In a lab on the other side of the Cthonic Mare, Veronica was fuming. “Wishing me good luck? How dare she! She knows I take pride in not needing luck to do anything, so to deliberately throw that back at me is incredibly rude.”
Looking up from her workstation, Rat commented “I still don’t get why you’re so upset about it. Yeah Queen’s competing against us, but it’s not like she’s trash-talking us or anything. She wished us well.”
Veronica twitched slightly, before she marched on over to Rat’s side of the lab and said “Rat, that is in fact trash talk. Queen knows me well enough to know exactly how I’d respond to this, and that just makes it even worse.”
Rat blinked in a distinctly unimpressed manner, before asking “if you know it’s a problem and you know why Queen did it, then why keep playing into her hands? We both know that you getting all riled up like this isn’t going to solve anything. Would a change of topic help?”
Veronica thought for a moment, before ultimately agreeing “You know, it probably would. How’s work going on the laser organ?”
Rat smiled as she replied “I’m glad you asked! Anyway, I’ve ultimately decided to go for a fiber laser setup. It’s easier to cool, more damage tolerant, more efficient, and offers the best beam quality available. Most of this is pretty standard, but I’m having a bit of trouble with the beam combiner module.”
Veronica thought for a moment, before asking “Mind if I have a look at it?”
Rat shrugged as she passed the tablet, and Veronica started picking over the work, before asking “Big question, were you going to try using a turreted beam director system where the entire emitter pivots, or were you aiming for something more like an adaptive optics system?”
Rat immediately replied “Adaptive optics. Yeah an eyeball turret would probably be at least a little easier to implement, but it has a few downsides that an adaptive optics system just wouldn’t. Still, I’m having trouble with the lens buckling in ways it isn’t supposed to.”
Veronica looked over Rat’s design for a moment, before saying “Yeah, your choice of material here is the problem. It’s just a bit too ductile for what we need here, and that’s what’s causing the warping problems. Personally I’d say that we should reduce the branching in the polymers a bit; that would firm the lens up enough to stop the buckling issue without too much trouble.”
Veronica made the edits, before passing the tablet back to Rat. Looking it over, Rat noted “This seems like it should work. Now it’s just a question of integrating it into our birds.”
Veronica shook her head for a moment before noting “Gotta do some real world testing first, and that means printing it in an organ box and seeing if it’ll fire.”
And so the two of them set the bio printers working away on their laser organ. As the printer churned, Rat asked “So, now that we know Queen isn’t available, who else could we get? We know we need an immune system person at the very least, or our critter is going to get utterly wrecked by feral nanoweapons the instant it’s released into the wild.”
Running her fingers through her long, dark hair, Veronica groaned “I don’t know. Queen was the only person I knew on a personal level who specialized in microbiology and she’s on another team right now.”
Rat’s whiskers wiggled as she thought for a few moments, before noting “I suppose we could put out an ad on the network and see if anyone comes through. It’s a slight statistical long-shot at this point in time, but it could work.”
Veronica nodded as she said “That seems like our most workable option, let me write up a draft for a personal ad real quick.”
A few minutes passed as Veronica typed up the advertisement, before passing it to Rat with a query of “Well, what do you think?”
Idly nibbling on some fish jerky, Rat read Veronica’s draft aloud “Wanted: third team member for Blackwood Invasive Species Tournament, assisting with design of an airborne predator for deployment to the Thundersnow Steppes. Microbiology expertise required.”
There were a few moments of silence before Rat sighed and said “Well, the first thing you did wrong is that you made it sound like this person would be a subordinate when you used the words ‘assisting with’. People are usually in it for the glory and bragging rights when they sign up for the invasive species tournament, so no-one’s going to join up if they think they’re going to be a mere assistant.”
You could have almost heard the breaking noise as Veronica’s train of thought derailed, leaving her with a completely blank expression as she replied “Oh.”
Rat broke the awkward silence after a moment by saying “Anyway, I think I can fix this to be more appealing to a prospective team-mate. All we’d need to do is change the words ‘assist with’ to instead say ‘contribute to’. The rest is actually pretty decent, all things considered.”
Veronica looked over the revised personal advertisement for a few moments, before saying “Well, this is probably going to do. Let’s send it off.” and clicking the option to send the request.
The two of them spent the next several kiloseconds on fine-tuning their bird’s beak geometry and composition for the prey it was expected to eat.
They didn’t have to wait long before a response arrived from an individual calling themselves Togi Sorresh, reading “Hello! I heard you were in need of a microbiologist for your team in the Invasive Species Tournament, and I was hoping you’d take me on. I’m quite skilled with work on the cellular and immunological levels, so I’d be a perfect pick.”
Rat and Veronica mulled over bringing Togi aboard, firing up a chat client and starting to talk with Togi about whether his qualifications were actually all they were cracked up to be.
Unbeknownst to Rat and Veronica, Togi was most emphatically the worst possible choice of team-mate, but not due to any lack of skill on his part. Even as he was chatting up his marks into letting him join, his gaze kept drifting to a piece of paper he kept pinned up on his bedroom wall that simply read “EVIL PLAN: RUIN BLACKWOOD TOURNAMENT”
Of course, Veronica Machinae and her team-mate Rat knew nothing of this, naively sending “Mind providing some credentials? No offense, but we’d like to know just who we’re dealing with.”
Togi replied without the slightest hint of audible smugness “No problem, sending my degree now.” before sending in a copy of his graduation certificate from Skyfountain University. No need to lie about this, his actual degree would probably be sufficient.
This was confirmed by Veronica’s next reply of “Sure thing, come on over and welcome to the team.” followed by the address of their laboratory.
Seeing this, Togi pumped one of his four arms as he ticked off one step from his evil plan. After all, he was part of a team in the tournament now, giving him much better access to what he’d need in order to implement the rest of his plan.
When Togi arrived in person shortly thereafter, Veronica greeted him with “Hello, Togi. Want me to show you around the lab? We were just getting for dinner if you’d rather do that.”
Togi smiled with false amicability, noting “I’d rather do my own exploring, but thank you for the offer. I’ll meet you for dinner after showing myself around.” what he most pointedly did not say was that he’d have a much easier time hiding certain items he didn’t want his teammates to find if he went exploring on his own, compared to if he got a tour.
Meanwhile, Veronica most pointedly did not say that making everyone else wait for dinner was kind of rude, and she also refrained from commenting on Togi’s extremely spiky steel-and-leather fashion sense. Rat also refrained from making similar comments.
Instead, the two of them said “Well, go ahead and claim a room I guess. See you at dinner eventually.”
Togi bowed slightly and almost pricked Rat with his spiked shoulder pads before replying “I will do so. See you there.”
Of course, Togi already knew the layout of the building from looking it up on a municipal government website before he got here, so he already knew where the bedrooms were relative to the lab. Climbing up the stairs to the second level he swiftly found Veronica and Rat’s rooms before picking one out for himself.
Next he started unloading some of his personal bio-engineering equipment. Protein synthesizers, various molecular encoding systems, and more quickly cluttered up his desk behind an obscuring screen of random knickknacks. That done, he made his way back down to the kitchen and asked “So, what’s for dinner?”
Wordlessly, Rat gestured to the pot of freshly cooked pasta on the stove.
Togi wandered over that way in search of food, idly noting Veronica calling out “There’s meatballs too if you want them!” as he started to serve himself.
A few moments later Togi had his food ready and sat down at the table as he asked “So, you’ve been working on your organism submission for a while prior to me joining in. Mind telling me what you’ve got in more detail?”
Veronica shrugged as she answered “We’re making a laser armed bird of prey. Been considering what sorts of additional features we can cram into it, but it definitely needs an immune system no matter what.”
Togi smiled as he finished chewing and swallowing his first bite of dinner, replying “Well, that’s what you got me for isn’t it? You needed someone who knows their way around immune systems and here I am, ready to provide exactly that service as requested.”
There were a few moments of silence before Veronica uttered a sentence she would regret in retrospect, saying “Glad to have you on the team, Togi. I look forward to seeing what we can create together.”
Togi smiled knowingly as he replied “I’m looking forward to finding that out too.”
There were a few minutes of silent eating before Rat noted “Actually, if you want to look over our organism design so far, here it is.” as she slid a tablet full of data over towards Togi’s side of the table.
Togi accepted the tablet with a simple “Many thanks.” before he started reading through it, producing the somewhat incongruous image of a vaguely menacing four-armed man dressed entirely in black leather and spikes intently reading the contents of a bubblegum pink tablet covered in flower stickers.
The rest of dinner passed smoothly, Togi taking the tablet up to his room as he noted “I’m going to try and get a bit of work in before bed and see what I can get done on your bird’s immune system.”
As he turned to leave, Veronica asked “Don’t you mean our bird? You’re part of our team now too, so you should have an equal claim to it.”
Togi smiled wryly as he insincerely agreed “Right, our bird. I’ll have to remember that.” before thundering off to his room.
The instant he got there, he locked the door and connected the tablet to his personal computer as he noted “Right, let’s see what sort of botch job these two dupes made on the immune system.”
It only took Togi a few minutes to spot several flaws in the laser falcon’s defenses against hostile nanoweapons, but his overall opinion of the system as it currently stood was a simple “That’s actually a fairly competent immune system from people who aren’t specialized in them. I’d have to be some sort of genius at nanoweapon design to close those security holes without breaking my own exploits… oh wait, I am.”
And so Togi worked on into the night, adjusting the immune system of the falcons to suit his needs.
Come morning, he presented a slightly edited version of his work with the incriminating comments removed, passing the tablet back to Rat as he said “Well, here’s what I’ve got for the immune system so far. It’s obviously a work in progress, but I’d like to know what you think of it.”
Rat accepted the tablet and started going through it, Togi carefully observing her reactions during every moment that followed. Rat’s expression stayed thoughtful and moderately impressed for several moments, before abruptly switching to slight concern as she noted “Togi, it seems like you’ve left a gaping security hole in the adaptive immune system. There’s an entire major category of antigens that it’s going to completely ignore, meaning any nanoweapon built with them will be able to sneak in without resistance.”
As Togi took the tablet back, he commented “I thought you said you weren’t really all that great at immunology?”
Rat shrugged, before noting “I mean, yeah? Immune systems aren’t really area of specialty, but I passed all the required courses on them and still remember most of it.”
Togi noted down that information as he carefully looked over the highlighted points in the plans for the immune system, while also checking on the actual exploits he’d left in. After determining that only one of the deliberate security holes had been detected, Togi replied truthfully “To be honest I just didn’t get to that part yet. It’s only been less than a day since I joined the team, so I just haven’t had time to get to it yet.”
Rat idly prodded her breakfast with a spoon for a few minutes before replying “I guess that’s something to take into consideration. Still, going to want to take a look at things to double check, just in case.”
Inside his mind, Togi was rapidly reassessing how much of a threat Veronica and Rat were to his plans. They knew just enough about immune systems that they stood a serious chance of uncovering his plot, and with their insistence on double-checking everything those chances were compounded even further.
Togi chewed his cereal slowly and deliberately as he tried to come up with a vaguely workable method of hiding his actions from his “teammates” for the remainder of the competition. Simply continuing as he had done had far too much of a chance of getting called out on leaving deliberate security holes, so he’d need to act proactively to either keep that from happening, or mitigate the damage when it happened.
Then Togi glanced over to where Veronica was currently checking over the bird’s flight characteristics for the fortieth time, and he figured out exactly what he needed to do.
On Veronica’s part, she was currently in a very good mood. She’d mapped out the aerodynamic forces needed to keep the bird in stable flight at quite extreme speeds, and even better it turned out that the lower end of the respiratory tract had enough room to install an afterburner. Sure that meant the feathers had to be fireproofed, but being able to accelerate to supersonic speeds for short bursts would be an extremely useful ability for an airborne predator to have.
After a few minutes of mixed work and eating, Veronica asked “So, pretty sure I’ve gotten the airspeed on this bird up to mach 2. Can anyone see any obvious problems with it?”
When Rat took a look at the tablet, she looked over the adjustments to the multi-modal biological jet engine Veronica had managed to cram into their bird before saying “You did a good job there Veronica, this bird is about as fast as we could have possibly wished for, really agile, and the fuel consumption is low enough to keep up those speeds for almost a kilosecond if it really needs to.”
Veronica smiled at the praise before saying “Thank you! Making sure those tissues could handle that level of heat and pressure was a massive hassle, but I got it working eventually.”
That’s when Togi spoke up and asked “Can I take a look at it? I want to see what you did with that bird, maybe point out some improvements.”
Rat shrugged and replied “Sure.” before handing the tablet over to Togi.
Togi hummed as he looked over it for a moment, before saying “Should have been rated for mach three at the very least, you can do better.”
Veronica’s response was a flat “What.” before she explained “Togi, there’s no more room to make our bird go mach three. A sizable portion of the chest cavity is already taken up by the laser weapon, we had to completely assimilate the respiratory system into the jet engine to get enough airflow for combustion, and if we make either of those systems any bigger there won’t be any room for the cardiovasular, digestive, excretory, or reproductive systems. Not to mention important metabolic organs like the liver and spleen.”
Togi stared Veronica right in the face before asking “Did I stutter? The bird needs to go mach three, or it’s not going to survive Blackwood’s threat environment. Make it bigger if it needs to be that way, but the bird needs to go faster.”
Rat groaned as she contradicted Togi with “We did our research, the fastest flying organisms in the region we’re deploying to are all slower than our laser falcon. Plus we can’t make the bird any bigger, we’re already pushing the upper bounds of the mass limit imposed by our registered tournament category.”
Togi raised an eyebrow before asking “Alright, what if you just ran the existing engine at higher output?”
Immediately, Veronica replied “Then it would be at risk of explosive failure, Togi. Look, maybe you can just stick to your field of expertise and let us handle the rest?”
A few hours later, the three of them were readying their next prototype when Veronica reached for her tablet, only to find that the spot where she normally set it was missing. Somewhat confused, she asked “Did anyone move my tablet? Even according to my digital memory this is where I left it, so it should still be there.”
Togi shrugged in response, asking “Could there have been a memory glitch of some sort? Those things have been known to happen. Just look around and see where it turns up.”
Veronica nodded, checking the other side of her workstation and quickly finding the tablet there. As she picked it up she muttered to herself “But that’s not… where I put it?”
This sort of event continued on for several Megaseconds, items disappearing from where Veronica and Rat thought they were, Togi denying everything, and Veronica and Rat both starting to doubt their own judgments more and more.
There were still two Megaseconds to the tournament when they decided enough was enough, and went to get their morphs inspected for memory issues. That said, the appointment they scheduled wound up only a few kiloseconds before organism deployment due to scheduling concerns. And so the two comforted themselves with the thought that soon they’d have answers to what was going on.
Rat and Veronica arrived at the doctor’s office about a kilosecond ahead of schedule, sitting in the nondescript waiting room of the clinic. The two were nervously holding each other’s hands as they sat in the moderately uncomfortable chairs for several minutes before the announcer called for them.
When the pair arrived, they were greeted by a person favoring a tall and slender synthmorph “Hello, I am Doctor Erren. What’s your issue?”
Somewhat nervously, Veronica answered “I think my memory might be going, and I want it inspected. Rat’s in the same situation.”
The doctor nodded in recognition before saying “Would you rather be in your morphs while I inspect them, or would you rather Mindcast out? I have some temporary mini-morphs on hand that you two can wear in the meantime if that would be more comfortable.”
Veronica answered “I’d like to be in a different brain right now please.” and Rat nodded in agreement.
The doctor nodded, before handing each of them a small currently inactive robot, noting “That’s a mini-morph with an integrated Mindcast scanner in its head. Please press it to a major data line in your current morph and switch bodies.”
Veronica complied immediately, pushing the head of the robot up against the black box implant she had in place of her sternum. A brief moment later she was in the mini-morph, hopping off her old body as Rat followed suit.
Looking up at the doctor, Veronica asked “Now what?”
Doctor Erren calmly lifted Rat and Veronica up to the counter before saying “Now, it’s time for the inspection.” as he opened a drawer full of highly specialized tools, a few of which were moderately invasive.
Several excruciatingly long kiloseconds of examinations passed as the doctor checked over the hardware and wetware running his patient’s normal morphs for any possible errors. After much searching, he reluctantly concluded “Well, at least on a physical level there’s nothing wrong with your morphs that would be causing the memory issues you’ve expressed concerns over. Both your neural and digital memory systems are in perfect working order.”
There were several moments of silence before Rat voiced another concern “Well, if the problem wasn’t with our bodies, maybe the problem is with us? Can that be a thing that happens?”
The doctor hummed for a moment, before saying “It’s rare, but it can happen. If you want I can look over the cognitive processes making each of you up and figure out what’s going on there.” before turning to retrieve an item from the cabinet.
Veronica nodded in agreement “Yes, please do that… what are you getting?”
That’s when the doctor revealed two small clipboards containing legal-looking stationery, saying “These are consent forms. By law any non-emergency medical procedure that involves invasive analysis or alteration of a conscious mind must have written consent provided beforehand, or else the doctor in question can face criminal penalties. Please sign here.”
Veronica and Rat both signed their consent forms without hesitation, Rat even going so far as to say “Please, we just want some answers.” as she passed her form back to the doctor, where some drones quickly carried it off to be scanned and copied.
The doctor nodded seriously as he said “I’ll see what I can do on that front.” and put both of the medical mini-morphs into stasis mode as he started digging into the closest things his patients had to what could be called a soul. He fully decompiled the machine code that they were composed of into something human readable, and with his thinking speed cranked up to the maximum as he dug through the data for any signs of a possible issue.
After a few kiloseconds, he recompiled his patients in their state at the start of stasis mode and booted them. As they snapped into awareness, Veronica asked “What did you find? Do you know why we’ve been forgetting things constantly lately?”
Doctor Erren sighed, before saying “Well, on that front I’ve got some good news, and some bad news. The good news is that you two don’t have any inherent errors in your consciousness that would lead to memory issues.”
Rat hesitated slightly, before asking “What’s the bad news, then?”
The doctor growled in frustration as he stated “You’ve been getting gaslit.”
This is the free edition of The Blackwood Tourney. It is entirely pre-written, and will have one chapter released each week on Saturday.
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