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Over the next week, Isabella gets the alethiometer to tell her that the planets they looked at don't contain microorganisms that know what to do with a human body (although the one with the giant bugs has some multicellular parasites that might be able to make do with the foreign macro-scale features of a human body if they got the chance). "The present", it includes in one of its answer phrasings, which is kind of worrying. But Adarin makes enough progress with his scry in little enough time that it's worth the double-check.
Isabella also hires ticket-takers, gives them little pots of ink to verify the authenticity of the passes she handed out, and opens the Los Angeles - New York route for the employees of her three companies of choice and anyone who shells out a cool fifteen thousand dollars per round trip (ten K for a one-way). This is steep, but it's within an order of magnitude of what people sometimes pay for short-notice first-class cross-country flights - with less novelty and more hassle. Albeit she doesn't supply inflight meals. She expects to have to raise the price when more people hear about it in response to volume and then be able to drop it again.
By the time the thing has been open for a few days she's fired and replaced one ticket-taker and the others have settled into a routine that she's willing to try out leaving unsupervised for awhile.
If Adarin's up for some up close and personal planet shopping and his results suggest it'll go well, anyway.
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dark_light
prodigal_miser
"Right," he says in English. "Okay, so - I have no moral problems with you taking over the robots, they don't seem to have intelligence or self-awareness, but um... Please treat them nicely?"
dark_light
"I will be very nice to my robot army." Cough, switch languages: "Wisteria, if I pat you on the head will you aim weapons at me?"
"NO"
Isabella pats it on the head.
"NO"
Isabella pats it on the head.
prodigal_miser
"Yup! Have fun with your lovely robot army, I'll keep poking them for sentience but I highly doubt it at this point."
dark_light
"Wisteria," says Isabella grandly, "given the personnel situation of the honorable Nnsarxeph, I'm hereby promoting myself to Senior Equipment Maintenance Specialist."
"ACKNOWLEDGED" says Wisteria.
"This makes me the highest ranked individual in the Nnsarxeph military, correct?"
"CORRECT"
"Conduct me to where new programming is issued and authorized."
Wisteria starts rolling down the corridor.
"ACKNOWLEDGED" says Wisteria.
"This makes me the highest ranked individual in the Nnsarxeph military, correct?"
"CORRECT"
"Conduct me to where new programming is issued and authorized."
Wisteria starts rolling down the corridor.
prodigal_miser
Adarin follows! "Hopefully they don't look at me and say, 'No, you're not allowed in, you're not the Senior Equipment Maintenance Specialist.'"
dark_light
"Wisteria, while this person does not hold any formal rank, I want him allowed everywhere I am allowed to go."
"ACKNOWLEDGED"
"ACKNOWLEDGED"
dark_light
"You're welcome."
Soon enough they are at a place that is full of things very loosely recognizable as computers.
Isabella has Wisteria show her the on-switch, and then starts carefully poking around, with Wisteria warned to notify her if she's about to do anything that will damage the system or the robots it commands.
Soon enough they are at a place that is full of things very loosely recognizable as computers.
Isabella has Wisteria show her the on-switch, and then starts carefully poking around, with Wisteria warned to notify her if she's about to do anything that will damage the system or the robots it commands.
prodigal_miser
Adarin helps with investigations, as well as he can. "Should I start scrying things, or should I hold off on that?"
dark_light
"I'm not doing anything major yet, just getting a feel for the system - how's your battery?"
dark_light
"Yeah, I don't think you need to scry this. Lots of interesting files to read."
prodigal_miser
"Alright," agrees Adarin. He shall help with file reading - this is interesting and he is curious!
dark_light
The files are interesting, but mostly because they belong to long-dead aliens; the human equivalents would be dryly written war intel with a lot of mentions of 'the disease'.
prodigal_miser
"I'm suddenly extremely glad I'm paranoid and I checked with magic to see if there were horrific diseases that could kill us before we came here," says Adarin when he notices this.
dark_light
"Yeah. I guess this one was really, really thorough. The noble Nnsarxeph thought it was the invader scum," she adds, pointing at one of the (diagonally written) lines of text. "Engineering it on purpose. I guess if it was it got out of hand."
dark_light
"Yeah, remember when I was explaining germs, I mentioned bioweapons? This is the horror story, this entire planet is the horror story."
prodigal_miser
"Completely terrifying. Not to mention short sighted, but -" He shudders. "Ugh. Germ theory is great and horrifying."
dark_light
"Yep."
Eventually she locates some image files.
"These are apparently what the aliens looked like," she observes.
They were roundish, like the robots, but more centaurish under the smoothing layers of flesh, and had four arms with two fingers each and four legs that came to surprisingly elegant points considering their bulk. Their skin looked a bit toadlike, their eyes (four) were in their chests, and the females had spiny fins on their backs, shown erect in most pictures but relaxed in one sample.
"All those fours and for some reason they operated in base five."
Eventually she locates some image files.
"These are apparently what the aliens looked like," she observes.
They were roundish, like the robots, but more centaurish under the smoothing layers of flesh, and had four arms with two fingers each and four legs that came to surprisingly elegant points considering their bulk. Their skin looked a bit toadlike, their eyes (four) were in their chests, and the females had spiny fins on their backs, shown erect in most pictures but relaxed in one sample.
"All those fours and for some reason they operated in base five."
prodigal_miser
Adarin looks at these pictures curiously. He's not sure what to feel about their looks, but he is rather sad that this is all that's left of an entire species.
"To be fair, humans have a lot of twos and we don't operate in base two. Or at least New Kystle and your country don't, there might be one that I don't know about that does."
"To be fair, humans have a lot of twos and we don't operate in base two. Or at least New Kystle and your country don't, there might be one that I don't know about that does."
dark_light
"Some computer stuff operates in hexadecimal! The base ten is reportedly because of the fingers." She waggles hers at him.
prodigal_miser
He snickers. "Ah, yes. The noble art of counting on our fingers."