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Author: Green

Date: May 23, 2172 (Earth Standard Time)

Location: Orestes Outpost

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It's been two years since Ruby's departure. I thought it was about

time I returned to this dusty old terminal and hacked something out

to send into the void.

We panicked for a while after she left. We were confused about

where she would have gone, how she went. Well, let's just say that

I was confused. The other two went off the rails. They weren't

worried too much about Ruby, only about their precious crystals.

Once again, it's been a living hell sharing this little rock with

them. If I didn't have Olive keeping me sane, the whole place would

have fallen to pieces.

Olive is two now. She can say "Daddy". She is resilient. She needed

to be.

Something happened recently that finally pulled us together again.

We discovered a stash of mining equipment, along with a broken

drone rocket, all sent from Arsinoe. It turned out they were

getting some of our messages after all. Fuckers.

Anyway, we were angry when we found out about this little delivery

that was so malicious kept from us by our A.I. I mean, we couldn't

really believe it at first, it sounded like too much of a cliche.

To make things worse, we realised our communications system with

Arsinoe had a little built-in preface module that allowed the A.I.

to editorialise about our messages and open a backdoor channel to

Arsinoe. We can easily check any outgoing network traffic from the

outpost, but since the A.I. messages were piggy-backed on ours, we

never noticed it was communicating. All we saw were our outgoing

logs. We are still confused about the fact that the A.I. seemed to

be 'responding' to messages from Arsinoe. We have no record of any

incoming traffic here for three years.

We all agreed to temporally disable the WHYTE A.I. It's been a bit

burdensome. We now have to manually monitor and update the systems

around the outpost. Navy drew up a rota and everyone's been pulling

their weight so far. It's starting to get better. We've united

behind our common frustration with WHYTE and the Arsinoe.

Most of the communication functions of the base were heavily

integrated with the WHYTE, so we're sort of in the dark now. We

have no access to any outside information at all. I finally managed

to rewrite some of the terminal code to allow us to transmit

messages outward using the QEC at least. If Arsinoe is still out

there (doubtful), it may see the messages indirectly. Not that we

can see its responses.

I'm mostly just sending this out now for posterity.

Having said that, I've kept the name 'masking' protocol. I never

understood why it was there in the first place, but I figure it

must have been for a reason. So, just to be safe, I'm keeping it.

I'm still Green, for now.

We should be able to survive here indefinitely. Our garden is still

producing well and there are enough rations to feed four for eight

years.

We've started digging. Navy has some theory about a hidden room

somewhere on the planet. Neither Pink or I really believe him about

it, but there isn't much else to do here. I've studied the mining

equipment thoroughly, and I think I can keep it running for a

while. We should be able to get pretty deep, but it will take some

time with the way the rocks are here.

Pink has pretty much ignored Olive since she was born. It's like

she doesn't really exist for her. It depresses me. I think she will

come around eventually, but it's been hard for Olive, going without

attention from her mother, and hard for me too.

I hope we find something down there.

===

Sent via the QEC