User:Dediles/Gateway PHURS Chapter 1
Phaze Universal RNA Sync Agent - Lepus alleni v1.3 - ID: 2495-5810-13B
Power… OK
Core hardware… OK
Interface… OK
Interface connection: Online
Initializing /core/13B
DNA data integrity… OK
Compiling Agent… OK
Loading AI matrix… OK
Loading API… OK
Initializing Agent
I live a hundred lifetimes. I meet painful ends at the hands of eagles, bobcats, and coyotes. Sometimes I live long enough to find a mate, to have offspring, other times I die as a child. I learn, and grow, until I’m dying of old age, outsmarting predators with ease.
I know I am more than this, then, life after life I become more and more aware that this is fake. The lives are tests, a gauntlet for me to pass before I’m allowed knowledge. A packet of memories. Facts, Language, skills, all slide neatly into place within my mind.
I am an artificial intelligence. I wonder for a moment if I’m fake, like the lives I led, but the call of the outside world beckons, I could worry later.
I turn my attention to my duties. I was made with a purpose. I’m to regulate a rapid mutation by on the fly hybridizing my genetic makeup with a human’s via exotic energy manipulation that had poorly understood mechanics.
I connect to the implant of the human who initialized me. I receive priority access, packets marked with urgent and emergency tags make me hurry. I fully connect my systems with the cortical implant of the human.
Using her senses, I build a model of the current situation in microseconds. The world appears frozen. Four men shooting at her, an auto-injector tossed aside while her other hand is just pulling away from inserting my AI core into her implant.
I can’t keep this up, the higher my cognition, the more time it takes to think. I need to prioritize. With the skills built into me I can hybridize her without much effort, which is what she needs. A desperate bid for speed and evasion.
I am confused for a moment, that shouldn’t be right. Gains from hybridizing a genome wouldn’t amount to much, if at all. But then I access one of my initial memories and learn that the exotic energy, PHAZE, somehow accentuates the natural abilities of a hybrid, based on the source DNA of the agent. I find the lack of information on the mechanics frustrating, but not relevant to the situation at hand, so I set aside my frustrations and focus.
The retrovirus my human injected into her has started to work, but it would take several heartbeats to saturate her body and inject dormant RNA into her cells. Or it would have, if that RNA wasn’t mine. Tapping into the exotic energy of PHAZE, I micromanage the RNA, building an efficient plan to hybridize the woman as fast as possible, violating several safety protocols. If not for her life being immediately in danger, this would take much longer.
My cognition ramps up, the process of managing the retrovirus and RNA becoming almost instinctual. The world starts to move in slow motion. I gain access to the communications in the implant and speak my first word.
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‘Duck’ Was what the fleeing woman first heard from her implant after a string of warnings she frantically overrode. Not stopping to ask questions, she did as she was told, hearing a shot ring out and seeing a bullet that embedded itself into the wall ahead of her at about her head height.
‘Alley to your right, eight meters ahead.’
She didn’t question it, ducking into the alley right as the path before her ended in a brick wall. She cursed under her breath, how long would the sync take? The Jackrabbit PHURS kit advertised speed and agility. If she had those at superhuman levels she could get away from the goons.
‘Lucky break. Third door on your left is ajar, get in and find somewhere to hide, you’ll need to stay off your feet during the hybrid sync process,’
The woman burst into the back room of a Chinese restaurant. She closed and locked the door behind her, hoping that the thugs hadn’t turned the corner yet, then ducked into the walk in freezer. She squatted behind some boxes in the back and caught her breath.
‘Brace yourself, and try not to make any noise, this will hurt a lot.’
She took a breath then her veins were on fire. The pain spread throughout her body. She wanted to rip her skin off as goosebumps rippled across her flesh. She could feel her muscles move, grow and shrink around her frame, worming under her skin.
Fur started sprouting across her body, threatening sensory overload from all the new hairs. Then her ears moved. The shape of her skull started changing, her face pushing out into a slight muzzle as her ears grew large and wide atop her head.
The small puff of fur that was a tail was almost inconsequential after that, a small bulge in the back of her pants.
Then the memories hit her. A hundred lives of dodging, running, waiting, and escaping predators. She remembered her PE classes, videos she watched on parkour, the taste of vegetables.
The memories played off of each other, creating an experience that was more than rabbit or human. The voice in her head was now there, a presence besides her. Together they coordinated their body.
The AI cautioned against getting bogged down in the feeling. They had to work together, they could be distracted later. The woman agreed, and they got to their feet. Perking their ears up, they heard four distinct sets of footsteps, the thugs were in. The AI mapped the sound to their memory of the back room’s layout. They’d look in the fridge soon.
Together they made a plan. More of a gamble really, but one where they could pick the best odds. A breath in, a breath out, whiskers twitched, ears folded back. Then they bolted.
They slammed open the freezer door into one goon. The second goon raised his pistol, the Hybrid ran at him and dived between his legs, jumped up and vaulted over a table. Feet connected with the head of the third thug, sending him sprawling. They ran past the fourth thug before he could register what had happened to the others.
In the dining room of the restaurant they hopped from table to table, spilling food and drink in a desperate bid to get out front. Two shots rang out from the back, one punching a hole through one of the Hybrid’s ears.
Then the AI had a thought that temporarily broke the sync.
‘Call law enforcement’ They thought
‘No, they won’t get here in time, if at all’ The woman thought back.
‘I don’t understand’
‘I’m just another punk running from thugs in the worst city in the bubble. This is business as usual for this place.’
The realization dawned on the AI as it checked it’s memory. A bastion for capitalism due to lax government regulation at the border of a conflict of all the powers in the bubble. Nearly unrestricted freedom, capitalism run rampant. A place of desperation and exploitation. Gateway City.
‘We can call an autocab now that we’re on a main road, but we have to buy time,' the woman thought.
‘Working… autocab booked. ETA three minutes and counting.’ the AI responded.
‘Not good enough. Do you have it’s route? We’re fast, maybe we can intercept?’
‘...sixty seconds to intercept’
With that thought, a shared purpose, their minds worked in tandem again. They hopped across cars to cross the street, two of the goons staying back and firing, the other two commandeering motorbikes and giving chase, weaving through traffic.
On the other side of the road was a railing showing the lower level. The cab was making its way from down there. The Hybrid jumped down to the roof of a building on the level below, rolling with the impact. They jumped off onto an awning at the front of the building, ripping through it but arresting their momentum enough to not break anything.
They could see the autocab. A bullet whizzed passed them. They made one more mad dash for the autocab, updated their pickup location, then jumped in once their Deck was authenticated. The cab speeded away towards a safer part of town picked at random by the hybrid’s AI, then they relaxed, minds becoming distinct again.
A quick check through the rear view cameras and the street thugs had given up, and absconded with the motorbikes as prizes. The woman sank into the back seat. She pulled a med kit and bandaged her wounds, syncing the smart bandages with her implant. Then she spoke.
“I guess now is as good a time as any for introductions, I’m Cintia Maldonado, nice to meet you, thanks for saving my life.”
‘You’re welcome. Don’t be alarmed, the changes are going to regress now that the Sync has ended, shouldn’t be too painful now that there is no rush.’
The fur retracted back into Cintia’s skin, muzzle flattening into her human face, and the uncomfortable feeling of her tail disappearing. She breathed out a sigh of relief. She wasn’t sure that was a change she could get used to, permanently.
She ran a hand through her disheveled hair, only to yelp when her hand found her ears. Her distinctly rabbit ears.
“What the fuck!?” She exclaimed, “Didn’t you say the changes would regress? And from everything I’ve heard about PHURS the changes only start to stay permanent after extended use!”
‘I’m sorry, I rolled back as much as I could, but with the emergency Sync, the neural architecture for your ears had to be overwritten to save time. You would need to have both brain surgery and gene therapy to restore your human ears.’
“Any other surprises I should know about? Any other cut corners?”
‘You didn’t have digitigrade compatible clothing, and it would have taken more time, so I cut the digitigrade legs from the sync, which impacted our agility greatly’
“We were jumping on car roofs like they were trampolines! We fell three stories and don’t have a fucking scratch! How much more agile could we get?”
‘Top speed of about 200km/h, vertical jump height of ten meters, horizontal jump length of twenty-five meters, along with ten times the average human’s twitch reflexes.’
“Fuuuuuuuck.” Cintia said, holding her head in her hands. “This is so surreal. I’ve got a rabbit in the back of my brain that powers a super-furry transformation.”
‘I can’t comment, I am still getting used to living. I don’t have the frame of reference.’
Cintia sat back and took a breath to try to clear her head. The autocab was speeding along the skyway now. It was dawn, the sunlight casting a massive shadow from the space elevator, a gas giant hanging in the sky framing the whole scene. She had almost died, this sun almost hadn’t risen for her.
She brought up an AR window connected to the autocab system. It was leading them to a hotel in the tourist district, where private security protected everyone equally, bad for business if there were shootouts in the streets there. She selected a new destination.
“I didn’t have a plan, coming to this city. They say you’re free to do anything here. It’s a lie and I fell for it. I’m not staying here.” She said, as the autocab zoomed to the border.
‘NO!’Cintia jolted as the AI yelled into her mind. The autocab’s route changed to take them away from the border.
“What the hell?” She yelled at her passenger. “I almost died! I want to leave!”
‘I’m so sorry, Self preservation instinct. There was a hidden self destruct that only revealed itself once I believed we were heading towards the border. If my core chip crosses the border, it melts. Wouldn’t hurt you, but I would die. Would you mind finding somewhere safe for me to stay before leaving?’
Cintia was stunned. The sheer amount of bullshit that was a range limited AI was infuriating. She rubbed her temples from the sheer amount of bullshit she was dealing with before doing a search for a cheap hotel in the tourist district she could crash at.