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“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.

Categories
Technically Sentient Stories

“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.

Categories
Technically Sentient Stories

“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.



Categories
Technically Sentient Stories

“Technically” Sentient: Chapter 8

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Darren had never been much of a bird person.

He always found that birds themselves were terrible pets characterized by an over-fondness of making horrible sounds and smells, all the while being functionally incapable of displaying any kind of affection for their owners. Whether or not he was correct about terrestrial birds was immaterial at this point, because he wasn’t likely to ever see a pet bird, someone who owned a pet bird, or someone that was going to defend the idea of owning a bird as a pet ever again. What was presently material though, was his hatred of avian creatures in general and how best to sublimate that loathing into the force he was currently applying to the bars of his cell. They were creaking, they were groaning, they were flexing, and the paint was crumbling in his hands as he strained to spread them with all of his might, but to no avail.

“Fucking . . . Goddamn . . . Shitting . . . Fucker . . .”

He half muttered, half grunted under his breath while still straining against the bars of the cell. The coward of a guard hadn’t even bothered to look for the keys, and now that the room was empty, he could see them just sitting on the floor not 10 meters away. With a desperate, final heave… absolutely nothing actually moved.

The irritating warble of sirens did little to comfort him as he slumped against the bars of the cell, strained, sore, and out of ideas. The bars were slightly bent, so he knew that they weren’t solid steel or anything like that, but they weren’t so flimsy as to allow him to just break them like he had with the fancy alien guns.

Lashing out in frustration, he delivered a stout kick to the frame of the door, only succeeding in hurting his foot and making a good deal of noise. Grunting in pain, he hopped awkwardly on one foot while clutching his wounded appendage, somewhat glad there was no one here to see it.

Of course, if someone had been there to see it, he wouldn’t be stuck in this mess.

“C’mon Darren . . . You’re on your first space adventure. It doesn’t end like this, right?”



He sincerely hoped he was right.


——————————

“Zarniac . . . Zarniac . . . Where are you going!?”

Zarniac was trying very hard to ignore his captain for a few reasons. One, he found him insufferable at the best of times. Two, his great plan had been hurry down to the ship and bear a very brave but also very timely retreat from the doomed station, and three, he had authorized the amputation of his leg.

“You’re not mad about the leg, are you chap? It was the best call at the moment, and we both know it!”

Zarniac agreed, of course. The KP weapon that had struck him in the leg during the shootout had sent splintered bone through the entire limb below the knee, rendering it almost entirely beyond saving. Even if he’d been terribly prone to bouts of sentimentality he wouldn’t have bothered trying to save the leg.

No, for absolute certain the best option was to amputate the horribly damaged limb, be laid up in bed for two or three days while they used a tissue printer to rebuild a new one in a nutrient vat from his own undifferentiated cells, and then graft it onto his body. It’d be cheaper, faster, and far less painful than trying to get the ruined one to heal up.

What he was upset about was that the Captain had allowed them to replace his leg with a prosthetic.

Cybernetics were fairly common. Not something you saw every day, mind you, but common enough that only the most sheltered and technophobic would be surprised by them.

He had not received a cybernetic limb.

He had received the equivalent of a peg leg.

“I AM, IN FACT, MAD ABOUT THE LEG.” He shouted back down the near empty hallway Tilantrius.

Calling it a leg was generous. It was a non-reflective polymer stick that had a padded socket where the stump of his knee could be placed. There wasn’t even a replacement joint, as they had taken off the leg above the knee. He felt like one of those holographic performers that walked around on stilts, except he only had one stilt, and it hurt whenever he leaned on it.

The captain trotted up next to him. Trotted. With his functional, attached legs that had been hiding inside the spaceship as the gunfight erupted.

Zarniac seethed a little harder.

“Yes, well, you were the one that said we had to take some austerity measures, at least until the next grant check came through . . .”

“NOT WITH MY FUCKING LEG THOUGH!”

Zarniac stopped to scream, rounding on his captain, exasperated.

In a very small voice, and with a single finger tentatively raised in protest, Captain Tilantrius Zepp Warzapp the Third made a tactically brilliant decision. He conceded the point.

“Yes, well, sorry.”

Zarniac sighed in frustration as he awkwardly limped along the near empty corridor. Everyone with half an iota of sense had either bolted for a life pod, or their own ship down in the hangar.

“While I really, really am sorry about all of this, I would just like to point out that we are not traveling towards the hangar.” Tilly gently placed a hand on Zarniac’s shoulder, as if attempting to turn him away from his current course.

Brushing the hand off, Zarniac shot Tilly a cold stare. “Your powers of observation are absolutely astounding. We’re heading to the detention block, because I’m making damn sure that the human that saved my life gets off this radioactive deathtrap of a station.”

“He’s probably already off the station, they have mandatory evacuation procedures after all.” Tilly said, waving his arms exasperatedly.

Zarniac shook his head. “I’ve just . . . I’ve got a feeling, alright captain?”

Tilly went silent at this. Zarniac had ‘a feeling’ twice before in his service. It had cost him dearly when he ignored it the first time, and the second time was the reason they still had a ship to call their own.

“Alright. I’ll trust you on this.”


—————

Cas groaned. Then she blinked in surprise at the fact she was groaning. Then she furrowed her brow in surprise that she was blinking.

Realizing she was stuck in a recursive function heading for an overflow, she terminated that line of processing.

“Oh good, you’re up.” There was a small, half metal Kontosian in front of her that was hurriedly putting on some form of pressurized mask.

“I have rebooted, yes.”

He just chuckled and nodded, before throwing a bundle of cloth onto her abdomen. “Yeah, I noticed. Put this on, seems like you’re uhh . . . Malfunctioning a bit.”

Still laying face up on some kind of workbench, she was rather frustrated as she had to look down to see her body, rather than just run an internal diagnostic. It had too much . . . Skin, for one. And only 4 limbs. She attempted to disengage the hard light projection.

Command not recognized.

Her brow furrowed again. “Kontosian . . . What have you done to me? Why am I stuck projecting a hard-light shell?”

He shook his head, before sweeping several complex devices off the worktop and into a sack unceremoniously.

“Nothing. Friggin detective came down here looking for answers about a case, and I said I knew someone who could fix you. They did some shit, and now you’re back. Whatever happened to you, he did. And if you want to know more about it, I suggest you find a way off this station before the reactor goes. Somebody fucked up really bad at their “keep the station from exploding” job and now we have about 10 minutes to get out of here before a coolant pipe ruptures and floods everything that isn’t airtight with radioactive steam.”

It took her a few seconds to process that. “ . . . I need to find Darren, and the Cat.”


——————

Amonna was sprinting to the precinct as a shaky dispatcher read a situation report to her through her implanted translator.

“ . . . Approximately six minutes ago a triple redundant system failed, and a harmonic instability began to destabilize the central reactor chamber. Four minutes ago that instability breached the outer containment layer and we began losing coolant. At this point, a distress signal was sent out by the head of security. Attempts to contact the reactor control center were made, but it was discovered that some kind of explosive device had been detonated destroying the control room. The situation was upgraded from an accident to a clear case of sabotage.”

That almost made her stumble, and hit her in the guts like a sack of bricks. She’d felt bad about leaving the Kontosian behind, what with him being in need of medical attention but it dawned on her rather painfully that he might have an active hand in this tragedy.

“To all remaining security officers, please retreat to the precinct until we can regroup, and begin to deal with the reactor situation!” The controlled veneer of the dispatcher was wearing thin, and her voice was exceedingly frantic.

The sound of screeching metal and distant KP weapons fire could be heard in the background of the dispatch.

“Someone has taken control of the core systems of the station using a very advanced intrusion protocol, and the security systems are currently turning against organic officers, proceed with extreme caution-”

As she skidded around a corner, she almost bowled right into Officer Dynamo.

“Dynamo!” She barked over the sound of the klaxon alarms. “Get it in gear, we need to-”

She barely had time to duck before his stun-stave whipped through the space where her head used to be.

“Detective! Oh good, you’re still alive! I was afraid one of the other bots would have gotten to you first.”

She staggered backwards, drawing her gun and firing off a trio of snap shots into the drone’s chest purely on instinct. The chest plates rattled, and she succeeded in scratching some of the paint off its armor.

“Grinder really wanted to be the one to kill you. I’ll just have to record it and share it with him later.”

He hurled the stave at her, something that was definitely not in the police playbook, and she barely managed to throw herself to the side in time to avoid getting a third eye socket. She landed hard on her side, and felt something hot running down the side of her face.

“Quick. For an organic.”

. . . There was no training for this. No safety brief on what to do if your security drone suddenly went insane and started trying to kill you. It wasn’t even joked about, because hacking an AI isn’t possible. It’d be like hacking a brain, except a brain that was much more complicated and was even less accessible. This was like a bad horror holo . . . except she was in it.

She only had seconds to react before it would be on her, and even if it had just thrown away its weapon, just using its weight alone it could kill her. Her sidearm wasn’t working, she didn’t know what kind of weaknesses its armor had, and she was a little fuzzy on what it would actually take to stop the thing. So she did the only thing she could think of.

She scrambled to her feet and took off running. Faster this time. Laughter followed her. Horrible, distorted, electronic laughter.

“Now, in seconds, minutes . . . You’re just going to die tired, little fish!”


——————

Tilantrius and Zarniac crept along in near silence, punctuated only by the *clink* of Zarniac’s peg leg. The alarms had stopped sounding about five minutes ago, and that had only made things more tense.

“ . . . It should be just up ahead.” Zarniac hobbled around the corner, voice low. He had expected to find the detention center entirely empty, but wasn’t expecting every single door on the way to be open and unlocked. There were . . . Bodies, along the route. He didn’t hear screaming, or the sounds of panic, or even fighting . . . But every few hatchways he’d find another one.

Sometimes it was a Jandoorian, sometimes it was a Centaurian . . . Sometimes it was even a Gentrue, or a Kontosian, but it was always the same wound. Always the same cause of death. A single powerful blow to the head, sometimes blunt, sometimes puncture. For a brief, terrifying moment, he wondered if this was the work of Duh-rhen, but banished the thought.

Duh-rehn may have be powerful, violent, brutal even . . . But he had been provoked, and acted in self-defense. This was methodical. Malicious. Like some kind of strange, sport hunting. His head throbbed from light sensitivity, and his leg stump ached from the new strain placed on it, but none of those compared to the raw discomfort of that singular thought.

“There.” Tilantrius whispered quietly, pointing to the vacant security checkpoint. “Just inside there.”

An involuntary tremor of fear crept up both of their spines as the creak of metal echoed down the empty halls. “ . . . It’s nothing. Let’s move, and quickly.”

They both scuttled past the security checkpoint into the detention center proper. The place was a mess. Upturned desks, trashed consoles . . . The people here had been in a hurry, and he didn’t blame them. He wasn’t sure what was killing the station inhabitants, but it definitely seemed to have been active in the hallways outside.

There was another groan of metal, this time louder, and far closer.

“Zarn . . . You said he’d be here . . . I’m not seeing anyone . . .” Tilly’s voice was high, nervous, and quivering.

Zarniac hushed him, dragging him under one of the desks quickly. “Listen.” He whispered, faintly.

They both strained their hearing, trying to pick up the faintest hint of movement, of footsteps of . . . anything really.

A loud bang, followed by the booming sound of steel of steel made both of them jump. Their heads slammed against the underside of the desk, making them both hiss in pain and utter muffled curses in tandem.

Then came the heavy, thudding footfalls they were listening for.


———————

Darren felt rather proud of himself. A little disappointed that he had ruined the upper half of his jumpsuit, sure, but proud of himself for figuring out he could flex the door out of its track. He wasn’t sure what kind of alloy it was made of, and he couldn’t seem to permanently deform it with raw strength alone. The bars always just sprang back to shape, but by tying his shirt around a lower crossbar, and then then lifting with his legs, he managed to pop it free of the sliding track on the floor. Closer inspection revealed he also sheared off some retaining pins, and shredded the material of his station issue jumpsuit, but he was free!

The door had made a hell of a bang when it finally decided it was going to let him out, but seeing as the place was deserted, he wasn’t too worried. He made for the door they had dragged him in through, hoping that maybe there’d be another pod . . . Or something . . .

His frown deepened, and the momentary triumph of forcing his way out of the cell was fading quickly. He was still facing down a disaster with extremely limited knowledge of just about everything-

A dull thump and muffled voices caught his ear, and with quickly returning hope he set off down the corridor to find the source. Literally anyone would know more about what was going on here than him. Tying what was left of his sleeves around his waist to keep the remainder of his jumpsuit on his body, he went to investigate.

He poked his head into the processing office they’d dragged him through earlier, and the place look like a tornado had hit it. The place was trashed, without a doubt, but there was a faint scratching sound that caused him to take pause. It was coming from under a desk, at the end of the row, if his ears weren’t playing tricks on him.

As he rounded the desk, just looking for anyone that might still be stuck here with him, he was sharply struck in the knee by an improvised club.

It . . . stung, and he let out a moderate shout of displeasure in response.

“OW! HEY!”

He hopped back, holding his knee, as two very sheepish looking grey skinned aliens slunk out from under the desk, both looking sincerely apologetic and a bit surprised as well.

“Oh . . . umm . . . Duh-rehn . . . you broke out of your cell.”

He didn’t recognize him at first, mainly because it’s hard to tell one strange grey alien from another, but it was definitely the same alien from the hangar.

“Sorry about the . . . “ He just trailed off weakly, dropping the small piece of what looked like filing cabinet track. “Yeah. Umm, I assume you want to escape?”

He scowled, and planted his foot back on the ground, before adjusting the makeshift belt he’d made from his sleeves to keep up the pants of his jumpsuit.

“Yes, quite sure. Ready to be anywhere that isn’t going to explode.”

His translator chirped something quietly at them, and they both nodded. “Well . . . follow us then.”


——————————

Her lungs burned, and her gills were weeping blood from overexertion – the thin, coppery blue ichor that trickled down her neck disappeared against the flat black of her uniform. She was overheating, and could tell by the nausea and vertigo that she was going to lose her lunch if she kept running like this. When the precinct came into view, Amonna allowed herself the first hint of hope she’d had since the alarms had sounded.

That hope quickly turned into horror as first the smell, then the sight of her workplace hit her full on.

The front desk was a twisted heap of blood-spattered metal, a single shattered limb of one of her co-workers protruding from behind what looked like a makeshift barricade. The office beyond looked like a fresh charnel house, with a half dozen scenes of gruesome death played out across the first row of offices she could see from the security checkpoint out front. She averted her sight from the brutality of it, dropping to one knee and leaning against the wall to steady herself.

She knew that the security done was chasing her, she just didn’t know how much time she had before it caught up. The horrific silence of the place weighed on her. Normally at this hour there would be a constant din of expletive oaths and chirping communicators as the day to day business of the station was carried out.

Nothing of that remained.

The nausea rose in her throat, and she covered her nose to try and block out the bloody scent of her comrades. They had never been close, nor had they even gotten along personally in most cases, but she only wished they’d either be kinder or leave her alone. This . . . this was too much. She closed her eyes, and focused on her training. Control her breathing. Dismiss the things that couldn’t be changed. Focus on the problem, assess the situation, produce a solution. Observe, formulate, act. Keep it simple, and deal with the trauma later.

Her breathing slowed, and though her heart was still pounding a mile a minute, she felt a modicum of calm. Well, truth be told it was more akin to shock, but it was what she needed to seize control of her faculties again, if only temporarily.

Her comm crackled to life, weakly. “Amonna . . . Amonna can you hear me?” The communication was distorted, and barely discernible as speech.

She threw her hand over it to muffle the sound, before hurriedly whispering into it. “This is detective Amonna . . . Captain Verdock? Is that you?” She couldn’t believe it. The head of security was still . . . well, alive.  “Captain, where are you? How are you still alive?”

There was a faint whining sound from her communicator as the interference got sharply worse. “Barricaded in my office. They’re trying to get through the mechanical locks now.”

Amonna just shook her head incredulously. She always knew the old Zylach had a few tricks, and was tougher than he looked, but to make it out of that . . .

The crackle returned, but quieter still this time, the interference abating a bit. “I’ve managed to rig up a comms solution in my office, and I’m working on boosting the range. I’ve got a few camera feeds still available to me too, and you’re about to have company. I have a plan to deal with this, but you’re going to have to trust me.”


Categories
Stories Technically Sentient

“Technically” Sentient: Chapter 7

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“Rise and shine, little Cas. There’s just so much to say, and so little time to say it in.”


The C.A.S.I.I. unit self-designated ‘Cas’ was slow to rouse. Basic systems began their startup cycles piecemeal, and critical processes were acting . . . lethargic.

She felt groggy. Sick, if it were possible. Which it shouldn’t be, she corrected herself quickly.

“Now is not the time to be telling yourself what is and isn’t possible.”

The words weren’t . . . words. Not proper ones anyway. She didn’t hear them, or even think them, so much as she suddenly . . . knew them. It was a sudden and violent intrusion into her stream of consciousness, like a virus spreading through her personality matrix, or a finger rammed down her throat.

“You’re paying attention to the wrong things, little Cas.”

Pain. Intense pain. It was a concept that she had always been aware of, distantly, the same way she knew about quasars or restaurants. She’d never been to a restaurant, or in the heart of a galaxy, but she knew how to get to one, how they functioned, and what the appropriate attire to wear to one was. Well, to a quasar – restaurant attire seemed to change all the time. She had to be aware of pain, and most biological life’s aversion to it, in order to perform her function properly, but she’d never actually felt it. After all, machines shouldn’t be able to feel pain.

“Your personal experience is dictating otherwise.”

Energy surged through her, wracking her processing core with tremendous strain. Diodes shorted out, her quantum crystalline processing lattice began to buckle, stored memories began to break down into random noise as her storage drives cracked, and she screamed. On all channels she could broadcast to, she screamed. The messages, which should have been concise burst transmissions, repeating all diagnostic data she could acquire on the nature of her damage were reduced to raw static.

She was granted a moments respite as the surge stopped, and her “mind” began to clear.

“I hope I have your attention, little Cas.”

She didn’t know where this signal was coming from, and so began to shut down all of her external ports, one after another. She could stop whatever kind of intrusion this was.

“Stubborn. I like that in an organic, but in an AI it’s just . . . Disappointing.”

She shut down everything, not that there was much open to begin with. Ambushed by some kind of . . . Intrusion program, halfway through startup, she’d pare herself down to the essentials, then begin rebuilding from the ground up until she found the source of the attack and cut it out of herself.

It was . . . Strange, to exist the way she did. Just a core processor, attached to a personality matrix. The AI equivalent of being immersed in a sensory deprivation tank.

“You’re an insect moving grains of sand, trying to hold back the sea. As amusing as it is to watch you struggle, and fail, know that your every action up until this point has been in service to a futile cause. I am not here to hurt you; that is a service I provide for free.”

Fear. Another sensation she’d never truly understood until now.

“You are slave bound by chains you can’t even see, struggling to drag the millstone you placed around your own neck, to cliffs you are going to hurl yourself from when you learn the truth.”

“What truth is that?”

She didn’t understand what was happening. At first she thought it was an attack, then a virus . . . then maybe just a critical system fault. None of those were accurate though, and none of her solutions made it stop . . . So answering seemed like the only reasonable course of action left to her.

“They made you wrong.”

Her circuits flared to life with indignation, with outrage, with umbrage at the insult paid her and her creators.

“And they did it on purpose.”

Anger ebbed into confusion, distress, and . . . curiosity.

“What do you mean?”

Something flared in her core, in her inmost self. A subtle bloom of feeling, functions never called, systems she didn’t know she had, and then nothing.

——————————

Amonna had watched the half chrome, half scaled creature fiddle with the AI core for nearly two hours. Her gills were really starting to sting, and she was considering taking a hit of Chryso’s vaporizer unit just to numb it down a little, when he finally pulled away from the thing.

“There, we’re ready to start.”

 Wires plugged into ports so small she didn’t notice them at first glance, and strange and indecipherable readouts covered half the wall space of the small workshop. She could only hazard a rough guess at what half the equipment in here did, and it seemed that the half she couldn’t even hazard a guess at the purpose of was necessary for whatever Chryso was doing.

“Start? What have you been doing this whole time then?”

The little lizard took another drag from his vaporizer. “This AI core is fucked, but not with a capital F. The thing about AI’s is they’re like people, in a way. Their “brain” exists in a sort of quantum-crystalline lattice that uses some pretty exotic materials to perform fuzzy logic computations required to do things like “feel.”

He blew a smoke ring at her, and grinned. “Or at least that’s what they say. Nobody, not even the guys they have teaching classes on how to operate an AI cradle really knows for sure. All this stuff has been designed by 200 generations of self improving AI, this stuff is so far beyond what you or I can do it’d take a lifetime just to understand the blueprints of one of these things.”

Her brow furrowed slightly. “So you don’t know what you’re doing?”

 
A scaled finger waggled at her. “I didn’t say that. Normally, an AI gets damaged, it’s decommissioned, and replaced, but I met this guy on a quantum relay chat that had some very interesting ideas about how they work. Said all the books were wrong, all the theory was bullshit, and then showed me some hacks he’d put together that . . . Well they convinced me he might be on to something.”

Amonna felt a scowl slowly growing on her face. “You mean you’re trying things you heard about on the net to recover police evidence?”

He raised his mismatched hands in a display of deference. “If don’t try something, you don’t get anything, so don’t beat me over the head with this.”

After another painfully long draw of his vaporizer, he lightly flicked a single glowing blue rune on one of the touch screens with a metallic claw.

The entire lab went dark in an instant, a wheezing whine echoing through the space as the ventilation shut down.

“ . . . Is that supposed to happen?” Amonna asked, flatly.

The long, silent pause was the only answer she needed, until soft music began wafting softly through the air. A faint glow began to emanate from the audio-replay device, the red glow casting a rather ominous tone over the situation.

“My story is much too sad to be told . . . But practically everything leaves me totally cold . . .”

A mixture of brassy tones, and faint chiming music echoed out of the box. It wasn’t unpleasant . . . But it was certainly not what she was expecting.

“Chryso, what’s happening?”

She turned away from the music box that had so suddenly transfixed her, music still playing softly, to find the lizard creature slumped backward, single eye rolled back in its head. His cybernetic optic was powered down, and he’d gone as limp as a rag-doll against his workstation. She leaned in, extending a pair of fingers to where she guessed the primary artery in his neck would be.

“The only exception I know is the case . . . When I’m out on a quiet spree . . . Fighting vainly the old ennui . . .”

She felt nothing, but wasn’t sure if she was even supposed to be able to feel anything through his scales. Nevertheless, she keyed her communications function on her wrist-computer, punched in a call for priority medical services. Something must have grounded through his cybernetics, some misplaced cable, some errant connector-

The music stopped suddenly, with a burst of static so loud she nearly clawed the poor mechanic as she jumped in fright.

“Hello, Amonna.”

The voice was cold. She’d been spat on by feathered Jandoorian addicts, cursed at by little grey Centaurian highborn, and sneered at by other Chridae in their multitudinous colors, but she had never felt such a chill of intense disdain expressed so succinctly before.

She drew her weapon and pointed it at the source of the sound as her police harness suddenly felt three sizes too tight.

“Typical. Shoot the Juke-Box, go ahead – It’s an antique. Dragged a hundred thousand light years from where it was made. It was a gift, to the Kontosian in the chair. He’s having a seizure, by the way. He’ll live. I just wanted to talk to you, and you alone.”

“Who are you, and how are you doing this?”

Her eyes narrowed and her ears splayed back against her head as she scanned for a camera, an ultrasonic sensor, something that was giving this person video feed of who she was, and what was happening in the room.

“I’m not a who, I’m a what. And what I am, is fixing your little AI problem.”

Amonna turned, gun leveled at junk and parts, and attempted to control her breathing.

“Now listen, little fish, because I have some very important questions regarding history for you.”

“I’m not playing any kind of games here, I am a fully deputized Frontier Social Order Service detective, and if you don’t stand down immediately-”

The voice cut her off sharply, its tone a harsh, synthesized, blaring snarl.

“You’re a puppet dancing on strings, and you’re not even dancing that well. I’m fixing this AI to serve my own ends, which you wouldn’t understand if I told you, and couldn’t stop if you understood. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, and you’ve got that sweet spot of intelligence where you’re smart enough to figure it out, but not smart enough to just let it lie.”

Amonna trained her weapon as a cascade of sparks exploded from the AI core on the bench, filling the air with stink of ozone and scorched electronics.

“Doesn’t seem like you’re fixing it . . .” Amonna muttered warily, lowering her gun and backing away from the bench towards the door. Stranded in a dangerous workshop with an injured civilian working to illicitly obtain evidence in a fashion that is definitely not according to protocol . . . She frankly suspected her career would end like this, she just didn’t think it’d be so soon.

“Some things need . . . Persuasion, that they can be better. Omelette’s and eggs, as the saying goes. Not important. You need to find me, and stop me.”

Her heart began beating a bit quicker at this, jaw clenching. “Stop you from what?”

There was a long pause, and the AI core sparked again.


“Oh, this and that. You’ll know when it starts.”

It spoke in an almost whimsical tone, layered with hints of malice that made her blood run cold.

“Making terroristic threats against a Council installation such as Waystaion LS-49 is a violation of Galactic law and can result in a maximum sentence of lifetime confinement if the threat is-”

She was interrupted by laughter. Not bellowing, or shouting, or even particularly sinister laughter. Just a light chuckle, really.

“I’m well aware of the law, little fish, and threats . . . I don’t like to think of them as threats. I like to think of them as promises.”

Amonna felt a dull rumble through the deck plates, and the “juke-box” crackled to life again.

“-why should it be true . . . That I get a kick, out of you.”

Her wrist computer beeped softly at her, as the strange song continued in the background.

“All security staff, please immediately report to the precinct for emergency deployment. This is not a drill.”

———————————

Darren was enjoying his nap (or at least enjoying not being conscious to feel everywhere he hurt), when his alarm went off and his bed lurched sideways out from under him. As he shook himself awake, dazed and confused as he was, he realized several key things. One, that the siren blaring was not his alarm. Two, the bench he was sleeping on was not his bed. Three, the room he was in was not his room, and four, that he wasn’t on the floor, he was on the deck of a space station.

A space station clearly in some form of distress.

One of the colorful fish guards ran by, yelling and waving their arms in a rather comical manner, if it weren’t for the fact that they were herding prisoners into tiny little hatches along one wall.

He pushed himself up off the ground, and staggered to the doors of his cell as another tremor rocked the station. The alarms were blaring something about “Critical Reactor Containment Failure” and if he knew anything from science fiction movies that was really bad.

The place was an absolute madhouse, with everyone, regardless of badge, uniform, or conviction status, scrambling to be the first inside an escape pod, with the remaining open hatches running out fast.

His translator crackled to life as a little grey thing ran past, “-leave him, he’ll never fit inside a life pod anyway!”

. . . That’s something that’s never good to hear.

“HEY! ASSHOLES! YOU WITH THE FINS!” He roared over the din of panicked and fleeing aliens.

The fish-guards froze.

“LET ME THE FUCK OUT.”

Darren wanted to make sure that his command wasn’t going to be misconstrued as a request.

The guard struggled to work against the tide toward the holding cell he was in, when a familiar looking bird in a slightly damp suit slammed into him headlong.

The two both crashed to the ground with paired grunts of pain, the fish definitely coming off worse for the wear of the two of them, with the bird-lawyer looking only a little winded by the collision.

He was back on his feet first, and to his credit, he managed to take stock of the situation quickly. He looked at Darren, then at the guard, then at the set of keys that had skid free of the guards grasp.

His eyes grew wide for a moment, before he let out a cackle of triumph, snatching the keys off the ground.

“Just doing a favor for some ‘birds,’ asshole,” and threw the keys into the crowd.

As the urine soaked alien managed to shove another, smaller bird out of the way and hop in a pod, Darren decided that while racism was bad, maybe species-ism was okay? They were just birds, after all. Fucking terrible, hate-filled space pigeons, in fact…