Meloira Sector, Battleship Singularity
Cadet Blosse turned when she heard the hatch start to spin. Her Marine training forced her to tense and never assume what would come through the hatch as she guarded it. Slowly, the hatch creaked open and after a worn black leather shoe stepped across the threshold, Blosse relaxed.
Admiral Gives exited the state room in an identical condition to which he had entered it. His wavy hair was not out of place and his expression was just as void as before. There was no indication of what had transpired in that room. Calm as ever, he sealed the hatch behind him, then turned to her. “From this point forward, the Hydra is to be considered a threat. No crewman is to enter this room alone.”
Blosse tried to gauge the intent behind that order, but it was stoic, no anger, no fear, not even concern. His blue eyes were stormy, but his emotionless façade was unbroken. “Yes, sir.”
“Then tell the other Marines that there will be additional combat training this week. Corporal Kallahan will be leading the exercises.”
Those words were every bit as calm as the last, but Blosse’s stomach still sank toward the deck. Kallahan was a Hydrian War veteran, the only one Blosse had ever met. If he was leading the exercises, they would be training to fight the Empire’s forces. “I understand, sir. I will let them know.”
“Very well,” the Admiral said, turning to continue down the hall.
Blosse watched him for a moment, then returned to the default posture of standing watch over the door. As she did so, the ship creaked around her, a soft, plaintive noise. That wasn’t an uncommon sound, especially after a stressful combat encounter, so Blosse ignored it until it came again, this time louder, more certain – a reminder that prompted Blosse to call down the corridor, “Sir?”
He paused and turned, no trace of annoyance in his expression. “Yes, Cadet?”
Blosse hesitated. As willingly as some of the other Marines interacted with the Admiral, she never had. Keeping her head down and avoiding attention had been a survival instinct that she could not overcome.
“Are you uncomfortable with this assignment?” he asked.
“No, sir,” she said. This was hardly the first time she’d been assigned guard duty. This issue was something else, something worse. She kept her gaze focused on the hatch ahead of her, not afraid, but ashamed to make eye contact. “You should know that during the raid, Yankovich, Santino and Colonel Zarrey found out about my artificial eye.” She dreaded even the mention of her cybernetic implant – a vile thing that made her less than human – but there could be no avoiding it now. “They offered to keep it quiet, but I know that won’t last.” Rumor was an inevitable form of entertainment for a crew isolated aboard ship. “I will accept any punishment you wish to give me, sir.”
The Admiral didn’t move from where he stood, only raised an eyebrow. “Cadet, why would I punish you for that?”
“Having a cyborg aboard this ship is a violation of Command’s regulations,” Blosse said. “I should be punished for my deceit.”
“I do not care what violates Command’s regulations,” the Admiral replied. “We no longer serve Command.” Why should Command’s rules matter now? “You are not the first augmented human to serve aboard this ship. Singularity’s systems are not electrically networked. Even if your implant was capable of interfacing with other systems, you would pose no threat to her, and she no threat to you.”
They were insulated from one another. Blosse understood that. But Command’s woes were not the only reason she felt the need to be punished. “I lied to the rest of the crew and I tried to lie to you, sir. That deserves disciplinary action. I do not wish to tarnish your reputation.”
“Cadet, my reputation is a lifetime of carnage and murder. I do not concern myself with it, and neither should you.”
That answer came calmly, as had every other before it. Admiral Gives was never anything but calm, an unwavering constant. Blosse admired him for that. “I do not wish to set a precedent for lying, sir.” The ship survived on the trust between those that crewed her. If they could not trust each other to be who and what they said they were, how were they to function in a fight? “I lied to everyone about what I am.” She was a cyborg, a less-than-human entity. “They had a right to know what they were working with.” Her comrades had a right to know why none of them could ever beat her marksmanship scores. She wasn’t some blessed talent; she was a cyborg whose artificial eye gave her an incomparable advantage.
“Did Colonel Zarrey and the others resent you when they found out?”
Blosse finally turned to face him, trying once more to decipher the intent behind the Admiral’s question, but even her artificial eye, always so keen to detect twitches of anger or amusement, found nothing on him. Her eye usually warned her of every intent and spoiled every surprise, always scanning and analyzing those around her more deeply than any human should. She hated it. That constant flow of information was sickening. It wasn’t natural. It wasn’t right. People didn’t scan everything around them, pulling it apart for information. Machines did that. “Colonel Zarrey and the others were respectful,” but that only made Blosse feel worse. They had fought cyborgs just moments before her admission. Blosse had seen how disgusted they were with those cyborgs. That had been a well-deserved repulsion from those less-than-human creatures. Yet, Zarrey and the others hadn’t given that same disgust to her, as if they didn’t realize that she and those heavily-augmented pirates were the same.
“Cadet, I understand you have a bias against cyborgs,” the Admiral told her. “But not everyone shares that disposition. Aboard this ship, I expect you will continue to be treated with respect.”
The treatment of cyborgs varied severely in the cultures of humanity’s nations. In some, their existence was rare, treated with fear or reverence. In others, their existence was commonplace, and simply irrelevant. However, Blosse knew that the types of cyborgs could vary just as much as their treatment. Some continued to look and act very human while others did away with that farce. Her home nation had been one of the latter. “Have you ever been to Rigel III, sir?”
Out past the southern reaches of the central worlds, Rigel III was a Kronium mining colony. It was a small nation, but was recognized as independent. Its main export was unrefined Kronium – the fuel that powered most of humanity’s ships. “I have not,” the Admiral told her. Rigel III had not participated in the Frontier Rebellion and steered mostly clear of the unrest that followed, so he had never visited.
“Every citizen of Rigel III is a cyborg, sir. We have our first parts replaced at sixteen.” Legally, she had still been a child, too young to become a soldier in the fleet or counter what her parents deemed ‘best’ for her. “Rigel III is not a delicate place. Our cyborgs are not like what you see in the central worlds. Their implants are not pretty. They are not subtle. They are not optional. Once the implants are installed, they cannot be turned off.” While no implant could be removed once integrated to the host’s neural tissue – at least not without severe damage – some could be powered off to rest the brain. Such rest was not considered necessary on Rigel III, so the implants did not allow it, and that constant flow of information, it altered the mind. “These implants change their host. After some time, after another few implants, they are not people anymore, they are the culmination of the programming running through their heads.” The most heavily augmented citizens of Rigel III rarely interacted with others. They rarely spoke, rarely laughed, rarely cried, just worked, slaves to the augments they had installed upon themselves. “I watched everything those people were rot away until there was nothing left but a machine.” She, in the end, would be just like them.
Blosse reached up to her eye, remembering how much its installation had itched. She’d feared machine rot would consume the socket, reducing it to a red hole of infected puss. “I should be grateful my implant was subtle.” It could be concealed where many of the more common replacement parts on Rigel III could not. “My parents believed that was mercy. They knew how much I didn’t want the implant, but they thought if it wasn’t obvious, I would have an easier time accepting it. As if I could forget that it’s not natural to scan my surroundings, not natural to zoom in on something in the distance, and not natural see perfectly in the dark. They acted as if I could simply forget that I’m no longer human.”
The Admiral was silent for a moment, expression unreadable. In some ways, it was terrifying to not know what he was thinking. The details Blosse’s artificial eye gathered always warned her of people’s reactions. It allowed her to know when she’d said too much and when she bored or upset them. Seeing that, she rarely bothered to speak on anything beyond her duties. Even if they were willing to entertain her, it was too obvious when they became disinterested, yet the Admiral was an exception. His perfect stoicism was not disinterested, even if he wasn’t interested either. Still, his silence was long, long enough for her to remember that these issues were not his concern. He was not obligated to care what one soldier thought of herself. Perhaps that was why it surprised her when he spoke.
“Cadet, you will be human as long as you wish to be. Your implant cannot take that from you.”
That was meant to be comforting, Blosse knew. But it was easy to give such consolation when he wasn’t the one with an implant wired into his brain, when his mind wasn’t being bombarded with the results of a detection scan every second. Blosse could not expect him to understand the way that changed one’s perspective.
Shifting his posture ever so slightly, the Admiral continued, “Humanity is more than a completely biological status, more than a frame of mind. It means something different to everyone, but if you truly believe that implant makes you more machine than human, that is still not something deserving of punishment. There is nothing wrong with being a machine.”
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Blosse wished she could believe that. “Machines don’t have emotion. They don’t care about people. They aren’t loyal. They follow their programming to a fault.” Blosse had never been sure what programming lingered in her implant. She didn’t know where it had been manufactured or who had handled it before installing it within her skull. The Admiral had been generous enough to tolerate her presence before, on the basis she could not endanger the ship. However, she could endanger her comrades. Once word spread about her implant, the secrecy that had protected it would be gone. It and she could be turned against them, easy targets for Manhattan’s control.
“Machines are complicated,” the Admiral said. “They come in as many varieties as we humans do. Something like a gun knows no loyalty.” It would kill whoever it was aimed at. “Something like a clock knows no pause in its purpose.” It would tick onward toward eternity, even if no one was checking the time. “But this ship… She is a Constancy-class battleship, Cadet. She is as mechanical as any of them, yet is faithful and dependable by definition. She has protected and served her crew for fifty years. She has not and will not ever waver from that intention.” He gestured vaguely to the dark gray bulkheads that surrounded him. “Of every accusation thrown at me, the one claiming this ship is my only friend is the one I dread the least.” It was meant hurtfully of course, some evidence toward his sociopathy that he was unable to care about anyone or anything else, but still, he did not resent that accusation. Why wouldn’t he want to be friends with the machine that had been his only constant companion for the last few decades of his life? “Singularity has seen me through more battles than I can remember. If I cannot call her a friend, then I surely have none.”
As she stood with her back against the cool metal of the bulkheads, Blosse found a surprising degree of comfort in that. If the legendary Steel Prince, notorious for being so uncaring, maintained a friendship with a machine that couldn’t even speak to him, then perhaps her comrades might still befriend her too. And yet, some part of that felt shallow. Such a friendship would be one-way, for Blosse could never know if her feelings were genuine or some programmed replica inserted by her implant. Truthfully, Blosse had no idea how much of her had been replaced when she became a cyborg. “Doesn’t it bother you that this ship can’t care about you the same way you do her?”
The Admiral took a step closer, and Blosse wasn’t sure what to think when he reached toward the sword sheathed on his hip. Discomfort gnawed at her momentarily, for it wasn’t often the Admiral carried a weapon, let alone handled it in front of the crew. When he did, it made the crew uneasy, not only because they were unused to it, but because he had maintained a reputation as the deadliest officer in the fleet. Aboard ship, his actions and demeanor were always mute, but Blosse had seen his skill with a sidearm firsthand. Yet, it was apparent that his intent was not to harm her. He drew the sabre slowly from its sheath. The scabbard was coated in black leather and decorated in fine silver filigree, patterned after nebulous swirls and stars. It relinquished the blade with an audible schhk.
Once the blade was free, he flipped it over to present Blosse with the blade’s spine and handle, then offered it out.
Blosse took it carefully, minding the blade’s wicked edge. It was a fine weapon, flawlessly maintained, but that shouldn’t have been a surprise, given the blade’s exceptional color. Most martial weapons were a silver color, some shiny, some not, some textured by the blacksmith’s folding. The Admiral’s sabre was a dark gray, nearly matte. It had an unexpected weight to it, given the thinness of the blade. Meant to slip between plates of armor, it was purposefully thin, but it was strong, stronger than most other blades could be, simply by nature of its alloy.
Blosse knew without question, it was one of the highest-quality weapons she had ever seen, let alone held. Given that, the brief glimpses the Marines had caught of it over the years had made it something of a mystery. Admiral Gives was not one for displays of wealth or affluence. Other officers had their uniforms custom tailored, added decoration or replaced the material with finer fabrics, but he didn’t. He wore his uniform plain, his black shoes so far from polished they were noticeably worn. He presented himself neatly, but like his expressions, plainly.
The sabre was an odd break from that. While everything else he wore was standard-issue, the sword clearly wasn’t. Blosse wouldn’t consider it gaudy – especially not compared to the jeweled weapons she’d seen other officers carry – but it was nicely decorated while maintaining good balance and practicality. Perhaps its most striking feature was the guard. It was a mixture of silver shades, all lighter than the blade itself, folded together into the flaming sun that served as the ship’s insignia. The grip was meticulously wrapped in a black ribbon with streaks of red to improve the wielder’s hold. A subtle detail, visible only now as she held the sabre, were the fourteen stars etched into the metal where the blade met the hilt – flagship’s stars that once would have circled the Singularity’s emblem as well.
The iconography of the sword was clear, but Blosse still looked up from it with a question in her mind.
“Emotions are not usually tied to the expectation that they be repaid,” the Admiral told her. “You can be happy for someone without expecting they be happy for you in return. You can be angry with someone without them being angry back. It is quite common to love someone who may not love you back.” Emotions were fickle, fickle things. The young Marine standing guard by the door surely knew that. The implant forced onto her had given her so much doubt, and emotion twisted it into a knot that she could not untangle. “That sword was given to me. It has served as a physical reminder of my duty to protect this crew.” That blade would never be turned against them. Not by his hand. “But not every enemy can be slain by a sword. Doubt is the most insidious of all.” It crept in silent and unnoticed, then twisted even the most content of minds into a shriveled husk – an adversary he knew all too well.
Taking the sabre back, he slid it effortlessly back into its sheath. “I know why you joined the fleet, Cadet. You were looking for something that you do not believe exists,” something that could rid herself of the doubt that haunted her and so many other unwilling cyborgs. She had been so desperate to find that something she had bribed her way through the fleet’s physical examinations – despite knowing the punishment for being caught would have been execution.
Blosse averted her gaze, discomforted by the reminder of sneaking into UCSC fleet, but more upset by the fact that she’d failed in her search. “It doesn’t exist.” She’d come searching for a legend, but it was nothing but a myth – only a story told to cyborgs who couldn’t adjust to their inhumanity. “The Machine with a Beating Heart isn’t real. There isn’t a machine in the worlds capable of true emotion.” Reflections of it could be programmed in, but none had been built genuinely capable of it. No machine could love or develop loyalty, and made into a machine herself, neither could Blosse.
“Emotions can be subtle, Cadet. Not all of them are demonstrated with overt declarations. Sometimes they are easy to miss.” Too easy, he lamented. “There is no reason to believe a machine would express its emotion in the ways that humans are familiar with. A being with no eyes cannot cry. A being with no face cannot smile. So, should our determination be that such a being could never be happy or sad?” He thought not. “Sometimes, you need to have a little faith, Cadet. You may find that what you are looking for has been right beside you the whole time.”
Blosse contemplated that for a long moment. “That’s how the tech-monks operate, isn’t it?” They gave their faith to a machine and interpreted its every action and reaction as the movement of a soul, the soul of entity that was limited in the ways it could communicate.
“It is.”
“Do you believe in their ways, sir?” Blosse wondered.
“Some of them.” He could not say he’d ever been much of a pacifist, and Technologists avoided violence in all matters except self-defense. “I believe Singularity is beyond worthy of their recognition, but I do not believe she would care to be hidden away and watched over by the tech-monks for the next thousand years.”
For some reason, Blosse felt there was a flicker of amusement in his expression, though her eye failed to trace it. “Think she’d get bored, sir?”
“Almost certainly.” He figured a battleship would be as good at sitting idle as the Marines were, so naturally, Blosse would understand. “All the same, Cadet, a battleship is no good without her crew. You and your skills are welcome here, with or without that eye of yours.” Even if she no longer wanted to apply her sight to sniping, there were a dozen other jobs she could fill.
“Thank you, Admiral. I appreciate that.” Truthfully, that calmed Blosse a great deal. His word was the law aboard ship, and if he said she was safe here, then she was, regardless of whoever else might decry a cyborg amongst their ranks.
Admiral Gives waited a moment, making certain Blosse had nothing else to ask of him, then turned to continue on his path. He had no destination on his mind, not yet, so he simply let the ship’s labyrinthine hallways take him. Truthfully, when he paused to study them, all the ship’s corridors looked very similar. The ship’s entire structure, every support, each bulkhead, hatch, and even the deck tiles were all made from the same dark gray metal. It was patterned by the tarnishes it wore: fresh scratches lighter and shinier than the base metal, and older marks darkened by the dust caught on their surface. The blemishes were signs of life, the usual wear and tear humanity incurred on its surroundings.
Unlike the hull armor, the scars on the interior of the ship usually had happy causes, and the corridors maintained a warm feel. The yellowish hue of the lights mimicked the glow of an afternoon sun, their shade not artificial enough to be bothersome, though they did have a slight buzz to them, if one paused to listen. Often that noise, so very soft, was drowned out by the sounds of the crew, or the hum of the engines, but he could hear the sound of power coursing through the lights now, buzzing nearly above the range of his ear.
The air was odorless. The damage incurred by Crimson Heart had been mostly abrupt: missile impacts and the railgun strike. There had been no widespread fires, and there was no lingering ash, so the air didn’t taste like anything. New crew or guests aboard ship would identify the air to have a metallic flavor to it. Just like different planets or houses, different ships did have different scents in the air. Given that, the Singularity’s air was not truly odorless, he’d just grown so used to it that it seemed as such, giving the air anywhere else a strange taste.
Pausing beside a hatch, the Admiral took inventory of his surroundings. He hadn’t left the deck that held the state quarters, simply wandered further into the ship’s bow. The hatch before him was marked for long term storage in extremely chipped paint. He reached out to it and another bit of white paint flaked off. These markers got damaged in every fire and decompression, not to mention got scratched away over time. They were overdue to be replaced, but the paint markers were an item that got shoved to the bottom of the maintenance list every time. Their faded state wouldn’t hurt anyone, just confuse new crewmembers and guests. Faced with war against the Hydrian Empire, he supposed these old paint markers would be the least of their problems.
No matter how many times he declined it, the worlds always found a way to put their weight on his shoulders. Truly, he wanted nothing to do with the worlds, but having stumbled across evidence of a Hydrian incursion, he could not ignore the fate that awaited them. That was his duty to his ship and crew. The crew would want to protect any friends or family they still had planet-side, and he could not allow his own disinterest to compromise the mission the Singularity had been built for: to save humanity. Those were his responsibilities as the ship’s commander, as much as it would have been his preference to set sail toward a different star and forget all about the Hydra.
We owe these worlds nothing, he thought to the old ship. Nothing at all. Yet, they wouldn’t leave, wouldn’t turn away, so perhaps it was his own flaws that insisted they should. He was the wrong person for the job. He didn’t want to be the hero that saved the worlds, because those rotten worlds weren’t worth his ship and her crew.