New Life

(( This is an (ongoing) story I had originally posted on my faction’s forums, however I thought I’d post it here as well in case anyone is curious as to my, uh, absence. ))

‘This is a most… unusual request.’

Procurator straightened his jacket and began playing with the sunglasses in his hands.

‘Yes, I know. We’ve already discussed the nature of my request. Has it been approved?’

Agent Gray stared at Procurator, unblinking.

‘I have spoken to my superiors, and your suggested plan shall go ahead. Please remember that we are placing considerable trust in your ability to see this through.’

‘Good. You’ll not find it misplaced,’ said Procurator. ‘When can I expect the access codes?’

‘They will be forwarded to you within the day. Intricate scheduling is required for this exchange to go unnoticed by your fellow operatives – the timing must be precise.

‘I have been reminded to ask of you the status of your new program.’

Procurator rummaged around in the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a PDA, on which he began to tap away.

‘It’s very nearly complete. This will work, you know. I’ve honed my skills to perfection, if I do say so myself. Even your programmers would be hard pressed to come up with something like this little beauty anytime soon.’

‘I am not at liberty to discuss our resources Mister Tonks,’ Agent Gray responded, raising an eyebrow. ‘Just as long as we get the program.’

‘You’ll get it, have no fear of that. But only when I’m finished with it. I told you I don’t know how long this will take. It could be days, it could be months.’

The two stood in silence for a moment. Bluepills walked around them on their way to whatever meaningless jobs they had. When busy, Center Park was perfect for meetings like this.

Procurator put his sunglasses on.

‘You’ll hear from me when it’s all over. T’ra.’

‘Good afternoon, Mister Tonks.’

Message Edited by [TGS]Procurator on 10-04-2005 12:09 AM

Procurator started to pick up the pace. The powers that be in the Machine hierarchy had obviously put a great deal of effort into keeping the lesser robots out of his way as he navigated the maze of corridors in the outskirts of Zero-One. He’d counted about two robots in the last ten minutes, and they were both occupied with more important matters than watching humans walking around. Although humans were allowed in these halls – at least humans who’d sworn allegiance to the Machine Civilisation – there wasn’t much cause for anyone to be here. Even with Agent Gray’s and the more important Machines’ promised protection, had any robot caught sight of him, rumours of Procurator’s presence here would spread to his fellow operatives in no time.

He reached another turn in the corridor and peered around it. Empty, as predicted. This should be the last stretch, he thought. Indeed, ahead of him the corridor came to an end in the form of a large double panelled door. Procurator glanced behind him and typed the access code into the panel to the right of the doors, which promptly slid open with the slightest hiss. Picking up the rucksack he’d dropped in his fervor to get the code keyed in, he skipped lightly through the doors as they slid shut behind him.

Upon entering the room he was greeted by a vast array of shelves, stretching away in all directions from the entrance. The doors’ final click as they locked was the last noise he heard for a while. This room would normally be teeming with robots collecting the items on the shelves and dragging them off to various other sections of the City, but now there was just silence, and an eery glow from the ceiling that kept the room lit and left no shadows. On these shelves lay some of the untold number of components that went into constructing the Machines’ advanced hovercraft. Consoles, fat cables, screens… even seats; all the things one would usually find in the broadcast bay.

After staring at the spectacle for few moments, eyes wide like those of child walking into a fully stocked sweet shop, Procurator headed for the third aisle of shelves from the left. He couldn’t imagine how complex it had been to orchestrate the schedule to keep the room empty, but he didn’t think it would last long: he had to hurry.

It took him a whole twenty minutes to run from shelf to shelf, grabbing things from their recesses and stuffing them into his oversized rucksack. Sometimes he’d miss something, causing him to curse under his breath in ever more flagrant ways and run back to pick it up. When at last he was satisfied, he legged it to the doors and made quick his exit.

Turning the first corner on his way back to the docking bays, he almost collided with a robot marching in the opposite direction.

‘My apologies, sir,’ remarked the machine, who bowed stiffly before going on its way.

Procurator wasn’t worried. By this stage no amount of wireless Machine gossip would reach the ears of any of his crew members before the Aggregator left Zero-One – it was already primed for departure, and the crew would be assuming their flight stations. He hoisted the rucksack higher onto his shoulders, and hurried along the hallway.

Flare walked into the broadcast bay just as Procurator was getting out of his seat, obviously having just come out of a construct – he’d never enter the Matrix without her at the controls. Procurator looked a little pleased with himself.

‘What’re you so happy about?’ she asked.

‘H’mm?’ murmured the captain, seeming to only just notice the ship’s operator. ‘It’s done! The program’s done!’

Flare looked confused and tilted her head to one side, inquiringly.

Procurator laughed. ‘Uh, never mind. How close are we to the rendez-vous point?’

‘Fro says we’ll be there in ten minutes.’ She tilted her head to one side again, and asked: ‘Are you going to tell me why we’re meeting this hovercraft crew? I’ve never heard of the HvCFT Clearsight before; they can’t be important.’

‘Oh, ah, you’ll soon see.’

Procurator left the bay and walked over to the ramp leading down into the storage area. Flare watched him, narrowing her eyes in suspicion.

***

‘We’re there, Pro.’

Frotee swung around in his pilot’s seat and looked at Procurator, whose mood had sobered somewhat since a few minutes ago.

‘Nice going, dude.’ Procurator turned back to face the rest of the crew who had gathered themselves in the Aggregator’s entry bay, ready for action. ‘Right,’ he started, looking from one member to the next, ‘The Clearsight might not be here for a few minutes yet. I’m going to head out there and wander over to the place I said I’d meet them – just around the corner, behind that outcropping. You lot can stay here until I call for you.’

There was a little shuffling of feet amongst the crew, and Campusanis spoke up: ‘Pro, I think as first mate I should accompany you, just until—’

‘Sorry Camp,’ interrupted the captain, raising his palm, ‘I mean you too. Me appearing outside the ship on my own is part of the arrangement… yes.’

He smiled weakly, and bent over to pick up the large, bulky rucksack at his feet. Heaving it over his shoulder he stood by the ramp controls, hit the button and marched down the ramp. Mist swamped into the hovercraft, enveloping the crew as the ramp began to ascend again.

Procurator stood for a moment in the bitter cold, gazing at the barren wasteland before and around him. Quickly discarding the thought of going back into the ship for a hat, he turned towards a large outcropping and started to walk towards it, shoulders sagging under the weight of the rucksack. He reached the rock wall and started to walk around it as it curved away to the left, an elbow of stone carved by God knew what fierce winds pervaded the area. After walking a few more meters beyond the point at which the Aggregator vanished from sight, Procurator faced the stone and started to stare it up and down. Eventually he spied what he was looking for: a narrow crack in the wall, barely discernible from a shadow. He put down the rucksack and took from it a pickaxe. With one blow part of the wall shattered, but the fragments that fell to the floor were rusted metal.

He entered the rectangular opening that had formed, dragging the rucksack in with him. He swept a torch he was holding from side to side, and attempted to navigate his way through the hallway. This small building had once been an underground reservoir, built into the side of a mountain. In the many years since the start of the War the landscape had changed considerably, but the manmade structure, fortified as it was against the machinations of nature, remained. The Machines had kept track of facilities like these, and had suggested this as being the perfect place for the plan to take place.

A rumbling shook the floor and Procurator almost lost his footing. A gust of wind flew through the doorway behind him as the image of a hovercraft flying low swooshed past it. Moments later the sound of distant gunfire echoed down the hall. As loyal as his crew were, Procurator knew they wouldn’t hang around to get attacked by the Merovingian ship he had summoned to drive them away from his location. The Clearsight was a ridiculous name he’d made up on the spot, but it had served to at least ferry him to this location. As extra insurance that he would remain lost, Procurator had cleared the co-ordinate buffer on the Aggregator – it would take them weeks to find this place again. He started moving down the hallway as the sound of his ship’s engines faded into the eternal night, the Aggregator going on the defensive and making its way to the sewers.

After a while he entered the control room of the facility, and started emptying the bag. It took him hours to construct the device out of its constituent components, but eventually it was ready. As tough and as thick as the reservoir’s walls were, they couldn’t block the signal this baby would generate. He pulled up the least decrepit looking seat from the room’s control panels and sat himself within it, making sure he got as comfortable as he could. He leant back, closed his eyes, and pressed the largest button on the device he had constructed.

Flare was sat in front of the broadcast bay console with her head in her arms on the desk. The scrolling code on the screens around her tinted the whole area and made her usual silver hair look bright green. She’d fallen asleep at the console for the tenth night running.

‘You’re not doing yourself any favours,’ Campusanis would say every morning after he’d found her slumped in her chair, snoring at the ceiling and about to fall over the armrest onto the floor.

Indeed, she had very rarely left her station since starting the search for Procurator all those weeks ago. After the Aggregator had evaded the hostile Merovingian hovercraft and returned to Zero-One, Flare wasted no time in running a search. Her fellow crew members had their misgivings, of course: why would his captors allow Procurator to jack into the Matrix at all? They had in turn started investigating other avenues, with Doomicon following leads in the Real through The Glitch Society’s amassed contacts, and Campusanis and Frotee delving into the Matrix’s myriad of rumours and gossip, searching for anything they could.

Through all this, Agent Gray was still tasking the crew and the rest of the faction with the usual missions to kill Exiles and retrieve seemingly unimportant data. In fact, a number of people had remarked on how little the Machines seemed to care about the disappearance of a captain of one of their most dedicated factions. Not that the Machines would show any emotional concern anyway, but under normal circumstances surely they would have given the crew more time to look for him? d4sh and RockyB had agreed to transfer new recruit Gookin over to the Aggregator to help, but even with his efforts the search proceeded distressingly slowly.

There were murmurs among the faction of officially naming Campusanis the new captain, but Flare would never allow it. The first mate himself had doubts over the idea, and said he’d much rather wait a while longer before giving up all hope. It was never discovered who did it, but someone must actually have recommended his promotion to the Machines, as one morning a message arrived in the faction leader’s inbox ordering him not to permit such an action. A message of reassurance from their masters, or another display of their oftentimes bizarre logic?

The broadcast bay was cast in a red light, and began alternating between red and white illumination. Flare shifted slightly in her seat and moaned, lifting her head up slightly to see what the problem was. Suddenly she snapped upright and started typing furiously at the keyboard. One of the screens had the words ‘Partial Match’ flashing across it, with a small table of co-ordinates listed underneath.

Not daring to think what it meant by ‘partial’, Flare narrowed the code windows down to examine the area the search had specified. She recognised the place at once. A series of large steps rising from the ground, metres high, topped by a lone door leading to nowhere: the Ascension Monument in Westview. She looked from one screen to another, staring at the code, trying to find just a tiny sequence of familiar characters. There seemed to be a very few disparate fragments that looked like they could be part of Procurator’s RSI, but they were scattered all over, almost like a cloud of code over the monument, interspersed with totally unrecognisable code that Flare couldn’t make any sense of.

She was squinting so closely at the screens now that it took her a while to register that there were a number of people standing at the base of the giant steps. She looked at them in turn, the descending code becoming shapes and colours in her mind, coalescing into distinct forms. There was one man standing apart from the others. For a brief moment, the operator was sure she had found Procurator, but almost as soon as she thought it, she realised she was wrong. He didn’t look that much like him, and none of the underlying code was anything resembling his. No. No, it couldn’t be him: her captain never wore red.

Turning her attention away from the lone man, she tried to work out who the other people were. They were standing around him, some pointing at him, talking to him, though Flare couldn’t make out what they were saying. Their posture was obviously aggressive – the man was in trouble, whoever he was. Examining the faces of the aggressors, she was suddenly struck by the fact that they were all wearing masks.