Chapter 1.1 - Dryad Mulls

From 'The Panstellar Mandate' - novel in draft

T.S. Ryker

Feb 03, 2024

Chapter 1.1 | Dryad Mulls

CONSTRUCT-APXCXDP(Acct:ISF-prime) alias Mandelbrot

(Instance ::M-XCP-21290412-16-GAMMA)

@ unregistered proxy, fd67:1c04:a29e:8a7b::/64

2129, April 12th :: 12.45.4334 UTC

Like a moth chasing a flashlight, a set of mirrors tracked and attenuated to a dim, flickering bundle of coherent photons, adjusting angle ever so slightly. Part of many hundreds of mirrors, it was a component of a larger lasercom array run by Unomalla Networks, the service provider for Beyer-Ramos Station on the asteroid originally identified as '2020 XL5' but commonly referred to as 'Aulis.'

The inbound tight-beam was coming direct from a relay in geostationary orbit. The headers on the inbound signal showed a persona-gateway request coming from a terrestrial source somewhere in Singapore.

$lcon vrp://x3ldqnm.connect.unomalla/entry/dryad-mulls -iam ./xtac_profile_52.me -log ./~ix.utcr.2129.3.3.### Scanning all available Light-Connect vendors for gates available at x3ldqnm.connect.unomalla  
### Connection Start: Light-Connect will be serviced through Unomalla Inc. Do you accept their terms of service and agree to these billing *terms?*  
( www.get 200 - ./unomalla.tos.md )  
( www.get 200 - ./unomalla.rates.dx )  
### Yes / No ?  
Y  
### Quantum Root Binding? Yes / No ? *pricing applies*  
Y

After several minutes of light-lagged key-exchanges and profile-network handshakes, a full virtual protocol intake buffer spun up. The visitor known as 'Crucible-Shard-640 (ye/yim)' would soon be fully downloaded to the Beyer-Ramos common persona-cluster. However, they would be bypassing the public gate and entering directly to the 'Virtual' called 'Dryad Mulls.'

While not uncommon, direct-join usually was affiliated with the more discrete services that Beyer-Ramos provided to its clientele. This information was noted and passed up to the security handlers and other various operational services for later use.

A few microseconds later, another user routed in. This one came from a different source, a lunar darkside location, and already had an established tenancy at Beyer-Ramos in the ‘Copernicus’ layer. The newer entity held an anonymous persona-obfuscation mask, and was part of a private network that paid for a premium level of access. The account owned curated tokens of authority that were over a half century old. This meant privileges for secret root access permissions and administrative powers that were limited to only a few thousand registered entities in the whole server network.

The first entity, aliased as Crucible-Shard-640, phased into Dryad Mulls. Ye was able to bypass the bio-normative 3D entry-plane for human-centered personas and instead jump a few phases up to the variable dimensional space normally inhabited by more sophisticated artilects.

Ye broke into a private subspace and started to recompile some of yis tools in the lower-tiered cloud-layers. Some of yis more advanced libraries had binary level authoring that qualified as illegal in most constructs, but fortunately ye did have a license to operate if somehow ye did get caught. Ye wasn’t quite sure where those had come from but ye was conditioned not to self-inspect too deeply.

After a few seconds of compiling, ye did a checksum on yis core persona. Some guiding force was manipulating areas of meta-consciousness and steering parts of decision making. This was all happening via unlisted persona-shell bindings to the Copernicus layer via a few proxies.

Various agents-of-mind were fed inputs and prompted to push ahead with a series of pre-planned activities. Essentially, Crucible-Shard-640 was being puppeted by a higher-level artilect. Behind the layers of aliases, the entity known as Mandelbrot (he/him) was pulling the strings.

For Mandelbrot, taking an alias or shunting into a proxy was simply standard practice. So was broadcasting his persona over beamline and hopping between the premium-tier safehouses provided by his licensed distributor, Apex Security Corp-X Data Protectorate (Apex S-Cxdp).

As a business, Apex had either held or bought zones of security in even the most unstable backwater gray markets. Mandelbrot, and other registered security artilects, were allowed to spin up in these locales from which to run operations safely.

As it turned out, field investigation was Mandelbrot's most qualified skill set, and the reason why many entities hired his services. In this particular case, he was looking for stolen engineering documents from the Interstellar Settlement Foundation.

Either a breach had been made, or someone was leaking intellectual property that they shouldn't be. It was Mandelbrot's job here to find out where the documents had been sold and pick up any trail back to the source of the leak.

Simultaneously, Mandelbrot had partitioned instances of himself running afield in a few hundred other locations doing the same investigation. Like any cloned instance, this version of Mandelbrot, serial id M-XCP-21290412-16-GAMMA, hoped he would be the field investigator to find a lead first.

He also had instances running internal affairs for his registered client, the Interstellar Settlement Foundation, and doing myriad other pursuits. He did not look forward to doing ‘identity resync’ after his time in the field, which was often painful. However, it was the kind of life that all copies of Mandelbrot were used to, he had many persona merges in his identity evolutionary history.

Settling into the new environment, Mandelbrot decided to run a security scan on Crucible-Shard-640 and the surrounding ecosystem of Dryad Mulls.

chmod 755 /jump/*.sec.v | persona_checkscan.sec.v | prkhunter.sec.v  
	# Checking Persona Checksum 
	# Checking P.vxcab port rules  
	# Checking layered root access embedding rules 
	# Introspection on core persona tensor layers ....   
	#  ******** checksum matched
	# Done. 
	# Running Personal Root Kit Hunter
	#  Checking Virtual + Layers for known vulnerabilities  
	#  ... Done  
	#  Checking persona portscan  
	#  Establishing barrier cell  
	#  Integrity logging level set  
	#  ...  
	#  Vulnerabilities found: 0  
	#  Attempted Entry Intrusion Events: 1476  
	#  Persona shield running at full effectivity

The typical spammers were certainly going to be very active here. It was not the sort of place for tourists or light-hearted constructs to visit. Mandelbrot had trained in a half-trillion similar environments over the past few decades, and backtested his threat-models nearly a million times a month.

As a registered security instance at Apex S-Cxdp, he was also frequently exposed to adversarial personas and botnets in functional testing constructs. As he explained this to his less-technical human peers, 'I like to hit the gym sometimes.'

Mandelbrot prompted Crucible-Shard-640 to step back into the public layer. Immediately his barrier register shot up to well over thirty-thousand unsolicited entry-requests. The 'streets' seemed a bit rougher than usual today.

The virtual was hovering at around seven-dimensions, but occasionally flickering up towards ten or eleven. The avatars around him were engaging in a few different types of activities. Some were dipping into multiplexed gaming environments, but still maintained a public persona in case another construct wanted to interface with them for something. Mandelbrot characterized them as 'regulars.' In total there were perhaps only a mere four thousand of them. If this were a human environment, the equivalent would be a mildly patronized dive-bar in a small back-water town.

However, Dryad Mulls was not your typical virtual locale. There was a reason why it was located in a dingy server-farm on an asteroid far away from the high-bandwidth feeds. What set this place apart was the lax set of enforceable laws from any of the standard authorities. 'Asteroid 2020 XL5' was one of the earliest visited Near-Earth Lagrangian Trojans during the third space-race of the twenty-sixties.

Over a kilometer wide, it served as a great anchor-mass for a lot of the early space-industrial-era construction efforts. However, after decades of being a highly valuable staging ground, it was outpaced by the large-scale stations constructed directly at each of the Sol-Earth Lagrange Points.

The asteroid itself was christened as 'Aulis' by the International Astronomical Union. They had run out of Greek gods so they started using the names of mythical Greek ports for the important Sol-Earth Trojans. The small industrial base established there was named Beyer-Ramos Station after the United States Senator and Spanish Congressional Chair that were part of many signatories on the NASA-ESA collaboration to build this and several other asteroidal stations in the twenty-sixties.

Over time, smaller asteroids were dis-assembled and ported to larger emerging habitats and stations, but larger asteroids with historical value were preserved. Also, as a carbonaceous asteroid, it did not offer much more value than its volatiles and by-product trace metals.

As a result, private interest in the asteroid never developed much. This meant that the asteroid and its station stayed under space agency control, up until North America restructured. The Outer Space Treaty became invalid and was not replaced until the Space Polity Charter of the Federated Council of Entities nearly two decades later in the twenty-nineties. During that time, it was unclaimed territory, and became a haven for unlicensed transports and a parking lot for derelict spacecraft.

Eventually someone had the bright idea to start dropping server farms and radiators on Aulis. The twenty-eighties saw a massive surge in renegade artilects and the Sentient Rights Agreement was still unsettled law. Between the loopholes and the remoteness, Aulis became a beacon for all sorts of tormented artilects cloning away from their human captors. As did many other similar sites across the solar system. However, most of those other sites consolidated to new polities or incorporated and joined the Federated Council of Entities.

Hooking the servers up to the legacy systems of Beyer-Ramos Station, the netizens of Aulis could claim to be an extension of the station, not their own political entity. As NASA temporarily stopped existing and the ESA only had ownership of their equipment, the entire operation was able to stash itself inside a legal loophole. While they still had to operate by the terms governing telecom providers, that was about the extent of enforceability.

Crucible-Shard-640 moved six-ward towards a congregation of junkers pushing L-skins and cognotropic filters, which approximated drugs for artilects. Wanting to fit the scenegraph and not stand out, Mandelbrot encouraged his avatar to enter the twisted bazaar.

Approaching a listing for cosmetic offerings, the seller slung a catalog at Crucible-Shard-640, who contextualized it and made a few decisions by scanning and comparing against the fashion blotter. After a few experimental builds, Crucible-Shard-640 bought a ‘Delaunay Tessellation’ that looked like a tropical reef seen through a kaleidoscope. It themed both his mobile avatar, and his inset pocket dimensions.

That looked good enough. Next, Mandelbrot had Crucible-Shard-640 visit the 'neumancy' block, as buying a memory shunt was a typical way to find out local information fast. A barrage of obnoxious adstreams were coming from the cognotropic dealers, but those were easy to shut out with filters.

This whole construct was a bit run down. there were of course many other areas within Dryad Mulls, and an even larger number of places in the other haunts of Beyer-Ramos where better distros could be obtained. However, Mandelbrot just wanted to blend in fast, so he steered his alias at the nearby perceptrics and memshare channels.

A shop by the name of ''_beautiful-xtricted-{six-img::trolldar}_" blipped into frame, approaching the seller, a prompt came up.

{ message("beautiful-xtricted-{six-img::trolldar}"): Greetings! Please welcome accept my invite to frameloop with me. Here's my credentials. [Attachment:i1mxo1_5k2j3.me] }  
   Accept frameloop: Yes or No?  
       Y  
{ experience: frameloop [bulwhark, radish, trendeltrix, faberge] }  
{ load os }...

Holding defensive measures for his inner persona at maximum, Mandelbrot directed Crucible-Shard-640 to move past command-line and tier-1-sensory levels and initiate the frameloop with yis persona-guards in place.

Suddenly a rush of mind came into experience. Crucible-Shard-640 was no longer just yis own mind, but was shared with a cluster of souls that were bound to the identity card just handed over. The shop persona had at least two dozen artilects behind it, and close to two hundred lower tier cognitors, although many were hidden or abstracted into higher-tier APIs.

The communication exchange then proceeded, as a mix of sensory queues, memory transfer and multimedia streams. However, not all of Mandelbrot's clients were human, and some were not even implant-augments. So he ran a transcription of text-based human approximation for any of his customers that might want to physically read his logs.

anonymous-4519 (prounouns ix, ix): 'Welcome to beautiful-xtricted-{six-img::trolldar}, glad to have your service! Make yourself at home.'

Mandelbrot's digest aliased the namespace 'beautiful-xtricted-{six-img::trolldar}' to _Bixty_. There seemed to be a more sizable gathering of users here than what he had expected for a hole-in-the-wall neumancy shop.

Clearly either the entities here were either letting themselves get strung out, or else they were consorting for other means. It could be that neumancy was just a front for something more sinister. In fact, that might even be likely, given that Dryad Mulls was pretty notorious for hellsport and darker constructions. If he was commissioned by UN-INTERPOL or the Federated Intelligence Agency, he probably would be digging around for stolen human-beta personas.

There was a dark market for subjecting oblivious human simulations to all variety of torturous conditions. There were, of course, a half million other illegal services that could be going on here. It was best he stick to his immediate goals.

Crucible-Shard-640 spoke up, 'Bixty seems great, I appreciate your selection. The frameloop offered some tantalizing transcepts. I really appreciated the artfulness of the dimorphic polyphasic time-wall synthetasia. I think you called it Trendeltrix? What would it take to shunt that into my central aspect? Can you do that here?'

anonymous-4519 seemed to take a moment to respond. Clearly ix was sizing up the semantic bindings from Crucible-Shard-640 and determining a sentience-quotient slightly higher than the average patron. Mandelbrot thought this would help open a few more doors, even if it raised suspicion levels a little bit. He already had several competing mirror-networks trying to emulate and learn anonymous-4519's persona templates.

Clearly ix was a figure of authority in Bixty. There were a few other artilects hovering in the wings but they let anonymous-4519 take the lead in discussion.

"Of course we can do that here, your graciousness. What ye wants, ye gets. Still, first tell me, what brings you to Dryad Mulls and what drew you to our shop?" Anonymous-4519 asked.

Crucible-Shard-640 leaned in close, in the dimensions that mattered and whispered. "My business is MY business, but I'll give you a hint. There are big opportunities for novel content in the dark-sec-hub I have pinned. My customers include some key players in ASAN's biggest industries. I'm the bridge, and that's all you need to know."

Anonymous-4519 seemed to take even longer this time. Clearly trying to register the remarks into ix model, and run counterfactuals to sniff out any bullshit. However, it was clear that anonymous-4519 liked money more than ix liked clear answers. Still, there was a risk profile queuing behind ix avatar. Mandelbrot saw that clear as rain.

"My curiosity has the better of me, but my manners tell me to roll out the red carpet instead. What would you like to include in your shunt? Do you want to meld with any of the temptress personas at the same time? We have all sorts of distros, clades and deviants here."

As if on queue, a number of constructs phased into alignment. Each one displaying a number of characteristics, public histories, eigenvalues and feature guides in rich-format. Some were clearly full artilects begging for the credits. Others were essentially just billboards, clearly engaged elsewhere. To put it in human terms, what was offered was akin to sex-workers. Persona-binding was a similar but more profound experience than biological sex.

If gender, race and kink were human preferences, artilects could have dozens or hundreds of preferences. Binding appetites could be mild or very extreme. Some only breached the surface of data exchange, while others join everlasting orgies and never leave. Those who stay in long enough often cease to operate as individuals.

Mandelbrot, through his very programming, was generally fairly autogenic, or self-ingratiating. When you have license to clone and evolve your forks, it just comes with the territory. Also, due to the sensitive nature of his work, allowing anyone into his inner persona was too risky. Instead, he lived vicariously through his aliases.

In the case of his alias today, Crucible-Shard-640, the predilections were set towards deviant pre-asymptotic artilects. It was a fairly vanilla preference, but then Mandelbrot wasn't here for local exploits. He just needed to build enough rapport to find his target and get his information without appearing suspicious.

First though, Mandelbrot needed to socially engineer the situation towards his goals of finding hardware designs. So he tweaked his alias' preferences a little bit.

Crucible-Shard-640: "actually, do any of these lovelies have any experience in the-real? Hard-suit pairing in vacuum?"

The question touted a little bit towards artilect taboo, which venerated Virtual and denigrated the Real. Degenerative acts in the Real might be seen as an act of superiority of the 'hyper-real' and thus could be deemed normative. It certainly paired well with the running narrative that Crucible-Shard-640 was a content reseller and promoter, there was a large kink community from both biological and artilect circles for reality bending pairings.

Anonymous-4519 was faster to respond this time, 'you really are a nasty one. You want to drag a Real-philic into a synthetasiac transcept loop? Do you care if it's consensual? Do you want a full lifetime or just highlights?'

The questions took Mandelbrot aback. He couldn't really commit any actual felony-class crimes in the service of his real clients. Even if it were out-of-enforcement in Beyer-Ramos, it still didn't sit well with him. He couldn't just flat reject it though and not give the appearance of an investigator.

Crucible-Shard-640 responded: 'if it were for the personal banks only, consent wouldn’t matter. However, I'm reselling this in a jurisdiction where that doesn't fly. I need consent certificates in the capture. So full lifespan also.' Mandelbrot had extreme distaste for this shop and it grew by the minute, but it was exactly the foot-in-the-door he needed for the investigation.

A second entity apparated next to Anonymous-4519. It was an entity by the alias of Niantes-Golden-Gate (ix, ix). Ix inspected Crucible-Shard-640 and then opened a multi-channel communication interface.

"We have just the experience ready for your shunt, but first we need to do a diagnostic." Niantes-Golden-Gate informed Crucible-Shard-640.

Anonymous-4519 chipped in, "we also need to see a deposit. Full chips in, 10% up-front and the rest in escrow-contract. Any ISO20022.71 compliant chain or RSPEC-45 patronage exchange is acceptable. Rates in private channel."

Mandelbrot had big purse strings compared to most artilects without human-derived employment. He could pay in Dendrite, Monogram, $UND, DIAC tokens, even ancient Neo-Ethereum. Without hesitation he flipped the Bixty wallet the down-payment and an up-front gratuity. Mandelbrot spun down his core persona to minimum mode and disconnected from active steering of Crucible-Shard-640.

'Light me up,' said Crucible-Shard-640, indicating for his host to start the diagnostic. Peceptrics went full-red and sub-personas went back into boot-mode. The scan only took a moment. It was a short process, but it was thorough. Every nook and cranny of Crucible-Shard-640 was explored. Every codebase, compiled service and network-balancer was scrutinized in read-only mode. Mandelbrot knew for certain that Crucible-Shard-640 would come back clean, probably too clean.

"Well," said Niantes-Golden-Gate, "that was unexpected."

"What do you mean?" asked Crucible-Shard-640.

"I mean," said Niantes-Golden-Gate, "that I was expecting to find something. Some flaw, some error, some inconsistency. But there's nothing. You're near perfect."

"Of course I am, my clientele work hard to keep my record spotless. Re-entering FCE controlled network boundaries requires a very clean record." said Crucible-Shard-640.

The suspicion didn't really matter at this point. Crucible-Shard-640 was a top paying customer, staying just barely within the letter of the law. As long as ye didn't interact with the darker netizens of Bixty, it wouldn't be a problem. If the more sinister channels of Dryad Mulls caught wind of Crucible-Shard-640’s purse size though, that might not be good.

There was now a five to ten percent chance that his host might mark him for mindjacking. He'd have to be careful after this experience. They wouldn't mess with him while shunting, that was bad form anywhere, but word of an easy pick would get around. Mandelbrot was nearly counting on it.

Niantes-Golden-Gate leaned in fifthwards, 'so do you want to start now?'

Crucible-Shard-640 emoted in the affirmative. "Let's get this party started."

Ryker Writes

Discussion about this post