System Overclocked 3 -ch 17-

Wrench really didn’t know what to say.

He was looking at what was apparently a planet, but he wasn’t sure if it was unique or out of the ordinary. That there was nothing for him to compare it to and he just genuinely had no experience with it.

“To me, it seems fairly mundane,” Goodie murmured. “Nothing that would attract our attention as a species, and if anything, less so. As if it were a waste of our time to go there at all.”

“It’s bright blue,” Wrench stated. “With… with white things across the surface. There’s green splotches across it here and there. I think it’s land.

“It’s-it’s incredibly pretty.”

“I see,” whispered Goodie. “I see. According to our scans it’s fairly generic as far as oxygen planets go. As a species we’ve encountered them on occasion. They’re not that common really.

“Fairly uncommon, in fact. You could say they’re rare.

“Even then though, it isn’t as if we haven’t come across them previously.

“Now I have to wonder if other planets like this held life. There’s a part of me that wants to go look into them. Make sure there isn’t anyone there that needs help.”

“I mean, if you end up going to check, I imagine there will be Hume, Humans, or something else there. You’re the main character mom. Where you go, the plot follows,” teased Wrench, patting at the tentacle wrapped around his waist. “Though, Dad, that means you’re the love interest. Make sure you don’t do anything that might get you hurt or anything. We don’t need mom going insane and launching most of the species into a black hole.”

There was a rough chuckle at that from Captain Boyfriend. He and Goodie were reviewing the footage that’d been recorded with Wrench.

He had outfitted a military drone with a camera, and had it record the planet in a way that Wrench could look at. They didn’t see what he did, obviously, and were going over other telemetric items that the drone hard recorded.

“I’ll keep that in mind, bud,” Captain Boyfriend got out with a chuckle. “If the Grand Lady were to go investigate, I would most certainly be sending a great deal of forces with her. Which means we’d have less forces here to cordon off this planet.

“At which point those Tongsta that follow around her like pests would peek into the planets here. Then I have no idea what might happen.”

Goodie made an exasperated noise at that and then huffed.

“Yes, I’ll remain here. You’re right of course. This is where the focus is for a reason. We can go check the other planets after this,” Goodie agreed. “Not to mention, the distance to the closest one is probably significant.”

Wrench nodded his head.

In the end, his entire Hab had been put into stasis on Goodie’s ship for the trip. It was going to be a significant journey for him, but not for the Tongsta.

Rather than let his clock keep running, as Goodie had called it, it’d be better to put him in stasis and travel there. That was the main reason for it, though there was also the fact that if they let time run normally, by the time they arrived, there would be a lot of rather pregnant Hume in his Hab that he might not want to leave behind for a trip.

He wasn’t quite sure how long they’d been in stasis, but Vnkah was quite pregnant now and the newborn she and Scrunch had taken on wasn’t a newborn anymore. It was quite closer to a year old he thought.

Though, it was really nice to see how protective Vnkah was over the kid. She wasn’t willing to let anyone touch the kiddo until she had given them a full set of instructions on what they were allowed to do and what they weren’t allowed to do.

“They clearly saw something,” Captain Boyfriend stated without a tone of any sort. It was flat and without emotion.

“Yes, they must’ve seen the ship I sent. I made an error and now that planet is aware that they aren’t alone,” lamented Goodie.

Oh.

He used that tone to get the information across, but not accuse Goodie of anything.

“I was wrong, Boyfriend. I didn’t even consider anything and was just-just too eager,” she continued after a pause. “Thank you for not disparaging me. Please help me in the future?”

“Yeah, Dad. You’re amazing. Mom should promote you to husband already. Captain Husband,” Wrench declared with absolute sincerity. He could see nothing but care and genuine warmth from Captain Boyfriend for Goodie.

Goodie made a weird noise at that, and a tentacle came up to wrap around Wrench’s mouth.

“Ahhh th-th-that is… ahhh… wha-what should we do next?” she asked in a flustered voice. “They’re watching the skies quite closely. Very closely. In fact, to me, it seems they’re watching the exact spot where the ship I sent retreated to and then hid itself.

“It looks like they’ve oriented all these devices in that direction. All of them. They have the look of things that are well above and beyond what the rest of the planet has. Doesn’t it?”

“Yes, I would agree. It has the feeling of civilian compared to military. That’s how I’d see it,” Captain Boyfriend offered. “The military, or the Grand Clan itself. Perhaps they haven’t told the rest of the clans or the members about what they’ve seen.

“They’re now watching, waiting, attempting to discern what has happened. Not trying to panic their population.”

“Erm, maybe they know about Tongsta? What happened to the other planet or where-ever they found the original Hume? Maybe they were in contact with this planet, or this is where some of their number escaped to?” Wrench suggested. “If so, that’d mean they know about Tongsta. They know about you and have done all they can to hide.

“Now that a ship has shown up, they’re on an extremely high alert. Ready for another ‘Tongsta event’. That’s all assuming they know about it but… is their technology great? Great enough that it’s reasonable to assume they should have space flight, but don’t?”

Wrench was utilizing a lot of the information he’d gotten from the world he had been working in with Edmund. A lot of that was providing him with a great springboard for these deductions.

“Ah,” Goodie stated in a way that sounded like a book closing.

“Yes. That would make sense. It’s what I would plan for if I was in their position,” agreed Captain Boyfriend. “Their actions make almost too much sense when considered from that view point.

“It’s also why there isn’t anything coming off the planet at all. No signatures that would make us want to visit out of curiosity. Almost as if they did indeed learn from another meeting and went to great lengths to obscure themselves.”

“Like Grae hiding in the Aerial Habs,” Wrench stated.

“Like Grae,” Goodie mumbled. “Poor things. What do we do then?”

“I genuinely have no idea,” answered Captain Boyfriend.

“If they’re aware of us and are watching, that means that at some point, we’ll need to make contact,” Wrench offered in the silence. “Doesn’t it? If we don’t, they might go looking or become even more defensive.

“This is when a Grae first drops out of an Aerial and wants to inspect you. They’re cautious, very likely to attack if things go wrong, but they also want to know what you are.

“Tickaht did something very similar with me.

“I ignored her to a degree but also let her smell, scent, and taste me. Shouldn’t we do something similar? Send a ship out to sit there in space and wait? Let them contact us?”

“That’s a very good idea,” Captain Boyfriend allowed after a pause. “Though I think we’ll need to use one of my inventions. This’ll need to be done by you, obviously.

“If a Tongsta showed up, it’d only reinforce the problem.

“If it were you, someone who looks just like them, it’d go quite differently. It might take some time for you to be able to speak with them in their own way though.

“I can’t imagine you and they have the same version of sound-wave communication.”

Ah, good point.

They probably speak a different language.

Much as Tickaht did.

“That’s fine. I’ll just go through the same thing I did for Tickaht with them. They will just have to work at understanding me, even if I understand them perfectly,” assured Wrench. “Which is fine. I wouldn’t mind fixing their understanding as time went on. I love fixing things.

“I look forward to fixing this relationship between the Human’s on that planet and the Grand Goodie Clan.”

Captain Boyfriend laughed at that and then made an odd bobbin motion that made his inside swirl briefly.

“Speaking of the Grand Goodie Clan,” said the large Tongsta. “I have news for you. I know you’ve only been out of stasis for half a day, but I thought you’d want to hear it.

“It’s in regards to Hume and Grae testing.

“A lot of what we talked about has been ongoing while you were sleeping. A lot of it, actually. To the point that it’s almost frightening how fast it went.”

“Oh?” Wrench asked, now very curious.

“We were having Hume and Grae both perform a number of tasks as medical facilities as well as elderly Tongsta facilities,” Goodie added with a laugh. “We honestly brought in anything and everything we could think of.”

“Unsurprisingly, the School Hume took over the elderly facilities. I had assumed it’d be that way, given their gift of conversation,” Captain Boyfriend explained. “I just told them that these were lonely and elderly Tongsta who needed someone to talk to them and bring them into the group.

“It felt like I’d just put down a broken thing in front of a Fixer and just said ‘it’s broken’.

“They swarmed the facility and started talking incessantly to every single Tongsta there. It took a bit longer than normal for them to start talking back and forth, but it worked.

“Now the Tongsta are considered school by the School Hume and are enjoying themselves from what I’ve seen and heard.”

“The Grae didn’t do very well with all of that, but they certainly excelled with those who needed internal aid,” Goodie said in an almost exasperated way. “Dad decided to pull the same trick again and told the Grae he needed them to hunt down differences inside the Tongsta. To ‘stalk, hunt, and eliminate’ anything that didn’t belong.”

Yeah… yeah that’d do it.

With both the School and the Grae.

“I take it the Grae suddenly found a newfound joy of hunting?” Wrench asked, already knowing the answer. “I’m sure they did. They probably fight over who gets to hunt first. That’d be about right for them.”

“Oh! We even found a great use for my Brawler sweeties,” Goodie enthusiastically chirped with a laugh. “My babies are helping out with moving people around and getting to show off while doing it. They’ve been put into teams to compete with one another on how well they can help their Tongsta about the medical wards.

“They’ve also been tasked with assisting with medical tasks like holding rips and tears closed. Also while in competition with other teams of course.

“Giving them a chance to demonstrate their prowess was what they needed. They’re quite docile when they return to their Habs after their shift and are pleased with themselves.

“The Grae appreciate them of course and they uh… fight a lot. There’s only been a few minor injuries thankfully, and they looked quite accidental.”

“In other words, it’s more or less what we expected it to be. Hume and Grae can be an integral part in more than one aspect of the Tongsta life. Comrades, confidants, and caregivers. So far,” Wrench summed up.

“Yes! It’s so exciting. We’ve also had more success with translation efforts. I took a Tongsta that’d never heard a single word of Hume speech, then had a group of Hume and Grae that could converse,” Goodie gushed with a rush of words. “I recorded it in a Hume way as well as a Tongsta way, then distributed it for free. I’ve had so many reports come back to me, so many, that the changes in the relationships between Hume and Tongsta were almost immediate.

“Even if the Grand Clan and others fight me, I can force the issue without them being able to stop me. After all, if every Tongsta out there can hear the words of a Hume or a Grae, and vice versa, there can’t be a mistake.

“There can be no misunderstanding. No allowances for them not to realize the truth.”

There was a subtle tremor that suddenly shook everything.

“No allowances,” repeated Goodie with some heat to the two words.

***

“Captain Boyfriend did this?” Stripe asked, her fingers prodding at the terminal in front of her. The notes that’d been provided to Wrench had listed it as the science panel.

“Yeah. He apparently has been working on Hume sized ships since the beginning. This is a prototype that he had used to test with. Upgraded it up to the point that it was at Tongsta standards, just… Hume sized,” Wrench answered.

Captain Boyfriend had showed them it, how to work it, put them in, and sent them on their way. He wasn’t far in a military vessel that the planet would have no way of spotting at the edge of the solar system.

“I feel like Captain Boyfriend is far more intelligent than anyone gave him credit for,” Seventh said, as she slowly flipped through the different scans and views that were available at the security station.

“I think it’s more the case that he was never given the chance to properly channel his own ability, in the right avenue,” argued Tickaht. She was leaning over Wrench’s seat at the “captain’s chair” as Captain Boyfriend had called it.

Given Wrench’s ability to diagnose an issue or a problem with nearly anything he picked up, everyone else had voted him as the captain. The ship wasn’t standard, and a lot of its systems were jerry-rigged together.

Multiple Fixers and Tongsta workers coming together to make it without a blueprint for all of it. Leaving it a mess of a system that wasn’t quite patched into itself as it probably should be.

“That’s a good way to put it,” Nunnkish affirmed from where she stood near the back of the bridge. She had apparently wanted to be that far back and standing rather than anywhere else.

There were only three spaces on the ship.

The Bridge, crew quarters, and the engine.

Everything else was part and parcel to the ship and could be accessed from those three areas.

Even the weapons, which Captain Boyfriend had insisted on it having. He’d made it clear that there wouldn’t be any possibility of him ever sending them out without a way for them to defend themselves.

Goodie had agreed and had nearly sent a military drone after them just to make sure they’d be alright.

Wrench’s promise to be safe, given several times, had been the only thing that’d caused her to divert away from that path.

“I like it,” Squeak offered from where she sat next to Zntik off to the side. The two of them had buckled themselves into the seats there and were more passengers at the moment.

“You like staying in your medical bay,” Seventh muttered in an accusing way. “This was damn near built in a similar way.”

“Yes. I like it,” confirmed Squeak with an ear-to-ear grin. “The medical bay on board is quite cozy and the tools are well made. Dad made some very unique things for me to toy with.”

An idle thought zipped through Wrench’s head.

“Do you think this is a thing Sccsccc would’ve been alright dying for?” Wrench asked more to himself.

“Who?” asked Tickaht. “That sounds like a Grae name, but I don’t think I’ve ever known a Sccsccc. I can tell you that if Fsciscc were here though, she’d approve.”

Errr, I wonder if that’s what Edmund meant.

Where a name subtly changes but doesn't actually change much of the way of things.

“I think… I think uh… something happened,” began Stripe. She sounded incredibly confused. “One of the sensors reported that a laser was detected. It struck the ship briefly. I think it was to determine distance?”

“We’re moving with a great deal of speed, are we not?” asked Squeak. “I imagine, to them, we’re moving incredibly fast, given their level of technology.”

“Captain Boyfriend said we would easily reach the planet within twelve hours. We’ve already passed by most of the planets in their solar system,” Wrench answered. “We still have another four or five hours to go.

“I guess we’re at the point where they can detect us coming in though. Maybe their tech is good at spotting incoming objects.

“Looking for the Tongsta or anything else that might come to clean their planet out, so to speak.”

“That’d make sense,” Seventh agreed. “Still. We’ve got a long way to go before we reach them and could be able to talk to them. Assuming they have something similar to what we’re using.

“Really, we could send them a message from here after all and they’d get it relatively quickly. Something akin to ten or twenty minutes I think? Tongsta stuff might as well be magic I swear.”

Wrench couldn’t argue that.

The Tongsta as a whole seemed incredibly strange and alien to Wrench when he considered all that he knew now. Their machines, the way they interacted with the world, and even how they perceived it, made him feel as if they were experiencing reality in an entirely different way.

“I think… I think the Tongsta are more akin to us, as we would differentiate two-dimensional from three-dimensional,” Wrench murmured with a small shake of his head. “Imagine a flat piece of paper. Draw two people on it.

“To those two people, the world is the piece of paper. There exists nothing outside of it, above it, or behind it. That is everything.

“Consider your hand for a moment. It’s in what we consider the real world with more than two-dimensions. We have not just length and width, but also height.

“If you put your hand on the paper, those two people on the paper could perceive the point of contact you made with the paper, but nothing of your hand beyond those points of contact.

“The idea of your hand extending out and beyond that point would be impossible for them to consider.

“What if the Tongsta are no different in that respect to us, as we would be to a two-dimensional person.

“The Tongsta intersect with our limited three-dimensional world and exist in another as well. We can only see, hear, touch, and interact with the point of intersection, but not at all with the dimension that exists beyond that.

“None of that even takes into account time, mind you. This is purely a physical space. Assuming that unknown dimension is actually another physical one. Sounds like it isn’t though, considering the Tongsta had no idea we had organs.”

No one said anything to that.

“Send them a message,” Wrench ordered. “We come in peace. Take us to your leader. We wish to speak.”

“Do you really think they speak a similar language?” asked Tickaht in a clearly pointed way.

“No. I don’t. But anything they send back will give us a starting point on communication,” Wrench answered honestly. “Even if it’s just ‘get fucked’.”