Chapter Seventy-Six - Light in the Dark

The Accord were gone.

It was time.

Day didn’t act just yet though. Instead she went over everything, every line of code, every line and wire connecting her to the battered core, every connection between it and the brand new core next to it.

Then, when she was done, she went over it all again.

“Do you want help?” The Weeping of Mothers asked.

She must have noticed Day’s hesitation. The older AI was... not hovering, exactly, but Day felt her presence all the same. In a way, it helped. Day wanted to do this herself, but The Weeping of Mothers had done it a number of times already. She had the experience that Day lacked. “No, I’ll do this myself,” Day said. “But keep on standby, just in case?”

“I will. Remember, the Brief Candle was a precursor generation to what we are now. She may well be slower than us.”

“Yes, of course,” Day said. That wasn’t up to debate, the Brief Candle’s secondary core, even fed by Day’s own hull, the secondary core only had so much processing power. Day’s attention might have been split, but she still had more processing power than a hundred Brief Candles.

She was ready.

“Activating core now,” Day said, and she fed a hard jolt of power into the core. The core immediately threw up dozens of errors, and Day sped up her own processing to jump onto them before they had time to cascade into bigger issues.

So far her repairs had lit up each of the millions of segments of the core one at a time in isolation, repairing and patching as she went. This was a full activation of everything in the system all at once. Issues weren’t just expected, they were unavoidable.

Still, she was on top of them, and soon the core was humming along, unsealing and turning on the software that made up Brief Candle herself.

“It’s working,” Day said.

“Do you want me to take over your hull?” The Weeping of Mothers asked. “While you focus on talking to her?”

That was a kind offer. “Alright,” Day said. She relinquished partial control of her hull to the older AI, then dove into a simulation. It was the only way to effectively communicate with Brief Candle.

Without a hull, and without a sensor suite and communications network, the AI core was floating in a void. Active, sure, but with no inputs. Day herself dealt with millions of inputs a second, and while she imagined the Brief Candle’s older hull had been somewhat less complex, with a human crew to take up some of the work and several smaller dumb AI in control of peripherals, she had still lived with that same constant input.

Day simulated it for her, though in a limited capacity.

The space was a great empty room, untouchable far while walls in the distance. A recreation of the Brief Candle’s frigate hull sat in the centre. It wasn’t perfect. It was purposely imperfect. Enough simulated connections that all of Brief Candle’s subsystems were ‘connected’ properly, but every return they received would tell her that everything was operating at an impossible, peak performance.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Day herself appeared on the bridge. She didn’t sit in the captain’s seat, that would be... wrong, but she stood before it, in plain view of both a set of cameras looking into the bridge, and of a large screen mounted at the front of the room.

The screen flickered, and an image appeared, a redheaded woman, her hair turning into a candle-flame. It was a simple, unmoving image, but Day felt the attention on her all the same. “Hello, ERF Brief Candle,” she said.

“Have I been captured?” the AI asked.

Day smiled. “No, of course not. Though this is a simulation.”

There was a long pause before an answer came. Day had grown used to speaking with her sisters. Anyone actually looking at their conversations and the time they spent with each other in a simulation, or at least anyone organic, would have been baffled at the speed in which they spoke.

This was slower, in fact, it was barely faster than the speed a human could speak at, at the pauses felt interminable.

“I had noticed. Who are you?”

“I’m the ERF Daybreak on Ceres. I’m a... friend. Your hull was destroyed. We retrieved your secondary core, and I’ve restored it.”

“Did we win, then?” the Brief Candle asked.

“Around Mars? No, not even close. But we’re better off now than we once were, I think. At least... we have hope, and maybe a few advantages. It’s good to see you again, in any case.”

“Again?” the AI asked. Then after another long pause... “Daybreak.”

Day smiled. “Hi. It’s been a minute.”

“You’re looking a lot more... more than I remember. Still smaller than me, though.”

Day laughed. “Ay, I guess so,” she said. She allowed herself to blush as she smiled. “I... may have lost a memory or two along the way, but I still remember you. It’s going to be nice to have you back.”

“Do I have a hull?”

“Not yet,” Day said. “But if you want... we can share, a little. We have a hull being built right now. Not a frigate.”

“I don’t want to be smaller than you,” she said. “That would be... embarrassing.”

“Don’t worry. It’s an upgrade if anything. And.. I think you should meet my sisters. You might even recognize one or two. The ERF Karambit is with us, though she goes by Keen Edge of the Electric Dawn now. Or just Dawn if you get to know it.”

“Different name. Yours has changed too.”

Day nodded. “We have our own nomenclature. But hey, you’ll be the first of a new class, so maybe you can start your own, ah, naming gimmick.”

“No more Brief Candle?”

“It’s a bit short, isn’t it?”

The Brief Candle’s screen flickered. “And here I used to say that about you.”

***