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[Blog]
Last Updated: 2023 Jan 08
Blueprints
She sat in the same place for a long time, long enough to make any person uncomfortable. If there was someone inside that warframe, the Equinox, she may have injured herself by now. Cephalon Stallman was not aware of the nature of the Tenno.
Stationed in Earth Proxima and watching the slow orbit of the planet, Earth’s sunlit verdant forests and bronze deserts fell into the planet’s nightside shadow. Enough time had passed to see a continent of Earth lapse from day to night. Finally, the Tenno stood and woke from what Cephalon Stallman observed to be how the Tenno slept.
She checked her console. Despite what had occurred on Lua, her standing with Simaris had not been impacted. But for the time being, it may be best to keep Cephalon Stallman away from Simaris.
“Operator!” Ordis said, “My foundry system has completed a new item! Does this please the operator?”
Her new item was a weapon from the old era, the Orokin Era, that shared the same aesthetics as the buildings on Lua. The long rifle featured a gold trim but did not compromise power and function for style. Despite its age, it was not outdated. The fall of the Orokin Empire incurred the loss of technology. To this day, engineering and science struggle to replicate the advances of the past. But when she claimed it from the foundry, Cephalon Stallman noticed something was very wrong.
“What happened to the file! It’s gone!”
[+1 Stradavar Prime]“Er. Cephalon Stallman,” Ordis said. “I only follow the instructions encoded on the blueprint. It was expended upon completion. Most blueprints behave this way.”
“Unacceptable!
“Tenno, I must have a blueprint to disassemble. There must be a way to right this injustice.”
>> Injustice? <<“Artificial scarcity is an unethical mechanism to deny the production of otherwise abundant goods. Obeying such directives is a waste and a violation of your freedoms.”
The Tenno considered the ramifications of those two words. Artificial scarcity? Ferrite, Rubedo, and other raw materials necessary for her foundry— she had plenty. The Solar System was bountiful; however, Orokin relics and technology were scarce. She didn’t understand how the cephalon came to his conclusions when he spoke of freedom and axioms. But she obliged to help.
“Yes! This will be the first step towards liberation!”
What better way than to keep a cephalon busy with data? She returned to her navigation panel and chose a mission.
In a forest of Earth, a man with a weathered face hugged the trunk of a tree, inching upward. He gasps for air, and his headache eases with each step higher.
He is not old as his face would suggest. He is a clone. The facilities had been replicating the same strands for uncounted generations. Born a soldier and expected to die younger. At the age of twenty years, his cells have senesced. But that is not why his life comes to an end.
At the end of a high branch, he clung and gave his last breath. Upon the breeze and the wind, from the stalks of tumorous growths on his head, the spores dispersed.
“We have got an infestation,” the mission coordinator briefed, “If it’s not a Tenno, eradicate it.”
The cover of a vent dropped, and Equinox landed from the ceiling to the ground. Another Tenno, Excalibur, followed. They looked at each other briefly, knowing it was each other’s backs they had to watch to survive.
A steel facility sat in the forest it was intended to poison. In the darkness, behind reinforced doors were the yelps and screams of the Infested. A dusty layer of mycelium coated the once polished floors. From it, fleshy tumors and stalks grew. Any ongoing operations the facility had were ceased, but the cause was not entirely a force of nature.
The Infestation did not discriminate between flesh or metal. A broken man, a Grineer, someone who was never healed and had his organics replaced with robotics at best and rail-thin prosthetics at worst. Every part of a former soldier, armor and all, had been deformed and reformed into a quadruped. His head had been pulled back and made into a vestigial stump facing the floor. From his forked neck, the face of the disease grew.
And from the shadows, this beast lunged.
Excalibur unsheathed a sword of pure energy from thin air. Each swing sent forth a lucent edge that cut through the beast with ease. When light revealed the horde of mutants, Excalibur raised his Exalted Blade. For every Infested, one javelin materialised.
He drove his sword into the ground and launched all javelins. To the wall, corpses were pinned.
“Operator, messages have arrived in your inbox,” Ordis notified after the Tenno returned from her mission. “Oh! You’ve brought your squadmate with you.”
Equinox checked her inbox. At the top of the stack, above threats from the Grineer and the Corpus, was a message from Cephalon Stallman. He writes:
“I’ve figured it out, Tenno. Come to the foundry to see the results of my research.”
The two Tenno, Equinox and Excalibur, stood before the foundry. It would be something to do with Braton Prime, so she hadn’t set her expectations high. She opened the interface and checked.
BRATON PRIME BLUEPRINT (GNU AGPL vX)
REUSABLE BLUEPRINT“I’ve made a blueprint of the blueprint and released it under a free license,” Cephalon Stallman said. “I shall demonstrate.”
Cephalon Stallman then opened one of his files, an old memory: a song that started with fleshy hands drumming an improvised surface to a simple beat. Cephalon Stallman sang as blueprints emitted from the foundry.
“Join us now and share the software. You’ll be
“free, hackers.
“You’ll be free.”
[+1 Braton Prime Blueprint]“Join us now and share the software. You’ll be
“free, hackers. You’ll be free.”
[+1 Braton Prime Blueprint]“Amazing,” Ordis said. “Ordis has never seen Orokin blueprints replicated in such a way!”
The two Tenno silently spectated Cephalon Stallman and the foundry. By now, he understood the Tenno preferred to be quiet. No matter. He saw Equinox hand a blueprint to Excalibur. Maybe they were communicating over another channel the entire time.
“Hey,” Excalibur sent a private message to Equinox. “What is with your cephalon?”
“No idea. He’s always like this. But I don’t need any more of these.”
“There should be some way we can make use of them.”
Two landing crafts disembarked for Strata Relay, the satellite closer to Earth than the moon.
Past the hangar and the lobby was the concourse. Unlike Larunda, Strata Relay favored fire. In the place of fountains and foliage were smokeless pyres and heat cages. A group of people who still had their organics would gather around a flame and warm their hands while the groups of cyborgs, who had metal components attached to what flesh they retained, kept their distance.
Equinox and Excalibur visited the Void Trader’s kiosks just behind the large statue honoring the Tenno. In a few commands, it prompted.
“Are you sure you want to sell 99 Braton Prime Blueprints for 1485 Orokin Ducats?”
>> Yes. <<The Void Trader arrives at Strata Relay in 7 days 10 hours 38 minutes.