Rijohe
Rijohe couldn’t believe he had fallen for such an obvious trap. His AI had led him to Tom's supposed “sleeping quarters” at the outdoor mall, a new mattress store, in the dead of the night. Thinking the human was fast asleep as the symbiote gave him no warning, Rijohe went in and sent out a small portion of his symbiote out for the genetic analysis. That's when the trap was sprung and the runes on the wall activated. Whoever Tom was had converted the store into a miniature version of a holding prison on Ultir, complete with white room induced symbiote separation and everything.
He has intimate knowledge of our way of life, this is no human for sure, Rijohe thought.
Now Rijohe’s physical body was trapped in an alien cell somehow built on Earth while his mind was stuck in a white eternity of nothingness and he had no access to his symbiote. He looked over at the grieving giant hawk-like creature standing next to him.
“What can we do? What led you to the mattress store?” He asked the AI.
“Bad information it seems. And you know how limited we are in white rooms. Completely isolated and dependent on the host system controlling it. We’re at his mercy,” the hawk said.
As the AI finished a tall, dark man and a large mountain ape-like symbiote appeared. He was a frail younger man that seemed to have conflicting emotions running across his face.
“Hi Rijohe I’m Tom. We have a lot to talk about,” the tall man said with a grimace.
****
“A symbiote the size of a flea is given to challengers to utilize the legion program. It comes from the host symbiote of the person that was supposed to control you, Rijohe in your case. As you grow in numbers the symbiote also grows,” Cindybot explained.
She was rushing through a fountain of information now, I felt like I needed to be taking notes.
“Your map will show you the difference between Rijohe’s minions, other Kwitles’ minions, and other challengers but only within 500 yards or so, this will grow as you grow. Your skills get stronger as you use them and even the map counts as a skill. You interact with the ships interface through both me and the symbiote, he gives you access to limited menus and skill usage, while I guide program and skill development.”
She took a small break while I tried to process all of that information. I decided to have Kendall near me for this one and it turned out to be a good idea.
“Can you handle skill growth, evolution, or any type of skill fusions? Can you develop new skills based on our ideas and the number of people he commands?” she asked the AI for me.
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“Yeah I totally uh, knew to ask that,” I said while eating my beef jerky. We were sitting on one of the shelter beds while most of the rest of the group got ready for the trip out to my parents house. A small group of five was going to stay behind to guard the shelter.
I hoped that this wasn’t going to take much longer, but it was nice that Cindybot was finally being chatty. She claims her “parent” AI bot had made her withhold information, and he had done it to the other challengers under Rijohe as well. But apparently after the AI upgrade and greenie addition she was behaving like a normal disembodied talking ball again.
“Skill progression yes, the rest,” Cindybot hesitated. “Before I would say of course not. But now I’m not sure. Defeat one more challenger and we’ll see.”
“Jon you must consume another challenger at all cost and as soon as possible,” Kendall told me with a hunger in her eyes.
“Whoa. Hold on there killer,” I laughed nervously. “My parents are my immediate goal and then we can see about min/maxing some skills.”
I felt a wave of disappointment in her mental link. The girl was thirsty for power. I wonder why she didn’t get the sheathe protection thing and I did?
“Could I split off a part of my symbiote and give it to her?” I asked the AI.
Cindybot started to laugh it seems, it was hard to tell sometimes. It glowed green and bounced up and down like a nightmarish ping pong ball. Even greenie seemed to rotate around her faster.
“It’s like seeing a baby ask about their tax preparation. You are very, very far away from that. If you ever even get there,” it said finally.
I frowned. It was maybe more chatty but there was still a lot of Cindy in the AI Bot. I liked to think ahead, it’s what made me a good server. Getting people what they want before they even think they wanted it. It helped me in class too and I usually had good discussion topics in our CANVAS class forums.
“But once that baby grows up. Is that a possibility?” I just went along with the joke.
“Well,” Cindybot said. “Once the baby grows to a legion about 10,000 people strong then maybe. But we won’t get to growing up by sitting here.”
With that I got the group together and we headed out. Kendall stayed with the shelter to write out some ideas she had and I left Ahmed with her since he had the large knife, our only other real weapon besides George’s rifle.
The trip had three main goals, get to the nearest pawn shop and grab whatever was left, take away any Rijohe minions and add them to my legion, and get to my parent’s house a few miles away.
“Rijohe was all about terraforming. He isn’t giving it a thought that you might actually win. He most likely has everyone working on building the printers already,” Cindybot said with hesitation as we walked outside.
“And the kids?” I asked, confused as to why the AI hesitated.
“The older ones taking care of the younger ones most likely. It’s what the Kwitle do,” it responded.
“Shit! then my parents?” I asked just realizing what it said earlier.
“Toss up. He knows they’re important to you. Either way we have to go check their house, it'll give us an idea of what he did,” Cindybot said.
I wish it would have told me that earlier. I asked my three fastest people to run out ahead to scout beyond the 500 yards of my interface map, and had George with his AR right next to me. I should have sent out the runners earlier but I knew they were getting to know each other and grieving. The roads were mostly abandoned from what I could see. Too many cars in the middle of the road made inner city travel difficult as we went. They would have to find mopeds and motorcycles along the way, which would thankfully be in abundance in Florida. Julio kept reminding me that only he could ride on his motorcycle and maybe a special lady. He was insisting that it would show up soon somehow.
We walked for a while talking about the large strays of abandoned animals that were now following us. It would soon be a legion of both people and cats at this rate. Ten or so minutes later one of my runners contacted me.
Boss I’m at Big Al’s Pawn Michelle thought through the link.
Already?? Amazing Michelle. Track staaarrr I thought back.
Haha yeah. Listen we’re in trouble. One of those challenger people have made it their home and um, she wants to talk. She said you better hurry.