Justin froze as he watched the scientist shout happily to the room around him, he was a little concerned that his new landlord appeared to be a crackpot, but the thing that troubled him most, was that he couldn't understand a word the guy was saying. It sounded like English, the tone and cadence was right and it tickled at the edges of his understanding, but none of the words made sense. A worrying memory tugged at him, like a forgotten bill come due. He quickly accessed his Complications.

Outsider You are a stranger from a strange land.

You do not speak the local language.

You do not have access to current affairs memory package.

All Social interactions with NPCs suffer a 5% penalty.

Half an hour ago, the news might have been the final straw that broke him, but now Justin was on the rise. He'd survived a crash landing, gained a pair of sidekicks (minions?), and was secretly infiltrating an obvious mad-scientist's lair.

And Justin was pretty sure the guy was a mad-scientist, mainly because he was currently poking something that looked like a cross between a slime and a racoon with a tazer pen, laughing in delight as it shifted between solid and semi-liquid states.

A little worried for the creature, Justin was happy when it finally tired of the 'game', easily slipping its restraints and leaping onto the startled scientist's face. Once there, it apparently bit his nose and dissolved his eyebrows, before disappearing through a vent in the floor. The zap-happy scientist, attempting to stop the totally-provoked attack, only succeeded in tazing himself in the forehead.

This is great, Justin thought, the new digs come with free entertainment.

Leaving IRA watching the now grumbling scientist gear up for a jelly-coon hunt, Justin decided to get back to studying code with ERA. He needed money and information, and he was hoping hacking would be the quickest way to both. He considered rooting through the files on the server, a strange boxy structure like a model city beneath him, but Justin didn't want to do anything to reveal his presence, not yet. He was also a little worried about what he'd find in there.

After a couple of hours of ERA teaching him basic coding, he realised he was beginning to think of the Sub-Routine as a her rather than a him. Whether that was because of the name he'd been calling her in his head or the higher pitched voice she'd chosen when he'd asked them to switch things up, he wasn't sure.

He also realised that she was only a novice coder herself, and he was rapidly approaching the extent of what she could teach him.

She had taught him a number of useful commands to use in code packages, including one he hoped would help with his translation issues, but If he was going to advance further he probably needed a lot more practice, and to see what he could figure out on his own.

Successful Skill Use +12 xp to Coding - Beginner Level 4 [10%].

+6 xp to skill group Coder - Beginner Level 2 [83%]Successful Skill Use +10 xp to Decipher - Beginner Level 3 [08%].

+5 xp to skill group Coder - Beginner Level 2 [87%] Crafting Recipes

Code Packets (Ketican Runic Script)

You have learned to craft the following commands within a code packet.

Beginner Level Commands (10 focus per command):

Message, Analyse, Harvester, Report, Stasis, Compression, Copy, Link, Transcribe, Observe, Decode.

After reviewing his progress, Justin checked in on the mad-scientist who appeared to be nursing a new bump on his head, and was now missing the left sleeve of his lab coat. The guy was sketching a new cryptozoological marvel on a large pad of paper, it seemed he was intending to work on an improbable combination of a dog and a porcupine next. Apparently jelly-coons weren't going to cut it in this day and age, or maybe he needed a dog-upine to keep the jelly-coon from stealing his trash?

Happy that the scientist wasn't about to stumble across him and demand rent, Justin began to analyse the scientist's files, first concentrating just on the code and how it moved. He'd been in a rush last time he inspected human code, now he had plenty of time and a much better grounding to work from.

After spending an hour just watching, he decided he was ready to experiment a little. Not on the scientist's files, since he couldn't afford to be discovered just yet, instead he flexed his newly improved coding muscles, sending packets out into some of the local data streams with instructions to [Copy] small sections of traffic and [Report] back. He made sure each packet was [Link]ed to him, so he'd know whether or not they were successful, as well as to get a better idea of what worked and what didn't.

Once again, some streams reacted poorly to his attention, throttling or cutting data, he even observed a few of his code packets get torn apart by aggressive, fast moving programs, whose streams he would then carefully avoid. One successful packet heading back with a section of copied code in tow set off the scientist's firewall, but luckily Justin had been watching closely, and was able to remotely disperse the packet before the Firewall could do more than blip in suspicion.

The Link/Copy/Reports failed more often than they succeeded, but he staggered his creation of the packets with time spent picking at the successful data copies, allowing his Focus to regenerate before sending out more.

Eventually he managed to crack open some of the more weakly encrypted copies, giving him a look at the code from the inside, improving his understanding of encryption methods, and giving him a chance to use the [Decode] command on the contents, letting KIP begin to learn English.

It was slow going, but Justin had nothing better to do and had rapidly lost himself in the soporific glow of safety and the rewards of repetitive but challenging training.

He smiled as the encryption finally fell away from his most recent prize, and a small section of a video clip sprang into his awareness. Video was much better than text for his [Decode] program to work on. Matching audio bites with accompanying images and on-screen text meant KIP's knowledge of English would jump ahead. He sent most of his future packets to the same stream, until eventually he was able to start distinguishing video files from text files from process data, speeding up his useful acquisitions immensely.

He was surprised when he eventually noticed the time, apparently he'd worked through the night.

Despite that being well over 24 hours, given his advanced acuity, he realised he wasn't even a little hungry or tired. He hadn't expected to be, given KIP's machine traits, but it made him a little concerned for the future. Would he become so accustomed to the AI's lack of human frailties that he would find returning to his real life intolerable?

It had never been a problem with his weekend use of game pods, but this time he was playing a particularly inhuman character in one of the most highly immersive games ever made, and he was planning to do it for months.

He expected that at least some of the psych tests they'd given him yesterday(?) had been to determine his likelihood of developing dissociative issues, and the game probably had systems in place to ease transitions. But still, he resolved to drop into the game lobby occasionally to reconnect with his humanity.

A little lost in his thoughts, he was surprised when the most recent video file contained not only words he now recognised, but the view of a familiar looking lake swarming with helicopters.

A TV reporter was interviewing a fisherman in front of a small boat, the words 'lake', 'meteor', and 'alien' were mentioned more than once in the short video. Oops.