Played on 7 August, 2011

As recorded by our reporter, Manon-Thérèse Renard.

Voyage to Argos

Thursday 22 February, 2379

After the enormous amount of information we'd received we decided to mull things over and make our decision together. Most of were anxious to turn over a new leaf: depart Gnapho II and explore other environments. Gert, however, was against that plan. He wanted to stay at Gnapho II, especially now it was revealed that the development of the planet would be accelerated.

I left him with his thoughts as Jasmin and I visited doctor Ango. It was a brief visit: I summarised our latest adventures and promised to make one last report, before (probably) leaving the planet. He had nothing new to share with us, and to be honest... I'd kind of had enough of Gnapho II. During the talk with the good doctor I found myself wishing to leave the planet and its dull life. If this was the future, I'd find mine elsewhere.

We departed from the doctor, wishing him well, and returned to our little group. After a lot of discussion, where a lot of our recent endeavours and conclusions were rehashed and rephrased, we decided to accept Cheng's offer. Our primary mission would be to research the disease strains on Bridgeport at the Glieze 693 system. However, we'd also travel to Alpha Mensa to investigate the target of the alarm signal. As if that wasn't enough, we'd also visit the planet Argos at the Procyon system, since that's where the Commune AI was made. Finally, I also persuaded my comrades to visit the spacetravel museum near Alpha Centauri. I was especially happy with that as it gave me a new chance to find clues on the whereabouts of my family.

We visited Cheng with the results of our deliberations, carefully not revealing anything about our secondary targets. It seemed that he was about to leave Gnapho II as well. He also all but admitted that he'd used his leverage to get Kang off of our backs.

I urged the rest to gather all the things we'd need on our trip, including all the particulars of our targets, while I finished my reports for doctor Ango. In the meanwhile, Knut and Lars were checking our spaceship, that was parked on the spaceport. According to them we could travel for about 120 days on one fuel tank, but further fuel stations could be found near spacegates.

Friday 23 February, 2379

After finishing everything up and gathering our things, we met at the spaceport. We baptised the ship "Ina" and departed.
I'll not bore you with the particulars of the voyage. It was enormously fast, considering the enormous distances we traveled. According to our watches (and perception) we traveled for about five hours, but because of the vagaries of science, the outside clock ticked much faster. It was 1 April, 2379 when we arrived in the Procyon system...

Sunday 1 April 2379

The Procyon system is a binary star system. Argos, its colonised world, orbits both stars in a figure 8, and has two moons itself. Knut showed me a model of the system but I only got dizzy.
Argos is an aquatic planet, its surface covered entirely with water. Various cities float in the seas without being ancored. Apparently the planet was large enough that the islands would never collide. Argos has some treaties with the COmmonwealth but is independent of it in name. Of course, that very theoretical since their gateway is part of the Intergalactic Highway.
We landed on an island city called Teros, a rather large settlement with 871 mille inhabitants. When we landed and left the Ina both Jasmin and I sighed a breath of relief. Finally, civilization. We barely looked at the papers we had to sign to be admitted to the city (I'm sure it was alright though since Gert signed them readily enough). We all but ran to the nearest health spa to get some cleansing done, trying to scrub everything from Gnapho II out of my body.

Unfortunately this was no holiday so I did some research while floating in some hot tubs. First I familiarised myself with the planet. The biggest island on Argos was Santos with 2,3 million inhabitants. Argos has 81 million inhabitants. That didn't sound as much but then again, they only had some floating cities to house them.
Next up, Solotech, creator of the AI known to us as "Aye" but less colloquially known as SN A1-574-7211-B2A. Their infraspace didn't exactly advertise the fact they made artificial intelligence, instead claiming to be an ordinary science institute. Seeing that they're the only company making AI that was a beit weird. Some digging came up with revenue totals and indeed, the sales of AI was a good chunk of their income. I called the support number, pretending to be interested in puchasing some AI, but the girl talking to me wouldn't have anything to do with it. She insisted that Solotech would only sell AIs to inhabitants of Argos. Right.
That was one avenue of investigation shut down, so I dug some into the infrasphere records. Sure enough, a small percentage of Solotech's sales went through secondary and tertiary, let's just say downrigh shady channels.

Session Log Navigation					Index
Manon:			Top of page	Next	Latest
Jasmijn:	First