How to Win Friends and Influence Pod Pilots

One of the complaints commonly made against us wormhole colonists is that we're unduly antisocial, that we've cocooned ourselves from the rest of New Eden's civilization out of greed and selfishness. It's funny how the people who usually say this have an icon of a flashing red skull next to their name, along with a less-than-friendly relationship with Concord.

They also have a point, or half of one anyway. It's certainly true that the sense of ennui that initially pushed me and the rest of APHID through the wormhole was antisocial in nature. And, to be sure, there are also those who go to great lengths to maroon themselves in w-space. But our experience over the last few weeks in J124654 has been anything but a lonely one.

Excepting occasional dry spells lasting 24 to 48 hours, visitors have shown up in this system about once a day. Most commonly, it's a covert ops frigate from the low-sec static wormhole exit, whose probes are the first things I pick up on scan. Occasionally, a K162 exit pops up from a neighboring w-space system and disgorges a complement of pod pilots seeking to mine this system's Sleeper sites for T3 parts and salvage.

In all of the above cases, APHID follows the same standard procedure:

1. All mining ops are immediately ceased.
2. All non-essential personnel immediately disembark from their ships and pods, or warp in their ships to a safe spot and engage a cloaking device.
3. A designated pod pilot (usually the one with the best scanning skills) endeavors to quickly scan the solar system for new or undetected wormholes.
4. Said scout then quickly scans down the newcomers and warps to their location at range.
5. Once we've evaluated the situation tactically, we then have to make a decision: ignore them and hope they go away, or initiate a conversation.

Some would say that a small, three-pod-pilot corporation like APHID should take the former course, hoping that our visitors either don't notice our HQ or don't care about it. After all, if they're not plundering our asteroid belts, then isn't a "live and let live" policy the wisest course?

The Silent City

Quomodo sedit sola civitas plena populo facta est.
[How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people!]

—Lamentations 1:1

It was the silence that woke me. The control tower at HQ is many things—but it's never quiet. I couldn't quite grok what it was I was supposed to do about it though. I guess that's why I had the Ex-1 "Executor" implant installed in the frontal lobes of my brain.

The nano-fiber semiconducting lattice of the Ex-1 "Executor" implant  forms a kind of catcher's mitt between the rest of my brain and the frontal lobes, which, as any neuroscientist (or Ex-1 salesman) can tell you, act to inhibit the more crazy-ass ideas that come from the depths of our still poorly evolved brains (Jovian company excluded, of course. Who knows how they've modified their meat computers, or if they even use them anymore?). Ex-1's nano-fiber lattice, paired with a femtoprocessor chip, also embedded in my gray matter, picks up on any brainwave pattern that the frontal lobes deem worthy of my acting out in the real world, and then it effects them itself, if the context is right.

Example: Let's say I decide to lower the thermostat, or convo an old friend; Ex-1 does it for me. The real neat part is that this all happens before I'm even consciously aware I wanted to do it. Thus the devices and ship modules all around me—in pod or out—know that I want to do something before I do.

All of this goes to explain how it is that Rol Prime had just accepted a convo that I wasn't even aware I had already sent.

"Look, I know you're going to say it is my fault, but it's not." His voice had already taken on a frenetic tone. Damn his eyes! I didn't even realize I was upset about something yet.

"Explain," I said, hoping the single-word response would give my frontal lobes a bit of time to catch up.

"You know how it is. I was getting bored watching the progress bars advance in the refinery, and I decided to listen in on Sleeper transmissions. I picked up on a data stream...a really interesting one."

"Define 'interesting'." I was beginning to see where this was going, and why my sub-conscious had immediately called Prime.

"I've never seen anything like it!" He was giddy. "Well, that's not true. It looked like the kind of instructions repper modules send out to the armor-repair nanobots crawling all around the hull of a ship, except these were more advanced than anything I've ever seen."

"And?" I still couldn't see how any of this explained the gnawing sense of unease in my gut.

"And I'll tell you." He was shaking now. "If we could figure out how to adapt a data stream like this one to our armor reppers, we'd have a module that would leave Tech II in the dust—maybe even beat out officer mods like Tairei's. We're talking a capital-class tank on a cruiser-sized hull!"

"So let me guess: You plugged the data stream into our mainframe to get a better look at it."

"Yes!"

Deep in the recesses of my skull the Ex-1 implant sprung into action, sending an instruction to a robotic arm conveniently located right behind the chair where Prime was sitting in the refinery control room. The metal arm reached out and swatted Prime on the head.

"Oww! Whadid you do that for?"

"I didn't; the Ex-1 did. The real question is, why do you think my subconscious mind wanted to slap you?"

He rubbed his thumped skull and mumbled something inaudible.

"I didn't catch that."

"BECAUSE THE SLEEPERS HAVE REPROGRAMMED OUR MAINFRAME!"

As he shouted it, conscious thoughts caught up with unconscious ones. "Let me see if I understand. You let the Sleeper data stream through the mainframe's firewall."

"Right, and now the Sleepers are rewriting all of the programs controlling several of APHID HQ's basic automatic functions."

"Anything important?"

"Not really, unless you think breathing is important. That silence you're hearing is the sound of fresh air not being pumped through our ventilators. It's only a guess, but I'd say we've got only a couple of hours of breathing left before we begin to pass out from hypoxia."

The robotic arm twitched again but held still. "Prime, why don't you tell me what is working."

"The Sleeper signal is hacking everything. It's like it's reprogramming the whole base to turn itself inside out. But for now, sure, yeah, some stuff is working: Weapons, lighting, pseudogravity. I even think the johns are still flushing. Oh, and oddly enough, auto-docking functions in the hangar are all nominal."

"That's all I need. Rol out." I disconnected the convo, got out of bed, and stepped into the head. I had a plan, but if that plan was going to work, I'd want to do it with an empty bladder.