“We were so close; can't you wake her up?” Curiosity beamed so brightly that the light filled the hall on the Seat of Royalty drowning out everyone else.

“These creatures require sleep, there’s nothing I can do,” Mercy answered. Since she'd left the body and pointed the finger at all the Kings she'd been in trouble. However, with Arguments help she had been able to present the evidence to the Scatha and convince most of them not to blame her. Now that she was alone with those very same Kings she didn't feel nearly as confident.

“Do we still need her?” said Judgment. She could tell he was still brooding over being dismissed so abruptly by Raini after such a long wait.

“I believe so,” said Curiosity, “I have come to a dead end with my investigation, and tests have shown that these creatures think a lot better after sleep. Unless you want to design a mind to take over the investigation there is nothing else we can do.”

“Yet she may refuse to aid us further.” Judgment said.

“I believe that if, as I first requested, you had not launched the invasion she and her people may have been a little more willing to help.” Mercy said.

“Do you think that I have made a mistake?” Judgment blazed at her. Mercy looked around the other Kings and knew that she would get no support. “Do you think I am capable of making such a mistake?” Judgment asked again. Mercy wondered briefly if she should backdown, apologize and request that another mind be designed for this task. She could go back to talking with Argument and waiting to discover life that may not exist. Then she remembered something that Raini had said, about if you were about to go down in flames you might as well make it as memorable as possible.

“Yes,” Mercy eventually managed. “You failed to protect Free Thinking Warrior, you failed to stop either yourself or one of the other Kings from killing him, and now your recklessness could very well mean the failure of my investigation. Knowledge, make sure you remember this part and make everyone knows. It is my belief, as the Mind who was given the remit to investigate, that Judgment went against my wishes and so has made my task impossible.” Silence reigned throughout the Seat of Royalty and Mercy guessed most of the Scatha.

“Do you believe then that these creatures are alive?” Judgment said after a eon. Mercy had spent her entire life around Argument and knew how to answer.

“Irrelevant to the charges, do you admit that you made a mistake?” Judgment leaned in over her, eyes blazing red onto her small form. If he decided to attack...

“I merely wish to know,” Mercy recognized this tactic as well, if she answered yes then he could claim that her judgment was impaired and therefore dodge the accusations.

“No,” she answered truthfully. “As you have so rightly stated, they do not have a soul. Truly living creatures exist outside of their bodies, they are not constrained by them.”

“I see,” Judgment said and stepped back.

“Now, will you admit that you have made a mistake?” Argument would either be impressed or horrified at what she was doing. Argument would say almost anything to win a debate, but he never called anyone out like this.

“I...” The lights faded, leaving the room in almost total darkness.”

“All of us have made mistakes.” The light came from a new direction and Mercy stared in amazement at Compassion as she spoke. She was lying on the floor as if she lacked the strength to raise even an arm. It reminded Mercy of the broken bodies of Raini’s people. “We do not know what most of those mistakes are, but we must try our best not to repeat them.”

“Are you happy now Mercy?” Judgement asked.

“No. Do you still wish me to continue the investigation?”

Judgment turned away from her and knelt down next to Compassion. Even like that he was still taller than Mercy.

“If I said no, they might assume that I was the guilty party, but that is not why I will say yes. You are doing well so far, better than we all expected. We will not attack the last bastion of these creatures for some time. If our estimates are correct Raini will reach there one hour before we attack. Tell her that and she may help you.”

“I doubt it, the only reason she would ever help us now is if we promised to leave this world.” Mercy said. She couldn’t look at Compassion, her lights had been so weak that Mercy now regretted her earlier outburst.

“That would be impossible,” Judgement declared.

Maybe it was part of Curiosity that pushed her to it. Maybe it was because she had spent too long with Raini and had on some level some sympathy with her, or maybe she was just sick of Judgments self-righteous attitude. “Why?”

“You know why.”

“No, I don't,” she said, trying to remember everything that Argument had ever taught her. “Why this world when there are seven others in this system?”

“They are not suitable.”

“We can make transports that can survive in space for thousands of years, but we can't mine on one of the other planets?”

“Making something to survive a planet’s atmosphere is difficult. Pressure, heat, acidity, they all play their part.” But Raini was on a roll now, her earlier outburst felt like a warmup.

“Heat still plays a part off world, and there are plenty of resources that don't have much of an atmosphere. Comets, moons, asteroids all lack pressure and acidity. Why don't we go for one of them?” She turned to face Curiosity, aware that he should be the ones asking these questions. “Would it be more efficient to mines resources and operate our factories in zero to low gravity? Are there more resources available off world?”

“I... I don't know,” he answered.

“How can you not know that? Why have we not looked into this? Even the creatures below who haven’t built a single rocket have this notion.” She thought back to the meeting when Avon had suggested it. Then it had just been a throw away comment but now, now it made sense.

“Because we had not thought of it, it is on reflection a good idea of the creatures.” Judgment's lights were almost matching hers in their brightness. “This is why I have suggested the creation of the Artificial Person project. It will allow us to harness their creativity.”

“Then why are we still on this planet? How long would the studies have taken? Minutes at most, if mining in space is more efficient, then ten minutes after Avon suggested it, we should have begun and left this world alone. There is no reason to be here.”

“That is not part of your remit.” Judgment said. Mercy fell dark, he couldn't do that could he? He couldn't just dismiss her like that. “In time we will design a mind to investigate moving our industry off world and if that mind recommends it, we will do so. Until that time, I recommend you stick to your two remits.”

“Am I dismissed?” Mercy stood straight and looked Judgment right in the eye. They all knew that every Scatha mind would know what had occurred, they would discuss it and Mercy could do nothing but hope that she'd come out on top.

“Yes. Go back to your own work.” Without a word Mercy disconnected from the body. She wasn't surprised that several hundred Minds had made other bodies available to her in the hopes she would speak to them first. What did surprise her was that one of those requests came from Hider of Small Things on the planet’s surface.

She transferred to the waiting Companion type body and found herself in the dark bowls of a lifeless ship. Water leaked slowly in and pooled at her feet, there was the stench of blood in the air and the only sound was a long-drawn-out flushing coming from behind her. Mercy turned around to find Hider using his small grapplers to operate a large water pump. She could tell from the low whine of his repulsers that he was struggling to lift the pumps handle. Mercy reached out and grabbed hold of the pump and began working it at a far faster speed.

“My thanks,” Hider beamed. “These wooden ships leak, with the crew gone this one will not stay afloat for long.”

“This is the Dominion, isn't it?”

“Yes, there is something interesting here that no one else cares about. I was hoping that you could take a look at it.” The yellow light danced around the room.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

“Is it within my remit?” she said with a hint of bitterness.

“Do I care?” Hider let go of the pump and began to hover away. “Remits are not my problem, caring about them is not within mine, this is. You all spend too much time thinking about remits anyway. Few of you ever step out of your comfort zone. Follow me.” He led her through the ship. She stepped over scores of bodies, a part off her wondered who they had been. Slowly they climbed to the very top of the ship, where a wheel and a strange object sat. It took just a quick check with Knowledge to confirm that it was what Raini had called a mechanical pilot. Finder and Memory of Small Things were waiting for them hovering around it.

“Did someone miss something again?” Mercy asked.

“Yes. This.” Finder responded, lights flickering over the mechanical pilot.

“What about it?” Mercy watched as Hider floated around the object as if taking it in for the first time.

“How does an arm work?” he said. It was just another quick request to Knowledge for the answer.

“Electricity that powers motors and servo's, that's all.” Mercy didn't know where they were going with this, but ever since they'd picked up Free Thinking Warrior's message, she knew that sometimes the Trio were worth listening too.

“This is a slightly different mechanism. Several very large and powerful springs power it, along with many cogs that have been designed and placed correctly to move the cable that control's the rudder on this vessel.”

“So, this is the equivalent on an arm?” she asked. Or maybe more than that. Was it just a problem of scale, if you could build a clockwork arm, could you also build a clockwork body? Evidently Hider was thinking much the same thing.

“This is the equivalent of our physical bodies, just on a very small level. The same technology could be used to build anyone of us. It would just be very, very inefficient and complicated, and bigger than this ship, but that doesn't matter. Do you understand this principle.”

“Yes, I think so.” Mercy looked around the ship, there were no lanterns burning now, nothing else was making a sound and she began to suspect where Hider was going with this. “But it has no mind, it can't think for itself.”

“Really?” Hider said and as if on que Memory rose and moved to the back of the ship. A wind vein waited there. Memory moved next to it and gently pushed it to the side just a little. The mechanical pilot whirled into life and the ship groaned as it slowly turned. “It thinks, it calculates, it responds to stimulus.”

“Yes but...” Mercys lights dimmed, no, impossible. “There is no intelligence within it. It doesn't understand what it is doing or why.”

“I do not understand the thoughts of Kings, Memory here does not understand our thoughts very well. Take a look at this world. It has creatures made up of trillions of cells who think and understand much, but it also has creatures made up of just one cell who understand nothing. This is there equivalent. This mechanical pilot is to me as I am to a King.”

“But it can't do anything else we can,” she said. All her confidence when arguing with Judgment had vanished, this was just too odd.

“But none of that matters dose it. According to Judgment whether something can think or talk or build others of its kind does not affect whether it is alive or not.” Memory had stopped playing with the wind vein and as it crossed back to them the ship swung around back onto its original course.

“But it has no soul, it cannot change bodies, it is constrained just like the other creatures here.”

“But we could take out the cogs and the springs and put them into a new body and it would still work.” Mercy gave out a blaze of lights that was the equivalent to a laugh, or at least a nervous laugh. “If it was broken into a million pieces, we could build another one that would act the same way.

“Is that enough?” she asked, and Finder gave out a soft wine.

“We don't know. That is our problem,” Hider said. “If anything, I would not call this a truly living thing, it is proto-life, but that is not the most important or worrying thing.”

“It's not? If this is life then-”

“Then we would be very disappointed. To travel across the galaxy for this would be an anti-climax. Think about this, the creatures here designed and built this, what if we had arrived two hundred years later? Would they have built more advanced versions, mechanical people powered in much the same way we are, mechanical people that may be indistinguishable from ourselves?”

“Are you saying that if we'd arrived two hundred years later, we'd have found life?” The light on all three drones dimmed for a second.

“It is true, only Finder could have come to the most frightening conclusion, every other Mind, including myself missed it.” Hider slowly turned to look up, with a grapple he pointed at one of the distant stars. After a quick calculation Mercy identified it as their original home system. “Who built us?” Hider asked.

She did not even have to consult Knowledge. “That's easy. Hatred did.”

“And who built him.”

“He always existed,” she said. It was a simple and truthful answer. Hatred had built the first four Kings for company. After they had then overthrown him, they had built the rest of the Scatha to help in their search for life.

“Who built him? If these creatures would have been able to build life in a few hundred years’ time, then the possibility exists that others like them built us. And as Memory pointed out to me, we have no evidence for the contrary.” Mercy thought about that for a while. It was true that no knowledge of the time before the Kings existed, she'd just assumed that Hatred had wondered the world in search of others like him and when he had found none had decided to build them. But the more she thought about it the more she wanted to question it. It was that bit of her that Curiosity had donated, it wanted to ask questions and wanted evidence. Had Hatred been around when the world was just a ball of rock and lava? The planet itself was only a few hundred million years old, but the universe a lot longer, where had he been before the planet formed. The Kings were built during the end of that planet's geological lifecycle, why did Hatred wait all those millions of years before building them, how had he learned to create the others? She had no answers for any of them.

“I don't know. Nobody could know,” she finally managed to say.

“Hatred knew, I think if we could discover his reasons for not telling us we would know even more, but we do not. Do you think that is the most frightening implication of this mechanical pilot,” Hider said. There was an odd hue to the light, as if he was gleefully expecting something wrong to happen.

“Yes.”

“Then keep all of this in mind and follow me.” Memory and Finder stayed where they were as he led her to the large room underneath them. A large table and a smaller desk took up most of the room, yet another body sat in the chair. Hider hovered over a set of three books and lit up the words on the front of the top one. Mercy leaned over to see what they were.

“The story of Jackal Averon, translated and analysed by Sanisari Vasrom.” She read. “Why is this so bad?”

“The story itself is of little consequence. However, it contains references to two other creatures, the Illifran and the Dragons. The former was killed by the later, would you be so kind as to open the book up to page six and read the first two sentences at the top?” Mercy did so, not liking how much Hider was clearly enjoying this. He could have just as easily told her about it.

“And at the firing of the Dragons first weapon, the sun itself was said to have dimmed, so ashamed it was that it had sought to challenge the weapons brightness. All turned to dust in its gaze and the dust, vengefully filled the air and so brought darkness.” Mercy felt a hint of panic, she recognized that type of weapon.

“What the book is describing is the use of a ½ Megaton Uranium 223 Warhead in a ground burst detonation.”

“How could you possibly know that much detail?” Mercy asked, wondering why no other Scatha had discovered this. Had these books been considered too trifling to be bothered with? Of course, they had, that was why the Trio had read them.

“Because only a single one is mentioned, we know roughly when it occurred and have found the location. A place known as the Vlatch wastes contains a higher-than-normal level of radiation, until relatively recently it was enough to make these creatures ill. However, the levels of radiation have fallen off to a safe level, the time this has taken has allowed us to discover the material used based on its half-life and scans of the area have identified the remains of the blast crater, giving us it's size. None of that is important. What is important is that elsewhere in the book Sanisari Vasrom gives the description of these Dragons as a giant silver bird.” Hider stopped then and Mercy continued the train of thought.

“We have two methods for such weapons, from orbit which would not have given them a description, or via a shuttle. Which to these creatures might appear to be a giant silver bird.” The realization hit her like the fist of an angry god. There was life out there, there had been to this world they were-”

“They are clearly as advanced as we are. Two possibilities present themselves. Either they are like these creatures, in which case Judgment will order us to attack them, or they have been built by creatures like these. Both of these possibilities will result in a war that we cannot win.” Mercy stared down at the book, these Dragons had wiped out one species, but left Raini's people alive. Did that mean they were protected or something? And they had these weapons hundreds of years ago, what would they have now? The Scatha knew of them, but had never used them and had no idea what greater weapons could be built.

“Judgment wont, he won't let us, he won't fight,” she said weakly.

“Are you sure? Unfortunately the information that might save us is being destroyed. This work is referencing another book, I have not been able to find a copy. The Warriors have a unusual fondness for fire during this invasion.”

“Have you gone to the Kings with any of this?” Mercy asked. Perhaps Raini would know more. It was yet another thing to ask her and yet another reason why the invasion should never have been started in the first place.

“I have informed Knowledge of all of this, but no Mind has this in their remit so I must wait for a King to take a look at it. However they are all a little occupied at this moment.”

“So why are you telling me all about it?” Hider paused then for a unusually long time.

“I have come to suspect that there may be more than one definition of life. I believe you have also thought this; therefore you deserve to know what I have found out. If what is here represents life in any form, we will need mercy to survive.” For the first time in her existence Mercy wondered if she would be up to that task. When there had been no knowledge of life out there it had all sounded so simple, so nebulous. Now that they potentially had some details it was like someone had just tangled up everything and the best they could hope for was to endure the chaos it had brought.

“I'll do my best. Is there anything else?”

“Three things. First of all I am attempting to keep this craft afloat, if only to provide some refuge to think. As the Kings have dismissed you and Raini Kasom is resting, would you mind working the pump below for a few hours.”

“No of course not.” It would give Mercy time to think and plan what she needed to do next, and besides if the mechanical pilot was alive then she should do what she could to prevent it from dying.

“Secondly, it concerns me that we have not seen the murderer alter any memories in some time. Either he has become so good at it that we do not notice it any more, or he is preparing some new kind of attack on a scale we have not seen before. Neither of these possibilities are good.” Mercy completely agreed.

“Thirdly, do you remember when the question about Hatred's soul was raised?”

“No,” she said.

“Neither does anyone else.”