Archibald nodded their mechanical head. "Yes, good point. I'll see what we can hook you up with. We fans got to stick together!" The pivo, done dealing with Aeos' irritating questions, beckoned Archibald out, and the two departed, the door shutting behind them. Aeos walked over to the blanket-covered couch and sat down heavily, rubbing her temple. T.Z. did not spend a single moment worrying about things; the bullet hadn't been found, they were getting updated hardware for their room monitor, and they had acquired some interesting information about Maria - most notably that she was associated with the Thrice-Dead Pirates somehow. Sure, Six was dead, but they still had his stack. It was an acceptable loss.
T.Z. retired back to his chamber, ignoring Aeos' questioning about how they were doing to hide Six's body when the maintenance crew came by the next day. It was a legitimate question, but T.Z. had faith in the incompetence of the custodial squad. They could deal with the body after "work" tomorrow.
A little bit later, Null and Surya came back, having been dropped off by Danika. Surya looked thrilled to see Aeos again; Null had not been good company, Aeos judged. Null, like T.Z., retired for the night to go over some interesting readings from their nanodetector; all they said to Aeos and T.Z. was that "There are swarms in the corners. All the corners."
Danika came by again a little while later to pick up Surya and Aeos for their party, and whisked them back to the abandoned mineshaft. There were a good three dozen people there, mostly humanoid biomorphs, but with a mix of synths and non-humans, including an impressive neogorilla with a mean zero-g breakdance moveset. The music was a bit subdued, more psychedelic than rocking, and half the partiers were incoherent after very little time. Surya herself was high as a Venusian kite after only ten minutes, while Aeos sampled just enough to avoid suspicion, using her pheromones and social skills to pry out what little information she could from the guests.
She learned that going to deep down the mineshaft, where Null had said there were pusher and spy nanoswarms, created a wicked dissociation high; just last week, Cassius Talos had hyped himself up and dove down there, and hadn't come up. When Danika had herself dragged him up, he was completely comatose and had been anonymously dropped off at the medbay. Last the neo-gorilla, Xie Gonji, had heard, he had been transferred to the "psych squad" and was going to be diagnosed today. "They'll probably use him as training," she said casually, though Aeos detecting anger behind the simian's voice.
Aeos also learned something else important: as soon as everyone figured out she was going to on the psych squad, no one wanted to talk to her anymore. In fact, she was all but cold-shouldered out the party after an hour. The only sympathetic one was the gorilla, who left her with a parting word of warning, and a promise to escort Surya back home: "The psych squad isn't like the rest of us. We mine, we test techniques, we ship stuff out. The psych squad's supposed to help us stay sane, yeah? But you'll see soon enough that this place has a very high rate of... mental instability. No one trusts the psych squad."
Aeos left shortly after, and Xie Gonji returned Surya to their suite only a few hours before their shift was due to begin.
Unlike T.Z., Aeos had to actually feed herself, so she had a quick breakfast at the cafeteria, waking up early enough to beat the rush, and then headed off to report for her first shift in in the main psychosurgery ward.
T.Z. had spent the night first cloning Six's TacNet so that his death wouldn't impede their communications, and then puzzling over the strange mesh structure of the colony. They noticed some interesting changes in the mesh network as "dawn" approached; namely, he found a little server tucked away simply titled ALTAR OF THE RED QUEEN. That gave T.Z. pause; the Red Queen was the name of one of the members of Taskforce ROVER. A quick prod of the server's firewall revealed that he had to pass a "purity test" to gain access, and found that server access was actually maintained by a pair of dedicated, fully sentient infolifes. Disgusted with their singleminded devotion to such a ridiculous task. T.Z. signed off and walked out the door to report to work as a "General Technician."
Neither of them noticed Null's absence until T.Z. ran a routine diagnostics on his cloned TacNet to find that Null had removed themselves from the TacNet an hour before T.Z. had left his room. As both he and Aeos had to report to their "jobs," there was no time to investigate where Null might have gone.
Work: Aeos
Aeos reported to her designated ward and, after receiving a code from a clerk, stepped inside a labyrinth of bright lights and sterile hallways. The occasional scream punctuated the dull hum of lighting and equipment. An AR path led her to an office deep near the end of the facility. To her surprise, when she stepped inside, she was greeted by theface of the habitat's head of psychiatry: Colonel Dr. Mir-Hossein Hoftada. The young, dark-skinned psychiatrist wore an impeccably white coat and his eyes were full of a deep sadness that contrasted with his piercing gaze from orientation the day before.
"Ah, welcome to your first day here as a member of our psychiatric treatment team. I trust your first evening passed pleasantly enough?" After Aeos' murmured some pleasantries in response, the doctor leaned back in his chair. His office had only a chair, a very impressive desk, and a psychiatrist's couch; there was no psychosurgery bench here.
"I am afraid I have some bad news for you; I know that you and the mining technician 'Null,' your suitemate, hit it off yesterday." Aeos wondered how he had gotten that impression, then reasoned he had extrapolated from security footage in public areas. "Unfortunately, he left your suite in the early hours of... well, what we like to think of as morning for this shift, and proceeded to walk into one of the arcades. He then curled up into a ball in the corner of the room, where he has since been in a mostly comatose state.
"Here, we like to get a good evaluation of your skills in person on your first day, so I will take you to him shortly. While I don't condone doing this normally, I did want to ask you what you know about Null. It is unusual for someone to have a mental breakdown after only being here one day, especially when they are inhabiting a synthmorph; I know the isolation and confidentiality agreements spook many people, but this is highly unusual. Did Null tell you anything that may be able to help us diagnose his condition?"
Work: T.Z.
T.Z.'s opinions of the staff at this habitat continued to drop. The habitat did not believe in working from home, as he had to still report to a physical room. The room itself resembled an old-Earth office, full of cubicles and desks with powerful terminals and monitors. His job, as a general rule, was to fix things going wrong, whether in terms of hardware or software (thankfully not wetware), and to accomplish a set list of troubleshooting tasks every shift. He was assigned a temporary cubicle equipped with a mid-tier terminal and very nice monitor, and instructed to do as much work as possible on the terminal instead of any implants.
Much like his meeting with the head of station maintenance, his first day of work consisted of very little guidance. On the whole, he did not object to this, but instead scanned the digital instructions and his list of tasks for the day. It seemed that he had been typecast as a mesh specialist, and so all of his duties involved fixing minor mesh glitches. He found this odd, especially as his instructions specifically mentioned that "Most routine mesh maintenance functions are carried out by a team of dedicated infolifes responsible for maintaining mesh and data integrity and purity." Yet, here he was, assigned a dozen tasks that the supposed "dedicated infolife community" of the colony was supposed to be handling.
Maybe they liked to make sure that the infolifes were doing their job properly. T.Z. thought this might be it, until he noticed a few senior employees sniggering at him. He then decided he was being hazed by being given redundant work that would likely accomplish nothing but annoy the infolife maintenance staff.
He mused over how to approach these tasks; should he carry them out in good faith? Pretend to work and use the time to investigate on his own, digitally? Call out his employers for wasting his time? The tasks all looked exceedingly boring, and he guessed that half of them would already be fixed by the time he got to them.
Then he noticed the last item on his list of tasks: Investigate "RED QUEEN ALTAR" server and determine its purpose and contents.
That was interesting. Of course, to get access to it, he would have to "demonstrate his purity" to the guardian infolifes, or else employ some powerful tools to try and crack it. T.Z. then realized something else, assuming that this last task wasn't a joke of some kind: the infolife community is doing something that the authorities here don't understand.