Jump 467: Crysis

Jump 467: Crysis
>Two of Cups (Love): The perfect harmony of union, in romance, friendship, or business.
...business plz. Ew.
>Age: 28
>Location: Lingshan Islands, 2018
>Identity: Drop-In, Type Green
No, not the reality warper kind of type green. That's a completely different world.
>Drawbacks: (+1000) The Lingshan Insertion, It Was Never Just About The Suit, They Built EVERYWHERE, Destiny's REALLY A Bitch
It's just like the good Mr. Murphy said. What can go wrong... will.
>Deep-Layer Protocol (1600)
I could already shut down my tech at will, but it's nice to know it won't do anything I don't want it to do, and nobody else can interfere with its operation.
>Man In A Tube (Free, Type Green)
Or voice on the radio, as the case may sometimes be.
>Twisted Motherfucker (1500, Type Green)
Twisted? I'm just trying to get useful data. Of course, I'm also a RESPONSIBLE motherfucker and not sending things out that will eat people. Or rather, forcibly immortalize them.
>Re-Purposeful Engineering (1200, Type Green)
The process of reverse engineering... sure, I've got it down to a science, but if I can bypass key steps to speed it up..!
>Dead Man Walking (Mandatory, Nanosuit)
Well that doesn't seem quite right. Not right at all. I'm not wearing any new suits.
>You Are All I Can Do Now (1100, Nanosuit)
Well, if I go Irresponsible Wizard, at least people will use the nifty things I leave laying out for them.
>They Called Me Alkatraz. Remember Me. (800, Nanosuit)
Hm. Well. This would be useful if someone tries to take over my body or mind, though that seems like a very silly thing.
>Inert Ceph Technology (Free, Type Green)
Now THIS is going to the R&D labs. I've got plenty of tech, but having THEM study this... that'll be promising.
>Nanosuit 2.0 (200)
Again... why would I want a nanosuit?
>Freedom (0)
Ugh. At least I can jailbreak it, if it's really unavoidable.

So, the first interesting thing about this world: while it's established that I've got technopathy that can theoretically affect the entire planet, that applies to traditional technology within a given range. Within, say, a half dozen centuries past the industrial age or so. And to be quite frank, this isn't a problem I've really run into before. Perhaps it's because I've gotten used to a certain level of sophistication, but I can only control Sufficiently Advanced Technology at short range, and even then only if I understand it intimately - from a distance, I can pick up that it exists and its function, but can't really manipulate it. And even then, that often requires a sample of it before I can pick it up, or at least these particular examples.

That's okay, though. Simply being able to pick up on the existence of this technology is good enough for me, and I've got an inert sample. Which means I can pick up other examples of this tech, and my oh my, there sure are an awful lot of these things scattered about the place. If only I had some means to teleport all over the planet, oh wait I do. And everything is all well and good, at least with the first site in the Australian outback, but my second apparation put me into the middle of an archaeological expedition that's being invaded by a hostile military force. And then the Ceph wake up.

Now, here's the thing, the worst possible thing that you can do when you have something that uses advanced technology: get noticed. Not as in, oh hey these beings are screwing up the stuff we want to study noticed, oh no. We're talking "there are things breaking physics" noticed here, which means that the local Ceph see things that don't work with physics, panic, and immediately set something altogether different in motion than you'd otherwise expect.

When a society hits a level of sufficient advancement, the most important thing is innovation - why do you think the Federation is exploring the galaxy? Not for diplomacy's sake. The Ceph are so busy navel-gazing that they're hoping for interesting chemicals! The occurrence of something that is completely off the scale for them means they're going to freak out and try to reach out for help from literally everyone they can.

When they opened a wormhole in the stratosphere over the island, I was able to shut it down in a matter of seconds, but that's an eternity when their purpose was a data transmission. This of course is a bad thing, and I wish I'd been looking forward with clairvoyance, because I'd assumed things were going to go a certain way and not how they were. I'm pretty sure every human on the island was rather surprised when they all found themselves teleported to another island in view of the main island of Lingshan, before the island they'd previously occupied disappeared due to a column of light striking it from the heavens.

I put Sajuuk in full defensive fortification mode, and over the course of the next week it seeded the solar system with FTL interdiction platforms. A necessary thing - before they opened the wormhole, the Ceph started waking up their other dormant colonies around the world. While Sajuuk was busy making world governments panic over an alien invasion by erasing an island, my companions and I are running around trying to eliminate as many Ceph seeds buried throughout the world as we can before everything flares up. And unfortunately it seems like these Ceph colonies are a lot more common than anyone could have thought.

Sajuuk and the defenses did an excellent job of keeping any wormholes from opening within a couple parsecs of Earth, as the defensive perimeter grew beyond the local solar system. Of course, wormholes aren't the only way to game physics into permitting faster-than-light travel, but interdiction worked quite effectively to prevent anything from getting near with Alcubierre drive either.

That aside: eventually, I found myself in New York, when the Ceph stopped being subtle and started trying to eradicate human life as a self-defense measure. Manhattan Virus? Not a fan. Ceph? Also not a fan - while entering New York, a submarine exploded because of them and the resulting explosion caught me and did non-trivial damage. Nothing I couldn't regenerate, but while I was briefly incapacitated, some idiot calling himself Prophet mistook me for a soldier, stuck his nanosuit on me, and promptly blew his brains out because he couldn't handle being transhuman.

It took me about twenty seconds to regenerate properly in order to bring his shade back from beyond the veil, and got some very interesting information from him. That whole thing about symbiosis? It's not entirely correct. Ship of Theseus and all, though it turns out the souls here don't really care about what makes up the body as long as SOMETHING makes up the body. Regardless... the suit was interesting.

Interesting in a bad way.

I spent the next few hours running around the city like a madman, wracked with pain for the duration, as my regeneration fought with the suit's attempts to cannibalize my body. For some godforsaken reason everyone kept confusing me with this dead Alcatraz fellow and I didn't have the patience to correct them, my attention too focused on the suit, using everything in my arsenal to try and postpone the assimilation while I could without leaving New York, because spreading the Manhattan Virus to the warehouse or elsewhere in the world would be .. well, undesirable is not strong enough a word. But the damn suit kept adapting to everything. Regeneration. Self-immolation. Magical healing. Psyker fleshcrafting. Splinching. Alt form shifting. Even the occasional idiot that decided to shoot me in the face. It adapted to these things... and when the suit started being capable of using them, that's when I actually started to worry.

I was eventually dragged in to have the suit removed, and at this point I couldn't stop laughing because that was actually my GOAL. And, of course, that worked about as well as I would have expected - the suit didn't come off at all. And as I ran around, I dedicated part of my consciousness to using technopathy to explore every last detail with the suit - the only thing I hadn't tried since it had been ineffective on other examples of Ceph technology. I'm pretty sure my heart skipped a beat when I realized that my entire body registered as technology when it came to the technopathy, but going "nanomachines, son" at Jacob Hargreave was amusing until he blew up his office around me. Prick.

On the plus side, having the suit integrated with me gave a better understanding of the Ceph than the reverse engineering I'd been doing on the limited samples I'd had, and countering the Manhattan Virus became... surprisingly trivial. It wasn't so much a virus as a targeted gray goo scenario, and countering with a blue goo of my own creation, magically targeted, proved quite effective. In truth when I studied everything, I had expected nanomachines. And sure, that's what I saw in the Ceph's technology. But that was a mistake -
 the exotic materials behind Ceph technology in the nanomachines weren't what they seemed. It's kind of hilarious, but they gamed the system in a hilarious way. Discrete items of technology, made of nanotech that was made of picotech that was made of femtotech to exploit loopholes in traditional physics.

After the smoke cleared, I had the interdiction fields dropped - when the wormholes opened, I jumped through and made contact with Ceph. Theirs is a very interesting culture, but I gave them a few baubles - a few novel ways to break physics that they hadn't seen before - in exchange for leaving our galaxy alone. They were kind enough to even clean up their settlements on Earth, though they let the other planets keep their Ceph colonies.

I spent about five years among them before my time was up, mingling, being the weird alien who for some reason was still attached to his body. It was pretty neat actually. I felt more welcome there than I did on Earth to be honest - they didn't think it was weird for me to have a voice in my head. And they didn't think it was weird when I created an extra body, shoved Prophet into it, and told him to stop angsting over everything, because he'd saved the world in a more concrete way than he otherwise might have hoped.

Though I do have some concerns over the Ceph going 'other universes? that sounds pretty interesting, actually...'