Game 4Game 4 Outline| Game 4 |
Game 4 Outline |
The flight to agency headquarters is fairly uneventful. When you get there, you are ushered into a modest guest room. This is the first time that you've gotten your own hotel room. Of course, this is because it's also the first time you've needed one. You shut the door and flop onto the bed. Feeling exhausted, you undress and slip into some light pajamas that you brought with. In a flash, you are sound asleep.
The appointment is bright and early the next morning. The examiners let you eat breakfast first, but when you finish you are whisked away to the examination table. At least five different doctors come in at varying intervals, poking, prodding, and nodding to themselves. However, you can smell that they are all perplexed. Finally, after taking some blood, saliva, hair, and other samples, they take you and your dad to a small briefing room. The chief examiner, Dr. Hughes, sits down at the head of the table. "Frankly," he admits, "I'm stumped. We were trained to look for abnormalities in the human body, and except for the word of the subject and one trusted agent, we haven't got a shred of evidence to support the thesis that the subject was ever human in the first place. Your daughter - er, son - is in perfect physical health, inasmuch as we can determine what 'perfect health' is for a species noone's ever encountered."
He sighs and looks at you. "I've gone over the details of your story, and weird as it sounds, I'll take your word for it. But we've examined every element involved...the viola, the fox at the petting zoo, everything...and we can't find the slightest abnormality, let alone one large enough to cause this. I sent the samples we took over to our boys in Forensics, but unless they come up with something, I haven't a clue."
Just then, a lab worker walks in. "Doctor," he says, "I think you should see this." He leads Dr. Hughes, your dad, and you into a laboratory. "Look at this," he says, pointing to a monitor. "This is what we found in the blood samples." On the screen are some small metallic objects.
"These have been magnified in order for the objects to be clearly visible," the scientist explains. "When we checked the samples, we found some large clumps of white blood cells. We dissolved the clumps and found a few of these things at the center. We identified them as advanced nanotechnology."
He displays a concerned look. "Which," he says, "means that a person is behind this. We're working on tracing the source, but we haven't had much luck. Can't even figure out how the things are supposed to function."
Your dad speaks up. "Can't we check the code?" he asks. The scientist sighs. "Sort of," he says. "The processor's standard enough, but we simply can't figure out the how the thing is supposed to work, at least on the more complex levels. We've separated the code into three major components: propagation, data mining, and alteration. The 'propagation' component is designed to make the thing act like a virus. After each nanobot does its other jobs, it splits into two new nanobots, through a process we don't fully understand. Then the new nanobots leave the body when a new host passes too close, similar to the way you can contract a cold from someone by close contact."
"The 'data mining' component does exactly that; it scans the information in your brain for some select type of information; we're not entirely sure what. It is the first component to activate, so presumably one or both of the other components rely on the gathered information."
"The 'alteration' component is by far the most fascinating. It uses a combination of actual surgery and genetic alteration to enact transformations like the ones you experienced. The only question we really have about this one is where it gets its blueprints from. It reads massive quantities of data from an area of RAM that the data-mining component writes to a lot, so it's a reasonably sure guess that the data-mining component creates designs for the alteration component based on something in the mind of the victim. Along those lines," he says, "we're going to have one of our shrinks examine you to see if we can figure out exactly how it determines what transformation to effect."
Written by mrhappyface
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