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Once the tasks have been assigned, you dismiss the Scrappers. The memes have taken hold and they have no reason to disobey the ideas that you have planted in their brains.
As soon as they have been led away by the tribesmen you had posted as guards, you vomit. While you were questioning Herrmann and Karlee about their skills, you swallowed all of the blood that bubbled up into your mouth. All of a sudden, it gushes from your mouth and all over the floor in a burst of crimson. What's alarming is the meaty chunks floating around in it, as though bits of your throat have been falling off.
Your brain feels even worse than that. What you're experiencing is beyond a migraine – your frontal lobe is wracked with incessant agony, as though a knife is being buried into it with every beat of your heart. It's almost impossible to focus on anything right now. Staggering away from that desolate chamber, you retreat deeper into Dispenser 300-9 and pass out in the comfort of Maintenance. It is a fitful slumber, regularly interrupted by bouts of bloody discharge.
Hours have passed by the time that you truly awaken and though you don't feel ideal, you're shocked by how quickly you have recovered. Blood no longer threatens to clog your windpipe and the only pain in your skull is a dull ache. By the morning of the following day, even that symptom has disappeared. Twenty-four hours and you're as good as new – you can't explain it. All you know for sure is that you had pushed yourself to your limit. Three uses of memes in a short space of time left you with internal bleeding, breathing difficulties and violent head pains. You don't want to think about what four or five would do to you.
A few days pass and the Voss become accustomed to the presence of the Scrappers as indentured servants, rather than equals. Until they have paid for the life they took – some toolmaker called Phanuhl – they will serve.
Herrmann, with his axe, is able to collect more lumber on his own than the entire tribe was able to previously. While his weapon isn't intended for tree-cutting, it still allows him to bring down small trees and chop them up. Previously, the tribesmen were forced to scavenge for branches and saplings. Thanks to the brute, the Voss now have plenty of firewood and all of the material that they could need for their crafting purposes.
Karlee, on the other hand, has some difficulty educating the Voss. You pick up most of her lessons quite quickly, as you already know the principles. The most important revelation is that the 65536 error is actually malware, according to her – the 216 Virus. It plagues most Bygone technology across the known world, rendering it unusable or worse. She knows a few tricks about protecting her own devices from the virus and how to format infected hardware, but the tribesmen struggle with these concepts – except for Jurvaz.
