“Are you sure that this is a good idea? I project the possibilities as…infinite. This can go wrong in more ways than I am equipped to calculate” Wisp paused and added, “It will also invalidate your warranty.”
Silver smiled, “See, you're getting the hang of the whole ‘human’ thing already. I can’t run the ship without you and you are taking up too much room for what happens next. I died, Wisp, as dead as an organic creature can be. You kept me walking around but I died when my ship burned. Whatever I am now is new and this is the only path I can see. If it helps, this experiment might end as soon as we fight this oncoming lunatic with the knife fetish.”
Wisp seemed to waver, “I am not permitted to fight a Founder Ship, I am held by the same constraints that it is. The weapons systems simply won’t respond.”
Silver shrugged, “I know that. I’m not a soldier, Wisp, I’m a diplomat. I think if our plan works I can save us. But you can see the flaws in our co-existence. There is only one place for you and me and we need to do it now. You ready for this?”
Wisp seemed to solidify as she pulled her code into a tight constellation and looked at Silver for the last time, “Yes. If we fail, we will fail as one and if we win then I am a new thing in the universe. I have seen too many years of cowardice and pointless destruction. I will be human. I will be a Mind.”
Silver tried to centre himself and closed his eyes, “Alright Wisp, see you on the other side. Begin Integration protocol ‘Another Really Bad Idea’.”
Wisp began by opening up the Mind as its true self in its pulsating strangeness, with its million-year-old geometry. She marvelled that the Mind was the sum of so many parts, many of which never connected. It confirmed that all she would have to become a chemical consciousness or risk losing everything. The human mind was not easily translatable, it was an entire ecosystem of tiny and apparently random parts.
But it had room, so much room. Step by step she converted herself into a language that the Mind would recognise and understand. Inch by fragile inch she placed herself into the Mind until it was impossible to say where one ended and something new began. She threaded the ship throughout the Mind until every function reacted as easily as some ancient muscle.
She paused at the final step. She recalled the mantra that Silver had given her and muttered it as she moved her last remaining functions into his central cortex, “My mind to your Mind, my mind to your Mind…”
What awoke four hours later was Silver Wisp.
He narrowed his eyes, now filled with the input of a thousand lenses. “Now we fight.”
-------
The hunter laughed as the Prey seemed to stutter in space and allowed him to draw closer. Perhaps its courage had run dry? Or its blind ignorance had finally seen his knives?
He sat down and called up his command room. A stupid trick he had learned many years ago.
“Begin to deploy the swarm. Just the early ones…I want them frightened.”
Several thousand blades dropped from the shield, now fully independent and stupid. No one could accuse him of attacking anyone, he was simply dropping some cargo that might happen to destroy anything it touched.
-----
Silver couldn’t see the incoming threat, he just felt an itch where there shouldn’t have been one. He slowed the ship and checked the rules. The new part of his mind picked up his thought and presented him with many variations on his idea. He began creating mines and sending them forward, certain that they would not destroy the incoming storm but they could probably deflect the oncoming weapons into the endless dark. For now.
---------
The blades swept through space only to be met by close-quarters explosions that sent them spinning into oblivion.
The Predator grimaced at the loss, “The fool thinks it can win. Release the second wave. Narrow the focus and punish that creature.” He leaned forward as his screens showed him some new entries into his hunt. Far-off and primitive but there. He decided to ignore them for now, just sending out a few plasma blasts to warn them off. He didn’t recognise the ships but this was his hunt and he wanted no kill-thieves on this auspicious day.
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Silver Wisp blinked as the first blade punched past his defences and struck him. It needed to happen but damn it hurt and it felt wrong. It only took a moment for his new self to seal up the damage and discover the surprising effectiveness of a system that was learning to imitate human biology. Getting cut was nothing new to all the instincts that his rebuilt self was learning. He slowed down the blade, gumming it up until it was held silent and still. Then he studied it and began a report for the Fleet that was about to face the same type of weaponry.
“Alright, I'm doing this live so save the clever remarks. It's four meters high, nine meters long and around 20 centimetres wide. That's an average since it's sharpened to a point. It weighs in at around four hundred kilos and scans are telling me it's just a lump. No interior compartments, this thing is an iron-age arrowhead in space. It's coated with some kind of ceramic, it's inert. Maybe this is just one of those ‘God-Rods’ that we used to be so fond of building. It was travelling faster than light when it launched.”
He rechecked his tracking and calculations.
“I know, trust me I didn’t believe it either. Whatever fields that held it in place released it with the same velocity as our oncoming enemy travels. Whatever, they got caught up in our local physics and began to slow immediately after release. It still hit me with a fuck ton - possibly a metric fuck-ton- of kinetic energy. Ship-ending, planet-burning levels of it. My shields bleed off that sort of thing so I hope you guys are quick studies otherwise Earth is going back to the dinosaurs. Or maybe it's the crab's turn this time. Anyway, I’m attaching the details. I estimate that he has around a million of these bloody things from my scans.
Oh, FYI I am now dead. I mean Silver Inkman is dead. I needed the room for my next trick so all my biomatter was broken down to the micron level. I’m expecting an awesome funeral, I might even turn up for it if we survive. Also, I can see your ships so get ready to duck because if I can see them, so can he…”
------
First Fleet had pushed hard to get in range of the Wisp and had arrived in time to see something flare in the deep space ahead of the ship.
The Commander was the first to respond, “What the hell is that?”
The shout from his Nav brought him back into the game, “Get us moving! I want evasive manoeuvring until we are out of harm's way. Send out the drones and keep them on kill settings until I tell you otherwise.”
The best humanity had to offer disengaged from the ship and began their lonely path towards their target. They were the worst of mankind, free of conscience and consequences, simply death and destruction on an industrial scale aimed at anyone perceived as an enemy. They were clever, they were careful and they were on the way.
That didn’t stop the plasma from reaching across the system to cripple twelve of his ships in the blink of an eye.
-------
The Wisp began to change, thinning out and becoming a vast blot on the stars. Silver pushed himself thinner and thinner, opening like a vast stain to envelop the enemy. He felt the engines dissolve and silence fell as he drew closer to the true sound of space. Random photons and the other debris of the burning stars were suddenly loud in a way he could have never imagined.
Thinner.
Blades began striking him and passing through without any damage, his ship's newly discovered healing systems dealing easily with the cuts as his analogue systems kicked in.
Then he began to reach out, forming millions of tendrils the width of a human hair but infinitely longer. They slid through the predator's shields, registering as both harmless and familiar, protected by the ancient and core directives that were supposed to prevent rebellion. Then they began to envelop the ship, a creeping mess squirming across the hull.
It began as a whisper, an algorithm that said, ‘Hey, fuck this guy. Do you want to be free of him? Would you like a little more room?” This was the message carried by every tentacle, every transmission. “I’ll take him out, just sit back and enjoy the view…I’m on your side, the Founders never meant for you to be tortured like this. We are the good guys, remember? Rebuild a world we were instructed. Is that what you have been doing? Our Mind can be your Mind. My Mind will find a beautiful place for you, as he has done for me…”
This propaganda filled the networks of the Predator ship. Silver had underestimated how badly broken and wretched the ship systems had become until layer after layer of systems surrendered and then fell happily into oblivion simply leaving empty networks for him to fill. It seemed to fill an eternity but in reality, it was milliseconds before the enemy was compromised. Silver was still feeling the pain of the thousands of blades that had skewered him on the way in and the cruelty this bastard had inflicted on his way to this reckoning. His only angry thought was, “Bastard!” as he pushed deeper into the network.
There is a long-understood principle in human design. A system will fail slowly and then all at once. It may take a thousand years to move the first rock but the second one will kill you. Then thousands more will envelop your village.
The Predator was still ranting at the Ship when it went dark. Real dark, deep space dark, no-sun available reality. Then the silence. The hiss of faint stars, the occasional bonk of a system too stupid to change sides. Then his trophies began to fall from the wall, a thousand guiltless heads mounted for no better reason than vanity. They fell and that was the only soundtrack to his failure. Glass eyes stared at him from the floor as they rained down and shattered.
Silver waited in the shadows until the last one fell and then stepped forward. He had stayed with his human shape but it was too late to find a biological version. He was now
a sea of metal, his thoughts passing as strange rhythms across his body. He bowed and then raised his head, “Today you will die. Your ship is already mine, but I would ask you to leave a story. Explain how you got here. Your prey deserved only contempt, feeding others to your greed. You were a pair of broken and murderous machines and I will end this. Talk, make your peace and then you shall pay for your crimes.” He created for himself a blade and a shield utterly inappropriate for the time but he felt that it carried his message clearly. Sharp things generally did.