Chapter 6
?rim
He had to find her. The human with the voicelock.
Aside from a mild sense of concern about why she’d fled his classroom, he had a keen professional interest in her.
This was the key to getting him back to Teos with more merit than he could ever use.
Forget about his other research. If he could figure out how to deprogram a voicelock without harming the subject, it would be galaxy-shaking.
They would be begging him to return to the research academy.
Even the colleagues who had backstabbed him would be desperate to throw themselves at the mercy of his towering merit.
Staying in Laurus long term had never been his intention.
He’d finish out his contract here, remove the probationary status on his visa that prevented him from applying for the tier I job pool, and go somewhere with a real research facility.
Pyo would have his educator, and he would get his bottled lightning.
Now he just had to figure out how to approach the voicelocked human and convince her to join his experiments without scaring her off.
But human motivation was a second-tier priority.
Instead, he researched voicelocks in earnest, diving straight into the darkwave message boards. He slipped into the forums under the alias of Harot, a nod to one of the original excavators.
Most of the posters were asking questions about standard things.
Looking for tech to mod my bangbot.
How to route around IA firewalls.
Fake ID chip? Cost? Supplier?
Low-level criminal activity. Nothing he needed to concern himself with. ?rim rubbed at the node on his wrist as he prepared to write his own post.
Voicelocks were highly illegal across all consortium and non-consortium planets.
Asking about them would be setting himself up for all brands of potential trouble, so he needed to be clever about the wording.
It was a tech forum, so he decided to go for the technical approach first. If it failed, he would switch to a different account and try a different post. It was likely his first query would yield no results.
He would start with one under this alias and then post a second under a different name in a few days if no one responded.
?rim triple checked the security of his connection and then input the words into his holoscreen.
[Harot]: Legacy voice modulator showing unusual authentication errors. Pattern suggests deliberate modification rather than natural degradation. Diagnostic protocols for non-standard voice restrictors?
It should be ambiguous enough for any casual viewer to ignore it as an overly technical question.
Only someone with true expertise in voicelock technology would have any idea what he was talking about.
?rim had little confidence that anyone would respond, but it didn’t hurt to test the atmosphere.
For now, the better way to proceed would be to get closer to Cassie and examine the tech firsthand.
Caught up in a flurry of excitement, he exited the darkwave forum and returned to his main device interface where he started to sketch the device from memory.
Sokt, he needed a better view of it. All he could remember was the square silver chip, but there was more to it.
An ultrasound would give him an even better view of the parameters, but he didn’t think starting there would be wise.
?rim finally rose from his workspace. He’d been in the same position, hunched behind his interfaces for nearly five standard hours.
The time had slipped away somehow. He needed to reseed and prepare for the next day of classes.
It was the darkest hour of the night, but Laurus never truly got dark.
?rim adjusted the blinds over his windows to achieve the closest equivalent to true blackness before removing his eyestones and refilling his seeding pool.
Once the water levels were high enough, he added the packet of regenerative solution and stepped inside. The water was cool around him as he sat and contemplated his next moves.
He didn’t want to repeat the same mistakes he’d made on Teos, even though he still contended he’d been unfairly ousted.
And then, his work hadn’t been on a living organic being.
He’d simply pushed the ethics of the simulator too far.
But he hadn’t been the only one. He’d just been the only one to get punished.
Called out for work they were all doing.
No one was harmed. But the Quorum of Imperial Sciences had decided his disregard for hypothetical ethics was an indicator of his willingness to cross lines when dealing with real research subjects.
It was outrageous. He’d simply been trying to create a better way to generate magnetic fields by tapping into a teosian energy core.
He was also speculating the same could be done with the electrical field of organic, sentient beings, but he’d never had the chance to simulate the protocol.
Sini and Brem had been right at his side through all the tests, but when Brem decided it was too much and self-reported, only ?rim had been implicated.
Infuriating. The memory sent a cascade of sparks through his energy core.
That’s why he needed a chance to redeem himself, to show the Quorum just how careful he could be, especially with a biological lifeform.
Studying and unveiling the inner workings of a voicelock would give him just that opportunity.
He emerged from the pool grim and determined.
All he needed was unfettered access to the human female.