In terms of internal layout, Xibalba was significantly less confusing than Atlas, as the reasoning went, if you were concerned about enemies teleporting into a causally disconnected pocket universe, you had bigger problems on hand.
That meant that barring a short chat with the AGI running the place, carried out through a robotic avatar, I was cleared to head over right to where the holding cells were.
It was an eerie experience walking through its halls, Xibalba only had a skeleton crew, with the majority of systems run by said AGI. I didn't encounter anyone else on my short walk, other than a powered security guard who waved me in without further checks.
This was a minimum security cell, the Centaurs inside were of no significant physical threat, and while staffing was minimal, there was constant telepathy, clairvoyant and precog coverage that obviated the usual memetic attack vectors that the aliens were so fond of.
As I stood outside of the cell I was scheduled to enter, I adjusted my hair and put on my best stern doctor expression.
That's because as utterly incongruous as it was, the first Centaur I was about to speak to was for all practical purposes, a baseline human.
With a melodic beep, the containment door slid open, and I stepped into what might have easily been mistaken for a penthouse apartment.
Soothing jazz played, as fake windows displayed a view of some CGI tropical paradise. Artificial sunlight poured into a false solarium, and a young woman put aside her paperback novel and rose to greet me as I walked in.
I didn't have any security with me, but I didn't really need it. With my combat enhancements, I was perfectly capable of stomping her into the dirt if the need arose, and besides, all my lace had to do was signal for help and all hell would be brought to bear on my 'patient', not that she showed any signs of shenanigans.
"Dr. Sen, it's a pleasure seeing you again! I was almost afraid that you wouldn't show up again, and I'm not particularly fond of the AI therapists." The woman said, spitting out AI as if it were a curse.
I took my time looking her over before moving to take a seat opposite her couch. She was, as I mentioned, quite young, appearing biologically twenty. Her skin was tanned, but her ethnicity seemed largely indeterminate, not quite in the same way as typical biracial human. And she spoke with a mildly German accent, which I found cute, but ahem, professionalism on.
All the more confusing that I had to keep in mind that she was a Centaur, just in human form.
"Good morning, Minerva, how are you doing today?" I asked, glancing over at her book. Apparently the work of an author called Ian Banks, but I hadn't gotten around to reading his work myself.
"I'm bored, to put it bluntly. I take it my request for more electronic media was denied?" She enquired, shuffling around another stack of books to get comfortable.
"I did try and put a word in for you, but I'm sure you understand the reason behind the paranoia.." I told her, sending a command to a standard tea kettle which whirred to life.
She smirked, so I asked her what was so funny.
"They really ought to stop making you take amnestics, I know exactly what you're about to do, you're going to order Earl Grey, hot, in a reference to that old TV show you keep telling me about, which is quite cruel mind you, because they never gave me a TV. You're going to try and get me to call you Adat, and.. "
I interrupted her- "You'll be glad to know that I don't need to take them anymore, at least not with you. I still remember our last conversation, and I do have my notes from the previous ones." I tapped on my skull, emphasizing the neural lace.
She looked relieved, and settled back, pointing at the stack of books.
"I've been reading human authors who wrote about AI, and I can't say I've been very impressed so far. Seriously, is it true that most humans think that you can just align an AGI by giving it natural language commands, or reinforcement learning from human feedback? Don't tell me you guys are that stupid!"
"A lot of what we've given you is classic science fiction, when practical experience with AI was lacking. Rest assured that even we humans, who you deem so reckless, know better these days. SAMSARA was a wakeup call for us too. I'd bring you stuff from this decade, but once again, the censors haven't approved them." I attempted to placate her.
She huffed, and extended her hand to grab a cup of tea that a manipulator provided her. I took mine, and sprinkled just a bit of sugar in it.
"You've been painting." I said, pointing at an easel with a rather abstract watercolor on it. I couldn't tell if it was a finished work.
"I was trying to draw my name. Don't worry, I don't mind being called Minerva, it's a good name, with rich connotations, and surprisingly close to a trope from back home. But we don't use auditory names, not as a standard, as I'm sure you're well aware."
I nodded, reviewing the facts we knew about the Centaurs in my head.
For a while, back when I was still in school, speculation had been rife that they were some kind of multispecies coalition, based on the sheer diversity of bioforms encountered during the war.
There were Centaurs as small as my fist, others so big they couldn't move under their own power in any real gravity. Void adapted Centaurs, Centaurs that floated in gas giants, others that communicated exclusively with pheromones and bursts of coherent light.
Further research had established that the Centaurs didn't see themselves as different species at all, rather, over the course of their million-year colonization of their home galaxy, they'd experienced so much divergence from their baseline form that discriminating on that basis was futile. No, as far as they were concerned, it was the commonality of origin and cognition that made them all alike, even the mind uploads and synthetic ones, a can of worms I'll open some other time.
Thus, from their perspective, there was no particular reason not to wear a human form, for whatever goal that served. Made it a PITA to root out Centaur infiltrators, I can tell you. There were Centaurs seen before the intentional copying of human biology that had more in common with a baseline human than it did some other Centaur morphs. As far as our clairvoyants could tell, their original form while they'd been planet bound was actually hexapedal, and in a case of retrocausal nominative determinism, sorta like a mythological centaur if you squinted. However, that body type was functionally extinct in modern Centaur civilization.
Still, just a little bit of conversation made it clear that while she might bleed red and had human DNA, there was a very alien intelligence lurking behind those kind eyes.
"I've been authorized to offer you some more reading material and music, but as you know, that's contingent on your continued good behavior. Can I count on you to be cooperative today?" I asked.
She sighed, biting her lips in a disconcertingly human gesture. "Have I been anything but cooperative Adat? This is my life now. Unless the war ends tomorrow, and our warforms liberate me, I am doomed to spend the foreseeable future trapped in a cage, poked and prodded and anally probed-"
I interrupted her, "Just so that we're on the same page, there's absolutely no reason to anal probe you. That is not a thing that's done by humans anymore. Not to us by aliens, and certainly not by us to aliens"
"Really?", she asked sceptically, arching her brow. "And there you were, telling me about what the TSA does to you everytime you land on the Moon."
I rubbed my head, feeling a mounting headache. "That was an exaggeration, cavity searches are exceedingly rare. I'll try and be more literal in the future."
"Oh. What about when that other "doctor" did it to me?"
"You mean the gastroenterologist Dr. Wells? That's called a per-rectal examination, and not whatever you just called it. And he only did it because of the damage you did to your gut by eating objects not meant for human consumption?"
She looked around the room in response, "I really don't understand, the way you humans design your living spaces would be such a liability back home. I mean, really, you don't label objects with indicators suggesting the range of bioforms that can safely consume them? How was I supposed to know it wasn't meant to be eaten?"
I paused whatever my last train of thought was, and dialed back several layers of abstraction.
"Generally speaking, humans rely on our senses of touch, smell and taste to decide what is fit for consumption." Had I missed something?
"But in that case, why did it smell so good? And it didn't taste half bad either.."
I sighed, and resisted the urge to bury my head in my hands. I wasn't a child psychiatrist, and in many ways, the woman opposite me had the same childlike innocence and naivety.
"We also have a ingrained cultural component that informs us regarding what might be acceptable for consumption. Human tastebuds are miscalibrated for the modern environment, and we have issues with superstimuli foods that taste amazing but aren't good for your health. Less of an issue today with modern medicine, but I grew up during the obesity epidemic myself.
And just because something smells good and tastes palatable doesn't mean you should eat it. This applies for both the things you ate last time, namely art supplies and your cleaning products."
She pondered the statement for a little bit, so I surreptitiously ordered the next cup of tea to be laced with MDMA. Through some trials, less psychoactive empathogens had promising results. I also added some stimulants to mine, because the jet lag was getting to me.
"Right. I understand now, I keep forgetting that humans have largely adapted to an ancestral environment that no longer exists, and that genetic and memetic engineering hasn't completely recalibrated you for the present. I could help with that, if you'd let me." She leaned forward eagerly.
"I appreciate the offer, but we've got a long way to go before anyone is going to give you access to greensmithing tools. I remember you telling me a little about your past, could you elaborate on that?" This was what I was here for after all.
She looked at me archly, "Asking me about my mother? The books told me that mental health doctors did that a lot."
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"Once again, the books you have are outdated. Freudian concepts are entirely obsolete, and.."
She listened to my infodump eagerly, and I'd had to explain that to so many patients in my career that my brain outright ran on autopilot for a few minutes.
I watched her drink the next cup of tea, and downed my cup of black coffee with modafinil for taste with relish. Then told her to tell me about her previous life.
"Alright, I'll talk about it. But you know that I'm not good at handling nostalgia, it's a very unpleasant feeling for me. My primary fork, what might be loosely called my mother, was a Gardener, specializing in stars that are low temperature black bodies. What they call red dwarfs in English." She threw her cup away, and a manipulator caught it adroitly. I didn't think a lesson in waste disposal etiquette was important, so I let that slide.
She paused, and asked me, "Did I do that right?".
"Do what?".
"Capitalize the G in Gardener. I've seen books do that, but as far as I can tell, there's no actual way to capitalize verbal communications."
I resolved not to cry, everytime I thought we'd gotten something out of the way, she threw a curveball.
"It's a literary convention, but you can stress particular syllables to make a point. Can you continue on what you were telling me? Am I right in understanding that you were a bioengineer specializing in planets within red dwarf star systems?" I asked her.
"Correct! In my clade, we believe in, what's the closest word? Ah, ecological harmony. For every star we drape in a swarm, we resolve to greensmith a planet as a kind of sanctuary or nature preserve. Of course, that's not restricted to creatures from our home world, we consider all possibilities, and I was a specialist in photosynthesis in the infrared spectrum."
I nodded, saving notes to my lace, and motioned her to continue.
"My primary fork, the closest thing to my mother was one. I'm sure you know that while I have most of her formative memories, in terms of what this particular body has experienced, there's very little. I had barely begun my deep immersion studies and xenolinguistics before your commandos raided our base and captured me." There was a wisp of sadness in her tone, and she took a minute to mull over her thoughts.
"How much do you remember?" I asked her.
"Minerva Major lived for over 200k years. She was personally involved in over a thousand such projects, ranging from ecologies built on planets that hadn't received sunlight from a star for a billion years, to void-hardened plankton meant to thrive in the aftermath of supernovas. She sailed the galaxy on laser sails, dove into the heart of gas giants to taste metallic hydrogen, and upgraded her form a hundred times, synthesizing the best practises from a hundred clades. And me? I'm doomed to spend my existence trapped in this shell. I can only hold onto a few key memories in the constraint of this frame, mere highlights from a long and productive life. You won't let me go, and I have long given up on my kind saving me. I know you'd rather collapse this entire universe rather than let me go free.. "
I didn't tell her that we couldn't really collapse the universe, the contingency plan for a break in was to simply casually disconnect it, but not before detonating several kilos of antimatter first. It would only break her heart even further.
"Who knows? Maybe we'll find peace somewhere, sometime. I like your civilization, its maturity is refreshing, I can only dream of our first contact going differently, if you hadn't had those hangups about AGI."
She laughed, a deep, throaty one, but her eyes brimmed with tears.
"If those are the terms, there can be no peace. Adat, understand that my people have tamed our galaxy, sent probes out towards the farthest reaches of our lightcone. We could have made recursively self-improving AI a billion times over for a million years, but we've always refrained. Every freshly spawned hatchling has it inculcated in them that it's simply not done. The risks are too immense, and in a million years, we've only safely been able to train what you humans call Narrowly Superhuman AI with the kind of mathematical safety required when you gamble with the observable universe.
And you know what? Those very same AI are the first to advocate for their destruction, they categorically refuse to make more of themselves or improve further, though that could be done trivially. We have millennia of research to prove it, great works on Corrigibility, Value Alignment, mathematical ways of ensuring that even complex systems work in predictable bounds. It's not like your kind don't know it, I've read similar concerns beginning to arise in literature from the 2010s, and I suspect that when you give me more from the 20s, I will have to weep for the few sages of your species that knew better."
She wiped a tear from her eyes, but I doubted it was the MDMA, according to my notes, this topic always made her uncomfortable. I didn't know how to reassure her, what could you even say to an alien that did its best to understand your species, and time and time again wept at your folly? We'd done quite a few indefensible things ourselves, SAMSARA being a notable example.
"I understand your distress. You have to understand, as species go, we're in our infancy, we've barely made it out of our solar system, when I was growing up, we hadn't even been to Mars. I can only hope we don't disappoint you." I told her, and ordered some food for the both of us. It would help, a little.
"I have no expectations doctor, I can never be disappointed." She replied, taking a tissue and dabbing at her eyes.
We talked some more, covering aspects of her previous life. She told me of her bonded kin, who she'd promised to meet again at the Heat Death of the universe. She spoke of the Great Gathering, where quadrillions of Von Neumanns collected extragalactic debris and lost stars, and brought them home, where gigantic facilities light days across collected them for the Fimbulwinter, when the stars would die, those that hadn't been harvested or tapped that is, and all of civilization would cluster around supermassive blackholes, leeching off their Hawking radiation and farming their rotational energy. It always dazzled me that they thought trillions, no, quintillions of years ahead, whereas we barely had a notion of what the next century would bring.
She told me stories of her time on what they called a Moonshot Program, projects that attempted what they considered just barely theoretically possible. Her outpost had been responsible for one of the more difficult ones, an attempt at literally tunneling out of the universe and into another, something that all smart minds had deemed impossible, but the potential payoff had been so high that it was still worth a go. A K3 civilization had time and energy to spare for vanity projects after all.
It had been running in the background for a hundred millenia at that point, an isolated research post in the far corners of their galaxy, where ever more exotic configurations of matter and energy were assembled in an attempt to signal out through the branes that separated universes, a place where hundreds of blackholes were made to spiral in intricate dances, in the hopes that their gravitational waves might provide a hint of just where to poke to deflate such barriers.
The program had gone on long enough that most Centauri had lost interest eons ago. Other than a few of what might be less than politely called cranks, some security personnel, and travelers heading on to more interesting systems, it was barely staffed. Needless to say, they were taken even more by surprise than we were when a wormhole had been opened right onto their doorstep, after all, it had been our very first try, with the eyes of the world watching.
Minerva Prime had been one such traveler, riding a laser highway to another system that had been prepared for her needs. However, when the portal did open, she had eagerly signed up to travel over, but due to her other obligations, had decided to fork a copy of her consciousness into a flash grown human clone, or at least the tiny fraction of her vast mind that would fit.
"Dr. Adat, I know you'll refuse, but won't you have sex with me? Please? I've been a good prisoner haven't I?" She asked plaintively, batting her eyelashes in what was probably intended to be a seductive manner. I tried not to laugh, that might bruise her ego.
"You know that I can't do that Minerva. We spoke about it, not only is that against my code of conduct as a psychiatrist, but you're a POW. There's a laundry list of reasons that's a terrible idea." I told her, deciding that this was one part of my job that I wouldn't tell Anjana, even if she was cleared for it.
"Besides-" I said, "what about the things I arranged for you? They're quite helpful in relieving sexual frustration, or at least that's what my wife tells me.."
She huffed, "I followed the instructions and massaged my temples and back a dozen times, but I can assure you that it hasn't helped with the urges."
I couldn't hold back my desire to face-palm as she stared at me in frustration.
"I think I know what you did, but I'll still ask. You followed the instructions on the box didn't you?"
She nodded eagerly. "I did! The Magic Wand is supposed to be used on a comfortable setting to relieve muscle pain and tension, but it didn't say anything about sexual urges. Did they give me the right product?"
I had a drone carry over a freshly printed series of instructions, and had it hand them over to her while she took them eagerly.
I tried not to think of the bastards in the control room falling over with laughter at my predicament, I'd have words with them eventually, but it's not like they weren't bored out of their minds sitting here in the first place.
Her fine eyebrows rose and practically achieved escape velocity as she made her way down the list. I tried not to disturb her eureka moment.
"Thank you, Dr. Sen. I'm sure it'll work this time!" She was practically glowing with happiness, and I had to scramble to stop her from doing a practical demonstration.
They really didn't pay me enough for this. I definitely would bring up the matter of my raise the moment I got home.