Ulla Vangelis – Leslie
Reggie Carlisle – John (Beta)
Trae Mowaka- Jesse
Jack Nash – John (Prime)
GM- Tod Foley
It’s been a long night. Ulla and Nash clean their wounds, and everybody takes turn on watch while getting some sleep. While on watch, Nash cleans the weapons and mounts Erstlinger’s gun on the base of Reggie’s jar. Trae uses his watch shift to mess with the “Fred” killbot. He manages to get it online again, but without proper electronics equipment, his fix probably won’t last long.
Later that afternoon they take off into the badlands heading east by southeast (the direction Erstlinger had pointed). Reggie and Nash are discussing the difference between reality and memories when a vortex suddenly opens up ahead, and sitting at its edge is a military-drab 2-liter canister with a row of red blinking lights on top. Nash instantly recognizes it as live ordnance, and shouts for everyone to hit the deck.
Reggie pushes with all his mental power in an attempt to shut the vortex, but instead he only manages to disable the canister itself. The blinking sequence stops as the vortex whirls up and away again, leaving the inert canister sitting there… and then the lid starts to open. Ulla realizes what’s about to come out, and she shouts “NANOBOTS!”
Everybody draws their weapons while Trae dives toward the canister, attempting to hack it as quickly as possible. He’s able to establish contact with the onboard system — and recognizes it as Wolfram code — but is unable to do anything else about the rising cloud of nanobots that quickly swarms all over everyone.
A cloud of nanobots enters Nash’s stun baton, morphing it into a writhing snake, and he jumps back. Another buzzing cloud surrounds Ulla, entering her head through her ears and skin, while an even larger cloud covers Trae’s body. But when the nanos in Ulla’s head reach her central DNI processor, something unexpected happens: her system “speaks the same code” as the tiny devices, and manages to pull them all under her control. Focusing on a single goal, she calls the entire swarm back to her… and they all fly directly into her head.
Ulla’s eyes go wide. Her vision and hearing are turned “up to eleven” — nothing but blinding white light and vast waves of horrendous sound — and as the two networks fall into synchromesh, she feels the unspeakable sensation of millions of tiny bots entering her head *from both inside and outside at the same time*. She falls to her knees and begins vomiting. Then, quickly as it started, it’s over. Her head is throbbing. There’s no sign of the swarm, though Ulla’s skull has grown slightly larger in size. Nash runs to her aid while Trae processes what he’s just seen: his network picked up a signal when Ulla called the nanos, and he could tell exactly where it came from. Ulla — he realizes — has a DNI implant in her head that she hasn’t told anyone about… and it’s all Wolfram tech.
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