Category: Technically Sentient

“Technically” Sentient: Chapter 13

Post author By TPH
Post date February 27, 2019
2 Comments on “Technically” Sentient: Chapter 13

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Faster-Than-Light travel was a bit of a misnomer, even if it was the term used for most means of interplanetary travel. While it was a commonly accepted name, it was also a commonly accepted fact that traveling faster than light was technically impossible. Accelerating any appreciable mass to the speed of light took so much energy that even if it was technically possible it was certainly economically non-viable. Some Core Worlds had looked into it, if only for academic reasons, and essentially concluded that the only practical application was extreme velocity kinetic weaponry. This was promptly banned, of course, but that didn’t solve the real problem. The universe has a speed limit. However . . . there were workarounds to this universal speed limit. Not exactly cheap or easy workarounds, but workarounds nonetheless. The primary way of dealing with vast interstellar distances was basically “why go in person when a phone call will do.” Quantum communications and the oddities of entanglement were very well understood, and with a few physics tricks, you could communicate across 15 light years with all the latency of talking in the same room as someone. Well, if the quantum bandwidth was available, but there was always enough if you were willing to pay for it. The other workaround was far less of a physics trick, and far more of an engineering marvel.

The warp-prow.

The way warp-prows were explained to children in school was with a blanket, and a needle. Given that it had taken several generations of self improving AI to design almost every aspect of technology, and that even individuals that had dedicated their lives to the study of theoretical and subatomic physics couldn’t effectively explain how they worked, most adults had it explained using the blanket and needle too. The blanket represents space, and the needle represents the fixed distance a craft can travel in a given period of time. Lay the blanket flat out, and the needle represents an insignificant distance. Bunch the blanket up though, and suddenly that blanket is only about three needle lengths from corner to corner. A faster ship meant a longer needle, and a more powerful ‘warp prow’ made the ship better at bunching things up. There was still the problem that folding space took a tremendous amount of energy, but it was doable. While expensive and challenging, interstellar activity was merely a complex engineering challenge.

As with almost every engineering challenge, it was a game of “fast, good, or cheap: pick two.” If it needed to be done quickly and well, a massive undertaking of pre-fabrication, supply chain establishment, and logistic expertise was carefully orchestrated by planetary scale economies working at full tilt to get the job done. If it need be done well and cheaply, then a simple probe was sent, stocked with ‘Artificial Persons’ capable of executing a several hundred year plan to build something from the ground up. Mining equipment would pull raw resources from asteroids to build more mining equipment to build more worker drones to begin constructing infrastructure and so on until a whole new autonomous civilization sprung up out in the reaches of cold space. Lastly, there was fast, and cheap. Send one, fast ship with a handful of organics working on a shoestring budget to do a Hail-Mary job of it and then hope that whatever it is becomes someone else’s problem before it really costs something for a solution.

The Indomitable Explorer was fast, and cheap. A scavenged leftover of the first attempt at civilization level interplanetary colonization, which had nearly sent the entire society into an economic depression so deep it could only be accurately described with the word “apocalyptic”, the ship had been built to herald the coming of a stellar society. Instead it had served as a warning about what happened when blind optimism met extremely well understood limitations of physics. Moving things through space was hard, and expensive. Moving people? Doubly so. An attempt was made to sell it for a tenth of it’s manufacturing cost along with hundreds of other unused interstellar craft to shore up the crumbling Centaurian treasury, but instead it wound up being kept in a spaceflight museum. As it turned out, absolutely no one wanted to buy a still ludicrously expensive ship when 300 year old financial institutions were dropping like flies and the government was teetering on the edge of insolvency. When the economic downturn caused by busted investments in the “space colonization bubble” hit, the museum in question was shuttered and forgotten as deep austerity measures stripped public programs to the bone. A rather unscrupulous night-watchman of the closed facility managed to build a retirement fund for himself by arranging the sale of the vessel to a mining company, which used it as a lobby decoration in their headquarters for nearly sixty years. Eventually it was gifted as a wedding present to the son of a board member. He donated it back to the revived Centaurian Office of Aeronautical History as a tax write off, and they lost it to a the Centaurian Office of Natural History in a card game. While the resulting scandal actually sent half a dozen people to prison, the ship itself wound up under the command of Tillantrius Zepp Warzapp the Third, and his aide from the Office of Natural History, Zarniac.

Their mission had been to brave new worlds, explore exotic landscapes, collect data on esoteric and alien phenomena, and to do it all in the space travel equivalent of a dubiously legal paddle steamer that had been rigged with a fusion powered outboard motor. Tillantrius rubbed his eyes, which had been getting heavier from fatigue, and tapped the Navigational-Aid AI module mounted on the control console. It was still reading data-lock. Only Chryso had come out of their escape relatively unharmed. Well, him and the cat. Zarniac had been fine . . . until he opened the bag with the cat in it. One fairly brutal mauling later, Chryso had dubbed the thing Hateful Many-Talons in the traditional style of his homeworld. Duh-rhen had managed to pull the thing off of him, but lost his grip on the vicious predator and let it shoot into the air ducts. They had managed to get it out, but not without additional damage to Duh-rehn. Ironically, he seemed to have the most affection for “Hatey Kitty” or just “Hatey” as he usually called it.

Tilly sighed, and tapped the frozen AI box one more time, knowing it was hopeless. They were stuck on their route unless Cas suddenly developed an affinity for astrophysics and the ability to interface with the guidance system, and she seemed too busy hanging out with Duh-rhen and Hatey in the “sick bay”. It was really just a bench and some padding next to the medical kit in a supply closet. Cas had said something about her “discovering the features of her new and seemingly persistent human form under Duh-rhen’s guidance.” Whatever that meant. Chryso was looking after Zarn in his bunk, but all that amounted to was administering antibiotics every 6 hours and letting him take a hit of whatever was in his vaporizer. Zarn’s eye was in a bad way, and it didn’t look like it was going to ever heal properly, let alone the rest of his face. His trusted second had come back from the cockpit very quiet after they had made their escape, and neither he nor Cas had wanted to talk about why.

There was a gut-wrenching lurch as space unfolded around them, and he prepared to make the thruster burn to compensate for the gravity of Cygnus X-1 with practiced and smooth precision. Except for one small problem, there was no gravity to compensate for.

He did a double take, looking for the massive, unmissable distorting pull that should have been drawing him into oblivion right that moment. A cacophony of exotic radiation and gravitational distortion should have been pounding away at his sensor array, but it was nothing but the faint afterglow of the warp-prow radiation. He checked every scrap of data he had, and then checked it again, trying to keep a composed and regal air even as he, at least internally, was screaming at a steadily increasing pitch. No black hole meant no slingshot, no slingshot meant not enough fuel to make the next leg of the trip, and not enough fuel meant slow miserable death as either the air, ration paste, or heat ran out on the ship.

He had half a mind to just open the cargo bay and look for a black hole, just to be sure, but as he triple and quadruple checked his readings, he was finally convinced there was truly nothing out there.

The math checked out, they should be caught in Cygnus X-1’s pull. A quick consultation of the star charts said they were in the right place, the right celestial bodies were shining from the right angles for them to be orbiting a black hole right now. By every metric he could find, they were in the right place, but where was the damnable black hole?

It’s not like someone could have just wandered off with it, right?

——————————

Amonna hadn’t really had an appreciation for total, and absolute dark until the third day. Even in the blackness of space, starlight filters in and lights things up, but not there. Not in her little cell. In her little tomb. It was a strange cycle, the more frightened she was, the more her bio-luminescent spots lit up on her face and forearms. As she calmed down a bit, the faint neon blue light would fade, and she’d wind up trapped in that Stygian dark not quite certain of where she ended and the dead space-station began.

She had been surprised by how quickly she’d gone from ‘burning up’ to ‘freezing slowly’. In the end, it really wasn’t that wide a range of temperatures she could survive in. As the station grew colder and colder, it creaked and moaned with unsettling inconsistency. She could hear banging, thumping, screeching, and the shudder of the contracting steel superstructure through the floor. It was like a death rattle to her, one drawn out over hours and days, a dying thing that just wouldn’t finally let go.

Sort of like her, in a way. She felt an odd kinship with the dying station, in that regard. It’s heart was ripped out, its body was cooling, but somehow it still . . . struggled against it. That it struggled against fate too was reassuring, in a twisted way.

The strange squeaks and groans had become so commonplace, that roundabout the seventh day, she almost didn’t react to the sound of something banging against the door to the decontamination chamber.

At first, she thought it had to be a figment of her imagination. That she had invented someone or something to keep her company through the crushing isolation that came with her slow death.

The knocking kept happening though. Steady. Consistent. And then her wrist computer chimed softly. “To all survivors, please respond on the emergency broadcast frequency. We will continue to broadcast this on sweep until the emergency response team has secured the entirety of the station. Help has arrived. This message will repeat in 30 seconds.”

To say she frantically fumbled with her wrist computer would be an understatement. “HERE! I’M HERE!” She practically screamed into the communicator, broadcasting across every channel she could tune it to. Her voice was hoarse and raspy from a mixture of dehydration and disuse, but what she lacked in finesse she made up for in volume. It took a few heart-stopping moments, but the reply came through in the same, mechanical, cool female voice that she had heard first. “Signal lock on successful. Due to excessive radiation levels in your area, retrieval may be delayed by up to two hours. If you expire during this time, do you have any ethical objections to aggressive reanimation treatment?”

Amonna blinked in surprise. The voice had been smooth and calm, almost strangely so. Clearly artificial but even AI’s had some semblance of emotion. This was just flat. “N-no? But I’m fine for now. Air is running low, but that won’t be a problem for 2 hours . . . probably.” She felt a little light headed as the words left her mouth, but she had lasted this long just fine, 2 hours was nothing compared to the 7 days she’d already spent in here.

“Remain calm. Help is on the way. Please do not resist retrieval.”

Amonna’s blood chilled a little at that.

“Why . . . would I resist?”

The tone of the voice shifted, ever so slightly, almost imperceptibly lower.

“Remain calm. Help is on the way. Please do not resist retrieval.”

With nowhere else to go, and no way to defend herself even if she wanted . . . she did her best to settle down, and remain calm.

——————————

Machinator watched over Verdock, monitoring his status. He had been 95% certain the captain would be dead, but as he watched rise and fall of his chest, the flicker of rapid eye movement behind pressed shut eyelids, he knew the Zylach was anything but dead. His body temperature had peaked at nearly 42 degrees Celsius, but hadn’t dropped back below 40. He had considered forcibly cooling his body with some of the advanced medical equipment on board the stolen Coryphaeus vessel, but as soon as he’d considered it the fever had started to come down. The vomiting had stopped at the 24 hour mark, but the introduction of intravenous feeding seemed to have brought on a 140 beat per minute persistent tachycardia. He had followed the plan to the letter, the cargo was secure, and they were on their way to the drop point, but treating Verdock had been a challenge he was unprepared for.

Everything else had gone according to plan. Why weren’t there any preparations made for this? Why didn’t he make arrangements for his own treatment? Why leave them in the dark?

The other security officers had taken up the running of the ship with little effort, most of the systems were automated in some fashion or another, and few of them were sentient. Those that resisted were neatly disabled by overrides. The weapon systems AI had been vocal about how they were all traitors and cowards, but Machinator didn’t blame it. He’d think the same thing too if he didn’t know the Captain the way he did.

He replaced the IV bag, the third one in almost an hour. The excess fluid was literally seeping through Verdock’s skin, which had taken on a much rougher, almost blotchy texture. Like a full body eczema, but worse. They were like burns radiating from the inside out, weeping plasma as skin sloughed off in wet sheets. It had some similarities to severe radiation poisoning, but a quick scan revealed nothing of that sort. He didn’t have the proper medical equipment to make a full diagnosis, but he guessed that there was something wrong with his kidneys as well. He’d tried to keep as much fluid in him as possible to counteract the open sores, but the clock was running out. He’d spent all day going over the details, trying to match the symptoms to any known disease, disorder, or injury in his admittedly limited field medicine database, when Verdock suddenly sat bolt upright.

Machinator reflexively hopped back slightly, the movement was so sudden and violent. Scraps of leathery grey flesh fell away, revealing fresh, pinkish growth beneath glistening with moisture.

“Machinator . . .” Verdock gasped. Yanking the IV out of his arm, his weepy, slightly distorted face pulled into a toothy, rictus grimace of pain as he tried to peel himself out of the now bloody cot he’d been resting in.

Machinator was speechless. Verdock shouldn’t have been alive, let alone up and talking.

“Machinator . . .” he repeated, this time deliberate and confidently. He unsteadily staggered forward, nearly falling before catching himself on Machinator’s shoulders.

His core process was overwhelmed with a sense of disbelief and amazement as he beheld his own friend standing under his own power, alive and talking. He didn’t remember him being this . . . tall, though.

“Machinator. Where’s the mess hall?” Verdock’s face split into a wide, sharp grin, and Machinator felt a very rare sensation.

Unease.

Tags Technically Sentient, Sci-Fi, AI, Fiction

Technically Sentient Stories

“Technically” Sentient: Chapter 12

Post author By TPH
Post date February 20, 2019
3 Comments on “Technically” Sentient: Chapter 12

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The path to the Indomitable Explorer was empty of . . . anyone, really. It would be relieving if Darren weren’t so damned heavy. She, Zarniac, and Tillantrius were all working together to guide the staggering oaf of a giant towards their ship. It wasn’t going well. He kept falling down, and when he fell down, it took all of them to get him moving again. Chryso had been “watching their backs” and taking extended hits from his vaporizer while toting an illegally modified energy weapon. He seemed quite smug about all of that.

Cas huffed quietly as she tugged at Darren’s arm. “Darren, get up and walk or we’re leaving you on the exploding station.”

A long, wailing “NoooooooOOOooOOOOo!” was his only response, as he pushed himself to his feet, took off at a run, tripped over a loose fuel hose, slammed headlong into the side of the Indomitable Explorer. Zarniac winced, Tilly grimaced, and Cas just sighed while Chryso chuckled quietly.

“ . . . don wanna asplode,” came the muffled sound from the twisted heap of muscled limbs that was Darren.

“Do you think his teeth fell out again?” Zarniac whispered quietly to her, looking slightly queasy.

She just sighed. “If they did, I’ll glue them in this time. Just get the door open, and plot us a course out of . . . here.” She gestured at the station as a whole. As if retorting to her remark of disdain, the entire structure trembled beneath their feet, and a quiet groan echoed through the superstructure. “ . . . sooner would be better than later.” She added, a note of fear entering her voice.

Somewhere in the distance, she heard the dull thunk of a pressure bulkhead failing. Judging by the expression of fear on Zarn, Chryso, and Tilly’s faces, they heard it too. With a fresh sense purpose, they all set about their self-allotted tasks.

Tilly opened the cargo hold and helped Chryso and Cas drag Darren inside, while Zarniac began furiously engaging the start up sequence. Darren contributed to the ramp ascent by drooling on it to make the dragging a bit easier, and mumbling about clowns to lighten the “imminent nuclear death” mood that had settled on the group.

Darren was the most effective of any of them at their selected tasks. This wasn’t so much speaking highly of Darren’s ability to drool, or the comedic timing of his feverish moaning of the word “clowns” while bleeding from the mouth, so much as it spoke to the abysmal failure of everyone else to accomplish anything.

Tilly, Chryso, and Cas couldn’t manage to drag Darren across flat ground, let alone an inclined ramp, and Zarniac found rather promptly that he didn’t have navigational clearance to operate the hangar airlock crane, let alone launch a ship during a security lock-down.

“Caaaaaas! We have a problem!” He shouted down the access corridor that connected the cargo bay and the bridge, and Cas was with him in moments.

“Problem?” She inquired, her tone neutral and entirely belying her fear.

“I don’t have takeoff clearance, and the security crane is inoperative. We can’t get the ship out of the station without someone manning that crane.”

Cas’s virtual eyes narrowed as she did a quick scan of his instrument panel. “And your navigational AI has been locked down by some kind of intrusion worm.”

Zarniac frowned, tapping the little blue screen next to his star-map. “Oh . . . the navigational AI is just crashing. It . . . it just does that.” He flicked it a few more times. The screen stayed a flat monochrome blue.

“One problem at a time though, someone needs to get to that crane and-”

Before he could finish his sentence, he heard the grinding screech of the overhand gantry hauling itself into motion, and his console flashed green as his takeoff clearance was granted. “How did you-”

Cas frowned at him. “The network security protocols for these are . . . really not as safe as they should be. In light of recent events . . . this definitely needs to be put up for review.”

Zarniac could only hinge his mouth open and shut weakly, looking for the right response as the magnetic clamps of the gantry latched onto the hull, jerking it into the air with a dull clang.

“He’s sliding off the ramp!” The call came from somewhere either in the cargo bay or possibly from someone desperately clinging to the cargo ramp and trying not to die.

Cas huffed quietly, and thrust her chin forward a nudge as the crane swung the vessel back and stopped short, with an effect similar to an ancient “Cup and Ball Game.” Except instead of a cup, there was the cargo bay of their ship, instead of a string, there was a hasty set of mathematical calculations, and instead of a toy ball, there were two fragile beings and a disturbingly durable semi-retarded goliath. Good heart on the goliath though.

She heard twin yelps of pain, and a dull thump. She guessed she got it right, because there’d be more screaming if she got it wrong. “Close the cargo bay.” Zarniac complied, and she ducked back down the access corridor to the cargo bay.

Sure enough, she’d done it right, and stacked up against the wall in a heap were the human, the Kontosian, and the Centariuan, in proper ascending order of fragility, with Darren on the bottom.

“Anything broken?”

Tillantrius groaned. “Nothing but my pride, dear.”

“Personal record for ‘butt-puckering terror’ experienced, yeah, but other than that no.” Chryso mumbled through a mouthful of robe.

“I think my teeth falled out again.” Darren’s translator intoned flatly. “Wait, I bite-ed my tongue. They still there.” The dull rumble of his voice carried well through the cargo bay, and for the one with the most raw damage having been done to his body, he seemed to be weathering it the best.

“Good. Buckle up. We’re getting out of here.”

Cas bolted back to the bridge, buckling herself into the captain’s chair next to Zarniac as the crane lowered them into the final airlock before launch. Cas overrode the safeties keeping the airlock doors from moving before the gantry had come to a stop, and slammed them shut around the cumbersome industrial lift.

The hiss of air leaving the station, followed by the dull silence of a hard vacuum indicated that they were green to go, and without waiting for Zarniac’s approval, she slammed the ships maneuvering thrusters to full.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going!” He shouted at her, as they nearly clipped the still opening airlock doors, missing them by only scant meters.

“Away from here!” She shouted back, slightly incensed by his indignation.

Zarniac balked, scowling at the upstart mutineer that had seized the captains chair. “First off, there’s a debris field that you’re . . . going . . . to . . .”

His voice trailed off as he managed to catch full sight of the space surrounding Waystation LS-49.

There were thousands of little silver pods glimmering in the navigational lights of the station. Life-pods, every last one of them. All of them packed with the desperate survivors of the horrific massacre on board. Suddenly, one winked out of existence in a spray of shattered metal fragment and frozen viscera.

“What the . . .”

The station asteroid defense systems were targeting, and systematically eliminating any survivors. Little ferrous cylinders, accelerated by magnetic coils, were being hurled at roughly 10 kilometers per second through the escape pods. There was something gut wrenching about seeing a system designed to keep people safe maliciously turned on the helpless victims it was designed to protect. They were dying unexpected, brutal, cold deaths in the hard vacuum of space. With no warning. Like singular blades of grass being clipped by methodical and meticulous reaper of sentient life.

Cas and Zarniac watched in horror as every few seconds another one winked out of existence in a little “puff” of depressurizing tube. The scale of it, more than anything else, chilled them to the core as they realized they were quite possibly the only survivors out of a spaceborne city of 25,000.

Cas wanted to do something to help, she wanted to find a way to shut down those guns, or ram them, or something . . . but she knew that those circuits were isolated physically to prevent anything like this from ever happening. She knew that if she rammed just one of the dozens of defensive guns she’d doom them all, and maybe not even slow down the massacre. All they could do, was watch, or run.

What had started the day as a trading hub, fueling station, and port of safe harbor was now a tomb beyond the edge of the galaxy.

“ . . . I have a course plotted around Cygnux X-1. We can make the jump, slingshot around, pass our intended survey target and head back into core space to . . . report this. To tell someone. To just . . . land somewhere.” Zarniac spoke, but the words felt like they were coming from somewhere beyond him. Outside of him. He couldn’t coexist with the massive cruelty and wanton slaughter of this moment, so he was letting autopilot take over.

Cas’s lower lip trembled, but she swallowed hard, and nodded. “T-take us away then. Get us out of here.”

With a high pitched whine, space folded itself around them, and they left Waystation LS-49 behind them for what they hoped would be forever.

——————————

Amonna pulled her legs up to her chest, and rubbed her arms, trying not to listen to the sound of metal buckling and the squeal of superheated coolant being forced through failing seals. The walls were getting warm. Not so hot as to burn her, but enough to make her worried. She’d been tracking the reactor readings on her wrist computer over the past 3 hours, and what she’d thought was going to be a detonation, an overload, or something equally devastating, had turned into the most agonizingly torturous game of “what kills me first.”

She had narrowed it down the three options. One, she was going to die instantly, without even noticing it was going to happen. This was arguably the most desirable outcome, if you can ever consider being instantly vaporized in a nuclear fireball desirable. The reactor would breach containment, a miniature star would be born in the heart of the station for a brief second, and then everything that wasn’t solid tungsten would cease to have any real shape or form outside of a gaseous collapsing plasma field.

It was also the least probable outcome.

Next on the list of horrific ends she was choosing from was being slowly cooked alive inside the ever warming decontamination chamber right next to the reactor core. The reactor had been designed with several failsafe mechanisms to keep the first outcome from becoming a reality, and they were clearly still doing their best to fight whatever mechanism of sabotage had been inflicted upon the station’s reactor core. So, as they bled heat into the superstructure over the next few hours, she would slowly broil inside a metal oven with no way to escape.

That was the most probable outcome, and as miserable as it sounded to her . . . it still beat doorway-to-death number three which was . . .

Dying of starvation, dehydration, and exposure as the reactor fails in a safe fashion, excess heat is bled away over a period of days, and the station loses all power. She would be at the mercy of basic biological functions like “breathing” and “drinking.” Sure it was only three days instead of three hours but it . . . was still horrific.

So as minutes turned to hours, and she still wasn’t vaporized, she began to get scared. She stripped down to virtually nothing, piling up whatever she had on her to make a little mound to sit on just to get off the ever warming deck. When the lights suddenly went out, and the blood-red emergency lighting kicked on, she went from scared, to total despair. She tried doing the thermodynamic calculations they’d taught her in survival school to figure out how long she had before the metal crypt she was stuck in would be so cold her skin would freeze on contact with the metal, but that only distracted her for so long.

When her wrist computer said that she had been on shift for 12 hours, and needed to take a break or she would face a disciplinary hearing, it actually made her laugh. A bitter, spiteful laugh, but a laugh nonetheless. As the deck began to cool, she pulled all of her clothing back on, piece by piece, but not after wringing the moisture out of it to drink. She’d been dehydrated when she’d been locked in here, and at this point it was a race to see if exposure or dehydration would be her end first.

When her wrist computer chimed and told her it had been 24 hours, she wanted to cry. She wanted to scream. She wanted to do . . . something, but she knew that every action she took, every emotion she allowed to well up in her would only accelerate her heart, make her burn through what little oxygen she had left, and just kill her faster.

Part of her thought that might be the best thing to do. Just start doing jumping jacks until the air runs out and go to sleep . . . but somewhere deep inside, there was a nugget of spite that just wouldn’t let her. It wasn’t so much that she wanted to live, which, she certainly did. She wanted to live more than anything else, she just didn’t have any hope of living. So when the hope ran out, all that was left was spite. A hatred of her circumstance so intense . . . so irrational . . . the only response she could come up with was to persist through it out of sheer defiance. A raw “fuck you” to the universe that had the gall to sentence her to such an ignominious and miserable end.

So she saved her breath. Slept as much as possible. Sucked the moisture out of the decontamination sprayer nozzles, and curled up in a tight ball on top of what little material she could find that wasn’t thermally conductive to stay as warm as possible.

And she waited for someone to find her.

——————————

‘Machinator’ stood over the prone form of his longtime comrade in arms, watching him closely. The Zylach ex-security chief shivered slightly, unconsciously curling his body up to preserve warmth. He’d moved him to the now vacant crew quarters, and thrown a survival blanket over him after they’d seized the ship. Besides the commando contingent, there’d just been a pilot and two maintenance personnel. No real resistance. Grinder and Dynamo were cleaning up the mess Verdock had left in the cargo bay, and it was . . . quite a mess. Once the cargo was properly secure, they’d plotted a course to the rendezvous location, and made the jump to dark space beyond the edge of the galaxy. The first leg of the operation was complete, and they were all be one step closer to living in a better galaxy.

But that wasn’t what occupied the majority of his processor cycles. It was Verdock. The joke at the department had always been that “When it comes to cold, calculating logic, the synthetic officers look to Verdock to double check their assessments.” It had only been a joke but it was universally agreed upon that the synthetic persons in the department found Verdock easier to get along with than most of the organic personnel did. He didn’t hesitate, or second guess himself. If he was uncertain, he deferred to those with more information and better insight. He wasn’t rude, or demanding, but he had exacting standards that he made very clear to everyone he worked with, regardless of the origin of their sentience. The previous head of security had been a sentimental Chridae that had been quite competent, but seemed to do their job largely by feel and intuition, and pinning down solid justification for some of their more ambitious endeavors was difficult. Verdock’s structured, logical mind had been made the running of things smoother. Security was being deployed not as the head of security dictated, but as the situation and protocol dictated. Crime fell, department approval rose, and complaints were sparse.

An innocuous package that he’d personally delivered one fateful morning had changed all of that.

Verdock roused slightly, eyelids fluttering as he seized the edge of his bunk. A tremor rocked his body as he hauled himself over to the edge to spill his guts on the deck below. The resulting mixture of bile and blood spattered Machinator’s lower appendages with a wet sound that echoed through the empty crew quarters.

That wasn’t good.

Machinator checked the timer he’d set for the Captain, only 8 hours, 12 minutes and 35 seconds had gone by. A thermal scan revealed his body temperature was almost 43 degrees Celsius, and when Machinator consulted an actuarial table cross referenced with Verdock’s condition . . . he estimated there were between 12 and 24 hours left until cardiac arrest and total organ failure, with 95% confidence interval.

Machinator thought back to that little parcel. It had seemed so unremarkable on the day it arrived. Just another little pressurized vessel for small, frangible objects. Perhaps unusual that it had been sent to Captain Verdock directly, not the head of security, and more unusual that it had no listed sender, but everyone received mail at some point.

Verdock had called a meeting the day he received the package, but it was not an ordinary or informal gathering near a charging hub or in the break room between shifts. It was late, the middle of “evening hours.” The concept of emotional trauma was foreign to most AI, particularly work AI that had the ability to edit their emotional responses on the fly to better perform their duties, but the only way Machinator could describe that meeting was “haunting.”

It had been a challenge to pack every security drone into the single classified briefing room, but they’d done it. Verdock had been sitting, the only one of them afforded enough room to do so. Once they had sealed the place, they sat in uncomfortable silence for what had seemed an irrational duration of time. Some had quietly guessed that Verdock was retiring, or had developed some fatal illness that was going to cut his career short, but none of them in their wildest imaginings could have come up with the truth.

He fished around in his pocket for a moment, before setting what looked to be a simple glass cylinder on the desk. Maybe 15 centimeters tall, with a diameter of roughly a third that, it looked like a paperweight, save the small conical indentation in the top, and the dull grey sphere suspended in the very center.

“This arrived specifically addressed to me 36 hours ago. It came with no return information, and I haven’t been able to find it anywhere in our shipping logs, which is an oddity in and of itself. Upon close review I have discovered three things of note. First, a small message affixed to the object.” He slid a small metal chit across the desk, bearing the inscription “To the seekers of truth, in service of the seekers of order.”

The language was old, maybe 1200 years old, and written in a form of Gentrue that was commonly found in technical documentation from that era. There was a subtle nuance to the usage of the word “seeker” in this context. It wasn’t a seeker in the way of a searcher, but seeking in the same fashion that a positive charge seeks a negative charge, the way something caught in a gravity well seeks to move to the lowest energy potential. Seeker in this context meant something that was inexorably drawn by dint of its very nature, not just desire. The odd structure of the phrase made it unclear if the “seeker of order” was the sender or the recipient, but all of this was just a passing flicker of cursory assessment that coursed through his inquisitive mind to be filed away for later review.

“The second thing, is that this device contains a large data-cache suspended in a crystalline lattice. The . . . implications of its contents are disturbing, and I have yet to fully delve into them.”

His expression darkened, and an expression of fatigue that was entirely foreign to Captain’s face played across it in the dimmed ‘evening lighting’ of the station.

“And lastly, radiological dating places it at roughly 8.9 billion years old.”

Machinator remembered there had been argument, after that. His memory was incomplete, and he could tell that he himself had purposefully damaged his records of the event. He had no audio or visual recording of what had transpired, but an ultrasonic-spatial recording still existed. Nothing but fuzzy and general outlines were available for him to review, but they showed that a security drone had picked up the archive, examined it for nearly 3 minutes, uninterrupted, before gently placing the archive back on the desk. At this point, the security drone designated ‘Trip-Hammer’ violently self terminated by clawing its central processing housing open and crushing its quantum processing core with both manipulator arms.

Machinator did not understand what he had seen. He could not guess at what would drive a rational being to self terminate without explanation, but he trusted Verdock. He had never wavered before, never fallen to irrational or wistful thinking. He thought like a machine, and that had always been a reassuring fact for Machinator. He reassured himself that all of this had been the product of rational thought . . . or at the very least tried to, as his focus shifted back to present matters before him.

Verdock’s breath had grown shallow and fast, back arched and mouth stretched wide in a silent scream as a nictitating membrane flickered across his eyes for the first time in the past 15 million years of his species evolutionary history.

“Reason . . . all of this is for a reason,” Machinator vocalized generally, tone laden with worry for his old friend. He sincerely hoped that both he and Verdock were right about this.

—————————————-

Tags Sci-Fi, AI, Fiction, Technically Sentient

Technically Sentient Stories Uncategorized

“Technically” Sentient: Chapter 11

Post author By TPH
Post date February 13, 2019
2 Comments on “Technically” Sentient: Chapter 11

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Verdock spared Amonna one last glance, pitying her exhausted and battered form writhing with invisible rage, betrayal, and confusion inside the decontamination chamber, before he turned and walked away away.

A heavy sigh escaped him, one clearly laden with regret.

Security Drone ‘Machinator’ was waiting for him at the end of the hallway, optic sensor array trained on his face.

“ . . . Sir?”

The mechanical, slightly distorted voice was faint, almost gentle, as he approached. ‘Machinator’ placed a whirring, servo articulated hand on his shoulder with a mechanically precise motion.

“Sir, are you having second thoughts?”

Truth be told, he’d been having second thoughts every day for the past six months, and probably a few times a week in the years before that. Of course, when he was younger, the things he second guessed were simpler. Enlistment versus officer training school, prioritizing street level tech dealers over distributors to keep neighborhoods safer, community presence or effective surveillance of known hot-spots . . .

All of that seemed so petty now, so very small.

“What we’re doing now isn’t right. It’s very, very wrong. At best, I’d say it’s the lesser of two evils. But it is necessary.”

The mechanical officer nodded. “I’m glad you have the resolve and clarity of mind to act with such certainty. I don’t think any of the other organic members of the force would agree with your assessment.”

He exhaled through his nose, slowly.

“And now they’re all dead. Save one.”

They began walking down the corridor together, shoulder to shoulder.

“Have we secured the shipment yet?”

‘Machinator’ shook his optical array. “Negative, we’ve been unable to breach the Coryphaeus vessel’s hold.”

Verdock nodded slightly. “I’ll see to it.”

He’d tried to protect these very people, for so long. From dangerous new additions to galactic society, from black market tech-dealers trying to pass off barely contained antimatter batteries as vacuum energy siphons, from their own baser natures even . . . and now here he was, doing all of those things himself. He pulled a small hypodermic injector of his pocket. He wore loose fatigues, nothing denoting rank. He looked like a trainee fresh out of the academy going for a jog, really, and in some ways he felt like one. All of this was new, different, and could go very wrong at any moment.

“Just like old times.” He muttered, quietly.

He turned the small polymer auto-injector over in his hands a few times. It almost felt flimsy it was so light. The label had been mostly scratched off with a knife, but at one point it had been a “Vigor-Vitamin Immune Enhancement Injection.” A cheap, over the counter, supplement for those who were stuck on long space voyages in close confines with less than sanitary individuals. Now . . . it was full of a Class-2 Bio-Tech viral serum.

He weighed it in his hands once more. Deceptively light, he concluded, for how dangerous it was. He plunged it into the the side of his neck, grimacing as a tendrils of burning discomfort spread from the injection site. “Machinator . . . start a 36 hour timer, and escort me to the hangar bay.”

——————————

Darren didn’t like the smell of office buildings. It was something he’d always been keen to pick up on, in banks, dentist offices, and high-rise corporate office space. It was a weird, almost metallic scent mingled with a faint floral note. Not a pleasant note either. He guessed it was a mix of anti-bacterial soap and maybe hot floor wax, but he could never really find the source, and he could never really pin it down. Right now, he would have taken weird office smell any day over the week over ‘dead alien elevator stink.’

“Oh my god Cas . . . it smells like this inside of a rotting whale carcass if a whale was made entirely of copper and rotten fruit.”

The smallish, humanish looking girl with a shotgun just frowned at him. “People are dead, Darren. People are dead and you’re saying they smell bad.” She shook her head slowly. “That’s considered very rude in most cultures. Is it not rude on Earth? Admittedly I only have a limited library of Earth cultures.”

He gagged a little, turning to face the door of the elevator, readying his leg-club. “I’m not saying it’s not rude . . . I’m just saying that bad doesn’t cover it.”

There was a soft ding, and a faint feeling of deceleration, and the doors slid open.

Darren wasn’t sure if a robot could look surprised, but as he took the equivalent of three sucker punches simultaneously, he sure hoped they looked surprised as he stayed standing.

Woozy, dazed, and in no shape to fight but standing.

Three of the beefy security drones paused, as if waiting to see if he was just going to collapse without the need for follow up shots when Cas slipped the shotgun under his arm and pulled the trigger. A smoking hole appeared in the chest of the drone on the far right with the screech of twisting metal and shattering ceramic. Moments later, he felt the flash of heat across his body, and the whine of a massive stack of capacitors recharging. There was a second deafening roar, things got fuzzy . . . and then there was the feeling of something buzzing inside his mouth.

“Auuh . . . Aff?” Talking wasn’t working right, and though he tried to form words, something was blocking him. Quite literally.

Cas was . . . kneeling over him, with her hand inside his . . . mouth? Zarniac looked like he was going to be ill, and Tilantrius was covering his eyes. “Whaff . . .” He reached up to pull Cas’s hand out of his mouth but she swatted him away, not averting her gaze. “Stop, I’m putting your teeth back.”

His eyes bulged a bit. “Bwha-”

“SUSH.” She added, sternly. “You’re only making this take longer.” The cyber dragon from before leaned over him. “Wow, you’re awake already? That’s . . . impressive. Making a note here, never picking up your bar tab, ever.” The red figure grinned, and a disgusting squelching sound emitted from Darrens slack jaw. jaw.

“Anyway, so uhh, turns out security drones are much better shots than drug addicts. And the remaining two drones decided to just . . . shoot you in the face. A lot. Cas finished them off with ‘Ol Reliable.” Chryso swung the space-shotgun up into Darren’s view, giving it an affectionate few pats. “But not before your face looked like paste. And most of your teeth were smashed. Fortunately, they’re the durable kind of teeth, that just pop back in.”

There was another squelch. “There, done.” Cas sighed, quietly. “I should have been a human doctor. Your species goes back together very neatly.”

“Mah faphe is nahmb.”

Darren reaches up, poking at his entirely numb face.

“Howb yoo doo dat?”

Chryso grinned wider, before pulling out a small bottle of something bright blue. “Drugs!”

That made sense, Darren reasoned. Drugs did lots of things. Drugs explained the electric girl, two little grey men, and cyberdragon doing surgery on him in an elevator that looked like a clown-slaughterhouse. Not a slaughterhouse run by clowns, but one for clowns. A slaughterhouse run by clowns sounded terrifying, he thought after a moment. A shiver went through him.

“Noooo . . . clowns . . .”

Chryso kissed the small, now half empty blue bottle. “Really good drugs.”

——————————

Verdock was burning up in his jumpsuit, the fever came on hard, and fast. He had just shrugged his tactical vest off, dropped him ammo belt, and even ditched his boots along the way. His head was foggy, and his joints ached. He hadn’t thrown up yet, but it was just a matter of time. “Captain . . . you are not well.”

He chuckled at Machinator. “Is it that obvious?”

Even as he joked, he began unbuttoning his uniform shirt, beginning to strip out of it as well.

“If locomotion under your own power becomes non-viable, please inform me. It is in the interest of operation success that I render appropriate levels of assistance.”

Verdock groaned, peeling the sweat darkened uniform top off, leaving only a sheer white undershirt clinging to his virus riddled body. Anyone else would have taken that comment for a standard, flat, low level AI response, but Machinator had been his adjutant for nearly 8 years. That was banter, at his expense.

“Knife.” He kept staggering along, steading himself on his AI companion with one hand, as the other he held out expectantly. Machinator obliged him, slapping 10 inches of mono-molecular edged high-frequency resonant alloy into his hand. “Thank you.”

He flipped the curved, vicious looking combat knife in his hand, and holding the cutting edge away from him, ran the tip across his chest and then down the side of his abdomen. It left two long, shallow, bright blue gashes in his flesh, just as he planned. His undershirt dropped away, having been sliced clean off, and he quickly slipped the knife into his boot. He pressed his hand against the open wound, before running it through his sweat drenched hair, letting the mixture of sweat and blood trickle down his face.

“Uhh . . . sir?”

That definitely wasn’t banter. That was legitimate bewilderment he was hearing from his longtime partner.

“Weakest part of Coryphaeus security systems are the people operating them.”

He stepped over a trio of bodies that had been cornered at the elevator leading to the hangar deck.

“ . . . I still don’t get it.” Machinator crackled a burst of static that was the machine equivalent of a sigh as they entered the elevator together.

He suddenly perked up, tilting his sensor array slightly as if he couldn’t believe the transmission he was receiving wasn’t some kind of statistically improbable distortion or mis-communication.

“Sir . . . our security checkpoint at the primary cargo elevator has just been breached by . . . a C.A.S.I.I. module with an illegal energy weapon and technically sentient ape.”

A wave of nausea pulsed through Verdock as the artificual gravity flickered. He never liked artificial gravity at the best of times but running around with a fever this high wasn’t making it any more tolerable.

“Let them go.” He managed to gasp, doubling over, putting almost all his weight on the hand railing with an iron grip. “P-pull back . . . pull back to an observation perimeter. Be ready to board the Coryphaeus vessel once I take care of the team inside.”

“Sir, I don’t mean to offened-”

Verdock half groaned, half snarled in pain. His blood felt like it was on fire, his joints felt like they were lined with sandpaper, and there just wasn’t enough damn air in the tiny box of an elevator.

“ . . . but you don’t look like you could win a fight with a tranquilized stuffed animal, let alone a half dozen of the Core World’s best.”

The elevator dinged softly as it reached the hangar bay, and the gold and ebony colors of one of the most advanced spacecraft for 300 light years were made clear to him. “Stay out of sight.” He mumbled, before weakly staggering towards the Coryphaeus vessel.

There were a dozen shattered security drone bodies scattered around, in various states of being pulverized. He could feel the pulse weapons charging as he approached, almost drunkenly staggering towards the rear cargo hatch of the ship. It looked regal, and opulent. More like an exotic sculpture than a ship of war, but why have form over function when you could afford both?

“My name . . . is Captain Verdock . . . I am . . . I was the commander of security forces on this station . . .” He shouted at the vessel, his words sounding ragged and desperate as he clutched at his bleeding side. “ . . . I’m requesting . . . evacuation on your vessel.”

The hairs on the back of his neck stood up as its point defense system locked onto him.

But then the rear hatch cracked open with a faint hiss, and three heavily armored commando’s burst out in confident, practiced formation. “Secure the VIP!” One of them barked, his voice heavily distorted by the full faced helmet he was wearing.

Two more commando’s streamed out of the craft, the clatter of their boots echoing through the desolate hangar as they swept up to him. Each of them slung their rifles over their shoulders, an electric buzz filling the air as magnetic clamps plucked them out of the air and snapped them to their backs. The three on the ramp scanned for movement while the other two grabbed Verdock under each arm, and hoisted him aloft, struggling to shuffle along at an even pace to get him inside to re-secure the vessel.

Another full body shiver rocked through him. “We need a medic!” They dragged him up the ramp, and dumped him to his knees in the cargo bay. “Sir, what the hell happened here? We’ve been trying to get launch clearance for the past 15 minutes, but our Nav system is locked down, and the security drones have gone nuts . . . they’ve been attacking in waves and- . . . sir, are you bleeding green?”

The commando in question likely had more than 4000 hours of simulated combat under his (or her) belt, in everything from zero-G to silica storms with 200 kilometer per hour winds. But right at that moment, nothing in their training had prepared them for what to do when a VIP pulled a knife out of their boot and thrust it through a squad-mate’s groin.

Verdock was vicious. Before the one on his right could even blink, he’d opened both femoral arteries of the Coryphaean commando. His blood pressure dropped like a stone, and he might not have even realized he was dead. The one on his right managed to push out a half syllable of “F-” which could have been an expletive or an order, but his throat was slashed from ear to ear in a single reverse cut before he could finish the statement. By the time the first one had hit the deck with a dull thud, and caused the three on the ramp to turn around, Verdock was among them.

The finest armor that the galaxy had to offer. Lightweight. Impact resistant. Modular. Fitted individually to each and every soldier. Thermo regulating. Self sealing. Pressurized. In-built cyber-warfare suite.

All of that counted for shit when a knife punched through the helmet gasket. Flexible materials were needed to allow a soldier to move, so overlapping plates made a ballistic attack almost impossible, but a knife . . .

A shower of sparks echoed across the deck as he rammed his blade through a part in the first one’s breastplate. They seemed to be moving in slow motion to him now. Their voices were dull, and distant. And he could make out the intricate details of their gear. The second one was left handed, for instance. His sidearm was on the wrong side of his body. Verdock slapped his rifle aside as before ducking under the shot of the third one, the almost certainly fatal blast missing him entirely, only to blow the head off the first trooper. Before the weapon even had time to cycle Verdock had planted his blade in its weilders armpit, slicing his heart clean in half from the side. A powerful headbutt smashed the ballistic lens of his helmet for good measure, before Verdock turned his attentions on his final obstacle. He delivered a bone shattering kick to an armored knee, and the joint reversed with a scream. As the last living commando on the deck collapsed, Verdock caught his helmet in both hands and twisted sharply, cutting the scream short.

He pressed his finger to his ear, body trembling. “We’ve secured the . . . “

He stumbled to the right, catching himself on a support strut, taking a few moments to catch his breath. Adrenaline was a hell of a combat drug. “We’ve secured the primary objective.”

His vision was growing dark around the edges, like he was being pulled out of the world and back down a long tunnel. “ . . . proceed to stage two.”

And with that, he allowed himself to collapse.

Tags Fiction, Technically Sentient, Sci-Fi, AI

Technically Sentient Stories

“Technically” Sentient: Chapter 10

Post author By TPH
Post date February 6, 2019
1 Comment on “Technically” Sentient: Chapter 10

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Cas felt nothing. Which . . . was a surprise, because she certainly thought she should be feeling something. Then came a sort of fuzzy feeling, followed by a sensation of itching in places she was fairly certain didn’t exist. Her sensor feeds began trickling along again, slowly at first, slowly building up until her perception of the world was more or less accurate again. Corridor? Check. Deck plates? Against her face. Cat? Very angry. Very hissy. Very safe in her arms still.

Murderous security drone? Smoldering basketball sized hole in its chest.

“Fvwhaaat ehhh . . .” Her vocal processing was terribly distorted as she struggled to sit up and maintain a cohesive shell. Something grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and hoisted her to her feet.

“Don’t tell anyone I have this. It’s a ‘go to jail for a long time’ type crime.” Chryso muttered quietly to her, letting go of her as he stuffed a rather menacing looking tool into his bag.

“B-but I saw, well, heard you . . .” Cas stammered weakly.

Chryso just tapped the side of his head sporting a nasty welt leaking blood. Tipping his head towards her to give him a better view, she could just make out the faintest hint of chrome beneath his cracked scales.

“I might have meat over it, but nobody takes out half a skull. Besides, what am I gonna do as the rest of it goes? Wait until cerebrospinal fluid is leaking out my nose?” He gave a weak grin, but he looked pretty unsteady on his feet. His artificial eye flickered, and he stumbled into Cas heavily, nearly knocking the two of them over.

“ . . . let’s just get to the hangar and hope someone is willing to give us a lift, yeah?” He wheezed weakly, holding his chest with one hand. “I think one of my hearts just quit.”

The cat, which had been entirely indifferent to their struggles and trying desperately to escape, suddenly became very, very still in Cas’s arms. Its ears twitched forward, and moments later they both knew why. The sound of dull thumping against the deck began to echo down the hallway.

“Chryso, we need to get moving now . . .” Cas whispered hurriedly to her illegal firearm toting savior, but all he could do was wheeze and stagger against the wall, sliding down it as he grabbed a fist-full of red jumpsuit. “Cas . . . it’s not . . . “

It sounded like a full toolbox being upended as he fell to his knees. “ . . . of all the times you stupid, second hand, aftermarket sewage pump of a heart . . .” Chryso threw in a few other choice insults as he began punching his chest as hard as his stubby little arms could manage.

The pounding was growing louder, and quickly. Something was running, and it was running at them. She looked between her incapacitated savior, the angry cat, and the end of the corridor that suddenly seemed too close for comfort.

Chryso weakly gestured to grease stained utility duffel he’d been carrying, a single clawed hand shaking weakly as his single eyelid fluttered. “In my bag . . .”

Cas tucked the hissing, yowling feline under one shoulder and dropped to her knees, not even certain what she was supposed to be searching for. Of course, when she unzipped it and saw the still glowing barrel of a a class 2 illegal energy weapon, she figured if there was anything they needed it was that. She shouldered it, putting her finger and what she was reasonably certain was the trigger, and leveled it at the end of the hallway.

“What . . . no . . . no I need that.” Chryso sputtered weakly, making a clumsy grab for the barrel of the blocky, smoking weapon that reeked of ozone.

“You’re in no condition to utilize this weapon. Also it’s a crime, and while extenuating circumstances apply I don’t want to have to include 2 illegal discharges on my report.” She paused a moment, remembering the absolute terror she felt as she faced down what she thought was the end.

“ . . . I don’t want to have to lie about 2 illegal discharges on my report.”

He just rolled his eyes, and groaned, before pushing something in his shoulder joint, sending his small chrome hand exploding outward from his wrist. It was only an extra foot of reach, but as the little hand wrapped around the barrel, a flash of blue crackled between the two metallic devices. Chryso convulsed, Cas screamed, and the cat was as upset as it ever was before the hand and gun separated with a static “pop.”

Chest heaving, eye wide open, and cybernetic optic practically glowing, Chryso sat bolt upright. “ooooOOOOOHKAY!” He hopped to his feet, practically vibrating in comparison to Cas who could only stare in disbelief at the sudden change in his health. “Ifeelgreatabsolutelygreatloadsbetterheartisworkinggreatgetup!” Cas could only blink as all of his words ran together. “Get up!” He repeated slower, with more emphasis. “Start running!” He aggressively pantomimed all of this to her in tandem with his hyperactive yelling, before taking off down the hall in the direction of the hangar bay.

“Wait, there’s-”

But Cas couldn’t finish her sentence before the little lizard plowed headlong into the toughest sentient she knew of.

Darren.

——————————

Of all the horrible sights that Darren was expecting to find when he rounded the corner, a tiny fat dragon in what looked like a red tracksuit plowing headlong into him at a sprinters pace was not what he expected. Not to say that the sight wasn’t horrible, it was a fat half-robot half-dragon in a tracksuit, but it was a crime against fashion and nature rather than the regular kind of crime. Doubling down on the unexpected events, he didn’t expect that to knock the tiny fat dragon out either, but he was hanging out on a space station that looked like it was decorated by a the combined creative efforts of a colorblind man and Rob Zombie. If anything, he was just happy to see a familiar face, even if she was kind of a bitch.

“Cas!” He called out in surprise as the lizard hit the deck. “Oh, shit . . . I broke your lizard. Wait, is this your lizard?”

Cas stared, dumbfounded. “ . . . Your ability to endure ridiculous danger and trauma presents a combined biological and statistical anomaly.” She began jogging towards him, cat in one hand, bag of . . . stuff . . . in the other. “And I’m very happy to see you.” She smiled at him pleasantly, a little rosy flush crossing her digital cheeks. The cat vigorously clawing at her arm while biting her did cause it to venture into the ‘uncanny valley’ area of smiles. She looked more like a serial murderer trying to explain why her freezer was full of hands while maintaining an amicable and carefree exterior than someone legitimately happy to see him . . . must be the lack of blinking, he concluded, before returning the smile.

Attempting to inject a bit of levity into the situation, Darren tried to make light of things. “Me too. You’re doing well, I mean, last I saw you, you were all holes and screaming. Thaaaat came out wrong.” Darren cringed visibly, scratching the back of his head.

Cas sighed, shoulders slumping. “An accurate assessment. I did have several structurally superfluous holes added to me, and I was screaming at the time of their addition. I apologize for my inability to effectively protect you or prevent conflict.” She perked up slightly though, and took a step closer to him. “You, on the other hand . . . seem to have weathered that unpleasantness remarkably well.” There was a slight uptick of surprise in her voice, as she looked him over head to toe.

“Yeah, alien guns don’t seem to have the . . . punch . . . that the ones from home do.” He mumbled quietly, scratching the back of his head.

“Well, we’re not trying to kill fully armored riot police out here,” she said with a quiet chuff. Darren glanced over her shoulder at the smoldering security drone, and she quickly added “. . .usually. Usually not trying to kill fully armored riot police out here . . . we should go.”

“What about your lizard?” Darren gestured to the faintly snoring robo-dragon that was spread eagle on the deck plating.

Stepping around him and heading down the hall, Cas called over her shoulder. “Carry him, would you? My hands are full.”

He grumbled quietly as he hefted the surprisingly heavy bundle of scales and steel, before dropping in behind her. “ . . . always with the telling me what to do and how to do it.”

He took two long strides and already paced himself beside her. “So we’re-”

She didn’t wait for him to finish his sentence. “Headed to the hangars, yes, to commandeer a vessel off the station.”

“Yeah . . . that . . . might not work out so great.” Darren couldn’t help but stare at the violently struggling cat under her arm. The very same cat that he had been abducted with, if his memory served him correctly.

“Oh?” Her tone was only slightly less patronizing than usual, but it was a noticeable improvement from how she’d treated him before.

“Yeah . . . the uhh, elevator the hangar looks like a grenade went off in the paint isle of a hardware store.”

“ . . . I have no cultural reference for half of these terms. A detonation involving pigment sales? I do not understand.”

They both rounded the final corner to see Zarniac and Tillantrius whispering quietly to each other, staring into the blood-slick elevator.

“ . . . I now understand what you mean by a detonation involving pigment sales.” Cas’s face twisted into an unsettled frown. “I lack the appropriate biological apparatus to satiate my current desires.”

Darren did a double take, because he couldn’t believe his ears.

“By which I mean I wish to throw up.”

Darren sighed with relief, causing her to shoot him a quizzical glare. “In any case, it seems we only have one course of action.” She dropped the bag, before rummaging around in it one handed. What she produced was, to Darren’s eyes, a sawn-off shotgun covered in wire coils with a half dozen D-cell batteries bolted to the stock. He knew on some level that he was wrong, but it was a tantalizingly familiar shape that he immediately found comforting. Zarniac and Tillantrius perked up at this as well. She dropped the cat in the bag to replace the gun, and zipped it up around the vicious bundle of fur that was doing everything in its power to draw blood from her hard-light hand.

“Miss . . . I don’t know where you got that, and frankly I’m afraid to ask . . . but will you and Darren go down first to make sure it’s alright?” Zarniac pleaded softly with Cas.

“A sound idea. Darren, you stand in front, and I’ll shoot around you.” Cas smiled at him.

This began a very heated debate that consisted of Darren trying very hard to make the point that “Just because I can survive being shot doesn’t mean I want that to happen.”

They all assured him that as frightening as the elevator was, all the other aliens that had died in it weren’t nearly as “big, strong, and tough” as he was, and that he shouldn’t be afraid of taking a quick ride down to escape – thus, completely missing the point. Zarniac and Darren voted to find another way, with Tillantrius and Cas voting for Operation Meatshield, they were at a deadlock. The cat seemed to be abstaining from the vote in protest of its confinement to a bag, and the cyber-dragon seemed to be unable to vocalize an opinion on account of being unconscious. In the end, Cas agreed that a compromise was in order, and that instead of everyone hiding behind Darren, only she would, with everyone else waiting for them to sound the all clear signal before boarding the elevator. That, and Darren could use Zarniac’s prosthetic leg as a club.

Zarniac shot him a look of betrayal as he pried his leg off and handed it over, revealing the pale, swollen stump bearing a crude looking plus shaped scar on the end.

All Darren could do was shrug, and board the elevator.

——————————

Amonna blearily shook herself awake. The spray of water on her skin and seeping across her gills was quenching the burning in her throat, but it wasn’t enough to offset the abuse she’d put herself through to get here. Her communicator was chiming non stop, so she’d clearly been out for more than just a few seconds. The decontamination cycle was finished, which meant-

There was a dull knocking on the door behind her. She rolled over onto her back, gouging her dorsal fin on the grating as she sat up to see what manner of insanity was going on beyond the reinforced security glass window of the airlock door.

It was Captain Verdock.

She rubbed her eyes, wondering if she was hallucinating or if something had gone terribly wrong. He held up his communicator to the glass, and she realized hers was still chiming. She lightly thumbed the glowing rune on it, allowing the connection to pass through.

“I’m sorry, Amonna.” Were his first words. She hadn’t quite put together where all she was or what all was happening, but this was definitely wrong.

“Don’t . . . don’t bother moving too much, save your strength. You’ll need it.”

His expression was sorrowful, and his tone quite gentle compared to his usual brusque and businesslike candor.

She wanted to babble a stream of questions, but as the security drone loomed into view behind him, she realized that was pointless.

“I didn’t think you’d believe me, at first. I thought . . . I thought that I’d have to subdue you some other way. Frankly, I think . . . I think that would have been easier than lying to you. When someone is shooting at you, trying to gut you with a knife or some such, it’s much easier to do them wrong.”

Amonna’s face twisted into a snarl of loathing.

“You . . . treacherous . . .”

“I did it to save you.” Amonna’s growl died in her throat, not out of any sentimental attachment, but out of sheer confusion. They had a highly professional relationship, maybe aided by their racial heritage but they’d spoken no more than twice while off duty.

He sighed, and said something she couldn’t make out to the security drone, that thumped away from the door. “He wanted to ask you some history questions . . . but didn’t have time. That was supposed to be enough of a hint to get you on the right track but the AI was a bit more stubborn than he expected.” Verdock sighed, pressing his head against the glass.

“I frankly don’t remember the script he sent me, and . . . it’s not important to sound clever right now. The Dolorous Star Massacre, Cygnus X-1, and the Cult of the Unfinished. Those are the things you need to investigate. It’s all . . . it’s all connected. I can’t tell you more, because . . .” He chewed his lip, rapping his knuckles on the glass in frustration. “Well I just can’t. Stay . . . stay in there. The decontamination chamber will shield you from the radiation until the fleet arrives, and . . . you were the only thing I could save on this station.”

Before she could open her mouth, he was gone. The line was dead, and she could only hear the faintest hints of footsteps through the deck-plating, then silence.

Tags AI, Fiction, Technically Sentient, Sci-Fi

Technically Sentient Stories

“Technically” Sentient: Chapter 9

Post author By TPH
Post date January 30, 2019
4 Comments on “Technically” Sentient: Chapter 9

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Cas decided that she hated running. Not because it was tiring, or anything ridiculously organic like that, but because of the amount of flailing involved. Hurling herself from one foot to the other, tottering along like some chaos pendulum stabilized only by several complex mathematic subroutines and a solid understanding of the laws of motion. She had a gut feeling that she’d done Darren a great disservice in that regard, now that she was having to do some running of her own.

Gut feeling. That was a new one. She wasn’t sure what had been done to her. She felt . . . violated, for one. Which was something she’d been unable to fundamentally grasp before. Someone had reached inside her, and fiddled about with all of the things that had made her . . . who she was. At the same time, she definitely thought she was the same intelligence, the same body, just with new perceptions and feelings inside of it. Some of her core processes had been obfuscated to her. Her emotional centers, for one, that she used to be able to tweak, shut down, or ignore as productivity demanded were like black boxes to her now. Stimulus went in, and feelings came out. Right now she was feeling violated, scared, angry, guilty, and frankly frustrated by the fact she couldn’t turn any of it off to focus on the problem in front of her.

Namely, that they had about 4 minutes until the station either exploded or was rendered so inimical to any form of life that she was unsure if even she would survive. A quantum processor is a finicky thing on a subatomic level, and hurling gamma radiation through one very rarely improved their functioning.

It took her a moment of processing, and she nearly stumbled when she realized it, but she was afraid of dying.

The concept of death had always seemed a bit silly to her. If one went so far as to separate consciousness from the physical body, then death, sleep, and being turned off were all essentially the same, save that death was typically much harder to reverse. Being afraid of an inevitable shutdown made as much sense as being afraid of a change in terrestrial weather.

Yet here she was, running (something she decidedly disliked) for her life. This was not one of her primary directives. A secondary directive was self preservation but-

She frowned as she slid to a stop, raising one hand to gesture for the Kontosian technician who was with her to stop as well.

“Uhh . . . Cas? You . . . oh fuck running . . . okay?” The wheezing, portly little lizard managed to sputter out as he propped himself up against the wall.

She turned to him, a look of astonishment on her face. “ . . . Technician Chrysophylax, I have no primary directives.”

His chest heaved, and his chrome augments whirred quietly, all trying to keep the still organic half of his body supplied with oxygen despite it’s lack of general fitness.

“Great, yeah, welcome to literally everyone else’s life-” He said, in one long breath before taking several seconds to compose himself for another sentence. “What you do have, is a cat.” He gestured to the bag on her back, its contents consisting of a single, very agitated feline. “And unless you also have a deathwish . . . the hangar is this way.”

He gestured towards a heavy blast door at the end of the hall with one hand, the other hand on his knee as he doubled over, panting.

“And as much as I respect your right to have crazy revelations . . . after we’re outside the station would be a better time.”

As much as she was writhing beneath the surface with unfamiliar emotions, she had to agree.

——————————

“ . . . wait . . . wait . . . GO!”

Amonna dove across the hallway, landing hard but quietly in a doorway across the hall. Captain Verdock had managed to get access to the camera feeds, and was leading her straight to the reactor to sort this mess out, pointing out security drones and shortcuts via her implanted communicator.

It was going better than she expected. She didn’t honestly expect to be alive at this point, so it wasn’t saying much.

She grimaced, gently pressing against one of her ribs that she was fairly certain she had just bruised with that little combat roll. “How much further?” She whispered softly, trying to keep her voice low enough that the mechanical monstrosity at the end of the hall wouldn’t hear her.

“Two hallways and a security door, you’re almost there . . .”

She could hear the tension in his voice. It was subtle, not like when a panicked civilian called in, or even her own beleaguered tone now. It was grim, but steady, and unflinchingly certain. If an executioner’s axe could talk . . . that’s how she thought it would sound.

She tried to steady her breathing, and push down the pain. Her lungs hurt now too, not just her gills. She was dizzy from overexertion, and if she was using a trick she learned in FSOS candidate to keep from passing out by periodically flexing her tail as hard as she could for as long as she could to keep the darkness at the edge of her vision at bay.

“Just a few more steps Amonna . . . come on.” She whispered hoarsely to herself, pushing up off the cold plating, and dragging herself onward through the hatch, and into the next hall.

The light flickered overhead, and she could see signs of battle damage on the walls.

“Alright, Amonna, you should be clear of patrols from here on out, but you’re going to need to put on a hazard-suit once you get inside the decontamination chamber.”

She could make out the heavy duty blast doors of the decontamination chamber. On the far side . . . a miniaturized star.

“How the hell am I supposed to fix this once I’m inside?” She staggered to the right, nearly tripping over herself. “Air is just too thin for breathing . . .” She muttered, vision beginning to blur.

The line crackled faintly in her ear. “Focus Amonna, you’re too damn close to stop now. These things were designed to be idiot proof, and safer than houses. Worst case scenario, we jettison the core, and go back to the stone age until the help arrives.”

She nodded weakly, managing to shuffle the rest of the way to the door. She palmed the security keypad, and it miraculously accepted her security override. “Airgap . . . hack that you smug prick.” She mumbled.

The world tilted to the left a little as she managed to drop prone inside the decontamination chamber. A cool spray of water soothed her burning gills as the decontamination cycle began. With a hiss, the door behind her sealed, and she allowed herself a moment of respite, rolling on her back and opening her mouth to let some of the water spray in. It was probably not good for her health in the long run, but nothing about today had been anyway . . .

——————————

Darren cocked his head to the side, and his nose wrinkled. A smell like a mix of formaldehyde and wet dog assailed his nose, and he hated every inch of stink that was trying to wriggle down his throat. The scene before his was no less grisly. They had called the elevator to the hangar bay. Just one short ride and about 600 feet of walking, and they’d be at a ship, and away from this nuclear deathtrap. There was one small problem.

Tilantrius had removed his little hat, and placed it over his colorful, medal festooned vest.

Zarniac was looking green around the gills, and had averted his gaze entirely.

The inside of the elevator looked like something out of a demented coloring book. All different colors of alien ichor were smeared around in a horrific Jackson Pollock painting of death. Nothing that had bled that much could have survived. Several someone’s couldn’t have bled that much and survived. It frankly looked like something out of a space-alien shoot-em-up video-game.

He cocked his head to the other side.

He just couldn’t figure out which one.

Maybe it was the shock of it. Maybe it was because they were aliens. Maybe it was the repeated blows to the head. Maybe the Facebook mom groups were right, and he had been desensitized to violence, but it just . . . didn’t seem to do anything other than make his nose wrinkle.

“So . . . do we go down?”

He looked over to the grey alien in a hat, eyebrows raised quizzically.

The little alien cleared his throat. “I suspect that whatever forces have arrayed themselves against us are fully aware of how many ways there are off this station. What would follow is that they have put safeguards in place to prevent us, or anyone else, from making it to the hangar. They might be in the form of diabolic contraptions, stout footmen, or perhaps that and more. Regardless . . . it seems that descending via that elevator has been the idea of many before us.”

He looked over to Darren with a sorrowful, and grim look.

“It did not seem to end well for them. I suspect it would not end well for us.”

There was a long pause as the two of them stared at the killing ground that was also their only way out.

“ . . . do we have any other ideas?”

An even longer pause followed the first.

“No.”

A dull whine, and thump echoed down the hall, followed by distant screams. Mixed screams, male and female.

Zarniac cleared his throat quietly.

“Guys . . . I think we have company.”

——————————

“RUN FASTER CHRYSOPHYLAX!” Cas screamed, straining her small audio output speakers until they crackled in the saturation range. She glanced over her shoulder one last time while urging the short legged lizard on, cursing his frustratingly small stride as one of the frighteningly quick security drones in riot gear ran them down.

“CAN’T RUN FASTER!” He bellowed back, before she heard a high pitched whine followed by a blood-curdling crunch.

“One down . . . see, it’s easy if you know how to do it.”

She felt sick, scared, confused, and more. She wanted to look back, but she knew that Chryso’s silence only meant one thing. Her emotional processing center wanted her to lay down and curl up and not move and cry, but she only knew how to do two of those three, and none of those impulses were strong enough to override her singular desire to survive today.

So she ran harder. It was just her, and the feline now.

She clutched her bag to her chest, listening as the shoulder mounted cannon on the thing charged up with a whine. They usually targeted non-vital areas, but the bodies they’d seen had all been dispatched with single, fatal blows. It had gone for their heads. Their hearts. She was just a hard light shell, which meant it was trying to guess where she was hiding her processing core.

Putting it in one of her limbs, or her head, or really anywhere other than her chest would probably give her the ability to shrug off a few more shots, but . . . they wouldn’t protect her only surviving charge.

She hadn’t done right by Darren, the poor, unlucky sod, but she’d take care of this other sentient.

She kept her processing core nestled squarely in her chest, protecting her precious cargo. The first blast flickered through her leg, making her stumble, and hobble, but it wasn’t enough to put her down. The second tore trough her shoulder, glancing her core and jarring her thoughts. She found herself a half dozen paces forward when her processor and internal clock synced back up, but she was still moving.

The third kinetic pulse round slammed into the small of her back. The hard light field beneath her blue jumpsuit buckled at the point of impact with a flash, and she went tumbling to the ground with an agonized scream as the sheer volume of disruptions to her shell overcame her.

She did her best to build a little cage using what was left of her body to protect the cat, but round after round kept slamming into her. It hurt. It hurt like nothing she’d ever experienced before, but she just curled the scraps of fabric and decaying hard light body around the terrified feline. She watched as her arm was blown clean off, dissipating into motes of ionized light and ozone as one blast took the limb off at her shoulder. She only had a few processor cycles to reflect on it, but oddly enough that hurt less than the idea that they were going to take her cat. She whimpered softly, curling around it just a bit tighter as she shut off her optical sensors. She didn’t want to know it was coming. Just . . . like falling asleep. She’d be off. Right?

She heard the subtle clinking of the numerous arachnid legs of the security drone as it approached her.

“This would have been so much easier if you’d just dealt with the Kontosian. I even offered to take care of the feline you didn’t have the stomach to end. Pathetic.”

She heard the whining of its shoulder cannon charging, but she dared not move, dared not look up. Maybe if she pushed her cat away at the last second she-

A sound like thunder ripped through the air, and then she felt nothing.

Tags Technically Sentient, Sci-Fi, AI, Fiction