trans_9 | Melting Clock: Quarantine

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Melting Clock: Quarantine

After Sam Henderson's announcement, the Contagion Containment and Treatment lab was going to get busy. Anyone suspected of being affected by the mysterious affliction would be brought here, and put into one of the large bubbles that would keep any potential contagious diseases in - and the patients themselves. Once in inside, they wouldn't be able to get out again until the Medical staff had cleared them.

And before they could do that, they needed to find out what was causing this - and why.

They had a lot of hard work ahead of them.

[[ooc: Just start your own sub threads under the main threads, guys! And if you're happy to have anyone tag in, put "Open" in the subject line. If you've already got plans for who you're threading with, put "Closed" instead.]]

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"You're not the only one who can be professional," he says, edging from casual into defensive. He stops fidgeting. He's fully aware that he's one of the least-trained staffmembers here, and probably the most expendable. He doesn't like feeling as if she's lecturing him on how to do a job he's actually bothering to try at.

"Aren't there rules of physics that determine how large something can get and still have hollowness? Not that I ever took physics, though." Does it really matter if you're inside something else if you never press your boundaries far enough to find out? The idea of being inside a larger cage inside an even larger cage is upsetting, but he doesn't know if it has any practical value.

"The rate seems unsteady? I've been trying to figure out if they're aging backwards to specific points or if it's just going backwards linearly. But I haven't found anything marking the points they've aged back to as special in any way." He writes down a note that he should have them describe everything that just happened before getting picked up by Stacy and then have them redescribe it every fifteen minutes. "Not everyone who's related comes from the same part of their timeline. That might mess things up."

"Agreed. I'm just impatient for the data," she hinted. He could start reading it out to her any time now.

"If all of this is a simulation, though, physics won't apply. And if there were such a thing as physics police, I'd think half the ship would be up on charges." Violating the laws of physics seemed to almost be a pastime for some of these people.

"You're right, I hadn't thought of different timelines. Technically everyone here could be sui generis, not really knowing anyone else, just their duplicates from universes so close to each other that we can't see the difference. How," she clenched and unclenched the fingers of one hand, clearly distressed, "how are we supposed to figure out anything with this many variables floating around?"

Then she paused and took a deep breath. "All right. If this isn't a malfunction in Stacy, then the next best theory is something found recently on the ship, or something found or encountered on XaXing, which may or may not have been brought back here. So what on XaXing, or on the ship, would be interesting enough that all of them would have gone to see it?"

He reads off his notes, which involve a lot of commentary on body language - that thing he's best at observing when everyone else is able to decipher the science and technology behind things. No doodles, unfortunately.

"I've actually been working under that assumption, that we're all from slightly different timelines. Or that we're all copies and Stacy left original people behind so no one would notice we're gone." He doesn't look all that much less distressed than Anwei. Distrusting his very surroundings isn't new to Howard, but it is stressful. "Interesting enough that they all saw it, but not necessarily anyone else. Or possibly they all saw it and it only affected them."

She types in what he reads off almost as quickly as the words came out, and makes sure to capture all of the body-language notes; she wishes she could still do that sort of thing. She can't, of course. She isn't good enough with humans, and without her AI with her, his voice in her ear, she was half-blind to such nuances.

"At least in my timeline, a neural mapper would leave a fairly large smoking hole in someone you used it on to make the copy. But there could be other methods, of course. And no way to find out from here."

Bear down, she reminds herself. Concentrate on the problem. "It occurs to me that under normal circumstances, this effect would be the perfect attack on someone, because they'd forget the attack. But - was it an attack? I don't think it was extortion, like when someone infects everyone on leave with a virus that only they have the cure for, and comes demanding payment. XaXing seemed like strictly one-time-deal people. So is it, what, bulk memory theft? Did any or all of the people affected sell memories?" A quick loop through the records suggests not, so that gets put aside.

"What else? Why would you want someone to go back in their own time? If it's an experiment, how are they going to record the results? Unless it's something on the ship...."

"I think we'd know if there was a conspiracy in Medical to experiment on people," although you can never be totally sure - he is only an assistant, after all, "but if someone was doing an experiment in like, Neuropathy or something, you'd think they wouldn't choose freaking superheroes to run the test on. Too dangerous. Or at least not this many of them."

No, this seems like it's going down the wrong road. "I'm thinking you were more on track with the bit where the seller doesn't know about it, or maybe they don't care, but I don't think this was for a purpose. It's too hectic." He harumphs a bit in frustration as he tries to bite the pen and only succeeds in poking his mask. He starts to rock on his heels, trying to think without pacing any more than necessary. His foot's mostly better but he doesn't want to slow any recovery on it.

"And it wouldn't make a perfect attack, because it's not taking the most recent memories, although for all we know whoever did this didn't know Stacy might buffer our brains or whatever. It's too much to hope they all got a shared vacation place, isn't it?"

Of course the whole ship might be an experiment, but perhaps that isn't a good thing to think about right now.

"Or the seller got the results they wanted," she says slowly. "The seller exposes certain members of the crew to - whatever, and it affects them, and they go on their way. The seller just needs to record that the affect happened, they don't need to do any sort of follow-up. Which says that the whatever - the time-eraser, maybe - was either bought by someone and brought onto the ship, or it's still back on XaXing."

She looks up at Howard, one eyebrow raised. "Imagine you're facing an army, and you wave your time-eraser at them and they all forget their battle strategies, their depot locations, their lines of retreat, everything. So the army goes back to base - and starts getting younger, losing skills, getting weaker. Tying up their medical personnel, plus taking all those soldiers permanently out of the battle - it's time warfare rather than bio-warfare. A fabulous weapon, really.

"But if it wasn't for the buffer, we'd have no idea where to look." She scrolls through the entered records. "We need to ask everyone coming in about XaXing; did they buy something there, did anyone offer them something odd. Let's hope it was something out of the ordinary, because we may not have time to test everything on XaXing to find out what did it."

For that matter, what if Stacy refused to take them back to XaXing?

"Or if you want to get really conspiracy theorist about it, it was already on the ship and someone on XaXing just activated it. But that's probably too far-fetched." Not that they're not being conspiracy theorists right now anyway.

"But you were talking a minute ago about it being untraceable." He shakes his head again. Paranoid as he is, something about it seems off. "If it was a weapon, why use it on random people? Why not target, say, Council or Rogue Squadron or hell, even us in Medical? Some of the people affected so far just seem to be goons, not anyone with all the battle strategy or technical knowledge. If someone really wanted to do damage, they'd try to cripple a department, and right now the only department really tied up is us."

He finally gives in and starts pacing. "Might not be worth the effort. Firstly, not everyone's going to show us what they got in XaXing, even if it seems harmless. Secondly, this might be an attack by someone from the inside who wouldn't show it to us even though they know it's doing this. Thirdly, everyone in XaXing was offering people weird crap. We'd need a better idea of what we're looking for."

After all, he's not going to show people that he stocked up on high-grade narcotics and amphetamines while on XaXing, and he doubts he's the biggest person to worry about on Stacy.

"But Stacy might detect the signal being sent." Then again, Stacy hadn't done so well on detecting the giant magical monster that had stomped through the City not so long ago. "And again, how does the person who activated it find out the results? No, I think we can put that one aside."

She stretches in her seat - her pelvis is narrower than a human's, and sitting for long periods isn't very pleasant in gravity.

"You might want to test the weapon on random people, and not care what the results were. 'Tested on five hundred random shoppers on XaXing, all showed time-loss (or whatever), no followup' - hrm. That's still a sticking point. Unless the thing is tracking them somehow, even in the Bleed, and detecting what is happening to them." Which meant it might be on Stacy after all. Damn.

"If," she ponders, "if the time-eraser just needed to be tested on a group of random people, but was not meant to be taken away onto the ship, what we would need is to find the person who wasn't offering something. Or rather, showing something but refusing to sell it. That would be pretty unusual on XaXing, someone might remember that." And of course it implied that you had to actually be in the time-eraser's presence for it to have any effect, but if the thing was just a ray-gun with an invisible beam into the crowd at random, they'd never find it.

"No follow-up that we know of," Howard corrects. He sighs heavily, rubbing a palm over his forehead. He feels like they're groping in the dark; every time they seem to be heading down the right path there are too many variables to narrow it down any. "I guess that's as good a lead as any. We just don't know if it's the right one. Is there any way to just, like, download everyone's memories from XaXing and compare them?"

"Do you really want Stacy to be able to download people's memories in her current state? Imagine if she decided she should be buffering everyone's memories, and then started feeding them back in at random. No, it's going to have to be interviewing people for now."

She ran back through the case notes so far. "It looks like everyone affected went on shore leave. Marco and Rachel know each other, so they might have been together. So far everyone seems to be fairly young, so I can't see them being eager to try any rejuvenation treatments that might have been for sale." She looked at the notes again. "Everyone seems to have gone shopping as well."

"She already can tamper with our memories. Haven't you heard about that Kaya chick? She got spoonfed a totally wrong set of old memories from someone else. So at the very least, Stacy has some people's memories on file, maybe from on the ship, too."

Frustrated, he loudly drops the clipboard onto one of the beds, although still keeps it far away enough that Anwei shouldn't be able to read it. At this point it's only a matter of spite, since he's read it all out loud to her. "Maybe we could narrow it down to stores they visited. It can't be everyone who went shopping or we'd both be going backwards too, and much as I'd like to say bye-bye to my memories of the FAYZ that hasn't been happening."

Anwei straightened in her chair. "Really? No, I hadn't heard. Has anyone done comparative brainwave scans, maybe taken a dendrite sample?" Then she slumped. "No, of course not. Nobody would dream of doing any sort of systematic investigation of anything atypical," she nearly spat. "And if they did, they wouldn't bother writing down what they did, oh no. They'd just keep it in their head, until they were repodded or killed or GlaDOS'd or whatever, and leave everyone else to do it all over again!"

She turned back to her computer for a minute, fingers flying as she quickly typed in her discussion with Howard so far. And saved a copy. Several copies.

Then she turned around again. One eye drifted to the clipboard and back; her arc of vision was somewhat larger than a human's, but she trusted Howard to at least read back his own reports accurately. "It's going to be tough to narrow it down to one particular seller. There must have been hundreds within walking distance of the hotel, and I'm sure some people hired transport."

She went a little pale at the thought that she might start getting younger. That would be - not good at all.

"Bitter, much?" Howard asks, pleased to see that his bad mood isn't just his alone. He leans over the bed with the clipboard, grinding his teeth behind his mask. "We can earmark all the weird sellers, first. Not that nothing could get through a filter, but we can crosscheck with places people who aren't affected went to. Assuming everyone here is honest about the places they went to, since if anyone hit up the black market they'll probably keep that close to their chests."

It's not much. For all they know, it's still all Stacy's problem and has nothing to do with XaXing. But it'll give them a direction to point in and at this point, that might be the most they can hope for.

"Everyone here should know that their memory is not safe," she gritted through her own teeth. "But I daresay that if someone suggested something as obvious as a daily roll call, to see who's here and who's been repodded or GlaDOS'd or whatever, everyone would bicker over 'invasion of privacy' and 'personal rights' and 'what if the monsters find me.'"

She rolled her eyes at Howard, out and in. "Maybe the Ohm are going to show up, see what a fine job we're doing, and then just laugh themselves to death. War over. Boom."

She turned one eye to her computer and started typing two-handed. "And of course no one has filed the receipts of what they bought, so we can scan those...so we ask about weird shops. Could be people offering time travel equipment, fountains of youth, exotic weapons, bulk memory transfers. What else? Anything stick out in your mind from talking to patients?"

"Maybe the Ohm aren't the bad guys here," Howard says darkly, collecting his clipboard and pen again. "Um, a bunch of people brought up food stands, obviously, so if there was something in the food it might be impossible to track down. That seems to be what people bought in bulk, though, so maybe we could cross-check people's diets. And people keep mentioning this weird clock thing, but I mean, we're not in a Goosebumps book. Unless it's enchanted, but even then no one's reported buying it."

He rubs a knuckle into his forehead, thinking. "I think at least a few of these people hit up the black market or they wouldn't be so paranoid, and that's where all the really weird stuff is."

He shrugs. "Some of them definitely didn't buy or sell memories, though, so that's out. You should find out if Stacy keeps tracks of purchases, and I'll cross-check more of the patient histories. Comm me if you figure anything out."

She tilts her hands out over the keyboard. "And of course any food they bought is going to be stored all over the place...well, I can ask the Quartermaster I guess. And Lord Zetta, he was buying supplies in bulk."

She shoots a look at him - not too hard, maybe a .22 look. "If people are mentioning a weird clock, I'll write it down. We don't want to forget." That last word was definitely loaded.

"I'll probably comm you anyway - thanks." She meant it too; it was a relief to have someone to bounce ideas off of who gave back rational answers.

"I'll ask the patients and see if any of them ate any of Zetta's bulk food or if it all comes from personal stashes, maybe save you some time." He matches her dirty look. "Already wrote it down. Would I have brought it up if I didn't think it might be good to know?"

He tucks his clipboard under his arm and his pen up his sleeve. "Later, Maw," he says lightly. Her genuine thanks seems to have disarmed him of hostility, if just for the moment.

"Thanks, Howard."

She wrote down a note about the clock as well, and then put it aside while she made a list of people she needed to contact for more information.

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Melting Clock: Quarantine

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