First | Previous | Wiki | Next
And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another, It is manna: for they wist not what it was.
— Exodus 16:15
Angela came to after a few seconds, with a splitting headache. She accepted the wet rag from Jessica and did her best to wipe off most of the vomit that had gotten on her hoodie. It was fortunate she hadn't eaten anything yet that morning.
Several of the silicon dice had been knocked from the tray and scattered across the floor, and Matt was trying to collect them all back up.
Angela opened her bag and retrieved her package of nicotine tablets. Fortunately she'd been able to find these at a Human pharmacy after her medical supplies had been stolen. Even if they were ridiculously expensive, at least she had something to deal with the headache.
"I still think you're full of crap, like one of those people who are 'allergic to wifi' or some BS." Mike said, with finger quotes.
"Mike," Jessica began, but Angela cut her off.
"What would it take? To prove I'm not making everything up." Angela popped six of the tablets out of the foil and grimaced as she swallowed them. The Humans packaged it in such ridiculously small doses, and the "mint" flavoring tasted just incredibly bitter.
"Prove you're able to detect the pufferfish pattern, or sigil or whatever." Matt responded. "If you're really sensitive to these things," he said picking another die off the floor, "in a double-blind test you should still be able to reliably detect it."
"Those are all burnt out now though." Were the Humans actually incapable of sensing the sigil's effects? That would explain why they hadn't had suffered any ill effect like she had, but in that case, what were they even doing with colony sigils at all?
"Wait what? The sigil's etched into the metal interconnect layer, they shouldn't be ESD sensitive —" Matt hurriedly pulled out a device that looked similar to the inside of the laptop she'd taken apart a few weeks ago. His face fell as he looked at it. "Oh..."
An anonymous man drove along a nondescript highway. Despite rush-hour, traffic was moving at a reasonable pace. He powered on the cheap pre-paid flip phone he'd paid cash for the day before, and dialed a number.
The phone rang twice, and was picked up. "Hey this Bill, whacha need?"
"Hi, do you have a few minutes?" the man responded.
"Sure watcha need?"
"Angela Smith has applied for a position with our business, and you were listed as a former employer."
"Ahh lemme pull up her file for you, Angela, yeah she worked here up until a few weeks ago. I was fixin to promote her t' manager 'fore she quit, one of the hardest working lasses I've met."
"Any idea why she quit?"
"I dunno, she just gave her two weeks then disappeared. Wish her the best 'o course."
"Anything unusual you remember about her?"
"Nothing major comes to mind, I mean she always wore a green hoodie, but 'long as they show up on time and are polite t' customers, t'aint really my business."
"Are you sure you don't remember any specific details about —"
"Hey I don't like this line 'o questionin', hey you never said who's hiring, where she onto now anyhow?"
The anonymous man snapped the phone shut, rolled down his window, and tossed it out. He didn't look to see the wheels of the truck behind him roll over it.
Mike left the office in disgust. "I'll come back once y'all are done playing pretend." he'd told them.
And good riddance, thought Angela. After he'd left, the atmosphere had immediately become much less hostile.
"Can you explain what you mean, 'burned out'?" Matt began after a minute.
"I mean the sigil ran out of energy." Angela wasn't sure if there was some specific technical term the Humans had for this, but she hadn't been able to find anything in her research.
"And you know this, how?" Matt asked again after a moment.
Angela wasn't sure if the Human was just playing dumb or if he was legitimately confused. "That's how sigils work, that's just common knowledge. Like your smartphone only works for so long before running out of power, it's no different." Although Angela had to admit, she had no idea how the Humans were able to get them to work for so long, she'd only needed to replace hers a few times since she'd arrived.
"What we're doing here is cutting edge research, I'd hardly call it common knowledge."
"Well clearly, those sigils are far smaller than I'd have even imagined possible!" Even when Angela had looked at one under a microscope the patterns were still too small to make out individual strokes.
"No, I don't mean that. We've been able to make chips even smaller than that for nearly half a century at this point. But nobody on this planet had even heard of sigils or whatever until just a few months ago when we discovered this 'colony sigil' thing."
"Give me a moment and I'll show you what I'm talking about." Angela reached into her bag and pulled out her pad of paper and a felt-tip marker, in addition to a slide rule and a thick book of tables. She decided to go with a sigil of light, since its effect would be immediately obvious and it was one she was very familiar with. She knew the normal version by heart, but she needed to check the book several times for some of the key figures for reducing the total energy, since normally it might keep glowing for hours.
An awkward silence had decended and stretched on for several minutes, but finally she completed the body of the sigil, and activated it with a few last strokes.
The sheet of paper immediately caught fire. "Aaah! That's not what I was trying to do!"
Anonymous 07/01/60(Wed)11:57:27 No.71697999
>>71697999
Called up the employer this afternoon, all I could get from him is that the alien normally wears a green hoodie. At least we have confirmation that it worked there, at the store. Can anyone find a photo?
^
File: 24433281481957.jpg (2.6 MB, 1920x1200)
Anonymous 07/01/60(Wed)11:57:27 No.71698003
>>71697999 nice trips
Found a photo from facebook from the store, I think that might be the alien in the background. I'll try and see if I can find any more images to figure out where it's at.
A chill ran down Mike's back as he read this and checked the image. That was definitely Angela.
He hadn't been on 4chan in a few weeks, but he had come back on to see if he could try and find anything about "phascolians" or whatever Angela was pretending to be. If he could find whatever anime or what have you this was from, he'd have fairly definitive proof that she was making this all up, and they could finally be rid of her.
Instead he found this. He scrolled back through the thread, reading through the evidence. He hadn't been convinced by Angela's stunt with the locator chips, but this was hard evidence. He didn't like being wrong, but nor could he deny it any longer.
He refreshed the page to see if there were any newer posts.
Anonymous 07/01/60(Wed)2:48:46 No.71698009
>>71697999
There was a vagrancy report in salt lake with a matching description a few days ago.
Oh crap. If they found her this could be really bad. He needed to let the others know now.
"You doing ok?" Jessica asked, as she sat down next to Angela.
She had offered to let Angela stay with her, as Angela hadn't had anywhere else to go.
"Just, what I'm going to do now? I'd never even heard of a colony sigil burning out before. I'd want be able to continue on and try to find a real colony, but I'd thought this would be a one-way trip. Now I don't even have a way off this stupid rock!"
"You'd said your interstellar stage was still in orbit, right?"
"Even if I could get to orbit though, what then? The main thruster had only just enough energy to get me here. I'm no rocket scientist, and even if I could remake it the hibernation sigil I used coming here is far beyond my abilities, I'd starve."
"I don't know."
The two of them lapsed into silence.
After a minute, Jessica spoke again. "But if there's anything we can do... We owe you for this mess and anything we can do to try and right this."
After a few seconds, there was suddenly a banging on the door.
When Jessica opened it, Mike was standing there.
"We need to talk."