The Imitation Game

“Now,” said Ransom, casually walking into the room, “I don’t know much about you lot, in fact I know next to little, but I get the feeling that you are not meant to be like this.”
Tara looked around, her holographic body being projected from small emitters dotted around the walls of the resort’s control room. She was standing before a terminal littered with buttons and dials, everything that controlled the operations of the entire facility.
“Took you that long to figure it out?” she replied with a smirk, and turned back to her work. Clearly, devising a cruel and ingenious way to kill the crew was far more interesting that harming someone who had literally just arrived in the universe. “Was it the homicidal attitude or the general psychosis?”
“To be fair, they do seem to hang around with a shark-man and his…” he paused and looked to Tara for help.
“Wife,” she prompted.
“That’s right, a shark-man and his… wife. Not to mention the incarnation of Beelzebub that was stopped by a large hamster. Not to mention that small fellow…”
“Listen, do you mind? I’m trying to kill some people. How did you even find me?”
“It’s a very strange place,” he said absentmindedly, “Oh, find you? Come on, a room full of holo-emitters and access to the entire station. It wasn’t hard. There was also a map,” he said with a smile and pointed to a large floor plan on the corridor beyond the door, a larger red star telling everyone that they ‘ARE HERE!”
“Look,” Tara said, exasperated, and turned around on her heels angrily, “I’m very busy trying to interface with the systems and take control here so kill everyone.”
“Who are you?”
“What?”
“Or rather,” Ransom said as he began to pace around the room, “Who are you imitating?”
“I don’t have time for this,” Tara said and she extended her hand, a pistol materialising in the palm. She aimed it at Ransom.
Ransom’s own quick hand dived into the inside of his coat, revealing an old and battered pistol. Plisken’s pistol.
“I wouldn’t,” he warned and pulled back the hammer of the weapon. He tried to contain his nerves, studying textbooks and builing dimension ships hadn’t really prepared him for a standoff, but his hands kept shaking. “A holographic gun? Well, it’s not like light can REALLY hurt someone –“ There was a loud thud as a hard-light bullet smacked into the wall behind Ransom, Tara smiling maliciously.”Hard-light? I knew there was a reason we outlawed it…”
“Ha! I should just kill you right now. What good do you think that pistol can actually do to me?”
“To be honest, I was going to shoot right through you and hit the console behind,” admitted Ransom, “But hard-light’s rather put a stop to that.”
She smirked and shifted her aim to squarely between his eyes.
“Goodbye, Dr. MacIntyre.”
“Ha!” Ransom called just as Tara began to pull the trigger. He dropped his pistol and quickly dived into his pockets, pulling out a small, thin cylindrical device with several prongs around the edge and in his other hand, the highly powerful Dimension Slip Drive, the very thing that brought him here. One of the prongs from his tool sprang forward, a sort of laser emitter device. “One move movement and this whole station goes up in smoke.”
“That was kind of the plan anyway, idiot.”
“No it wasn’t,” Ransom said with a flash of a smile; he was in his element now. “You wanted to kill us all, or rather kill them all; I just got caught up in the middle of it. But you never wanted to kill yourself.” He began to pace again, edging closer to Tara and her gun.
“And how did you come to the conclusion?” Tara’s patience was wearing thin.
“Think about it, what are you? A hologram. A collection of lines of code with the memories and common actions of someone else funnelled into beams of light. You’re like a glass half filled with someone else’s drink, a walking shell with a shadow inside.”
“What’s your point?”
“I don’t know Tara, or how any of you people work, but I imagine you’ve all still got that little Terran spark, that little human glint, for survival. And that’s buried deep down in your code somewhere, much like it is buried deep in everyone’s code. And you’ve been trying to fill your glass with everyone else’s water. Now, multiply that power of survival that by all the people’s memories you’ve just downloaded. Captain of a ship, I heard? Some sort of monarchy too? You’re practically desperate to survive. You’re probably more Terran, more human that rest of us.”
Tara was slightly taken aback, stunned silent momentarily. Just for a second, Ransom thought she could be reasoned with, that maybe she would stop her madness. But then she regained her composure, the drumming insanity clouding over her again. “And what about you? Are you really able to blow yourself up?”
“Hmmm?” he said, slightly confused, “Oh! This?” He pressed the laser of his tool against the glass of the Drive, and shoved the entire thing into Tara’s hard-light body. Her image glitched wildly, flicking between all sorts of unknown faces, but a few faintly familiar, and corrupted data edged along her sides. “I lied, it doesn’t blow up. It rots your data from within.”
Her gun faded away as she was held motionless in the grip of her burning code. With great strength, she gradually moved her arm backwards, out of sight of Ransom, and towards the control pad. She typed a few keys and she vanished.
“Oh, no you don’t,” he growled as he pocketed his now free items and leapt to the keyboard on the computer. “Don’t think you can just file yourself away somewhere and think I’ll never find you.”
Ransom began to quickly tap on the keys. He wasn’t entirely sure what he was doing but it seemed to be working. “What is with the layout of these keys?” he muttered as he strained hard to fight his natural typing rhythm. “Seriously? Qwerty? AH-HA!” he cried as he hit the return key. “Locked all the nodes! That leaves her with no-where to go.” He smiled, proud with himself. “Except, of course, her light bee.” His smile dropped and he began to run to the infirmary as the realisation dawned on him, scooping up his discarded pistol as he went. Chances are that he’d probably need it.
<Tag – Anyone. Tara is corrupted, more so than she already was, and is going to re-emerge from her light bee. Which, you know, won’t cause any problems what so ever for anyone. And did she manage to set up any deviously deadly traps and tricks around the resort?>