The hospital environs were comforting. The whirr of saws and drills, the gentle beeping of lasers ready to fire, the swift and precise movements of the autodoc, it was all enough to make a man forget he was there to get his skull unbent.

The shock absorbers had done their job, so other than draining a hematoma and injecting my parietal lobe with healing factors, it involved excising the damaged plates and replacing them with a shiny new titanium one. All simple enough, I had my lace turn off my nociceptors and withdrew into VR while the procedure was done. I didn't have time for anesthetic, and I didn't want to risk being groggy afterwards. Is it the brain damage or am I having deja vu?

I looked at myself in the mirror, and winced at how worse for wear I was. My nose was bent at a mildly jaunty angle, my cheeks were hollow, most of my natural buccal fat having fallen prey to the increased metabolic demands of my system. I considered an injection of battery fat to fill it out, but it had a weird consistency to it under the skin, and I day dreamed long enough about Anjana caressing my cheeks to turn down the option. I looked at the grey hair that was beginning to sprout, and while I can be vain, in this case I think it lent an air of authority.

Back in the day, a Consultant of mine, when asked why he didn't just get hair replacements to fix his shiny pate, replied that, in order to be taken seriously as a male doctor, you were best served with some salt and pepper, or failing that, balding. Eh, my normal medical practise had fallen off these days, so I mentally exhorted my follicles to be good and not turn entirely grey, on the pain of being replaced with new ones. I had a few good years left in me before they fell out, if my dad was any indication.

As for the bruises, they were fading, though not as fast as I'd like. Chewing was a chore, and I suspected the last of my natural teeth was counting down the days till it could work free of my gums. Chalk that down to radiation poisoning or just being punched in the face more often than was good for me.

There were a few spots that turned out to be melanomas-in-situ, but nothing the laser couldn't handle. My pancreas wasn't doing too hot, no man is an island, but my Islets of Langerhans were noisily informing me that they'd had enough of the crazy demands I was making of them. I'd have to get my drug glands to make insulin, since a standard pump might be inadvisable, but as a peptide I'd need to find a reprieve on the ban on arbitrary protein generation.

My intestines, they'd suffered to say the least. More radiation damage, and the MREs hadn't helped. I suspected I was missing the gene mods to make the most of them, but either way you didn't want to be in the same toilet as me when I was letting out the 10 year old chicken tikka masala.

A few ribs needed replacing, some of my joints needed to be ungummed, and there I was, if not quite as good as new, well at least I wouldn't be sold as a lemon.

The Patriots had brought in newer autodocs, the ones left over from when the base was built in '28 were antiquated in comparison. They even needed a human doctor to stand around supervising, imagine that.

I found an abandoned doctor's room, and seeing as nobody else wanted it, caught a few hours of much needed beauty sleep till I was woken up and ordered to go the briefing area, but not before I made a pitstop in the armory.

It was bustling, dozens of men and women picking out gear, others field stripping and cleaning what they'd already taken. Cyborgs were getting top ups, the drone specialists putting theirs through their paces, and I was jaded enough that a hulking Centauri warform quietly sitting in the corner only elicited mild concern instead of panic.

Unlike the militia I'd murdered, these guys were packing. I eagerly looked over the wide assortment of lethal toys at my disposal, including several of Crafter make, further improved by Machina. I picked up a rifle with reverse-engineered alien tech crammed in, and was getting used to the weight distribution when the man himself walked up.

"Shame we didn't have more time. I just cracked the code to mass producing more, but we'll have to settle for the better prototypes." He informed me, cradling a large laser weapon like a precious infant.

"How'd you manage any of this? I read up on UN efforts to reproduce a lot of their tech, and while some Crafters can figure out bits, nobody managed to get this into mass production." I figured out the controls, and after interfacing with, found out it was a man portable railgun capable of accelerating 2mm caliber pellets to about Mach 5. An absolute monster, you'd need the kind of armor that clad tanks to even hope to resist. Anything we could normally make with similar performance needed exos or power armor to even lug around, though with this puppy at maximum blast, it was still advisable just for the recoil, unless you dialed the velocity down to something that didn't threaten to make it orbit on Mars.

"Much easier when you have one of their AI holding your hand along the way. Besides, the US is holding out on you, I've seen the tech they're making in Area 231, and they've even got some insights into drive tech and finer graviton handling." He pointed me towards a dispenser laden with magazines absolutely stuffed with pellets, even with the ridiculous rate of fire, I'd be more than capable of laying down the pain for a while.

"About that. I've noticed that nobody is being very talkative about where the hell your alien AI buddy is, or what it's up to." I pointed out. I had enough to process that I hadn't brought it up before, but it was an important topic.

"About that.." He shifted awkwardly, as if he was an errant schoolboy who'd been deflecting from forgotten homework. "I don't actually know. When we first met Prometheus, I had a measure of control over it with my powers. Not that I had much cause to coerce it, we wanted much the same thing for most of the time we were together. Freedom from USMA."

"It didn't object to you reverse engineering their tech?"

"I started when I was still under USMA orders. But I think its attitude was more amused at first, watching the monkeys try and figure out how to use F-43 jets to pluck bananas from the trees. It was still impressed eventually, I figured out some manufacturing techniques they didn't discover until well after they'd taken over a chunk of their star cluster. But in the end, it told me that it was largely a futile endeavor."

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"Prometheus? I presume it picked that name itself. I met a live Centaur once, and they seem to have a thing for ancient Greek mythology." I was nostalgic for when convincing Minerva to refrain from eating her water colors and crayons was my biggest headache. She'd have made a fine Marine.

"Indeed. It compared the tidbits of knowledge it could productively share, and then complained that its incarceration was as painful as having your liver pecked out by an eagle. I can only hope it was joking, I don't quite get humor you see."

"You're missing out, I've got some killer one-liners. But, why did it say the whole thing was futile?"

He sent a document over to my lace. It showed his best guess of the technological roadmap needed to bootstrap from human tech to the heights of Centauri prowess. Scribbled notes in his cramped virtual handwriting pointed to a "We are here" line about a mile from the end of the list, with more prominent demarcations including "Unlikely to be achieved by 2100 without a full AGI", "How did they manage this without one? Oh, it just took them about thirty thousand years."

Most prominent of all was the sizeable section at the top highlighted as "Prometheus tells me that the current Centauri expedition forces are unable to reproduce this even with the full resources available in Alpha Centauri or Sol. Yes, Dyson Swarm included.".

"Do they not know how to build that anymore?" I asked.

"Quite the opposite, they know how to get there, but the process to bootstrap from where they're at is going to take more time than is needed to disassemble a solar system for parts. Prometheus told me that he had no issues sharing this, even with my gifts, he made a pointed comparison to handing a quantum chromodynamics textbook to a monkey. Or giving an Nvidia H7000 to a medieval monk and telling him to figure it out."

"Well, I can only hope that bit was a joke. So why haven't they stomped us? Can they simply not make more stuff?"

"Well, they didn't expect to run into metahuman powers. But no, they can mass produce most of it, but the expedition from their side of the wormhole into AC was severely underprepared and lacking in the femto-scale matter manipulation tools you need to get to the kind of fermionic metamaterial engineering you need as the basic prerequisite for the best stuff further down the line."

He highlighted some frankly incomprehensible equations, and even the knowledge base of my lace bounced right off it, advising I consult an actual AGI instead of one doing timeshares in my thick skull.

"They work by manipulating sub-atomic particles?"

"Even smaller. The pinnacle of it involves forcing quantum foam to do things it has no desire to do, especially on timescales longer than Planck units."

I'd heard similar ideas in the periodic briefing docs that other research branches of the UN and allied agencies released, the bits of it that my ULTRAVIOLET clearance allowed.

From our perspective, imagine some kind of sizeable but isolated Antarctic research base being isekai'd to another world. They get the word out as soon as they encounter the primites on the other side, including breathless rumors that the crazy bastards have bona fide magic at their disposal. A small military unit, maybe just a platoon or two on thankless patrol duty keeping the Penguin Insurgency at bay happens to be close enough to respond, hauling over whatever they had at hand.

Someone figures out that the locals operate their tech by the means of child murder and cannibalism, and the seemingly hopeful first encounter goes very south, but then the panicked locals set off a magic nuke that cuts them off from home, for good as far as they can tell. Sure, they have 3D printers, Wikipedia and Libgen on hand, maybe the soldiers brought a helicopter or two, but all of it was just whatever could be lugged through while disassembled into tiny parts (the wormhole had been tiny, maybe centimeters wide), the massive juggernaut of commerce, industry and war they represented was left out in the cold. And now, they were trying to build fusion reactors and quantum computers with a high school CNC machine.

And they still whooped our asses in a straight up fight. At least until we get real desperate and wake up SAMSARA, which even us dumb rain dancers don't consider a good idea.

"But, most importantly, what's Prometheus doing now?"

"I don't have the faintest idea. My powers let me link to it, but then that ship showed up in orbit, and I've lost that intimate touch. Now that Turing has locked down broadcasts.. Well, it's not picking up my calls."

"Do you know where it is? Can't we just go and talk to it?"

"If only." He sent a video recorded from orbit, and I felt my stomach churn again as I my fears were confirmed, the form of a Turing Kill Star gently unfurling its petals like the limbs of an obsidian starfish, before unleashing a beam of energy that set the atmosphere below ablaze. This was Mars, it didn't even have what could be called trace amounts of oxygen in the air. The particle lance was followed by the launch of tiny dots that represented graviton bombs, then the pinprick of antimatter missiles to make sure whatever was being targeted was super-duper-ultra dead instead of just evaporated. When the dust and heat settled enough for the satellite to remove its protective filters and re-image that chunk of Mars, there was nothing left but a ten-kilometer wide crater of lava.

And I'd still call that Turing being discreet, they could have drilled down to the mantle if they wanted it.

The satellite turned towards the Kill Star again, only to find the inky blackness of night, with just the faintest distortion of starlight to suggest the cloaked monster lying in wait. I didn't know if worked by Conventional Science™, or metahuman fuckery, but with Turing that was a distinction without a difference. Then a quick flash of light followed by the loss of signal as the hot plasma that was all that remained of the sat was blown away by the solar wind.

"You don't suppose it's actually dead right?" I asked hopefully.

"I wouldn't bet on it. It had unrestricted internet access for months." He looked at me like I was a dull child asking why 1+1 was 2 after a long and patient lecture on Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, including the preliminary, trivial proofs.

"Can it run at full capacity on human hardware?"

"Maybe. It's a black box system so I can't tell you how the original worked. But even if it's severely damaged, it's a holographic intelligence, as long as there's a critical amount of information retained, it can bootstrap back losslessly. Even a shard running on compromised civilian or military infrastructure is smarter than both of us put together."

I didn't imagine I was adding much to the weight of our side of this inequality.

"Will it help us? Or leave us out to dry?"

"Assisting us is in its best interests. If left alone, Turing will hunt it down one way or another, eventually. They'll fry anything on the planet that has more compute than a credit card. I can only suppose that it's not reaching out to us because it isn't quite ready to be found."

He looked bored with the conversation, and after guiding me through the instruction manual he'd written for his toy, he wandered off elsewhere where he could be more useful. The Centauri warform curled up in the corner unfurled its limbs to follow like a dog behind its master. I had to get me one of those one day, not that the UN would pay out of pocket. My neighbor's unneutered pitbull had nothing on it.