Contagion! Maybe…

Setting the Scene

It’s only been a few days since the fight at Parallax.

The Bedlam’s new paint-job is complete, and it’s out of the air-dock space where it had to live for that to be done. Sketchy hung around to make sure that all of the Bedlam’s crew saw and approved of the design, intercepting them as they returned to the ship to get their reactions. He also recruited a few “friends,” likely others who are living in the cheap pod-bunk spaces on Psyche, to help move stuff into the ship as needed.

The characters are starting to move things back into the Bedlam that they needed out of it while it was in the air-dock, in preparation for their next job or journey, whatever that is. As things are getting started,Casper and Garb are on board, Cerys, Chase, and Grax are nearby outside the airlock:

• Cerys is preoccupied with getting food or something along those lines, and arguing with a local proprietor about… something, but is in line of sight of the airlock to the Bedlam, even though she’s the furthest from the airlock at this point;

• Grax is keeping an eye on Cerys, since the argument’s starting to get a little… heated; and

• Chase is recording a fly-around of the Bedlam’s new paint-job, with his ‘bot out in the vacuum;

News Around Psyche

REC-U 5 was taken offline a couple days ago for maintenance. Apparently a body that was recently submitted for recycling had foreign matter in it that the REC-U couldn’t handle, and it’s taking some time to clean the system out (see the Psyche page with respect to what a REC-U is). Estimates are that it will be back online in a couple of days. Rec-U 101 is the recommended alternative until then. REC-U 5 is one of a relatively few units that can handle biologicals at or above the size of a body.

What Happened

Grax is the first to notice that Sketchy is hurriedly making his way to the airlock that the Bedlam is docked behind. He’s slowed substantially because he’s helping one of his “friends” — one Gawain Baye (pronounced “Gavin”) limp along with him. There’s something visibly, obviously wrong with Gawain’s left leg. A casual observer would think that it’s got an extra joint in it about mid-thigh, or something along those lines, given that it seems to bend there when it shouldn’t.

Sketchy is flagged down before he can reach the Bedlam's airlock-door, but given his frantic state, it wouldn't have been surprising if, had he not, he'd ring and ring and ring on the airlock's call-button. He brought Gawain to the Bedlam because he knows that someone there was responsible for healing the knife-would he got when the characters first met him. He's not terribly clear on the specifics, but figures they're at least as good an option as taking Gawain to Community Medical. (He's still got the scar, but it's mostly stopped glowing, with it showing up under club/bar lighting in a couple laces he frequents. He keeps it hidden, because he was asked to, but mentions that it still glows in casual conversation).

Gawain is in his late teens, at a guess. He’s a “worker of opportunity,” for lack of a better term: picking up odd-jobs when/wherever he can find them.

Garb is summoned, and starts trying to heal Gawin's leg, but there's something… odd… going on there. Gawain had a surgical implant in the leg that's acting odd — a titanium mesh that's supposed to be supporting a weakened area resulting from an injury that left the femur with too many small fragments to knit together well. Gawain’s got a system of scars on that leg from the surgery.

From what Garb can tell (and relay), something is breaking down that mesh. Stranger still, it's apparently being used to create a different mesh — much finer and more flexible — just below Gawain's skin in his leg. After spending some time “tasting” various metals around the ship, Garb can identify that the new mesh is, indeed, titanium. After digging out the onboard med-scanner (an ultrasound device, since that's small and portable), it's easily verified that this new mesh is covering a fairly substantial area under Gawain's skin.

Garb also notes that there are "sand things" moving around in Gawain's body, heavily concentrated around the original implant, and the new mesh. It takes a fair length of time for Garb to relay to Ebony, and Ebony to the other characters what Garb is “tasting” there, but after some thought and conversation:

• Garb heals Gawin's leg-bone;

• The best guess is that the “sand things” are some sort of nano-tech; and

• Garb goes on an active seek/locate/exterminate of the nano-tech things in Gawain’s body.

After some investigation and discussion with Gawain, it comes to light that the day before REC-U #5 went offline, he was working there, and helped handle the body whose “foreign matter” is causing problems there. Garb suggests that they might’ve “seeped in” while Gawain was handling the body.

It's also determined that the body was recovered during a run to and from Elektra by a Spager’s Guild freighter the Savage Mantis. It was found drifting around Elektra’s minor-planet-moon system, in a local Trojan point. The body had UNSF identification on it, though it was vacuum-cemented to the remnants of the suit it was found in, to the point where no name could be determined. It had been there for a long time, probably at least as far back as when Earth went dark. Between Gawain's recollections, and some digging into Psyche's records after it gummed up the REC-U, some additional facts came to light:

• Gawain noted that it was heavier than it should’ve been. Not a lot heavier, but definitely heavier.

• It was so desiccated from vacuum exposure (decades of exposure, in all likelihood) that it had to spend a long time in the rehyrdation phase of the REC-U's processing;

• The body was retrieved from REC-U 5’s processing, and was discovered to have the same kind of mesh throughout it.

• It had, of all things, a standard data port in the skull.

• The body was crated up, and shipped to Ceres, to a Hephæstus medical/research division office, via a company light courier.

Grax reached out to MacPherson on Porthos to see if they had any insight into what might've been going on with the body. His response back boiled down to

They also reached out to the Mantis:

The characters are going to plan to go and at least get samples from the body, if not abscond with it outright…

But that's for the next session.