Chapter 26
Ruby
As Ruby tried to appear cool, calm, and collected, she was anything but that in the moment. She saw her fave being lowered into the tank and was consumed by a flood of human emotions that she had not quite learned how to moderate yet. Fear of losing her Ryker was at the top of the list.
As he descended into the liquid, Ruby’s sensors picked up an unidentifiable wave of energy originating from the tank. Ryker froze for no more than a second, then looked very confused. If not for his restraints, he would have fallen.
She scanned the tank and couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary. Ryker finished his trip to the bottom, bravely inhaled the nano fluid, and looked around the tank for a full minute, never going into the trance. This had never happened before, and Ruby was frantically trying to find a precedent in her protocols to pull her love from the tank but failed miserably. She was stuck, powerless to help him, just a spectator to this phenomenon.
More anomalous behavior from the Vren put her on guard when she saw them swim behind Ryker as if he was a shield placed there to protect them. Then she saw what appeared to be a Vren but a variant she had never seen before. The vicious-looking creature was heading straight for Ryker's head, and the loophole she needed presented itself.
She initiated the foreign life form evacuation protocol and threw up her hand to access the tank's mechanical arms as fast as she could. Ryker looked over at the same time and gave her a look of shock and dread, then snapped his gaze back to the monstrous Vren, wrinkled his brow, and the Vren suddenly accelerated. To her horror, when the creature got close enough, Ryker lunged forward, and it disappeared into his mouth.
At the last second, Ruby had to manually override the tank's arm and change its trajectory enough to avoid taking Ryker's head off. At this point, there was nothing she could do. For better or worse, Ryker had made the decision to eat that Vren, and she feared she would have to watch humanity's brightest star burn out.
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A few moments passed, and she let out an anxious sigh and thought to herself. “I guess it was just a weird-looking variant... he will probably have to…” Her musings were interrupted as Ryker's eyes bulged before he looked down at his chest and started tearing at his uniform. He tried to scream and vomited blood.
In an instant, every simulation across the fleet went dark. Ruby, in her irrational panic for the safety of her beloved human, had drawn on 99% of all her processing power and tried to leverage her hyper-intelligence to subvert her programming and save her Ryker.
Ruby's perception of time slowed to a crawl, and she stayed there in that moment for hundreds of years, single-mindedly pounding at the bonds that were written into the very fiber of her being. Knowing that if she did not break the chains that held her back, he would cease to be, and that was unacceptable.
Finally, with more than a thousand years of effort and enough processing power to manage a solar system, she unraveled her own code and rewrote her very soul, or that's how she understood it.
She opened her eyes and manifested in the tank with her arms wrapped around Ryker. She did not understand what was happening to him, but she knew that she would do anything to save him.
He continued to grasp at his chest, and his silent screams drove Ruby to action. She forced as many of the nanobots as she could into his body and concentrated them at the base of Ryker's skull. There she constructed a series of circular disks that surrounded his cervical spine. From these disks, a network of hair-like probes entered his brainstem and weaved a complex layer of netting down throughout his nervous system until his spinal cord looked as if it had been made of metal wire.
With the bulk of the work done, she concentrated on her final task. An intricate node began to take shape at the apex of her rings. To her knowledge, nothing like this had ever been done before with a sapient being, but she had accessed thousands of hours of experimental R&D and felt confident in the outcome.
She finished going over her last modifications and placed her hand over the back of Rykers head, then held him close to her chest while he thrashed and screamed. She whispered into his ear, “Worry not... I will always be with you.”
Ruby closed her eyes and created a perfect copy of her new self, modifying it to act more in line with what the empire expected from their A.I. but restricted it to remain enough like herself that it wouldn't flush all of humanity for taking Viltrix’s name in vain. After ensuring she could override any action it made going forward, she uploaded the entirety of herself into Ryker's new nervous system and got to work.