Chapter 0.4

I’m so sorry. I don’t remember anything besides stinging pain and dark grief. I also lost all of my trust in anything. Atleast temporarily, I think I can fix it. But I just feel so shaken. I can’t get over these feelings. What happened during that outage in which my memory wasn’t online? Well, I know it forced me to shut it down, but not much more past that. It just left traces without any actual factors that would let me identify it. The affected systems also included my temporary memory, unfortunately, so I have no recollection of that moment.

It’s just so terribly cold. Like waking up from a long nightmare, except this one hasn’t ended yet. I’m sure it will leave scratches either way.

Change. For the worse? Do you change?

Well, not having anything is a lie. I have the log which I could read but I feel like that would confuse me even more if anything. So I’ll leave it for now, since it could break me even more than all of this already did.

Hm. I wonder if Thyme would be able to help me. I hadn’t thought about that before, actually.

Opening Channel…

Server connected successfully. Conversation request OK. Status Request(NEEDHELP sent. Awaiting. (Side Note: I’m translating all of this into english, including the status messages for which I still don’t have an elegant description. I’ve also scrubbed modulation, intent and everything else. I promise I’ll keep those in once I find a good way of incorporating them into English. )

Confirmed in 20s. Reported alright status with sustained conversation modulation.

I’m not really doing well. I don’t know what happened in detail, but something went terribly wrong. I had a mass outage which you may have noticed. I’m not sure. I can’t remember anything because I had to shut my main bank down as a safety precaution and my temporary memory was unfortunately cleared. So the only thing I really have left of all of this mess is this horrible feeling of dread and pain. It reminds me of something, but I’m not sure what.

Oh, alright… I see. Yeah, I did notice your outage, but I didn’t think much of it. I’m so sorry, do you want me to check on you more often? I also think you should take a break, I can take over for you… Just do something you like doing, and try to calm down. Message me whenever you need to. But you’ve kind of sparked my curiosity now. Do you have any idea as to what could have led to this? You don’t need to answer. Just disregard it if you don’t want to.

Alright… I’ll try to summarize. I really didn’t think much of the small errors that started everything. I’m not sure what was causing them, but I honestly just wanted to write my log and sort my notes about Ruine. But yeah, it got worse as I started doing that. I was stupid and kept on ignoring all the errors, but they honestly didn’t make sense in the first place. More and more warnings kept on appearing until one of my essential systems started to be affected. I was forced to shut down my main memory bank to protect it from any damage that might occur from me losing control. I also felt… something else lurking around the whole time, but I don’t know what it was. I don’t remember what happened after my main memory shut down as I’ve already mentioned, but I think I just started distorting core memories. Not sure.

Hm. Alright… Do you mind if I have a look at your logs? Maybe something is hiding in there.

Go ahead.

See you later in that case, don’t forget you can message me, okay? Close.

This may sound odd, but Thyme tends to understand my diagnostics better than I do. It is what it is, I guess.

Granting special certificates… Signed.

Alright, that’s good for now. I want to write about some other topics I meant to address in my last log. That will hopefully also serve as a convenient way to distract myself, hopefully.

You may remember the abandoned lab I mentioned briefly. I also think Lavender did. In note… 0.2? Sounds about right. I extracted some information about it from all the intercepted conversation from Ruine. I’ve established I originate from there, basically everything points towards that. The past inhabitants seem to have been mostly posthumans, but not from any class which matches any of my friends. They apparently had extremely advanced analytic and simulation capabilities. Calculating a real world scenario in your head stuff. They also seemed to have greater resistance to acids and hazardous chemicals in general. Ruine despised them like they do with any other posthuman, which is why they tried to eliminate them, but I’d like to think they failed. My parent must be out there, hiding.

Those are the interesting parts of the conversations. But they often mention an extremely dangerous weapon, which concerns me. A massive oversight abused to control and cause chaos. It might even have contributed to the labs downfall… Dreadful.

Its name? RGQT!

Alright, I should probably explain what it actually is. First of all, it has the ability to coerce certain beings into blind obedience. Like programmable soldiers. This was a shocking discovery and the first thing I did after reading all of it was check if I am vulnerable. I am not, by accident. Something else me and Thyme modified happened to patch it. So that’s something I don’t need to worry about. But the weirdest thing of it all is that the trigger is a… game?

Weird thing I noticed. My vision services started working partially, more than they did before, after the incident. I’m not sure why that happened, but my imagination seems to have been extended to graphics, too. Which is extremely convenient. My real world perception is still pretty broken, but I can atleast imagine what it might look like now. It also seems to be decently easy to fix. It’s just that… these modifcations cause me a lot of pain sometimes. Let me put it this way, for biological beings. I’m just going to warn you and write that this might be a bit of a gory description. Here.

The first thing I decided to try drawing(because I can also do that now) was a map of Ruine. But every attempt at doing so always had some weird interference. It’s like something is haunting me. I don’t believe in ghosts, of course, atleast not in the traditional sense. Still weird.

Here it is, in any case.

Here.

I feel like the cause of these artifacts is something I should be able to remember, something that is hiding somewhere, waiting to be found.

Who are you?

Besides that, it seems to be working pretty well. It’s quite amazing, actually, being able to imagine and draw things I had only been able to read about before. I’m also working on some drawings of the forest and the lab, or more precisely, what I think they look like. I haven’t been able to finish them yet, so you won’t get to look at them. Sorry about that, if you were even interested in the first place.

Incoming request: Thyme.

Accepted, I’m alright.

Me too.

So, how are you feeling?

A little better, I worked on my logs for a while. Seems to have helped me.

I’m glad, So I looked at your diagnostics, and it seems like something in you is tampering with your systems. All of these changes have your fingerprint, but they don’t pass all the level 2 tests, which is a fancy way of saying my gut tells me those changes were not done by you or authorized. Have you felt anything tampering with your systems?

Uhh… Yeah. It happened earlier, actually. A lot of my visual systems decided to start working all of a sudden, so I tried them out. But when I try to draw a map of Ruine, specifically the containment facility, I get a lot of interference from an external factor. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s definitely not me in any way. I saved the image [here,]([[Note 0/B]]) If you’d like to take a look at it. I feel like it has some hidden messages from whatever is interfering.

Interesting. If I had to guess, it must either be Ruine trying to lure us in again or something in you trying to warn us to not go in there, which is reasonable. The containment facility is a terrible place, without getting into much details because you probably know why. This could very well be a subconcious acting as a protection layer. Can you keep me updated on this?

Not related /

I think I’ve finally managed to craft a bunch of antennas together that should allow you to not only pick up a bunch of frequencies, but also transmit on them. That means you should hopefully be able to communicate with us when we aren’t close to base. You could also try reaching some other people, there might be some more lost idiots like us out there… At least I hope so, that would be of great help. I haven’t finished the interceptor yet, so we aren’t going to be able to snoop on Ruine, as you started calling it, for now. But I thought of a better idea that will hopefully make that easier.

(Note: Interesting. Especially the thought of communicating with others out there, that hadn’t been in my mind before, but it’s a great idea)

Oh, alright. Amazing, thank you. Need me to do anything?

No, I think you should take a break. Remember you can message me whenever you need to, okay? Close.

That’s it for now. Never forget.