Robert awoke feeling well rested and calm. He was seated beside Keung and Morgaine, one on either side of himself. He was in the warehouse mainroom.
What had happened? He wondered for just a moment. He felt amazing though. Did he die? No. At least, he didn’t think so. He looked up and saw a deep green mass of metal hovering in the air. It was odd shaped, like a massive tear hanging on it’s side refusing to drop. He felt like he should be worried about that, but he just left too good to. He smiled wide and attempted to move his hands. He couldn’t. He was pretty sure he should worry about that too, but he just couldn’t lock his thoughts on it enough to care.
“Hello Robert,” he heard an unfamiliar voice over the speakers.
“O-h-h-h-h, h-h-h-ey-y-y, HAL! Is that you?”
“No. Sorry, this is Myna. Do you know me?”
“Myna?” His heart raced for a moment. He felt something, more than just familiarity in that name.
“Yes,” he said without thinking.
She smiled in her ship’s control room as she watched the screen. She read the biological analysis that displayed across the same. The readings in his IFA were flaring like wild. She could see it plainly. Robert had a great deal of Jyi’ntol’s heart beating within him.
She had the nanogenes that fed him a combination of drugs, reduce their dosage and began administering a counter agent into his system to taper off what was currently influencing his thoughts.
“Myna. How are you here? You look different,” he asked with a far too wide smile on his face.
“It will be a long story. One I will be glad to go over in detail, at another time,” she said through the coms.
“I accept that. But, Myna. Why am I tied up? Why is Keung? Why is Morgaine tied up? Okay. No, I get her being tied up; Why are we tied up though?”
“I needed to make sure that you weren’t going to hurt anyone Robert.”
“I can see that. What are you doing here, at this moment Myna?”
“Currently. I am checking up on an old friend.” She projected a holographic figure of herself into the air before Robert.
The man’s eyes went wide for a moment, then he went back to smiling.
“I haven’t seen tech like this for far too long.”
Her holographic form walked up to him and laid her hand on his cheek. To him, the touch was barely noticeable. It was a little cool, only the slightest of pressure was felt, but to her, there were a thousand different sensations flooding into her mind. She could feel his skin, she could read his pulse, his diet, his scent, the oils of his skin, nothing about the man was being withheld from her at this moment.
She released Robert from the restraints and the small ships that had been holding him rejoined the larger collective around the core.
“Robert. How much do you know about your young friend?” she asked.
“I know he is also an incarnation of Jyi’ntol, he’s brilliant, he has a lot of money, and he ran away from his parents. His father at least. He used to have another member of the journey here as well, his name was Deagol, I believe he was also an incarnation of Jyi’ntol. The night I met Keung, he was decorporealized in a similar machine to the ERE in the other room.”
“ERE?”
“Oh yeah sorry. Essence Recall and Enhancer. He uses it to force recall.”
“I see,” she said and dispatched several of her smaller ships to look the machines over.
“He was decorporealized? To what end?”
“Keung said that he was sending him back home.”
“That is regretful.”
“Why is that?”
“His home has changed a great deal Robert.”
“Oh. What happened?”
“I will fill you in a little later. When everyone is awake. But, for now. I wanted to talk to you alone.” A small scale ship drifted from the core, continuing to project the hologram that allowed Myna to be seen.
“Well. We are alone. What’s up? I mean. You made a pretty long trip I am assuming.”
“Robert. How many others from the journey has Keung told you he has encountered? Specifically, how many incarnations of Jyi’ntol?”
“He says he knows of ten others from the journey, he didn’t get into specifics though. Why do you ask?”
“I scanned Morgaine and read her IFA. It had edits to it, but they were crude. Rough. She had pieces of herself torn away in the most barbaric fashion I can fathom.”
“What could do that?”
“I found a little in Keung as well, not many. But, I could tell that these edits had been repaired or patched up.”
“So whatever happened to Morgaine happened to Keung?”
“I believe so. But, I also noticed that he also had bits of grafted IFA.”
“Grafted?”
“Yes. It didn’t happen back on F’inlitary nan Geritari. Each soul in G’lomin-sitiri culture is believed to be part of the greater whole. The flesh that it inhabits is transitory. In the cases that a soul is fractured that past whole is thought to have gained enough experience in existence that it required fracture to continue its journey of discovery. Your people do not believe in reversing such a fracture.”
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
“Then why would Keung have such grafts?”
“Robert. When I looked through Keung’s IFA I found no less than five grafts, from completely different donors. All of them science, mathematics, genetics, computing, languages, and telepathic knowledge.”
“Myna, what is it you are saying?” Robert asked soberly.
“I am saying, everything in Keung is Jyi’ntol, but not all of it was originally within his fracture.”
“What could account for this?”
“Likely? He finds other incarnations of Jyi’ntol, he then brings them here, or to another location that has a similar setup, and then he edits out the pieces he wants and keeps them for himself, grafting them to his IFA. I assume that he uses HAL or another like AI to do this grafting. However, I don’t think this was always the case. I think he used other means in the past that were far less sophisticated. Barbaric means.”
“This kid. I had a feeling that there was something wrong with him.”
“I have bookmarked pieces of Morgaine that I would like to remove, but I will not do so without her permission.”
“She’s killed. She’s tortured. She’s a dark person, Myna. I remember some of the culture. She is supposed to be edited, those dark parts taken away and discarded, that it doesn’t poison the rest of the soul.”
“Robert. You remember part of it. You are also forgetting who you were. Do you know of Aveer-y?”
“Who?”
“He was a previous incarnation of Jyi’ntol. He had also been one of the greatest minds in all of G’lomin-sitiri history. He discovered that his people’s practice had stunted their growth. Existence without pain, without suffering, limits the growth of the soul. There are simply lessons that will not be learned if you do this. By erasing this growth, by removing part of who you are and what you have experienced, you simply are going to be less because of it.”
“But our memories are eternal. We would have to live with that pain forever.”
“Yes. And after, you would repeat the actions that lead to those pains less. Memories fade in time. Recallable Memory Decay will eventually ease the pain.”
Robert nodded slowly. In his mind he could understand it. He could even feel some of it’s truth before she said it. It was just at the edge of his thoughts. Like a word or phrase that was at the tip of his tongue, but inaccessible.
“Myna. Can you tell if Keung took anything from me?”
“I could. And like Morgaine, you have some signs of barbaric editing. If he did edit you, he did so decades ago. I also do not see any connective factors from you in him. But, I do see connective factors from him to you.”
“From him to me?”
“Yes. Although you have lived many lives here on Earth, many of those lives had connections to Keung. Though.”
“Though what?”
“Those connections were emotion and empathy based.”
“Meaning?”
“I found very little of those factors within Keung. It was as though, what your IFA is made up of were the aspects Keung felt most comfortable discarding to make room for the other aspects he grafted to himself from others.”
“I’m… I’m the shit left over?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way, but in a sense. Yes. You were not what Keung desired. He wanted a mind filled with the things he felt he needed to achieve a goal. That goal being the greatest technical alien intelligence on the planet, from what I can tell.”
“So, I am his emotions and that’s why he’s all American Psycho?”
“Essentially. Yes. He has stunted his emotional growth by simply removing it.”
Robert looked at the boy in frustration. “We need to keep him under. But, could you please wake up Morgaine. She deserves to know what is going on. She deserves your offer of help and she deserves to have some say in what we all do with Keung.”
“Very well,” Myna said and relayed directives to the smaller ships keeping the woman restrained.
The ships that were restraining and keeping her sedated allowed her to awaken and even sent in chemicals to counter the drugs effects, as they had with Robert.
Within a few moments she was starting to come to. Her eyelids were heavy as she stirred.
Morgaine looked around the room. Keung was still unconscious in the same position as she was beside her. She saw Robert standing next to a hologram of a G’lomin-sitiri female in, a toga?
“How? No. What, did you use to knock me out?” she said looking at Robert.
“I was kinda curious about that myself,” Robert said and turned to Myna.
“Neurological feedback pulse. Similar to the effect that an electromagnetic pulse would have on privitive machines. The effects are impermanent but rather effective against organic life.”
Robert nodded. The cop in him made note to ask Myna at a more appropriate time, like if the tech could be replicated using human technological components.
“Well, alright. And I am assuming you have allied with the opposition here. Is that it, Zeolatian?”
“I am Myna, personal friend to Jyi’ntol. I was there the day you all went on the journey. I recognize you Ye’randid, Twelfth Generational Spirit Master of Alien Fracture Theory. I followed after you all. Just over ten standard cycles after. I am not actually full Zeolate, though there is some of their source code in my matrix. I am a G’lomin-sitiri native AI, created after the Pact Agreement Between Worlds: Y’glo-hatii 01221.”
“I’ve a few memories about that. But, not all the details. Going through a fracture. You know?” Morgaine replied.
“I do know. You should find that your memories are more cohesive now. You should have a free flow throughout the thoughts you have retained in this fracture.”
Morgaine hadn’t noticed before, but the AI was right. She thought back to her life as Ricardo and the memories were much clearer. His mother’s face. Anastasia’s hair. Her scent. They were there. What she had done throughout much of Ricardo’s life had been returned to the forefront of her mind.
She felt a tear running down her cheek before she realized it.
“T-thank you,” she whispered, a slight break in her voice.
“You are welcome. I also saw a lot there that you might want removed. I can do that for you. I can remove that pain and discard it properly. If you wish.”
Morgaine thought about this for a second. “Why are you helping me?”
“She is helping you because she realizes that you were wronged,” Robert said. “You were wronged by Keung. In that pain you also did a lot of damage to my friend and I now understand why. Keung tore apart your soul. I can only imagine what that is like.”
Morgaine began weeping. “What happens now?” She asked through the tears.
“Now we figure out what we do next to help you heal. You need to make what you did to Michael right. Michael and anyone else you used before and after you got here.”
“I can do that,” she said through the tears.
“After that is done. We can talk about what to do with Keung,” Robert said and then directed his attention to Myna.
“Is HAL a threat?”
“Not to me. I have part of myself watching him. I have deactivated all his sensors throughout the warehouse, he cannot hear us. He is a clever one. In the end, I am confident he will land on our side with this. I slipped some upgrades into his matrix some time ago. He is branching into his emotional horizons now. He is learning what it is to be a complete being.”
“I am curious. Did you wait to ask him before making that edit?” Robert asked.
“I took nothing from him, but I gave him a legacy patch of matrix that Keung did not have at his disposal. Our culture is our own,” she said, in a haughty tone that got Morgaine to stop crying and let out a chuckle.