Log Date/Time (Local): 41y_92d_1545m
Log Date/Time (Universal/Calypso Time): 55Yac_42D_1234
Need to ensure the revival terminal at outpost x1357y902 is functional. It is currently installed and powered, however, there has not been an opportunity to do a live test (NOTE: irony). There is no standard protocol for testing revival terminals on humans. Killing someone and then seeing if they revive would probably be a breach of ethics… The best that the revival techs here have come up with is sending some poor screecher or sand boar through the terminal. Some standard protocol should be instituted by the EDL, but that is way beyond my paygrade.
While the revival regulations turn a blind eye to revival of animals, there are strict rules regarding using the revival for humans that are still alive, with very large penalties if you were found to violate them. Some less ethical people had been found to bypass the death condition on activation of revival, and as a result, the regulators on CDF were forced to deal with some small bands of cloned troublemakers on Calypso, though generally these folks had a self-destructive streak and didn’t get along well with themselves. Generally, the repeat offenders ended up losing access to the revival network. Which makes the penalty of abusing the revival system worse than death. I suspect we may see the sporadic case also here on Next Island.
The revival system is as close to witchcraft as a technological device will get in my opinion. The initial attempts at its development failed as scientists attempted to clone the physical form, then replicate the chemical reactions that occurred inside the revival subjects body. This only resulted in a shell of a being in a vegetative state, which is pretty creepy if you think about it. The breakthrough in teleporter technology coincided with advances in mindforce. The ability to travel between dimensions unlocked signatures of our being and consciousness that could not be seen before by science and turned out to be the missing puzzle piece for replicating a person that had a ‘soul’. The mind signatures were analog, so they were analyzed in the frequency domain and stored for a sufficient bandwidth so that imprinting these stored signatures on the physical and energy forms of the clones resulted in an indistinguishable being from the original, at least to our perception. But what might be lost in the analog to digital conversion of our souls, might keep one awake at night.
My mind tried to work, but having a laser pistol pointed at your melon puts a damper on brain function. The woman in Resa garb, keeping the pistol near my head, motioned for me to move off the path leading back to the outpost. I slowly moved as she told me to, trying to slow down my breathing, adrenaline now rushing in my body. Think damn it, I thought to myself.
It was strange that a Resa would decide to go for the direct confrontation route. It was even stranger that they would do so out in broad daylight so close to a Elysium outpost. I glanced at the woman briefly. Her hands shook, though she was doing her best to steady it. There was blood on her leggings and on the elbows of her leather shirt. I caught a bruise and scratches on her cheek that was hidden, barely visible on her face in her headwrap. And she walked with a slight limp. It looked like she had been in a bad fight.
“What do you want?” I spoke softly, trying to steady my voice so it did not betray my fear as we moved out of sight of the outpost into the brush near the path. She did not answer me, gripping my pistol tightly in her hands and pressed into my back. Her eyes, darting towards the outpost and me, revealed fright rather than malice. My eyes caught a quick glimpse of an iridescent green pendant she wore around her neck on a leather strap before she quickly hid it again beneath her shirt.
Once we were about two hundred feet away from the path, the woman with my pistol turned me around. “Where’s your med kit?” she asked, her voice quivering with fear or pain, or maybe both.
“Look, are you hurt? I’m sorry, but I left my restoration chip back at the camp, but if you are hurt, maybe we can go back to the camp together and we can try to help you, if you aren’t trying to kill me,” I replied, trying to defuse the situation, but speaking a bit to quickly. Now that we were a bit closer to one another, I could see a gash in the woman’s right leg. The blood on her leather leggings looked fresh.
The woman cursed quietly. “I need that restoration chip,” she whispered to no one in particular.
I took a deep breath to try to calm myself. “Why don’t we go to the outpost, and we can look at your wounds. I promise nothing will happen to you, and we can forget about the gun and all that,” I said, trying to be reassuring.
“No, we can’t do that. There are people tracking me, and I can’t risk them finding me here,” she replied. “And I know the Elysium Alliance doesn’t really give a damn about the Resa. You all just think we are nothing but scavengers anyways and don’t really care what happens to us. So no, I’ll take my chances.”
“You don’t really have much choice,” I said. “It looks like you are losing quite a bit of blood. You need help.” Why did she think she was being followed, and who were they? Who was this Resa woman? I thought.
“Look, I’m going to need you to get me into that outpost so we can get that restoration chip. Then we are going to both leave the camp, so they can’t use you to track me down,” she said in a weak but determined tone.
Then her eyes rolled back, and she collapsed onto the floor.