Let's Read For I have tasted the fruit

[Demo.Graph]

In the dark something goes *POP*.

Spoiler

The light turns on, the arc flashes in the darkness and three figures fall out of it.

[baaarf!]

We’ve made it!

Stop! Making! Noise! My head! [baaarf]

Oh, enough of it, you two! We’ve made it, Prokhor! Your plan worked!

Isn’t it?

My head! Medic!

Prokhor?

[baaarf!]

Somebody!

Oh, come on. Here, have this. [Morgan hits Zakharov in the hip with a painkiller syringe] Better?

It’s better... [lies back]

No, no, no, no. It’s not! Don’t lose it! We have a problem!

[baaarf!]

He’ll be alright.

[baa-baaarf]

It’s not about him, Prokhor. Something’s not right.

Zakharov opens his eyes.

Spoiler

Doesn’t look like my base.

Exactly.

Doesn’t look like Eurytion.

Are you sure?

[baaarf]

I see plants. There shouldn’t be any.

Are you sure?!

First of all... oh, my head... First of all, the planet existed in hellish conditions for the last several billions years, so no complex life should be possible. Secondly, the gravity here is weak, but not 0.3g of Eurytion. And lastly, I had a goddamn base preestablished! Not. A cave.

We’re on the wrong planet?

Yes.

Not Chiron as well?

No. [looks around]

Not... Nessus?

No.

Zakharov stands up and comes to the faintly glowing gate. Silence comes.
That is, if one disregards quiet humming of the gate, interrupted by another round of vomiting.

Drat.

What?

It’s broken. My linker can’t get meaningful data out of it.

What?!

Let me think. [lies down]

So we’re not where we had to go.

[baarf]

...And not with the ones we should have gone with!

Your goddamn contraptions failed again!

You could’ve stayed to watch the transcendence.

God fucking damn it, Prokhor!

[barf]

Zakharov rummages through the boxes near the gate, gets some device out of it and starts waving it around.

What’s that?

A multimodal scanner. Wait a bit, will you? And check Sheng.

He’ll be alright.

You sure?

I’m good.

If you say so.

The scanner keeps working.

Так, хорошо. We’re definitely not on one of the larger bodies of Alpha Centauri A. Probably not on the ones around Hercules as well. Proxima is less certain, but...

Meaning?

I don’t know where we are.

Great.

We’re on some natural stellar body not that far from Chiron, if it helps.

Can we be near Sol?

Almost surely not. Psi gate shouldn’t reach that far. Something happened during the transfer and we’ve missed our target and went to some tertiary base. It might’ve been a side effect of the transcendence. It might have been a diversion.

Or a coup.

Yes, a coup... No.

Someone might’ve wanted to get rid of any of us.

Speak for yourself, my dear chairman!

Or a psi flow was interfered with. It’s practically impossible, but, theoretically speaking, there might be a possibility to recombine aleatory variables in the primordial flux to distort the probability space inferring...

More to the point, please.

Psi gate isn’t working properly. It receives some transmissions, but they seem even more chaotic than usual. Might be some interference from the transcendence or heliopause incapsulated quantum tides or...

To the point.

We can’t go back. We can’t send a distress signal. The gate still receives the flows, so we might be able to get visitors or some cargo that was supposed to follow us.

I say we mine the thing.

In case we get an undesirable cargo.

I think I preferred him barfing.

Yang, the gate has control panel. I can check a structure of incoming space-mass and accept or deny it.

The mining is not necessary then.

We’re still in trouble. It’s obviously one of reconnaissance bases we’ve established. The recon kit is limited but it’s here. However, I see no exit from this cave. Even if it caved in, we should’ve seen the exit. There’s none. Seismic sensor can’t lie. It means that recon team had likely met some danger and closed all entrances properly.

It also means that we have limited amount of food, water and, most importantly, oxygen.

What?!

But we have some empty volumes nearby. So we can dig there and check if something is left there from recon team.

And simultaneously looking for danger that team might’ve sealed off?

Yes.

Great!

We’ve no other choice, gentlemen. You can’t make the gate work, right?

Probably not. I need to check it more thoroughly, but it would take at least several days. We would suffocate by then. It’s a very small cave we have here.

Then we’ll dig and look for other sources of oxygen. Can we dig?

Yes, we have a dozen of multifabs. Handheld ones.

Let’s get started then. After all this time I don’t want to die in a mudhole.

Several hours of feverish digging later.

What’s the situation?

We have several tons of clear water in these two ponds. And we’ve released enough oxygen to last for a week, maybe more.

I’ve found a dozen muckroots.

Ugh.

And some fungus-derived liceplants.

And?

They’re edible.

Gentlemen, it’s a food for drones!

Eat all the crop and stock you can find, Nwabudike. I’m going to survive.

Speaking of survival, I suggest us saving nutrient bars as much as we can.

I concur. Unrottable food is precious.

I’ll lock the box then.

Aren’t you interested in my opinion?

We’ve just had a democratic voting, I think. And majority won.

Fucking commies.

What?

I say, I’ve established some primitive facilities. Sanitary block, crash space.

I’ve printed some pneumolocks. For protection.

There’re wild life forms in these caves.

These are shinebugs! In Morganworlds they’re bred for fun!

There’re no Morganworlds anymore. And there might be more dangerous critters out there.

All right. What else?

I’ve printed a bioprocessor. We’ll be able to make some gruel from local plants in case we won’t acquire more suitable food.

Great. We’ll need a power plant to recharge multifabs if something happens with the gate.

How? We have no power source I can think of.

I’ll think of something.

Good. Anything else we can do?

I saw some more roots in a far cave.

Let’s go. We’ll be back soon.

++++++++++

What’s this?

It’s the only power source we can make out of nothing.

How does it work?

Let me guess. Superlube?

Yes.

Great! Ingenious!

Excuse me?

When the wheel is accelerated it’ll slowly wear off a superlubricant between the layers, thus emitting heat. At the same time the wheel will convert this heat to power. Superlube is slick but dense. It’s very energy intensive.

But who will operate it?

My proposal is that we’ll be taking turns.

I think, the creator should give it a test run.

Definitely. I don’t want to put this precious contraption at risk. I’m not really accustomed to these things.

But!..

Majority vote, Nwabudike. We’ll take turns later, I promise.

What’re you two looking at?

It’s slightly amusing.

I was checking the battery charge.

I was thinking about connecting to this power plant of yours. I need some equipment to better monitor the gate and I need some power for it to work.

Be my guest, huff puff. But I’m surprised that you two’re unfamiliar with a treadmill.

I prefer body pills.

Me too. I remember those advertisements of yours on Morganvision, but I thought they’re just for show.

In the long run it pays to be healthy.

In the long. Run.

Day one over

Reminds me of the first days on the planet. I wasn’t alone then, of course. But just like here I had to wrangle my way through the administration and gather resources from almost nothing... These men, they’re definitely smarter than the mooks I had to deal with then. I’ll play dumb, then get them in my pocket!

It’s all over again. What was it, two centuries ago? I was weaker then.

It’s a precarious situation, indeed. But interesting.

Technical note

Spoiler

I’m going to do it mostly blind. I’ve played two games of ONI before. First base has died of overheating and secular stagnation. Second one failed due to freezing crops, lack of water and abundance of boredom. And while the game’s premise is ok, endless fiddling seems to kill all the interest for me.
Let’s see if it will change because of this crossover.

And, in case you’re interested, here’s the team.

I’ve wasted a quarter of an hour of my life rerolling them until I got something acceptable. Some things are still off (shirts and haircuts are wrong, I would’ve liked some other bios, etc.), but I’m not going to spend any more time on this retardation.

 

[baud]

 

[Hellraiser]

Title should be "for I have tasted the muckroot".

 

[CappenVarra]

uhm

good thing Santiago isn't here, or you'd all get shot

 

[RK47]

And here I was expecting something else.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

This isn't what I thought it was

But its still interesting

 

[vazha]

Looks good

 

[Demo.Graph]

What’re you doing?

Spoiler

A greenhouse.

Why?

We need something to eat.

I think we should concentrate on getting out of here.

Zakharov’s already doing that. I intend to make a foundation for our survival.

There’s another option.

Namely?

We can dig up until we’ll get to the surface. Then we’ll decide what to do.

I’m not going to move anywhere from the power source, a food deposit and a relative security.

Zakharov took our food. We’re left with those... roots. And fungus.

And I’m going to make more of it.

Surely, you understand that it’s not a long-term solution.

Surely I do. But we need to consider all the other options in case our esteemed academician comes up with nothing.

Do you really intend to eat fungus?

I definitely hope so. This Gaian morph seems to have a very short livecycle. It would be good, on the other hand, if you’ve managed to help us with the other problem.

Oxygen?

Oxygen. I think I’ve sensed a possible opening in the leftmost cave.

Maybe you should do it? You seem to handle multifab digging mode better than we all.

Do you know how to organize a greenhouse?

I’ll get back soon.

Management.

Academician’s journal. T+3
For the last two days I’ve been analyzing the gate’s condition.
Psy matrix is intact, its functions nominal. I’ve connected to the gate’s processor from my linker. An internal repair protocols can’t find anything unusual, so either everything is working correctly, or someone creative had tampered with the gate.
I still can’t get a coherent signal from the outside. Usually the gate receives chaotic noospheric jumble with an occasional coherent thought. Now it’s only jumble. The gate’s battery keeps getting charge from subatomic space-time fluctuations, though, so I should be able to accept incoming signals normally. I do not dare to send a signal as something obviously went wrong out there and our activity might attract excessive attention.
I’ve also scanned our surroundings. Background radiation level is weak so we’re either on a large stellar body with a magnetosphere or very far from the local star. I can’t detect gravitational disturbances, but my instruments are crude, so that doesn’t mean anything. Seismic scanner has detected a complex underground composition of the soil around us, but, again, it proves nothing.
Alas, I must make a regrettable conclusion. I still don’t know where we’re. It don’t even know how deep we’re under the ground. We can always dig up, of course, until we get to the surface and it would have been the most obvious thing to do. But one thing troubles me.
There’s no serial number on the gate. No expedition markings. No log. No info whatsoever. So it’s likely that it’s an unauthorized gate with everything that entails.

How is it going?

I can’t break the wall.

Why?

I’ve ran a scan and there’s a small pocket of oxygen on top of a large pool of carbon dioxide on the other side. If I break the wall, CO2 will flush into our space.

There’s an entrance to the second water pool below that cave.

So?

Expand the entrance. Break the wall near the floor. CO2 is heavy, so it’ll sip into the pool below.

I see. Will do.

It’s a real wonder he’d managed to resist my assaults at all.


Academician’s journal. T+4
Still no progress with the gate.
Nwabudike had managed to pick the lock on the chest with nutrient bars and ate one of them. I gave his and Yang’s share to Yang for safekeeping. My stash is hidden under the Thing, because no one in their right mind would look for it there.

It’s been two days, Prokhor. Any success?

I have nothing to add to what I’ve already said. The gate is fully functional but we have no signal. At this moment we can safely assume that we’re cut from the external world for an unknown period of time.

Anything else?

I still don’t know where we are.

I did a scan of a surrounding area. We have a geothermal nearby.

So we can make a stable source of power.

We’d also get boiled rather sooner than later. The steam would dissipate through the microfissures in the ground slowly heating everything in the confined space.

Let me repeat my proposal then. We can’t use the gate and it’s dangerous to stay here. So we should dig straight to the surface.

I concur. Let's start with a total scan of the surroundings. Sheng, scan the top and everything around the vent. We’ll get the second seismoscanner and check the left side. Let’s see if we can find a safe way to the surface. Or, at least, a way to escape the heat.

Several hours later

The land near us looks promising – soft ground and another pool of water. There However, I used some resonance amplification techniques and managed to probe even further up.

Drat.

Exactly. It’s all sturdy igneous rock intersected with pockets of unbreathable and sometimes volatile gases. It’s a death sentence to go there without preparation. We need vac suits, probably airlocks, pumps. In other words, an organized excavation job. What about you?

It’s all the same, except with less hydrogen and more traces of biocontamination I don’t want to get close to.

I think I’ve recognized traces of fungicide bacteria. I think Prokhor’s recon had fought some outbreak here.

Can it be that we’re somewhere in the vicinity of Chiron after all?

No. The gravitational force doesn’t fit. It’s either wrong or too small for all significant celestial objects or too large for asteroids.

The gravity can be altered.

Yes, but then I would’ve detected a regular gravitational fluctuations typical for gravtech.

What about atypical one?

Okkam’s Razor.

Touche.

It means that the only way we haven’t checked yet is down.

I don’t like an idea of going even deeper.

It’s still worth checking, though.

I know. But I would rather exchange it for some other option.

In the lower cave

Scanning. Found another void.

Won’t you stop commenting on everything? I see the same thing you do on my linker.

Can’t stop speaking. Too much fun.

Clarifying the configuration.

[whoosh]

Hey! It’s childish! Give that back!

You’re making too much of an interference. Wait a little, I’ll set the resonance right. Setting

Now he does it as well.

Setting.

Xenofauna! To arms!

I told you we don't have any! Evac to base?

Yes! I told you we’d need those airlocks!

I told you two to shut up!

Whatever the hell it is, it’s beyond a cave wall! What the fuck is wrong with you both?

Deirdre’s hybrids.

Planet cults.

They leave no survivors.

It’s not like we have a demon boil in there, don’t we?

Okay. It doesn’t look aggressive. And it looks caged in there. More importantly, I think we’ve found some traces of your recon, Prokhor.

Drat. Right near that thing.

And right behind that dense rock formation. I’d need a week to dig through it with tools we have.

And we’re cornered from below as well. Look, another pocket of volatile gases.

Are we really surrounded?

It seems so.

All right. We need a break to think it through. Let’s get back to HQ and discuss it all in half an hour.

Half an hour later

Let’s sum up. Am I right to assume that we can’t get out of here?

The gate is off.

We’re surrounded by hostile terrain on all sides. Vent on the one side. Poison, deeply compressed soil or pockets of aggressive gases on the others. Digging through any of them without preparation might be fatal.

It means we’re staying. So we need to create some basic facilities to operate in here. Yang, open your linker to me, will you?

Yes.

Good. This’s a rough outline of the base we have now.

I've divided all the volume to typical Morganspace(TM) blocks, convenient, interchangeable and easily adaptable to your specific business environment.

Note the Cartesian with Psi gate in the block zero-zero. From this point we’ll move to a more civilized way of living.

Our first challenge is to create an entire life-support infrastructure, from top to bottom, out of whole cloth. Bioponic farm, recreation commons, network node and recycling facilities need to be connected to each other and launch almost simultaneously for us to survive, all the more, thrive.

I’ve also color coded areas according to a person responsible for them. Me in gold, Sheng in blue, Zakharov in green.

I’ve also noted an areas of possible development. First things first, we would need a power grid extension. Even a simple thermal power station would be great.

A luxury.

A necessity. More energy means more automation, and more automation means less handwork.

Or legwork.

Less work.

While I’m in favor of the power grid, I think an expansion of research facility is in order. We need more advanced tools to break through the difficult areas around us or make life simpler. For that I need power. Energy power, but, more importantly, a computational power. Luckily, I have some blueprints for a pet project of mine, a water-cooled optics-based processing unit I can assemble in a day.

You've said, energy power? Significantly more of it?

Slightly. We might need to stretch our legs a bit.

I say, we’ll need a stable source of oxygen, that’s for sure. We have some stock, it won’t last for long. Everything else can wait.

We can vaporize some fungus.

This way we’ll run through it very fast. No, we need a more long-term solution. A proper kelp farm down below.

All right. We have a set of conflicting priorities. I say we load our proposals into linkers and let our expert algos compute a material requirements for the projects and advise on them. We'll decide tomorrow morning.

Agreed.

DECISION TIEM

Spoiler

You, oh expert systems, use your miniaturized brains to assist your owners.
Project locations are in bold.

Oxygen and food don’t seem to be a pressing needs at the moment. With all the free O2 released from the surrounding caves, with roots and fungus breeds slowly growing in the pots, we can spend some time on development (even though some nutrient bars would probably disappear again). What should be the group’s priority?
1. Expand the network node! Install a better research bench. Then we’ll be able to outtech all competition. But Morgan (and maybe others) would need to be a wheelhamster for some time for this to work.
2. Energy bank! Research and install a coal generator. Less running, more labouring! But it might enrich our colony with some flowery scent from burned organics.
3. Kelp Farm (algae farm). The oxygen isn’t endless and when we’ll begin suffocating it’ll be too late to think about that. However, at this tech level it would require some maintenance legwork.

 

[Demo.Graph]

And here I was expecting something else.

This isn't what I thought it was

Just as planned.

Title should be "for I have tasted the muckroot".

Spoiler

It should've been "Transcendence not included". But it would've been too obvious. I'll probably change it after a while.

 

[CappenVarra]

3. Kelp Farm

 

[Hellraiser]

1. Network Node, plenty of stuff that should be researched ASAP and can't be researched without a better lab. Best to rush to some things before the training wheels starting resources run out (algae for oxygen diffusers and the pitiful amounts of wild food that can be foraged).

Coal generator will choke you without a carbon skimmer. CO2 build-up is always a problem even without running a generator in your lebensraum. The heat it generates is another issue, but if you are smart it can be mitigated for long enough until a long term solution is available. Heat is the third biggest problem any colony has to deal with. Except with ice core asteroid starts, on those you really need to work hard to cook your crops dead and starve.

Algae Terrariums will eat into your water supply if you don't have a polluted water filter for recycling it back, and add too much busy work for dupes that would be better spent on grinding their mining skill or researching new gadgets. Better just go for oxygen diffusers and mine algae until you get an electrolyser fed by an electric pump in that snazzy geyser pool you found.

 

[Storyfag]

As I have NO clue on the specifics of this gaem, I shall just watch, but will not vote.

 

[baud]

Well, Hellraiser looks like he know what he's talking about, so I'd vote 1 to break the tie