redshift: tdm #1.

[modblob]

Redshift: Welcome to the v͖͕̺̲̘̱̜͎o̴̦̣̠̦̘̹͞i̯̖d̛̪̬͈̱̦̝͍̕.

Click here to read what characters will experience when arriving in Anchor.

a. virtual reality.

You’ve been in too long and you know it. You’ve been in too long and you know it. You’ve been in too long--

The day is bright, the air is clear, and Anchor is in the middle of a festival.

"Isn’t this wonderful?" A passerby beams at you, and you have to admit, it is. You're not tired or in pain. Your clothes are clean and you feel refreshed, maybe for the first time in a long time.

In the plaza at the bottom of the city, spilling over into the park it surrounds, are people celebrating the new arrivals. Fireworks crackle to life above the park’s trees, sending little thunderclaps of sound echoing upward along with the cheerful music being played by a band on the plaza.

On the upper levels, in the entertainment district, the shops and restaurants are all operating in full swing, offering free samples, free drinks, and free merchandise. There are coupons galore being handed out, everything from a discounted 45-minute session at one of Anchor's three spas to a solo hour in the VR environmental simulation chamber.

The agricultural centers have contests for the biggest and best quality plants, baked goods, wines, and animals. On every level there are exhibitions of that district's specialties.

"Isn’t this wonderful?" A passerby beams at you, and you stop a moment to watch them pass. You could swear you've seen them somewhere before.

Trying to talk to the people around you only seems to get limited, cheerful responses. If you watch, they don't go far, walking back and forth to the same points along the breezeway or turning into businesses and out of sight before they walk by you again with a friendly greeting and some bit of rote dialog. The songs start to repeat. The food and drinks all taste the same. The fireworks never stop.

By the time you've noticed all of this, you've noticed something else, too. There are others like you here. People, god let them be real. They stick out once you look for them, because like you, they’re the only ones not constantly smiling.

b. lockdown.

You've finally escaped VR hell, and maybe you’re exploring the agricultural levels of the colony. Maybe you're preparing to explore the surface, or you're trying to program different songs into the music bots in one of the empty restaurants, or you're poking around one of the nonfunctional spas. Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, it’s interrupted.

The lights blink out, then turn on again, the bright red emergency bulbs washing everything with eerie light as the bulkhead doors come slamming down all across the colony. Something or someone has triggered the lockdown procedure. Wherever you were exploring, you're now sealed in. For an unknown length of time. With whoever or whatever else is in there with you. Welcome to Anchor.

c. the red shift.

You've had it, or you just want to know what's out there. Either way, you're geared up (or not) and ready to get the hell out of Anchor. Unfortunately, the planet is far less hospitable than the abandoned colony behind you. In Anchor there are systems in place to keep out the dust, the toxins, and the radiation. Out here there's nothing but rough terrain and red-orange sand.

A drive in any direction will reveal nothing but mounds of red dirt and crumbling hills - and the occasional broken down vehicles and cracked helmets.

On the way back, you get your first taste of what the Anchored call the red shift.

Named for the colors that envelope individuals caught in the phenomenon, it surges up around you like a rising tide.

The world becomes distorted, warped, impossible to navigate. Hallucinations overpower you, both visual and auditory. Disorientation follows. We hope you went out in protective gear after all, because we'd hate to see you cooked alive by radiation so soon after arrival.

Even those wearing full protective gear aren't safe, however. The red shifts carry pieces of other universes, places and objects familiar or strange. Monsters you thought you'd never see again, or never wanted to see in the first place. If you're lucky, these bits of other places will disappear before they can hurt you (one way or another). If you're not, they might just stick around.

d. home away from home.

You've had a long, miserable day. Time to unwind at one of the few functioning entertainment facilities — the creatively named "Rusty Chain" bar. Its (unfriendly) robot bartender can only make you a tequila sunrise, and might get testy if you climb behind the bar, but it's worth getting a few synthesized Maraschino cherries thrown at you to try some of the other synthetic booze back there. There's a lot of it. Maybe you want to play bartender yourself for a while. Why not?

Someone else's favorite mediocre songs from another universe play from the broken music bots on repeat. There's a pool table with holographic balls that flash different colors after being hit by a laser-tipped cue, and a bizarre, violent interpretation of foosball that's closer to foos-battle. Each player controls their team via old-style arcade controls, attacking and defending each other. The goal is to get a holographic bomb into the other players base.

There are also darts. Which are just regular darts. Sometimes you don’t mess with tradition.

Navigation.

Comments

[benhargreeves]

Practical advice was what he'd asked for, and in a way it's a relief to actually hear it. This guy sounds like he knows what he's talking about, and everything he says makes sense. But it visibly hits Ben hard - harder than is entirely logical. It hadn't even occurred to him that this lockdown might last long enough that having food and water, or conserving oxygen, might be an issue. He had thought and hour, two hours, maximum. The thought that he might be locked up for a long period of time is, to say the least, Not Great. The fact that it's a lab isn't helping much, either.

He sucks in an audibly surprised breath, taking a step back so he can press his back against the wall, trying to steady himself. For just a second he lets the distress show, pressing a hand over his eyes and hanging his head. He nods, though, to show he heard the other man, and to confirm that it's his first lockdown.

"Okay. Okay. We can, uh- ch-check the cupboards for food and water. That door - " he gestures to the one he means, "leads directly out to the center of the Anchor and that's all open, so um- probably we should go back- into the lab and shut that door behind us."

Ben's doing his best, but 'calm as possible' is a relative thing, and there are a variety of factors making this particularly challenging for him. Not the least of which is how much he'd forgotten, in all that time being dead, just how physical a thing terror could be. His knees are actually shaking, no matter how much he wants them not to be.

[shouldstoptalking]

Alex glances over at sees the young guy panicking or at least looking like he is about to panic. He comes over and reaches over to take the guy's shoulder and help him feel a bit more grounded. He knows he does at least when he feels touch.

"Easy there cowboy. Don't worry, we got this." He gently nudges Ben to sit down, that way he won't fall over hopefully. "Usually lockdowns don't last long, we don't have to worry. "

He moves to sit down next to him. "I'm Martian. We got domes like this while we work on terraforming the place. And without an atmosphere stuff from space is a slightly bigger problem. So they err on the side of caution and have lockdown drills often. This is probably just that."

[benhargreeves]

Ben allows Alex to steer him in the direction of the small table, and after he maneuvers his way into one of the cheap folding chairs he realizes that sitting down was actually a great idea. He can tell that he is being handled, like some kind of an overreacting child, and a part of his pride prickles at it. But the thing is - that's just what he's acting like, and he knows it, but can't seem to make it stop. Unfortunately, any kind of thorough explanation why he is panicking in this situation would be humiliating, not to mention a huge overshare. So he settles for a half-truth.

"In my, um- reality, I guess you'd call it, nobody's ever been to Mars. Or any further than the moon. So all this space stuff's a bit..."

He trails off into a shrug, letting Alex fill in the blank. Unfamiliar. Terrifying. Weird. Confusing. Ben twists his hands together in his lap, but he is doing his best to believe Alex's reassurances that this is probably an unnecessary precaution, that it will likely be over soon. It's hard, trying to force catastrophic imaginings from his mind, and so for distraction as much as from curiosity, he asks:

"You said you lived on warships. Are you - like a pilot, or some kind of soldier?

It's fairly obvious what he's doing, that he is talking just to fumble for any semblance of normalcy and emotional control. Ben's not doing a convincing job of faking being okay, but hopefully Alex will play along, and perhaps he'll actually get there eventually.

[shouldstoptalking]

Alexs eyes go a little wide at that. That seems so different than what he knows. He shakes his head slightly. "You're from earth then? Earth is where we're all from sort of. Originally. But the earthers colonized Luna, then Mars and then the rest of the solar system. Some places are trying to break free of that, Mars declared itself free and all that. I used to pilot ships for the Mars Congressional Republic Navy, but that wasn't warships. That is later. We're more... Free agents, even if we do a fair amount of work for the Belt." He doesn't mind sharing. "When we get out of here I'll show you a map." Or draw one, he isn't sure that there is one of the solar systems here.

[benhargreeves]

[ Ben has the stupid urge to laugh for a moment, hearing Alex talking about colonizing the solar system, because it sounds so much like something out of the cheap paperback science fiction novels he used to read as a kid. Not like anything that could be someone's real life. But he checks the impulse and listens with a straight face. And, in fact, it is actually kind of helpful. Alex's explanation gives him something else to focus on, and he can forget about himself for a moment, and about the situation they're both in. ]

That would be cool.

[ There is a moment or two of silence, and Ben thinks: He seems really nice. At least you didn't get locked in with some asshole or complete weirdo. Then it occurs to him that if Alex knew anything about him, he would probably be thinking about how unfortunate he was to get locked in with such a weirdo, and then his thoughts begin to spiral again, and he laces his hands together on the table, curls forward so he can press his forehead against them. In that position he asks, with curiosity that only mostly hides a hint of desperation: ]

What kind of work? I mean, what kinda jobs do you do with a spaceship anyway? Like- transport or, science stuff, or what?

[shouldstoptalking]

Well, there are different kinds of spaceships. Military we mostly talk about transport, various warships and also supply ships. Civilian use is more of everything. Some people live on their ships. A lot of us do actually. Hard not to when a trip easily can take months.

The Roci is... well, she is a former warship, we do a bit of everything though. Transport, hunting pirates, all sorts of stuff. Before that I was on a ice hauler. Water is a hard thing to get in space so ice haulers are sent out to harvest it from moons or comets and then we bring ice back to the stations.

[benhargreeves]

Ben listens, remaining curled forward until Alex get to the part about hunting pirates. That is intriguing enough that Ben sits up, eyebrows raised in surprise. He doesn't know this man, can't get a read on whether he's joking or not. Either he's got a super deadpan delivery or he means it...

"Pirates? For real?"

Of course they probably didn't have the whole peg leg and parrot aesthetic if they are in space, but the idea of pirates being a real part of someone's real everyday life is so bizarre to Ben. Fantastical, even.

(It does occur to him, in an offhand sort of way, that there's probably a lot about his own life that would sound bizarre and fantastical to most other people...)

"So have you ever met, like, aliens, or is it just humans who have spread out from Earth?"

It had been a popular theory in the media and among 'fans' when he was young, that Ben was an alien of some kind, or half-alien, or some variation on that. Certainly, of all the Academy, he was the one that people agreed seemed not human. Something animal, something other.

[shouldstoptalking]

"Well that is the term they use and they do things like setting up a trap and then lure you in and either kill everyone on board and strip your ship or leave you for dead and strip your ship." He sighs and shakes his head. "Or they fleece desperate people needing food or water."

The mention of aliens has him going a little pale. "Well... Not really. There is this thing. The protomolecule. It acts like a virus. And then a big lump of it went and made a portal in an empty bit of space." And then Alex and some others had gone through it. But he didn't need to share that.

[benhargreeves]

"Sound like real scumbags."

That description of their violence really does take the wind out of Ben's proverbial sails. He knows actual historical pirates were bad news, too, and that the versions in the novels he's read are nothing like the reality. But he can't help being a little bummed that space pirates aren't a little bit daring and romantic. No, apparently they're just bands of criminals, hurting others for their own gain.

Ben is prepared to be similarity disappointed when Alex starts talking about molecules and viruses - sure, they might count as alien life, but he'd been talking about organisms a little more complex than that. That is, until Alex mentions a portal, and Ben's interest visibly spikes. He sits up, and the fear is finally really forgotten, as he leans in, asking:

"A portal to what?"

[shouldstoptalking]

That is the thing, the protomolecule is plenty complex, but given that Alex doesn't entirely understand it himself it is hard to explain. "We don't know. We suspect that the protomolecule is just a machine, a thing or something made by someone else and that that is why it has been taking over people, to get enough mass to build this portal. We don't know where it goes. We went through the portal and strange things are going on there. There seems to be a speed limit on how fast you can go. We were mostly running from some people coming after us."

[benhargreeves]

In some ways, this was the ideal person to get stuck with - someone willing to calm him down, and who apparently has lead a wildly complex and interesting life before coming here, that Ben can ask about and focus on rather than thinking about the fact that he's locked up.

"Why were there people coming after you?"

A portal built by machines is a little less immediately relevant to Ben's interest, but he figures they can circle back there.

[shouldstoptalking]

"Someone blew up a ship and blamed it on us. And it doesn't help that the captain is known to be a loose cannon. They also had a doctored video of him claiming it was us." He sighs. "A lot of politics I am not sure you're interested in really."

[benhargreeves]

"I wouldn't understand them, but that's not the same as not being interested."

He had barely been keeping up with some of the stuff that Alex seemed to think was pretty basic, so if he's giving a warning about it getting too political and complicated, he's probably right to. Still, Ben has always much preferred listening to speaking, and the panic continues ebbing away as he hears about all the crazy adventures this guy has been through.

"Are any of your crewmates here?"

They sounded close - Ben had noticed him saying we and us, talking about them all as a unit, in a way that doesn't really sound like they're just... coworkers. Peers. He thinks maybe it's a little more like a team, like what he'd had with his siblings at the Academy.