I wasn't entirely in the dark about the movements of the fleet, every few minutes, updates would arrive from Gupta, and after an enormous amount of independent vetting by the Bàdào's systems, they'd be sent over to me over the minimal interface I was allowed. I had a moment to glance at it, while the emulation reconfigured, Xinglan conferring with the more powerful AI lurking at the heart of the ship in order to figure out the circumstances most conducive to getting Shen to be useful.

I wondered about her. When I'd glanced at the files covering most of the man's life, details about his real, flesh and blood daughter had been scarce, so redacted they didn't even bother telling me which parts had been scrubbed from the record. There was little evidence, barring census data, that she'd even existed. Social media, even third party forums, such as those dedicated to gossiping about metahumans and their families, those of the rich, or in this case all of the above, they all lacked any sign of her presence.

Mind uploads come in many forms, let alone formats. You have what might be called the gold-standard, where molecular dynamics are modeled as faithfully as possible, then at the level of individual neurons (and other relevant cells, such as astrocytes), then bundling of functional regions according to their statistical correlates, all the way to what some disputed even counted as emulation, such as training an AI, often a language model of some kind, on the numerous artifacts of a person's existence, such as all the text they wrote, audio-visual recordings, biometric data and the like, until it can reproduce their behavior beyond the ability of anyone to distinguish, at least until they come face to face with a computer instead of a person.

The molecular level is computationally intractable, at least for mundane computers I know of, leaving aside the immense difficulty of even scanning a brain with that nansocopic precision. The cellular sims are hard, most existant Uploads, and there aren't that many, are a combination of cellular modeling and then some abstractions and approximations to make it possible to run them at anywhere near real-time. It can't really be helped, AI architectures are so much more efficient in terms of intelligence per operation, I remember the first "human level" AI several decades back running on truly minimal hardware.

Fleet Admiral Gupta and the rest of his cyborg crew had been on the bleeding edge, their brains (or what was left of the organic part) had long been prepared for an emergency scan. Trillions of nanites had infiltrated them, coating axons like barnacles, injecting microneedles for gently reading and writing data in their quiescent phase, but always ready to jump into action and tear cells apart so as to taste their internals and process that into code. Most of the hard work had been done ages ago, and the Admiral's frontal lobe had been the lone holdout.

Close to magic, in my eyes; when I'd first seen the process of a brain scan, it had been an achingly slow, painstaking process, with a plastinated and cryopreserved brain taken from a dying donor that had been sliced with nanoscalpels into planes micrometers thick, then scoured with electron microscopy. That particular upload hadn't worked, the entity produced a gibbering wreck, beyond the ability of error correction to fix. But the tech had progressed fast, even if I hadn't seen the new developments, it had been just a year later that the Federal US had announced a high quality emulate running in-silico, albeit at about a thousandth the speed of a brain made of meat.

It's only now, if you have a few billion USDC to burn, be it your own or that of a government, that you can reliably get a high fid scan that works as fast as you did before, and if you're with the big boys, then faster. Hardly the mass-market posthuman existence I'd once hoped for myself, but I've seen plenty of miracles in my life, and with biological immortality almost prosaic, I'm not in a real rush.

(Most of the money is in the compute, scans are negligible in terms of cost)

Barring the "train an AI to impersonate you" route, all of them meet the standards of the Objective Continuity of Consciousness Assessment Scale, a behemoth of a neuro-mathematical construct that claims to reliably show that the version of you in the computer is the "same" as the one who got in the tube with all the whirling cutting tools and lasers. Remind me to talk about it some other time, when I've got the time for footnotes.

At any rate, Xinglan didn't seem like a normal AI, was she a model trained on the real daughter? A low-fidelity Upload? I knew enough about Shen to be quite confident he wasn't a bio-chauvinist, if that was "really" his daughter, I don't think he'd be affronted that she was now a digital sentience. I'd heard rumours about attempts to merge a mind upload with an AI, but what material was available to me at my level of clearance suggested it was a waste of time, more like gluing them together and hoping for the best rather than a true synthesis. Human minds, even digitized, were just too different from all known routes to AI.

I do mostly trust the OCCAS myself, it tells me that taking a nap and waking up again leaves me the same person, so does being anesthetized, or growing older, but having a decent chunk of my frontal lobe burned away and then regrown from fresh stem cells doesn't, which I can only hope is an intuitively reasonable position even if you don't follow the maths. That's why I still felt pangs of doubt about running hot again and doing just that, despite having resolved to do it if I had no other choice.

I still hadn't entirely given up hope, after leaving the Agnimatajay in a manner my captors couldn't predict, I'd felt it again, burning away at my morbid desire for revenge through taking them down with me. Maybe, just maybe, there was a way to get out a message that was obvious to any superintelligent AI watching, while passing by the notice of my compromised lace, which I had little doubt would hesitate to just fucking fry me if it thought it necessary.

Still, I wasn't the only one with problems, looking at Gupta's latest report, I almost had an aneurysm on his behalf.

(I could get used to XRAY, the sheer amount of juicy gossip I'd been missing out on! Let's hope they forget to take it away from me.)

One such document I had access to, without having any other reason to read it barring clearance and curiosity, was the firm rejection from Earth of Gupta's fervent pleas for aid:

HUMAN-READABLE SUMMARY OF EXECUTIVE DELIBERATIONS

[A bunch of verbose nonsense about checksums, relativistic time adjustments and quantum and metahuman encryption, which I'll skip since I'm fucking dying here, just because a baseline human can read it doesn't mean it's worth their time]

Decision Makers-

UNSC members (veto holding) + Rotating GA voting observers + 7x Actinide AGIs (voting) + 32 Lanthanide AGIs (non-voting) + 2362 Sub-Lanthanide AIs (observational only)

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Total Votes-

2554 for, 184 against, 3 abstain

Veto(oes)Enacted?

No

(Great, that meant everyone who mattered had decided to leave us out to dry)

The Extended Working Group for Intra-Solar Affairs has decided to deny Fleet Admiral Gupta's request, on the behalf of the wider Taskforce Gangaputra, for further military assistance, including activation of contingency protocols [REDACTED], [REDACTED], [REDACTED]..

(The length of the list of reactions was itself redacted)

.. SOMNOLENT CANINE, SLUMBERING DEITY, RUBY LANCE, MAGIC HURRICANE..

(I'm skipping most of them, just because XRAY tells me their names doesn't mean I get to know what they actually are)

.. as well as requests to divert the Cislunar Fleet, operational prototype vessels meant for Taskforce Reconquista, or to requisition combat-capable non-UN affiliated vessels in-system, or the diversion of the Strategic Metahuman Reserve (elements not included in the list of contingencies mentioned prior to this).

Explanation of Our Decision-

The Working Group, including the supermajority of relevant voting members and all veto-wielding entities, believes, in good faith, that the diversion of additional resources to assist Gangaputra is not in the best interests of Sol, and specifically, Earth.

We are aware that this is a disappointing result, but as holders of GAMMA and above, you are capable of examining our reasoning in minutiae, and are extended the right to appeal, even if precog analysis suggests that is futile.

(And above?? It's the XRAY classification that lets me even know there are levels above GAMMA)

To condense our reasoning as succinctly as possible, the most relevant factors were-

1) Taskforce Gangaputra represents (or represented) an investment on the order of 3 months of total industrial capacity in Sol (1 month adjusted for further exponential growth by 2034). As the force entrusted with the prosecution of the war in Alpha Centauri, you represent a grossly excessive amount of force/manpower/investment for the purposes of preventing a secessionary event on Mars. This accounts for the additional necessity of containing a hostile Centauri AGI, which is believed to still be operating well below nominal capacity, as well as the interference of the terrorist metahuman organization known as Lumen.

2) The destruction of the majority of Gangaputra has already exceeded acceptable casualty figures. Rest assured that sanctions against the United States are being enforced as we speak, one of them being the abnegation of their customary veto rights in this matter.

3) Mars is simply not important enough to risk compromising the security of the rest of Sol, be it by the activation of final contingencies, or the diversion of Terran Defense Forces to assist you. We do not believe that the garrisons beyond Mars will be able to reach you in time for it to matter.

4) Precog analysis suggests that deploying most of the assets requested would tip the balance of power in such a manner as to prompt Lumen to retreat, or worse, attack other, less well defended targets. Until the issue of their rapid deployment capabilities via teleportation is addressed, this constitutes an unacceptable risk to the shipyards in Ceres, Jupiter and Mercury, where the bulk of Reconquista is under construction.

5) Disruption of the financial system has crossed acceptable parameters.

6) Reassuringly, both precog and Actinide AGI analysis suggests a non-negligible probability of successful resolution of the conflict within the newly updated parameters, [REDACTED] +- 17%, without further (significant) aid.

The denial of the requisition of strategic assets constitutes both an informed risk-benefit calculation, as well as a representation of our confidence in your ability to handle the matter with assets at hand.

We wish you luck, and remind you that discretionary deployments are in progress to either support you in case of a victory, or continue prosecuting the conflict in case of failure.

Well, shit. I can taste the shit even after the UNSC put it in a sandwich, to summarize a summary of a summary, they'd decided that we weren't worth throwing good money, metas and ships after bad. I wished there was more detail about the "disruption to the financial system", but I didn't really have the time to look into it.

I'd be actually reassured if they'd told me what the odds of success were, but those were some wide error bars, even after the best AGI and precogs had a crack at it. I suspected Lycosa's bullshit again.

Let's hope the 95% confidence interval didn't kiss zero.

It was cramped in the cabin, yet more metahuman support staff cramming in, discussing arcane matters and the best use of their powers in synergy. I got the impression that they were trying to pull all the stops, it seemed that Shen had an annoying tendency to cotton on about the false nature of his environment given enough time, either a testament to his IQ or his powers. They were scared of him, treating him like a caged tiger where the sedatives weren't on a reliable timer. This puzzled me, the man wasn't much of a threat in combat, as far as I knew, but I decided it was more that their necks were on the chopping block if something happened to him. The CCP(R) weren't known for being merciful.

Xinglan appeared again, cool as a cucumber straight out of an industrial freezer. I didn't see any sign of her being agitated, such as if her boss had seen my subtle hints, but that meant less than nothing. As with Van Der Waals, her face showed not one twitch of a muscle she didn't mean it to.

"Dr. Sen. The situation is heating up, the Fleet Admiral has ordered that we extract maximum value from our asset as soon as possible. Here is a list of powers, known, suspected, or projected, of our Lumen adversaries, we must ensure that the Anchor is calibrated to tackle them."

And what a list it was. I felt a sinking feeling in my gut, the latest of many, certainly not the last. I hoped the planners were being paranoid, as they ought to be, the combination of powers was enough to suggest that they could give us a run for our money. I fervently hoped the Kill Star hadn't run out of party tricks.

"Isn't the typical time taken for calibration of a brand new power about 2 hours? How the hell are we going to finish this?"

I poked at the projection as she pouted. "At great expense, I've got a Chronomancer on the way, but even then, she's not here yet, and time is of the essence. Do your best, it'll be a few minutes till we're ready, I'll leave you to it."

Bitch just vanished on me. Come on, I'm sure she could spare the clock cycles to keep a conversation going. I wasn't too busy profaning her, a Chronomancer? It might be a coincidence, it might be the smart one taking notice of my position. I felt numb, I suspected that the emotional circuitry in my brain was burned out in a far too literal sense.

Shen's brain had burst a vessel, turning the supporting fluid a shade of salmon. Our Healer was on it, I didn't know if her gesticulations were necessary for her powers to work, a show for the rest of us, or for her convenience. Maybe all of the above.

Right, that ping was the first After Action Report, at least the first I'd had time to look at. Consul had, against all expectations, broken out of the attempts at stun-locking him indefinitely and had begun to fight us for real.

The walls of the Bàdào, meant to shrug off blows that would erase a city or three, didn't feel quite so thick.

I started to look at the carnage he'd wrought.