Tying Up Loose Vines: Making the Rounds
03 Feb 2022Lily Flemmon
(UNPUBLICISED: CTAC RESTRICTED: MILITARY-SIGNIFICANT DATA)31 JAN 3308
-Well, if I'm going to be staying at Chilton for a while, I may as well get up and about around the station. The gardeners don't need my help these days, and I'm not exactly up to date with how all our gardens are doing. I'd help out for old times' sake, but I'd probably get a bit too much in the way. Besides, I still have to take a look at some of that military-marked data, see what we already have to work with in terms of internal station defenses. First, a stop at the department labs that the Director recommended to me, plant kinesthetics being first on the list.
-I walked into the PKNS lab, "pickins" as it was called casually, and it didn't take long to find the lab quartermaster. The labs in CTAC didn't have specific leaders, but there's always someone assigned for doing the clerical work.
The PKNS quartermaster, a femme enby in their late 30s who went by "Wiggles", was at their desk, on which there was a small desk toy that looked a lot like a dancing tree. "Oh hey, Lily, was starting to wonder when you'd stop by! It's been what, a few months?" They leaned back in their chair and reclined in what looked like, but was apparently not, an uncomfortable position.
"Hey Wiggles! Sorry to uh, disappoint, but I actually have a reason to come here instead of just saying hi, not that I really needed it."
Wiggles raised an eyebrow, and as usual for them, that meant raising an eyebrow comfortably to the limit of what would seem humanly possible. "Oh? I'm curious."
"Well, I talked to the Director, what was it, a month ago? And, well, remember that time early on when one of the techs was kidnapped along with the nanite control system they were trying to fix? Yeah, we don't want that happening again, and with CTAC's name getting more out there since my trip to Colonia, we should probably have a way to prevent it from happening again. So he gave me access to miltary-significant data, which currently isn't even allowed to go between labs, right?"
"Well, if you look at little twig boy here on my desk, he's the only public piece of a project from this lab that got shuttered when it got scaled up. They called it "Ent-ertainment" last I heard. Mostly just dancing trees so far, but if we could get in touch with the bioreactivity lab we might have something better than random oscillating motions, maybe even pointing at a heat source or maybe a source of something humans can't pick up on their own. But right now the few people on that project have barely been able to make a clock. Fair reason though, the big ones were pretty strong, reported up to 20 tonne-meters of torque on a joint."
"20 tonne-meters? that's like, the landing gear on a Type-7, hell."
"Yeah, military significant for good reason, as I said. I'll send you the project data, authorize access for whoever you will, within reason, and withing CTAC. I hope it can be something more useful soon, although twig boy is pretty great already, at least to me. Good luck though!"
"I'd say I'll need it, but at this point I don't even know that much. Take care though, Wiggles!"
-Next stop was the bioreactivity lab, and they had less to show, and I asked their quartermaster, a man in his early 50s, about military-significant data, and he gave me a confused look. "Us? Military-significant? Pfft. Sensing properties aren't exactly durable on their own, and the most impactful we've done is streamline diagnostics for the crops. Pretty impactful, sure, but it can't hurt anybody."
I wasn't too surprised, honestly, I had already started to form those thoughts myself. "Well, those sensing properties could come in handy with this project, the one the pickins lab calls "Ent-ertainment." Biomechanical servos maybe? That could definitely hurt someone."
"Biomechanical- holy shit lady, that's a jump. Well, looks like you sent me access, let me have a look." He skimmed the document summaries, and got to a line that seemed more interesting than the rest. "Reason why this is miltary-significant?" He looked up at me. Am I allowed to look at this?"
"Yeah, go ahead. Director gave me clearance and privileges."
"Alright, looks like it's a video log..."
I couldn't see his screen, but he was certainly curious. I heard the voices of a few lab technicians and researchers in the video, and it seemed like they were running some kind of test.
"Alright, are we clear of the test area?"
"Clear!"
"Barriers secure?"
"Secure!"
"alright, starting in three... two... one..."
(I heard some quiet creaking, and then a loud crash combined with a sickening crunch. The bioreactivity quartermaster's face suddenly displayed a mixture of shock and horror.)
"Holy mother of FUCK! That, my friends, is why we take safety precautions!"
"How much did we have to pay for that tensile load sensor?"
"About 5 thousand credits if I remember right. And that's not a tensile load sensor anymore, that's two halves of a twisted piece of metal now."
"Did we get a reading off of it? Alex?"
(There was a pause for a moment.)
"Alex? You alright?"
"Yeah, I'm fine, it's just, that was a one-meter arm, right?"
"Yeah one meter. What's our load reading?"
"Load reading was maxed out at 500 kilograms, but going by the accelerometer on the end of the arm and our mass-distribution test data for the arm, we're looking at... Holy shit, 20 tonnes. Uh, guys? We're all in agreement we're miltary-marking this now, right?"
The quartermaster took a deep breath. "Well, that's... yeah, those would be quite some servos. I just can't believe how quiet that thing moved. What's the urgency on our lab getting that thing under some kind of control, and making it useful?"
"Not sure yet. I'll keep you posted though, I have one more lab to visit today."
"Alright, just let me know. Stay safe."
"Yeah, you take care."
-Third stop? Macrotechnology integration lab. I walked in and instantly noticed the broader use of dense holographic displays, surrounding and annotating live tests. Numbers on every leaf, showing similar readouts as the nanite fertilizer control tablets, but much more in-depth. I was pretty engrossed in examining the displays, trying to understand them. I had just noticed that the plant was not in soil at all, and instead of roots, it was growing out of some kind of open-frame machine, when I heard a voice behind me.
"Fascinating, huh? Too bad the girls only get to show the one project."
I turned to see the Macrotech quartermaster, a green-haired woman not that much older than me, looking 26 at most, leaning against a support pillar. I'm sure I was visibly startled when she spoke up, but as soon as I saw here I couldn't form words in my head. See, I hadn't seen her in several months, and she looked absolutely gorgeous, and I was too flustered to put my finger on what she had changed. I stood there blushing profusely as she kept talking.
"Well, that and my hair, I guess. Although it's a collab with the core tech lab, too. The DNA of my scalp is modified, and the hair is a completely synthetic genome, and I can control its growth using a miniature version of what you were just looking at-" She turned her head to the side and tapped what at first looked like a hairpin, but was evidently a nutrient supply system and a control system, just very, very small. "So yeah, my hair is more like grass than hair."
I managed to stammer out a few words, albeit embarrassing ones. "It's... you're hot." Goddammit, Lily.
The quartermaster giggled softly. "Well your hair is nice too. Is it that bright purple all the way to the roots?"
"I- uh- yeah, actually just about everything about me has some sort of genetic modification. Unified genome though, I think. Been a few years since I- uh, I transitioned, so I don't remember all the details, but there's no upkeep I have to do anymore. This- is me, yeah!"
The quartermaster started to blush too. "Well, sounds like you walked so I could run." She nervously twiddled with her hair, and I could see a small leaf, about a centimeter long, that had been sort of hiding before, and also I noticed a ring of small buds in a crown around her head that weren't obvious at first.
"Well hey, um- wait, what's your name again?"
"Glad you asked, I got it changed from Margaret to Magnolia, but people still call me Maggie, or Mags. I feel like should know yours, too, but I can't quite remember..."
I raised an eyebrow, since most people in CTAC knew my name. "I'm... Lily."
"Like Commander Lily?"
"That's me."
"That's- Oh! Wow, I'm sorry I didn't realize-" She blushed a bit more, and I noticed her become a bit flustered.
"It's okay, I don't like being famous anyway, even if it's just around Chilton. and besides," I looked at her and tried to smile softly, but it quickly became an uncontrollable grin. "I'm clearly not Chilton's only flower."
Maggie slumped down to the floor against the support post she was leaning on, and covered her face as she blushed as much as I had. And a few seconds later, the crown of buds around her head opened up and bloomed into small magnolias, pink and white, only about 2 centimeters across.
I didn't expect my compliment to be so literal, but turns out it definitely was.
She took a few deep breaths and fanned her face with her hand to cool it off and calm down, eventually gathering herself as the buds slowly closed back up.
"Not everyone gets to see that, and it's never happened in public... like this..."
"You okay, Maggie?"
"Yeah... and thank you, that means... a lot. By the way, um, are we flirting right now?"
I shrugged a bit, and helped her back up. "Up to you."
We heard a stifled laugh from the back of the foyer, by the doors to the labs, and we both immediately turned to see Shandra, one of the Macrotech researchers, standing with a hand on her hip.
"Sounded pretty gushy to me," she said once we noticed her.
"Well it's up to Maggie here, like I said," I replied, a bit defensively.
Maggie's buds started to open back up, and I saw her start to stagger from the embarrassment, and as she started to lean away from the post she was leaning on before, I caught her in my arms, not realizing until a second later what the implications of it were. Maggie's buds opened up even more as she realized the same, and she kept leaning on me, putting her hands over mine. She looked over at Shandra, and said in a bit of a playful tone, "Yeah, we're flirting alright." Then she looked back at me- well, up at me, since she was leaning quite a bit. "Should we get a room?"
Shandra piped up again. "Well, I assume you're here on some kind of business, Lily, not just to sweet talk with Miss Magnolia here. Not that I'm against that, I'm all for it, you just seem easily distracted at the moment. I'll be honest, y'all are cute together."
I turned to Maggie again. "She's right, and... also she's right. I did come here on business, but got sidetracked before you even said hi, heh." I helped her back to a normal standing position. Stepping back, I addressed both of them. The Director gave me access to military-relevant data and projects, with the idea that I'd find ways to keep our tech from getting turned into a bioweapon. We had a close call a few years ago, but CTAC's name is attracting more attention, and we're likely to have more of those if we don't do anything about it. Transponders on all the control consoles and equipment with bioweapon potential will help, but we'd rather not that be our only preventative measure."
Shandra's face lit up. "Well, Mags, guess we finally get to show off the neural control projects. And our little firing range. Got a few tips from PKNS, and, well, you'll see what I mean in a bit. Come on back, you two."