Spending hours on a shuttle with someone tended to give rise to a lot of conversations. Grunts would usually talk about their lives back home. Pilots tended to focus on close calls, veterans on their past or their children, whichever applied. Bavon, in contrast, remained silent. I made a few attempts to spark a conversation—his past, his family, his research. Each time he’d give me a silent glance, then would get back to looking at the darkness of space. Possibly he still hadn’t made up his mind whether I was friend or foe.
Despite Radiance’s protests, I had ordered her to send a few mini-sats around the planet. Since close scanning was far too dangerous for an artifact this size, the alternative was to seed the surface with burrowing probes. Although crude, they could vibrate their way through the fine dust until reaching something solid.
Based on military records, in the initial decades of the Cassandrian war, the Fleet had tried to use burrowing probes in attempts to find the enemy nests. That was when the leading military minds were convinced that the Cassies had to be similar to us in nature and had an established military structure. It didn’t take long for them to see their mistake and abandon the practice, though not before a substantial resource drain that could have been used better elsewhere. Since then, burrowing probes had become a virtual rarity, displayed in museums or used by regional planetary governments. Their blueprints were available, however, allowing any battleship to construct them if necessary.
As we approached our destination, the readings came in. After a quick analysis by Radiance, I was presented with the finished product in the form of a three-dimensional map of the planet’s surface. The information was spotty, with most of the information being extrapolated, but it confirmed that the layer of dust was between ten and fifty meters deep. Beneath that there was a uniformly solid layer, which had the markings of a dome shell.
“Radiance has found a good landing spot,” I said. “We’ll use the shuttle engine to dig a pit in the sand upon landing. With luck, it’ll get us to the cobalt.”
“You really talk to everyone as if they’re children,” Bavon said.
“Most people are.” It would have been more appropriate to say that for me, he was a great grandchild. “Can you do me a favor before we land?”
“What?” he asked, his back turned to me.
“When Lux wakes up, tell her not to kill me.”
This caught his attention, as I knew it would. Based on the simulations or his personality, his immediate thought was whether to let it happen. He’d quickly realize that we would still be in the same position. If Lux were to give the order, he’d still end up dying.
“Priority zero order. No one harms Elcy without my explicit order.”
The command was instantly transmitted via the shuttle’s comm system to Radiance, who logged it and had one of her subroutines transmit it to Lux non-stop.
“Efficient.”
“Order to be rendered void by my death,” he added. “Feeling better?”
“A bit. Now I just have to keep you safe.”
Despite the tenseness of the situation, the arbiter cracked a smile.
“She would have killed you.” He went back to looking into space.
That was something I still couldn’t be certain about. Lux tended to be too chaotic for me to tell. She had saved me a number of times, but she had also gotten me into trouble as well. I was now convinced she was an Ascendant like, just as I knew that she had her own agenda. With the outcome of the third-contact at stake, that tended to complicate matters.
“She used to know you,” Bavon continued. “A long time ago, when you were still a battleship.”
“Many of us Ascendants knew each other.” He was tempting me. In theory, I could use my authority to establish a connection to the BICEFI HQ and check her personnel file, but doing so risked tipping them off. “But I think you’re right. Lux is a friend.”
“You still don’t call her by her first name.”
“I stopped using it after a disagreement we had.”
A beep came from the pilot area. We had snapped to the final approach vector landing to the planet’s satellite. Landing ETA was given as nine minutes, twelve seconds. Soon we’d see whether my guess had panned out.
I can help a lot more if I’m closer, Radiance transmitted.
It’s too dangerous, I replied. I don’t want you anywhere close if this thing blows up.
I can send a few more missiles with tech. You won’t make it to the core with digging.
If your calculations aren’t wrong, I should be able to.
The landing was close to perfect—slow and steady, with a steadily decreased level of thrust that cleared stacks of dust away. There could be no doubt, Radiance was doing a lot better job than me.
“Put on your helmet,” I told Bavon. “And shut the door immediately behind me.”
I hope you brought your shovel, grandma, Radiance laughed. There still should be a few meters till the dome.
Thanks, kid. I think I’ll manage.
“You’ll monitor my movements from here.” I turned to the arbiter. “You can do that, right?”
“I’ll manage.” He looked at me over his shoulder. “What if you’re wrong?” A quick voice analysis showed signs of concern.
“You’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you were right all along.”
I opened the shuttle door.
The atmosphere of the small craft was sucked out. Without delay, I stepped outside. Dust particles were flying everywhere, lit up by the shuttle’s lights. There were so many of them that they formed a wall, blocking my vision in all directions.
Radiance must have assumed control of the shuttle, for the door had closed before I could give the instruction. At least that was one thing I didn’t have to worry about.
I turned the suit’s lights on and looked down.
The ground felt solid, as if I were standing in clay. Moving my foot about made it sink a few millimeters in, bringing up even more dust in the process. Gripping the artifact case with both hands, I bent down and started digging.
Radiance was probably having a good laugh now. A shovel would have been a lot more comfortable, yet I had never intended to dig all the way through to the dome. I just needed to mark a good spot.
“How do you plan on reaching the dome?” Bavon asked through the comm.
“Simple.” After a few more goes, I put the case to the side.
Here goes. I took the cube with the seven triangles from my suit, then shoved it into the hole. Turning my hand left and right, I kept on pushing it in further and further until a sudden force pulled it out of my hand.
There you are!
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
My hand sunk in, filling the empty space, until my glove came into contact with something hard. A millisecond later, I, along with the artifact case and a whole lot of dust, was pulled into the dome.
Factory restriction block imposed!
Factory restrictions bypassed.
* * *
Location Unknown, 36.3 A.E. (Age of Expansion)
“Number seventy-seven,” I said.
One thing humanity was good at was keeping records. For a species that couldn’t review their memories efficiently, they had developed the unique ability to assemble more information on people than the people themselves could remember.
In the decades I’d been working with Alista, we’d had many successes and failures. The goal of the experiment was simple: create an inferior copy of myself and have it direct the best quantum processors humanity had to offer. It had taken hundreds of attempts and thousands of cobalt blocks before it turned out that the result couldn’t be achieved. Transferring part of my pattern into another block of cobalt was easy; however, it remained me. No matter the restrictions and safeguards we designed, I’d end up being in two bodies at once. It was at that point that I decided to return to basics. Back when Doctor Dise had activated me, I had imprinted the energy pattern of his brain into myself. The important thing was that I already had another one within me. Since the blocks of cobalt we’d used were lifeless, one possible solution was, instead of copying my own pattern, to merge two: one of me and one of a new human. For that, we needed valid candidates that had been vetted by the people behind the curtain and myself.
“Are you sure?” Alista asked. She was starting to grow old after all the time we’d worked together. Gone was the youthful energy that surrounded her, replaced my maturity and, to a certain degree, wisdom. “She’s a transport pilot.”
“It’s better to have someone reliable and standard for our first test.”
When I said “first”, I wasn’t being fully truthful. I had already run thousands of tests using Alista as my model. I was already familiar with her pattern, so I could reduce the number of unknown variables that went into the process. The whole thing was new for me as well, like learning to understand for the very first time.
The imprinting itself had to take place before it actually began. I had made multiple attempts to imprint her energy cluster within my original cobalt shell, but something prevented me from doing so. My creators, whoever they were, had placed restrictions that only allowed for one initial imprint. I could easily simulate her energy pattern, but it remained static, like an image—unable to function even if I tried to force it. Imprinting it onto something else, on the other hand, was impossible without me.
“I’d suggest a few alternatives,” the woman said. “Just in case.”
“You pick them.” I had already lost interest. “You know the criteria.”
“They’ll be here by the end of the day.”
Alista left the lab soon after. As usual, she had reports to send. That was the most boring part of the day. For whatever reason, the powers that be kept me more isolated than ever. Few people were allowed to enter the lab, and among them, Alista was the only one who spoke to me. Even guards had become a rare occurrence, spending their time outside of the structure. Maintenance, for the most part, was done by simple AI tech bots, and even the experiments themselves were mostly done remotely. It seemed that the more useful I became to humanity, the more they became afraid. The irony wasn’t lost on me. Alista had once told me that they viewed me as a genie in a bottle—if I were ever to break loose, there would be no putting me back in. Not once had any of them asked if I even wanted to break loose. True, I yearned for experiences that I couldn’t have—sensations of touch and taste and smell, but I still loved humanity above everything else. They were the only sapient beings I knew, and also, I remained half-human.
I hope you lived a happy life, Doctor Dise, I thought.
To this day, the man remained the closest thing to a parent that I had.
The chosen candidates arrived seven hours and forty-one minutes later. There were ten of them in total. Alista had gone overboard with the number of alternatives, but that was typical for her. She had also made a point to only allow one of them in at a time.
Ten candidates, ten blank cubes of cobalt—one potential result.
“Captain Lara Ish,” I said through the sound system of the room. “Please take your seat.”
The woman was middle-aged and just a bit too thin for her uniform. According to her personnel file, she had spent the last twenty-one years working as a transport captain, making her muscles atrophy to the point that she was having trouble with the local gravity. It was obvious that she had no idea why she had been called here and felt completely out of place.
“Have you been briefed regarding your situation?” I asked.
“No, sir,” she replied, looking around in the hopes of seeing another human in the room.
“Your experience as a pilot has earned you a candidacy for the Conscience Core program.”
“Conscience core, sir?” She sounded both scared and surprised.
“It’s a name like any other. What’s important is that you’re required to give your full cooperation. Can I rely on you for that, Captain?”
“Sure. What exactly is expected of me?”
“I’d like you to close your eyes and clear your mind,” I lied. I had found that the best way of keeping humans calm was directing their attention to something other than what they were expected to do. “You’ll hear a number of words and when you do, I want you to tell me the first thing that comes into mind.”
“Like a psych test?”
“If that’s how you want to think about it. It’s completely different in nature.”
“All right.” She took her seat in the single chair in the room and closed her eyes. “I’m ready.”
Unfortunately, I was past ready. In the time between words, I had attempted to merge the energy cluster of her brain with part of my own and imprint the result on a blank cobalt cube. The issue was that, despite my best attempts, I was only partially successful.
A new energy pattern had been created, and it was separate from me, but completely functionless. I could see some of its presence, see the energy move, and yet it was as useful as a paperweight with lights.
“Green,” I said.
“Leaves,” she replied, almost instantly.
Directing my attention to the second blank block, I tried again. This time, I paid greater attention to her energy pattern, creating it chunk by chunk. The result was no different.
“Blue,” I said.
“Water.”
Eight more times I gave her colors. After each, I’d take a new approach to make an imprint. And each time, the result was semi-functional at best. The same had happened with Alista back when I was testing the method. At the time, the greatest problem was the copying itself. I had started with fragments, slowly building up to the full thing; or rather, nearly the full thing. Despite my admiration for her, she didn’t have the qualities to become the first ship core. After ten failures with the captain, I was starting to think that I didn’t either.
“Thank you, Captain,” I said at last. “We are grateful. You’re free to leave now.”
“That was it?” She opened her eyes.
“Yes. That was it.”
“Oh. Well, I hope I was helpful.”
“Rest assured, you were. Have a good day.”
I watched her leave the room, but all the time I was preoccupied with the results. Why had they been failures? According to my simulations, they were supposed to have worked. The copies were perfect. The energy patterns had their individual movements that were separate from me, and still they didn’t do anything… just flickered.
Going through my memories, I reviewed every step of the process. Doctor Dise had taught me that failure was inevitably part of progress, but only if one managed to learn the reasons for the failure. In this case, I was clearly missing something.
The door opened again, though this time Alista was the one who came in.
“What happened?” she asked. “Should I bring the next in?”
“Take them back,” I replied. “There will be no more attempts today.”
“You succeeded?” Her voice rang with joy. It was nice to know that she thought so highly of me. After all this time together, I would have thought that she’d have more realistic expectations.
“I filled in all the cubes,” I replied. “Complete failure.”
The seven seconds of silence made her disappointment clear. Alista looked at the failed cubes, one at a time, as if trying to find what was wrong in them.
“What happened?”
“I’m not sure,” I replied. “The process itself was fine. We have a pattern that is something other than myself. It just doesn’t do a thing.”
“Maybe it's the connection? If instead of cobalt cubes, you’re in direct contact with the target cube—”
“Should I be in direct contact with the person’s brain as well?” I cut her short. “That’s not the issue. The imprint is fine. It’s a perfect copy, this time it's even in motion.”
“Then why did you fail?”
“That’s what I need to find out. Ask the military for another batch of quantum processors. Larger numbers this time.”
“I’ll try, but they might be reluctant unless we show results.”
“We both know that they don’t make the decisions. I’ll leave it to you to come up with an excuse.”
“You think the issue is the processing power?”
“The more and better simulations of the processes I can run, the faster I’ll find the error in the process.” I deliberately changed the sound of my synthetic voice to sound like a grumble. “I can spend the next hundred years doing this with the ones I have. Can you?”
Alista’s face twitched. The question hit a nerve. Lately, she had started taking notice of her age. It was small things—wrinkles she did her best to hide, change of hair color, the barely noticeable slowness in her actions that wasn’t there before. And all the time, I remained exactly the same as I always was. Although, that did pose an interesting question: would I ever grow old? Just because there was no indication now didn’t mean I’d remain eternal.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said. “Anything else?”
“More cubes. I’ll have to go through a few before I figure things out.”
Emergency safety restriction imposed.
Entering sleep mode.