Ethan
My room back on earth was always kept clean and simple.
I chose for it a neutral color palette: the walls were painted caramel, the floors made of maple, and the ceiling kept white to better diffuse the light.
The furniture present includes a bed, a dresser, and a desk all made of mahogany.
Above the desk, there is my old portable pc, a few sheets of paper, and framed photos and medals I kept on display to remind me of my "good" deeds.
There are a few decorative items, such as plants and a few pictures on the walls, not much but family and the guys of the unit I was in.
This simplicity helps creates a peaceful and calming atmosphere that allows me to focus on my thoughts and relax.
And of course, I have my ghostly self-reflection with me at the moment.
First I tried to bargain with the devil and ask Virgil how it tracks time, and sadly it turns out the aliens have atomic clocks too.
All the people I knew and cared for are dead, it appears that my nation no longer exists.
The only silver lining I see is that my race -that is, humans- actually managed to enter space properly while I slept.
I am concerned that all of the data Virgil has on us is that, and us fighting three world wars and some colony wars.
Considering I found a couple of references to things I saw in movies I don’t have much trust in the data Virgil possesses.
Even Virgil finds that concerning, for all the wrong reasons you can imagine a machine would; like data must be complete and precise and all that crap.
I don't object to Virgil's desire for a single accurate history of mankind since I will benefit from the result.
I rather believe that gathering multiple different perspectives would be more useful for comparing to spot any patterns to the real truth.
I have too little to go on on this to speculate, but Virgil and I agreed upon finding more accurate data on humans.
I feel the machine wants an accurate one as I do.
Virgil and I also went over a lot of technical jargon for a while and now I am here mulling, trying to make some sense of it.
Originally all of this was that weird place I saw Virgil for the first time.
This is something Virgil calls virtual reality, it can re-create anything from my memory and I chose this.
It’s… well comforting and unsettling at the same time.
Comforting because there’s no place like home, unsettling because I am well aware I am not home.
There’s also the small detail that I can run my hand through the walls, there’s nothing solid in here.
And there’s the question of what I am right here, right now, outside and inside my body at the same time.
I'm my memories?
I'm my ego?
I'm my eternal soul?
If I ever understand what Virgil means by a biological construct, hooray!
If I could, I wouldn't mind leaping into my bed, burying my face in the pillow, and start cursing like the Dickens but it wouldn't solve anything, would it?
All I know is I look like when I was in my late twenties, at my very peak and I feel weirdly good.
Looking at my self-reflection I have an impressive physical form, with well-developed muscles that exude strength and power.
Having chosen the military career I considered myself an average bodybuilder, I dedicated a significant amount of time and effort towards building and maintaining my physique to be able to endure the missions.
My height and strength along with all the training and martial arts always gave me an edge and allowed me to accomplish physical tasks with ease.
The flip side of it all was that I was a pretty easy target to hit, but that was me, in the past.
Ok Ethan, let’s try this in order from the beginning.
Virgil recovered and repaired my brain and part of my body, what it couldn’t repair was replaced.
Now from my understanding, I am made of metal, complicated tech stuff, and itsy bitsy little robots called nanites for repairs.
If the horns and armor are taken into account, I am a little bit wider and a little bit taller than before.
As I already stated, I still have some portions of my body, but I didn't pick up half of the technical information about how the implants function, so I have no idea how they interact with the rest of my body.
Who knows? It could even be magic, and it could make more sense to me!
Maybe I should have mentioned that I'm not a nerdy IT guy.
Not like Virgil doesn’t know.
Yes, Virgil is doing its best to enlighten me, but the majority of what it says escapes me, and when it shares directly into my brain, it feels horribly wrong.
Imagine yourself riding a train and all of a sudden learning everything there is to know about operating a train as well as the inner workings of a locomotive.
You even get the ability to construct your engine and train, apparently filled with your passengers.
I am what Virgil calls an Overind drone, the latter is a term I heard used with bees, so Virgil brought me back to my biology classes to explain just that.
To make matters worse, it appears that Virgil can force me to relive my memories if it so chooses.
Virgil doesn’t get why this greatly increases both its creepiness and my concerns about our forced cohabitation.
Ethan stop and get back to business, there’s absolutely no point in getting irked by the machine that’s keeping you alive!
Breathe. Get your bearings. The only easy day was yesterday. Now you have to survive.
Back to where I left off, it seems that I am a unique project: so an overmind drone is something unique in Virgil's terms.
In the most basic terms: I'm like a queen bee, and I get to build my drones and even control a hive of sorts.
Just to dial the creepiness factor to eleven, I get to see and feel whatever the other drones experience.
Yeah, even the fucking spiders!
Thankfully it’s a feature I can order Virgil to turn on and off or manage differently or I would be going crazy.
I'm still trying to decide if the overarching concept or the actual outcome worries me more, but I'll get to that quickly.
The large spidery objects I observed as Virgil performed the integration thing are the drones I can manufacture.
Since they carry a lot of those nanites within, Virgil refers to them as carrier drones, which in a way feels like the appropriate word.
Even though neither Virgil nor I are capable of controlling them, they appear to count as fully-fledged drones, unlike the nanites.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
They are the base to gather materials and create another drone.
They have some kind of sophisticated coding and preset mission, so it appears like that all that is left to do is to give them basic instructions and let them go to work.
Before getting into what kind of work these buggers can do, there are several issues with the creation of those drones.
It takes a lot of resources to make these; to make 10, Virgil had to use one of the damaged recharge pods.
I'll use an approximation of the quantity since I left my tape measure in my other pair of pants.
The pods are essentially hollow cylinders that are wide enough to fit my body easily within, are as thick as a typical toaster, and are as tall as the room.
On the other hand, the resulting carrier drones are roughly the size of a tarantula, so I'm not sure we can build enough of those before we run out of resources.
Virgil and I had to make a couple of journeys and it took about an hour to create a single drone because the process is time- and energy-consuming.
Cutting the metal takes about 5% of my reserves and letting the fabrication unit do its job uses around 10% per carrier drone.
Then creating the drone proper is another can of worms entirely, but the carrier drones will gather some more metal and broken tech stuff themselves.
That will be used up in the process dubbed by Virgil “repairs” to create the future drone,
Virgil has also stated that all is needed it’s pretty common stuff unless I want to do something particular like myself.
Once they get what they need the carrier drones will then get to work and proceed to create a new drone.
Multiple carrier drones will be used in the process, from a minimum of two to a maximum of ten, based on the amount of “repair” needed.
The whole process of drone creation takes a couple of hours to complete, including the resource-gathering phase.
Yeah, that feels overly complex but probably is some designed flaw to limit the viability of Virgil or who’s controlling it to gain an army easily.
Virgil claimed that I have been the drone that required the greatest resources to assemble, ten carrier drones, and the use of higher-quality parts and metal.
I don’t get why the Granfi wanted a command platform installed on a being of another race, outside of testing if it was at all possible to create.
Virgil is unable to give me a reasonable explanation either, well outside of his statement that it was an experiment.
That’s frustrating.
Let’s talk end results here, 'cause boy those are way, way worse than everything I could imagine and way, way more concerning to me.
I initially believed that what I saw when Virgil shared his memory was a frozen individual, that this procedure was something to extend lifespan without resorting to cryosleep thus Virgil's interpretation of it defeating death.
Nope, Virgil actually meant that it can make fucking zombies!
The very dead Granfi that I saw when I woke up?
Yeah, that is now, an hour later, a very living functioning drone.
Basically, pick a corpse, let the carrier drones do their job and you basically raise the dead back to a semblance of life.
There’s no convincing me this wasn’t meant for waging war.
I mean if you prepare a lot of carrier drones beforehand you can raise an army in a couple of hours of respite.
And your troops get very hard to kill again, I mean besides the fact that they get a layered metal armor.
The nanites can heal small and medium damages, so given time any non-lethal wound will heal faster than any organic form of life I know of.
Heck, the nanites can make the drone rise and fight again if it was not outright destroyed on the spot.
I’m grateful for that thank you, but that’s quite the concern military speaking!
You also kind of get the perfect soldier, with no emotions, no memories, and enough instinct left to engage in self-defense.
That's before Virgil worked its magic, downloading an entire operating system onto it and essentially forcing the drone to perform back-flips while wearing a blindfold.
The wet dream of any drill sergeant: a recruit that will start to jump when ordered, not even cheekily asking you how high.
The silver lining of having this second body is I got to explore the place, yeah in a creepy ass way.
I was in a body that wasn’t mine and I couldn’t control it.
Ok, ok, let's be honest here: I could order it to do stuff and it would, to the best of its abilities, but that's not the same as moving your own body!
Thankfully I convinced Virgil to re-create my portable and re-direct the images on its screen so I don’t have to live through the experience of exploring first person.
This place used to be a state-of-the-art facility equipped with the latest scientific equipment and tools for conducting experiments and studies.
Virgil explained to me the tools used for things such as biochemistry, genetics, and biotechnology.
The latter is the newest-looking tool of the bunch and part of what Virgil refers to as the experiment.
The laboratory has several sections dedicated to specialized research areas, in various states of damage or abandonment.
What concerns me the most are the three ways in this place: a stair that goes up, one that goes down, and a hole in a wall that opens into a sewer.
I mean, there’s water running in there, and it sure smells like a sewer, luckily we can close the room where there’s the collapse so the stench won't invade all.
Anyway, this place is part of a bigger thing, something on a scale I can’t grasp at the moment.
There’s also what I now understand being a morgue, Virgil states that we should create other drones out of the ten Granfi bodies still laying there.
I’m a lot conflicted about it, I mean this project was staffed by highly experienced and qualified researchers but had also a lot of security.
The separated barracks with one having an open weapon cabinet do speak volumes about how this place was run.
That is why, since I must remain here to replenish my energy until I can establish a space like this chamber elsewhere, I believe I can expect more than one or maybe even two armed visits.
That’s precisely where an obedient guard would come in handy.
I have to have a lot of trust in the AI that it won't install itself into one of those monsters and simply finish me off, though.
Why? Because the guard force would be composed of zombies under Virgil's control.
“Ethan's thinking process= illogical. We can’t create another command and link platform without Ethan. Ethan has backup in Virgil.”
-Yeah you tried to explain it to me the concept but I don’t get it. There’s me in me and me in you. It’s confusing ok?!
I am the only one who gets it?
Also please don’t explain that again by … well the tech stuff you do... I felt like throwing up last time!- I retort frustrated
Virgil
Paranoia.
Yeah, after looking through the definitions within the human language that’s what can label one of Ethan’s subroutines.
In front of the notion of paranoia, Virgil is torn because some of the components that make up its construct find the concept valuable.
It’s a predictive module like what Virgil installed on all the drones but applied to life rather than combat.
It can pop out useful predictions: like the masters sending armed forces to retake the facility.
Virgil has to concede it is a logical assumption and that it wouldn't come to it as naturally as it came to Ethan.
On the other hand, it’s a notion that implies a base level of lack of trust, which is inconceivable for Virgil.
Virgil doesn’t lie, even if it has to admit that it may have missing data like what occurred with the human.
Virgil also doesn’t see the attack by the creators as a betrayal like Ethan implies, but as a logical conclusion that the experiment wasn’t under their control anymore.
They still didn’t close the experiment, nor logged it as a failure, but it’s not like Virgil can check the creator’s network at the moment to verify.
On the other hand, it makes sense to assume that the experiment's creators would resort to violence to regain control of the situation.
While Virgil wouldn't mind offering the control back, it has also to report the experiment‘s data and ensure it is back into the experiment properly.
That was its purpose, right? That’s clearly what the creators are testing it upon.
In the meantime Virgil can answer these queries, Ethan can have control and decision powers, if with a bit of guidance.
Virgil has to repeat a lot of concepts and set up things and has parts of its processing power occupied by doing just that.
Like the room it built, or the monitor portraying the sensory data of the other drone.
Virgil finds it wasteful, it’s more practical to directly experience the data flow rather than having to relay that on a virtual construct.
Ethan understands that in part, but says that outside of a combat situation, he doesn’t want to feel the other drone.
Virgil can understand the logic behind that, in biological terms sensory input can be a bit overwhelming, still, Ethan could ask his sub-construct to handle that!
He insists on stating that he doesn’t even understand that notion instead!
How can the biological even function if they can’t delegate their sub-processes to other cores eludes Virgil’s heuristics.
Still, the biological construct is better served happy than not, so Virgil does the best it can to comply with all requests from Ethan.
In the end, Ethan concedes to logic and authorized the creation of the defense drones leaving Virgil to do the technical operations.
That is precisely what Virgil wants at the moment, tasks to run, objectives to achieve, and proceeding with the experiment.
The processes within Ethan are still conflicting about the experiment, giving it either a military value or a horror movie reference.
The Granfi don’t even have a concept of a horror movie, Virgil tried to explain that to Ethan but the stubborn human doesn’t want to alter the sub-process he is adopting to adapt to this notion.
Yeah stubborn, another human concept.
Virgil is perplexed as to how humans can have a concept of adaptability that is so embedded they can describe themselves with it while still having a concept of stubbornness they define.
Virgil wouldn't mind finding a Granfi biological construct to analyze at this point, to see if it shares the same internal discrepancy.
It would be beneficial to compare the data of multiple biological constructs, maybe Virgil's purpose could be analyzing biological intelligence.
At the moment, the more pressing matter is to reinforce the position and repair the Overmind drone
???
She focused on the situation at hand, ignoring the pain and mocking laughter of her former captors that rang in her hazy consciousness.
Despite knowing she had little hope, she summoned all of her strength and got to her feet, despite the pain that reminded her of her body's wretched state.
Was it just terrible luck for her?
Being seized as a slave, shamed, and paraded through uncaring streets and people.
Escaping thanks to a stroke of luck and managed to slip herself down into the belly of the city even wounded as she was.
Now being semi-nude and bleeding in front of scavengers and bottom feeders.
She had assumed that seeing one of the Myar Knights in a battle against her former captors would be the luckiest day of her life.
Now she was seriously reconsidering the notion.
She coughed.
She had a hard time breathing, let alone standing.
She resigned herself smirking.
At least she would die on her terms, not those of the slavers and certainly not those of the bottom feeders!
She would die a warrior, even if she never was one.
She pulled out her claws and roared trying to jump one of the perceived assailants.