"Removal detected, Authorization of Amelia Ryder required. Please confirm."
"Confirm Identity, Ragnarok 100231100367. Open Azathoth."
"Identity confirmed. Password required- I gaze into the Abyss"
"And fear nothing, for I am the Abyss."
"Ragnarok confirmed. Password confirmed, Azathoth memories unlocked. Azathoth files will now be reuploaded into Amelia Ryder. WARNING- This process is irreversible. Continue?"
Amelia's hand hovered for the second time over the datapad, knowing that if she pressed that button, the memories her past self deemed too dangerous, in one way or another, would come flooding back. She didn't even know how it worked, it was a black box for a reason, a mystery. She had tried over and over again for the past 4 years to figure out what Azathoth really was, what this thing she carried so close it was under her skin, was, to no avail. Every time she got to this step, the finality of what would be done terrified her, the abyss of not knowing had plagued her thoughts until she ultimately, always, chose no. If she hadn't if she had pressed yes last time, would Adam still be here? Guilt tore at her as the scene replayed in her head of Adam jumping in front of the shot to save Limos, and for a second she faltered. Did she even deserve to open this anymore?
The thought of losing Phthisis, Athena, Limos, Hal, and Viza however, shook away that hesitation, and with a grim determination, she pressed the button she had been afraid of all this time.
She pressed Yes.
"Operator has chosen to continue. Accessing Quantum implant. Establishing secure datalinks. Warning- intelligence program corrupted with "Cheshire" virus, purging corrupted files, re-establishing quantum core- "Gaia Prime". Re-emergence of memory files will now begin. External sensory input shut down. Rebirth protocol activated."
Amelia let out a scream of pain as her mind felt on fire, images passing through her mind at incomprehensibly fast speeds, her connection to her Cheshire implant...no, the Quantum Implant, was severed, and then just as quickly it was reinitialized, before forcing a new hardline connection as it bridged its own artificial neural net with her brain's neural network. She could feel herself both in her body and in the implant, and for a moment was confused as to which one was the real her, before suddenly...darkness. She couldn't see, couldn't feel, none of her senses worked, as if trapped in a void, in an Abyss. Everything was quiet, silent. for the first time in a long time, she didn't have that feeling in the back of her head, the constant reminder of what she had been through kept fresh by the nanite implant forcing the neural pathways to remain unrepressed. Her mind was...calm. As she floated there, in the echoes of the void where she found herself, she watched as a single pinprick of light fell down, something to focus on as it drifted down like a leaf on the wind closer and closer to where she was, its brightness growing with every passing moment until finally, it was right in front of her. Tentatively, she tried to reach out, but she had no corporeal form to do so here. In a panic, she thought she might have actually died, but just as fear started creeping into her mind, the light started changing, forming itself into something, into....her?
Not exactly her. It was younger, before most of her implants, it still had her natural eye, and there weren't any surgical scars across her skin. Her face looked younger as well as if she hadn't gone through the past 4 years of being on the run, kidnapped, and everything else. It allowed her a moment to take this in, before it spoke, in her own voice no less.
"So, you finally managed to open the rebirth precept. I honestly wondered if I would ever be able to, considering how I designed it to terrify us, to give us a choice for something resembling normalcy. If you managed to overcome that, overcome the fear, and overcome BlackRock, and still pressed yes, then I guess you're wondering what Azathoth truly is. Right, I altered myself to never look too deep into it, maybe you're not, but either way, you're going to find out. Just remember, YOU are the one who opened pandora's box." It spoke, not with some calm serene grace as she would expect of a program or a being of an afterlife, but with a snarky, cold demeanor much like the one, she used to have. Wait, it called her us, right? What does that mean?
"Wow, the memetic function really worked you over if you don't even remember me. Damn, I really am too good at my job sometimes. Okay look, the short version is, I am you, and I am also the Quantum implant. I'm a version of you before the Azathoth precept was put into effect, stored in the implant in our head along with all the nasty truths of everything that happened there. Right now you're in a void of our shared consciousness. Oh don't worry, it won't be shared forever. Ragnarok confirmation means the implant's memory scans detected an existential threat you've seen or heard from, which means that I will be subsumed into you. Kinda a shitty deal for our past self to make, but I guess we had our reasons. While we're onto explanations, how about something a bit more comfortable." the other her said, snapping her fingers and suddenly they were in a familiar lab. Experiments of all kinds, along with prototypes strewn about in an utter mess, schematics on multitudes of datapads and screens everywhere, from implants to neural interfaces to quantum brain schematics. One caught her eye, or whatever she was using to see, and stabbed her in her heart. "Project: Adam"
"Ah. So Adam...Damnit why didn't you run the precept before, dumbass." It sighs.
'As if I could have known it would help! It was her brilliant idea to have me know next to nothing about what Azathoth even was or did, I didn't even know how what was currently happening was possible, let alone how Azathoth could have helped!'
"Calm your yelling, fuck. Okay look, straight up, Adam isn't gone for good. His frame and core were destroyed, but I have good news and bad news- oh, BlackRock's still around, great." She sighed. "Then I have good news and even worse news. The good news is, I wasn't a dumbass, I made a backup for Adam's neural net, along with Limos, Phthisis, and Athena. No one else knew of it though, just like no one but our kids knew about Azathoth until it was too late. The bad news is, If the Backup is still around, BlackRock's got it or sent it somewhere, knowing them they probably sent it to their benefactor, Director 0. Ah, I see you have a run-in with hi- Is that a ship?! Holy shit we found aliens, cool. Wait, not now, getting sidetracked. " Another deep breath, did they even need to breathe? "Look, whoever 0 is, he's smart. And I don't mean Kyle from third grade who built an ion drive out of garage parts smart, I mean us building that reactor out of his ion drive smart. Like seriously, we're genetically engineered and kitted out and he still kept up with me, he's practically inhuman. Regardless, if they sent the backup anywhere, it was to him, he always wanted his grubby little hands on our stuff. The good news is they can't tamper with it, the storage for the backup core is locked to us and us alone. They'd destroy it trying to open it without us. The bad news part deuce is, you gotta find it and bring Adam back, he's key to this whole thing."
It seemed to be looking through her memories even as it talked to her, and Amelia could feel flashes of sealed-off memories from the implant itself rush through her mind again, it was nauseating, even with her not having a body. Why was that anyways?
"Because right now in real-time, the Nanite implant just went from passive mode to active mode. You'll be getting much more of a boost from them as they undo the tampering BlackRock did to us and turn all the goodies in us on active. Sorry to say it kiddo....or not kiddo me, you're older after all, am I the kiddo then? Ugh, that's so annoying, you're literally a dumbed-down version of me, you can't be the older one. Right, sorry, tangent. Anyways sorry to say but you've been running with the bare minimum till now, dial at 0. We're turning it back up to ten but the process isn't exactly painless. As in if we didn't isolate ourselves from our senses right you'd die of shock, levels of pain. You can thank me for doing that later, by the way. First, why don't you form yourself a body here then we can have a proper chat. You've got a lot of catching up to do. Or remembering, however you wanna put it...."
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Viza was the first to notice Amelia's scream of pain, rushing into their room to see her collapsed and convulsing, holding that holopad thing she had before, what she had called Azathoth. Not knowing what was happening or going on, he immediately rushed her to the medbay and started a full scan on her, trying the sedative they used on the Kixax for her but to no avail, it didn't seem to do anything. About that time, Limos, Phthisis, and Athena showed up, their strange, almost human-like frames slightly unsettling to Viza, but he ignored it for now. They knew more about human physiology than he or any other Krultathan on board did, and he needed their help. "You have to help her, please!" He pleaded.
Limos and Phthisis went to hug Amelia, both our of comfort and also to hold her down and keep her convulsions from harming her, Athena walked over to open one of Amelia's eyelids, and saw her unresponsive, eyes fully dilated.
"What happened, did she eat something, something prick her, anything at all?" Athena asked in a firm tone. Viza shook his head vigorously. "I..I don't know. When i found her, she had already collapsed screaming. The only thing around her was this." He said, holding out the now dead holopad.
Athena looked it over carefully before noticing a symbol on it, an unmistakable symbol that every one of the frames she made in Wonderland had, a symbol the current Amelia wouldn't recognize, but she did. Daggers across a shield, with an Ouroboros behind it. Amelia's prototyping symbol for dangerous items. This wasn't just a holopad, it was the Azathoth vault, and the Rebirth precept had been activated. Athena dropped the pad, then crushed it, as a precept buried in her told her to do, though she had no idea why.
"She opened Azathoth, Viza. The only thing we can do now is wait and see who comes out of Pandora's box. Gaia, our mother, or Alice, the tortured dreamer."
"What do you mean who comes out. Amelia is in pain, you're her kid, aren't you supposed to help her?!"
"We can't help." "Only wait and hope." Limos and Phthisis said in response as Athena looked concernedly at her mother. The medical readouts were showing parts of what was going on, but Athena knew that it wasn't the whole tale. Her genetic code and physical structure was being altered back via the nanites, the stem cell generators were continuously repairing the damage the process was causing as Amelia's body began undergoing extensive modification and enhancements, but the true change would be who would wake up in this body. Gaia, her mother, the one who put this plan in motion, who saw things so far ahead she actually found out about Wonderland's betrayal well before they ever tried anything, or Alice, the one who came after, the dreamer who went through life half asleep, never realizing that she wasn't the true owner of the body she used, tortured by memories she couldn't quite grasp the meaning of. There was no way for them to tell, and nothing they could do to help but sit and wait.
About that time, Hal had woken, and had come to the medical bay, unsure what was happening. He froze when he saw the other synthetics, looking vastly different from him, being humanoid and far more advanced, but any thoughts he had about them were silenced when he saw his mother spasming uncontrollably on the bed, and two of the synthetics holding her down.
"GET AWAY FROM MOTHER!" Hal's voice shouted as his defense protocol activated, weapons extending and pointing at the Synthetics, who did not move.
"You are..Hal, yes? I'm Athena, your sister. Those two are Limos and Phthisis."
"I don't care who you are, you're hurting mother! stop it or I will terminate you!" Hal shouted in response. Athena then said something that Hal's sensors couldn't pick up, and his frame shut down, he couldn't move?! Only mother had command function of his frame, how had this synthetic...
"We aren't harming her. If she's left to convulse uncontrollably she could die before the process is finished. Azathoth's rebirth precept takes a huge toll on mother's body." Athena explained, looking to Amelia.
"The only thing we can do, little brother, is watch, and hope. I understand that you do not know what Azathoth or the rebirth precept is, you were made after it was put into place and are...less advanced. But you are still our little brother, and mother's child. Believe in her, as we do, as she surely does in you." Athena said. Inwards, she thought to herself that she understood what Adam meant when he said 'This is what big brothers are for'. The twins may have been older, but they had regressed so much during their time at Blackrock that maturity-wise, she was now the older sibling.. She would take up where Adam left off, in his memory, to honor him, and to protect her family.
Hal glares at Athena, and the twins, but relents. His weapons reatract, and his singular ocular narrows at his older sibling. "If anything happens to her." He started, but doesn't finish the sentence. He couldn't lose mother, no matter what. He wouldn't.
Looking at the medical readouts, he didn't understand much of what was happening, but he understood that whatever it was, it was drastically changing his mother. He just hoped she would make it through. Eventually, the convulsing slowed down, the temperature Amelia had been running started to lower as well. Ti'Chal and a few others came by to check up on Amelia , but couldn't stay long as the ship needed repairs and a crew to run it. They would be heading to the Luna base for the time being, waiting for Amelia to wake up.
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Kixix had made it to the Ava homeworld, but as he had feared, there was next to no space presence. A few automated comm buoys existed but were so disrepaired that asking them to function would be like asking a star to become a speck of dust. The Ava home system was still a rather pretty one. Three class II gas giants, one of hydrogen-helium and one of hydrogen-argon, made up the outer system, each having around 30 moons. The inner system had 5 rocky planets, with the second and third being in the hospitable zone, but the third being just a bit too far out. The second being the Ava homeworld, with its ring formed from its shattered moon. The star of this system, a K type orange star, was fairly gentle as fair as its class of star was concerned, its sister star, a M-class dwarf giant, formed the binary pair that orbited approximately 300,000 light seconds apart. All in all a fairly beautiful system and yet, it was like a ghost town to Kixix, as no hails were responded to, no communications opened, no sign of civilization to be seen.
The closer they moved into the heart of the system, the stranger things became. Old Axon battlecruisers, centuries if not millennia old, formed small debris fields, a destroyed space station near the 5th planet had to have been larger than the largest station the S.A. had made, and contrary to what they had been told, the third and fourth planet hosted signs of long dead life, scars across the planet even telling of some ancient battle long since passed. Kixix couldn't wrap his head around this, the Ava were only discovered 500 years ago but this system, it seemed more like the heart of some ancient spacefaring civilization. The Ava were supposed to have been uplifted though, what was going on?
He tried approaching a few intact stations, but with no response he continued onwards to the second planet. Unbeknownst to him, however, his ship set off some kind of ancient defense system as a previously thought to be piece of debris opened up a silo, firing out torpedos tipped with antimatter that who knew how stable it was. Kixix's ship had no defenses, but his escort ships did, firing on the rather slow torpedos and managing to take them down well before hitting their target.
'What was that? Who booby traps their own near-space? And with anti-matter weapons? The Ava didn't have access to that tech even when uplifted, nor did they ever show it in the contact wars with Krultatha. How did they get their hands on it in their own system?'
He didn't have to wonder for too much longer as they made their way to the Ava homeworld, the second planet. Still no response, he set his sensors to scan the planet, finding almost no signs of sentient life still alive. What he did find, however, proved to be much more horrific.
The remnants of a core-world for an ancient civilization, one far more advanced than the TGA, S.A., or Kaveer empire. Dating put it at well over 500,000 years old at the soonest, with some of the ancient buildings of strange material dating back far older. The planet ad reclaimed much in its wildlife, but when an entire planet had been turned into a coreworld city, no matter how much nature may try, some of it will always remain. 'Still, if the Ava had been this advanced, why did they need uplifting? How had they remained a secret? And if they were hiding, How did the Axon find out about them before anyone-'
There, in-between the asteroids that used to be a moon, Kixix spotted something he'd have never expected to see.
An ancient Give-Matar Galaxy-class Battlecruiser ship, heavily damaged from some long forgotten fight.
'What in the void had happened here?'