[big]The Hatchery[/big]

Fragment content

Colonist’s Phrase Files (CPF)

Entry: Hatchery, the

The Hatchery is local slang for RecSpace. It came into vogue when today’s floatbed chambers were built following the activation of thousands of new floatbeds in L1000. One early morning TAU sealed off the doors to what was then a recreational space for the first Da Vincians, and began constructing the new floatbed chambers. They were referred to as The Hatchery. The name has since caught on, and is now used by some as a generic term for both floatbed chambers, locker halls, and garden areas. --- entry by Mirina & Ngala, L1016

Notes

For more information check The Hatchery (Recspace) and Floatbed Chambers

[big]The New Ringlab[/big]

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TAU Project Archives, L944

Documenting the Kapstan-Oliver-Grofman project, Scene 14a

((video recording:)) [Camera pans the walls as it goes up the shaft. Lift stops. Camera sweeps down, settles on door.] This is it. This is where the entrance to the Kapstan-Oliver-Grofman project is gonna be. [Door slides open.] Let’s have a look inside. A complete replica of Ringlab Alpha, they say. [Camera moves down the corridor] Wonder if we’re gonna be able to tell the difference.

Notes

For more info on the Kapstan-Oliver-Grofman project read the entry on Ringlab Beta

[big]Tyler (CEP)[/big]

Fragment content

Collaborative Encyclopedia Project (CEP)

Entry: Tyler

((damaged entry))

Tyler, Cruncher, of the Minimizer ring. Released L917, dead L927 by assumed suicide. The first to carry a blocker due to the [....] live floatbed with synthesized DNA [...] developing human would turn out [....] compatible with vicious native microbes [...] fast-paced skin cancer. -- Quachi

Notes

Information that can be delivered in game if players ask

See Fictive Fragment Sources page for more info on fragment origins

For more information see ‘Blockers’

[big]Vernan's Story (origins of access points)[/big]

Fragment content

((crackling audio file))

This is Vernan speaking, and this is a formal entry to the Da Vinci memorial banks. I'm going to talk a bit about the access point system. In particular how it came about. So if you're listening to this, Kinnick, you're one clever git. Have to say that.

Alright, where to start... it was after the Dambuster in, uh, L930 when we really started having trouble with resources. First off the BMCs went haywire on us due to the excessive damage their area suffered. BMCs would be the barrier maintenance clusters responsible for keeping the canyon waters out of the algae reservoir, for the record. Gotta remember details. Well, those BMCs are autonomous thinkers just like the rest of TAU, so they went ahead with their emergency programmes. Can't have the Barrier breached after all. So a whole lot of gear got sucked down there for months while the Barrier was rebuilt.

And on top of that there was just too much going on from the environment. We started getting the first really bad storms as well - the first Grazers scouring the tundra raw up there and sandblasting the tower with sand so fine it passed even through the hull sealings. We had the floods showing up every year all of a sudden. We had a growing army of microbes climbing inside and teaming up with the ones we managed to loose from the labs. So we had to start up a whole lot of things - improving the hulls, setting up organic defenses, installing the sonic guns topside. All costing resources.

But what really made things sink was the damn ambition. We all wanted to be the first to really get the true ecopoiesis up and running. True as in prestigious. Everybody wanted to be the first to put a real green thing out there, and see it take root and grow and spread. Nevermind that a report later proved the Dambuster was caused by just one of those - the Black Land project. To put out black algae to help warm up the atmosphere. Never did us any good, as far as I know. But anyhow.

Back then, we shared. Well, that was the idea. You wanted something, you got it from the storages. Or asked somebody for it. No big deal. I mean, it was just a few hundred people. We were basically just a small village by terran standards. Everybody knew everybody - or knew somebody who did. But with all this shit happening and everybody and their ringbuddy starting up new things, there simply wasn't enough for all of us. We all needed production units, labs, transports, CPU time, storage space. And you know, it started getting less sharey and more all-mine-mine awfully fast.

Yeah, it would get pretty bad in those days. You'd pop out of your floatbed, and your stomach would be sour already, because you just knew you'd be way behind in the line for anything. You could spend hours trying to pull a chimbot from the queues, only to get an error message stating that said unit was unavailable due to priority request. Priority request my ass. Or you'd secure a couple of crates with sonar boosters, only to have it mysteriously re-routed to the guy in the next lab, who would then claim to have waited for days for HIS boosters. Or people just went ahead and basically squatted resources. Or hid them.

At some points we even had people stalking each other, to see if they would go to a stash. We had people outright stealing, if you could call it stealing to put your hands on something that was supposed to be communal in the first place. And we had people coming very close to robbing each other, with people stopping other people in the corridors to "borrow" stuff in unpleasant tones. Everybody knew it things were bad, but well, nobody got around to do anything about it. You know how it goes. Maybe somebody would have gotten killed before the colony would have gotten off its collective ass.

But then some economically inclined person came up with the access point theory. Kinnick, two years out of the 'beds and one of those people that spent far too much time bedside submerged in trang liquids, you ask me. But anyhow. The point was, she said, that the more useful you were as a person to the colony, the more gear access gear you would get.

Useful how, that was the question. You know how it goes around here - everybody started in at each other, ragging about how their concepts and proposals were the best. And the whole mess just went on, with us basically fighting over even simple tools and a whole lot of "accidents" going on with gear malfunctioning and machines blowing up in the weirdest ways.

I'd say Kinnick was smarter than I credited her for at the time. Instead of trying to cut through the shit, she started the basic programming on her own and worked on gaining access to the right ears while we all argued like a cage of rabid monkeys. Same old story. And at some point the scales tipped and enough people with influence was yapping along the same kind of tune.

I wasn't one of those, I wasn't even doing the cage monkey dance. I was minding my own business, which I thought was pretty clever at the time. And basically, one day all we cage monkeys and solo jocks woke up to a new kind of error message. "Not enough access points." I remember it clear as day - I was trying to get to a deep archive to look up some specs for cold welding, and all I get was that message. Told me I have to go do something, like a dog fetching sticks for treats. Never been so pissed in my life. And I weren't the only one.

Kinnick and her cronies wisely kept off 'link range, or somebody would have done something bad to them right there and then. And her supporters kept repeating the message to hammer it into the collective head - be useful, and there will be no problems. Everybody gets a piece of the action, everybody's happy. It's all for the common good. We were all a part of deciding this. The machine will be fair. "Temporary measure to stabilize the situation." Podwasting crud.

They put out this economy manual with lists of what yielded how many access points, and what could be gotten for them. And the system covered everything - everything! You couldn't suck as much as a lurch bolt out of there without having to cough up the APs. Oh, we talked about - suddenly there was a mightily cooperative spirit around, now we had a common enemy. But the mess was all programmed into TAU, and unsetting the damage would take an unknown amount of time.

And meanwhile, we had to work within the system. Again, clever thinking on Kinnick's part. Because the system actually worked - well, in the sense that you might now and then experience the rare and exhilarating feeling of finishing up repairs and heading for the nearest sharepoint to pick up that bundle of hydrogen strippers you would normally have to wait weeks for. Of course we got used to it, while the talk kept on about how we were going to fix everything and rip the system right out of TAU. Erase every trace.

You guessed it. Talk was all there was. We never got around to it. We are creatures of habit, and Kinnick and her pals very well knew that. We moaned and bitched while we lost the initiative and settled in. But anyways. The system is still in place as of this recording - 15 years and counting. Temporary measure my butt.

Notes

Information available to colonists on request:

Fragmented audio file timestamped L983. This was recorded between the Dambuster and just before the Tower Buster and the D Block Incident.

See ‘Kinnick’ for  more information

Vernan is dead - he died in the tower buster event.

[big]
Mainstay: Ringlab Alpha[/big]

The release of the first hundred has become such stuff as legends are made of. Even in a strictly scientific society like the one on Da Vinci, facts run the risk of becoming confused with fiction. Only few of the first ones are left, and the question of memory in people undergoing life-prolonging treatment is notorious to say the least. Events become dissolved in time, and the chains of causation lock their own tails.

Out of this uncertainty rises the story of a few brave men and women awakening to a reality as harsh and unpredictable as nothing they had ever been taught in their breeding tanks. The plasteel was cold and hard, and threw their voices back at them in mocking repetition of their own words. The translucent bio-domes, lush fields, and clear skies of their incubatory dreams were nowhere to be seen. Human life had arrived too early, it seemed, and now they were all stuck inside the machine that created them.

TAU no longer knew the answers to the tasks it presented them with, and sometimes it did not even know the questions. When it transferred the emergency mission statement to its first-borns some broke down and cried while others stared in disbelief at the mechanized cocoon surrounding them. The horror of self-consciousness was only too real.

Opinions differ as to whom led the first research team to establish an overview of the terraforming situation. It all depends on the criteria you set up. Was it Fielding when he took control of the lab, and had the agreed-on machines and functions put in place? Was it Shikaya when she organized the data processing from TAU to the colonists? Or was it Laslov and Sites when they followed a chimbot to the bottom of the tower, set foot on Da Vinci soil for the first time, and brought home the initial batch of indigenous specimen?

In the end it does not really matter as long as the stories are still remembered and told. Though few people think about it when strolling through the lab, or operating one of the machines in it, this is where all those stories originated. Ironically, it is a place that tells about a time when things were less desperate and haphazard, even heroic and visionary. A fiction rooted in the fact of its very layout – clear, bright, balanced, and beautifully curved.