[font=Lucida Console]It was the stuff of books, really.
One thing was being an archeologist on some dig site looking for knick knacks and decoding alien texts.
Another was finding the dig sites.
Not just taking samples in the dirt either, some of those places would be too far underground.
Serpentinius was a famous explorer, at least to some degree- had always been a science nut anda daydreamer, spending too much time on neural games than on his tudies, fortunately.
Yes, fortunately. He'd been able to hone his reaction time, and it had saved him in more than a few scraped. Some people didn't believe stories of his exploits however, they also probably didn't need to as he didn't tell them. He wrote books about them. None of them any particurlarily interesting, mostly field notes and studies, he had a cult following among university students.
A cult following.
This is the one story that changed all of that however.
People would know "snake" by the end of it.
Partly because it was true, mostly because it had action, intrigue, suspense!
[font=Lucida Console]Skipping some of the long storytelling bits, trivia and possibly extravagant descriptions, here are some bits and pieces of what happened on this fateful trip:
"It was deep inside the Omicron systems when I found it, or, well, it found me. The black starcloud itself. An imposing nebula of thunder and gas pockets, serene violence and death, in a can, so to speak." Was what the professor had said to me when he told me about it, I had gone out here to find such a thing, and I was mildly disappointed.
The gas pockets? They were there, but there were no enery discharges and the way deeper inside was, for lack of words, very neat. The gas formed a tunnel around the ship, debris floating around eeriely.
It wasn't serene, nor was it violent.
It was creepy.
It was black.
Dark like the clouds back home, an ominous, quiet sensation of doom spread over me. Nevermind the excerpt of his logs, Snake proceeded deeper into the abyss, this nebula wasn't all that large, just... out of the way, one of those things where you end up cruise-speeding for at least a month in one direction. He steered his current live-ship closer into the dark, a camara transport, so he was at least stocked on basic needs for the trip and back.
The journey had made him feel old, he was no longer scavenging for simple 'kavosh relics in space.
He was exploring, discovering, seeing.
And here, he'd found a machine. A machine that, well, he didn't know what it did, but it seemed to be the cause of the nebula.
Mainly the volatile gasses hugging around it. It was here he also noticed the "tunnel" was, indeed, artificial, a form of ring structure coursing with fading energy seemed to pry open the gap. Snake guided his ship towards the construction, anchoring against it, strapping himself into a vaccuum suit, and letting himself flow slowly out of the airlock. into an opening not too a-similar to a doorway in a temple-type digsite he saw once.
He thought the nebula was dark.
This.
This was devoid of light.
Snake tried turning on the light on his torch, which seemed to just flicker out at the mere mention of straining itself. Either, the bateries just shorted... or something here gave off a strong enough electromagnetic pulse to at least stop a flashlight. He cursed, and put it back in its holster among various other tools, pulled out a sealed tube of sorts, fumbling around for it in the darkness. Finally, the dim light crackled to life, and he held it up to the expanse of darkness above him.
It was still dark, but he could.. hear things.
This was space, in a suit, in vacuum.. But he heard things- from outside.
visitors, He thought.
If there were any, he'd be out for a case of bad juju, very bad juju.
He was out in the middle of the rear end of nowhere's cousin, twice removed.
Nowhere to run. He cast a glance out through the hole he'd pushed through.
The debris out there was crashing into itself, and the.. ring had collapsed.
Just his luck. Nowhere to go but forward, and the abyss was staring back.
Or so he thought.
An automaton seemed to be suspended from the ceiling, the dim lighting of his flare making it look more alivee than it could ever be. This.. was some sort of computer, pretty primitive looking, for that matter, but older than anything he'd encountered, he concluded, simply because it looked that way.
A small screen of light hovered in the ai.. well, space, before him, floating aimlessly, with a last sliver of energy left trying to deliver a dying error message to a man who couldn't read that dialect of alien moonspeak.
[font=Lucida Console]It took days, by his own counting, to strip the derelict of artifacts. None of them seemed to be any valuable, or in working order. And he wasn't oing to last if he spent days here without a way back. He was about to accomplish a scientific feat unfit of a lonely man without a lab and proper tools... He was, no, he had to fix whatever machine was here, it was, so far, his only hope of getting out.
A week has come.. and gone, with me toiling on this machine. I think it's sentient, It.. talks to me, when I'm not paying attention... or when I have my head stuck down inside the walls looking for any wiring I have yet to find.. It's.. I know it sounds crazy but it's helping me fix itself.
[font=Lucida Console][color=#000000]And fixed it, he did. As it turned out, the machine was a sort of unfinished bibliotheque. It had an aversion to the word "library" once it learned a couple of other human words, claiming "I am a catalogue of information, not general storage!" Oh great, thought Snake, the thing was developing a personality.
Time once again, passed him by.
This facility was supposed to be more, so much more, this was only a piece of it, and a piece of that, again, was all he was left with, when he was done. A small orb, in which the AI could 'live', and interface with Serpentinius through.
It was broken, and incomplete in the first place.
But with it, he could re-boot the storm tunnel, get out, and live to tell the tale.
Which contrary to his beliefs, wouldn't make him all that famous, just recognized.
He could tell a tale, and had proof, that he manually fixed alien technology, however simple, it was the talk of all of cambridge for a while. A pathetically short while, in which he had to attend seminars he didn't care for, didn't like.
The people would know, he had swore.
They knew. It wasn't all that grand..
Alas, this was just the beginning for the young man, but he didn't know it yet.