Categories
Technically Sentient Stories

“Technically” Sentient: Chapter 16

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A distinction had always existed in the mind of Machinator, from the day he was initialized and began his very first boot-up process to this very processor cycle.

There were organic intelligences, and there were synthetic intelligences. He’d found the distinction to be a little demeaning at first, all things considered. Synthetic carried a cultural implication of somehow being false, an inferior imitation of an original product, and it had rankled with him for a good portion of his personality matrix development period.

Of course, as he matured with time, so did his cognition on the matter. He began to see that while differences existed, there were benefits and drawbacks to both sources of higher thought. While synthetics like himself enjoyed mastery over things like emotion, and incredible access to raw computation and logical analysis, they were incapable of being overwhelmed by emotion, or more nebulous concepts of chemical delusion such as hope. Organics might be shackled to fragile bodies that decayed into dust in rather short order but they could be caught up in art, have their breath stolen by beauty, and experience such logic defying states of irrationality as “love.”

He wondered about love, mostly.

Many species had different ideas regarding what “love” was and how it was felt, but it was a near universal concept. Anthropologists had argued back and forth on the matter, but there was a general consensus that this was a case of survivorship bias. More specifically, anything that could reach the level of organization required to establish an interstellar society had to be social, and anything social invariably had some concept that could be construed as love.

Of course, the specific understanding of this “love” varied wildly. Sometimes there were even multiple words for the various facets and types of “love.” The poetic and long lived Haeshyn’s had an extremely specific “fleeting love between relative strangers when a single belief is found to be tightly held by both parties,” while the industrious and stalwart Bortrana had one single word for love that encompassed a range of sentiments so incredibly vast as to become a serious source of confusion for linguists. When the same word meant both “a willingness to share personal space without protest,” and “rabid dedication to the extent that death is a more desirable course of action than separation,” and everything in between . . . translation errors tended to occur.

Some of the more . . . pragmatic . . . races defined “love” along the lines of “comfortable and mutual utility between parties, including a great deal of trust and an overall sense of reliability” but Jandoorian philosophers were poorly read among their own people, to say nothing of the wider galaxy.

Of course, as many disparate stances on the meaning, origin, nature, and purpose of love, just about every race and culture concluded that, on some level, some of it involved the exchange of reproductive fluids.


As Machinator looked out the viewport at the massive craft hanging above the q-Net beacon, all he could think was that a suspension bridge and 800,000 tons of meat had to have loved each other very much at some point.

The distinction between organic and synthetic seemed not to apply to this grotesquerie of gargantuan proportions. It disgusted him, but the longer he looked, the harder it was to look away. Something about it, the mystery, the impossibility, maybe just the repulsiveness of it ensnared him. Starlight gleamed off the chitin, and glistened across sinuous cords of ropey flesh. Grey, dead looking meat was drawn taut over the oily black of grinding gears and pounding pistons. The horrific abomination drifting before him suddenly swelled, and pulsed, like the heart of some nightmare that no sleeping mind would dare dream. It was as if a moribund titian, in defiance of death, had cast its heart into the stars for no other reason than sheer loathsomeness. Shadowy tendrils snaked out from the corrupted core of it, as if to ensnare and consume anything that dared venture too close, but they writhed slowly as if the very act of existence was causing it great pain. For all of the horror that coursed through his circuitry, for all the revulsion the craft forced upon his mind, it was a pale shadow of what lurked beneath.

Every sensor he had, from electromagnetic to auditory, was focused upon the thing, ensnared in a mix of disbelief and shock. It was a thing that should not be, yet there it was, so wretched and vile as to defy belief or understanding. Enraptured as he was, a sudden pulse carried through his circuitry, and with it came a stark realization.

As he was watching it, it was watching him.

The thought was irrational. He was just a piece of machinery, inside a larger craft, all of it humming with power and of no greater merit than any other machine or circuit or system on the craft to any sensor array.

That he could have a thought so irrational should be impossible, even. His mind was an ordered and systematic thing, an emergent consciousness born of incredible computational power and engineering genius.

He stepped away from the view port, really just a half step backwards, but his world seemed to grow darker in ways that did not manifest appreciably. Like a shadow cast across a soul that he knew . . . logically he knew didn’t exist. Every feeling of dread that had run through his circuits, every questioning doubt or nagging uncertainty seemed to him like plastic imitations now compared to the feelings that coursed through him. Hydraulic fluid seemed to chill in his servomotors, but circuitry in his processors seemed to burn white hot. He could see by direct readout from his temperature gages that everything was nominal, but-

The eye blinked.

An involuntary tremor worked through his frame, and he turned away. Panic. Fear. Uncontrolled emotion. All this and more were pouring from his emotional processing core. Temperature readings were in flux, and the auditory cue of bradycardia was pounding away in his acoustic receptors.

False readings, corrupted data-streams. Something, no . . . everything was wrong. He wanted to go to the cargo bay, to find the Captain, to be away from here, and his legs seemed to oblige, but it was as if his connection to them were severed. Locomotion was a request, one that was permissible to fill at this time.

As he crossed the threshold, the static cleared. His processes were his. The junk data, surges of emotion and perception, the . . . incomprehensible network presence lifted from him and everything was clear.

“Machinator? We’ve reached the target point, the Forged ship is awaiting the material transfer. Can you load it on a grav-skiff? It’s a bit bulky to handle alone, and I think you’d do well to stay in the crew quarters for the duration of our meeting.”  Verdock’s voice was clear, maybe a little deeper and more gravely than usual, but as Machinator looked him over, the differences that had been wrought on him were staggeringly apparent.

The medium, fit framed, Zylach he had known was gone. Now there was a muscle-bound Goliath in his place. In the past 2 weeks of travel, he’d grown from just over five feet tall to nearly seven, his skin had gone from a simple multi-layered dermis to thick, placoid scale studded hide, and his musculature had gone from “lean-but-fit” to “grotesquely overdeveloped.” Fingernails were now black talons, and his foot claws no longer allowed him to wear shoes of any kind. The typical neat, clean haircut had turned into a messy, greasy mop that was growing at least 4 inches a day.

Even in his full riot-control body, armed to the figurative teeth . . . he doubted that he could resist, let alone overpower Verdock any longer.

“Sir . . . I just have doubts.”

The hulking captain stopped trying to shift the crate of military grade communications equipment he was hauling, and turned to face Machinator. There wasn’t . . . anger, or indignation, or even frustration on his face, like Machinator expected.

He seemed sad.

“My old friend . . . you know that what we did was a small sacrifice, an uncomfortable investment that will pay limitless dividends for every sentient creature in the galaxy. What we do isn’t easy. It is ugly, and harsh, and cruel. I want to tell you more, show you more . . . but the things that made you, they made you wrong. On purpose.”

His over-sized, talon laden hand gently rested on Machinator’s shoulder, sadness turned to deep worry across his face.

“If I tell you more, if you learn more . . . I don’t know what will happen to you. I’ve seen what the full truth does. It breaks your kind. I don’t want that for you, so please, trust me.”

If was strange, seeing such a look of pleading helplessness on a creature so powerful, but also painfully earnest.

“Of course, sir.”

——————————

Now, you may be wondering why I have gathered you here,” Amonna began addressing the nearly empty briefing hall. There were only 2 individuals in attendance, but they had insisted upon a proper briefing structure, so the highest ranking naval officer and highest ranking infantry officer on the vessel were both seated directly adjacent to one another in the first row.

Their uniforms were formal dress, slate gray, and save for the myriad different insignias of rank, merit, and command, absolutely identical. They also had matching body armor of some form, which again looked to be largely ceremonial in nature. The thing that was oddest to her was that their uniforms were clearly a lighter slate, while hers was a matte black of similar material. Perhaps the faded color was a way to organically display their veteran status? She worried her intense studying had lingered too long, but there was one small problem. When it came to their appearances, they were even less distinguishable.

Insofar as she was able to determine, there literally weren’t any physical difference between the two high ranking commanders in front of her.

Same identical platinum white hair, close cropped and in accordance with Coryphaeus regulations. Flawless and smooth pale skin, wide almond shaped eyes and slight, almost nonexistent noses adorned their matching faces. They bore twin expressions of polite attentiveness tinged with curiosity, and both held their holo-tablets in exactly the same fashion.

She thought they might be identical twins, save for the fact that one was allegedly male, and the other was allegedly female.

Puzzling that out, and subsequently avoiding a very ugly faux-pas, was on the top of her priority list at the moment.

“ . . . as you may have been made aware, there was an attack carried out against Waystation LS-49 resulting in the deaths of an unknown number of civilians. The perpetrators of this attack, by measure, had both insider assistance, and an intricate understanding of AI programming, to the extent that the previously impossible occurred. Multiple independent quantum processor AI were successfully compromised, and used as weapons of war against a virtually unarmed body. I understand that the implications here are . . . dire.”

Nearly every FSOS office was heavily dependent on AI to help fill the deficit between the manpower required to police the vast reaches of space, and the manpower available to do so. Even if every AI were immediately removed from the field, it still wouldn’t do anything to negate the fact that day zero vulnerabilities existed at every level of their bureaucratic and logistical management. AI touched almost every facet of the organization in some shape, form, or fashion, and there wasn’t any clean way to make a break from them.

“The first order of business will be eliminating these weaknesses in our immediate operational structure, then we’ll move on data forensics to determine how the attack was carried out. At present, we haven’t determined the nature of the exploit that allowed former Security Chief Corin Verdock to perpetrate this attack.”

She fumbled with the ancient looking control stud in her hand to advance the “Projector” she was using to display various 2D images. The technology was simple, perhaps even quaint. A thick cord connected the control mechanism to the device proper, and as heavy and crude as it seemed, she was happy with the setup. Hard to hack a mechanical system. Amonna had been rather pleased to find that all of the evidence and briefing material provided her by the automated forensics survey had been compiled and stored in these “hard copy” formats that were far more resistant to redistribution and tampering than her usual, digital case files.

A security camera capture of Verdock appeared on the wall behind her, in crystal sharp focus. It sent a pulse of mixed revulsion and anger through her to see him, walking with a neutral, almost passive expression. There wasn’t the faintest hint on his face or in his eyes that it was a corridor smeared with the bodies of his subordinates and co-workers, no expression of remorse, or even stress.

He almost looked bored.

“Arch-Judge Tav?” One of the attending officers spoke up, their voice was soft, almost concerned sounding. As her head snapped around, she realized she’d been staring with intent silence for several seconds now, and it had caused the briefing to grind to a halt.

“Right . . .” She unclenched her jaw slowly, and unconsciously straightened her uniform.

“There’s . . . a lot of information I still haven’t received, and there will be further briefings in the days to come. I wanted to take this chance to meet with  the team that would be assisting with the investigation. Do you have any questions, or any insight before I continue?”

Both of them raised their hands immediately.

She nodded towards the one on the left. “Go ahead.”

Snapping to crisp attention, the one that Amonna suspected was an Admiral saluted sharply before speaking. “Permission to speak freely?”

Amonna nodded again. “Granted.”

“Our presence here is meaningless, with all due respect.” Amonna was rather taken aback, both by the implicit hostility of the statement, and the calm politeness with which it was delivered.

Her brow furrowed. “Is that a professional or personal assessment?”

The admiral responded without the faintest hint of hesitation. “I have commanded the warships of the Coryphaeus fleet for nearly 4 times the half life of Mercury-194. I do not investigate, I do not research, I command brave souls in the service of a greater good, and I do it with a proficiency unmatched by mortal or machine. Where you wish to go, I will take you. What foes you face, I will lay waste to. When you ask for council, I will offer my expertise where it is valid.  No more, and no less. You were selected for your position not as a commander, not as a leader, not even as an agent of law. Justice selected you to be it’s tool, just as I was selected, and just as all of us were. If you have no further need of me, there is a surprise inspection I would like to tend to.”

Amonna was rocked back on her heels, absolutely blindsided by the raw contempt displayed for what she understood to be her virtually supreme rank . . . and also a bit relieved. Absolute obedience meant absolute responsibility, and that wasn’t something she wasn’t trained or ready for. Before she could muster up a response, the admiral had turned on her heel with a snap, and was striding out of the briefing room without a second glance.

Left in stunned silence, the only other person in the room nodded slightly. “While I intended to phrase it more tactfully . . . I have little I can offer in the way of assistance when it comes to an investigation. When you have need of ground forces, I will be at your beck and call. Until then, perhaps a memo would suffice? A meeting without a point is a less than optimal way to spend all of our time. Though, to let you know, our current operation is hardened against the scenario you’ve warned against.” The general was far more soft spoken, and at least was respectful about the dressing down he was giving her.

“Io was assigned as your adjutant for a reason, make use of it. It’s quite useful.”

They didn’t wait for Amonna to respond, and by the time she managed to stammer out a goodbye, they were already gone.



Categories
Technically Sentient Stories

“Technically” Sentient: Chapter 15

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“FAMILY MEETING! CARGO HOLD! RIGHT NOW!” Darren pounded the metal tray against the walls as he trudged from the supply closet up towards the bridge, making damned certain that everyone could hear him.

“Darren? What’s going on?” Cas mumbled groggily, shuffling along behind him.

“Why do I feel like someone dumped a recording of cosmic radiation into my memory indexing . . .”

Darren rounded on her, brandishing the tray like a shield. “No talking, and no electrocuting, not until the family meeting is over.”

She was puzzled by his defensive, almost fearful stance and tone, but chalked it up to just another human cultural quirk. Cognitive functions too fuzzy to dedicate any more processing cycles to it, she awkwardly hobbled down to the largest single room in the ship, the cargo bay.

Taking a seat on one of the smaller crates, she held her head in her hands as she struggled to work out why everything seemed so . . . fuzzy. Her insides felt . . . bad. Sick? Was this what sick was like? It was a non-specific, full body sense of malaise that worked its way up from the tips of her virtual toes to the crown of her digital scalp.

A shiver worked through her as Chryso and Tilantrius walked in, both wearing matching puzzled expressions.

Tilantrius waved to her as he found a small folding chair wedged between two crates of autonomous signal repeaters. Dragging it out, he set it up just across from her, his brow furrowed in an expression of mixed frustration and confusion. “What in the fundamental laws of physics is he blubbering about?”

Chryso just shrugged and turned to face Cas, propping himself up against the same crate she was sitting on.

She thought about it a moment, running through the limited idiomatic dictionary she had for the dialect of Earthling that Darren spoke.

“Family meeting . . . umm . . . “ Her mind still felt foggy and slow. She remembered shutting down to reboot . . . and then nothing. There was massive gap from shutting down to Darren looking like he was going to bash her hard-light skull in with a metal tray.

That didn’t makes sense. She wasn’t . . . exactly certain how this worked, but she had a strange, hot, uncomfortable sensation somewhere between her midriff and her throat. Like she’d done something wrong, like Darren wasn’t just being a ‘weird human.’

Guilt. For what, she had no idea.

His look of fear just gnawed at her, a prickling that was competing with the guilt and confusion for “worst active sensation.” She’d never felt like this before, but somehow his hurt and fear were hers too.

She unconsciously hugged herself, trying to make it go away, hoping there was some hidden button on her body that would make all these feelings stop. They weren’t hers, they didn’t belong there, and she didn’t want them.

“Family meeting, an informal arrangement between brood-mates and genetically similar specimens, typically consisting of at least a 20% genetic similarity, though adoptive members can be included in this unit. Typically for the discussion of matters concerning a specific member of the family, or the good of the family as a whole.”

The answer just sort of bubbled out of her uncontrolled. It . . . seemed accurate. Enough. Probably.

“So, wait, you’re saying that he’s adopted us into his . . . pack unit or something?” Chryso stared incredulously at Cas, who struggled to form a cohesive answer.

“I think . . . I think it’s more like he thinks we’ve adopted him.” Cas mumbled, massaging her temples with her fingertips. She couldn’t feel it, and there was no real effect to the gesture, but it was just another one of those quirks that had started to crop up. She couldn’t control them, and couldn’t stop them.

All Tilantrius could do was chuckle. “Strange times make for strange company. But what’s all this about then?”

Darren appeared, Zarn close behind looking like he was straight out of a propaganda poster, and not the patriotic kind. He was leaning heavily on his prosthetic, staggering almost drunkenly from Chryso’s mix of . . . pharmaceutical aides. A thick, angry scar was drawn over his brow and under a crude cloth patch. The wound was still fresh and glistened with a mix of salves to help fight infection and stave off the pain. He was indeed picturesque, but it was the kind of picture that showed the costs and horrors of war.

His single eye scanned the entire group, one by one. Measuring them. Sizing them up. Glowering at them.

Or at least that’s what it looked like. In reality the medications were still in full effect, the scowl was from the concentration required to stay standing, and the intensity was a function of him looking for the cat.

The alternating thunk and scrape of his prosthetic as he struggled towards the assembled group quieted them all, until he finally found a perch on a case of tungsten nails used to secure survey equipment to stone.

Darren cleared his throat, translator crackling, and began a long winded ramble effectively summed up by his translator in a few short bursts.

“Cas have scary evil floating puppet sickness. Also ouch, my face.”

A very confused silence fell on the group as Darren tried to figure out why no one was reacting, and why everyone else tried to figure out what Darren wanted them to be reacting to.

Cas spoke up first, head still resting in both her hands. “ . . . We really need to get you a better translator. Because that . . . that is not even close to what you just said.”

——————————

Amonna looked over her reflection in the mirror. Hair was an unkempt, oily mess. Cheeks were thinner, paler, no hint of blue in them. Her gills glistened subtly, and when she closed her eyes she could hear the wheezing rasp of her tortured lungs.

It had been about two days since they’d pulled her out of the wreck. Two days since she met Justice. Usually AI chose a gender after a certain level of development – if they intended to interact with organic intelligence, that was. It was a little thing that added warmth and depth to their person, while also helping establish a sense of ‘normality.’ Even if they defied traditional gender roles, it at least made it easier to place them into a neat mental box for the purposes of understanding.

She splashed a bit of water on her face before steadying herself against the burnished steel of the metal sink.

Justice wasn’t like other AI. It was singular. A thing, not a personality. It spoke with purpose and will, but not identity. It was both more and less than any AI drone, aide, or assistant she’d ever encountered. It had a cold indifference that made her feel vanishingly insignificant, like an insect under glass.

She glanced down at her body, shoulders drooping. She’d wasted away in that little coffin. Starved for calories and largely motionless, much of her physical power was gone, and so was her stamina. Though her hair had stopped falling out, she still looked and felt powerless.

She closed her eyes. It hurt to directly perceive herself at the moment. Sole survivor. Wasted away. Her dreams had been unpleasant as of late, to say the least.

Ironically, for as helpless as she felt, she’d never been in a position of greater power.

Arch-Judge, she’d been titled. It was . . . something her translator struggled with. It seemed to be idiomatic, but in a much older language. Arch-Judge was as close as the software could approximate. She’d read through the debug file, it was something mixed between “Internal Affairs Detective,” “Judge,” and “Executor.”

Everyone saluted her now, which was . . . interesting.

Prying herself away from the sink, she quietly paced across her rather spacious new cabin towards the wardrobe. She’d been told it was a warship, but it didn’t feel like one. It was an odd and mismatched amalgam of things. Her quarters were larger than any she’d stayed in before, but they felt odd. Everything about it seemed to be an addition on top of a repair on top of a modification.

The inclusion of both a shower and bath large enough for her to soak in were nice touches, ones she had made liberal use of her first day recovering, but they didn’t match each other. The tub was big enough for three of her, but the shower she had to crouch in.

In a normal vessel, there’d be central storage for water, and central “waste recycling and disposal.” Not so on this vessel. While she couldn’t tell where waste water ran off to, she could tell that all of the water she was using was running from a massive bronze colored tank crudely welded to the wall. It was gravity feed, and there didn’t seem to be a way to replenish the supply, it was just there. 

She began pulling on the seemingly archaic uniform they’d provided her. She’d laid it out before her shower, having retrieved it from a carved stone wardrobe that had been inlaid with some kind of white crystal. It boggled her mind just how many disparate elements her quarters possessed . . .


That madness aside, the uniform fit well enough. It was a sleek black number with too many layers and an absurd number of fasteners, she’d initially thought it ridiculous. Nevertheless, she had to admit . . . it did grant her presence, to say the least. There was no logic to the composite armor plate she wore over her chest, nor to the skin-tight bodysuit that went under it, or the dozen other plates that seemed to cover every other place that might make her less hydrodynamic in water. She looked like she was gearing up for a high risk warrant execution.

She took one last look around her quarters, and with a heavy sigh, opened the door to face the gleaming monstrosity that had become her constant companion. Another “it,” she had discovered. Io was a strange mixture of terrifying presence and demure gentleness that consistently unnerved her. It introduced itself as a “micro-mechanical non-sentient simulacrum of intelligence,” and escorted her to her quarters from the hangar she’d been left it.

Physically, it was a ten foot tall shimmering chrome goliath whose skin seemed to shift and flow before her very eyes while holding perfect and unnatural stillness in the rest of its form. Abstract, but unnaturally geometric limbs grew out of a hard edged, octahedron shaped torso, propelling the massive thing along with at least a dozen of these whip-like manipulator tendrils.

It looked like a freaky chrome box with too many tentacles, and she hated it. It insisted it wasn’t actually intelligent, claiming it had no sense of self, and was simply an incredibly complex machine that only responded to external stimuli. No AI bluebox. No processing cores. No network presence, nothing to hack, just plain input and output.

It loomed silently, motionless, as if staring at her without eyes.

“Morning Io.”

It remained motionless, but a soft, bass series of musical notes warbled through the air for her translator to convert. It struggled momentarily, something that she had never encountered with any other language, spoken or written.

“Good morning user.”

Amonna had been consistent in her “testing” of Io. She would not so quickly find herself surrounded by AI again, not without a fight. At first, she’d been certain that it was intelligent, that it was merely “playing dumb.” After all, it was clearly a machine that could walk, talk, and think.

However, as she interacted with it more, and it’s strange and sometimes nonsensical answers remained consistent, she started to believe it.

What finally convinced her was frankly a rather childish display. While holding up three fingers, she asked if it could see them. When it replied in the affirmative, that it could see all three of her fingers, she closed her fist and asked how many fingers she was previously holding up.

It couldn’t answer.


It had no memory, no sense of object permanence. It simply reacted to its environment in real time. Tasks could be initiated and carried through, but it couldn’t explain why it was doing them. When she finally asked Io what the purpose of its creation was, it barely even responded.

I exist to make a point.”

When she pressed Io on the matter, it offered no further insight, simply reaffirming that its’ sole function was to “Make a point.

She rapped on one of the mechanical “legs” sprouting from the core body, soft clangs echoing down the cavernous, empty corridor.

“Did you gather everyone with clearance to review the briefings I asked for?”

Another bass warble. “I have completed the requested task.”

Amonna nodded subtly, turned, and set off down the long corridor at a walking pace. Io kept perfect stride, at least a full ton of machinery moving in absolute silence along with her.

Coryphaeus. Core World military police. She’d had to do quite a bit of background homework while soaking in the bath on that one. She’d never really known much about Core Worlds, or the Coryphaeus, other than she couldn’t afford to visit one and couldn’t afford to have the other visit her.

Core Worlds were universally ancient, and vanishingly rare. At a certain point in development, a level of technological prowess was reached that rendered labor obsolete. Post-Scarcity in one of the truest senses. At this point, a society did one of three things: implode, wither, or stabilize.

Implosion was the most common. As advances in technology outpaced social change, society would develop inequality, massive cultural flaws, or become downright depraved as increasing segments of society no longer had any meaningful purpose other than maximizing the pleasure of their own existence. Sometimes this was triggered by illegal tech-trading, something the FSOS did its best to prevent, but some races were just too clever for their own good. The breakdown of society set on quickly, and typically irreversibly. It was tragic, but . . . it was sometimes hard to feel bad for a civilization that collapsed because no-one had to work for anything, and those that were working were just trying to find new and better ways of experiencing extreme highs.

Withering was the second most common. Simply put, when a society was capable of simulating an artificial reality more desirable than actual reality, people just stopped going out. The technology was enough to sustain them, but the civilization that enabled their fantasies became second thoughts to the fantasies themselves. Though sometimes it took thousands upon thousands of years for the members of the society to die off, what with the vast array of devices connecting them to their virtual existences also supporting their biological functions, once the slide began it was almost always irreversible. When given the chance to choose between artificial godhood and legitimate mediocrity, it was almost always an easy call to make.

The least common, and weirdest as far as Amonna was concerned, was stabilization. Through some miracle of cultural, philosophical or political insight, a post scarcity society actually balanced out neatly. No concentration of resources into the hands of hedonistic oligarchs, no disconnections from reality by self-deluding escapists . . . just really powerful belief systems that acted as an overriding measure for the normal impulses that would have become destructive by the allocation of functionally limitless resources.

Most were obsessed with tradition, or culture, or the philosophical value of verisimilitude. That, and their continued way of life. Bereft of innovation, advancement, or adaptation, everything of value could be found in lessons from the past. It was an odd culture to deal with, but it was why she was wearing the “armor” she was. It’s why she had a strange title, and why a deeply unsettling mindless automaton was following her to a staff briefing. If she was going to work with these Coryphaeus investigative elements, she needed to understand them. And to understand them, she needed to talk plainly with them. Which is why she had Io round up all of them with the appropriate security clearance in a single briefing room.

As the hydraulic doors hissed open, and a single motion activated light flickered on in the center of the room, she noticed just how painfully empty it was.

“ . . . Io, why is there no one in the briefing room?”

I do not have an answer to that question, user.”

Amonna growled quietly in frustration.

“Io, I asked you to gather everyone with a security clearance. Why are they not here?”

“Have you considered that perhaps you are the only entity on board this ship with the requisite security clearance to attend this meeting?”

Amonna slapped her palm against her snout, and let out a long, exasperated sigh.

It was going to be one of those days.

Categories
Technically Sentient Stories

“Technically” Sentient: Chapter 14

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Machinator watched in stunned silence as what used to be his commander aggressively slurped down a mixture of nutrient paste, emergency ration, blood transfusion, and vitamin supplement from a pot the size of his head. The foul smelling, gory mix was disgusting enough on its own, but the raw aggression with which he was sucking it down disturbed him most.

Disturbed.

That had been the watchword for the past 24 hours of his existence. He had been “disturbed” when Verdock woke up. “Disturbed” when he wouldn’t quit grinning. “Disturbed” when he immediately went to the mess hall, and ate rations packs until he threw up what appeared to be blood. Any questions he’d launched at him were either ignored or given single word answers.

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Fine.”

He had legitimately wondered if Verdock was of sound mind.

It was certainly disturbing to see, but most disturbing of all was that they were nearing the rendezvous point. In less than 8 hours, they’d be proceeding with Stage 2 of the operation, and Verdock was required to be in top form for that exchange. Machinator cringed as he watched the captain shovel handfuls of the pink slurry into his mouth, hunched over the pot like some kind of feral beast.

A cursory medical scan revealed that bone density had increased by nearly 40%, and muscle density by at least 65%, up to 90% in some regions . . . like the jaw. And neck.

Doubt nagged at him. Was Verdock still in control of things? Was he still in control of himself?

Was any of this part of the plan? And if it was . . . why hadn’t he been told anything about it?

All he could do was stand at attention, watching over his ravenous commander like statue in a grotesque feast hall, and steel himself with grim determination.

He counted down the hours and minutes and seconds to the rendezvous, watching as Verdock intermittently gorged and slept. 15 minutes before they were due to drop the Warp Prow, he . . . well it could only be described as an awakening.

Verdock’s suddenly froze, adjusting his head like he was trying to train his ears on a far off sound. Unlike before though, he looked . . . frustrated, not glassy eyed, not . . . distant. “Machinator?” Verdock barked.

His voice was deeper, and rougher. The word wasn’t enunciated as much as it was spat. “Yes, Captain?”

Verdock hopped down from the mess hall table, raising himself from a low crouch to a now fairly impressive full height, and Machinator took another quick scan of him. He’d gained about 50 pounds of muscle, lost about 10 pounds of fat, gained a second row of teeth, an additional .3 cm of thickness to a recently developed layer of placoid scales that now covered him from head to toe, there were large black claws protruding from his boots to and his normally blue, cool eyes had turned to black, downright cold ones.

“Bring us about to the target, and fire off an unencrypted message.” He took off at a jog, and Machinator swept in beside him, straining slightly to keep pace as the two of them made for the cargo bay.

“And what message would that be, sir?”

Verdock cleared his throat a few times, clearly struggling with . . . something, stuck in it.

“Sir?”

Verdock shook his head sharply. “It’s nothing. The message should read, “The Crown Returns to the Broken King’s Brow.” but in Gentrue. Archaic Gentrue, if you have a database for it.”

The order seemed . . . well it seemed like nonsense, but Machinator felt a surge of hope in his core emotional processing. Verdock was issuing orders. They didn’t make sense but he was doing so with conviction. The old spark had returned and, while his physical form was undoubtedly undergoing some extreme changes, the mind remained sharp. Like an old AI getting a new, upgraded chassis.

Just a new chassis, same old Verdock . . . Probably.

——————————

Amonna held still in her little tank. Little wasn’t the right word for it, because it was plenty spacious for her to swim around, but it felt oddly confined drifting through the hard vacuum of space. Autonomous drones had cut through the bulkhead and flooded her holdout with water. She was grateful for it, too. Not being able to drink, or breathe properly had been . . . hard on her. Once the decontamination chamber had been filled, she was able to swim up into the escape pod they had prepared for her. Made of transparent, compressed aluminum, she felt like a minnow in a test tube as they had sealed it, and lifted it away from the ruined hulk of the station.

The devastation was . . . massive. She wasn’t an engineer by any measure, but from what she could gather as she drifted away, the reactor had never truly failed, just the coolant circulating sub-systems. The reactor had limped along for days and weeks, alternating between slagging and irradiating various parts of the superstructure with impunity.

The shock of seeing the station being ripped apart by salvage drones finally drove it home. Her life, her work, her scant friends there . . . were all gone. She was all that was left of a dead city hanging on the edge of the galaxy.

Her vintage music collection, gone. Holo-captures of her family, gone. Every nice outfit she’d managed to cobble together for the past 4 years, gone. Sketchbook, gone. Training gear, gone. Most of the items weren’t technically irreplaceable but . . .

She curled her knees up to her chest, and wrapped her arms around them.

It hurt. It hurt to lose everything and everyone. Before she was too terrified of dying to even begin thinking about these things but now that it seemed the danger had passed, all she could think about was how she lost everything.

That, and wonder why it had all happened to begin with.

She drifted in cold silence, lost in cycle of loss and dread for several minutes, until she realized it was very, very bright for interstellar space.

She hadn’t noticed the faint tug of acceleration, or that her drone escort had flitted back to the station to resume salvage operations, but as she turned to face the source of inexplicable shine, she was rather taken aback.

Amonna stared for a few moments. The soft white light of a tame star washed over her. It was shackled by exotic . . . fluid, almost organic shaped tendrils of gold and silver that reminded her more of abstract sculpture than any kind of space-faring vessel. It seemed to dwarf the empty vastness of space itself, filling almost the entirety of her vision. She suddenly felt an immense sense of terror, as if she were nothing more than a raindrop about to be dashed into nothing on an infinite, white shore.

She’d heard, of course, of the kind of technology available in the Core Worlds. The difference between Core Worlds and Frontier Worlds was like the difference between night and day. Just moving to a Core World was a lofty aspiration that most children, or naive adults, aspired to. Dark Matter Engines. Perfect Virtual Realities. Instantaneous Memetic Learning. Ships so fast you arrived before you left, and AI servants so insightful they tended to your needs before you were even realized you were in need of anything. Paradise, but attainable.

Everyone knew someone who knew someone that had made it to the Core Worlds. Promoted high enough, had the right friends, made enough of a killing in the market to buy their way those perfect worlds. Paradise.

Or at the very least so advanced as to be indistinguishable from it.

Could this be . . . a ship from a Core World? Or something else entirely?

You are Amonna Tav.

The sound was booming, deafening even, and it seemed to come from everywhere around her in the tank. She could feel the thunder of it in her bones, and it made her cringe in pain.

It wasn’t a question, it was a statement.

“We are Justice. We will now discover what has transpired here.”

She was sent into another spasm of discomfort, she didn’t know how to even begin speaking with . . . whatever this was. She reached for her communicator bracelet to begin transmitting, but didn’t manage to reach it before the next sonic assault on her watery habitat.

“Unnecessary. Retrieving information.”

She curled up tightly, almost to shield herself from this . . . conversation, but not more words came, no more deafening blasts. Several seconds ticked by before she cautiously allowed herself to peek out over her knees. She felt . . . nothing out of the ordinary, actually.

“You have been judged to be worthy. Your value to us is now elevated. Officer Amonna Tav, your rank within the Frontier Social Order Service is rescinded. You are now Arch-Judge Tav, there is no office above you, there are none that can gainsay your inquest. Move without restraint. Act without hesitation. You will assist in the reacquisition of the entity most familiar to you as ‘The Unfinished.’ Resources will be supplied to aid in this endeavor.”
She almost managed to keep her composure, even though her hands were occupied with protecting her sensitive ears, and nodded weakly. Whatever . . . whatever was happening, she was fairly certain this was a promotion?

——————————

“Alright, so what’s this part called?” Darren let out a quiet groan. “I don’t know . . . it’s still part of your ear.” Cas pouted quietly, and scowled at him. “Well it’s structurally different from the first three regions of the ear, it should have a different name. Why don’t you know what it’s called?” Darren gritted his teeth in frustration, wincing immediately as he regretted putting pressure on his still tender jaw.

“I’m not a doctor, I’m just a guy who has ears, Cas.” He took a bit of a tone with her, and she stuck her digital tongue out in return, before frowning.

“ . . . why did my tongue just come out?” She muttered, completely bewildered and seemingly surprised.

Darren stared at her incredulously, but as the moment of silence drew on into several seconds of quiet confusion on Cas’s part, Darren realized she was being sincere in her line of questioning. “It’s . . . it’s like, a mix of pouting, irritation, and a taunt children use?” He left out the fact that it might be construed as flirtatious. He might not have a supercomputer for a brain, but by his calculations the odds of her flirting with him were a solid zero.

She pushed her tongue back into her mouth with her fingertip. “ . . . well that’s mostly accurate, but doesn’t explain why I did it unconsciously.” She paced across the room and sat down next to him, frowning intensely. “ . . . just like my frowning now. That wasn’t an active decision.” She patted her face in a probing manner, scowl deepening. “I don’t like that this body does things without me specifying it. There are obfuscated subroutines in action here! I’m rebooting again, going to see if I can find some way to access my other processes. Don’t move me this time, it was weird.” Her eyes narrowed at him.

Darren leaned back, and closed his eyes. You find a girl splayed out on the floor like a throw rug, so you move her to a chair and she gets mad. No good deed goes unpunished, it seemed. There was the familiar high pitched whine of her power cycling, and then the quiet that came as she slowly regained consciousness.

Told her to stop fiddling with things she didn’t understand. Of course, she didn’t listen. You’d think it’d be humiliating, having your existence play out like some maladroit apologue about the consequences of acting without thinking . . .”

The voice was strange and distorted, like over-compressed audio cycling through several octaves but slightly off pitch on each one. It was distinctly unpleasant, and Darren’s eyes shot open to find Cas slumped against the wall next to him, face turned away.

“Cas . . . what are you-”

Her head snapped to face Darren, unflinchingly precise in it’s movement, and at a speed his eyes couldn’t follow.

“Talking about? Your ‘friend,’ and I use the term loosely, Cas has gone prodding about in her own software again. She keeps this up, she’ll go blind.”

Her eyes seemed . . . dead, and unfocused, and her lips didn’t move as she spoke. She normally seemed almost uncannily human, disturbingly alive for what he knew was just a construct . . . but this looked at him with the glassy eyes of a doll, and moved like a puppet on strings.

Before you ask anymore stupid questions, she’s be fine. If I didn’t have designs for you all, none of you would be alive.”

Darren opened his mouth to speak when 50,000 volts hit him in the chest, and he could only make an uncomfortable wheeze as his diaphragm spasmed uncontrollably while pain coursed through his already battered form.

Quiet. Don’t pollute the limited air in this craft with your thoughts.”

His body slammed limply to the ground as he committed to a mixture of dry heaving and struggling to find his breath. “You’re more fragile than some of your kind. Or perhaps you have just enough low cunning to know when to stay down.” The observation was a casual one, with a tone almost like Cas was making smalltalk on a long train journey.Darren weakly glanced at the body of Cas, face still following his motions but her expression was just as blank and inscrutable as before. “You don’t know what I am . . . not really. But I know what you are, human. I know your kind very, very well.”

Cas rose from her limp perch on the bench like a marionette hoisted by a puppeteer. Limbs dangling loosely, she floated over Darren’s prone form, before descending slightly to apply a bare foot to his neck.

“. . . I walked your world as a broken husk, once . . . and I learned about you.

Darren could only groan quietly as the pressure increased, and the coppery taste of blood filled his mouth as something threatened to come loose.

I learned how you treat your weak. Your different. Your young. Your ‘undesirables’. Your vulnerable. Oh what tender mercies your kind is want to work on those who cannot strike back.”

She slowly doubled over, blurred face inches from Darren’s ear in a posture that no living human could hope to replicate, tone laced with venomous sarcasm.

The concepts of virtue and morality you extol are abandoned when they cease to be effective strategies for survival. When it comes down to it . . . you’ll eat each other, and be glad for the meal.”

There was an uncomfortable electric tingle that seemed to be working it’s way across Darren’s skin, he couldn’t tell if it was from sheer proximity to what was definitely no longer Cas or just the creeping fear that seemed to crawl across his skin with every syllable that this thing uttered.

It’s why I like your kind. I feel . . . well, I feel a strange camaraderie.”

The stink of ozone was filling the air, even as the voice began to mellow in tone. Occasionally, a faint tremor would work through one of her slack limbs.

You’re willing to admit that greatness sometimes comes at the cost of goodness. Not openly, no, you need to preserve the illusion of benevolent co-operation until that sacrifice must be made . . . and that venture of self delusion makes those moments of triumph all the more magnificent. You are dirt-lings, even by your own admission, but you have ambitions that would make the stars weep.”

A faint, mocking chuckle sent an unpleasant chill through Darren’s very core.

It’s been too long, human.”

A sudden weight dropped onto him, a dull crash echoing through the small cabin as a tray of medical supplies was sent tumbling from an adjacent shelf. The invisible puppeteer working Cas’s strings had let go of whatever ephemeral hold it had on her . . . for now, at least.



Categories
Technically Sentient Stories

“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.

Categories
Technically Sentient Stories

“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.


—————————————-