Interlude: Strawberry Crumble
15 Aug 2024 - XSYS Team
Previously: Marlow agreed to help repair Doctor Okazaki’s ship, in exchange for removing the world-jumping device from it. After all, in the wrong hands, such a device could wreak havoc. Magus expressed doubt at her strategy– after all, if both he and Doctor Okazaki had independently created devices, couldn’t someone else?
Open on the docks, in the afternoon. Doctor Okazaki’s massive brass-and-gears ship looks out of place bobbing in the waves. Okazaki’s technician, in an oil-stained jumpsuit, is directing several other humanoids and synths in lifting a large armillary-sphere-esque assembly out of the back of the ship.
- OIL-STAINED TECHNICIAN [shouting, distantly from the camera]: Okay, careful, steady, step, step, step, hold…
The group carries it onto the dock, and starts moving down onto the street. Marlow is leading them towards the distant silhouette of the Polaris building, the building from which she functions as de-facto city leader.
The technician leaps down. Doctor Okazaki is standing on the dock, her arms folded, looking understandably cross.
- DR OKAZAKI: Well, there goes my life’s work. I expected something like this might end up happening, but I was hoping to make it more than a few jumps first.
- OIL-STAINED TECHNICIAN [wiping their forehead]: You’re not gonna ask me to improvise a whole new core out of an extra synth-shell and half a pizza, are you?
- DR OKAZAKI: …Is that on the table?
- OIL-STAINED TECHNICIAN: Not unless you can accelerate it to nine-tenths the speed of light, and then get it back.
- DR OKAZAKI: I’ll keep you posted.
Okazaki walks offscreen.
Cut to the arena, near dusk. The floor of the arena is partially pulled up, and Magus is walking around with half his body obscured in that pit, alternately coordinating the synth team and typing on a wrist-mounted cyberdeck-style computer. Okazaki sits on the edge of the drop floor, her lab coat splayed out a little.
- DR OKAZAKI: Anything I can help with?
- MAGUS: [sizing her up thoughtfully] You want to take your mind off it, or you want to blow off steam?
- DR OKAZAKI: I’ll take the latter, if you’re offering.
- MAGUS: Great, I still need to make sure I didn’t screw up the holoemitters. Just bonk things until they evaporate.
Magus sounds a little like he’s telling a white lie. He types a few keystrokes, and a white doll-body sprite materializes atop the drop floor. Okazaki nods sharply and snags a length of pipe from under the exposed floor on her way to her feet– she swings it rather like a golf club, and the sprite explodes into pixels.
- MAGUS: …I think it’s bullshit too. For whatever that’s worth.
- DR OKAZAKI: Not worth much, if I’m honest. Words are cheap.
- Okazaki glances over, waiting for Magus to spawn another. He does.
- MAGUS: Believe me, I’ve pulled all the levers I have. Marlow keeps a tight, tight lid on that kinda tech. And as long as all the synths see her as their leader…
- Okazaki kicks the next one in the chest and jabs with the pipe as a follow-up, though it’s too short for her reflexive stab to connect. It disintegrates.
- MAGUS: …anyway, you’re welcome to hang out here as long as you want.
- DR OKAZAKI: [catching her breath] …Is there even anything else out there?
- MAGUS: The crash site of my last arena, a couple miles out. Nothin’ else, as far as I can tell. To hear the synths tell it, this city’s the only thing that’s ever existed, and the rest is rolling open countryside as far as anyone’s ever explored.
- DR OKAZAKI: How can that be true? Any civilization sophisticated enough to produce synthetic life couldn’t have lived its entire history inside a few square kilometers.
- MAGUS: Could’ve been seeded by another society that moved on.
- DR OKAZAKI: That’s a funny thought. I wonder how long world-travel’s existed. How many people have independently invented it.
- MAGUS: The answer to that question terrifies me.
Magus looks up to the sky. Night has fallen, but the sky is completely starless, given the light pollution from the surrounding city.
- MAGUS: If you look up at the sky, and you think about every star you can see, and every star you can’t… and, what. Maybe one in a trillion has people around it. And one in a trillion of those survives long enough to make something that lets them reach out and touch another world…
- DR OKAZAKI: Then where the hell are the rest of them?
- MAGUS: [laughing] Yeah. Where the hell is my audience, more like. …It wasn’t always like this! It used to be easy, you’d have people stumble in all the time from weird distant places.
- DR OKAZAKI: [resting the pipe on her shoulder] Right. Six years, or so?
- MAGUS: Closer to seven, now. [shakes head] I just hope Marlow sees reason. The tighter she crushes down on this kind of tech, the less prepared we’re going to be. Hell, there might be someone already in the city, and they’re just smart enough not to announce it.
- DR OKAZAKI: [staring up at the sky]
- MAGUS: …Doc?
- DR OKAZAKI: You raise some excellent points. I’ll see you later, Magus.
- MAGUS: Gonna get some shut-eye?
- DR OKAZAKI: Something like that.
She walks out of the arena. Magus, meanwhile, returns to working on the arena.
- MAGUS: …God dammit, I needed that pipe.