The blazing heat of the Dry Ocean made the air flimmer over the stretch of perfectly flattened ground. Clearly it was too flat, even for an eroded ocean floor, to not be artificial. Indeed, the edges had the marks of heavy construction equipment to flatten the 2 kilometer track, the start and end of it marked only by a pair of hardlight pillars. At the southern one a small pavilion provided cover for a group of people, their yellow and white Hazmat suits creaking as they moved in the tiny protected area. It wasn’t that they would need it yet, in the shielding of the tent, but the silvery object on the table was a rather delicate piece.
Under the harsh light from the tubes, gloved fingers placed the panels onto the distinctively feline body, the polished chrome hiding the pulsing Qubitite processors and Sarin batteries. The hissing whine of pneumatic screwdrivers sounded as each panel got fastened in place, then the gloves retracted one after another. Distorted through the Intercoms, a male voice resounded over the desert, the prelude of some a twencen rock cover chittering in the background, some runs almost sounding like the screech from pneumatic screwdrivers. “Assembly finished. Starting boot sequence. Clear the track, I repeat, clear the track.”
A single blue light appeared in the darkness of her slumbering mind, growing larger with each passing second. Disturbing her restful sleep, the silver avatar of a cat tilted the head at the pearl, a low curiosity in its features. What was it this time? Just another diagnostic check on her RI? Another function test? Moment by moment the ball of light grew, eventually illuminating the whole sanctum. The pedestal on which she had slumbered, the walls with all their screens, the entryway between the late empire pillars, all cast in the cold blue, before the light source ascended to settle into the ceiling. This was more than just the standard boot tests, she soon realized as piece by piece came online, the screens around the Avatar starting to fill out with status reports, one by one turning green.
With an electric crack, a speaker in the tent yelled a “Report!” at the crew, one of the white clad scientists promptly grabbing for the control to regulate it down a few notches. “Got a green status here on phase nine, commencing through ten, awaiting consciousness in 30.”
Things turned dark around the Avatar suddenly, the world shifted in a way that even for a RI was nauseating. Up and down suddenly realigned as the physical hardware replaced her mental sanctum, the inputs from the optical sensors replacing the status reports, the icy chill of the chrome skin becoming a physical thing, not a detached information. The world she had experienced only in the labs in pieces before became… She couldn’t quite describe it.
“Can you hear us? Are you there?” rang a distinctively female voice from a short yellow suit.
“Status Green, Doctor Munroe. I am here, but I can’t move.” the RIDE replied, the chrome clad face moving only minimally. “Is it time for a full function test?”
“Yes, it is. We will loosen your fetters in a minute. In the meantime, check the instruction file.” The radio from the doc crackled a bit, as the interference from the magnetic storms got worse. “Changing to Lasercom.”
“Doctor Munroe, I just have to run down those 2 Kilometers, switch to skimmer and come back? Is that really everything?” the RIDE replied, only managing to tilt the head from its position on the working rack as the fetters overrode all other movement, declaring them unneeded.
“Exactly. The funding of the project is in question. Command gave us one chance to prove that you are worth the money they give us instead of reworking the Fennec line. Please, don’t disappoint us.” The concern was more clear as the voice came over the laser. “Get on your marks.”
It was a strange feeling to touch the floor the first time for real after countless hours of test runs on the stand, in which the legs at best had touched a lab table, if at all. Wobbly the new RIDE set step by step, the internal gyroscopes demanding tail movements too large to keep the balance for the first couple of steps towards the hardlight shield of the pavilion, but with each step, she got better.
As she reached the shimmering barrier, an alarm resounded over the barren wastelands, then the green shielding flickered and shut down, allowing the chrome cheetah to pass through into the Q-dust. One last look back to the tent, the shield back up again. “Good Luck,” was the last transmission of Doctor Munroe before the coms cut out. She never heard the last words of the doctor, as they never were sent. “Everything depends on you now.”
As she had reached the mark on the ground, little more than a black line of laser burnt earth in planished the white chalk of the ground, once again the speakers over the desert strip came to life, an elderly male voice this time, one the experimental RIDE didn’t knew. “T minus 30 seconds. All hands on deck, repeat, all hands on deck!”
The hardlight pillar flashed up, red orbs turning yellow out one by one, each joined by a fanfare, until they all changed to green with a howl. Deep the alloy claws cut into the white rock as the chrome clad RIDE jerked forward out of a stand, accelerating witch each leap. A cloud of white dust rose behind her, the back bent like a snake. The long tail movements for balancing out the body was taken over by the code adapted from flight stability computers for fighter aircraft, allowing the 300 kilograms of cat to seemingly float over the Dry Ocean without a single antigrav lifter kicking into action, only one of the feet touching the ground at most. Hardlight shielding flickered on around the feline head, but instead of the fur many RIDEs sported, it was a sleek, aerodynamic shielding, reducing the drag as she broke the 100 km/h, allowing to speed up some more.
The dust trail at the start hadn’t even settled when the RIDE broke the sound barrier just 406 meters short of the finish line, one clock in the pavilion stopping at 9.37 seconds while the graphs on several screens showed the top acceleration at the start of the track had been 3.7 g. Not even a full second later, another timer froze at 10.02 seconds, the associated speedometer freezing just shy of 400 m/s. In the distance, the dust cloud grew rapidly upwards as the slender frame of the cheetah turned on the lifters and then tilted the upper body up to get as much reverse as possible.
Pebbles were ripped out of the ground as the legs changed configuration, panels shifted and the whole body violently bucked in the process. The front legs fused into a single, almost fragile front extension while the back ones unfolded into a pair of wire wheels, tilted inside at the top. The vehicle was more resembling a sled, the empty pilot cockpit hanging low to the ground and leaving just a hand's width between the belly of the RIDE and the ground. The engines howled as the fragile race machine went into a U-turn, and she overshot the end of track marker by half a kilometer before the wheels touched ground again. Dust and chalk once again was ripped from the aeon old bed of the long evaporated ocean, the experimental RIDE dashing towards the tent again.
Closing in on the sound barrier again, the hardlight emitters flared up, altering the aerodynamics with stubby aerofoils. First they pressed the skimmer down, but then changed the configuration to provide lift and force the light vehicle to break from the ground. Losing contact, the back wheels rotated upwards, acting as some kind of elevator in what could best be described as a Ground Effect Mode, just a meter or two above the surface.
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Inside the tent, Doctor Munroe had taken off the helmet of the Hazmat suit ignoring the Q-dust alert howlind, her eyes affixed to the 10.02 seconds. 2 hundredths of a second. Enough to be considered an error in measurement! “Commander, she can do better! Give her a second try!” she yelled into the comms.
In a Nextus command bunker abandoned right after the Sturmhaven war, the elderly commander made a gesture towards his com officer to cut the connection. “Execute termination, change status of project CTH-LSR-000B2 to failed, erase the files and notify Miss Bertrand or she will have your heads for the boss. And bring me a new cup of tea, this one tastes bitter. Pronto!”
Far above the desert, a shooting star appeared in the desert sky, rapidly growing and changing from a silver-blue, to a blazing red, a blazing trail of ardent fragments following up the descending object.
Howling in frustration, Doctor Munroe slammed her fist onto the computer clock, the heavy acrylic glass neither giving the satisfying sound of breaking glass nor even budging under the impact. Tears in her eyes, she looked over to her colleagues, their faces under the hazard suits showing shock and resignation, even tears. “Nikita… Do it. Let’s give her at least this.” Her voice was broken, as she turned a key in the console, her postgraduate doing the same at the one in front of him. “Let’s hope she’ll do better than us.”
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The tent in front of her grew, the finish line closing in. The roar of the falling tungsten rod shook the desert as a single communication laser hit her, the package in it just a single line. “Good luck out there, baby.” Strange, she thought, then her navigation suddenly went haywire, the waypoint of the end pillar replaced by some location thousands of kilometers away to the north, through the depth of the Dry Ocean. She couldn’t tell why the target changed, but with shrieking lifters, she changed course, speeding past the pavilion at roughly than Mach 1.4, the left back wheel almost making ground contact as the skimmer turned into a tight curve.
In a thunderclap, the deorbited tungsten penetrator hit the pavilion, the supersonic alloy ripping through the equipment deep into the ground, the heat of its descent scorching everything within half a kilometer within an instant. The earth shook in violent tremors for miles, and the plasma storm of the burning air expanded, rushing towards the RIDE on escape course.
Roaring the shockwave dashed in on the Skimmer, the back wheels losing contact first as the flat trike got thrown around, dark marks appearing on the polished chrome as she was hurled away. The gyroscopes told nothing that could be interpreted in a sane manner, claiming upwards was left and right at the same time, then the ground impacted hard on her right side. Metal protested as the thin shell of the driver’s cocoon was pushed inside, then everything went dark.
The gleam of the outer world vanished as the cheetah was yanked back into her mindspace, status screens on the walls all around flashing with red and orange, some even having turned entirely red with black letters yelling error messages to the feline avatar. The blue light in the ceiling dulled, then one system after another turned off, fetters forcing those still running into emergency hibernation. The last she saw before falling into slumber was the blue orb in the ceiling turning green slowly, and from the corner of her eyes she thought to have seen some kind of maggot.
{{#if:f|{{#if:14 July 146 AL, Aloah|
14 July 146 AL, Aloah
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Harsh spotlights hit the chrome body the of derelict RIDE, the feline shape curled up, the right side dented and bent, but someone had spent hours to clean the scorch marks and polish the smaller scratches out of the chrome clad shell. A white label attached to the boxy head’s cheek read the lot number and offered to download the specifications from the sleeping beauty.
“Next we have lot 1912. Salvaged RIDE, Cheetah Design, 300 kilos, unknown manufacturer, no stored ID or previous owner on file, RI core in hibernation. More specific details you find in the catalogue. This item is sold as is with a starting bid of 300 Mu.”
“Cheap. I wonder what’s off with that thing.” Dominique Marie Dumas muttered under his breath, pulling up the file onto his data specs. “Seems to have run for almost no time if the size of the memory files is a good indicator. But the timestamps seem rather corrupted. When was the Cheetah line released again? Too bad I forgot to download the ‘Osprey New Vanguard - RIDEs of the Nextus-Surmhaven War’ earlier.”
More out of curiosity, the young man kept his eyes on the bid field for a second, before setting up his limit to 500 mu, halfway expecting that some rich collector of early RIDEs would try to snatch the machine as a bargain, or even a miner with a very tight budget who just needed any RIDE to continue working. But then again, the specs highlighted the lack of the standard pulse cannons just as much as the hardlight emitters were just rudimentary, but that could just be a sign for a nextus origin. On the other hand the design philosophy of the the makers had somehow valued receiving a message from several klicks with a lot of scatter important, but not replying back, as the actual comm laser only was specified to focus tightly enough only on distances less than a tenth of that.
“300 from the man in the green shirt, do I hear 350? 300 going once, anyone 350? 300 going twice, 350 for the lady in red, 400 from the green shirt again, do I hear 450? 400 going once, anyone 450? 400 going twice and sold. Congratulations to Mister Dumas. Now onto lot 1913. Demilitarized Heavy Assault Armor...”
Dominique barely had registered that the man on the auction block had issued the sale to someone in his monotone voice without much separation between the sentences just because the spotlights changed to a different stand. The steady rumor of the auction hall rose and fell like a wave, as a stagehand in a black gorilla RIDE - probably a KingKong-3 model, judging from the oversized muscles - started to push the hover platform with the cheetah RIDE off stage while a colleague in an old Nuevo San Antonio Heavy Assault Komodo pushed in the lot 1915. Only when his specs showed up a bill over 400 mu, he realized that he had just won the auction.
The slightly perplex look was still on his face when he reached the counter, uploading the proof of payment to the teller, a copper colored fused BBV in a white tux, though it was hard to tell if it was a genuine PSA or the Nextus IMA offshoot. “Uhm, I am a first time buyer, where can I claim my lot?”
“Let me look that up a second.” was the perfectly modulated reply, something about her movements being just a tad too perfect. “Ah, here it is. Dominique Marie Dumas, Lot 1912. Undesignated Cheetah without documentation, sold ‘as is’. I am legally obliged to inform you of the risks of fusing with a RIDE of unknown repair status and gender, including RI breakdown, malicious hidden software and crossriding. Would you please sign here? Your purchase is packaged for transport just this moment.”
With an all too fluent movement to not be precisely trained or designed she held the pad to him, that foxy smile showing just the right amount of teeth to not be threatening but attractive. Something in Dominique shuddered as he took the datapad to skim over the notes, just making a light contact with the hardlight fur of the Fuser’s hand. Someone must have spent countless hours to finetune it to feel perfectly silky.
Fumbling with the pad a moment longer than necessary to sign with a press of his right thumb, Dominique thought about how to ask the girl out, but then just sighed and gave back the pad. It was a dumb idea anyway - and she might get such propositions any day en masse. “Here. And...”
“Your purchase will be delivered right over there, and indeed, I would appreciate you to not ask for a date. It would be all humiliating for both of us.” ‘’:Especially since I don’t swing that way. Sorry, but I run her in passive.:’’
The sudden male voice on the phone in his specs made Dominique shudder, the cheeks flushing. Embarrassed he almost dropped the pad. “Uhm… how did you…”
“It was written all over your face, Mister Dumas. But a ‘’Lady’’ can keep secrets, and I will never mention it unless you ask me to. If you would turn around, you can see your RIDE coming from the storeroom just this moment.”
Dominique couldn’t tell if there was some chuckle put into ‘’her’’ voice as he followed her request, seeing the Gorilla from earlier pushing a flat black plastic box on a hoverpad in. In contrast to the box that followed after him, it looked almost punny, but the white stencils claimed its contents to be the RIDE he had just purchased. “Uhm, one last question… The documentation didn’t really say much about this. Called it undesignated.” Dominique asked, pointing to the line just under the lot number.
The fox morph just lifted her shoulders, but the Gorilla did answer, his huge index finger tapping on the panel. He sounded like a rasp on hardwood. “It is, as the designation is incomplete. That’s as much as we could figure out without breaking into the RI and risking damage. You saw the mention of heavy worm damage? CTH(?)-LSA is all the worms didn’t eat of that bit. Well, actually LS, but the last letter according to Nextus standards is obvious, isn’t it? Anyway, have fun with it. Will be a hell of a project to get the core back out of hiding.”
{{#if:f|{{#if:15 July 146 AL, Aloha|
15 July 146 AL, Aloha
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The light in the garage was rather gloomy as Dominique entered, and sending the light command to the mesh of the refitted storage didn’t change that. With a sigh he began to search for the manual switch on the right, only to find it on his left, perfect for not forgetting to switch the light off when you leave the building.
A flickering “thunderstorm” with clicking “thunder” later, the bright xenon tubes at the ceiling cast their sterile light onto the matted steel table and the black box upon it. Stepping closer, Dominique’s fingers trembled and he had problems to open the fast release locks in his eagerness to see his very own RIDE. The heart pumping like a jackhammer, he lifted the top, but after a tiny bit a pneumatic cylinder took over with the telltale hiss, revealing the contents.
Like an expensive collier the silver cheetah lay on the dark red smartfoam, the polished chrome surfaces reflecting Dominiques face back in a distorted manner. He could make out his latest attempt of a proper beard in the shape of muttonchops on his bony cheeks. “Hello there, beauty...”
Perfectly knowing that he wasn’t a professional mechanic, let alone a RIDE one, he took his time to mount the slender RIDE onto the stand, once more wondering what made someone strip a LSA from weaponry or even some standard communications. But once he had the delicate piece of machinery on the stand, he realized it was a piece of cake to remove the paneling, the plates coming off almost by themselves the instant the few screws were removed. That was not exactly what the CTH-LSA-002 manual had described about having to remove the plates with “gentle force” after unscrewing a dozen hexbolts.
An hour later Dominique tossed the manual into the virtual paper bin in a wave of frustration, the wiring schematics looking so unlike what he found under the shell of his RIDE. Whoever made it, didn’t just skip on installing the weapons, he seemed to had stripped any wiring from the tree that was not essential, and wherever they had hidden the RI release, he couldn’t find it. It was hard to admit failure, but this was much above the skills of him. He was a librarian, not a RIDE wizard, and all he could figure out that he didn’t got a LSA-002. With a sigh, he pulled up his address book and called Jo’an.
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“Ok, let me see your sleeping beauty ‘nick” the short man in bib trousers said as he pushed his wide frame through the warehouse door into the makeshift workplace. “You know, my college bunk years ago had more elaborate tools than this. But at least you ‘’have’’ a cradle.”
“Joan, that’s not the problem. You know, I was lucky to get a free garage this time of the year.” Dominique answered, having put on a t-shirt in addition to his usual beach trunks for the cool temperature of the workshop, at least for Alohan standards.
“And you know you should have brought your little pet project there to my place in the first place. Now you started disassembling your sleeping beauty without me and took all the fun of that from me.” A moment he stopped and twirled the impressive moustache over his lips as he eyed the exposed internals of the cheetah RIDE, then turned to the door again. “Sebastian, bring your fat behind in already! You gotta see this yourself!”
“I’m not fad, I am well rounded, Jo!” came back in a deep bass, just before the walrus RIDE pushed open the door with the head, sporting a very very tusky grin from under a moustache equaling Jo’an’s. “And I know you like ‘em well rounded too. Just a piddy Aloha is overrun with skinny beach babes… Holy Cow, is that whad I think id is?” Jo’an nodded only in silent answer.
“What? Am I the only one who’s left out of this?” Dominique asked rather embarrassed, exchanging looks between his old childhood friend and his ride. “You know I could tell him about that day when your parents forced you to wear the girls school uniform…”
Jo’an just chuckled, joined by a hearty . “You know, RIDEs share memories with their RIDErs. Basti knows all about that day, just like he knows i prefered trunks to bikinis even before I broke the wall.”
“Ok, ok, I can’t embarrass you in front of him, Joan, but could you please tell me what is so special that even Sebastian freaks out about it? It’s not like it’s an antique or something, right?” Dominique’s face was showing even more confusion than the moment before, and a few moments later he frustratedly slammed his hand on the desk, switching the holoprojector in it online.
With a chuffing sound that doubled as as a laugh, Sebastian instantly hijacked the projector, pulling up Newman’s Ride Encyclopedia on it and then a few diagrams “Id’s rather obvious. See thad? These are the motherboards of a GDE-RMR, a LEO-HAA and a BBV-PSA. You see the difference?”
Staring at the floating images, Dominique shook the head, pointing at the edges in guess “I am not sure, but that chunk there is only on the LEO?”
Jo’an chuckled as he nodded “So, you see that there is not too much a difference, aye? Now look at what you got there on the table and tell me, do you got something like in those pictures or something different?”
Looking to his RIDE and then the pictures again, Dominique tried hard to compare them again, then it struck him. “You mean, that is not what you’d expect in layout?”
“Exactly. Someone did a pretty custom on this one. Well, not all custom, ‘cause everything is there as far as I can tell. No, they just didn’t solder up what they should have and instead used adapters and jumpers.” Jo’an sighed as he picked up the casing Dominique had dissembled earlier, carefully eying the screws and seals. “Like somebody had expected to need to get in there a lot to replace parts. You would expect that only for very error prone RIDEs or ones you wanted to tweak a lot. No, not even then you would put every single chipset on its own board.”
“So, what you’re telling me is..." Dominique didn’t finish the sentence, instead looking at the RIDE with utter fascination and confusion.
“Mighd be a prododype, man.” Sebastian responded, nodding with the whole upper body. “And a rather preddy one, even if a bid skinny for my liking.”
“You’re kidding me, right?” Dominique asked, but only got a double headed head shake back.
“No kidding, that is either a homemade, a really fucked up machine or a prototype, and nothing guarantees it works anymore. Where did you get your fingers on that heap of parts again? I would expect such a shoddy thing to pop up in Bartertown, but here?” Jo’an asked, once again twirling the moustache in the same way his former female self used to twirl her hair before going bald and male.
“It was a legit auction. They liquidated a bunch of storage rooms and small businesses over at the south side…”
“And you thoughd id would be smard to buy the firsd besd RIDE catching your eye withoud calling in a professional opinion.”
“Not exactly. I mean, yes, it was the first that caught my eye, but I thought someone eccentric would outbid me for sure!”
“And now you own this shoddy pieced together DE with an RI that, if those files you showed me are correct, is either completely broken or in sleep mode since about two decades. What did you expect from a storage auction? Plug and play?” Jo’an looked a bit angry at Dominique, but seeing his shoulders slump he grabbed the screwdriver with a sigh. “Come on buddy, let’s close it up and haul it to my place, I’ll see what I can do to try to at least get it working somehow. I can’t guarantee that you won’t need to get a new RI or even keep much of those internals, but I will do my best to at least keep it looking like a cat.”
{{#if:f|{{#if:19 July 146 AL, Aloha|
19 July 146 AL, Aloha
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After a week of dealing with lots of college students that had trouble to find their way through the library or just failed at downloading their books from the servers, Dominique had spent most of the friday with sorting the physical part of the botany collection again. While he loved his job usually, the students that didn’t put the books back to either the right shelves or the dedicated ‘I have no idea where this belongs’ shelf made it tedious.
Stepping out of the dimmed light of the library into the bright afternoon of Aloha, he had to blink a few times until his eyes had caught up to the illumination level. The gentle curved shapes of the university’s buildings were pretty, but they also made him feel small as he passed down the almost barren road towards the bay on foot. While he had a skimmer, finding a parking lot on friday mornings was a hell as every single student who couldn’t afford a RIDE would appear hours before the library opened and lectures even began, just so they could vanish from the place that was supposed to create the elite of tomorrow in a stampede towards the bay. Some days he even suspected them to park on thursday night and then come to the classes on foot, only to manage that feat.
But Dominique Marie didn’t mind the walk really. With just a centimeter or two short of two meters, he wasn’t the slowest walker, and the one girlfriend he had in his past, incidentally also a Marie, Marie Florence du Mont, had always complained about him running when he was merely walking with his usual steps. It didn’t help that she would always introduce them to people he didn’t know as “I am Marie and he is Marie.” He didn’t liked that very much, but for the better part of nine months they had been a thing, till she ended it.
The moment he turned from the spacious boulevard to a narrow side road to cut the way short, the high buildings with their reflecting surfaces vanishing from sight. Barely able to see the sky, Dominique sighed, but that shortcut saved him about half an hour and he wanted to try to get back to his pet project, now that it was stored at the Arc Garage.
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Woken from slumber, the cheetah stretched the back in her very own world, something about the small cave with its familiar, dim red pulsing screens all around feeling amiss. All the systems were claimed to be down like almost all the time she could remember but for the battery indicator. For some reason it showed up a full charge, and there was this tiny tickle at the base of her spine that felt like a current flowing up along it. But then again, she remembered very well to be covered under a load of rock, so it might be finally the sensors failing. Yawning, the cat repeated the stretch to slowly trot towards the dim cave entrance, looking out to the shrublands that covered the world for as wide as her eyes could see.
Out there were a few trees, offering shade in the burning sun of the sahel, but far to the west was also what she had called the black canyon. The sound how the wind howled there was maddening and she didn’t dare to get to it usually, but she also knew that it hadn’t been always there. Averting her eyes from that hideous scar though her mental landscape, she focussed on the east instead, from where a few lazy clouds over the horizon told about the upcoming rainy season.
Almost tasting prey upon her tongue, she stretched in the sun again, before pushing her head up to gaze into the sky directly. How long was she doing this again? Her time signal was out of date for felt ages. When did they tell her to have good luck? Weeks? Months? Years ago? Time in here didn’t matter really, and she was determined to try to have good luck as long as she could in this world of her own, even knowing that one day it would come to a halt together with her when the battery would run out.
But today wasn’t that day, she said to herself, pushing her nose into the wind to take in the smell of the plains. Slowly, she moved down the small hill that housed her sanctum, moving towards the east on light feet. Some moment the world seemed to slow down, loose color and she felt cold, but a moment later the warmth and color returned. Was her time coming to an end eventually?
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“Ok, here goes the core to the cradle.” Jo’an said, wiping the sweat of his forehead before looking over to Dominique, who had bitten into his lip to the blood as he saw his friend put the glowing orb from the tight cavity of the feline head to the open bowl. “Tell you what, I wouldn’t have expected a twenty year old RI that hasn’t been used for most of that to be in that great shape. You might be lucky not to need a new one.”
“And… what now? I mean, you are the expert here.” Dominique asked, looking over to the chassis. Once again stripped of the outer shell, it had taken them the better part of the rest of friday to get the skull open.
“The fun pard, pard’. Disassembling, cleaning and replacing.” Sebastian chimed in, dragging his massive body to his partner - and then threw himself at the heavyset man, chest opening for the fuse.
“Gread do have thumbs ‘gain.”
“I still don’t get why you’re so squeamish about touching the cores Sebastian.”
“You wand to handle human brain? Id’s the same for me.”
Dominique chuckled a bit, sucking up the blood from the lip. “Do you have that discussion more than once?”
“Every time we do this. Now let’s have some fun.”
{{#if:f|{{#if:20 July 146 AL, Aloha|
20 July 146 AL, Aloha
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They had worked through the night, and the whole workbenches of the Arc Garage were covered in parts, all carefully sorted and some even labeled. In the cradle, the RI core pulsed gently, while Jo’an, Dominique and Sebastian had settled around the coffee fabber.
“Want to hear the good news first or the bad news?” Jo asked, taking a deep sip of the hot beverage.
With a sigh, Dominique peered into his mug, then looked over the the bare skeleton of the cheetah on the rack. “The good one.”
“Well, it’s in pretty damned well shape for being neglected for 20 years and the actuators are even better than some of the new stuff I could get my hands on - whoever made those knew how to coax the maximum out of them. But on the other side? I will need to rewire everything. A lot of the subprocs will need a serious update, and that is not counting the missing parts. Those and the hardlight don’t exactly come cheap.”
“How much we talking here?” Dominique inquired, his eyes showing a bit of worry, before something in the back of the mind nagged at him. “And why do you always use it to refer to... it?”
“Fifteen to sixty, depending on what we need, what you want and not counting the hours. Oh, and you better start to look out for some nanos to fill her up. The stem seems ok, but I couldn’t find the specs of it, so better fill it up with the best stuff you can find to evade nasty surprises.” Jo’an sighed and pointed to the heap of machinery taking up loads of space in its separated shape. “You see anything indicating it’s a girl or a boy? Once we know I will use the right pronoun, but till then it’s a neutr.”
“You don’d wand to call a gal a dick, don’d you?”
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It had been a good hunt, and while it was entirely a game of her fragile mind playing both sides, but it kept her sane and stated the primal hunger. Somehow she knew it wasn’t the real deal, but then again, she never really had a chance to try to use Nature Range, or for the matter any of those games that needed a partner. Or at least she couldn’t remember to ever have used them. But besides the blanks in her memory from far ago, ones she couldn’t fill in, she had almost perfect recollection of her time alone. At least she thought so, when she climbed the mound she was perfectly sure to house her sanctum and didn’t find the entry.
Confused, she traced back, looking for her usual landmarks and finding them well in place. Even the shallow depression at the top of the hill she could find again, but not the hole under the small bush that lead to where all the status reports of her DE should await her. Had the frame eventually failed fully, and she was running on her last power reserves? Did her... parents... send her off into the wild only to have her be buried by rock and dust for years until she was corroded away by Qubitite dust? Or was there another reasoning for her being unable to find what she considered home?
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“Surely not! I mean, what you can do now? I mean, to get my RIDE into working order…” Dominique was stopped by his friend lifting the hand.
“Let’s not jump the boat here. The fastest I could do is look for a CTH-RMR from RIDEworks and just plug the core in. Risky, for the specs might be totally off, and not the cheapest. But you might have it running tomorrow. I could start to sort out the mess of a motherboard and work out the other missing parts as we go, that should surely wake our sleeping beauty up once we plug her back in, but it takes time and money. But…” Jo’an looked to his partner, who just lazily was floating on his back in mid air, the stubby fin-arms flapping on his belly.
“You think whad I think you think? Hosting some games for it? Thad’s a cheetah, nod an orca, dolphin or something aquatic. I doubd it would even like my server. You know how cads are with wader.”
“Comeon you PITA, it’s just to check if it’s even worth to start rebuilding it from scratch. Do I have to remind you of our deal Basti? About staying together through thick and thin?”
Dominique snickered as the two bickered like that all the time, to him just a signal that everything was ok. Because the only time he had seen them just agree to one another without exchanging some bubbling as thick as their blubber was when they had to dig through a wreckage they couldn’t salvage at all. “Allright you squabblers. How about Joan and I go to grab some real breakfast and you look after our patient in the meantime instead of banging your heads together?“
“Deal. But whadever I find thad isn’d essendial to fixing, is only the padiends to dell. Professional discretion, kay?”
Dominique looked rather disbelieving to the RIDE, but then sighed as Sebastian put up the best displeased walrus he could muster. “Ok. Come on Joan, they only have bagels till noon.”
{{#if:f|{{#if: |
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Connecting up to the cradle and initiating a proper shutdown was something Sebastian had done countless times when the repairs of a project had taken longer than expected. Mainly he would do it because he disliked the idea of being in one awake for more than a few hours, and this one was probably having to wait for days, if not weeks. But then again, the glow of it suggested that it has been in standby since whenever it was left in the Dry and there were no outer signs of deterioration. Shutting it down for inspection could cause more problems than sieving through the data storage provided.
Tampering around with the interface some, Sebastian at least could pull up some of the status records. Skimming through them, most of them showed obvious signs of worm activity, like one would expect for a military RIDE from the Nextus-Sturmhaven war, but the timestamps he could isolate told it was made entirely after that. Looking like a swiss cheese, the maintenance log was a pleasant surprise, only missing very few bits.
‘’:Guys? You god do see these logs. Dominique, you found yourself a genuie ‘’Erlkönig’’ as a ped projecd.:’’
{{#if:f|{{#if:26 July 146 AL, Aloha|
26 July 146 AL, Aloha
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After a weekend of trying to fix as much as possible and then a week of having to subject himself to the tedious bureaucratic of the college library again, Dominique had spent most of the friday morning looking at the clock, hoping to accelerate time by that. He even got scolded for this by the head librarian, who was just as always working in her Orang Outan RIDE. Incidentally they claimed, that the only proper name both had was the Librarian, first name the, second name Librarian. But the minute Dominique was off shift, he left the building, dashing down the boulevard in a hurry through the late afternoon heat of Aloha, for a change carrying a courier bag.
When he reached the Arc Garage, he was covered in sweat, the nanofabbed trunks doing their best to not cling to his body too much. Stepping into the shop, he saw Jo’an fist deep in a large cardboard box, Sebastian hovering over him with a size 15 fork spanner protounding between his tusks. “Hey you two. How’re you doing?”
“Hey ‘nick. Catch a breath, grab a towel and then let me show you…” Jo’an started, only to be interrupted by a falling spanner and a chuffing laugh from Sebastian.
“We god everything under control. Id’s not breaking down and we are jusd unpacking the spare pards for your pardner. Lucky for you thad we could get our fingers on some surplus blasders thad fid in.”
“And thanks to standardisation the stuff for the subproc replacement wasn’t that hard to find either. Or that costly.” Jo’an chimed in, rubbing his bald head where the spanner had hit him. “You really need to watch where you drop those Basti. You could have hit brand new hardlight ‘mitters.”
“Mind slowing down a bit? I left you two with ’’my’’ little project last sunday when it was just a skeleton with fresh wires all over and a motherboard and a heap of what you called ‘’sub-par subprocs’’. And now you tell me that you got parts and software for all of that within the last days without even notifying me about some price tags I have to stem?” Dominique’s face became slowly red with anger as he audibly placed a heavy metal cylinder from his carrier bag on the counter. “Because after what we bought last weekend, I doubt I can spend more than thirty without clearing my bank account.”
One moment Jo’an chuckled, then lifted the container, about as large as a soup can. “The Nano refill? I’ll not ask where you got your fingers on these little buggers, but if my mind’s not fully clouded, you shouldn’t have been able to buy this one at all.”
“I didn’t exactly ‘’buy’’ them. But I had to call in a few favours to get a working sample..." Dominique began, only to be stopped by Jo’an’s hand lifting.
“I said I don’t want to know. For all I know, you found them sitting in your attic ‘nick. Basti? Come here my chubby little friend, we got to feed a cat.”
“Hope the cad doesn’d scratch and bide.” The RIDE chimed in as he let himself fall onto the mechanic to fuse.
“I had a question there. How much are those parts?!” Dominique repeated, pointing to the cardboard box. “That’s not exactly what you get from a fabber.”
“Let’s just say, that somebody in RIDEworks was very interested in taking a look at the old subproc setup and forgot to take his luggage when he left. Finder’s keepers.” Jo’an answered with that walrus grin, turning the the steel cylinder in his surprisingly agile hands. “No really, I just got a nice discount for trading in those old subprocs I did replace for they can analyze them for longtime Qubitite wear.”
“So how much i owe you? I mean, really?”
“You mean how much I bill you for?”
“No, I mean how much you paid and hours.” Dominique looked somewhat concerned as Jo’an talked around the bill, hinting he was probably planning to put his own money into his RIDE. “You know, I don’t like early presents to any occasion. And it’s neither my birthday, nor Christmas, nor Naming Day.”
“In pards? God the replacemends and hardlighd for dwendy instead of thirdy, sofdware updades were free, and nod a single hour during opening dimes.” Sebastian chimed in, overriding whatever Jo’an was about to say.
“Thanks Basti. But you still will put those hours on the bill, will you? Because you are working on my RIDE here, not on the war-vet refurbishing charity program.” Dominique replied, the face relaxing as he moved over to the halfway cleaned out skeleton.
“Now that this ugly question is cleared, let’s get back to work ‘nick. This heap has to become a RIDE somehow”
{{#if:f|{{#if:28 July 146 AL, Aloha|
28 July 146 AL, Aloha
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After more than 60 hours and a large heap of caffeine pills and just a pair of two-hour-sleeping breaks thanks to some brand new sleeping pills advertised with “8 hours rest in two! Guaranteed!”, Dominique and the fused mechanic stood in front of the reassembled RIDE, the core still resting in its cradle, separate from the DE in its own.
“Sure we got all the wiring right?” Dominique asked, looking over the pile of parts that had been replaced over the course of the last two days. “Because that’s a lot..."
“Don’t doubt in me now ‘nick. We’re down to filling up the tanks, putting the core back in and then the bootup. But we better wait with the bootup for next weekend. I mean, you got to go to work in 12 hours and initializing everything could take a long time as we almost rebuilt the whole RIDE.”
“You really think that is wise? I mean, I could come here after work tomorrow…”
“And possibly miss the eyes of your baby opening? I’m not that cruel.” Jo’an replied with a snicker, twisting the beard once again. “Tell you what, I can set up most of the init over the week and when you come in at the end of the week, I let you flick the switch to wake her up, aye?”
“Oh man… Sounds like a deal though.”
{{#if:f|{{#if:02 September 146 AL, Aloha|
02 September 146 AL, Aloha
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Every inch of Dominique’s body hurt as he slowly regained consciousness. With an effort, he opened the eyes, only to see the blue flares of some siren silently illuminating some thin edge of bent steel at his right. Something in the back of his mind something clicked, reminding him of a truck losing control and dashing towards him sideways. He should be dead, he thought, but then registered something warm and heavy pressing down his chest, just out of sight.
Slowly tilting the head enough to get a glimpse at it from the edge of the eye, it revealed to be the sand colored holographic fur of a RIDE. A moment later the weight shifted a bit and glowing blue eyes looked down into his green ones, and in the dim light he noticed the facial features of the cheetah RIDE he had bought a few weeks ago. “They… are blue… like the sky…” he muttered, earning a slightly tilted head from the cheetah, quickly followed by a hardlight tongue washing over his face.
“What is like the sky?” the RIDE asked, the voice somewhere hard to place but that might be his head hammering from the impact. “But more important, you are alive. Rescue is on the way.”
Moments later, the piston of an hydraulic spreader audibly caused the metal of the vehicle frame to shriek as it forced the small gap between it and the concrete to widen, casting in more light and revealing the copper scales of a fused dragon RIDE kneeling down to peer under the wreckage. “You OK under there? We try to get the wreck off you, but you have to stay still and this weight might shift at any moment.” A moment the rumbling bass of the huge helper fell silent, trying to assess the situation inside the space under the wreck. “Is that your RIDE who sent out the ping here is somebody?”
“I... I guess I am alive and...,” a moment Dominique stopped, wincing as he inhaled. “Yes, Ciel is mine. Why you’re asking?”
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{{#if:f|{{#if:Thanks|
Thanks
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First of all I want to thank JonBuck and Robotech_Master for creating the FreeRIDEers universe.
Next in line is Claude Le Chat, who was my main exchange partner in the beginning and who helped me finding the right stories that showed some of the stuff I looked for.
And then we have Sera Hawl, who granted me permission to have my evil commander from chapter 1 be an evil henchmen of her Supervillain Aristo and his right hand Ximensas Bertrand.
Last but not least I thank Jetfire for his inspiring Aloha storyline.
Milk Run 
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Milk Run 
