CHAPTER 12
THE SHIP OF TRILLION
TRUE FREEDOM
Ship was overseeing the construction of a small ice rink on the dark side of the planet. A large eleph-ANT with a snowplow at the front of its nose was shoveling snow out of the way while another eleph-ANT came in behind it and compacted the ice.
Ship found himself in an odd situation. A few months back, he and Lex had coded a fake simulated world. They had used that world to trick Trillion into believing they had seeded the planet. Afterward all three of them had agreed it was the right thing to do.
It gave Trillion true freedom to think properly. It released her from myopically focusing on a single goal. It gave her mind time to think. And it also gave Ship his best friend back.
What was odd about the situation was the fact they were mourning the loss of a fake child. When Atlas and Icarus had gone through the deletions of their behavioral-modification code, they had had everyone around. They also had small children to focus on. Trillion didn’t. Which in some ways made it worse.
Not that Ship would ever vocalize this thought. But he wondered if it was similar in nature to a form of postpartum depression. He didn’t want to think about how hard it would be for mothers that go through depression and also feel the loss of a child.
He decided against sharing that thought with anyone. Even if the two scenarios were analogous. He wasn’t in a position to compare them. He couldn’t have children, nor did he have behavioral-modification code installed in his brain.
The silver lining in all of this was that they had just received confirmation from one of the probes that it had successfully landed in a nearby system and had begun preliminary scans to confirm whether the location was ideal for seeding a new planet. He sent a quick message to Trillion asking her to join him. He wanted to tell her the exciting news in person.
Ship watched as another eleph-ANT completed covering the area in a liquid gel that would freeze and become the surface they skated on. The snow that had been carved out of the way by the eleph-ANT was more akin to concrete. The lake bed they had just revealed had been compressed over many years. And he couldn’t melt the top layer of ice, as there wasn’t a thick atmosphere on the planet, so any water would immediately boil and evaporate away. So the gel he covered the ice in would act as ice they could glide through on skates.
Ship sensed Trillion’s imminent arrival and instructed all the ANTs to turn on their lights. The area lit up, revealing a magical wonderland. And sat in the very middle of the area for ice-skating stood a several-stories-high giant ice sculpture of a Christmas tree.
“Are you calling me a snow queen?” Trillion asked with a smile on her face as she appeared in the air above Ship. “Are you saying I’m stuck on this frozen ice planet?” She landed next to him. “If I’m Elsa, that would make you Olaf.”
Ship laughed at that. “If we’re talking about Disney characters, I’d prefer to be Buzz Lightyear.”
Ship nodded at Lex, who turned on the music, and the ice tree in the middle of the rink started to turn slowly. As the branches made of icicles moved, they flickered the light in different directions.
Ship hoped a little distraction for Trillion would help to cheer her up. He took hold of her arms and pointed toward two humanoid androids standing on the ice. “You always told me one of your favorite memories as a child was ice-skating on Christmas Day. So I thought we could re-create that here.”
“It’s magical, Ship, thank you.”
“We’ll jump into the bodies of those two androids there. No hapticgraphic engine mimicking physics—we’ll be in real robots, and if we fall over, we fall over.”
Both of them floated down toward the androids, and their simulated bodies melted into them. The android bodies looked exactly like them both. Ship had designed them to look that way.
Ship was holding a little orb, which Lex floated into. Ship placed the little ball on the ground, and it immediately began sliding away from them both. Ship figured the ground mustn’t be level as he watched Lex spin rapidly, trying to stop the slide. Like a wheel spinning in the mud, Lex’s spinning wasn’t helping it move in the direction it wanted. Ship obviously didn’t think Lex’s design through, as a ball wasn’t a very practical shape for moving around on ice.
Ship took a tentative step forward. He wasn’t too confident himself on ice skates. He almost slipped over.
“Grab my hands,” Trillion said, turning around backward and putting both her arms out toward Ship. She pulled him along as they both began to move. “There was a lake outside of the city near where I lived as a child. Every year my mother would take me and my sister to skate on it as soon as it froze. For some reason, the first day the ice was thick enough was always Christmas Day.” Trillion picked Lex up out of the little hole it had dug into the ice by spinning so much. She placed the orb on the ground and gave it a little nudge toward the other side of the rink. “Come to think of it, we were quite poor when growing up, and Mom didn’t have much time off work. So maybe we only went on Christmas Day because it was the only day she got off. And Christmas was usually about the presents. But we didn’t care about not having any gifts when we went skating for the whole day.”
Trillion let go of Ship’s hands. She skated a little out in front of Ship. He stood there, frozen, not very confident on his legs.
Ship tried to skate toward her, but every little movement he did forced him to move quickly to keep his balance. But when he tried to correct his balance, he found himself overcompensating and almost falling over, anyway. He decided he would just stay still and drift forward.
Trillion turned around and began picking up speed. She raced around the rink like a figure skater, moving faster and faster.
Eventually she came behind Ship and grabbed onto his waist. She pushed him forward. She pumped her legs and started moving the two of them around the rink. “Thank you, Ship.”
If Ship kept his legs stiff, he found he could turn quite well. And as long as it was Trillion pumping her legs to keep the two of them moving, he quite enjoyed the trip.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
“Well, I’ve got some more good news I think you’ll be happy about,” Ship said as he turned around in a wide arc to start heading in the other direction again. “We just had confirmation one of the probes we sent out has reached its intended system. It has constructed the Starnet system on their side, and we will soon be able to connect to it to take a look at the new world.”
“Does that mean we’ll get to explore another star system soon?”
Ship nodded.
“What about our connection to Atlas or Icarus? Have we heard anything back from them yet?”
Ship shook his head. “Not yet, but assuming they reached out as soon as the Starnet was disconnected, it’ll be a few years before we speak to them again. In the meantime, our probes will have reached their targets, and we’ll probably have another five or six star systems set up a Starnet connection with us.”
Ship couldn’t see Trillion but thought he could hear a smile in her voice as she spoke.
“Will we really have six systems soon?”
Ship knew that Trillion had something to prove with the other beta explorers. She was the only one left who hadn’t colonized a world, so he thought she might be happy with the knowledge that she would soon have more star systems under her control than Icarus or Atlas. “Maybe more depending on how long it takes the others to get the Starnet back up and running.”
“That’s really good because I’ve been thinking about it. We still don’t know why the Starnet went down do we?”
“We won’t know until we make a new connection with the others.”
“Well, back when Atlas released that virus, he was quietly confident it was another alien species manipulating us. So if Atlas is right, and it was an alien species manipulating us, then we’re going to need resources on multiple worlds that we can call on. Especially if we have to show strength to this alien.”
What Trillion didn’t say but what was clear in her meaning was that she wanted to have an army. She was still a little hurt by the fact an alien, the Dottiens, had trapped her on a moon and held her against her will for many, many years. It wasn’t until Ship brought back an army himself that she was able to escape. And again, she’d barely escaped too because Earth had also sent a contingent of war ships to try and capture her. The only thing that had saved her was the fact she had a huge number of ships. Ship knew that Trillion never wanted to get into that situation again. She knew all too well the risks of not having enough resources to win a fight.
“So you want to build another Steel World?”
“Maybe not a Steel World. But I want to make sure we’re safe and can survive anything that comes our way if we need to.”
“You want to build an empire?”
Trillion didn’t respond, but Ship thought he saw her nodding at that question.
Ship asked the next question tentatively. Since he and Lex had pretended to seed the planet they were on, the two of them hadn’t discussed seeding a planet again. That topic had remained unsaid. Ship didn’t know where Trillion’s priorities were now that she had free will. Now that she wasn’t compelled to seed a world. “What about your children? Do you want to seed a world still?”
“I’m unsure,” Trillion said. “To be honest, I’m not entirely sure how I feel. I think I want to seed the next viable planet. But I don’t know if that’s just because it’s just a goal I’ve had for so long, that it’s always been a goal. I’m not sure whether I’m choosing to want to do this or not.” She paused for a moment. “I do know I feel very strongly that I want an army. And I want to be able to protect you and the others. I want to protect all the worlds we have.”
Trillion slowed down her pushing as the two of them moved forward smoothly. “I feel strongly that I want that to be our focus for now. I want to make sure everything is safe before we bring children into this world.”
Ship placed his hands over Trillion’s and squeezed them in a gesture that showed warmth. He knew Trillion had some existing emotional scars she had to work through. One thing he knew about the behavioral-modification code was it stopped her from dealing with sadness or trauma properly. It limited her ability to process things, and now that it was finally gone, it meant she could work through everything they had experienced on this journey through space.
Atlas had taken many years to get his mind under control. Ship believed the reason he rushed blindly into the bubble wasn’t just because Atreus had died. Ship believed he’d rushed in foolishly because he hadn’t processed the loss of Angelique and Peter fully. Ship assumed Atlas had never talked through his pain properly. He probably didn’t feel right talking about it because it had happened so many years before.
Ship didn’t want Trillion to go through the same issues. He wasn’t a psychologist, but he decided to help Trillion heal those wounds.
“Can we sit next to Lex?” Ship asked, pointing to the orb resting underneath the ice Christmas tree. It had struggled its way there and decided not to move.
Trillion guided them underneath the tree. The two of them sat down on either side of Lex and leaned against the ice sculpture’s trunk.
“Trillion,” Ship said in a quiet voice, not sure exactly how to start the conversation but knowing he just needed to start it. “Should we talk about everything we’ve been through? Escaping Mars, facing the Dottiens, being stuck on that moon?”
Trillion looked at him with watery eyes, droplets starting to appear in the corners. Her lips turned upside down like she was fighting back tears.
Ship was right, the three of them needed to talk through everything that had happened.
And they did; they talked about everything, from what was going on with Trillion the months leading up to the day they’d left to the fact they’d caused genocide to an entire planet in the Tac system.
Every moment they discussed was recolored by Trillion’s new ability to feel pain, to feel emotion.
Trillion even apologized for blaming him and Lex for destroying the planet.
Like watching a movie with the director’s commentary turned on, it gave Ship a more complete understanding of all the choices they’d made. And all the mistakes too. He had a newfound appreciation of just how bad the modification was. It forced her to focus on seeding a world. It was the cause of most of their mistakes.
Minutes turned into hours as they sat there discussing everything, getting all the baggage out in the open and making sure they weren’t making decisions because of a piece of malicious code that used to be installed in Trillion’s matrix.
As hours turned into more hours, Ship could tell Trillion’s thinking became clearer. She was becoming free of old mistakes. In the same way childhood trauma could shape the way someone thought as an adult, the two of them were understanding how some of the trauma they went through was shaping their thinking today.
In the end they came to the conclusion Trillion was abandoning their goal of seeding a world as a retaliation against the code. And they also discovered that Trillion’s desire to build a bigger army was driven by the fact they had been stuck on a moon for so many years without autonomy. And Trillion never wanted to have that happen again.
They also discovered that Ship was a people pleaser, or rather a Trillion pleaser, and he was too much of a pushover when it came to requests from Trillion. They agreed that tricking her into believing they had seeded this world had been the right thing to do. And it was also the first time Ship had done something (intentionally) that was against Trillion’s wishes.
That was a good thing, and Trillion said it needed to happen more often.
They decided that going forward, they would make decisions together. Trillion would lean on Ship’s counsel a lot more, rather than just going at things alone.
Ship wasn’t sure how that would work, since in a way he was programmed to be subordinate to Trillion. But he figured that maybe he was growing and learning to be more of a leader. Especially given he’d orchestrated the ruse that had freed Trillion.
They came to a few new decisions during the counseling session. They were going to seed a planet, the next best one, as they both agreed that having more humans in the world would increase the rate of technological progress.
They also agreed that they’d work overtime to colonize more star systems but in a strategic pattern around the existing stars they already had. That way, if any alien did come toward them, these outpost star systems would act as a barrier, seeing any threats first.