The Quicksand Singularity ArQive: Array.init:0

A0T5.3 The Ëchüha Incident (Part 4)

QSI-N_0266801c(4)
Fhá Vngví - Hàkétzü DZ-C_060041386

Part 4
A Truly Sensational Experience

The VirtuCast ended abruptly, ejecting Fhá out of Hvórþ's body. Neural shock propelled her back into her seat, muscles spasming. In a panic, she grabbed the headset and flung it off her head. The device clattered onto her desk, the sound like magazines falling onto hard surfaces. Fhá flinched and recoiled with a yelp, heart pounding even harder than it was before.

Nothing could have prepared her for what she'd just experienced. Not the games she and her boyfriend played almost nightly, and certainly none of the CineCasts they got from the Net. There was always a distance, a dulling of the feed, intentional choices that walked the ever-so-fine line between verisimilitude and full-force, raw neurostimulus. Only the most cooked VR Junkies would willingly jack into a raw memarq unprotected. The hapless basket cases would, provided some catastrophic malfunction didn't fry what was left of their brain, walk away with someone else's unfiltered memories etched directly onto their neurons, leaving imprints of another's persona perpetually dancing between their synapses like some kind of metaphysical STD.

Katzali had made no editorial decisions. In actual fact, he hadn't even bothered to dignify the classified subarchive with the slightest hint of warning. Then again, he was an Inquisitor. His expectations must have been loftier than anything the Imperium could ever have provided. Fhá imagined the man, sitting in his comfy, leather chair, twirling his waxed moustache whilst swirling single-malt whisky worth more than Fhá would make in a lifetime, that his report would be viewed only by other Inquisitors, or, barring that, wouldn't be audited by the third lowest rank on the totem pole of Imperial Bureaucratic hierarchies. Hells, she was so low, if the totem pole was a real thing, she'd be at least a dozen metres in the dirt, six stations below anyone with a hope of seeing the light of day.

Given how meticulous Katzali had been, Fhá couldn't help but figure it wasn't a Katzali problem, but Ngèza's idea of a funny practical joke. She imagined someone somewhere had developed some kind of VCaster that wouldn't fry raw neuromesh data indelibly onto someone else's brain.

Fhá sighed angrily. Clearly she should have known better. Pressing play on a .meme file in an Inquisitor's Classified Archive!? Obvious risk should have been obvious! How could she have been so stupid! Everyone point and laugh at the big dumb dummy!

Not that foreknowledge would have helped any. Auditing the archive wasn't an option. Getting rawdogged by unfiltered memarqs, like a great many other indignities, was in her contract. Somewhere.

Reaching into her desk drawer, Fhá grabbed her favourite wickerball, attempting to calm her nerves and racing heart. Hvórþ's memories had, undeniably, imprinted themselves onto her, and they were taking her for the ride of her life. Unlike Captain Kickass, Fhá wasn't a special forces operator. She had no training, no experience, no preparation for what she'd just, unwittingly, jacked herself into. As she squeezed the ball, the scene of that creature, that gods awful creature, appearing in the darkness, killing Nobuo and Kàng, Hvórþ's sheer, all-consuming terror, and that buzzing, that infernal buzzing, it kept playing over and over. All the while a single question, as much Hvórþ's as her own, cycled like a broken audio clip.

What was that...that...thing?

None of the documents she'd reviewed prior to beginning her review of the Inquisition's Inquiry Report indicated its existence. None of the local wildlife in the Ecologist's Report showed anything any more hostile than what would be present on an Engineered world. Sure there were predators, and they wouldn't turn down human if it meant an easy meal, but they weren't hostile like very nearly every native lifeform on The Rimworld's UltraMax Penal World, Embers of Exile. Whatever that wispy, shrieking, wraithlike creature was, its demeanour was beyond hostile. It was like it was compelled by wrath so insatiable it could even have eclipsed Ngèza's after a night of heavy drinking.