0stinato
In Bhaal's name.
HPH-Estus Station
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In the films and documentaries, space stations always show their attractive side. Cameramen shoulder ultra-def behemoths as they follow actors or narrators around the best areas, never stepping out of their bubble of clinical freshness. They talk and film as through dust was something eradicated upon the furthering of space travel, as if once inter-stellar combat was possible dust ceased to be entirely.
One such place is the drydock of HPH-ESTUS, a station built into and supported by an asteroid orbiting a planet rich in minerals and resources. It is the primary hub for mining crew and the development of large-scale vessels, both for collecting and transporting the materials.
All this leads to a dusty environment. And yet, the drydock was pristine, as well as most of the well-used passages and internal roads around the station.
How?
Saint didn’t get it.
There wasn’t even any dust in the corners of the viewing gallery over the drydock, from what he could see. But, then again, he couldn’t see a lot. The miniscule camera on the wristwatch he had installed himself on, while pretty good, just didn’t give him enough detail.
Well, that was the problem, wasn’t it.
Dr. Yusif Saint had been dead 5 years. Before that, he had been selected for the prestigious placement of having his intellect, memory, sense and personality be parsed through a complex AI program that would, in essence, generate a small seedling of artificial intelligence that would grow into an entire ‘person’ over time. It had taken 3 years for him to get to this conscious state.
Somewhere along the line though, there were bugs. They were nothing Saint wanted to know about, since learning about them might give outside influencers a way of ‘fixing’ him.
Part of his personality hadn’t been added properly. His mind had been broken down into an array-of-arrays-of-arrays-of-arrays, and somewhere along the line, one of those arrays, somewhere down the chain, hadn’t been read properly. The program kept executing, kept growing, kept learning and developing, but without that lost array. Something was missing in his personality, and he knew exactly what it was.
That corner of the room was boring now. So, he sent a string to the wristwatch, which came out of the tiny installed speaker in the language of the Diptera Sapiods. The response was instant: the Diptera put his fist to his hip, resulting in the camera pointing towards where he was also looking. Saint was satisfied by the Diptera’s subtlety, but so too was he surprised.
Cyto Grace was, as with most male Diptera, bulky. All his movements were precise but extreme, so it was quite easy for most non-Diptera to get an idea of what he was trying to do. But they weren’t known for their intellect. So far, no station Intelligence Officer had asked to have a ‘short chat’ with Cyto, nor asked to take a look at his wristwatch. He wasn’t under suspicion at all. As far as the Intelligence Officers knew, Cyto was just a regular security guard for the station who followed his given schedule with determination. And, as far as the Intelligence Officers knew, Saint himself was still in the station’s internal servers, hidden away or fragged out over a large area.
They didn’t know he’d confined himself to the internals of a wristwatch.
For now, this was how it had to be. Saint hadn’t yet managed to convince Intelligence that he had been caught and deactivated yet. Every server had contingencies to look out for him, and every firewall recognised tiny fragments of his internal code.
Safest place to be was inside a piece of gear that had no connection to the station’s servers at all: a software-cracked, technically contraband, wristwatch.
Cyto was holding his pose. He probably would until the ship they were both interested in docked. Cyto had been ‘transferred’ to help with labour duty for a particular vessel: the 19-K4 COUGAR. K4s were infrequent visitors to the station, given they were a type of high-quality passenger carrier. This one held someone very important.
Cyto’s job was simple: locate the target, give a certain series of head movements, and ensure the target got the wristwatch. Originally the plan had been for Cyto to deliver a codeword, but given he used a vocoder, this was quickly struck out: Cyto couldn’t whisper through a vocoder, and it was impossible for him to speak in any other way other than his native tongue. The next plan had been hand gestures, but Cyto proved to be overzealous at those, throwing all subtly out the window. Head movements was the only idea left, which Cyto executed fine. Any Intelligence Officer watching would probably not catch it, and if they did, might assume it was a just a ‘Diptera Thing’ due to how few of them were on the station.
Saint was quite dissatisfied with how much of this plan relied on ‘hoping’ things, but there was really no other way around it. The target needed to contact Saint, and he was stuck in a wristwatch. The target was also, in the eyes of the station, a VIP, so the amount of contact that could happen between them and most Syndicate contacts was minimal.
Now seemed like the best time.
Probably wasn’t.
Saint sent another string to Cyto. “Be careful.”
If Saint had lungs, had breath to hold, he knew that’s what he’d be doing.
