🧽🪐 📹📡🔫 🧫🥼 🦦💤🦦⏰
Crew Personal Logs
Diaries of the crew on this mission.
Turn Up the Radio
Since the enemy isn’t here at the moment, we are all doing our best to cope with its inevitable return. Lexx is off keeping up-to-date with those in charge here and on the space station above. Sresaka is getting lots of sharp objects from somewhere, and borrowed my industrial welder to attach them to mop handles and any other objects with reach. Ash and I are doing science stuff (with Widget constantly reminding me that he has been “patenting” everything we come up with). So far today, we’ve built a device that can catch the 15 terahertz jamming to station cameras if the doppelganger is changing form in range. We’ve narrowed down just how close the creature needs to be to a camera to cause it to turn the signal to snow.
We realize this is all the doings of those nanites, but I was worried that we didn’t have enough to test to see if we can subject them to what we want them to do, or at least stop them from shape-changing. Returning to the med bay, I attached the new signal jammer to my rig and asked it to tell the scattered nanites in the petri dish goo to wake up, turning the jammer on and off as needed. It, ah, worked. Within seconds, there was a pale green finger sitting where the goo had been. I am certain that the shade would match Lexx’s skin tone. While I’m sure there are boundless applications for this stuff, I am making sure we can tell the nanites to “sleep” if the doppelganger comes back.
And then Aida woke up.
She Blinded Me with Science
We dropped off Lexx at the infirmary. Not sure what else to do, I went back to the kitchen to see if I could get residue samples from the open drain pipe. I took my samples back to the infirmary’s lab to analyze. That took about seven hours. While waiting for results, we were also looking through as many databases as we could for shapeshifting species. We found four. Ash thinks it’s Astrozoan. It could be, except… I found nanites in the samples with the biological material. I don’t know what species this is.
We also discovered the electromagnetic interference at 15 terahertz is what is messing up the cameras. And then, we got a call from waste processing that they found an open valve that had been used by the creature. We are assuming it left that way. Widget is sure nothing would want to use that as an entrance.
Sresaka is so frustrated with not being allowed to bring weapons on to the downport that she is seriously considering welding kitchen knives onto a stick. I may lend her the industrial welder I carry around.
Clones (We’re All)
Widget has been reviewing so much security footage that he hasn’t had time to get in trouble. Which is good, as we have enough already. I found three remote detonators for three cargo containers in the warehouse. I had to leave Ash to diffuse them alone, as we realized a lot of footage was on a loop. The warehouse was basically offline for sixteen hours! And then I went to turn to Lexx, and he wasn’t there. He’d gone back to our quarters by himself. I just knew that wasn’t good.
We raced there (leaving a surprised Ash at the warehouse) in time to see a very fast Lexx running away from a not quite but almost choked to death Lexx. Knowing we couldn’t catch up (we tried), we had Widget pull up live feeds and saw the doppelganger run into the kitchen. Within seconds, the creature was gone. We only knew how from the open drain in the floor, and footage of a black ooze entering the drain at the time the Lexx impersonator would have been there. I guess we should cover that with some sort of anti-doppelganger cover….
Hunting High and Low
And even more things are happening! Widget, along with anyone else watching chunks of security camera footage from the night before, saw that Tabaei Vari, the head of the planetside station, was seen messing with something on the docks the night before, and eventually had disappeared in a warehouse near the location of the shuttle explosion. We split the crew up, so Ash and Sresaka could keep investigating what we’d found prior, as Lexx, Widget, and I called Derrik Mason up at the station above that we had a problem. Tabaei was at the dinner with us at the time he was seen at the docks. We got permission and a security detail to let us into his Tabaei’s private quarters while Derrik kept him busy elsewhere. No dead victims, nothing. So, if he had a doppelganger, it hadn’t taken over. Probably. It seems more likely that the real Tabaei was at the dinner and not skulking around.
We need to make a timeline and figure out if the Ash doppelganger is definitely a separate creature, or if it is actively switching what it looks like depending on what it wants us to be seeing. Or not seeing. Argh! I’m an engineer, not a detective!