I had been putting some thought into how I would pull off my next few steps for some time now. My ability to travel between worlds was something I had played around with for a while, grasping at its limits. There was a certain sense of distances between places, and I could feel the difference between places I'd connected to before and those I hadn't. Trying to arrive at a place before or after I'd left it last wasn't something I could do. Well, unless I let my connection to it drift forward as I moved forward myself. I'd found more than a few fictional worlds -- most of which were as far as I could tell just generic dramas of one form or another. Lots of zombie apocalypse worlds. Or just "deadworlds" in general.
I'd also learned that I could "peak in" to a world -- like skimming the surface -- without actually forming a connection. That made narrowing down what I wanted much easier, as it reduced searches from physically connecting and guessing if I got the timeframe correct down to something akin to running my fingers over the surface and just "knowing" if I was in the right vicinity, or if it had "what I wanted". A good example of this would be the world I now found myself in… and more precisely, where I found myself within it. The design offices for the replacement flagship of the UEO, to be precise. Yeah. SeaQuest DSV. My memories of the show were relatively vague, but I wasn't really looking to invest myself into the plot any more than I had been in the Fullmetal Alchemist world. There were only a few things I was really all that interested in obtaining here, and I could do all of them in this place. Snatch-and-Grab. I'd need what I was obtaining here for my next stop and for other, further, plans. So, USB drive slurping down the poorly secured design schematics and manuals governing the care and maintenance of the SeaQuest herself, while I "hopped sideways" over to the berth where they were growing the subs' hull material. I'd need a sample to expedite things -- and honestly, it was amazing to see it in person. The SeaQuest was a living ship -- or, at least, its hull was comprised of a living organism, and had a crush-depth rating of 9,000 meters. That might not sound like much until you realize that the SeaQuest was the size of a naval frigate, and could go half again deeper than the deepest steel-hull vehicles ever made… which were also something like two orders of magnitude smaller than the sub I was now looking at. In other words, it was a ridiculously capable living material, for a human society with a 21st century techbase. One able to withstand pressure differences that one would find in indirect hits from nuclear weapons without rupturing. And self-repairing so long as the vessel had appropriate power and mass to "feed" it.
I almost felt bad about stealing the specs and samples needed to reproduce the stuff. I'd have to send the man who invented the stuff a fruit basket someday, or something. And besides; it's not like they'd find anything gone missing. On second thought, this place was kind of a one trick pony in terms of anything I might get of lasting value here. Best to just move on.
I hopped sideways back to my data download, with my illgotten gains firmly in hand, and proceed on to my next totally legitimate business transaction across realities.
Altered Carbon. This place challenged me. On the one hand, cyberpunk is lovely visually and the grittiness makes for compelling storylines. On another, the colony worlds are shall we say less than enthusiastically maintained bureaucratically yet still have access to the same techbase. I'd be coming back here from time to time. But for my first trip, the biggest thing I would be taking advantage of is the free health clinics that offer installation/implantation services for one's Stack. The data on the things are literally open-source. They're considered a basic human right, and the hardest part of my efforts here was finding a clinic sufficiently remote enough in a world with sufficient population that my claiming to be a disenchanted son of a religious exceptionalist group wouldn't have the colony's Child Protective Services on the imaginary cult's compound.
Getting a pawnshop to transfer gold coins to an account in my name no questions asked was slightly more difficult. Using that to purchase a pair of dataslates with a universal wireless data transfer device was somewhat more difficult still. But hey. At least I finally got to live in a decent hotel for the duration it took me to pull this off. The less said about the people I encountered while firmly sticking out of anyone and everyone's way and doing my damnedest to give off "utterly unimportant, pay no attention to this man who is utterly boring in every possible way" vibes … well. I was pretty sure I'd failed, but I was also pretty sure I didn't care. Hopping sideways to that clinic and grabbing a handful of unallocated stacks was going to cost me in the future, but stealing the things was sort of like stealing aspirin. Barely more than a misdemeanor.
The next step I was going to take was one I cared about rather a bit more, and a much longer "figurative" trip. I'd thought for a while about where exactly to go to get this done. Some corner of my mind felt that television series somehow had greater "mythical weight" or something and thus would be easier to find, as opposed to settings or worlds that only had written form. But there was just no getting around the next step I had in mind -- I just simply couldn't even after years of wracking my brain remember or locate one that had what I wanted in exactly the format I wanted it in. And it was an important one to my future efforts.
Brain-computer interfaces. Neural implants. Especially ones that allow the implantee to "synchronize" with complex and largely arbitrary forms of technology. One of the things I'd noticed early on was that for whatever reason the vast majority of the worlds I could find were "hard" realities. Star Trek was on the softer scale of what I could access -- and only the earlier stuff at that. Truly magical settings… even Fullmetal Alchemist's author claimed that it was science fiction not fantasy. Comic-book universes? Star Wars? Straight up unreachable. At least, not for me as I was at this point.
This was a dilemma that I'd need to thread the needle on: On the one hand, I needed personal power that would be guaranteed to be effective in any universe I found myself in, and the less equipment I needed to carry to pull that off, the better; as I was limited in travelling between worlds to what I could readily carry on my person. I had some ideas for how to work around around that problem, but until I did, I'd be strictly limited to what I could either carry or become. And since pretty much every form of low-magic setting that allows an individual to become powerful does so at the expense of deals with entities or phenomena that can only be guaranteed to exist in that universe … well. I was lucky I'd found Fullmetal Alchemist. Or maybe my unconscious mind already knew what I would need and what would convince me. I'd never know.
Anyhow. Point here is: scifi universes were far more accessible than magical ones (somehow the Buffyverse was within reach. I still hadn't worked out all of the rules for my range, but I sure as hell wasn't going to try figuring them out there. Heh. Buffyverse. Hell.). The less handwaving mainly involved, the more likely I could freely access them. And thus my overall problem: I needed a form of "hacking" interface that was capable of interfacing with as many different techbases as I could possibly get, that I could carry with me anywhere I went, and wouldn't set off alarms for having it, and wasn't from a setting that was too fantastical to pull that off. During my time in Amestris, I'd worked out where to go. One of the worlds of the Eco-Tech Coalition, circa The Parafaith War. And it was in part why I'd stolen multiple samples of both the Altered Carbon Stacks and why I'd stolen the specifications for the SeaQuest's hull material. See, the Eco-Tech folks -- they were big on mastering biotech. They were terraformers and genetic engineers writ large. And they were also stuck fighting a interplanetary civilization of religious fanatics, and as such had bent their technology towards various military applications. Including but not limited to an "intelligence" model of neural implant -- made of biological materials -- that was remarkable not for its wireless interfacing capability, as all of their milspec implants had this, but for its ability to go undetected to in-depth bioscans performed by hostile governments looking specifically for said implants as a way of detecting spies.
This next part was going to suck, though.
I allowed reality to uncrumple around me, in the middle of a technical briefing by Eco-Tech terraforming experts looking to convert an oceanic world into one more suitable to permanent habitation by future colonists.
"Greetings, programs! I come in peace! Take me to your lead-"
Did I forget to mention they had neuralytic shock inducing stunner weapons?
I woke up and found myself in a nondescript beige cell. Ten meters by ten meters by ten meters. One bed, with some sort of padding that was made of something I couldn't tear, or leave cuts on. One ceramic toilet, like a prison cell of my homeworld would have used steel for. One faucet. No mirror. Nothing else I could see -- any of the seams in the wall could be for a door, and I wouldn't be able to tell.
I cooled my heels there for a while, after splashing some water on my face. I didn't know, exactly, how long this game of chicken I was now finding myself in would last but the one thing I was sure of was that whatever form of brainscans or memory probing these people could do without causing long-term damage, they almost certainly had already done to me. So it was just a matter of showing them that I was willing to be patient until they decided to play ball. Forcing the issue by side-hopping would be a great way to get myself dead.
I lasted … well, I don't know how long, but it felt like a couple of hours, anyway, before I finally called out. "Hey, can I get, like, a deck of cards or something? Or maybe y'all can stop pretending you've forgotten me in here and we can get to brass tacks on why I've come? Dunno how much you've gotten from me already but I imagine you have questions. Can't promise answers, but I can promise good faith dealing."
Nothing. Well, it could've been worse. They could've been blasting "Macarena" at ear-damaging volumes and flashing strobelights. Or lacing the air with truthdrugs. … Actually were probably doing that and just waiting for their bioscans to confirm they were taking effect. Meh. I'd planned on being honest.
Fuckers waited until I'd fallen asleep to rush in and grab me again. They even used a stunner on me while picking me up. I mean, what the hell.
Bleary-eyed me woke up with my face smushed in an entirely undignifed position on a plastic table of some kind, with my hands locked down by some kind of restraints. I didn't actually know if I could do my stepping out of reality thing restrained like this. Blinking, I noticed that the person in front of me was actually showing up in my infrared and backscatter vision as well as regular sight.
Huh. They didn't take my eye. That was actually surprising. Maybe they hadn't worked out … how it worked? "Uhhh… howdy."
Smooth. Real smooth.
The vaguely hispanic/asian looking man in front of me was a good bit shorter than I was, even with my chair lowered than his. He was also remarkably unimpressed. "Typical aryan sloppiness. What were you expecting with a stunt that stupid?"
I blinked again, the low-key shock of the sheer casualness of the man's tone at total odds to the setting I was in. I snorted. "Honestly?" I rattled my hands in their restraints, or tried to. "This. Had to be as persuasive as possible if the rest would hold out. Have your people worked out the samples I brought? What they can do?"
The man glared at me. Way too long. Seriously, if I wasn't able to watch his body-heat patterns fluctuate I would've thought he was a robot, he remained perfectly still for that long. "Perhaps we should start again. I am Lieutenant-Commander Nakajima, Eco-Tech Naval Intelligence Division. And you would be…?"
I offered a wan smile. "No truth drugs in the air? Oh man. Disappointed. Or maybe they just didn't work? Hrm. Anyhoo, it's a pleasure to meet you, Commander. You can call me Mark Andes."
No visible reaction. Dude's a friggin' rock. "I see. Well, Mr. Andes. You have created something of a stir in your arrival. I will … cut to the chase, I believe is the term you would expect. Your arrival created a rather great deal of consternation amongst our people. You are quite lucky that the conference you chose to 'bomb' was not a livecast one, and that this colony is only fairly remote. You are even more lucky about who it is that has chosen to intervene on your behalf. Were it not for Vel Seen, you would likely never have woken up again."
Oh. Oh shit. The Fahrkan. I'd completely forgotten about them. Of course those arcotech greys would notice my arrival. They'd probably dealt with, like, a billion people with abilities like mine. I immediately strangled my panic. "Oh? Can I assume that this 'Vel Seen' will be wanting to speak to me, then?"
Nakajima snorted. "No. In fact, Doctor Seen was quite insistent that we ask you politely to 'leave and never return to this universe', end quote. Emphasis on the politely."
I frowned. "I had rather hoped to make a successful bargain with your people. I could offer a great deal of …"
"It might interest you to know that Doctor Seen is a specialist in submarine habitat modeling."
Damnit. Well. Okay. "I… had rather hoped your people would be able to get some good use out of the samples I'd come with. The Doctor's people haven't simply taken them from you, I hope?"
Nakajima lips quirked faintly upwards in what I would almost call a smile, then looked to the door and simply nodded. "You're planning to leave the materials in question with us even though you can't actually get anything in return?"
I just nodded.
Nakajima bowed his head slightly. "Then on behalf of both my government, I am authorized to provide you with this sample container. Within you will find an early-generation bioneural implant and instructions on how a surgeon might safely implant it in an adult human of good health."
This was surreal. "Why?"
"We have found it good policy to mirror the Fahrkan in how they respond to the absurd."
My mind stuttered. "What."
Nakajima didn't respond except to release the clamps on my hands and pick up a slim briefcase which he slid over the table to me from its spot on the ground by the table, where I hadn't seen it earlier, stand up, bow at the waist, and walk out of the room.
What the actual hell.
I picked up the sample case, and slid out of reality.