9cubed arrives at the Underwater safehouse holding the OSK Oracle pool, there's a dilapidated stage he once played on to the left of the entrance. It's cast in a half broken blue light. He hangs his Atragon Shiny Suit on a hook to the left of the door and joins his friends at a nearby table. Looking around at the sterile white walls makes him wonder how this place ever changed from a medical suite into a ghetto telepath commune. Three of those "Eternally-17" wetware using punks are laughing over a Galaga tournament they're having on an antique machine in the corner. Cubed orders a drink, part monatomic silver, part ultra-concentrated neural nano-overclocking clusters. He thanks the regal gray-haired lady whom serves him and then sits with his friends at a table. "Do you remember when ol' Johnny was staying here for a while before taking off West?" ask Pearl. 9Cubed nods and sips his strong revitalizing elixir; lost in thought and memories of this once forgotten place. He's watching the light reflect off iridescent water filling the pool centered in the large room.
He heads toward the 2nd floor, past the comfortable looking sleeping cots where drifters stay, covered with fluffy and worn comforters. Seems like there used to be more, but this place is at the end of a very long, abandoned street in an Underwater City. Up the dark brown stairway to the 2nd floor, past more sleeping spots and overlooking the counter is the Oracle Pool, the sector needing repair for this mission.
He's looking over the temperature regulated pool. The liquid must be a carefully maintained balance of nanosilver - properly gauged by NanoCytoxicity Particle-Ratio Detectors - Earth salts mined from the Kingdom Within, and Liquid-Tunable Eloptic Nanotransceivers. Silently he recites a rite of Isis before beginning his repairs to honor his Psychotronic Ninja Clan Sensei's instructions.
The next couple of days are spent toiling over the burning hot master circuit of this 2nd half of OSK Cen-Comm. He eventually realizes switching the two protocol kernels initialization assignments causes the feedback loop that results in corruption of his automatic access rights into the liquid server's control bay. He sighs, switching the components back to the incorrect order. "This is gonna be a shitty work around." he thinks. He manages to keep the file structure of regulatory waveform output system intact by duplicating files in both sectors.
Eventually, The Submarine arrives and Captain Brantley and Tobor drop off a crew of Rodent Industries Salvage Men at the Underwater CastleStation. They're wearing full, regulatory diving gear for this sort of operation and they're here to sort out the corrupt sectors of the device from the needed data with a mission to guarantee recovery of functionality. 9cubed helps them perform a datarun through a proxy relay on a local D-VI's Lao AI-bank.
Day four of the repairs...or is it day five? Getting harder to remember now. He takes a break, he's not feeling well despite the headway he's made. He walks down the stairs away from the pool, lighting a cigarette he notices a bit of blood on his finger. Runs and checks a mirror - he's bleeding from an odd laceration slightly above the base of his spine and out his nose he soon finds. A friend rushes over to check on him but is caught mid-step by the an explosion from the western wall.
11 angry looking Brantley-Bots with Black- symbols on their forehead are standing in shadowy silhouette cast from the broken windows and holes ithey tore in the wall. The stray light rays reveal only their sinister grin of sharp, small white teeth, like sharks. "Fuck they've got Giggles Gas Bullets" thinks 9cubed seeing a canister discharge out one of the cannons being held by these replicants. Utter-fucking-chaos ensues as this handful of Brantley's decked out in purple pinstriped suits proceed to bust up the joint. 9cubed is still bleeding as he ducks down a short hall - A small, bald feminine form adorning a blue robe is floating in auric envelopes. Her eyes pierce his being. Cubed spits and half coughs a visceral spot of dark red on the ground beneath him in reaction to some unseen force exerted by the transdimensional figure. "This is YOUR anger and hatred." her serene voice resounds through the ether as his vision transfixes the words' echoes across the atmosphere around the stain, set to the clean marble floor. The blood rises conjoining in a spherical form that floats in front of him. "We are undertaking your cleansing on behalf of Control." the voice continues.
His vision fades into square matrices of shifting widths and heights; blue/greenish soft hues moving over the gray cubes. He communes with unseen forces here for what must be hours. Deep Gnostic-interfacing with Control's full-spectrum broadcast. Then a click - when he comes to he's still in the same spot. It seems like no time at all passed as he peers around the corner to find several Salvage men are battling the Brantley droids. Some of the Salvage men appear to have fallen but then again some of the Brantleys' domes are splattered about the room also. Their heads are packed to brim with explosives after all. Multiport Nucleonic-bomb impants, not even Black-Phi wants a bunch of fucking renegade Brantley's running around. Even the slightest collisions with their heads can cause these bots' destruction in some cases.
9Cubed charges the room full of the evil-replicants blasting off two Tri-coil tunable RGB guns. He manages to take out a couple but winds up caught in the blast of their implants. Several minutes later, Ikipr notices Cubed's EKG monitor transmissions have gone dead.
"Rakuge," he thinks "Now, I'm the last of the Ninja Clan I hail from...." He presses a blue button on the intercom "Please send someone to Underwater sector 47 to retrieve 9Cubed's S.IX suit. We can't have such materials falling into the wrong hands." Specialized Dharma Cleaning crews are dispatched via D-VI pipelines to retrieve this unit and any other prototypal or prohibited materials Cubed may have been carrying. Luckily the prototype for the Cognitive War Bismuth Suit was still safely tucked away in the Neo-D Labs.
When the cleaning crews arrive on the scene they notice a couple Brantley Micronaut clones running around out of the remains of the necks of a few bots. They are practically less than no-thing, tiny explosions under the boots of the crews. Stability of the Oracle unit checks out overall, but there's lag and corrections to be made still. Agents of D-VI have been tasked with shipping the Oracle Pool unit to a docking bay where it will be picked up by Neo-D lab scientist and taken back to the Central SubComm for analysis by Dr. Z.
"9Cubed is dead....as the last one, I must face the Mirror Rite alone now." Dept. 142 had grown weary of Cubed's lawless ways. The warnings from Chuck that went unheeded were in fact true. Retrospect always allows us the privilege of perfect(hind) sight.