In Their Native Art Style

[simon.clarkstone]

> Jz: Check whether the door has, in fact, re-unlocked.

It has. You brought the broken spear to help open it, but did not need it.



You feel the gravity outside. It is significantly less than that of Earth, and matches that of Venus. There is a ladder down from here. You might want to take some of the things you have acquired with you if you are going to explore outside, or maybe the spear is enough.

The author did have a policy of not linking back to earlier posts, but decided that that was a stupid policy for something as slow as this. Pete Abrams is allowed to do it, after all.

[kd7sov]

> Take the ropes, the data cable, the solar cell and battery, and the medical kit. And the spear, of course.

[orngjce223]

> Tie everything you will take together with the rope so that it may be carried on your back, so as to leave your limbs as free as is practical.

[simon.clarkstone]

> Take the ropes, the data cable, the solar cell and battery, and the medical kit. And the spear, of course.

> Tie everything you will take together with the rope so that it may be carried on your back, so as to leave your limbs as free as is practical.

You disconnected the sensor pack's power supply. You expect that its sudden re-appearance on the Venus area of the Internet will have attracted immediate attention, but even if unguided it will have instinctively sought out interesting objects in range, examined them in detail, and transmitted the data back for storage by now.

The solar panel is too big for you to carry along with the other things. Even LN-4-7-22 struggled to carry it and the battery at the same time.

Ok, that was slower to read up for and to draw than the author expected.

[simon.clarkstone]

These structures must be the sploiters that are generating the (impressively-smooth) artificial gravity in there, to disguise the Venus-like gravity. That explains the slight anomalies that you observed before. It is sufficiently certain and distinct from the real gravity that you will draw it on every diagram.

If you are on Venus, the time is probably not what your cybernetics say it is, because getting from Earth to there in a few hours would be extremely difficult. If the time on your cybernetics is wrong then that could explain how you could have a multi-day-old scar that you didn't notice for all that time.

You will consider yourself to be cryptographically compromised, though it doesn't make much difference while you are not externally networked. Presumably Tkhlpzyv will have come to the same conclusion when Tk saw whatever happened to youand arranged for key revocation. You will have to not completely trust your cybernetics until they have been checked out thoroughly, though there is not much harm they could do now that you are wary of them.

[SonicLover]

Is that image a top view or a side view? I can't tell.

[kd7sov]

> Examine surroundings. What useful or informative objects stand out?

[Leafsword]

Is that image a top view or a side view? I can't tell.

Side, because the stuff on her back is shown not overlaying it.
If it's overlapping it, like in 754, that's a top view. If it's shown next to it, like in 755, that's a side view.
Can also tell if you know one image of something is topdown and it looks different in the other one (Like the blue rectangles in the same images)

[simon.clarkstone]

> Examine surroundings. What useful or informative objects stand out?

The lighting is bright, and the walls and floor are made of pseudometal. You hear some indistinct sounds coming from all around, presumably machinery of some kind in nearby rooms. From the outside of the structure you can clearly see that it is a fake, designed make you think you were trapped in / escaping from a human-tech containment structure on their Earth. You can see the sploiters underneath that create the illusion of Earth gravity in there (a very good illusion though), the power cables that supply them, and the pipes that were recirculating the water to form a stream. The whole structure is raised off the floor on pillars.



Over on the far side of the room you see evidence (probably) that LN-4-7-22 has been here: a small panel pulled out of the wall by its cable, leaving other cables sticking put of the wall. They look like power cables; best not to touch.

By dead reckoning, you decide that the structure above and to your right is the place where you discovered the the SRHN. The shape and the water pipes coming out from underneath support this hypothesis. There are more (undamaged) power cables connected to the sploiters under it and going off to the right. The two boxes here (only the larger one shown) have some physical controls on them.

You decide that the SRHN probably needs power to become intangible and it became inoperative a few moments ago because the subject cut that power.

[kd7sov]

> Can you tell where LN-4-7-22 went?

> Are the physical controls visibly labeled?

[snuffysam]

> When you say 'Undamaged' power cables, what exactly do you mean? Is there power in those?

[orngjce223]

> Do you know any materials or technology that would be able to generate the properties of the SRHN?

show spoiler

hide spoiler

casually bumps

[Draco18s]

> Do you know any materials or technology that would be able to generate the properties of the SRHN?

show spoiler

hide spoiler

casually bumps

show spoiler

hide spoiler

As enthusiastic as I'm sure you are to see this rise again (as am I), I have it on good authority *cough, friend of the author, cough* that it may be a while, due to the mental demands of the writing and art style require to do them justice.

[simon.clarkstone]

> Are the physical controls visibly labeled?

Yes. There are three buttons on the left and six on the right, and some indicator lights (turned off) in the middle.

A bit more should be coming up this evening. Hmm, gotta get into the habit of this again.

[snuffysam]

Let's start in order. Press the upper-left button and see what it does.

[poiz]

Press the 2 buttons which are alike.

show spoiler

hide spoiler

Yes! Update! Yay!

[Draco18s]

Push the button in the upper-most-right. That one looks like a power on/off switch.

show spoiler

hide spoiler

Go go I/O symbol similarity

[simon.clarkstone]

Let's start in order. Press the upper-left button and see what it does.

You press the upper-left button. The device produces a beep comprising two main frequencies in a simple ratio - 2:3. The six buttons on the right become lit by incandescent bulbs behind. (Now that you know they can light up, you indicate the non-lit ones with a dark border on the diagram and the lit ones with a colour-associated-with-illumination border.)

Press the 2 buttons which are alike.

You try the mid-left button next. The device produces a beep comprising two main frequencies in non-simple ratio - about 7:17 or 5:12. Button illumination does not change.

Push the button in the upper-most-right. That one looks like a power on/off switch.

Taking the lighting of the buttons as a guide, you try pressing the top-right one. The device produces the simple beep again, and one of the chevrons in the centre lights up. Button illumination does not change.

Readers with implausibly-good memories will notice that the "colour-associated-with-illumination" is the same colour that was used for the solar satellite and the solar cell.

[poiz]

Push all of them in a systematic way.

[snuffysam]

> Push that last button again. See if you can turn off the chevron.

[Draco18s]

Push the 2 buttons which are exactly identical.

There are not two buttons with the same icon. The left side only has 3 buttons (but six icons).

[simon.clarkstone]

> Push that last button again. See if you can turn off the chevron.

Four more presses of the button light up four more polygons continuing down the from the top, with the simple beep each time.



The sixth press lights up the bottom chevron, dis-illuminates the right-hand-side buttons, and sounds the non-simple beep.

After a couple of moments, the physical controls (including the polygons down the centre) go back to their original unlit state.

Push all of them in a systematic way.

The behaviour seems to be the same if you press the top-left button followed by any sequence of six button-presses on the right. The bottom-left button behaves the same as the top-left one as far as you can tell. The middle-left one never seems to have an effect, and only ever produces the non-simple beep. Pretty much everything else you try just produces more non-simple beeps.

> Can you tell where LN-4-7-22 went?

Your automatic reaction is to consult the location-tracking database, before you again remember that you are still not online (and LN-4-7-22 wouldn't be tracked by it yet anyway). Instead you try to smell where the subject has been; though you have had negligible amounts of practice at that before now. The scent is weak from the ladder to the pulled-out piece of wall, and between there and those physical controls on the wall which the power cable connects to. The scent is a stronger from the pulled-out piece of wall to this door over here.

If you could work out what the physical controls on the large box (and for that matter the identical ones on the small box) were for, that should help decide if fiddling with them is likely to achieve anything, and if that thing is useful.

[snuffysam]

> Trace wires (if any) from the large box to whatever it controls.

[poiz]

Assume the complex beep to be an error sound. Explore.

[simon.clarkstone]

> Trace wires (if any) from the large box to whatever it controls.

There are no wires coming out of the large box (or the small one), just wires going between other things. The two boxes seem to be storage boxes that you cannot open.

Assume the complex beep to be an error sound.

From what you recall, evolved organisms prefer simple ratios of sound frequencies to less-simple ones. This suggests that the non-simple ratio was indicating incorrect usage of the physical controls, in which case you have been inputting a series of nonsensical commands and the device was rejecting each command as you completed it.

The author has a good idea what to do next, but is now falling asleep.

BTW, is it worth the author going back and fixing the many broken images? He thinks he will have a more-reliable host available, after a little setup.