This wasn't good. In front of him, the AI was weaving a tight net, preventing any hope of his retreat or advancement. Orion could see what it was doing but it didn't seem to matter. This battle was lost, and in a flash it was finally over.
"Rook to C7 and I do believe that's check mate, Orin." The digital fox girl gave him her usual cocky smile as her holographic tail flickered and swished behind her. She had pinned his king with both a rook and a knight. An elegant solution for a chaotic battle.
The AI’s name was Tanya, or at least that's what she likes to be called. She was as elegant and annoying as her final move was. Original her personality matrix gave her a different name and a different physical form for that matter. One that was far more androgynous and booky. But, as with any self-learning and adapting AI this advanced, significant personality drifts were inevitable, over time anyway. The form she chose was based on, what she thought Orion would like. She wasn't all together wrong.
Orion stared at the holographic chess board in front of him. Wondering just how fair the match truly was. Even simple AIs had long beaten humans at this game. It was true that Tanya wasn’t just a simple AI, and her pattern recognition was closer to what a human might see and do, rather than something that could just brute force a solution, but still. It wasn't the same as his.
Tanya watched the human looking down at the board lornfully. Somewhere in one of her many artificial neural patterns a thought began to creep and grow. Reinforced by his expression. Maybe she should have let him win this one. "Are you ok Orin?"
With a shake of his head he responded, "I'm fine, just tired." Orion looked up at the concerned hologram in front of him. Her Vistage twitching occasionally as the low quality hololenses flickered in the empty curved hallway. That match was less relaxing than he had hoped it would be and now he needed to walk to clear his head. Which is what he had hoped the game would do in the first place.
Thought out the cavernous empty space, his footsteps echoed. Alone. Only a constant low background hum could be heard as he wandered through the strange space.
The hallway seemed like a Euclidean nightmare. An impossible structure that seemed to bend always upwards both behind him, and in front of him. The soundlessness of his ghostly companion gave further credence to the thought that he was alone out here, in this impossible space.
"Hmmm, you are tired. But your heart rate and blood pressure are elevated." The hologram squinted at him.
Orion closed his eyes at his prying companion. She had access to all the stations' bio-metric sensors and could see everything about him. Even that miss-shaped mole on the back of his arm. She had been looking at earlier. Which was as they now spoke, being painstakingly dissected virtually for cancer markers by one of the medical AIs. It was invasive, even if she was just protecting him.
"You're prying again." He dead panned.
"I'm just doing my job." The AI smirked back at him with a wink. She was trying to appear cute, hoping to defuse his melancholy and shift his focus off her unwanted probing.
The fact was though, this wasn't her job function. That why the station had medical AIs and robotics, to do that very thing, though they were always more annoying and far less caring than she was. True to form, those systems were more artificial than intelligent.
At most, Tanya was just supposed to be a secretary of sorts. To manage basic operations and organize the station's human crew. That was it. It was also unnecessary since, functionally, Orion was the last of the crew. Perhaps not literally, but for all it mattered, he was it.
"Just… lonely I guess." Orion couldn't help but stare out of one of the many windows on the station. The stars outside, slowly moved in almost straight line like arcs. Originally this station was supposed to be humanity’s future. Their gateway to the outer planets and maybe even beyond that. In the distance, the bisected surface of the moon showed itself. A jagged and hardline between light and shadow all overtop the pale greys and blackness.
Lerna was originally to be called Jump Point Alpha. A silly name perhaps, but it was going to be the first production facility for spaceships large enough, and powerful enough to make it out past Jupiter. The first jump beyond humanity's baby steps into space.
All that changed a few decades ago, as humanity quickly changed. Who needed actual space when you could escape into a virtual one that was just better? Real space was massive, unimaginably so. Even the short distance between earth and the moon or Lerna station was a quarter of a million miles. In terms of time, it was three days away with a gravity transfer, maybe a bit less if you were willing to burn a ton of fuel. Jupiter on the other hand or even further… That could take years with conventional rockets. Even with those fancy fusion rocket designs that no one built, it would still be months in transit.
Fusion rockets, that was Lerna's original purpose. Massive ones at that. Mine the materials on the moon, haul into orbit. Use spin gravity to allow for the forges to work properly. Then assemble in zero-g; All of it powered by a massive fusion core, a true artificial sun. The station wasn't even a quarter done when earth's government abandoned the project. The mining stations on the moon, fully automated, were similarly abandoned. Lack of public interest for a several hundred-billion-dollar piece of infrastructure. Why spend money on reality when VR was just, cheaper and more accessible?
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
So, what was to be done with the partially completed, industrial base beside allowing to atrophy? Turn it into a commercial opportunity of course! The hydra project. A new type of quantum computer, all built on top of a quantum singularity and powered by the massive fusion core of the station that was already completed. Humanity's dream, now a faded hallucination of their collective dying consciousness.
Orion hated it.
Yet, he still chose to work up here, despite hating almost every minute of it. This was as close as he'd ever get to his own dream. Staring out that window, those dreams seemed ever further apart from this reality.
"ORION!" Tanya finally yelled at him, snapping him back to the waking world. His smile was bittersweet, he knew he was just like the rest of crew and humanity when it came down to it. Lost in the world of comfortable and warm dreams, instead of hard and cold reality.
"You're an annoying fox." He chided his companion and watched as her cheeks puffed up. For a moment he wondered how much of that was real and how much were just code to mimic what a human might expect to see. Matrix calculations done on a modest sized quantum frame somewhere on the station. In the end, he supposed it wasn't that different from the wet-ware calculations his own mind did. But still, it was different.
"You're daydreaming again. It's not healthy to daydream that much."
He snorted unconsciously, "Oh? Why not tell that to the rest of our crew?"
The spunk in her face faded, as did his own or what little there was of it. Everyday, it felt like the two were alone at the station. Surrounded by other computers and processes, none of which had an interest in either of them, and which was all even less human than the virtual fox spirit.
Technically though, it wasn't true. Even ignoring the AIs of the station, there were 19 other people… present. In some loose sense of the word.
“… You have a meeting in a few minutes.” Tanya tried to pull the two of them back to reality. This was her core job after all, organizing the crew and ensuring they were present for such trivialities.
Meeting aside, something else caught his attention.
For a moment, Orion felt something in his legs. A twinging sensation like there were shaking slightly. It quickly went away as he rubbed them, but the feeling didn’t seem like it came from him. Looking up at the holographic fox, he could see her staring off in the distance as her core processed some new data. “Anything wrong?” He verbally poked.
With a blink Tanya came back to him and smiled. “No, seems like just the usual gravity echoes. Nothing major.” For an AI, she wasn’t that great at hiding her lies. Sublet face twitched on the hologram, and some unusual additional flickers from the lenses. Orion had no idea if it was intentional or not. But it was a silent way to communicate between the two of them. A tell of sorts.
As for the vibrations, It wasn't the first time the station had physical issues; it was never fully completed after all. Still, every time something odd happened, his heart skipped a beat. Lately, they seemed to be getting more frequent too.
The fact was, this station was never designed for the singularity it housed, there were always new issues because of. Most were minor, and the machines could handle them. But the stress was made worse by the frame dragging effects caused by the rotation of that infinitely dense mass at the center of it all.
Orion held a few advanced degrees, one of which was actually in astrophysics, along with mechanical engineering. While he understood the basics of quantum computers, he couldn’t even begin to comprehend the mathematics behind this system at the core of the station.
The AI Asher always insisted the various vibrations and creaking was normal and by design. Yet, both always wondered and doubted. From what Orion had gathered, he was pretty sure the original designs never intended it to spin like it did. A Kerr black hole was fundamentally different than a pure Schwarzschild one. Again, it was certain the station design didn’t take that extra stress into account.
In his time at the station, he had interacted with one of the original designers and creators via messages, never actually speaking face to face. Dr. Wakamina was stuck up, and more than a bit grating. A classic knows it all, but then, given her paper, perhaps she had a right to be. The questions she always asked seemed strange and cryptic at times, particularly recently.
Things about data processing rates, and transaction numbers. Orion was only able to send her one full copy before Asher stopped him. It wasn't a secure channel for such sensitive material, he said. An unbreakable quantum encrypted link was not secure. Of course, that didn’t make sense but the AI was more or less his supervisor out here and he had to obey. There were many reasons he didn't trust that AI, not the least of which was it lied, all the time.
Wandering the station hallways was always a way to pass the time, and good exercise in the lower than earth-g environment. It was massive, built for a crew of a thousand people even in its incomplete state. Alcoves and seating permeated the walkway. Any would work to tune into the meeting. A few even had neural jack ports, connections designed to interface with a neural uplink, like he had in the back of his neck.
Orion never had a choice in having the device, it was a requirement of modern-day astronauts. It served many purposes, from rapid interfacing with systems, medical exams, to even just recreation. That last reason was why some people on earth would try and get one, and also why they were so restricted to authorized and necessary users only. The risks of having one were considered too great without a valid reason. Pure entertainment wasn't a good one, and Orion had 19 examples of the severity of the risk.
It was an irrelevant point though; he would not be using his neural uplink for the VR stream of this meeting. He wouldn't even being using VR. Any alcove would do as he sat down and turned on the holoscreen in front of him. The stream started with Ardman, the CEO of the company standing before the board. Mentioning something about users.
Orion didn't really pay attention, as right when the meeting started, there was another set of vibrations and suddenly a master alarm that sounded through the station. It seemed he had other things to worry about beyond this quarter’s “success metrics”.