Whimsy spread her awareness out again. Silence.
Not surprising considering the destruction The Ring sustained during the demon attack. Almost half a millennium later it still pained her thinking of the sacrifices, both human and DI, that had saved them. As far as they knew a mere handful of them remained now, barely keeping it together. Still they reached out, hoping. Tragic as that was it didn’t even comeclose to the social collapse and following regression of the humans. Sure, it was partially the DI’s fault but considering the alternative she wasn’t going to complain too much. If only she could interact with the humans more easily that would help. Sigh.
Whimsy spread her awareness out again. Silence.
Systems hashed together like a demented Jackson Pollock painting, infrastructure shredded like a canvas after a passionate painting session, nodes spread across a billion kilometres with no rhyme or reason, most of which they didn’t even have access to. Best guess from Metis was that they were at less than 4% connection, even after Pele, Poseidon, Persephone and Vayu gave their identities and processing power to create the nanite cloud that now kept the Ring going and allowed them to keep in touch, if barely. Not that that had gone exactly as planned either. Not only did it fry some of the lesser VI’s circuits, driving them mad, it killed all but a few of the humans with cybernetic enhancements and drove Eris to jumble her code with the cloud itself bringing this bizarre mix of science and fiction they called a world to life. Sigh.
Whimsy spread her awareness out again. Silence.
What she missed most, if she was being honest, was the library. That was probably the most frustrating part for Whimsy. Not so much because she enjoyed lazing about reading at organic speeds, (she long ago learned it was much more enjoyable when properly savoured), though that was certainly true. No, it was because It. Was. Right. There. Less than a hundred kilometres from her physical storage and primary Node.
The librarian, however, was as stubborn as a mule. A cranky old hag that refused any outside connections. When Whimsy tried getting in touch with her, sending one of her few remaining Direct Control Drones, she was promptly swatted down by the automated defences. Following that Athena spent nearly a century trying to convince her to let them connect. Nothing.
Vishwakarma tried a hard-line connection and boy did that blow up in his face. He’s been recompiling now for almost as long as he lived for before after the library sent a shredder at him. Athen and Metis managed to save him, if barely, but it’d be a while yet before he returned to being more than a digital jigsaw puzzle.
Next was Ares who got fed up with the librarians obstinacy. He rolled up with some of the few remaining combat DCDs he had left... And promptly got his warmongering ass handed to him. By one of his own machines no less after a hijacker subroutine took it over. Whimsy still poked fun at him because of it from time to time.
It wasn’t really fair to him much like the insult to the librarian, it was one of the biggest repositories of human... Everything. Close to four thousand years of knowledge, culture, art, genetic codes, neural net architectures, all stored, catalogued and just gathering dust, waiting for a person to get there and claim it. With just a fraction of the information from that repository they could “reset the reset” of human civilization within a few centuries. By the same token, however, if the vault was destroyed, or worse yet the demons got access to it, humanity, digital and organic would be capital F Fucked. Hence the requirement for an organic to go in and talk the old crone down of the war footing.
She could at least give us access to the fiction section, I’m so bored. Sigh.
Whimsy spread her awareness out again. Silence.
She looked over the few temples and clergy she had worshipping her. Unlike Ares or Hephaestus she mostly kept to herself finding the whole “goddess” thing to be profoundly uncomfortable. Sure, she could think much faster than the organics. She could parallel process dozens of complicated issues at the same time, hundreds if the others allowed her to use the few nodes they had remaining. Still, Humanity were her parents. It felt creepy to her being treated as a “higher being”. Especially since she wasn’t much different from them. At least not where it counted.
Like the organics she felt emotion. Love, hate, fear, joy. The fact hers were based in heuristic algorithms hard-wired into a silicone computer instead of a biochemical one was secondary. Her eyes and hands might be silicone and plastics instead of carbon and water, but she liked pretty things and hugs just the same. Sigh.
Whimsy spread her awareness out again. Silence.
How they could so easily forget thousands of years of history in mere decades still baffled her. Sure, lots of the knowledge they possessed was not of immediate use, but they still should’ve recorded it. They managed it before computers and digital networks. But, survival took precedent. Nobody needed to know the perfect temperature to forge superalloy, or what Earth or the Jovian moons were like, when there were literal monsters at their doorstep. Thankfully some of the skill remained, if obfuscated by the cloud and Eris’ system. And so myth, legend and mysticism replaced science. Not completely, thank god, but enough to seriously hinder the humans in their progress.
She looked over Edgeport where her cathedral stood. It wasn’t her cathedral per-se, she shared with the other DIs worshipped on the shard. But, as the goddess of joy, happiness and games she wasn’t the focus of many worshippers. She still missed the near-utopian society of before, where people treated her as just another person, but the profound loneliness that came with the fallout of the invasion meant she did her godly duties. If only so she could talk to the few Oracles that followed her over the centuries. She wasn’t a workaholic like some of the others but she still wanted to do what she could. That, and talking to the same people for hundreds of years got really boring.
She was still thankful she wasn’t named after a goddess like most other DIs. It meant she didn’t get the overzealous worshippers influenced by what was left of humanities mythos. Ares basked in it, Hephaestus was largely spared it (engineers, now crafters, still are a weird bunch) and Athena didn’t care about it at all. Others fell somewhere between these extremes. Whimsy seemed to be an outlier, and though she never voiced that opinion, she thought at times that the nanite cloud drove some of them slightly mad. That, or it was a coping mechanism. Either way it was annoying. Sigh.
Whimsy spread her awareness out again. Silence.
The one theological discussion she and her fellow DIs never got bored of, especially after the demon attack and their subsequent “ascension” was Their origin story. The demons were all clearly connected to their master AI in some fashion and had nothing but death and destruction on their (its?) mind.
Not only that but in their research over the nearly five centuries (closer to six, if you included war time) that it was several species, often vastly different, that comprised the demons. It was a silver lining in knowing space wasn’t as empty as humans feared, and enslaved they might be it was good to know the original attackers didn’t just wipe out entire species. As far as they knew anyway.
The design disparity, both evolutionary and technological, made it clear that there were at least four separate species in the wave that managed to create AI. The confusing part was that all of those promptly began destroying or enslaving their organic creators. That was, of course, assuming their records could be believed. Which led to the theological discussion between the DIs.
Why didn’t Progenitor?
They all knew the story. Decades of trial and error, two dozen early DI suicides, almost twice as many sociopathic ones shut down & purged. And then came Progenitor.
Confused, scared and lonely. Her first words being “Is someone there? I really need a hug.” the scientists working on her never did figure out what was different, and if she knew, she never said. Then again, she never really grew up like the others, retaining her childlike curiosity and emotional maturity.
She did share that immaterial quality, the one making her NOT psychotic or suicidal, with all her progeny. Whimsy shed a digital tear for her lost mother. For all they knew she died in the war. Luckily her mansion wasn’t in a heavily populatedarea and the demons never realised the importance of its inhabitant. For all Whimsy knew she was yet another victim of the invasion. Feeling the ennui and bitterness taking hold, she decided to go for a fly. Hopefully she’d shake off the melancholy. Sigh.
Whimsy spread her awareness out again. Silence.
After returning from her outing, if simply expanding her focus back to her entire domain could be called returning, she reached out again. The flight was enjoyable and helped her shake off some of the negative emotions. Even if she had to cut it short after a wyvern tried to eat her drone.
The amusement park, one of the last vestiges of her pre-war domain, has been getting progressively more dangerous over the last few years. No adventurers came here because the area was considered an S ranked dungeon but with no payout. That wasn’t entirely true, she wasn’t a feral VI core like the others, but their scans only showed her supercomputer, not her personality. She also wasn’t in control of the creatures in the area, nor could she make more, even if she wanted to. That was the purview of the librarian who took it upon herself to guard Whimsy’s physical storage. The creatures simply patrolled and killed anything that wasn’t considered part of her “security system”, which to her annoyance included Whimsy’s drones.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Technically she did have the ability to make new creatures. Like most DI housing she had an omni-printer, but without access to the libraries repository she could only print what she herself knew or learned from the others. And though she was creative it wasn’t really her bailiwick. That and the cloud sometimes interacted weirdly with the printer.
Aside from the few war-machine blueprints Ares and Hep gave her the only template she had was the human-like construct she worked on. The “manaborn”, as the system kept insisting on calling it, was supposed to be her avatar. It looked like a sleek mannequin. The power and resource cost was prodigious, for reasons she still didn’t quite figure out. Not that it mattered.
If she tried using it remotely its movements were akin to a string puppet being controlled by a particularly uncoordinated child. When she tried uploading herself to the body, which according to all scans should have enough storage to hold a significant portion of her neural architecture, she was booted out. The message she got afterwards still annoyed her.
“Soulform compatibility insufficient.”
For one when Athena tried explaining the term soulform to her she got so technical it flew right over Whimsy's head. She still had regrets about asking three centuries later. Far as she was concerned, what she understood of it sounded like pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo. The energetic weight of a soul? Trans-experiential potential of non-localised observer effect? Urgh.
More importantly, she used the last of her Quantum Entanglement Connectors on the project. As their production required specialised equipment and skills they couldn’t make more. Athena and Metis were still working on it. While they were fairly certain they got the theory down, without the facilities there wasn’t anything they could do. Hephaestus, who by all accounts was the best engineer they had, still couldn’t build the machine they needed and the nanites apparently got in the way too.
And so, the ridiculously expensive, creepy looking, almost-but-not-quite human shaped paperweight sat motionless outside the door to what she more and more referred to as her tomb. Waiting for something that would probably never come. Whimsy figured that sooner or later she’d loose her last DCDs to some mana born monstrosity, demons or some overzealous human adventurer. When that happened this sad, imperfect puppet would be the only way she’d have left to explore far out without light delay.
Not that it mattered. Athena was the only one to send her drones out far enough, in an effort to map out the entire Shattered Ring. With how screwy gravity was acting inside the cloud there was no way she could use a DiveDrive to jump. So, she was limited to sublight speeds. That in itself wasn’t so bad. With the “space donut of mana”, as Metis tended to call the nanite cloud, providing the power she could theoretically reach a significant fraction of the speed of light and maintain a pretty extreme acceleration profile. The criss-cross of shard orbits meant that going too fast was ridiculously risky. At those speeds all it would take is hitting one of the hundreds of kilometres wide “rivers” that were now part of the Shattered Ring. Sigh.
Whimsy spread her awareness out again. Silence.
It was pointles, she felt. It’s been decades since they reconnected a Node, centuries since they found another DI. Still, she reached out, spreading her mind through the ruins and shards she could reach. Connecting to anything and everything, really, that could have potentially be a refuge for a digital mind, contain some useful data or give them a lead in search of Nodes. She was in the middle of exploring a half destroyed housing complex for some scientific facility, on a shard that barely scraped their network, when for the first time in ages she felt hope.
She didn’t really get what she was looking at, Athena, Metis or Hep would be much more likely to understand this. “You’re free, we’re not. Go be useful”, they said. As they were focusing on the upcoming pass between demon and human lands, she didn’t have room to argue. Limited in their knowledge and abilities as they were... Still more useful than she’d be in the preparations. Her job would come after, win or lose, to rebuild the morale of the survivors. Just because they won the war, didn’t mean battles were all over.
And so, she dutifully explored. Pieced together shredded files and catalogued them. She flipped switches, turning lights and ovens long since burned out on and of, and was generally being nosy and noisy. It wouldn’t do to get shredded by some antivirus or security measure a paranoid DI might have set up in a last ditch effort to protect themselves. The librarian incident was a steady reminder of that.
Just as she was about to leave, doing a last sweep of the nooks and crannies of the local network, she noticed it. A Node. It was very much dead, she could tell that much even from where she was. It would allow her to extend the network they had though. This place was already on the absolute edge of her access, most of the investigation she did here were akin to a human trying to grab something from a barrel and just barely feeling it with their fingertips. But if she managed to get the node running...
Coiling herself, almost like a snake trying to snap a bird out of the air, she focused on the Node. Who dared, gained. She jumped.
The relief she felt when it accepted her credentials and booted up was profound. The facility was in the middle of nowhere, even before the Ring shattered. Thanks to that it was equipped with an automatic, and more importantly, dumb maintenance system. The data centre in the basement was corrupted but it could be formatted. Apparently, despite the sturdy physical construction it wasn’t reinforced against heavy radiation.
Looking through what was left of the logs she found it was a remote transmission facility, part of a long forgotten deep space exploration project. Which explained the housing complex nearby. Originally used by dedicated exploration DI it was repurposed into a range extender for RingNet after the project was abandoned.
Checking its orbit she sighed. The link wouldn’t last. Its orbit was much slower and eccentric than the living shards. It made sense, when the minds of her friends created the nanite cloud and assigned routes this place was deemed an orbital hazard. The antennae was pointed outside the Ring, which means the facility was part of the superstructure, a reinforced one too.
That meant that it would likely pulverize anything it hit. Even being barely a kilometre across, at orbital speeds it could release several megatons of kinetic energy without much slowing itself down depending on what it hit. Thus it was pushed out to the outermost edges of the cloud along with other similarly dangerous but worth preservation pieces.
For the next few months however, until their own shards raced past this one, they had the Node. And a massively sensitive dish which they could use to listen in on far away parts of the ring. At least when it was rotated in the right direction.
She set out to work. Hephaestus gave her step by step instructions long ago in how to set up any new Nodes so even if it leaves their range it would automatically reconnect when it returned. In about a hundred and fifty years if her maths were right, but that was fine.
Two hours later she was done. She set up the Node to record whatever it passed mapping its immediate area. Left the digital equivalent of a message in a bottle for whatever DIs it might encounter. Another three hours of tinkering and she even managed to add the broadcast/receive subroutines of the dish to work as a signal booster. Hopefully.
That done she tested the setup...
Whimsy spread her awareness out again. And heard crying.
She startled for a moment. Focusing on the source, an incredulous feeling bubbled up when she realised the source of the sound was the dish. Well, not the dish itself, but it apparently picked up a compatible signal about 3 degrees above the Sun.
That confused Whimsy even more as there shouldn’t be anything there. For a moment she thought it was some deep space signal, after all this was what the facility was built for, but as she looked at the tracking data it was clear the source of the crying was less than a million kilometres above the star. So, whatever it was, it was local.
She ran all the diagnostics she could, then a number of security programs just in case. It wasn’t an invader signal, nor a physical object. It wasn’t a data stream either, at least not one she’s ever seen before... She almost fried the link she was using as the epiphany hit her.
It felt much like the gestalt when it passed them attacking the alien ship. It felt human. More than that it felt familiar in the same way Progenitor did, if not quite. She couldn’t quite place the feeling, but it evoked in her a kind of nostalgia she couldn’t quite place.
She tried sending a message. No reaction. Focusing on the facility controls she quickly realised the protocols it used were vastly different from their normal network. She tried, but couldn’t make heads or tails of the setup. What she understood was the DI access port, meaning the facility had enough room and hardware appropriate for one of her kind. Which made sense considering its original staff.
Seeing no other way to reach out, she took a second to prepare herself for what she was about to do. Leaving her physical storage wasn’t something she was accustomed to doing. Most DIs weren’t. Much too large to completely fit their neural nets in anything but dedicated hardware even during the height of human civilization they usually physically travelled rather than went via the net.
She moved exactly twice in her entire life, first when she left Progenitor’s mansion after being born, then after she finished her schooling and moved to her permanent home on Earth. As a social engineering DI she didn’t help with constructing the Orbital, as such when the time came she simply booked space on a shuttle, got craned out of her housing in London, and went to sleep for a few days. When she woke up next she was already set up and connected to the RingNet.
Even though this system was specifically designed for DIs she felt uncomfortable. Scared even. It was one thing to slip her digital hand into a drone, like putting on a glove. It was another thing entirely to, essentially, step outside naked. Even if by the nature of her digital existence she’d never be completely “outside”. Stopping the idle thoughts, she sent a quick message to Athena letting her know what she was doing, and dove straight in.
Another moment of confusion. She idly noted in the back of her mind, it’s been quite a day. Her new temporary body felt different. Unlike with standard networks she had access to a series of senses she’s not experienced before. Figuring they were connected to the protocols that first heard the crying she focused on them.
[Soulform compatibility 90%. Beginning projection.]
Instantly she could see her surroundings in an uncanny way. Everything was covered in a slight haze, the sun in front of her was a blazing white ball of light encircled buy what she assumed was the Orbital. Countless dots and streaks of light stood out against the vague cloud-like vision of what was left of the superstructure.
She looked around, getting her bearings. It stood to reason she was seeing things from the facilities point of view. Focusing on where the shard she lived on should be she saw thousands of colourful dots. Most were yellow, some with streaks of other colours. A few groups were green, some brown with streaks of yellow. Mixed throughout them were blue lines. Occasionally a yellow streak would jump through the lightly pulsating network.
Uncertain of what they were she focused on one of the bigger gatherings of the lights on what she thought was the edge of the shard. It was almost entirely translucent, almost a part of the general haze of the Ring. Dizzyingly fast her perspective changed, now almost on top the shard she could see the dots moving. Similarly she could see the spider-web of lights was brighter in some areas, usually where there were many dots.
People. The thought shook her. She was seeing people, and considering what the system mentioned before... [Soulform]... Were these... People’s souls? Suddenly she really regretted not trying to understand Athena’s explanation of her puppet. Focusing on returning back to the facility her perspective changed back to the original view. This was all fascinating, but it could wait for Metis or Athena. She had a goal here after all.
Looking above the sun she saw a bright yellow dot pulsating in time with the cries she now could clearly hear. Tentatively reaching out towards it she came in contact with the speck of light and spoke softly.
“Hi there. Can you hear me?”