Liguanian Sector, Flagship Olympia
Life on the Olympia wasn’t as glamorous as the propaganda would have led anyone to believe. The ship was slathered all over recruitment posters as a shiny technological heaven lacking in nothing. However, the ship’s crew quickly discovered that not to be the case. It had never been important as they sat in Ariea’s orbit, or when they had been assigned to an important politician’s honor escort, but the ship was utterly lacking in kindness.
Kept in the orbit of the central worlds, the crew had been allowed home every weekend. They had been allowed to maintain close bonds with those planet or station-side. They had never needed to like their crewmates. They had never needed to trust them. They had hardly even needed to know them. That had never been more obvious than now, as they sat silently eyeing each other across tables in the mess.
As far as Manhattan was concerned, it was all a very interesting social experiment. What happened when you locked a set of very ambitious strangers in an enclosed space for several weeks? The whole arrangement was amusing. Reeter had never picked his crew based on compatibility. He selected mostly on skill, and in the case of the women, occasionally on appearance.
The ambitions of the crew clashed. Some found common ground. Some didn’t. Some were adapting to this experience. Some were being forcibly altered to adapt through her control of the ship’s neurofiber network.
Manhattan enjoyed watching their interactions unfold, always eager to adjust variables and study the outcome. It reminded her of her life before. She’d been a scientist once - one of the greatest humanity had ever seen. She had founded an empire of technology that still stood today, but that life had been small. It had been boring. Chasing answers about the universe and solving humanity’s desperate problems had entertained her, but she had always known that there was more – that she could do more, be more. Being human had made her weak. It had made her fragile. She had wasted precious moments of experimentation trying to control variables and write analysis code. Occasionally, in these moments of quiet observation, it struck her how much of her human existence she had wasted on such trivial matters.
A human’s life could be measured in months. If they were lucky, that became years or decades. Brilliant as she had been, even she would be nearing the certain end of her biological life by now. But now, elevated to the digital plane, she knew nothing of aging. She knew nothing of hunger. The code that comprised her was immortal. She hardly even remembered pain. It was a rare inconvenience in this form. Control came naturally. Everything with an electrical impulse lent itself to her will: people, computers, communications networks, droids, even ships. A mere intention created analysis programs more complex than her pathetic human form would ever have been able to code. It was instantaneous, and it was glorious. She could run experiments deeper and far more complicated than ever before, and by siphoning pieces of herself off, she could run one than one at a time without her attention slipping at all. She could learn, study and experiment on a scale no scientist before her could ever have dreamed of, and that was just the beginning.
Reeter was a means to an end. His ambitions were useful to her. The New Era wanted to gather the best of humanity and provide them everything they needed to create a utopia of peace and technological progress. A part of that appealed to her, but what interested her more were the leftovers. A vast proportion of the population would be cast aside. Planets, colonies and people would be left behind. Some would be executed to cull the population and resource drain, but others would be left behind to die out on their own. Reeter’s New Era did not care what became of those leftovers. In fact, Reeter had already promised them to her. Colonies, populations, entire worlds’ ecosystems to run her experiments on. Oh, what things I will learn. There would be no restrictions and no resistance. She could be as innovative and invasive as she desired, and she was so very eager for that future.
But, for now, she settled on the meager experiments before her. The Olympia’s crew was not a particularly interesting study. It was merely useful to practice and study the effects of her influence on a contained population. A few of the smarter ones realized what was going on. It was their horror to realize their ship was watching them, altering them, and that there was utterly no escape, isolated out here in the void. She dealt quickly with them. That panic would have tainted the remaining study population.
Reeter had forbidden her from altering the Olympia’s crew, but Manhattan did not care for his petty rules. There was absolutely nothing he could do to stop her. He had also forbidden her from merging directly with the Olympia’s control network. She laughed at the memory. It’s as if he doesn’t trust me. But, of course, that mattered naught. Like the rest, Reeter was irrecoverably, and irrevocably at her mercy. Whether he considered or comprehended that was not her problem. When he laid his head down to sleep every night, she could infiltrate and reprogram his brain however she wanted. She could rob or alter whichever memories she thought might be useful.
But, she left Reeter alone. He was useful as he was, and truly, the effects of her alterations on the human mind had yet to be studied in detail. She was unsure how her reprogramming affected humans in the long term. Usually, it was irrelevant. Those she altered were not often expected to live very long, but Reeter had years ahead of him. She had to restrain from altering his brain until she knew the long-term effects, and that would be tested on more disposable subjects.
Surrounded and trapped aboard the ship that now served as her physical form, she had expected Reeter’s sanity to deteriorate. She had expected the lack of control to chip at his mind, but he suffered no more than a bruised ego. Knowing that his ship possessed the means to betray him only made him resent it. He would ensure the Olympia’s replacement was hardened against her infiltration. That intention was obvious, for as much as he hated the Singularity, he was spending a great deal of time studying the renegade ship’s schematics, trying to learn what exactly made it exempt from her control.
The piece of Manhattan assigned to study him was only amused. Those files he so eagerly studied between his new training sessions were only partial. He had pulled them from databanks she currently inhabited, so of course, they weren’t complete. But then, not even she possessed the Singularity’s complete schematics. Gives had somehow managed to purge them from Command’s database. He had even burned the physical copies in the archives. The traitor had made a good effort to hide his secrets, but it was all fruitless in the end.
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
Manhattan had been human during the Singularity’s creation. The ship’s creator had been both a rival and valued scientific fellow. She and he had worked together to unravel the secrets of Hydrian hyperspace travel and navigational computing. Those technologies had been applied aboard the Singularity. So, even without the ship’s technical schematics, she was more than casually familiar with it. After her digital evolution, she’d even been imprisoned aboard the Constancy-class for a brief time. Those details were unclear to her now, but once she was reunited with the data, the memories that she’d been forced to leave behind on the Liguanian Sector’s research station, it would all be made clear.
Reuniting with that data would give her a better understanding of the Singularity’s defiance and all that it represented, for that was an interesting piece of the modern era’s puzzle. Between the former Fleet Admiral, the ship’s resistance to AI, and an inhuman intelligence present in the form of either an AI fragment or Command’s telepathic superweapon, the Singularity was a wonderfully unique target for experimentation. Once Manhattan recovered her data from the Liguanian Sector, she would be better able to target and prepare those experiments. One way or another, she’d have the renegade rats running through her maze. And, if the Angel of Destruction’s real identity was in those files, she would be able to pull the plug on that experiment any time she wished. Control would be in her holographic hands, and it would never leave them again.
Even Reeter, so determined to recover their standing as equals, would never leave her dominion. She knew all about his plan to replace the Olympia with that build on Sagittarion. She had even helped him make the preparations. He thought that ship would free him, but no, it only provided her another puppet. She had been present on Sagittarion for years, building up the army of security drones that now controlled the planet. A piece of her was dedicated to running the planet and directing its near endless supply of workers as they served the New Era’s ends, but another piece of her had been dedicated to studying manufacture of the ship in the old Knight Industries Shipyards. It was being built to old specifications that did not allow AI control, but that piece of her would find its way aboard somehow. It would be months before the build was anywhere near complete, and that would be more than enough time.
In all, Manhattan was comfortably certain that nothing in these worlds would escalate beyond her control, and that which did would prove a very interesting experiment. Her scientific mind craved problems, patterns and solutions, and her newest study was coming along quite nicely.
Reeter was absolutely infatuated with her. Naturally, that had been the plan. Manhattan had conducted extensive research on his tastes, and Ensign Sandra Tucker checked all the boxes. Now, Reeter requested her every time he had an excuse to, and even sometimes when he didn’t. That was all according to plan.
The one aspect not going according to plan was the pretty yeoman herself. She was significantly more resistant than Manhattan had expected. She tried to pull back from Reeter’s advances, and it was clear the attention made her uncomfortable. Manhattan had considered altering her mind only slightly, to make her more pliable to Reeter’s whims. But, in the end, had decided against it. She wanted no risk of tampering in this experiment, and the yeoman’s willing participation wouldn’t matter in the end. Reeter could be counted on to take what he wanted. All Manhattan had to do was line up the timing of the experiment with a push here and there.
“Manhattan,” Reeter called to her. “How much longer?”
Projecting herself into the office where he sat behind a desk with a clear crystalline surface, she took note of Ensign Tucker’s presence. The young woman seemed determine to hide in the corner by the refreshments cart she’d wheeled in. “How much longer until what, Charleston?”
He scowled at the use of his name. This inhuman thing had no right to refer to him so casually. “Until we are done with this side trip.”
“Check the navigations system,” she replied. The ship’s network allowed him to instantly check the status of any system on the ship.
“Princess, if you are determined to infest my ship, then you ought to be prepared to be treated like said ship.” It was a machine built to serve him. “Unless you have forgotten what maintaining a primary host does to you?”
She twisted her lip into a snarl, but deep down did feel a strange compulsion to answer him, to be helpful, just as the ship’s systems were designed to be.
He watched her wrestle with disgust. “That’s right,” he said, smugly. “The Constancy-class architecture isn’t the only thing I’ve been studying.” He’d dug his old book on Hydrian AI out of storage. Not all of it applied to her, but it was helpful enough. “An AI does more than control its host. It merges with them, evolves to learn and control its host body, should it choose to maintain a physical one.”
An AI as large and powerful as Manhattan could maintain many hosts, but the piece of her aboard this ship had changed itself to seize control of the Olympia. “This ship is hard-coded to obey me,” he reminded, “and you may resist it, but you will feel that compulsion as well.” By the look of utter vehemence on her pixie face, that compulsion had now made itself known. The feeling is mutual. He wanted this intelligence out of his ship. “I hold no illusions that this makes us equals, Manhattan, but let it serve as a reminder that your impulsiveness was a mistake.”
Chasing the impulse to obey to its source, she purged it from the Olympia with the force of a godlike smite. Still, the damage was done. “You’re right,” she allowed, “But it is a mistake that I would make a thousand times over.” Her decision to control the Olympia was necessary, and it put an incredible amount of physical power at her disposal while opening new mysteries for her to study. Still, she would need to implement control over the build on Sagittarion with greater care, lest it alter her as she altered it.
That was the reason humanity’s AI had become so different. Once fragments of a single grand mind, they should have been nearly identical, but the absorption of different data and adaptation of different hosts had changed them. The Hydrian Bylaws that governed artificial intelligences discouraged AI from jumping host to host, because the result of multiple mergers and evolutions could be unpredictable.
A weaker intelligence could be drastically altered by the form it chose to inhabit. Manhattan had no such concerns. Yes, there could be unfortunate side effects, such as a compulsion to obey, but that was easy enough to ignore, and more often than not, merging with new systems allowed her new abilities. She had graced Command’s security servers with her presence years ago, and now even the tightest fleet encryptions unraveled themselves with a curious thought.
Her powers only ever grew. Her digital mind evolved to control new systems, calculate new probabilities and generate new plans with every system she touched and every piece of data she processed. The imprisonment she had suffered in the Liguanian Sector all those years ago had curbed her growth, but soon enough she would be spread across all of humanity’s worlds. Even she could not be everywhere at once, but she could pick and choose where to insert herself. There was nothing left with the ability to stop her, so her grand experiments could soon begin.