DIMITRI – TECHNOCRACY HQ, WASHINGTON DC
The room was still empty when he arrived. The windows letting him take a peek at the most majestic view he had ever seen before. The meeting room was on the top floor of the building, granting him unrestricted line of sight all around. It was the only skyscraper in the area, or at least the only one deserving such a name, and the air was so clear today that even the farthest details were crystal clear to his eyes.
The optical implants only added to the amazing scenery.
“Seems I’m early.” Said a voice from behind. Dimitri turned around rapidly, having not sensed anyone enter the room at all. What he saw was a perfect representation of a human that was not there, a hologram in the shape of a slightly awkwardly moving person.
That must be Justin, he thought. He was on the moon, apparently, and the distance made all his reactions at least a couple seconds slower than normal.
The man joined him in watching out the windows, in silence. He seemed pensive, sometimes mumbling about heat radiating fins or other things all relating to the Corvette that was about to be completed on the moon. Dimitri was well aware of the role that man played in the ideation and construction process of such a spaceship, so his mumblings actually made sense. Not that he’d call out on him anyway. That seemed a good way to earn a one-way ticket out of this room.
For all he knew, the man was among the five most powerful people in the whole Empire, being directly connected to the two actual powerhouses of the planet. Soon to be interstellar empire, apparently. Now that he thought about it, the fact that Moonbase was now a city meant that saying planet no longer covered the entirety of the human race.
“Helloooo, bitches!” A chipper, loud voice came from the hallway. One of the two powerhouses was finally here. “Oh, seems we are missing a few people. Eve, what the hell?” He mumbled the last part to himself, Dimitri presumed, but it was too loud anyway. Not that the man needed to care about these things, and in fact he didn’t seem to.
“My bad, used a new algorithm and it seems like it needs to be adjusted slightly.” A woman’s voice said. He didn’t recognize the voice directly, but knew very well who she was. She had appeared out of thin air, already sitting on her chair. The chair too was made of loose photons like the woman, the image existing only in the virtual space created by the retinal implants.
Eve used a different voice for each person she talked to, and another one still whenever she needed to speak in an official manner to a large group of people. It was as if she was a different person depending on who she was talking to. Who knew, perhaps it was indeed this way. She was more than capable of doing that.
Of course, this was not her official voice, and neither was it the voice she used when talking to Dimitri. Same for her appearance.
She had taken the form of a gorgeous red headed woman. Tall, lean but muscular, godly curves that… he shook himself out of it. He would not think of that impossibly beautiful amazon goddess at all. Her form, this form, he knew who it was for. She would have shown to each person her carefully constructed personalized avatar if not for a singular individual present in the room. A person who she respected so much to go so far as to drop the disguises and show herself as she truly saw herself.
A man entered the room, and everyone went to their seat. Dimitri looked kind of lost for a little moment, before a marker appeared on top of his assigned chair, courtesy of Eve. He sent her a mental thanks and she smiled at him in reply. He looked away shyly, not used to this kind of close personal interaction with the digital goddess. Her chosen form did not help.
She could have used her usual method of communicating with Dimitri, he thought, appearing as an ever-changing amorphous blob of floating information. But she did not. This only reinforced his theory.
A chair was left empty. Dimitri queried Eve about who the missing man was, and got Eric’s file.
“Aw, come on! I hoped we could have had our full council of Machine-touched today!” Nicholas fake whined.
“Is that what we’re called now?” The man who last entered the room asked. Louis, perhaps? He was not that old, but differently from Nicholas his aura seemed spread and suffused. Like he was made of ethereal matter, mutable in its form ranging from strict and stern to shrewd and slick when need be. Backstabbing, perhaps? Dimitri always trusted his instincts when it came to reading people, in fact he had to admit they came in handy at times. Most times. It was merely his own interpretation of the information Eve always fed him, his own vision of the world. An overlay on top of the holographic overlay on top of the real world itself.
“Agree, the name sucks.” Said the other hologram. Justin, from the moon. His voice and movements perfectly normal if not for the fact that they were way too late to the party. Amazing how even just a little second can affect a conversation.
“Okay, I give up. Louis come up with a name for us?”
“Define us.” Louis didn’t skip a beat. This is what a great political mind looks like, Dimitri realized, being able to handle Nicholas like this. His mind didn’t even think about politics as it was before Eve came, of course, with it being a time before he was even born. 25, he was, and thus for him the term had a whole different meaning.
“Us five, of course. Plus, maybe the little brat here should he prove his worth.” The casual mention of his existence brought Dimitri out of his musings. He shuffled uncomfortably on his chair, not knowing what to do or say. This meeting wasn’t supposed to be so informal.
“Don’t tease the boy, dear.” Eve schooled the man, slipping in a casual flirt which flew completely over Nicholas’s head.
“I’m Dimitri.” He managed to say at last.
“Well, then. A pleasure to meet you boy. May you be the element to bring stability to this unruly Council of Six.” Nicholas said solemnly.
“Council of the six.” Louis said, no inflexion in his voice, but clearly amused.
“Accepted. It’s official now!”
It was time to take control of the situation, Dimitri thought to himself. He had come here thinking it was rude to try and read people and had refrained from doing so, at least consciously. But the part of his mind that still tried to keep tabs on everyone here had noticed something: it was as if they were expecting something of him.
He decided to activate his full suite of tools. Colors entered his view as he once again became capable of seeing, rather than merely watching. His brain working under the hood in order to manipulate and understand data not even his conscious self knew it was requesting of Eve. He had no idea what was going on, only that he was now seeing again.
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So, as far as he observed: Nicholas was the mad genius or something. His aura was small but unruly, tendrils of it extending in the distance, peering into darkness. It was a fluid, constantly in motion, constantly searching for new things and thoughts to stimulate itself. At its center laid a small, pinprick sized point of pitch back. Looking at it was like gazing into an abyss, and abyss he was sure was staring back.
Eve was the digital god-being who was impossible to read to a mere mortal like Dimitri, perhaps truly known only to her creator and no one else.
Eric was absent, so no idea.
Justin was the engineer, good for practical approach solution, so long as no living, sentient beings are involved. His aura the epitome of order and elegance, straight lines and circles. Not a speck of chaos, not a single curve that was not a circle, parabola, hyperbola or other similar ones. There was a beauty in that order, though. The element of the human mind hidden, though, a small ball of chaos carefully encased in a crystal lattice of controlled ordered thoughts. It had been hard to spot at first.
Louis was the politician, the one who kept the ship sailing, of course. The connection between the… council and the rest of the world. Different from Eve, who was the logistician, he was the swayer of masses. His aura was permeating, thin but wide, observant. Like his own, maybe. There was also something else to him, though. What he deduced about the man was not enough to justify his presence here.
He queried the database through Eve, and a wide splotch of new colors appearing in his vision. His personal database interface, the way he could see everything that existed within the AI’s cyberspace. And now he saw it, the man’s aura finally taking the last bit of color it was previously missing. Metallic lines connecting to everyone else, keeping them here, grounded, together.
He was the anchor. The one to keep the others on the ground, the one with the pragmatic approach to things. A former CEO, born and forged in a pre-machine world.
This helped him to extrapolate Eric’s position then, as the actual cog in the machine. A captain, or at least he will be soon, someone who… it didn’t make sense. Eric was irrelevant to the big picture. A broken man who was thrust back in space just after a second big trauma in his life. He had no place in this council.
The sixth person, then, was not Eric.
“Precisely.” Nicholas said. There was something different about his aura now. It was vast, crystalline, unseen potential making the very air take an ozone aftertaste.
“Wha-”
“You are precisely right. The missing man, is not Eric. Good job, you figured it out, and you are now officially a part of the Council.” Said Nicholas. His aura reverting back to his old one as soon as he was done speaking. A new small tendril of curiosity now attentively watching Dimitri, the highest form of respect that man will ever give to anyone.
Eric’s file disappeared. Dimitri decided to ignore the fact that Nicholas had somehow read his mind. Even if for but a moment, his aura had been that of an Emperor. A ruler of worlds. A god in the making. That was answer enough, for now.
The last man. Another riddle, then. Who was the last member?
There was something missing from this council. There was the society part of things, Louis, logistics then as Eve, engineering as Justin and the wide world vision as Nicholas. Ignoring himself and his role for now, there was one thing that had been left out.
Military.
And that’s when the door opened again, a solid, monolithic aura flooding the room with the smell of iron.
ERIC – LUNAR HANGAR CORVETTE_01
The Desolation of Infinite Dreams.
“Holy shit.” Was all Eric managed to say as soon as he saw the massive metal sphere in the distance. A perfect sphere of dark metal, with lines running all along its smooth surface. Circles that indicated places where retractable implements were hidden under the thick plating of the hull. Depressions where the antennae dishes were cleverly hidden. Holes where the fusion exhaust would be directed in order to generate thrust in any possible direction.
He knew the specifics by heart by now. 50 meters of diameter, with at its core a fusion reactor so powerful it was scary to have under his feet. Lasers, torpedoes armed with various different warheads, railguns, point-defense machine guns, a maximum acceleration of 10-g for a short burst, the capability to turn any of the engine jets into a death particle beam. A full complement of various drones for scouting, repair, and other tasks. A limited AI to emulate Eve until a better solution was found.
And this was supposed to be just a Corvette.
The team of fourteen slowly approached the towering metal structure, clad in their suits to protect them from the vacuum and the cosmic rays that bathed the moon’s surface. The smooth metal was a mirror that distorted their world, a hidden sphere of pure wonder just behind the illusion.
Even Ramirez could not hide her excitement, walking beside the others and not skipping ahead just out of sheer force of will.
Three days, then finally onwards into space. And a month of training later, the mission.
DIMITRI
From that moment on, the mood in the room changed. He had been right; the small talk and the chipper mood was a test. A test meant for him. He had suspected that the man who had built the Empire could not be as airheaded as he had seemed at first, and he was right. The man knew how to keep himself in check.
General Descan entered the room and sat on his chair. Dimitri knew it was the first time the man ever met the other member of the council, but he showed no outward signs of unease. His aura was a still as a block of iron. His body language mute and his clothes immaculate.
“Finally, we can begin.” Said Nicholas. In the silence that followed, for a moment his aura returned to that of the Emperor. His body stilled, his tics vanished and his already piercing blue eyes became endlessly deep. Then he snapped back to himself. “Welcome, Martin, to the very first meeting of the Council of The Six.”
“First names here?” Louis raised an eyebrow, his comment a way to school Nicholas into behaving.
“Right. My apologies, General Descan. The others here will still continue to use first names because that’s how it has always done. You, general, will be the sole exception to the rule.” Nicholas said, struggling to keep sarcasm or idiotic comments out of his voice. Too bad his aura basically screamed intent, and his body betrayed him even more. The General didn’t flinch.
“It has been a tradition that everyone from before, well, Eve’s era uses first names only.” Louis explained patiently. Like a father explaining the erratic behavior of his child, his soft yellow aura becoming a little smaller and denser.
“It is of no issue.” The General replied.
“Now, the first item on the list: the climate is still warming up. And the antarctica is wrapped in a persistent weather anomaly that has lowered its temperatures by tens of degrees. Thoughts?” Nicholas said. There he was, the Emperor again.
“The model is still incomplete, but I must say the anomaly is providing pretty good data.” Eve said. She had no aura, of course, every movement from her part perfectly calculated and thought beforehand. Who knew how much computing subjective time she allocated to each minor movement of her body?
“As for the warming, there are a few projects going. Nothing concrete for now, however.” Justin chimed in, late as always. His aura flared orange with uncertainty for a moment, fearing an adverse reaction perhaps?
“Uhm.” Nicholas hummed in acknowledgment. He had still his Emperor aura on, but he seemed to be able to switch between the two like he was changing clothes. Dimitri had no idea whether one of the two was fake, or they were both real.
Justin evidently didn’t expect such a mild reaction, but Nicholas went on. “If in another ten years the situation hasn’t resolved itself, then it means that we’ll have to actively intervene. I’m in favor of seeing if the climate can recover, but it has been years already since we cut all of our emissions to almost nothing. Prepare accordingly.”
“The second point on the list: have you thought of ways to fight against the deterioration of the body when in low or zero gee?”
This time Justin was confident in his answer. “Yeah, of course. For the permanent planet bases we have training rooms that are basically gyms built on spinning structures. They simulate gravity up to 2 gees so that people can train there and fight the effects of low gravities. For space stations, I suggest artificial gravity by rotation. Finally, regarding the permanent staff on the Corvettes and such, I’d say to accelerate them to one or two gees whenever the crew does physical training, similar to how it’s done on planet bases. That’s only for when they are stationed and therefore still, of course, since for away missions they will always be accelerating or decelerating anyways and therefore have gravity onboard.”
“Perfect. Expand research on genetic engineering and stimulation through implants. I also want to see if we can use exoskeletons to help us, by setting them to work against the body rather than to help it. Of course, make the setting changeable between the two modes.”
“Now, with that out of the way, it’s time to discuss the main dish. General.” He turned around to face the man. “Let’s talk about the Interloper asteroid mission.”