"Look alive techies, crate of burnt-out Stimboxes comin' in."
Two technicians in dirty blue overalls leapt to their feet -- one was older, with a scratchy gray beard and sun-baked skin that resembled both the colour and texture of oak bark. He looked as if he'd spent lifetimes under the hot sun, and had become all the more wise for it. The other was far younger, inexperience clearly visible on his smooth face, and he seemed to be glancing toward his partner as if looking for instruction and guidance.
"Timeline?" asked the older technician, as he took the crate from the immaculately dressed Legion officer.
"ASAP." Came the reply. "You can call me when they're done, Evan." The officer's pristine boots clicked harshly on the ground as they left the room; the
tap-tap-tap could be heard long after the door had slammed shut.
Evan exhaled slowly, wearily, as he hefted the crate over to the wobbly metal table they'd set up as a temporary work surface.
"Well, we'll continue our previous chat later," started Evan. "Looks like you're learning SBs, er, Stimboxes, now instead."
He lifted the lid off the crate, revealing a jumbled pile of cylindrical metal devices. Each device was roughly 6" long, and 2" in diameter; it had a valve opening on one end, and loose wires running from the other. There were hundreds of them in the box, each one seemingly indistinguishable from the next.
"Those rat bastards..." the old man swore. "They didn't even keep the gods damned things organized?"
He dumped the contents of the crate out onto the table, spreading them flat across the entire surface. He picked one up, and held it out to his younger partner, showing one side of the cylinder. "Here's your first lesson on SBs, Ochi. See this stamp?" Evan rotated the device to catch the light so that the stamped serial number on the side became visible.
"X... F.... 94G... 12" Ochi read the characters slowly. "A serial number?"
Evan nodded, and then pointed at the table with countless other Stimboxes spread out across it. "All SBs come in pairs, two devices that are intrinsically linked. They will only ever
talk to each other. That serial number? That's how you keep them paired."
"So... where's the pair to this one, to... XF92G12?"
"Ahhhhh, see, that's the problem now isn't it. Where indeed? Why isn't it right next to this one? It's almost like it'd be a
really good idea to
keep them in their pairs, using some damned forsaken organization to make our lives a little less shitty." Evan punctuated this last word by slapping the table, causing the Stimboxes piled upon it to jump. A few of them rolled off the table, prompting Ochi to quickly duck below in order to retrieve them.
"So here's what we're going to do." Said Evan, taking the loose Stimboxes from Ochi's hands. "We're going to sit here for the next two hours, sorting each of these into their distinctive pairs. Or rather, you're goin' to do that, and I'll handle the hard part."
"What's the hard part?"
Evan grabbed one of the devices and twisted the valve on the end of it; with a soft grinding noise the valve opened, releasing a tiny cloud of particulate. "If you remember," he said while turning the Stimbox upside down and giving it a little shake. "That officer said these were burnt-out SBs. That means they've got no juice left in them -- no power to make them work." A couple tiny drops splashed onto the table. "Don't touch that, by the way" Evan noted of the droplets on the table.
"In order to recharge these, we need to insert a new metal core through this valve, and then refill the inner reservoir with solution. A chemical reaction between the two produces power -- electricity." He pulled the corroded metal core out of the Stimbox and tossed it into the corner of the room.
"It's what makes the whole thing work. The electricity zaps the Twinflesh held within the cylinder. Then the Twinflesh inside its paired Stimbox responds to it, triggering the device to output a short burst of electricity. The same works in reverse, too -- two electrical boxes that are capable of sending and receiving simple signals. It's then up to whatever device that houses the Stimbox to encode and decode those into more complex forms of communication, like the speech that comes through
Rendulgraphs."
"Makes sense." came Ochi's reply. He had started rummaging through the devices on the table already, flipping each one over and over until finding the serial number stamped into the metal on the side.
"Although..." he said, after a moment of searching. "Wouldn't it be easier to recharge each Stimb-- SB first, and then just zap one and see which other responds?"
Evan's face crumpled into a wry smile. "Very clever Ochi. Yes, but there's a few problems with that. First off, I don't want you touching this solution here, it's quite corrosive, bad for your skin. Second, you really do not want a pile of fully charged SBs getting random zaps being output throughout them."
"Why's that?"
"In this exposed form, one SB outputs a zap into another that outputs a zap into another that... well, you get the picture. Quick way to lose your hands, if you ask me, from the resulting electrical fire -- or even explosion."
"Got it, manually sorting them."
Ochi exhaled slowly as he bent over the table once more, examining Stimbox after Stimbox with dreary acceptance.
The
tap-tap-tap of the Legion Officer's shoes slowly faded into the pair of technician's awareness. The door to their room opened roughly, and the Officer stepped in once again holding another large crate. His shoes gleamed in the dim light of the room.
"Look alive techies, another box of burnt-out Stimboxes for you." He dropped the crate onto the already full table. "Timeline moved up, too. We'll need these by noon."
The
tap-tap-tap of the officer's shoes and the sound of the door slamming behind him as he left perfectly masked the furious cursing coming from the experienced technician in the room.
xD