Apollo 2017/05/18(Thu)22:53 No. 802853 ID: efc9ab
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>If it was obvious I wouldn't have asked. Might be the whole not-native-language-or-species thing, but you also didn't answer the question.
"Oh! Sorry, I meant, uh, how do you say..." They tap their chin. "Certainly!"

"It was an either/or question."

"Yes!"

We go back and forth for a little longer than is worth describing, but I break down the language barrier enough to know they're here for both of us.

>But does it repeat itself? Like, is this another version of our history that happened after the one we are familiar with ended?
"Pretty much, to put it in very reductive terms. You and me were amongst the lucky ones to get out before it all collapsed."

"Alright, give me that cable."

They give a sigh of relief and hand it to me, and I take that chance to leap in and smooch 'em right on their dumb face.

Apollo 2017/05/18(Thu)22:53 No. 802855 ID: efc9ab
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I wave my hand in front of their face.

They don't respond.


I think we overwhelmed them.

Are you seriously not gonna say goodbye to your friends?

>>802855
Damn, finally, you were starting to wonder if you broke something with that not working on anyone.

Smug smile, and jack in.

>>802866
We're not leaving yet (unless this person lied). The jack isn't the way out of the matrix, it's for a brain to bird brain infodump to try and convince us to leave.

Looks like a bad input. Better smooch again to get 'em unstuck.

Apollo 2017/05/22(Mon)14:14 No. 803628 ID: efc9ab
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>Are you seriously not gonna say goodbye to your friends?
No.
>We're not leaving yet (unless this person lied). The jack isn't the way out of the matrix, it's for a brain to bird brain infodump to try and convince us to leave.
That is correct.

>Looks like a bad input. Better smooch again to get 'em unstuck.
Worth a shot.

Apollo 2017/05/22(Mon)14:15 No. 803629 ID: efc9ab
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A vein on their face bursts, spraying coolant all over me.

I don't think that helped.

Apollo 2017/05/22(Mon)14:15 No. 803630 ID: efc9ab
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>Smug smile, and jack in.

Apollo 2017/05/22(Mon)14:24 No. 803635 ID: efc9ab
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They start talking rapidly as the world comes into focus, uttering a series of whistles, hoots, howls, that all come together in a strange bird song. After a moment the noise shifts, somehow not changing at all but becoming entirely understandable to me.

"-I'm so sorry about damaging your clothes, it was just so sudden and I got a little overwhelmed and then the central heating may have peaked in response and-"

"It's okay!" I shout, shocking them out of their ramble. "I'm used to it at this point."

They seem none the less embarrassed despite my assurance. "Very well then, I hope you like the accommodations. I loaded in some drinks if you'd like them. And some music, for comfort. Is that dress okay? It's what you wore during our time here but if you'd prefer I could load some different attire- oh I'm getting carried away. Uh, what were we just discussing again?"

>>803635
Have a drink! The cable was to explain the "outsiders" thing, so let's start off with that.

Secondly, what's up with all the voices in your head (us)? Thirdly, you saw a bunch of other bodies that looked like you; are you not the first copy of Marie they sent in to stop this? A lot of them were destroyed, so it seems like Roderick was very well prepared indeed. One of them was crushed by some facility walls that got smashed together...

I think actually we fixed part of the damage Roderick did. The cybernetics program was sabotaged due to his interference but Haley and Liz are now mostly-functional synthetics and thus serve as living proof that the brain template works. Just gotta make sure they're not full of Victor.

But anyway, the plan now is: we leave Morgan to do his thing, make sure Victor isn't trying to hitch a ride on anyone, and then leave.

>Is that dress okay?
It's fine, been a while since I wore a nice dress. At least, I think so. Unreliable memory and being apparently inserted into a narrative, and all.

It's comfortable. And pretty.

>I loaded in some drinks if you'd like them
Sure! Nothing mind-altering, if we're simulating biological processes, please. Surprise me! Plus side of memory lapses is getting to try things for the first time again.

>Uh, what were we just discussing again?
I believe you were about to give the the secret answers to life, the universe, and everything?

(Come on, he's fun to fluster, and it's sorta accurate if more grandiose sounding).

That is, you were going to explain what I was doing where I was, why I was there, and why I should go back with you. You're trying to tell me what's going on and convince me of something.

"I hope overheating you with surprise smooches didn't cause permanent damage." eye wink.

"You're tall."

Damn they tall

>>803635
literally nothing, we just got here.

Apollo 2017/10/11(Wed)23:01 No. 836077 ID: efc9ab
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>Damn they tall
I don't think I even come up to their waist if we were standing.

>Sure! Nothing mind-altering, if we're simulating biological processes, please. Surprise me! Plus side of memory lapses is getting to try things for the first time again.
I take one of the drinks at random. It tastes not unlike having a gold brick thrown through my brain. I have to blink away the stars in my eyes before I can continue. "I believe you were about to give the the secret answers to life, the universe, and everything?"

They spit out their drink and stutter out half a response.

"I'm kidding."

"I hope so! I don't know everything in the universe."

>what's up with all the voices in your head (us)?
"Neural code. Not the best transfered, mostly bits and pieces, and whatever sections of it were cognizant managed to start talking to you."

"So I have people in my head."

"Fragments of digital ghosts. Unfortunately, you all have grown into eachother such that I don't think I could separate you. The line between what parts were originally you and what parts were originally them have become too blurry now." They shrug. "Perhaps if we had met sooner- well, that kind of thinking won't help anyone."

Apollo 2017/10/11(Wed)23:03 No. 836079 ID: efc9ab
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>The cable was to explain the "outsiders" thing, so let's start off with that.

"To properly explain that, I'll have to rewind the clock a little." They lift their hands and conjure up a cube out of mid-air. "I'll start at the beginning. Boom, one big bang." All at once the inside of the cube floods with small lights that expand and bounce around inside of it. "All the stars we've known in the universe, all the people who come to be, they're what we call locals. This is their universe."

"But not yours?"

"Ours. Over the next billions of years the universe as we know will slow down expansion, and then turn around and begin collapsing back into itself. It's slow, so slow that it's irrelevant if we had a normal life span. But being immortal robot people we realized that eventually our home was going to collapse in on itself."

"So you what, outran black holes?"

"We left, hopped on outside of the universe as it collapsed back into a single point. That's actually when this party was. A toast to the end of the world and all that." At their gesturing the cube expands and a small ship begins floating it's way out of the center, warping and bending out of shape as it does so. "This is when we began to consider ourselves outsiders. As you can imagine, there was a lot of debate about what we could do from here. Everything in the old universe was gone, and a new one would pop up from the next big bang but what then? Do we turn around and find our old home? Should we?"

They lean back and let their show play out, silently watching as the pinpricks of light coalesce into a single point. I soon realize they aren't even watching the cube anymore but instead staring out the window, where a similar point shone off in the darkness far away. They sigh, "As much as I would have loved to see my old home again, we ultimately decided against it. One look back was enough to see the wheel of time began anew and things repeated once more. We could intervene, but nobody could truly claim to have so perfect knowledge as to know the impact of doing so. You could run back and save yourself from an accident, but how many lives would you condemn to never to be born in the process? Would you even improve anything in the long run?"

"So you stayed out of it."

"We decided it was the best to leave the next universe to it's locals, and for us to remain Outside."

"Except for Roderick."

They take a large bottle of something and down it faster than I possibly could. "I should have known he'd so something like this. Just look at what happened. It's a mess."

>>836079
Sometimes things get worse before they get better. Just like you can't predict if things will turn out for the best, you can't really say if things will turn out worse from whatever you do. Well, within reason.

I say intervene only when it would prevent absolute and total disaster. Like global ecosystem collapse? Catastrophic meteor impact? Genocide on a planetary scale? Might want to prevent that. "it could be worse" is only an excuse when you're dealing with survivable events for civilization as we know it. Of course, once there's a galactic civilization there's less and less of a need to intervene, because even if entire planets get exploded life will go on.

...what was Roderick trying to change, exactly?

Time that's both a wheel and a line thanks to a cyclical universe. That explains the conflicting data on time travel, so far.

We didn't find any evidence of other instances of ourselves outside the universe? If the universe repeats, exactly, after every big bang / big crunch (so long as there's no outside interfere), then every cycle should have resulted in the same group escaping. Unless we're from the very first iteration of the cycle, which seems unlikely.

It's more likely the iteration of the universe you came from was, in fact, perturbed by the prior, just as you and Roderick perturbed this one.

Was that why there were so many mes in there? All the Maries, from all the past universes, jumping in to stop one Roderick and mostly getting killed? Or did our group just make multiple insertion attempts / copies, trying to get me in?

>>836079
wait, so what were the things Liz was talking about here:
https://tgchan.org/kusaba/questarch/res/676739.html#i679213

The whole point of defying your fate in the singularity was to experience life beyond the total collapse of reality. If you don't interact with your surrounding universe, then what's the point of your continued survival?

If the universe was an anomaly entangled from its very existence to the exact replication of its previous incarnations down to the quantum level, then you could interpret the continuation of that repetition of the universe to be a very material Outer Heaven - familiar in its repetition but forced to experience the exact same existence, in all forms of consciousness, with no accumulated insight or destiny beyond the immaculately lucky rats fleeing the ship. Beyond that is a final insult in the form of conflict between the crucible of surviving existences, each of which are repeated instances of each other at separate, maddening kalpa.

If the universe does change slightly between each iteration, then it is inevitably our destiny to be a part of that change. Our existence as an outside entity means we have three options: poke the universe, wait here, or explore this outside existence. Each choice is an inevitable facet of life, and if we are living beings then why should we not interact with a universe? Existing in this slowly decaying shell of patterns in this tiny ship now designated as a microuniverse is in itself another form of stagnant repetition.

And all of this is ignoring the VERY certain fact that we are leaving quadrillions to die.

Hold up a minute. If time's cyclical and we're from universe n preventing meddling in universe (n+1), what about the Marie and hot bird from universe (n-1), (n-2), etc? What are they up to?

>>836191
It's a variant on the Prime Directive. They don't believe they have the right to interfere. (There are certainly enough examples of well meaning intervention or imperialism going horribly wrong in history for people to stop and question conducting social experiments or uplift projects on the scale of a universe).

There's also the logistical problem of trying to 'save' the lives of every person who ever lived in a universe.

>>836279
Also the situation resource-wise. Not sure if they have anything they didn't bring with them.

I have a problem with how the butterfly effect works here; if they "escaped" the big crunch, then they have taken their own mass out of the singularity that precedes the next big bang. That would have huge ripple effects across the next loop, even if the difference ends up being relatively minor for the first million years or so.

Apollo 2017/12/17(Sun)02:05 No. 852343 ID: efc9ab
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>...what was Roderick trying to change, exactly?
“I think you would know better than I could.”

>I have a problem with how the butterfly effect works here; if they "escaped" the big crunch, then they have taken their own mass out of the singularity that precedes the next big bang. That would have huge ripple effects across the next loop, even if the difference ends up being relatively minor for the first million years or so.
“That’s a fair concern, but we’re not exactly capable of gathering enough information to know what impact this will have yet.”

>Hold up a minute. If time's cyclical and we're from universe n preventing meddling in universe (n+1), what about the Marie and hot bird from universe (n-1), (n-2), etc? What are they up to?
They shrug. “I don’t know. We’ve never found them. Considering they have a 20something billion year lead and appear to not want to be found I doubt we ever will. As best I can tell they feel the same towards us as we feel towards the people who followed us. Personally, I like to believe we’ll find some stray discarded storage device someday. Akin to how one could forget to sweep the dust off the upper shelves before moving out- did you just say I’m a hot bird?”

I deflect, “What like they’ll leave nanomachines laying around?”

“Not nanomachines per se more like, well, unless you have a thorough understanding of pseudo-quantum computing it’s very difficult to explain.”

“Which is…”

“Also very difficult to explain without a deep understanding of compressed transistors and heat slips.”

“That sounds made up”

“It’s very impressive, I assure you. If we’re lucky it’ll have recording of a history that would be our future. Can you imagine that? A recorded history of things to come.” They sigh as if off in a dream. “I can only hope.”

>wait, so what were the things Liz was talking about here:
They pause, seemingly in shock. “She… it…” They suddenly lean forward and grab my shoulders. “Liz, she, are her eyes a golden amber color? Did you see any similarly colored veins visible on her skin? Has she been injured recently and seemed to miraculously recover?”

"How screwed are we, because yes to all three of those Liz things."

I can't find anywhere that shows her eye color nor can I find any veins on her. She still has that arm in the sling too so she didn't heal from the wound.

>>852344
Kome if you're going to lie at least tell us why you're lying.

...we HAVE seen that kind of stuff in flashbacks though... and a photo. Images associated with Roderick.

I don't recall. My memory's a bit dusty...

Apollo 2017/12/17(Sun)02:54 No. 852353 ID: efc9ab
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"Yes. No. Maybe? I don't remember"

"Marie I need you to go subtly check as soon as possible. Roderick may have exposed her to something that is similar to but not quite nanomachines that may have infected her body."

"Can we just call them nanomachines is that such a big difference."

"Fine! The nanomachines appear to have dumped information into her brain which she misinterpreted as a vision of the future and if it had bonded to her then she's carrying the equivalent of nuclear power in a civilization of cave men inside of her body now."

"So what do we do?"

"I DON'T KNOW! She's part of this cycle, we can't just abduct her and take her with us. But her condition is caused by Roderick's intervention so she's already been set on a different path than she should be but we can't just make someone disappear and hope it has no effect on the grand picture but we also can't just leave her alone and hope she doesn't learn to use it-" They go on like this for a while.

>>852346
Well actually, I remember seeing some girl in the archives with glowy yellow eyes and a bunch of akashic (thin circles connected by electronic-style thin lines) yellow tattoos. Not sure WHO it was.

>>852353
LICK birb to calm him down. Priority should be direct interference to minimize chaos, continuity be damned.

Why don't we just send some of our own nanomachines to seek out and destroy the bad nanomachines?

>>852360
A) They're technically not nanomachines, so they might not do "nanomachine microbattles" like regular nanomachines do.
B) If the bad nanomachines eat the good nanomachines and level up, we're opening a can of bird flu.
C) Adding more unregulated nanomachines into the universe, even if they're on our side, is not healthy. They could mutate, in exponentially more ways than regular viruses since they're on the quantum level.

>>852353
i can find not a single instance of liz with golden eyes, however:
https://tgchan.org/kusaba/quest/res/712056.html#i763415

Wait wait what. Hot bird, you didn't answer a very important question.

If there's only one of me outside the universe, and we've had no contact with any of our forebears, why did I find so many copies of myself down there. I had bodies everywhere. Heck, I forked myself into one of the intact empties.

Why are there so many me-corpses down there?

>>852353
Okay we'll go check her eye color. Easy.

>>852366

Its dust. Syndey gave us the same explanation when we asked about how Dust worked, after divulging into quantum physics nonsense to explain the quantum psychics.

>>643449
See, same explanation given about dust located here. Its too similar, not to note the golden dust shown in the picture. Psuedo-quantum computing probably only advanced 7 billion years after 5 billion AD, so yeah.
Also, 7 billion years after the events of the incomplete Red Giant. Spoilers, anyone?

>>787629
Oh, and for the golden part? It doesn't have to be Gold. Gold represents Exposure, something due to a massive exposure it bonds to you, reducing your life span to 3 years. It isn't birthright since we would of noticed earlier, She got plagued.
>>615287

My links are broken, here's the links.
https://tgchan.org/kusaba/questarch/res/615246.html
https://tgchan.org/kusaba/questarch/res/639082.html

>>852435
Yes sure, blue is birthright, gold is exposure. Our bird friend is asking for gold veins because Liz was exposed to dust but obviously doesn't have birthright nor plague. Plague was due to "infected dust" which normally just kills you. Thus, either Liz has Exposure, or she has nothing. Honestly I think we'd have noticed if she had Exposure? The markings are very distinctive! On the other hand maybe she's wearing contact lenses and makeup. How would we know for sure?

Haley kindof looks like she's got Birthright, which would be an interestingly sneaky way for Roderick to have implanted Dust technology into this world-- via the new android model. On the other hand, our bird friend already SAW Haley so that can't be the case; I'm guessing those are just mundane markings. Okay hang on can we actually come up with a name for her? The chirps and whistles don't translate to text.

One thing that's worth asking: what would we even do if Liz or one of the other prophecy-recipients has Exposure? Is the implication that they'd have to die to stop Dust technology from spreading?

>>/questarch/635976
Haley has exposure in this picture, which makes no sense since it reduces your lifespan heavily.

>>852538
Dude. Those are her shorts.

was hot bird waiting outside the entire time or were they down there with us doing stuff?

what did the masks from thread 4 represent, or rather who did they represent?
Narrator was Victor. who were Furious Mask, Lamenting Mask and Peculiar(?) Mask? one of them was Jeannine - i'm not sure if she was four eared shorty, or if that was someone else or if four eared shorty was actually more than one person. no idea.
at some point after we killed the narrator, four eared shorty talked about us killing their better half. who were they referring to? the last person we killed before that was the narrator, but the last person who died was Haley. i'm guessing it was one of the other masks?
i have a suspicion the 4 masks were actually shards of Marie, which would mean she took part in the cannibalizing, but that's pure conjecture.

who's this guy https://tgchan.org/kusaba/quest/res/712056.html#731750

where is Roderick?

Why did root Marie and Roderick kill Victor again, anyhow?

Who was admin Manaus? Victor? Roderick? my guess is Victor.

what's with the weird metaphor-space we entered between threads 4 and 5 and left when we shut down the power plant? that couldn't have been real (doors where shelves should be, squashed hallways with a crushed dead Marie in them somehow (wtf was up with that anyhow) and half a room being eaten and just disappearing from reality, rain underground), but it was seen by non-cyborgs as well so it's not that we were hacked or gone crazy.
on that note, what was with the spare Maries in the scrap yard?

if we still have it, show hot bird https://tgchan.org/kusaba/questarch/res/684559.html#685453

hey pollo you were right, it really does make more sense on re-read, for the most part. i mean, i understood almost nothing until hot bird explained the out of universe thing so saying 'connect the dots' at like thread 3 was a little mean, but still.
also, come back to #tgchan, we miss you over there. i promise not to ask about updates

you realize you're gonna have to give this entire explanation again to the other marie, right? she's the original one anyhow (sorta)

https://tgchan.org/kusaba/graveyard/res/754415.html#755207

"That guy" showed up in these little tiny shorts. Have no idea how it may be related directly but its something, I guess.

>>771500

Found it, This is where that person did this. Huh. The tie ins are extreme.

On second thoughts, they look nothing alike, Similar, but too different.