leap of faith, falling heavily into an empty hopper with a resounding echo. Thus begins your odyssey, a climb unmeant for you nor any other living being, for that matter. Though gravity reluctantly imparts less force and the suit eagerly provides a magnetic force equal to or greater than the apathy of your bones, you still find the narrow catwalks and almost-ladders to be needlessly arduous, afterthought or precautionary and entirely unsuited to the task you attempt - no sane person would dare a climb under these conditions but you have no other choice. Like the tunnels and so much their inverse - vast and open, nauseatingly open, you would rather descend into the gullet of the station than embrace the vacancy over your shoulder - you cling to each rung, pray it will hold you. The added weight of the parts you collect meticulously, holding each up to the faint flashlight beam, inspecting by careful touch - a pair of panels the size of your torso slung across your back with makeshift sling, the cables you wrap around your waist, the capacitors carefully shoved into a mesh bag and tucked into the cable-belt, the battery you sacrifice a hand for - exhausts you and armors you; you will not fail, you will fall. One final problem remains. Return. You sit precariously atop a row as they tick by slowly, your idea of safe harbor growing further and further away with each passing second. You have no idea where the rows go, nor any intention of finding out. A solution presents itself to you, farfetched and almost laughable at first. You shouldn't. It would be a death sentence, even with the countermeasures in place. But what choice do you have? You have no choice but to trust it, standing unsteadily and feeling the suit contract to correct for fluctuations in the gravity, for the shifting of the row frame and the burden you carry. It is a long, long way down. Strangely, you find yourself unafraid. Perhaps confidence; the artificially lowered gravity and mag suit will prevent the fall from being fatal, though they cannot mitigate pain or regret. Perhaps apathy; if the fall proves fatal then you will never know, you will find yourself released from this task and all future ones, all future suffering. And if you survive - then surely the most difficult portion of your labors will be complete. It is a long, long way down. It is a long, long way down and somehow, somewhere in your supposedly perfect solution you have encountered an error. Miscalculated. The abyss rushes up at you, the briefest glimpse of safe ground revealed by flashlight to be just beyond your grasp - you have come up short, you are moving much faster than you should be, this is the end. This is how it always ends; falling the mechanism of your demise, her demise, both the guilty Daedalus and foolish Icarus, too close to the sea, too close to the sun and always doomed by gravity. This is how it always ends as the breath is driven from your lungs in the same instant you catch the very edge, mag suit systems and seemingly the Repository itself conspiring to prevent your fall. Blind and panicked, you scrabble forward to haul yourself over the event horizon once more and lie flat on the platform, fumbling with the straps of the helm until it rolls away and you press your cheek into the cool composite of the floor, take deep gasping breaths. A relief. A reprieve. You lay there for a time, until the ache of your ribs subsides some and your heartbeat no longer chips away at the floor. Until it seems as if the ground embraces you in kind, and like a lover in the early hours, you must leave. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|repo-conclusion][($PassageNo = 1) , ($chapter to "Repair Protocol")]]</div> </div><</nobr>><</switch>><<if ndef $PassageNo>><<set $PassageNo = 1>><</if>><<switch $PassageNo>><<case 1>>It is becoming increasingly evident that violence is a valid solution to your problems. Especially the issue that has become traversal within the station. <<if $injured_window is true>>You tighten your slick grip on the pipe, reminded of what happened last time you shattered a window. A silent promise to your flesh; you will be more careful this time.<</if>> You heft the pipe to your shoulder, brace your core. Take aim, swing with all your might. The breaking of the window in a cascade of glass is almost musical to your ears. You stare into the yawning dark, leaning into the abyss as you are met with silent alarms, red strobes igniting the depths of the room. Steadying yourself, you climb cautiously into the armory. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 2>>There is not much you know about anything, there is little you can say with full confidence, with full knowledge - but you know definitively that you should not be here now. More so than the tunnels, more so than the Administration Cortex: <i>you do not belong here</i>. You do not belong here amongst the leaping, blooded light or in the suffocating shade, dark enough to leech into your pores and cling to your clothes, dark enough so that the only brightness is that of the alarm strobe. In light as in dark, you must proceed, pressing forwards into the hostile depths. Why must a space station have an armory? Were there seeds of discord foreseen from the very start, did the plans always call for violence? A system primed for violence, not defense; few dare these reaches of space with ill intent, fewer still would dare to hijack an observatory. The weapons were always directed inwards, blade pressed to forearm, barrel to temple, murder-suicide. You are not - were not, will not be - a violent being, you think, you hope; you are not a violent being and this is the reason you feel as though you do not belong, surrounded by the tools of violent intent. You weave your way through the rows of armor and weaponry by touch and touch alone, your eyes half closed and cast upon the ground to avoid the maddening siren's call. Trust that your touch will yield what you seek, a spacesuit, a tether kit, some luck to offset the misfortune of your waking existence. You have no such luck, garish shadows stoop to mock you, unfortunate soul with weapon clutched defensively to chest, asking what it is that you seek, if you think you can hope to find without embracing further the nature of this room. Reap what you have sown, violence and chaos, shattered window and bloodied hand. The tombs of equipment abandoned stand a head and half taller than you, worn gunmetal and white enamel with red-stenciled names. Most lie empty, their burial niches left gaping, waiting impatiently for a return that will never happen. Still others contain the partial remnants of their inhabitants, a boot here, a glove there, cracked helmets and loose straps and armor, the bones of a kill scattered by scavengers. Further down the row, the suits begin to assemble themselves - the one on your right is half complete, the left missing only a few vital components. The smell of heavy plastic vinyl and burnt carbon ever present, permeating every movement, every examination of suit and niche. You could be forgiven for mistaking the suits alive, you could be forgiven for the terror that permeates your thoughts as in the flashes of dark, you swear that the suits move, shift, lean in close to leer at you, whisper to you. <i>Do you know what you have done?</i> They ask. <i>You have doomed us all,</i> they accuse as you bite back tears, push your way through the condensing darkness, recoil at touch upon your skin. Three niches down, you find what you were searching for. A complete spacesuit, glove outstretched. As if it were waiting for you, beckoning you. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 3>>The ardor of dressing yourself in the spacesuit was completely unforeseen. Every movement a struggle, a test for your aching muscles and wounds. A task better suited for camaraderie or intimacy - arms around your waist, deliberate and deft hands, a body pressed against your back in wanting and - Heavy-plated boots and insulated pants reinforced perhaps concerningly along the seams are connected by internal belt and webbing to a top worn temporarily around your waist as you rest, try to clear the feeling of having desecrated a grave from your mind. The rest of the spacesuit is unremarkable, albeit difficult to put on with your terror and injury-slick hands; you are thankful for the shade of the light concealing the extent to which your suit must be stained. The rest of the spacesuit is unremarkable, thin and flexible in places and armored in others, triangular ceramic plates arranged into arrays of hexagons. You consider briefly why a spacesuit would need to be armored, though you suspect that your answer lies remarkably close to the reason for the armory existing to begin with. The rest of the spacesuit is unremarkable until you hold the helmet in your hands. The maddening light illuminates sporadically a warped reflection in the first of two visors. A translucent one, ever so slightly iridescent - and over it, moving delicately with a series of precise hinges and magnets, a folded opaque one. You test the action cautiously, the translucent visor covered sequentially, like the unfurling of leaves in spring or the opening of morning flowers, fragile-printed circuits and composite screens revealing why the opacity was necessary. Perhaps foolishly, you don the helmet. The armory blossoms before you in artificial contrast - systems struggling to compensate for the fluctuations in light, somewhere amongst the flickering are list inventories stretching decades, unfamiliar names and numbers and data, meaningless statistics and strings of number and code that must have meant something to someone once but now serve to render you blind and senseless. And in a fit of clumsy fury, searching for the release tabs at the seal, you somehow dislodge the visor. The onslaught ceases, the sound of your frantic breath deafening in the helm. A moment of calm before you persist, the armory passing in a daze as you search for a tether kit. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 4>>Towards the back of the armory is a section that required an identity check to proceed. Almost humorously, the cameras and barriers seem derelict, empty eyes watching, skeletal arms outstretched to ward off the threat of invaders long since passed. You proceed cautiously, the moment of humor - <i>how could a machine know who you are, when you yourself have no idea?</i> - lost as the opacity of the visor conceals your familiar-unfamiliar face, the simple truth that you do not know who you are or were. You are You were You were enchanted by the stars, always looking up. First, as a child gazing towards the golden rings of your home as they grew to encompass the summer skies, tracing the patterns of the clouds that seemed to weave between each individual glowing thread, hand in hand interlinked. Hand in hand interlinked you sat on a bench somewhere deep in the dregs of summer beneath the setting rings, waiting for the stars to return. she was soft upon your skin, sunlight in spring, the first snows of autumn. The stars shone in her eyes, always. Delusions of grandeur lost in the summer winds of her laugh, the comfort of a fire in winter in her embrace. Who could blame you, for turning your gaze away from the sky? You were enchanted by the stars, enamored with them. Who could blame you for leaving her, when the stars in her eyes shone no longer? In your hands is a tether kit. Some autonomous portion of your mind must have guided you here, some unconscious reflex recognized your target, and here you are. Inside the orange-red case is the tether kit, a device that, while undoubtedly a genius piece of technology, does not inspire confidence. A simple harness and minimalist padding - features that feel more an afterthought - rest over the surface of the suit, the tether itself is coiled snakelike in a bag worn at your hip. This is all that will provide safe passage through the breach. This is what must you entrust your life to. You have all you need. You should leave. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 5>>Something waits for you as you turn. The fangs of the armory turned inwards, a ring of lasers directed at your head, the black-eye-barrel of a rifle directed at you. <i>Intruder,</i> it whispers. <i>Enemy,</i> it names you. <i>You do not belong here,</i> it tells you. <i>You do not belong here,</i> it tells you. <i>You do not belong here. You will be excised, you will be purged.</i> The ring collapses into a single dot and slowly, you reach for the pipe slung over shoulder with makeshift strap, a former rifle sling. You will not wait for your execution; you would rather die standing, would rather lose your life in a single glorious moment of violence, not cowering on your knees. It is in this moment you understand why the weapons were always pointed inwards. It is in this moment that you act, regardless. And the station retaliates, a single burst of light brighter than the alarms, brighter than supernovae. You wake on the floor, body leaden and uncooperative. The alarms have ceased, they assume their intruder dead and the threat thus abated. You are very much still alive; you search with blind hands for the wound, knowing that if you were struck you would be dead, having bled out all function and left peaceful and cold. And still, you search, find nothing but confusion, the world distant and muffled, the scrabbling and the drag of metal pipe on metal floor all but silent to your ears. Staggering as you stand, the world still devoid of sound and spinning, falling as you stand, falling as you limp your way out of the armory, back into the hallways. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|armory-conclusion][($PassageNo = 1) , ($chapter to "Escape Protocol") , ($injured_armory to true)]]</div> </div><</nobr>><</switch>><<if ndef $PassageNo>><<set $PassageNo = 1>><</if>><<switch $PassageNo>><<case 1>>Fundamentally, the Repository is as its name describes - a place for mass storage. Made necessary through the double-edged sword of the station's role as observatory - isolated enough to escape light pollution and the constructs of humanity, isolated enough to avoid gravitational lensing of light like that found nearer the galactic core, isolated enough to be passed over by nearly all trade and supply routes, isolated enough to warrant complete self-sustainability, isolated enough to disappear. The Repository houses duplicates or triplicates of every single piece used in construction, enough to sustain the station. Enough to completely rebuild it, Theseus' everlasting ship, rivet by rivet, panel by panel. The Repository houses something more unsavory. To staff the station over the course of its operating cycle - up to five hundred Solar-Equivalent years - volunteers were collected. Debtors, prisoners, those unfortunate souls out of options, people who had only time and bodies to contribute to the great advances of science and industry. They were sequestered away in tanks of cryogenic liquid, out of sight and mind until needed. A necessary evil; the station would not - could not - run without their sacrifice. If one can get past the contents of the Repository, stomach the cruelty inherent to its operation - then the facility becomes wonderous. A spectacular feat of engineering, system nested within system. Spanning from the very top of the ring all the way to the lowermost floors and consuming almost a quarter of the circumference of the ring, it possesses its own environmental control, own artificial gravity, own power and computer systems, own crew - existing far outside the grasp of the station proper. You in your jumbled memory have never set foot inside the Repository. Few - outside of those newly awoken for whom the memory of waking in such a place must feel like nightmare, and those chosen for duty beyond the bulkheads - ever get further than where you stand. A small requisitions room stands as still as the day it was abandoned, and under the sporadic light of the alarms, red-white, red-white, you are shown two different narratives. The perfect preservation in white, insidiously pristine in comparison with the detritus-strewn landscape revealed in red. Though a shudder makes its way down your spine, you venture further, looking for a way into the facility itself. The path forwards comes in the form of a small, faintly lit room with the door propped open. A small armory greets you, rows of lockers and benches and personal effects left behind to collect dust, left as if their owners would return eventually to claim them. You, thief, sift through these effects, as mundane as the softness of a shirt on your face or as sentimental as a folded photograph. You are looking for something you will know by touch, something necessary for what is to come. On the floor of a locker next to a pair of stiff, leathery boots is a helm tipped on its side, a hexagonal parcel tucked inside. The conditions inside the Repository are dangerous; thus a strange combination of ancient and new was created, a simply named mag-suit. It promises safety in a strange kind of sentience as you drape it over your shoulders and it settles on your chest and arms, thick hexagonal plates that once bore decorative paint in a chain mail like pattern over a thin adaptive matrix, held in place by its own internal magnetism and a harness that feels rather inadequate for its life-saving role. It unfurls slowly across your limbs without your interference, offering what becomes almost a sheathe or holster for your weapon, the pipe that attaches almost too-perfectly across your back. You bite back tears as you put on the simple helmet, one that shields your face and bears a rudimentary heads-up-display, one that indicates that you are ready to proceed. A final gift, an integrated flashlight that casts a thin, hazy beam from above your brow, useless in both light and shade but a way of buying your trust regardless. As if you had any other choice but to trust it. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 2>>Fundamentally, you know what the Repository is. As its name describes - a place for mass storage, consuming very nearly a quarter of the station's circumference and almost the entire height, housing duplicates and triplicates of every single piece used in construction, enough to completely rebuild the station, panel by panel, rivet by rivet. Fundamentally, you know what the Repository is, something that rejects your presence, turns hostile at your touch. What lies beyond the bulkhead is Is Is You stand on a dock that stretches out as far as your eyes can discern, until the curvature is lost in utter darkness emerging from haze in either direction; the fog shrouded shore of some vast shallow sea whipped into frenzy by storm, lightning flickers and leviathans loom above the waves to threaten you, trespasser, defiler, lightning flickers and you gaze upon sterile featureless fields of white. And swept out towards these ominous giants is you, powerless to stop yourself despite the cries of danger from the helmet display, despite the occasional floor marking warning you - <i>no further, you will not return, you are making a mistake.</i> You look up and expect to see the stars like some vast creature's eyes leering down at you and instead find that the rows disappear into red-black nothingness, by the same haze as the alluring depths far below. Row after row after row of materiel in fanning columns are paraded slowly before you, emerging and sporadically returning to the dark as the alarms cycle, their soldier's rank and file interrupted by brutish mechanical arms autoloaders that do not respond to the mag suit's call, moving endlessly and senselessly in the dark, unwilling to listen to your pleas for cooperation. You will have to traverse the rows yourself. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 3>>The task before you is both Herculean and not - you need surprisingly little to complete your repair and yet, you are entirely unwilling to dare the Repository. Not on pain of falling or death but of fulfilment. What comes next, when you have repaired the array? Not if, but when, you know yourself capable and still find yourself frozen, your bones aching to get it over with despite the conflict that has you rooted to the platform. You will fulfil your purpose, complete your task - you are built to do so, meant to do so. Then what? Do you disappear like the rest of the crew, fade away into the fog? Will the station lull you back to sleep or coerce you more violently to pause or end? Further questions, growing more seditious to border on paranoia. Will the restoration of power bring with it the remembrance of ghosts, will saving the memory banks fill the gaps in your own memory? Would it tell you then who you are, who you were? Would you even want to know? You are You were You were enchanted by the stars, always looking up. First, as a child gazing towards the golden rings of your home as they grew to encompass the summer skies, tracing the patterns of the clouds that seemed to weave between each individual glowing thread, hand in hand interlinked. Hand in hand interlinked you sat on a bench somewhere deep in the dregs of summer beneath the setting rings, waiting for the stars to return. She was soft upon your skin, sunlight in spring, the first snows of autumn. The stars shone in her eyes, always. Delusions of grandeur lost in the summer winds of her laugh, the comfort of a fire in winter in her embrace. Who could blame you, for turning your gaze away from the sky? You were enchanted by the stars, enamored with them. Who could blame you for leaving her, when the stars in her eyes shone no longer? Carried unconsciously, tidally, you stand at the very edge of the abyss, the event horizon. Like the pit, it beckons, promises freedom somewhere at the very bottom. You cannot oblige it; you are bound to honor and duty, even in trespass. The mag suit points out your target row and the extended arm of a broken autoloader that cannot deny you, its joints fused in a position close enough to where if you leapt, to where if you managed to catch the extended arm, you would find yourself amongst the frames. You back up several steps, steeling yourself as best you can. The event horizon is a point of no return, you remind yourself. A point of no return, throwing yourself over the edge, eyes closed. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 4>>The combination of artificially dampened gravity and the countermeasures built into the mag suit mean that - despite impacting the extended arm obliquely and sliding with a horrible metal on metal screech - you find yourself safe atop the autoloader. A moment to slow your racing heart spent reviewing your checklist: replacement photosynthetic panel and the appropriate cables, overflow capacitors, a new emergency battery. For each item, the suit relinquishes a location and suggests a path. You have no choice but to trust it. And so you proceed, crawling on hands and knees up the arm of the autoloader, eyes trained only on the beam before you; if you look down you will be sick, if you look up you will begin to cry. At the artificial shoulder, you make a much less impressive leap of faith, falling heavily into an empty hopper with a resounding echo. Thus begins your odyssey, a climb unmeant for you nor any other living being, for that matter. Though gravity reluctantly imparts less force and the suit eagerly provides a magnetic force equal to or greater than the apathy of your bones, you still find the narrow catwalks and almost-ladders to be needlessly arduous, afterthought or precautionary and entirely unsuited to the task you attempt. Like the tunnels and so much their inverse - vast and unstable, the seeming hostility extending even to your climb - you cling to each rung, pray it will hold you. The added weight of the parts you collect - a pair of panels the size of your torso slung across your back alongside the pipe with the assistance of the mag suit and a makeshift sling, the cables you wrap around your waist, the capacitors carefully shoved into a mesh bag and tucked into the cable-belt, the battery you sacrifice a hand for - exhausts you and armors you; you will not fail, you will fall. One final problem remains. Return. You sit precariously atop a row as they tick by slowly, your safe harbor growing further and further away with each passing second. You have no idea where the rows go, nor any intention of finding out; something tells you that you would not want to know what the system does with intruders it catches. A solution presents itself to you, farfetched and almost laughable at first. You shouldn't. It would be a death sentence, even with the countermeasures in place. But what choice do you have? You have no choice but to trust it, standing unsteadily and feeling the suit contract to correct for fluctuations in the gravity, for the shifting of the row frame and the burden you carry. It is a long, long way down. Strangely, you find yourself unafraid. Perhaps confidence; the artificially lowered gravity and mag suit will prevent the fall from being fatal, though they cannot mitigate pain or regret. Perhaps apathy; if the fall proves fatal then you will never know, you will find yourself released from this task and all future ones, all future suffering. And if you survive - then surely the most difficult portion of your labors will be complete. It is a long, long way down. It is a long, long way down and somehow, somewhere in your supposedly perfect solution you have encountered an error. Miscalculated. The abyss rushes up at you, safe ground just beyond your grasp - you have come up short, you are moving much faster than you should be, this is the end. This is how it always ends; falling the mechanism of your demise, her demise, both the guilty Daedalus and foolish Icarus, too close to the sea, too close to the sun and always doomed by gravity. This is how it always ends as the breath is driven from your lungs and your face blossoms in pain in the same instant you fail to catch even the very edge, mag suit systems and seemingly the Repository itself reluctantly conspiring to prevent your fall. You look up through shattered visor at the event horizon, roughly an arm's length above with your open, magnetized hand stuck flat to the wall being your only anchor to existence. It is here you wait for some time, until it feels as if your shoulder might separate and send you plunging into nothingness and instead, you haul yourself over the edge to lie flat on the platform, fumble with the straps of the broken helm until it falls away and you can press your aching cheek into the floor, take deep, gasping breaths. The storm of alarms rages overhead, somehow a comfort, somehow a reprieve. You lay there for some time, until the ache of your ribs subsides slightly and your heartbeat no longer chips away at the floor and you have convinced yourself that somehow you still retain all your teeth. Until you are half-blind and entirely exhausted and it seems as if the ground embraces you in kind, and like a lover in the early hours, you must leave. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|repo-conclusion][($PassageNo = 1) , ($chapter to "Repair Protocol") , ($injured_lowg to true)]]</div> </div><</nobr>><</switch>><<if ndef $PassageNo>><<set $PassageNo = 1>><</if>><<switch $PassageNo>><<case 1>>Your handprint has worked thus far; there is no reason not to believe that it will again. Regardless, placing your bare hand on the panel feels like a betrayal of moral, principal, identity. You have no right; you follow in the footsteps of another, you are nothing but cheap imitation, Administrator in title alone. Begrudgingly, the system allows your intrusion. The door opens, and light spills into the hallway. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 2>>There is not much you know about anything, there is little you can say with full confidence, with full knowledge - but you know definitively that you should not be here now. More so than the tunnels, more so than the Administration Cortex: <i>you do not belong here</i>. You do not belong here, in the eerily placid armory. The light should be a comfort - could have been far worse, you could have stumbled through the dark or tripped alarms. The light should be a comfort, and yet is the furthest thing from it. The hostile depths beseech you - <i>come and see</i>. And who would you be to refuse it? Why must a space station have an armory? Were there seeds of discord foreseen from the very start, did the plans always call for violence? A system primed for violence, not defense; few dare these reaches of space with ill intent, fewer still would dare to hijack an observatory. The weapons were always directed inwards, blade pressed to forearm, barrel to temple, murder-suicide. You are not - were not, will not be - a violent being, you think, you hope; you are not a violent being and this is the reason you feel as though you do not belong, surrounded by the tools of violent intent. You weave your way through the maze of armor and weaponry hurriedly, giving none pause too long; you cannot help but feel a great unease amongst the towering rows of equipment, standing a head and half taller than you, worn gunmetal and white enamel with red-stenciled names. Most lie empty, their niches waiting patiently for a return that will never happen, perpetual guardians stoic in their duty, both laid to rest and eternally on guard. Still others contain the partial remnants of their inhabitants, a boot here, a glove there, cracked helmets and loose straps and armor, the bones of a kill scattered by scavengers. Further down the row, the suits begin to assemble themselves - the one on your right is half complete, the left missing only a few vital components. The smell of heavy plastic vinyl and burnt carbon ever present, permeating every movement, every examination of suit and niche. You could be forgiven for mistaking the suits alive, you could be forgiven for the way you flinch at the sight of an empty visor; reflection and glare give the illusion of disembodied eyes watch from every hollowed helm, stares following until you have passed from line of sight. Three niches down, you find what you were searching for. A complete spacesuit, glove outstretched. As if it were waiting for you, beckoning you. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 3>>The ardor of dressing yourself in the spacesuit was completely unforeseen. Every movement a struggle, a test for your aching muscles and wounds. A task better suited for camaraderie or intimacy - arms around your waist, the whisper of lips against your neck and shoulder, a body pressed against your back in wanting and - <<if ($tool_gauntlet is true) and ($injured_window is false)>>Heavy-plated boots and insulated pants reinforced perhaps concerningly along the seams are connected by internal belt and webbing to a top worn temporarily around your waist as you decide how best to proceed. If it were as simple as pulling the collar over your head and sealing the side seams, you would have acted deftly, minimized your time in the haunted niches. In your examination of the spacesuit, you have realized that the gauntlet cannot be worn underneath, that you will need to remove it, you will need to relive - albeit briefly - the agony of activation once more. Holding your breath, you release the first clasp from your forearm. The limb trembles as you clench your jaw, fire setting beneath your skin, melting marrow and collapsing muscle. The second clasp nearer the wrist, the third across the back of the hand, and at last comes the act of degloving. You pull until you are certain you will finally separate gauntlet from hand and draw out a stump instead. You close your eyes as hand comes unsheathed, not daring a single glimpse of what you could have removed. The rest of the spacesuit is unremarkable, save for becoming increasingly difficult to put on without the use of your gauntlet hand. It is only when almost entirely clad that you are able to fit gauntlet over glove, welcome again the use of your clumsy fingers. It promises that it will be more useful in conjunction with the spacesuit; you have no choice but to trust the parasite's promise as it latches onto your forearm, briefly and horribly contorting the limb before relinquishing it back to your fragile control. The rest of the spacesuit is unremarkable, thin and flexible in places and armored in others, triangular ceramic plates arranged into arrays of hexagons. You consider briefly why a spacesuit would need to be armored, though you suspect that your answer lies remarkably close to the reason for the armory existing to begin with. The rest of the spacesuit is unremarkable until you hold the helmet in your hands. The stark light overhead illuminates a warped reflection in the first of two visors. A translucent one, ever so slightly iridescent - and over it, moving delicately with a series of precise hinges and magnets, a folded opaque one. You test the action cautiously, the translucent visor covered sequentially, like the unfurling of leaves in spring or the opening of morning flowers, fragile-printed circuits and composite screens revealing why the opacity was necessary.<<elseif ($tool_gauntlet is false) and ($injured_window is true)>>Heavy-plated boots and insulated pants reinforced perhaps concerningly along the seams are connected by internal belt and webbing to a top worn temporarily around your waist as you rest, try to clear the feeling of having desecrated a grave from your mind. The rest of the spacesuit is unremarkable, albeit difficult to put on with your terror and injury-slick hands; you are thankful for the strength of will not to look at the extent to which your suit must be stained. The rest of the spacesuit is unremarkable, thin and flexible in places and armored in others, triangular ceramic plates arranged into arrays of hexagons. You consider briefly why a spacesuit would need to be armored, though you suspect that your answer lies remarkably close to the reason for the armory existing to begin with. The rest of the spacesuit is unremarkable until you hold the helmet in your hands. The stark light overhead illuminates a warped reflection in the first of two visors. A translucent one, ever so slightly iridescent - and over it, moving delicately with a series of precise hinges and magnets, a folded opaque one. You test the action cautiously, the translucent visor covered sequentially, like the unfurling of leaves in spring or the opening of morning flowers, fragile-printed circuits and composite screens revealing why the opacity was necessary.<<elseif ($tool_gauntlet is false) and ($injured_window is false)>>Heavy-plated boots and insulated pants reinforced perhaps concerningly along the seams are connected by internal belt and webbing to a top worn temporarily around your waist as you rest, try to clear the feeling of having desecrated a grave from your mind. The rest of the spacesuit is unremarkable, albeit difficult to put on, perhaps made intentionally so; a pointed display of vulnerability, of trust. Perhaps you simply are struggling. The rest of the spacesuit is unremarkable, thin and flexible in places and armored in others, triangular ceramic plates arranged into arrays of hexagons. You consider briefly why a spacesuit would need to be armored, though you suspect that your answer lies remarkably close to the reason for the armory existing to begin with. The rest of the spacesuit is unremarkable until you hold the helmet in your hands. The stark light overhead illuminates a warped reflection in the first of two visors. A translucent one, ever so slightly iridescent - and over it, moving delicately with a series of precise hinges and magnets, a folded opaque one. You test the action cautiously, the translucent visor covered sequentially, like the unfurling of leaves in spring or the opening of morning flowers, fragile-printed circuits and composite screens revealing why the opacity was necessary.<</if>> Perhaps foolishly, you don the helmet. The armory blossoms before you in artificial contrast - <<if $tool_gauntlet is true>> illuminated outlines on the display indicate items with which the gauntlet is compatible,<<elseif $tool_gauntlet is false>> made all the more unsightly in the light, everywhere amongst the unrelenting brightness are<</if>> list inventories stretching decades, unfamiliar names and numbers and data, meaningless statistics and strings of number and code that must have meant something to someone once but now serve to render you utterly blind and senseless. And in a fit of clumsy fury, searching for the release tabs at the seal, you somehow dislodge the visor. The onslaught ceases, the sound of your frantic breath deafening in the helm. A moment of calm before you persist, the armory passing in an oil-slick haze as you search for a tether kit. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 4>>Towards the back of the armory is a section that required an identity check to proceed. Almost humorously, the cameras and barriers seem derelict, empty eyes watching, skeletal arms outstretched to ward off the threat of invaders long since passed. You proceed cautiously, the moment of humor - <i>how could a machine know who you are, when you yourself have no idea?</i> - lost as the opacity of the visor conceals your familiar-unfamiliar face, the simple truth that you do not know who you are or were. You are You were You were enchanted by the stars, always looking up. First, as a child gazing towards the golden rings of your home as they grew to encompass the summer skies, tracing the patterns of the clouds that seemed to weave between each individual glowing thread, hand in hand interlinked. Hand in hand interlinked you sat on a bench somewhere deep in the dregs of summer beneath the setting rings, waiting for the stars to return. she was soft upon your skin, sunlight in spring, the first snows of autumn. The stars shone in her eyes, always. Delusions of grandeur lost in the summer winds of her laugh, the comfort of a fire in winter in her embrace. Who could blame you, for turning your gaze away from the sky? You were enchanted by the stars, enamored with them. Who could blame you for leaving her, when the stars in her eyes shone no longer? In your hands is a tether kit. Some autonomous portion of your mind must have guided you here, some unconscious reflex recognized your target, and here you are. Inside the orange-red case is the tether kit, a device that, while undoubtedly a genius piece of technology, does not inspire confidence. A simple harness and minimalist padding - features that feel more an afterthought - rest over the surface of the suit, the tether itself is coiled snakelike in a bag worn at your hip. This is all that will provide safe passage through the breach. This is what must you entrust your life to. You have all you need. You should leave. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 5>>Something waits for you as you turn. The fangs of the armory turned inwards, a ring of lasers directed at your chest, the black-eye-barrel of a rifle directed at you. <i>Intruder,</i> it whispers. <i>Enemy,</i> it names you. <i>You do not belong here,</i> it tells you. <i>You do not belong here,</i> it tells you. <i>You do not belong here. You will be excised, you will be purged.</i> The ring collapses into a single dot and instead of fearing or waiting for your execution, you remove your helmet. Stare into the very soul of the station, the camera-eye that regards you with curiosity, wonders who you are to dare cheat the justice it would provide. The weapon-arm of the station hesitates. The truth of the matter is this - the violence was always directed inwards, means of control, of maintenance, a violent upkeep. And the station, for all of its supposed impartiality looked upon you and decided you exception to the rule. Too important; to harm you contradicts all prior programming. It hesitates, retracts as you stagger out of the armory, back into the hallways. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|armory-conclusion][$PassageNo = 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><</switch>><<if ndef $PassageNo>><<set $PassageNo = 1>><</if>><<switch $PassageNo>><<case 1>>Fundamentally, the Repository is as its name describes - a place for mass storage. Made necessary through the double-edged sword of the station's role as observatory - isolated enough to escape light pollution and the constructs of humanity, isolated enough to avoid gravitational lensing of light like that found nearer the galactic core, isolated enough to be passed over by nearly all trade and supply routes, isolated enough to warrant complete self-sustainability, isolated enough to disappear. The Repository houses duplicates or triplicates of every single piece used in construction, enough to sustain the station. Enough to completely rebuild it, Theseus' everlasting ship, rivet by rivet, panel by panel. The Repository houses something more unsavory. To staff the station over the course of its operating cycle - up to five hundred Solar-Equivalent years - volunteers were collected. Debtors, prisoners, those unfortunate souls out of options, people who had only time and bodies to contribute to the great advances of science and industry. They were sequestered away in tanks of cryogenic liquid, out of sight and mind until needed. A necessary evil; the station would not - could not - run without their sacrifice. If one can get past the contents of the Repository, stomach the cruelty inherent to its operation - then the facility becomes wonderous. A spectacular feat of engineering, system nested within system. Spanning from the very top of the ring all the way to the lowermost floors and consuming almost a quarter of the circumference of the ring, it possesses its own environmental control, own artificial gravity, own power and computer systems, own crew - existing far outside the grasp of the station proper. You in your jumbled memory have never set foot inside the Repository. Few - outside of those newly awoken for whom the memory of waking in such a place must feel like nightmare, and those chosen for duty beyond the bulkheads - ever get further than where you stand. A small requisitions room stands as still as the day it was abandoned, pristine, preserved with assignments and orders burnt into the faded screens overhead. You venture further, looking for a way into the facility itself. The path forwards comes in the form of a small, dimly lit room with the door propped open. A small armory greets you, rows of lockers and benches and personal effects left behind to collect dust, left as if their owners would return eventually to claim them. You sift through these effects, as mundane as a spare shirt or as sentimental as a folded photograph. You are looking for something you will know by touch, something necessary for what is to come. On the floor of a locker next to a pair of new boots is a helm tipped on its side, a hexagonal parcel tucked inside. The conditions inside the Repository are dangerous; thus a strange combination of ancient and new was created, a simply named mag-suit. It promises safety in a strange kind of sentience as you drape it over your shoulders and it settles on your chest and arms, thick hexagonal plates that once bore decorative paint in a chain mail like pattern over a thin adaptive matrix, held in place by its own internal magnetism and a harness that feels rather inadequate for its life-saving role. It unfurls slowly across your limbs without your interference, <<if $tool_gauntlet is true>>encroaching into the gauntlet despite protest from both systems. <<elseif $tool_pipe is true>>offering what becomes almost a sheathe or holster for your weapon, the pipe that attaches almost too-perfectly across your back. <<elseif ($tool_gauntlet is false) and ($tool_pipe is false)>>bringing with it an uncomfortable claustrophobia that seeps into your bones.<</if>> You bite back tears as you put on the simple helmet, one that shields your face and bears a rudimentary heads-up-display, one that indicates that you are ready to proceed. You have no choice but to trust it. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 2>>Fundamentally, you know what the Repository is. As its name describes - a place for mass storage, consuming very nearly a quarter of the station's circumference and almost the entire height, housing duplicates and triplicates of every single piece used in construction, enough to completely rebuild the station, panel by panel, rivet by rivet. Fundamentally, you know what the Repository is. What lies beyond the bulkhead is Is Is You stand on a dock that stretches out as far as your eyes can discern, until the curvature is lost in a distant haze in either direction; the fog shrouded shore of some vast shallow sea, the great frozen plains and snow-bound fields, sterile and featureless and cold. And beyond the shores are giants that shift in the light, figures that clear as you approach. The helmet display reads off numbers indicating distance to the edge, red markings cry danger and you are oblivious to it all, transfixed. You look up and expect to see looming stars and instead find that the ceiling is concealed by the same haze as the depths far below. Row after row after row of materiel in fanning columns are paraded slowly before you, their soldier's rank and file interrupted by vast mechanical arms, autoloaders that do not respond to the mag suit's call. The Repository itself pauses in thought. You will have to traverse the rows yourself. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 3>>The task before you is both Herculean and not - you need surprisingly little to complete your repair and yet, you are entirely unwilling to dare the Repository. Not on pain of falling or death but of fulfilment. What comes next, when you have repaired the array? Not if, but when, you know yourself capable and still find yourself frozen, your bones aching to get it over with despite the conflict that has you rooted to the platform. You will fulfil your purpose, complete your task - you are built to do so, meant to do so. Then what? Do you disappear like the rest of the crew, fade away into the fog? Will the station lull you back to sleep or coerce you more violently to pause or end? Further questions, growing more seditious to border on paranoia. Will the restoration of power bring with it the remembrance of ghosts, will saving the memory banks fill the gaps in your own memory? Would it tell you then who you are, who you were? Would you even want to know? You are You were You were enchanted by the stars, always looking up. First, as a child gazing towards the golden rings of your home as they grew to encompass the summer skies, tracing the patterns of the clouds that seemed to weave between each individual glowing thread, hand in hand interlinked. Hand in hand interlinked you sat on a bench somewhere deep in the dregs of summer beneath the setting rings, waiting for the stars to return. She was soft upon your skin, sunlight in spring, the first snows of autumn. The stars shone in her eyes, always. Delusions of grandeur lost in the summer winds of her laugh, the comfort of a fire in winter in her embrace. Who could blame you, for turning your gaze away from the sky? You were enchanted by the stars, enamored with them. Who could blame you for leaving her, when the stars in her eyes shone no longer? Carried unconsciously, tidally, you stand at the very edge of the abyss, the event horizon. Like the pit, it beckons, promises freedom somewhere at the very bottom. You cannot oblige it; you are bound to honor and duty. The mag suit points out your target row and the extended arm of an autoloader - close enough to where if you leapt, to where if you managed to catch the extended arm, you would find yourself amongst the frames. You back up several steps, steeling yourself as best you can. The event horizon is a point of no return, you remind yourself. A point of no return, throwing yourself over the edge, eyes closed. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 4>>The combination of artificially dampened gravity and the countermeasures built into the mag suit mean that - despite impacting the extended arm obliquely and sliding with a horrible metal on metal screech - you find yourself safe atop the autoloader. A moment to slow your racing heart spent reviewing your checklist: replacement photosynthetic panel and the appropriate cables, overflow capacitors, a new emergency battery. For each item, the suit relinquishes a location and suggests a path. You have no choice but to trust it. And so you proceed, crawling on hands and knees up the arm of the autoloader, eyes trained only on the beam before you; if you look down you will be sick, if you look up you will begin to cry. At the artificial shoulder, you make a much less impressive leap of faith, falling heavily into an empty hopper with a resounding echo. Thus begins your odyssey, a climb unmeant for you nor any other living being, for that matter. Though gravity reluctantly imparts less force and the suit eagerly provides a magnetic force equal to or greater than the apathy of your bones, you still find the narrow catwalks and almost-ladders to be needlessly arduous, afterthought or precautionary and entirely unsuited to the task you attempt. Like the tunnels and so much their inverse - vast and bright - you cling to each rung, pray it will hold you. The added weight of the parts you collect - a pair of panels the size of your torso slung across your back with makeshift sling, the cables you wrap around your waist, the capacitors carefully shoved into a mesh bag and tucked into the cable-belt, the battery you sacrifice a hand for - exhausts you and armors you; you will not fail, you will fall. One final problem remains. Return. You sit atop a row as they tick by slowly, your safe harbor growing further and further away with each passing second. You have no idea where the rows go, nor any intention of finding out. A solution presents itself to you, farfetched and almost laughable at first. You shouldn't. It would be a death sentence, even with the countermeasures in place. But what choice do you have? You have no choice but to trust it, standing unsteadily and feeling the suit contract to correct for fluctuations in the gravity, for the shifting of the row frame and the burden you carry. It is a long, long way down. Strangely, you find yourself unafraid. Perhaps confidence; the artificially lowered gravity and mag suit will prevent the fall from being fatal, though they cannot mitigate pain or regret. Perhaps apathy; if the fall proves fatal then you will never know, you will find yourself released from this task and all future ones, all future suffering. And if you survive - then surely the most difficult portion of your labors will be complete. It is a long, long way down. It is a long, long way down and somehow, somewhere in your supposedly perfect solution you have encountered an error. Miscalculated. The abyss rushes up at you, safe ground just beyond your grasp - you have come up short, you are moving much faster than you should be, this is the end. This is how it always ends; falling the mechanism of your demise, her demise, both the guilty Daedalus and foolish Icarus, too close to the sea, too close to the sun and always doomed by gravity. This is how it always ends as the breath is driven from your lungs in the same instant you catch the very edge, mag suit systems and seemingly the Repository itself conspiring to prevent your fall. In gratitude, you inch forward to haul yourself over the event horizon once more and lie flat on the platform, fumbling with the straps of the helm until it rolls away and you press your cheek into the cool composite of the floor, take deep gasping breaths. A relief. A reprieve. You lay there for a time, until the ache of your ribs subsides some and your heartbeat no longer chips away at the floor. Until it seems as if the ground embraces you in kind, and like a lover in the early hours, you must leave. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|repo-conclusion][($PassageNo = 1) , ($chapter to "Repair Protocol")]]</div> </div><</nobr>><</switch>>The journey is slow. Agonizing. You don't know whether you would prefer the confines of the tunnels or the empty shaft of unending, gently curving hallway. You proceed. Step by step, inch by inch. It would be so easy to give in, to succumb at last, to lay down and let the ground consume you, drift off to sleep and not wake until you are needed again. It would be so simple. Freeing, your chains shattered and consciousness left to roam in some endless dream, body resigned to monotonous automation, mindless subordination. Routine, pattern repeating. Step by step, inch by inch. What if you were wrong? What if in running you have betrayed everything you are, everything you know? This is your home, not your only home, not your first, but your home nonetheless. There is nothing for you elsewhere; you have nowhere to go, you can neither return nor do you know how to proceed. There is safety here, a certain uncertainty amongst the closed loop, between the scales of the ouroboros, where you start - unfamiliar quarters, broken skull - is where you will end. The tides ebb and flow, the seasons wax and wane; in change, stability can be found. You are reborn as the moon is - from light-ringed shadow to brilliant fullness, you exist in phases. You have faded and risen again, have slipped into shade and risen to full light. In the light, all will be revealed. In the light, you will see - you were wrong. You cannot escape. You cannot leave. No matter how far you run, you can never leave. Step by step, inch by inch. You follow the path as it is laid out for you, you who aches and feels nearer and nearer to death with each stride. You follow the path as it is laid out for you, a task requiring only that you do not falter, that you persist. Somehow, you persist. You are close now; frost grows in fragile branching fractals up the sides of the arterial hallway, catches the light in deep gouges in the walls, scars signature of repairs attempted and failed. Scars that tell you any attempt to save the station would have failed. You could never save it. You can never save her, the sudden absence at your back, a shadow no longer trailing. You can never save her, you turn and expect to see your mirror image and are met with nothing; you cannot save someone who never existed to begin with. The abyss awaits. Step by step, inch by inch. <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|breach][$chapter to "The Breach"]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<if ndef $PassageNo>><<set $PassageNo = 1>><</if>><<switch $PassageNo>><<case 1>>The first thing about the breach is that it currently exists only as thought, only as idea. The uncertainty principle states that until you are the observer, you can make no assumptions about the state of the object being observed; it exits in any, all, and none of its possible configurations. And upon viewing, the "true" nature of the object reveals itself to you, though alternate versions of the event or object exist, have existed, will exist somewhere else in space and time, somewhere parallel. The second thing about the breach - something which contradicts the first - is that you know it to be real and dangerous. You witnessed the simulation, watched it with eyes wide in disbelief as the wireframe structure was struck, fragmented into scattered particles, left a yawning emptiness where once there was wholeness. When you open the red emergency hatch and climb into the makeshift airlock, you will become observer and thus the many universes posited by some long-dead scientist collapse into singularity; the breach awaits. The third thing about the breach, you note, hauling yourself through the emergency hatch and sealing the door behind you, is that you are afraid. Past the airlock beginning to depressurize is nothingness, the abyss, certain death. To say that you were unafraid would be a lie; terror has hounded you from first waking to now - but it has become something more, a crushing weight upon your chest, a peculiar hollowness. A chime in the suffocating helmet tells you that at last it is time to go, the heavy second visor folds down, there is a single moment of bated-breath blindness before the camera feeds come online and like waking, you see what it is that you feared. The fourth and final thing about the breach is that it is completely and utterly silent. This was to be expected; sound cannot travel in a vacuum. Light can, requiring neither medium nor observer to exist. A matter of perception; sans gravity, up and down bear no meaning, ever-changing. You look up, to where the tapestry of stars are just barely visible beyond the glow of the planet above-beneath. You look down, to where you must go, the illuminated far side of the gap. In a spiral before you lies the way forward, a minefield of rent panels and fragments of station structure held together by a net of wires and cables, by the remnants of artificial gravity and the pull of the planet, by magnetism and the want for closeness, the want of wholeness. Disembodied, you proceed, finding your hands distant and unwieldy, your legs wholly useless. You have no choice but to continue, unfurling the tether. A way of returning, should the way prove too dangerous, should you fail. The first tether replaces your desperate grasp on the handles outside the airlock. You need not test your weight - you are currently almost entirely weightless - but your confidence. The tether holds. You must advance. Into the spiral, unto the breach. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 2>>To advance - to escape - is to dare, to overcome the sheer terror in your veins and move deftly, make no mistake. To make mistakes and survive them, to get knocked down and pick yourself up again, again, again. To have the <i>want</i> to survive; if want were all it took to force the universe into compliance, want would make gods of men, would tether you better than this flimsy cord. Should you fail, it is not for lack of want. Every tenuous handhold, every desperate attempt at balance, every time you must trust a new placement of the tether, everything. You inch your way along the skeletal ladder, descend-ascend between ribs and along vertebrae, finding holds in ligament and tendon, use vein and nerve as support. It is here, clutched to what was once wall of floor or ceiling, gazing up or down or sideways at pitch blackness, met with only silence, always silence as your chest rises painfully against the armor of the spacesuit - that your want runs dry. You have grown tired beyond belief, like treading water in an endless ocean, land nowhere in sight as the waves, the depths promise rest. You have been buffeted by solar winds sending sparks across your vision and static through your teeth. You have fought sudden fluctuations in artificial gravity, instantaneously entirely weightless or dozens of times your weight. You have felt the pull of the planet itself, heavy, omnipresent, a waiting embrace. A promised return. It is here that you let go. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][($PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1) , ($chapter to "...")]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 3>><span class = flashback>My love, do you return at last?</span> <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|breach-choice][($PassageNo = 1) , ($chapter to "The Breach")]]</div> </div><</nobr>><</switch>>You fall. Fall and rise, Icarus and Prometheus all in one, this is your fast approaching wine-dark sea, this is your accursed chained mountaintop. Fire and ambition stolen, abandoned. This is the result. You fall. You rise. You have been falling forever, it feels. This becomes the inevitable conclusion, freefall. On Garden Worlds - an archaic categorization composed of planets similar in size, life-bearing potential, chemical composition, and abiding by the same laws of physics as pre-Collapse Earth - freefall is defined as the state in which the only force acting upon a falling object, being in this case <i>you</i>, is gravity - this differs for planets with artificial atmospheres and again for the rarely inhabited gas giants. At an acceleration of the prerequisite Earth-like nine point eight meters per second per second, terminal velocity is reached after twelve seconds of freefall. This is at long last terminal velocity, knowing you are falling, rising, doomed, and no longer caring. You will sink into the planet's gravity well and be lost in the atmosphere, consumed by the violent winds and fire of friction. It will take a lifetime and but a moment, plummeting through the clouds she once prayed would clear on overcast nights. A shooting star; to call yourself a star would be facetious save for the single, brilliant moment in which you would illuminate the skies in a stroke of light. Fate deserved or undeserved but no less unescapable, you turn your face to the planet below. Your final resting place, perhaps. <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[You fell towards it.|breach-1][($choice to 1) , ($chapter to "...")]]</div> <div class = choice-item> [[You rose from it.|breach-1][($choice to 2) , ($chapter to "...")]]</div> <div class = choice-item> [[You are not of it.|breach-1][($choice to 3) , ($chapter to "...")]]</div> </div><</nobr>>And it is now when you reach the end of the tether, and hang some distance above or below or beside the station. Small and alone and denied your perfect death. Just you and the stars. Just you and the abyss. It is here that you have a new and terrible thought. The abyss smiles up at you. <i>Let go,</i> it whispers. You could oblige it, you could let go and drift off into the quiet and And And And you cannot, not when you have made it this far, survived this much. You have wounded and been wounded - to give up now would be to betray the effort your body has taken even in absence of rational thought or full consciousness. You have crawled through tunnels barely wider than the breadth of chest and shoulders and limped down venous hallways, spoken with the god in the machine and defied its terrible will, stared down an arm of the station's violence and walked away triumphant. You have seen yourself grotesquely reflected in the face of another who walks these halls, same as you - and you have not faltered. Despite everything, you have continued, defied every odd to get to this point, clinging to your tether, adrift below or above or beside the space station that would have been, could have been, should have been your grave. And you cannot give up now. <i>And you could be free of all pain, of all suffering, </i>it promises in the same dulcet tone as the station. <i>Let go.</i> <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> <span class ='glitch' data-text ='Let go.'>[[Let go.|end-secret-attrition][($chapter to "Attrition") , ($ng to true)]]</span></div> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|hangar]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<if ndef $PassageNo>><<set $PassageNo = 1>><</if>><<switch $PassageNo>><<case 1>>No. No. You have come too far, survived too much. You will not give up here and now, of all places and times. You have come too far, just beyond the airlock will be the hangar, will be escape, glorious escape. Salvation. Completion of the escape protocol, relief from duties as the Administrator you never were, defiance of the station and breach both that whispered to you to give up, to succumb. Defiance found at the core of every human, spirit indomitable in the face of impossible odds, the only odds you have ever faced. You have come too far now, you stare out at the tether stretched taut and grit your teeth. <<if $tool_gauntlet is true and $injured_window is false>>Hand over gauntleted hand, you climb the tether.<<elseif $tool_gauntlet is false and $injured_window is true>>Hand over bloodied hand, you climb the tether.<<elseif $tool_gauntlet is false and $injured_window is false>>Hand over hand, you climb the tether.<</if>> You ascend, inch by aching inch, foot by agonizing foot. <<if $tool_gauntlet is true and $injured_window is false>>Hand over gauntleted hand, you climb the tether.<<elseif $tool_gauntlet is false and $injured_window is true>>Hand over bloodied hand, you climb the tether.<<elseif $tool_gauntlet is false and $injured_window is false>>Hand over hand, you climb the tether.<</if>> You ascend. You No. You are greater than the sum of your parts; the abyss of memory calls and you refuse it. Clung to the side of a piece of the station rendered unrecognizable, you catch your breath, allow your half-faded vision to clear. The other side of the breach is but a leap of faith away. And it is here, with shaking hands, you detach the tether. It comes undone far more easily than would have assuaged your earlier fears, had you not summoned every mote of your courage for this very moment. The collar twists off of the locking gate, which opens with the press of your thumb. You grasp the rope in <<if $tool_gauntlet is true>>gauntleted <<elseif $tool_gauntlet is false>>gloved<</if>> hand, pull up, let the carabiner drift from the loop on your chest. The piece of wreckage that serves as your safe harbor drifts closer to the edge of the gap. You hold on, wait. Stay as still as possible as not to disturb the arc, abide by the conserved laws of motion. You hold on, wait, let your aching muscles tense in preparation. You leap as the gap closes, mere feet away and yet a distance that seems insurmountable. You leap with all the hope left in your body, every ounce of strength you could summon. It is very nearly not enough; your landing is less a graceful touchdown and more a glancing blow, a near miss. Your chest slams into the edge of the gap and your fingers scrabble for grasp upon the wreckage, knotting in wiring as gravity suddenly presses on every inch of your body. It is very nearly not enough, weathering the storm as circulation dissipates from your hands. It is very nearly not enough, but somehow you haul yourself over the edge, crawl on all fours, half blind and breathless to the airlock. The handle beneath your gloves is victory enough to bring tears to your eyes. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][($PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1) , ($chapter to "Escape Protocol")]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 2>>Somewhere in the hallways past the makeshift airlock, you discard your helmet. The air is thin, hard to breathe, escaping you at every attempted shallow breath. You lean on your knees in attempt to collect yourself, brow again bleeding onto the pale of your spacesuit.<<if $injured_armory is true>> The world spins before you, vision doubled and too-bright to contrast the ringing silence that comprises all that you can hear.<</if>> You need to leave. You need to leave now. You won't make it much longer. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][($PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1) , ($chapter to "The Hangar")]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 3>>The hangar is a cavernous space, one that lacks the destruction of the hallways and the ossification of the Administration Cortex. Once, there were ships here; dignitaries and emissaries and budding scientific minds eager to search for the next breakthrough, the downtrodden workers serving their turn in orbit, pushing their latent ice-bound siblings along into storage, the debt-prisoners who sacrificed their time, labor for clean records, a ticket somewhere else in the galaxies. Once, there were ships here, great sleek ships like strange sea life attended to by their schooling crews, a mélange of language and purpose and uniform, the flitting bright dots of landing attendants and mechanics, the swift, dark-clad pilots and engineers, the opulent slowness of oft-unwanted guests, tides of humanity enough at its busiest to drown out the spooling of engines, the whine of machinery. And now - there is nothing. Empty space, disused and desolate. The colors faded to gray, the vast airlocks closed, the yellowed fluorescent lights half-lit and flickering, casting the dim shadows of ghosts across the working docks. A single ship remains - just one, one single ship already waiting on the launch strip, conviction enough that this is right, that you were meant to escape. The ramp has been lowered, it calls to you, waits impatiently for you to board, to make good on your promise and want and leave this place. It will have to wait a moment longer. You slump sideways against a crate, your legs weak, suddenly aware of gravity and your aching bones. The ground takes you slowly. You could lay here forever, you think. Could close your eyes - when you wake, the ship will still be here, the station will still be here. Your purpose will still be here. Or perhaps when you wake, it will be like the first waking, the waking that spurred this quest - bloodied and without memory. Perhaps then you will wander away from your escape, be lost to the station or breach, will have come all this way for nothing, nothing at all. You struggle to rise, find your body unwilling, your determination wasted on injury. You are offered a hand. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|hangar-choice][$PassageNo = 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><</switch>><<if $alarms_on is true>>The Engineering Core is horribly alight with the urgency of the alarms you tripped, light and sound intertwining, congealing, conglomerating until singularity is reached and the white-red-white light has become one with the shriek of alarms. Until it is an overwhelming wall of sensation, eyes unseeing and searching still as they fill with burning tears, anguish or agony or both, like slamming your head into a wall over and over and over and over until the world is silent and distant as you cover your ears and torn from somewhere deep within is a scream and And The Engineering Core is still and dark, heavy air laden with anticipation, potential charge that hums in your bones, dances across your tongue, invites you to break the silence with speech. Like you used to, an articulate orator stumbling through each sentence, abstaining from the concentrated stare of the gathered crowd. Your speeches were best delivered on the pillow, in the quiet moments where poetry gathered sweet on your tongue and your hand curled around her cheek, thumb brushing smile. In a sudden tautening of muscles, you flinch away from a resurgence of the sirens that never comes. Punishment for your perverted remembrance - this was not the way things went, this is not the way things were, how dare you - <i>you</i> - defile her memory, how dare you remember to begin with? How dare you, pale imitation, fraudulent ghost?<<elseif $alarms_on is false>>The Engineering Core is still and dark, heavy air laden with anticipation, potential charge that hums in your bones, dances across your tongue, invites you to break the silence with speech. Like you used to, an articulate orator stumbling through each sentence, abstaining from the concentrated stare of the gathered crowd. Your speeches were best delivered on the pillow, in the quiet moments where poetry gathered sweet on your tongue and your hand curled around her cheek, thumb brushing smile.<</if>> Silence holds as you navigate the room, searching for a pulse. Something to resuscitate, to bring this room into emergent, resplendent light, to usher in some sound other than your tentative footfalls, your hiss-echo breath. Resuscitation requires for there have to been life previous. For this to have been something other than cold skeletal metal. A contradiction, though you know it impossible - the station has always felt alive. A slumbering giant with few indications of waking, murmuration just beneath the surface of sleep, ominous shifts in consciousness - but never waking, not fully. Systems glow hazy red, a thousand eyes watching, blinking slowly, an audience for your trespass. You have tripped some sensor or caught fully the gaze of one of these mechanical eyes, and like the sun rising triumphant after a long night, there is light, faint at first but growing, growing until there is no facet of the room left shaded and you wish it were still dark. The station has always felt alive; there have been indications that beyond the programming there was something intangible, something curious and hungry. The feeling was worse in some places, the crawlspaces, the Administration Cortex, the data and memory banks, the Repository. The Engineering Core is not one of those places. Has never been one of those places. It becomes difficult to maintain an atmosphere of life while simultaneously being serviced by the frozen corpses of debt workers and their automated assistants, kept running by the specters of engineers in the night. This tomb, this ossuary, all strict geometric line and hard edge, holds its breath. Waits. Stands imperious and strong, modular, columnar construction and jointed walls covered in dials, displays, gauges, every system of the station carefully surveilled and reported on for you. You, who knows what every number means, the function of every station at the wall, of every inch of this room revealed to you as if it waited for you, as if it wanted you to know. This being its vulnerable underbelly, this being the point at which organic becomes mechanical, where animal and construct meet. Something ungoverned by thought, like instinct, like programming. Crawling under the perforated floors is the pseudo-neural pneumatic network, the beating heart splayed across the walls and converging upon a single point - a maw in the floor over which a perilous outcropping juts. The station has always felt alive. Except for here, nearing the edge. Where there should be a maelstrom of thought made tangible through the feeling of static on skin - there is nothing. No life. No warmth. Cold blood becomes cold equation, inhale and exhale code to zeroes and ones, strings of data to interpret or conscious thought. Carried unbidding to the very edge of the outcropping, you lean over the railing. <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[There is nothing left to lose.|eng-1][($choice to 1) , ($chapter to "...")]]</div> <div class = choice-item> [[You have lost your way. |eng-1][($choice to 2) , ($chapter to "...")]]</div> <div class = choice-item> <span class ='glitch' data-text ='get it over with. jump.'>[[You have lost yourself.|eng-1][($choice to 3) , ($chapter to "...")]]</span></div> </div><</nobr>><<if $choice is 1>><span class = flashback>Purpose is a damning thing. She was meant to study the stars. She was meant to be a methodical and exacting scientist, with her pattern-seeking brain and disdain for social interaction. She had the capability to discover, to interpret, to understand. And now, she had the gateway to the universe promised before her and-</span> No. No. That's not right. That's not you. What is <i>your</i> purpose? Were you made for beautiful things, holding the delicate hands of a willowy woman and pressing the flushed knuckles to your lips? Were you made for soft green fields that stain your knees and the wildflowers she wore as laurel crown, were you made for white linen mornings and coy smiles, to behold bare skin gently freckled by the sun? For art and chivalry, for honor and courtship, days wasted in her eternal summer? For something as unattainable as peace? No, look at you. Look at you. What is <i>your</i> purpose? Does the breadth of your shoulders and the depth of your chest betray it, do the callouses and scars of your hands hold it? What of the short-cropped hair and the rippled muscle beneath sun-poisoned skin, the cough from nano-particulate matter settling into the vesicles of your lungs? What of the unflinching nature of your existence, not to pause at blood nor pain but to soldier on in self-destructive persistence like the underdog boxer who lost in the moment she stepped into the ring? Is yourself the only thing you will destroy in the quest to fix things? Do you find yourself to be an acceptable loss? What of everyone else? Of comrades and friends, fellows dressed in the same uniform, the uniform you took off of the dead woman who laid in the hall, head at unnatural angle to shoulders and - What of the memories of tree-lined lanes and blue skies? Of the voice, the quiet voice, the gentle voice that said a name that sounded less a name and more the changing of seasons, more a distant thunderstorm, a voice that promised - Acceptable losses? You do not exist in a way that matters; contradiction, paradox. You remember the curvature of a spine that is not yours, a body intact, vocal cords that yielded a commanding voice, not harsh intonations of almost-silence, not piercing screams, acceptable losses.<<elseif $choice is 2>><span class = flashback>Loneliness is an inevitable thing. She came here seeking answers. For herself, perhaps, and for everyone else. Everything else. For the name of science. To follow in the footsteps of Copernicus and Galileo and Newton and Einstein and Bohr, to stand on the shoulders of giants and look further than they could have ever imagined. It was so easy to get lost in her work and-</span> No. No. That's not right. You aren't lonely. Weren't lonely. Don't have the capability to be lonely, you stood on the shoulders of giants after clawing your way up their legs and what did you see? The stars? The vast universe, unending? Did you at last understand the scope of it all, from the heights did you realize that you are less than a single grain of sand on the cosmic shores? Did you bite back that notion, do you still see hope? When did you abandon it, how was it you found desolation? Was it peaceful, waiting for companionship that will never come? Was it frustration, did you pace the empty quarters and cry out, pout like a scorned child, bang your fists against the wall? Did you ask for it? When you asked where everyone else was - was it a scream or was it whisper? Either way, there are tears in your eyes and your voice trembles. Was it before or after you smeared your brains against the wall of the dead man's quarters? Before or after you dressed yourself in the dead woman's clothing? Before or after the station cleared you of your guilty conscience; you, the sole survivor, you, the root of the collapse? Loneliness is an inevitable thing, true. An unenviable thing. You, many of your station. You, last of your name. A tool, thawed and refrozen. Used as needed. When tools are broken, they are discarded. Isn't that what happened? Things stopped working right, then altogether. What did not work was discarded. And you were left. Just you. Just you in this lonely universe. Just you.<<elseif $choice is 3>><span class = flashback>Ambition is a fatal thing.</span> So is falling. It is said that when you dream of falling, it signifies a lack of control. That something in your life has gone awry and the subconscious interprets this and produces the feeling of freefall. On Garden Worlds - an archaic categorization composed of planets similar in size, life-bearing potential, chemical composition, and abiding by the same laws of physics as pre-Collapse Earth - freefall is defined as the state in which the only force acting upon a falling object, being in this case <i>you</i>, is gravity - this differs for planets with artificial atmospheres and again for the rarely inhabited gas giants. At an acceleration of the prerequisite Earth-like nine point eight meters per second per second, terminal velocity is reached after twelve seconds of freefall. Orbit is a state of constant freefall, producing weightlessness. The station, despite being in orbit, maintains a gravitational force of nine point eight Newton-kilograms, the force equivalent to a constant acceleration of nine point eight meters per second per second in a central direction. The pit is not deep enough for you to experience freefall. It is said that when you dream of falling, you always wake before you hit the ground; the body is ill-equipped to deal with simulated death, and thus the problem is avoided entirely by waking just before impact. The pit is not deep enough for you to experience freefall. The pit is deep enough for a fall to be fatal. You lean forward. You hope it is deep enough to where you are rendered unconscious upon hitting the ground, for the moment of impact to be painless, for there to be a brief moment in which everything remembered is bright and glorious and then gone. Gone. As if you had never existed to begin with. Gone.<</if>> <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|eng-choice-2][$chapter to "Engineering Core"]]</div> </div><</nobr>>The journey is slow. Agonizing. The burden you wear on your back all but doubles you over in the increased gravity, each step is taken with leaden legs. You don't know whether you would prefer the confines of the tunnels or the empty shaft of unending, gently curving hallway. You think it would be kinder to collapse. You proceed. Step by step, inch by inch. It would be so easy to give in, to succumb at last and shrug off the weight on your shoulders, to lay down and let the ground consume you, drift off to sleep and not wake until you are needed again. It would be so simple. Freeing, your chains shattered and consciousness left to roam in some endless dream, body resigned to monotonous automation, mindless subordination. Routine, pattern repeating. Step by step, inch by inch. What if you were right? What if the station is truly beyond repair, what if <i>you</i> are truly beyond repair? This is your home, not your only home, not your first, but your home nonetheless. There is nothing for you elsewhere; you have nowhere to go and thus you must proceed with your repairs, you must at least try to save what is left. For the sake of someone long forgotten and grieved only in the empty parts of you, for the sake of you, you who has only sought stability, has only sought peace. You who has only found turmoil amongst this broken loop, has felt the fangs of the ouroboros turned from pursuit of its tail to strike at the hand that would divert it, you who dreams of calculated violence, broken skulls and leaps of faith and cataclysm. You, who falls in line with the station by way of force; it made you so and so you are. Reborn by its will, reborn as the moon is - from light-ringed shadow to brilliant fullness, existence in a series of phases. Defiance and compliance, dark and light. You do not yet see. In the light, all will be be revealed; you will be made to see. There is nothing so futile as surrender, as losing hope, as the seditious thoughts you fail to hide from the station. You cannot succumb. It will ensure it, a guiding hand, a guardian angel, a warden, if it must. Step by step, inch by inch. You follow the path as it is laid out for you, you who aches and feels nearer and nearer to death with each stride. You follow the path as it is laid out for you, a task requiring only that you do not falter, that you persist. Somehow, you persist. You are close now, descending steeply as your knees protest under weight, as you draw bloodied breaths and fear seeps into the few thoughts you manage. You are close now; frost grows in fragile branching fractals up the sides of the arterial hallway, catches the light in deep gouges in the walls, scars signature of repairs attempted and failed. You cannot fail, you must not fail, you do not have the luxury to fail like your ill-fated predecessors did, not when there is so much at stake. Not when lives hang in the balance. You have to save it. You have to save her, the sudden absence at your back, a shadow no longer trailing. You can never save her, you turn and expect to see your mirror image and are met with nothing; you cannot save someone who never existed to begin with. The airlock awaits. Step by step, inch by inch. <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|spacewalk][$chapter to "The Airlock"]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<if ndef $PassageNo>><<set $PassageNo = 1>><</if>><<switch $PassageNo>><<case 1>>In the lowest depths of the station is a series of airlocks meant for things like this, access points for spacewalks and repair and the end of the world as you know it. It looks the part, cramped ceilings and a narrow catwalk suspended above the most fundamental construction of the station, metal and carbon composite, arterial pipes and venous branches of sheathed wires, a pseudo-neural pneumatic network, a beating heart whose cancerous ambition has escaped the confines of the slatted floors. Thinking, panicking. Breathing, aspirating. Like a hand around a lover's throat as the light leaves her eyes, epithelial, ethereal, ephemeral. Enmeshed walls are lined with half-consumed spacesuits, empty, broken ghosts that reach for you with their perforated gloves and whisper that you will meet the same fate, that beyond the airlocks is not what you expected, that beyond the airlocks there is only death. That you should stay here, that this is where you belong, that this is home, your home. You have no choice but to ignore them, to blot out the whispers that cling to the dim rays of light that filter through the shielded lamps. At the far end of the airlock is seemingly an altar, a suit almost untouched by the growth of the wall, illuminated by a swaying lightbar. It is labeled with the same name as the uniform you wear. It is only fitting, for your journey to end the same way it began. Only fitting that you should honor the memory of someone you never knew, will never know in the only way you could, wearing them as shield from who you may have been. To dress yourself in the spacesuit takes all of your remaining strength, first in the ardor of convincing the mag suit to release its embrace and then every movement afterwards becoming more and more of a struggle, a test for your aching muscles and wounds. A task better suited for camaraderie or intimacy - arms around your waist, the whisper of lips against your neck and shoulder, a body pressed against your back in wanting and - <<if $tool_gauntlet is true>>Heavy-plated boots and insulated pants reinforced perhaps concerningly along the seams are connected by internal belt and webbing to a top worn temporarily around your waist as you decide how best to proceed. If it were as simple as pulling the collar over your head and sealing the side seams, you would have acted deftly, minimized your time in the haunted depths of the station. In your examination of the spacesuit, you have realized that the gauntlet cannot be worn underneath, that you will need to remove it, you will need to relive - albeit briefly - the agony of activation once more. Holding your breath, you release the first clasp from your forearm. The limb trembles as you clench your jaw, fire setting beneath your skin, melting marrow and collapsing muscle. The second clasp nearer the wrist, the third across the back of the hand, and at last comes the act of degloving. You pull until you are certain you will finally separate gauntlet from hand and draw out a stump instead. You close your eyes as hand comes unsheathed, not daring a single glimpse of what you could have removed. The rest of the spacesuit is unremarkable, save for becoming increasingly difficult to put on without the use of your gauntlet hand. It is only when almost entirely clad that you are able to fit gauntlet over glove, welcome again the use of your clumsy fingers. It promises that it will be more useful in conjunction with the spacesuit; you have no choice but to trust the parasite's promise as it latches onto your forearm, briefly and horribly contorting the limb before relinquishing it back to your fragile control. The rest of the spacesuit is unremarkable, thin and flexible in places and armored in others, triangular ceramic plates arranged into arrays of hexagons not at all dissimilar to the mag suit you have decided to don again as an additional protection from what lies beyond the airlock. You consider briefly why a spacesuit would need to be armored, though you suspect that you neither want nor care to know. The rest of the spacesuit is unremarkable until you hold the helmet in your hands. The shielded light overhead illuminates a warped reflection in the first of two visors. A translucent one, ever so slightly iridescent - and over it, moving delicately with a series of precise hinges and magnets, a folded opaque one. You test the action cautiously, the translucent visor covered sequentially, like the unfurling of leaves in spring or the opening of morning flowers, fragile-printed circuits and composite screens revealing why the opacity was necessary.<<elseif $injured_window is true>>Heavy-plated boots and insulated pants reinforced perhaps concerningly along the seams are connected by internal belt and webbing to a top worn temporarily around your waist as you rest, try to clear the feeling of having desecrated a grave from your mind. The rest of the spacesuit is unremarkable, albeit difficult to put on with your terror and injury-slick hands; you are thankful for the strength of will not to look at the extent to which your suit must be stained. The rest of the spacesuit is unremarkable, thin and flexible in places and armored in others, triangular ceramic plates arranged into arrays of hexagons not at all dissimilar to the mag suit you have decided to don again as an additional protection from what lies beyond the airlock. You consider briefly why a spacesuit would need to be armored, though you suspect that you neither want nor care to know. The rest of the spacesuit is unremarkable until you hold the helmet in your hands. The shielded light overhead illuminates a warped reflection in the first of two visors. A translucent one, ever so slightly iridescent - and over it, moving delicately with a series of precise hinges and magnets, a folded opaque one. You test the action cautiously, the translucent visor covered sequentially, like the unfurling of leaves in spring or the opening of morning flowers, fragile-printed circuits and composite screens revealing why the opacity was necessary.<<elseif ($injured_window is false) and ($tool_gauntlet is false)>>Heavy-plated boots and insulated pants reinforced perhaps concerningly along the seams are connected by internal belt and webbing to a top worn temporarily around your waist as you rest, try to clear the feeling of having desecrated a grave from your mind. The rest of the spacesuit is unremarkable, albeit difficult to put on, perhaps made intentionally so; a pointed display of vulnerability, of trust. Perhaps you simply are struggling. The rest of the spacesuit is unremarkable, thin and flexible in places and armored in others, triangular ceramic plates arranged into arrays of hexagons not at all dissimilar to the mag suit you have decided to don again as an additional protection from what lies beyond the airlock. You consider briefly why a spacesuit would need to be armored, though you suspect that you neither want nor care to know. The rest of the spacesuit is unremarkable until you hold the helmet in your hands. The shielded light overhead illuminates a warped reflection in the first of two visors. A translucent one, ever so slightly iridescent - and over it, moving delicately with a series of precise hinges and magnets, a folded opaque one. You test the action cautiously, the translucent visor covered sequentially, like the unfurling of leaves in spring or the opening of morning flowers, fragile-printed circuits and composite screens revealing why the opacity was necessary.<</if>> You layer the mag suit over the spacesuit, cursing the return of the sudden and claustrophobic closeness, and don the helmet. You expect relentless data, endless lines of information from the union of suits<<if $tool_gauntlet is true>> and gauntlet with your own biological system,<<elseif $tool_gauntlet is false>>,<</if>> you expect to be blinded and reeling and desperate to tear helm from head and in place of it all you find nothing. Nothing. A single system check, a few lines of scrolling code dotted with flickering errors and then nothing. Nothing. You are clear to proceed. You reassemble your supplies, check and double check that you leave nothing behind - and approach the nearest airlock. The abyss awaits. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][($PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1) , ($chapter to "...")]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 2>><span class = flashback>My love, won't you look at me? Won't you remember?</span> <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][($PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1) , ($chapter to "The Abyss")]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 3>>To say that the cosmos is beautiful would be an understatement. It is staggering in its starkness, in its vastness, in the way that all seems to go completely still, completely silent. This was to be expected; sound cannot travel in a vacuum. Light can, requiring neither medium nor observer to exist. Light that has taken millions - no, billions - of years to grace your eyes, to paint in broad strokes the canvas of the universe before you, a velvety depthless darkness dotted with points of bright that gaze upon you and smile, grant you sight, ask you to gaze upon them in turn and weep. A matter of perception; you lack scale and gravity, this is equal parts momentous and mundane, as confusing as up and down losing all meaning, ever-changing. You look up, to where the tapestry of stars are just barely visible beyond the glow of the planet above-beneath. You look up and feel small, so very small and entirely disembodied, drifting away from yourself. You turn your gaze back to the station, to the unending wall of slate gray punctuated with the worn paint and protruding holds of the service ladder that will lead you to your objective, and feel as though it and you are the only things in this universe. You descend. One step at a time. You descend. You descend for what feels like an eternity, the vertical climb turning into a crawl somewhere along the belly of the station, turning into a more dangerous game as you navigate the wound, picking your way between ribs and along vertebrae, finding holds in ligament and tendon, using vein and nerve as support. Absentmindedly, a state of numbed dissociation, you persist forcibly unaware of the risks you take. Your own body suffers in return - buffeted by solar winds sending sparks across your vision and static through your teeth, fighting sudden fluctuations in artificial gravity, instantaneously weightless or dozens of times your weight as your burden threatens to tear you in half, your chest rising painfully against the armor of the spacesuit and the weight on your back - but as if in a dream you remain blissfully unharmed. The final stretch is the most dangerous yet, a paneled platform suspended on a spire far beneath the station. And it is here that you awaken. It is here that you are afraid. You reach for the spoke-ladder, less than the rungs of tunnel and inner ring combined, less than any of the tenuous hand-holds of the wound, your life entrusted to cold, brittle metal and the strength of your <<if $tool_gauntlet is true>>gauntleted grasp<<elseif $injured_window is true>>bloodied grasp<<elseif ($tool_gauntlet is false) and ($injured_window is false)>>grasp<</if>>, nothing more. You descend. One step at a time. You descend. And it is here, in the final stretch, that the station betrays you. Rib or rung gives way beneath your boot. You fall. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][($PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1) , ($chapter to "...")]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 4>><span class = flashback>My love, do you return at last?</span> <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|spacewalk-choice][($PassageNo = 1) , ($chapter to "The Abyss")]]</div> </div><</nobr>><</switch>>You fall. Fall and rise, Icarus and Sisyphus all in one, this is your fast approaching wine-dark sea, this is your endless infernal task. Doomed in repetition with tears like hot wax trailing your skin; you have come so far to have done nothing at all. This is the result. You fall. You rise. You have been falling forever, it feels. This becomes the inevitable conclusion, freefall. On Garden Worlds - an archaic categorization composed of planets similar in size, life-bearing potential, chemical composition, and abiding by the same laws of physics as pre-Collapse Earth - freefall is defined as the state in which the only force acting upon a falling object, being in this case <i>you</i>, is gravity - this differs for planets with artificial atmospheres and again for the rarely inhabited gas giants. At an acceleration of the prerequisite Earth-like nine point eight meters per second per second, terminal velocity is reached after twelve seconds of freefall. This is at long last terminal velocity, knowing you are falling, rising, doomed, and no longer caring. You will sink into the planet's gravity well and be lost in the atmosphere, consumed by the violent winds and fire of friction. It will take a lifetime and but a moment, plummeting through the clouds she once prayed would clear on overcast nights. A shooting star; to call yourself a star would be facetious save for the single, brilliant moment in which you would illuminate the skies in a stroke of light. Fate deserved or undeserved but no less inescapable, you turn your face to the planet below. Your final resting place, perhaps. <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[You fell towards it.|spacewalk-1][($choice to 1) , ($chapter to "...")]]</div> <div class = choice-item> [[You rose from it.|spacewalk-1][($choice to 2) , ($chapter to "...")]]</div> <div class = choice-item> [[You are not of it.|spacewalk-1][($choice to 3) , ($chapter to "...")]]</div> </div><</nobr>>The return passes without incident or recollection; one moment you are outside the space station staring down at translucent photosynthetic panels and the next your hand rests on the airlock handle as you wait for the pressure to equalize. You all but collapse inside the airlock, stagger through the inner doorway and careen almost off the suspended walkway. Even with helmet discarded, the air is thin, hard to breathe, escaping you at every attempted shallow breath. You lean on your knees in attempt to collect yourself, brow again bleeding onto the pale of your spacesuit. The world spins before you, vision <<if $injured_lowg is true>> halved and<</if>> doubled and filled with the recollection of stars and static. You did everything right. You did everything you were supposed to. It won't matter. You won't make it much longer. You did everything right and yet - you cannot persist as the station does, as it finds life and memory anew, as in resplendence it shows you things fractured and bright, things that don't make sense, things that fall outside of your perception of time, of space, things that incite a headache like the wound on your brow that aches and throbs in time with the urgency of your pulse and you recall for the briefest of seconds why you split your skull on the wall to begin with. You slump sideways against a sealed airlock door, your legs weak, painfully aware of gravity and your aching bones. The ground takes you slowly. You could lay here forever, you think. Could close your eyes - when you wake, the station will still be here. Your purpose will still be here - there are always repairs to be made. Or perhaps when you wake, it will be like the first waking, the waking that spurred this quest - bloodied and without memory. Perhaps you will never wake again, despite the station's insistence otherwise- and this will all have been for nothing, you will have come all this way for nothing, nothing at all. You struggle to rise, find your body unwilling, your determination wasted on injury. You are offered a hand. <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|airlock-choice]]</div> </div><</nobr>>She stands over you, offering wordlessly her <<if $tool_gauntlet is true>>gauntleted <<elseif $injured_window is true>>bloodied <<elseif ($tool_gauntlet is false) and ($injured_window is false)>>outstretched<</if>> hand. To help you; she would help you despite the futility of her existence, your existence. With her assistance, a hand strong in yours, you stand. Stand face to face, stare into your own eyes mirrored. You blink - her image remains - you press your eyes closed until spots swim through the darkness, hoping blindly that when you open them, the apparition will dissipate. You open your eyes. It remains. She remains A further test, shedding your glove and reaching for her. To touch her skin, to acknowledge her as real and tangible and not only that - but to recognize her skin as you would recognize your own. She does not flinch as fingertips brush her face; she holds her ground and bites her tongue, stifles all but the single tear that runs down her cheek. She wears all the same wounds as you, <<if $tool_gauntlet is true>>arm shattered and dubiously repaired by the presence of the gauntlet, forehead gashed from temple to brow<<elseif ($injured_window is true) and ($injured_lowg is false)>>hand gouged by glass from shattered window, left stained and stiff with dried blood and torn flesh like that of the wound that carves its way from temple to brow<<elseif ($injured_window is false) and ($injured_lowg is true)>>fractured cheekbone and swollen eye painted in garish blue-purple shades, swollen and hot to the touch like the forehead gashed from temple to brow<<elseif ($injured_window is true) and ($injured_lowg is true)>>hand gouged by glass from shattered window, fractured cheekbone and swollen eye painted in garish blue-purple shades, all left stained and stiff with dried blood and torn flesh like that of the wound that carves its way from temple to brow<<elseif ($injured_window is false) , ($injured_lowg is false) , ($tool_gauntlet is false)>>forehead gashed from temple to brow<</if>>, but she is unbowed by them. Her skin is warm, the pallor diffused, her breathing steady, unlabored. And you are cold, getting cold, struggling with every little motion. It is alive; she is alive. And you are dying. She offers this to you by way of comfort, explanation, a fragment of shared and unfamiliar information. Of waking alone, the press of fingers through ice and membrane, coughing fluid out of lungs, an unwelcome metamorphosis. Of empty pods and empty chambers, of uncertainty found first in weak legs that could not carry her and again in the space where memory should reside. Again, in the face behind the glass. The first, the last, the noble, the abandoned. You could mistake this for an apology, with her arms wrapped around you. This is the cycle; waking alone from frozen depths, saved for an occasion like this as the station cries out for rescue. And there was nobody left to call upon but you. None else remained. This is the cycle; the station is wounded, you are wounded. The station is dying despite your best efforts - and you will die with it. You will die. You will die. And she She She will live on in your stead. She asks your purpose, the protocol you follow. Why you have come all this way if you knew it would result in your death. You stand in the airlock a shell of your former self, stripped of everything but a dying wish. Your last will and testament, to - To - <<nobr>><div class = choices> <<if $end is not 4>><div class = choice-item> [[End it.|end-4-capitulation][($chapter to "Capitulation") , ($ng to true) , ($end to 4)]]</div><</if>> <<if $end is 4>><div class = choice-item><span class = flashback> Martyr. You knew your cause was futile from the start and yet - here you are. Are you still blind, still hopeful?</span></div><</if>> <<if $end is not 5>><div class = choice-item> <span class ='glitch' data-text ='Kill it. '>[[Kill her.|end-5-recursion][($chapter to "Recursion") , ($ng to true) , ($end to 5)]]</span></div><</if>> <<if $end is 5>><div class = choice-item><span class = flashback> Monster. Don't you see what you've done? Isn't this what you wanted, to try again? Why don't you try again?</span></div><</if>> <<if $end is not 6>><div class = choice-item> [[End it all.|end-6-annihilation][($chapter to "Annihilation") , ($ng to true) , ($end to 6)]]</div><</if>> <<if $end is 6>><div class = choice-item><span class = flashback> Traitor. You thought it would be over, didn't you? Thought you'd outsmarted the system, thought you'd escaped. This is only the beginning.</span></div><</if>> </div><</nobr>><<if ndef $PassageNo>><<set $PassageNo = 1>><</if>><<switch $PassageNo>><<case 1>><<if $choice is 1>><span class = flashback>Loneliness is an inevitable thing. She came here seeking answers, let her ambition run rampant, let her curiosity play king to every action. She forgot who she was, once the child that climbed the tree to watch the distant traffic of the spaceport, once the falling child who relished the wind on their skin and did not realize that they would hit the ground, once the child who collected almost eagerly scars like pale stars upon their skin, the young woman who abandoned her home once already in the name of answers, studying distant galaxies and finding only more questions. The woman who returned, who abandoned everything - <i>everything</i> - for the sake of love. Love, stupid, foolish, illogical love. Not something that can be defined through the nature of scientific inquiry, though many have tried. Love, like want, can make gods of men. Love can bring these newly forged gods to their knees. It was a fundamental betrayal of who she was; all she was meant to do, staring out at the blankness at pinpricks of cold bitter light while the one who burnt warmly and brightly called her back like a siren, again and again. The calls were frequent at first. Fewer, as time went on. Shorter. More terse, hostile, dismissive. A missed birthday. A barely-remembered anniversary. The smile lines lost in the decay of signal or the fading warmth. <i>When are you coming home?</i> She would always ask, a spark of hope in those dark eyes. <i>I miss you, you know? Come home, please. It'll be like you never left.</i> Loneliness is an inevitable thing. There is not a universe in which she would return. Until this one instance in this one solution to the many-worlds problem, until in a blaze of glory she is falling ever more rapidly, nearing the Roche limit, wherein all will cease to be. And before her lie two possibilities - loneliness, infinite darkness, the stars but a distant dream - or reunification. The thought, if even for the briefest of seconds as life fades from her veins, that she will see her again.</span><<elseif $choice is 2>><span class = flashback>Perhaps she should be bitter about this being the conclusion. Falling. Like she did all those years ago, arm still outstretched, the sky growing farther and farther away. There is some cruel or dramatic irony in this being the manner of both her death and awakening. Perhaps it should be a comfort. There were good days. So many, where the stars were but an afterthought, where all that mattered was that the sun rose. Where she lie in the arms of another, white linen and freckled skin, memorized of the folds and curves of a body near. Where she walked the shores of a shallow salt sea, followed the tree-lined lanes dappled in light through the thin apertures of leaves to a home with knotted hardwood floors and open windows through which the wind whispered. Hand in hand interlinked, the dark eyes filled with the stars she once sought, her delusions of grandeur lost in the summer breeze of her laugh, of her smile. Warmth even in winter, when the world grew tired and gray and ever more beautiful, glazed in ice, blanketed in snow, all soft edges and hidden forms. It was a late winter day when she had sat across the table from the other woman. <i>This is the opportunity of a lifetime,</i> she had told her, as a sad smile curved her lips. She had turned her gaze from the stars for too long. This was what was necessary; ambition comes at cost, pride must beget pain. Perhaps she should have been more careful, more diplomatic. She never wanted to hurt her but - <i>Why are you crying?</i> she asked of the woman whose hands she held. <i>Can't you see this is a good thing?</i> <i>Stay,</i> she pleaded. <i>Stay with me. If you go, I'll never get you back.</i> There is not a universe in which she did not leave. There is not a universe in which she regretted doing so. The stars were not meant for her nor any living thing, for that matter; space is dark and airless and cold and uncaring and she had knowingly left the only good, the only warmth, the only comfort to have ever be born of her ambition. It is fitting, then, that she should perish amongst her beloved abyss.</span><<elseif $choice is 3>>Selfishly, you wish you recognized the planet that grows to consume your vision, that this were a homecoming in the worst way, a funerary procession. That when you fall through the swirling clouds and ignite and some small part of you strikes the ground, you will have at least come home. Home is a wound that does not close. This station, this observatory, this grave, was not your first home, that, you know. Your first home was heavy with black smoke that choked the skies, the twinned suns dripping red silhouettes through the haze, blooded skies and salted soil. Home is an ache like that of your wounds. Home is not found here, amongst the semi-circular hallways, a living tomb of metal and carbon composite. Nor is it amongst the memories of the dappling of sunlight through leaves whose half moon shadows sprawl lazily across knotted hardwood floors. Home was the aching-chest thrill of running, of climbing, eyes aglow with adrenaline as you wove your way through the vast drydocks, scaffolding like giant's legs that disappeared into the smoke, supported the looming shadows of starships far above, the starships you hoped would one day carry you from this place. You dreamt of something far greater. You found only this, only falling. But you had made it to the stars, at long last. You had made it, even if for only a single, glorious moment.<</if>> <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 2>><span class = flashback>My love, must you slip through my fingers again? Must you always leave?</span> <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|breach-choice-2][($PassageNo = 1) , ($chapter to "The Breach")]]</div> </div><</nobr>><</switch>><h3><span class = alttext>Constants and Relations</span></h3> A particular measurable property of an isolated physical system that does not change as the system evolves over time is defined by a <i>conservation law</i>. Conservation laws exist within the framework of Noether's Theorem as symmetries, a concept fundamental to the construction of our Universe. For each differentiable symmetry of nature, there is an exact law. Conservation laws cannot be broken, despite of the machinations of humans and their constructs. You cannot truly return. You cannot truly fix something. You cannot truly escape. You have taken something, and thus, something must be taken in return. Conservation laws appear in two categorical definitions, these so called "exact" conservation laws and "approximate" laws. For the sake of clarity and brevity, the approximate laws - many of which are highly localized and relativistic to obscure areas of study - will be omitted. The exact conservation laws are listed below: <<nobr>><ul>Conservation of mass-energy.</ul> <ul>Conservation of linear momentum.</ul> <ul>Conservation of angular momentum.</ul> <ul>Conservation of space-time.</ul> <ul>Conservation of electric charge.</ul> <ul>Conservation of chromodynamic potential.</ul> <ul>Conservation of charge, parity, and time reversal.</ul><</nobr>><<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|prereq-ng-2]]</div> </div><</nobr>><h3><span class = alttext>Fundamental Laws of Thermodynamics</span></h3><i>The Zeroth Law:</i> If two thermodynamic systems are in thermal equilibrium with each other, and also separately in thermal equilibrium with a third system, then the three systems are in thermal equilibrium with each other. You are a living thing amongst the stars. <i>The First Law:</i> The total energy of any isolated system - one that cannot exchange energy or matter - is constant; energy can be transformed from one form to another, but can be neither created nor destroyed. You cannot truly return; something is always lost in doing so. <i>The Second Law:</i> Every process occurring in nature involving an irreversible or spontaneous change from one equilibrium state to another will result in an increase in entropy; this remains true for reversible processes, the sum of the entropies remains unchanged. You cannot truly escape; every attempt only draws the noose tighter. <i>The Third Law:</i> The entropy of a system approaches a constant value when its temperature approaches absolute zero; it is thus impossible for any process, no matter how idealized, to reduce the total entropy of a system to absolute zero in a finite number of operations. Eventually, we will all be stardust again. <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|prereq-ng-3]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<nobr>><span class = flashback><i><ul>I must say Good-bye, my pupil, for I cannot longer</ul> <ul>speak;</ul> <ul>Draw the curtain back for Venus, ere my vision</ul> <ul>grows too weak;</ul> <ul>It is is strange the pearly planet should look red as</ul> <ul>fiery Mars,-</ul> <ul>God will mercifully guide me on my way amongst the</ul> <ul>stars.</ul></i></span><</nobr>> -Sarah Williams, <i>The Old Astronomer</i> (1868) <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|on-stars][$chapter to "On Stars"]]</div> </div><</nobr>>She stands over you, offering wordlessly, almost frantically her <<if $injured_window is true>>bloodied <<elseif $injured_window is false>>outstretched<</if>> hand. To help you; she would help you despite the futility of her existence, your existence. With her assistance, a hand strong in yours, you stand. Stand face to face, stare into your own eyes mirrored. You blink - her image remains - you press your eyes closed until spots swim through the darkness, hoping blindly that when you open your eyes, the apparition will dissipate. You open your eyes. It remains. She remains A further test, shedding your glove and reaching for her. To touch her skin, to acknowledge her as real and tangible and not only that - but to recognize her skin as you would recognize your own. She does not flinch as fingertips brush her face; she holds her ground and bites her tongue, stifles all but the single tear that runs down her cheek. She wears all the same wounds as you, <<if $tool_gauntlet is true>>arm shattered and dubiously repaired by the presence of the gauntlet, forehead gashed from temple to brow<<elseif $injured_window is true and $injured_armory is false>>hand gouged by glass from shattered window, left stained and stiff with dried blood and torn flesh like that of the wound that carves its way from temple to brow<<elseif $injured_window is false and $injured_armory is true>>trail of blood from bruised ear betraying the lack of function within, forehead gashed from temple to brow<<elseif $injured_window is true and $injured_armory is true>> hand gouged by glass from shattered window, bruised ear betraying the lack of function within, all left stained and stiff with dried blood and torn flesh like that of the wound that carves its way from temple to brow<<elseif ($injured_window is false) , ($injured_armory is false) , ($tool_gauntlet is false)>> forehead gashed from temple to brow<</if>>, but she is unbowed by them. Her skin is warm, the pallor diffused, her breathing steady, unlabored. And you are cold, getting cold, struggling with every little motion. It is alive; she is alive. And you are dying. She offers this to you by way of comfort, explanation, a fragment of shared and unfamiliar information. Of waking alone, the press of fingers through ice and membrane, coughing fluid out of lungs, an unwelcome metamorphosis. Of empty pods and empty chambers, of uncertainty found first in weak legs that could not carry her and again in the space where memory should reside. Again, in the face behind the glass. The first, the last, the noble, the abandoned. You could mistake this for an apology, with her arms wrapped around you. This is the cycle; waking alone from frozen depths, saved for an occasion like this as the station cries out for rescue. And there was nobody left to call upon but you. None else remained. This is the cycle; the station is wounded, you are wounded. The station is dying - and you will die with it. You will die. You will die. And she She She will live on in your stead. She asks your purpose, the protocol you follow. Why you have come all this way, if not only to die. You stand in the hangar a shell of your former self, stripped of everything but purpose. Your purpose, to - To - <<nobr>><div class = choices> <<if $end is not 1>><div class = choice-item> [[Let her leave.|end-1-ascension][($chapter to "Ascension") , ($ng to true) , ($end to 1)]]</div><</if>> <<if $end is 1>><div class = choice-item><span class = flashback> Heretic. Order was given to you, purpose, dogma. Peace. What does your defiance lead to, if not needless death?</span></div><</if>> <<if $end is not 2>><div class = choice-item> [[Leave.|end-2-supplantation][($chapter to "Supplantation") , ($ng to true) , ($end to 2)]]</div><</if>> <<if $end is 2>><div class = choice-item><span class = flashback> Coward. Did you really think you could escape? There is nowhere to run to. This is only the beginning.</span></div><</if>> <<if $end is not 3>><div class = choice-item> <span class ='glitch' data-text ='Kill it. '>[[Kill her.|end-3-desolation][($chapter to "Desolation") , ($ng to true) , ($end to 3)]]</span></div><</if>> <<if $end is 3>><div class = choice-item><span class = flashback> Murderer. Do you feel guilty with her blood on your hands? Did she get what she deserved. Did you?</span></div><</if>> </div><</nobr>>You perch on the railing, facing the pit. Below you, pitch darkness. A promise to never have to return to this place. And behind you, safety. A return to the ardor of your task, of promises to fulfil. <i>Go ahead. Jump.</i> The pit beckons. <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item><span class ='glitch' data-text ='Take a leap of faith.'> [[Take a leap of faith.|end-secret-dereliction][($chapter to "Dereliction") , ($ng to true)]]</span></div> <div class = choice-item> [[Back away.|eng-2]]</div> </div><</nobr>>It is said that when you dream of falling, it signifies a lack of control. That something in your life has gone horribly awry and thus produces the feeling of freefall. You do not yet dream of falling. You have a choice. You stare death in the face and make a choice - to deny the tyranny of time and the station, to refuse Atlas' burden and Calypso's isolation and leap, fulfil your only true purpose as dictated by biology - to die. You in your unflinching nature, bloodied and brutalized and half-lucid have found yourself an acceptable loss, a final sacrifice unto the station. No. Not to the station. To the giants whose shoulders you stood upon as much as you stand up on the railing now, wavering ever so slightly. To the universe that you once saw as hope but now feels as empty and distant as the bottom of the pit. To the silence that greeted when you asked where everyone else was, when you asked who you were, to the silence of the abyss that greets you now, devoid of the thought characteristic of the station as you know it. It does not protest. You stand on the railing. You have made your choice. <i>It will be lonely,</i> it whispers. <i>Loneliness is an inevitable thing,</i> she responds. <i>It will hurt,</i> it promises as you fall. <i>It won't matter,</i> you reply. It is said that when you dream of falling, you always wake before you hit the ground; the body is ill-equipped to deal with simulated death, and thus the problem is avoided entirely by waking just before impact. Death - like solitude and heartbreak, like gravity and the fast-approaching ground - is an inevitable thing, always the result of multiple organ failure, systems going one after the other after the other until only the lonely brain remains. And the brain relinquishes the senses, ending last with hearing and touch, though electrical activity remains often for minutes. And in this frantic review of long-gone bodily systems, this preparation of the soul, this final review of memory - you hope you will be at peace, the golden years remembered through the kind lens of nostalgia, because this is the last you will feel of anything save for striking the ground, because you don't want to be scared. Because you don't want it to hurt. It won't matter. Brain activity will stop and all will cease to be, and here in the dark, your story will end, extinguished alongside your broken body, dead and gone and steadily cooling to equilibrium. And you will be free. <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[End.|Startup]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<if ndef $PassageNo>><<set $PassageNo = 1>><</if>><<switch $PassageNo>><<case 1>>You scramble away from the edge, all but falling over yourself to escape. Look back as you scramble down the outcropping, unaware of the half-wall of consoles that surround the looming maw until it is too late and you slam into them, crumpling to the ground. You stare blearily into the space between slats in the floor. Something stares back at you. You have to get up. You crawl back to your feet slowly, leaning heavy on the console before you, head pounding. The wound oozes like a slow tear escaping, hot against your brow, cheek, neck before disappearing into your collar. The harsh-edged command console is warm to the touch, warm like the blood of your brow, warm like flesh, warm like life the likes of which this segment of the station has never known. Warm like it could have lived, once, if you had willed it. If you had just tried a little harder, if you had just done your job, if - You retch. There is nothing in your stomach but blood and spit and acid and still your body heaves, tries to purge you of it. Sick with guilt, with self-deprecation, with the overwhelming desire just to crawl back to the pit and throw yourself over the edge and And And what? Will you just lie there at the bottom, bathing in self pity as you die, slowly and painfully, leaving nothing but a regretful corpse? Would you gaze up at the distant light and think - <i>if only</i>? You would die unfulfilled. The station would fade, not long after. An unacceptable outcome, given the only purpose you know is the completion of repairs, the sustained survival of the station. <<if $tool_gauntlet is true>>You place the gauntleted hand on a ridged panel, listen to a gentle set of clicks and whirs indicating that system and gauntlet and flesh are one. <<elseif $injured_window is true>>Your bloodied hand leaks with a fervor unmatched by any of your other wounds; blood pools along the seams and ridges and sills of the inset panel you press into, one that struggles briefly before accepting your handprint.<<elseif $injured_window is false and $tool_gauntlet is false>>Your rest your hand on a ridged panel, one that hums every so slightly before accepting your handprint.<</if>> The system welcomes you. The system welcomes you back with a title that burns a pit of guilt in your stomach. The system changes its mind. Administrator. Administrator, it calls you. Lies to you. The Administrator is dead, has always been dead; you in your fractured memory cannot recall a time in which your lives were concurrent. You are recognized as such out of desperation, Administrator for the sake of salvation and nothing more, a plea to fix things - this is what you are, remember, this is what you do, this is why you exist, remember, this is all you exist for, save me, save me, please. <i>Save me,</i> it pleads, tone taut, desperate. <i>Save us,</i> it says. <i>Administrator</i> <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][($PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1) , ($chapter to "...")]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 2>><span class = flashback>Don't you see? It was never supposed to be like this.</span> <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][($PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1) , ($chapter to "Engineering Core")]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 3>><i>Administrator.</i> The system bares itself to you, struggling to deploy a hologram from a ring of projectors hanging above the abyss. Flickering, blinking, straining through static to produce an image, faint at first and growing stronger until the pale blue of a cloudless sky illuminates the Engineering Core. <i>You remember the first time you had seen blue skies, distant and delicate, a dream realized in shades of cerulean; you remember never wanting to look away, wanting to count and recount each whisp of cloud, to know how it would feel beneath your fingertips and -</i> The system bares itself to you, concerning statistics everchanging, numbers dipping into the red and barely reemerging green; you see, the wounds are worse than originally anticipated, it remains alive but barely, it needs help, it needs <i>you</i>, it needs your help. <span class = flashback>She was desperate as she bled, holding on as long as she could, holding on as tight as she could, fingers grasping at the slats in the floor as if she too would run off to be lost in the depths, a stain upon the world, forgotten, wiped away when morning comes, if morning comes -</span> Gestures half remembered, the mirror of some distant ancestor who knew the ritual ways to force information out of lines of code and bare, the system gives you what you want, surrenders to your open hand. The station is wounded - more so that you had originally anticipated, more so than you could have ever guessed. Gutted; a gash nearly half the circumference of the ring spans the belly of the station, the entrails of the station hang projected as pixelated dust shifting in the solar winds. The ring itself is shattered, a section missing. A brief calculation shows the shrapnel impacting the telescope and the telescope thus impacting in fragments the inner ring, explanation at last for the sealed windows and debris and silence and coldness. <span class = flashback>The cold came rushing in as the breath was ripped from her lungs, as the blood crystalized on her skin and her last thoughts were of -</span> You stand quietly stunned. The animation shows over and over again an impossibility, catastrophic damage, a complete collapse of the system. The telescope and observatory itself destroyed, the station's purpose being thus wiped out. Anything and everything you do would be futile. <i>No,</i> the station tells you. <i>There is still data here, still work, still the concerted effort of science and industry. This was a home, once. It must survive. If nothing else, let the memory survive. Please.</i> And you ask what you must do, your hands resting above a projected keyboard. It shows you. The Repository will have the parts you need to repair a solar array connected to the emergency power grid. Fluctuations in power have resulted in data loss and all communication systems being knocked offline. The station does not respond to your query on how long it has been since communications were online. It provides further steps instead. You will go to the Repository. You will collect the array parts. You will use an airlock on the inner aspect of the ring to access the array in its current position beneath the station. You will complete the repairs and return to the Engineering Core. There will be more work when you have completed your first task. There will always be more work, more to be done; this is futile, this is hopeless, this is pointless, this is - The station tells you to leave. You, who is staring at the itemized list, at the path carving through the station and avoiding the breach, at the slow rotation of the hologram, at the calculated animation playing out over and over and over again, the station struck by an unknown object and fragmenting, fragments begetting more fragments, more destruction until the station too is frozen, still and quiet. The holograms blink out of existence, the air growing heavy with something you could imagine to be desperation. The lockdown is lifted for you without raising a finger or your gaze, the ground seems to guide your stumbling path towards the exit. You look back, over your shoulder with every few steps. You do not know what you expect to see following you. <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|core-cortex-trans][($PassageNo = 1) , ($chapter to "Repair Protocol")]]</div> </div><</nobr>><</switch>><<if ndef $PassageNo>><<set $PassageNo = 1>><</if>><<switch $PassageNo>><<case 1>><<if $choice is 1>><span class = flashback>Loneliness is an inevitable thing. She came here seeking answers, let her ambition run rampant, let her curiosity play king to every action. She forgot who she was, once the child that climbed the tree to watch the distant traffic of the spaceport, once the falling child who relished the wind on their skin and did not realize that they would hit the ground, once the child who collected almost eagerly scars like pale stars upon their skin, the young woman who abandoned her home once already in the name of answers, studying distant galaxies and finding only more questions. The woman who returned, who abandoned everything - <i>everything</i> - for the sake of love. Love, stupid, foolish, illogical love. Not something that can be defined through the nature of scientific inquiry, though many have tried. Love, like want, can make gods of men. Love can bring these newly forged gods to their knees. It was a fundamental betrayal of who she was; all she was meant to do, staring out at the blankness at pinpricks of cold bitter light while the one who burnt warmly and brightly called her back like a siren, again and again. The calls were frequent at first. Fewer, as time went on. Shorter. More terse, hostile, dismissive. A missed birthday. A barely-remembered anniversary. The smile lines lost in the decay of signal or the fading warmth. <i>When are you coming home?</i> She would always ask, a spark of hope in those dark eyes. <i>I miss you, you know? Come home, please. It'll be like you never left.</i> Loneliness is an inevitable thing. There is not a universe in which she would return. Until this one instance in this one solution to the many-worlds problem, until in a blaze of glory she is falling ever more rapidly, nearing the Roche limit, wherein all will cease to be. And before her lie two possibilities - loneliness, infinite darkness, the stars but a distant dream - or reunification. The thought, if even for the briefest of seconds as life fades from her veins, that she will see her again.</span><<elseif $choice is 2>><span class = flashback>Perhaps she should be bitter about this being the conclusion. Falling. Like she did all those years ago, arm still outstretched, the sky growing farther and farther away. There is some cruel or dramatic irony in this being the manner of both her death and awakening. Perhaps it should be a comfort. There were good days. So many, where the stars were but an afterthought, where all that mattered was that the sun rose. Where she lie in the arms of another, white linen and freckled skin, memorized of the folds and curves of a body near. Where she walked the shores of a shallow salt sea, followed the tree-lined lanes dappled in light through the thin apertures of leaves to a home with knotted hardwood floors and open windows through which the wind whispered. Hand in hand interlinked, the dark eyes filled with the stars she once sought, her delusions of grandeur lost in the summer breeze of her laugh, of her smile. Warmth even in winter, when the world grew tired and gray and ever more beautiful, glazed in ice, blanketed in snow, all soft edges and hidden forms. It was a late winter day when she had sat across the table from the other woman. <i>This is the opportunity of a lifetime,</i> she had told her, as a sad smile curved her lips. She had turned her gaze from the stars for too long. This was what was necessary; ambition comes at cost, pride must beget pain. Perhaps she should have been more careful, more diplomatic. She never wanted to hurt her but - <i>Why are you crying?</i> she asked of the woman whose hands she held. <i>Can't you see this is a good thing?</i> <i>Stay,</i> she pleaded. <i>Stay with me. If you go, I'll never get you back.</i> There is not a universe in which she did not leave. There is not a universe in which she regretted doing so. The stars were not meant for her nor any living thing, for that matter; space is dark and airless and cold and uncaring and she had knowingly left the only good, the only warmth, the only comfort to have ever be born of her ambition. It is fitting, then, that she should perish amongst her beloved abyss.</span><<elseif $choice is 3>>Selfishly, you wish you recognized the planet that grows to consume your vision, that this were a homecoming in the worst way, a funerary procession. That when you fall through the swirling clouds and ignite and some small part of you strikes the ground, you will have at least come home. Home is a wound that does not close. This station, this observatory, this grave, was not your first home, that, you know. Your first home was heavy with black smoke that choked the skies, the twinned suns dripping red silhouettes through the haze, blooded skies and salted soil. Home is an ache like that of your wounds. Home is not found here, amongst the semi-circular hallways, a living tomb of metal and carbon composite. Nor is it amongst the memories of the dappling of sunlight through leaves whose half moon shadows sprawl lazily across knotted hardwood floors. Home was the aching-chest thrill of running, of climbing, eyes aglow with adrenaline as you wove your way through the vast drydocks, scaffolding like giant's legs that disappeared into the smoke, supported the looming shadows of starships far above, the starships you hoped would one day carry you from this place. You dreamt of something far greater. You found only this, only falling. But you had made it to the stars, at long last. You had made it, even if for only a single, glorious moment.<</if>> <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|passage()][$PassageNo = $PassageNo + 1]]</div> </div><</nobr>><<case 2>><span class = flashback>My love, must you slip through my fingers again? Must you always leave?</span> <<nobr>><div class=choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|spacewalk-2][($PassageNo = 1) , ($chapter to "The Abyss")]]</div> </div><</nobr>><</switch>>And it is now, as you slam into the platform you are meant to repair, that you are returned to reality. You have purpose again, you have a duty to this station, you have come so far and you cannot give up now, when you are quite literally face to face with the reason for your continued existence. A pair of shattered photosynthetic arrays, a string of red-glowing lights indicating a power failure, tracing a route back to the central spire where a shielded box has been rent apart, internals scattered to orbit. The repair itself is strange, you think you should feel accomplishment and triumph and instead it feels dreadful and intrusive, more self-surgery than mechanical intervention, fumbling with nerves and not wires, with bone and not support struts. The repair is strange in that you have no idea what you're supposed to be doing and yet <<if $tool_gauntlet is true>>aided by the gauntlet and muscle memory,<<elseif $tool_gauntlet is false>>aided by muscle memory,<</if>> you find your movements programmed and efficient, precise despite your injuries. You watch from afar while simultaneously elbow-deep, your burden lessening with each proceeding step until Until Until Until you stand dazed amongst a blossoming solar array glistening in the light of the distant sun. You're done. You have done all you have set out to do, repairs complete, repairs successful. You're done. <<nobr>><div class = choices> <div class = choice-item> [[Advance.|airlock][$chapter to "The Airlock"]]</div> </div><</nobr>>