"Okay, what the shit?” Vinn asked, shrugging her shoulders as Gizzy and Nicole sat at the table. Zhoren was cuffed but otherwise free to sit with the rest.
“It’s complicated, but we’re working on it.” Nicole said.
“So... Vicki went nuts, murdered the shitbag guy, that part I get. It makes sense. And then Dee, the new sentient AI one, turned herself in for mutiny before she did one, and ordered herself locked up in Zhoren’s cell in the cargo bay, because reasons, clearly. And now Zhoren, a guy with 70 counts of murder, is out of his cell… because Vicki who is chained in a cryo-pod is in the brig. Because she’s way more dangerous.”
“That’s not Vicki. Well, it’s not ONLY Vicki.” Nicole explained. "She’s still in there. That’s why I had Candice restrain her. I had to unleash her worst fear to get Vicki back in control long enough to see if she was even in there, and she was too scared to fight back. She’s possessed by the Pitch somehow, but she didn’t drink it.”
“Wait… again? Like a second time? Why?” Vinn asked.
“We don’t know. Weirdly enough, she broke into the lab AFTER killing Shitbird. She didn’t kill him because she was taken over, she killed him, and then looked for the pitch vial. Luckily I hid it after the first time she drank some. We’re as lost as you on the reason there.” Gizzy explained. Nicole paced the room while the security footage played in the background.
“Dee is locked up because her wireless receiver has picked up interference from an outside ship that is following us. It’s the damn black hole ship.” Nicole sighed.
“Evil Vicki didn’t die.” Gizzy said. “She apparently killed the Mechanovore crew and fixed the ship. She’s been following us, and she’s racking up a body count.”
“So evil Vicki is alive and now good Vicki has turned into evil Vicki as well, without drinking the evil goop?” Vinn asked.
“Yeah, I dunno.” Nicole shrugged. “But Dee is worried that her wireless receiver might be hackable too if there is a telepathic connection to Vicki, who we think may have absorbed the Mechanovores. That would mean that we have a godlike AI robot ON THE SHIP that can control our ship, now controlled by Evil Vicki.”
“Well fuck me in the beard… why is Jack in Shitbird’s old cell?” Vinn asked.
“Because we can’t put him in the cell with Dee in case she goes Vicki mode and kills him, and we can’t let him free because he thinks we’re all delusional and plotting against his wife. We can’t trust him. He’s in love, he’s broken, he’s confused, and her mind fuckery is strong. He would do anything for Vicki, and she’s doing a good job of acting. There’s enough Vicki in there to cloud his logical mind, so we have no place for Zhoren, and frankly, after watching the little heart to heart security cam, I’m not convinced he’s that dangerous, especially compared to either a demon Vicki, or an AI god possessing an overpowered robot. So for now, he’s a lack of options crew member.”
“So what do we do?” Vinn asked.
“Well, we know that the Pitch doesn’t like the cold and Nicole had a drugged out oddly sexual hallucination inside the scroll room involving cryogenic freezing and lavender to help Vicki sleep. So we’re assuming that means freezing her into full long term stasis to both protect and contain, and possibly kill, the damn pitch thing. Deebot is in a Faraday cage lined with every kind of energy shielding we have to block any signals from entering, and we wired them both with a fuckton of explosives.” Gizzy sighed.
“Wait… we did?” Nicole asked, looking alarmed.
“Right, I mean we put a non-lethal shock collar on Dee and Vicki… that I previously lined with a shitload of explosives. Don’t give me that look. Those cells are blastproof. This isn’t playing around, these are universe ending enemies we don’t understand. I want a kill option.”
“That’s still Vicki on some level. You kill her and we lose Jack. You wanna send him into a villain arc too?” Nicole asked.
“Okay, Deebot had the idea. She even put it on willingly, that should tell you something. A hyper-intelligent AI who just wanted to be free and live, who was fine taking over a surrogate body, would rather kill herself than be taken over by whatever the fuck is in TWO Vicki’s right now, who can somehow apparently teleport bodies or some shit we don’t know. Honestly, if you weren’t here as captain and somehow oddly intuitive and crucial to the flow of events in this timeline, I would put both of them in a cryo pod, launch them into the nearest black hole, wipe Jacks memory of it all, and clone Vicki back with a memory file from the day we started and just make some shit up to explain why we’re here. None of us are the same people we started as, and we all started as copies of people not here. We’re all expendable printouts, except you. So if not for you on the ship, I might just ram the other ship and self destruct all of us, and just eject a pod with a fresh me to clone us all back from scratch.”
“Why am I so special?” Nicole barked.
“I don’t know, you just are. You’re one of 2 living hybrids in the known universe with DNA of a species with only two creatures in it let. One we lost track of, so potentially Just 1, Menace. I’ve been studying Menace for years, looking for her homeworld, trying to understand what Menacodians even are. Hell, they’re so rare that we named the species after the one we have as a pet. She can’t be cloned. You don’t clone right, you clearly have plot armor, you know things you shouldn’t and the only theory I have… I’m just gonna say it. Vinn, cover your ears, and this will sound insane.”
“Oh, so more than it does already. Yeah, I’ve gone far enough into the shitstorm.” He said putting on headphones.
“Try it.” Nicole sighed.
“I’ve noticed from the cloning research that some of us have an anomaly in our… universal ‘DNA’, for lack of better word. The code the universe is made of, that everything from the fabric of reality to fucking redbull is entirely made of, some of us have a fragment of code that’s independent from that. Pieces of us exist… outside the universe.”
“What?” Nicole asked.
“It’s like some rare people have a small percent of a different code that’s outside the main universe code, like having your big toe stuck in a higher dimension so anything that happens in this one, even complete annihilation, would still leave the toe remaining. I mean that as a metaphor, not literally a toe but a roughly toe-sized percent of someone’s base code that makes what they are.
“Like a Soul Fragment?”
“I hesitate to call it a Soul Fragment. Some of us have multiple different…”
“Soul fragments?” She said crossing her arms.
“Okay fine, Soul Fragments. Whatever. But they’re tiny amounts. I have about 9 different ones totaling about 16 percent, which is why I apparently just can’t stay dead. 16 percent of me, outside this universe, is just enough that I come back as myself in some form or another. Apparently 16 percent Gizzy is quite potent. Vinn is about 9 percent, Jack and Vicki are straight up zero percent, Dee is zero percent, 99.7 percent of the population is Zero…Menace is a fucking mind-blowing 61 percent, and all in the same singular… Damnit… ‘Soul fragment’. I have never once in hundreds of genetic samples seen anyone over 19 percent except Menace, who blew that away, and being 1 percent Menacodian I assumed you would be roughly my level. Nicole you are 93 percent outside source code, and all of that one single Soul Fragment. At that point we may as well just say you ARE a soul. You basically almost entirely exist outside this universe and what little bit of you is NOT outside code is so insignificant that if you were to get obliterated, you and your other copy both, you could just re-exist as basically the same person. You’re not living with one toe in another higher universe, you’re living in another universe, with one toe in here.”
“So…” Zhoren said. “She’s a god?” he asked with a smirk.
“I’m sorry, I forgot you were here, mister 0 percent.” Gizzy said. “But… no. Maybe. I don’t know what it means.”
“It means either one of the gods favors her beyond all others, or she is a god herself… perhaps even both.” He said, lowering his head to her in respect.
“Okay there, oh powerful shaman, thank you for the wildly speculative theory, but the adults are talking hard science and trying to prove theories here. I seriously doubt that in a higher dimension there is just a 93 percent identical Nicole living with godlike influence on this universe. What is she, like God’s girlfriend? Then why change 7 percent? Laziness? It just fit the plot a little better? He just didn’t know her well enough? Maybe she requested to be a little bit seamonster? Please, there is a far more sane explanation; I just don’t have it quite yet. But essentially Nicole, you are player 1, and the rest of us are kinda just NPCs in your story.”
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“I can’t accept that. There has to be a mistake. You botched the math, carried a 1 somewhere, or didn’t look at the code from the right angle or something. I can’t be 6 times as important as you are to the universe.”
“No, it’s exponential. So you’re likely something like a few hundred or a few thousand times more important. Nicole, the whole universe is unraveling and should have ended already by every calculation I’ve done, and my world-altering efforts have bought maybe 3 months of time, and you just going into space on a ship generated another year. You could eat a saltine cracker and make the universe live 2 minutes longer. That’s why I’m so trusting of you. If we leave you safe on the ship for a mission, the mission may not even generate fully, but if you get killed on a mission the universe may just…end. Or maybe you physically can’t die on a mission. Either way, I have to bring you along and keep you safe, but I have to let you run free and let the universe generate. I can’t stop you. I can’t lock you in a safe room, I can’t do this without you, and you keep doing the impossible, so getting in your way only hurts us all. However, Vicki is zero percent source code. And right now, she’s a host for one of the most volatile sentient things I’ve ever detected, and if anything could kill you, it might be that. Or worse. What happens if someone existing mostly outside the universe gets corrupted by a mind controlling living substance that can replicate and telepathically communicate with the other hosts, that magnifies and mutates someone’s base abilities on a cosmic scale?” she asked.
“I’m sorry, but fuck Vicki, the universe doesn’t need her and she is easy to copy. We have her on file as she was when the mission started, and I even have her file pre-bug bite. So we could print her out in 45 minutes either fresh from chapter 1, or all the way back before she was a blood sucking badass, but then she would be a dying girl with cancer. I don’t know which is worse, and we could just guess and then ask her… but whatever she is with that demonic tar in her veins, is not Vicki, and we can’t let that near you at any cost.”
“It already had me, and it let me go. It didn’t bind with me, maybe it can’t. Maybe the 7 percent of me that’s… in this universe isn’t enough to connect to as a host. Maybe that’s why it likes Vicki. She’s all here, she’s already powerful, and if it controls her, it controls all of us to some degree, especially Jack. I may be immune to it.” she said.
“Yeah, that’s comforting… if it gets into your blood, the universe MIGHT not end or distort into a satanic hellscape reality that it can control through you. Maybe. That’s a fun low risk roll of the dice. OR… hear me out. We wipe Jack’s memory, we kill both Vickis and the Tar demon shit, drop everything contaminated into a black hole, and just… clone a new Vicki, ask her she’d rather be a bug-vampire who is healthy if she keeps drinking blood, or a human again and have cancer. Just a thought, your majesty. It’s not like I can override you, you have more soul than I do.”
“Fuckballs. Fucking fuck my actual balls. I’m not mentally or emotionally equipped to deal with this kind of decision making. What if the 7 percent of me that’s… mortal?... what if that’s the part of my brain that is smart enough to fix this? What if I’m 93 percent goddess outside of spacetime and 7 percent of me is just some dipshit in space?”
“See, lines like that just prove the theory. You’d have to be an observer to really grasp the irony of that statement. It’s kinda funny if you get it.” Gizzy said staring at the reader.
“The point is, I’m running on intuition and guessing here. I’m just lucky or winging it with a pretty good success rate, but your plan sounds broken, somehow. I don’t know why but we have to understand it better before we act. We need to know what we are dealing with before trying to kill it or separate it. Can we just talk to her?”
...
“You killed the prisoner.” Gizzy sighed in annoyance, staring into the cell. Nicole sat on a stepstool so she could have the same interactive space. “After we all risked our asses, off the mission, to get you a backup food source, you intentionally kill him.”
“Clone him back.” Vicki shrugged.
“Do you understand how resource heavy a cloning machine is? It’s not a 3d printer for bullets or a damn microwave oven, it has a finite limit and every scumbag we bring back is one less crewman we can revive. That’s the life of one of us, or you, wasted on that shitbird because you can’t control your desire to bite.”
“She was right, you can’t let anyone else kill unless you order it. You’re god, determining who deserves to die and live, wielding the orders, the machine, and the executive decisions. You’re pissed off because someone else with free will said fuck your hypocritical orders and did something for themselves that you didn’t plan out. You’re mad because I stood up for myself and showed a hint of defiant power.” Vicki said, eyes glowing as she grinned through 2 layers of armored glass.
“Who was right? Who told you to kill the prisoner?”
“The new Dee seems to have some good points, and funny how all of us that obey are ‘family’ but the one entity with rivaling power is an opponent, even before she doesn’t anything hostile. Dee just told the truth and showed me the facts, I made a decision, and you hate that.” Vicki growled.
“I hate the way you’re acting right now, like a villain. And yes, I am one, I would know from experience, who better to warn you? You want to ignore my wisdom based on mistakes and regret and make your own mass grave? Not if it includes my family and friends. You know, before I confronted you, Dee got me aside and told me to go easy on you, that you were not in your right mind and didn’t have control of yourself. Now normally I’d assume she was the villain here, but you know who doesn’t lie? Security cams and ship scanners. The ones I bugged and have everywhere for EVRYONE’S protection. So if Dee is so wise and benevolent and guiding you to the truth, then why is there security footage of her riding big blue’s cyan dong, while you stood in a room by yourself and had a 2 way conversation with nobody?”
Vicki looked a little confused and disgusted.
“She’s lying, she was the one who…”
“Dee wasn’t in the room with you. You think she’s right and ordered you to kill, but then she’s also evil and setting you up? So is she setting YOU up or me? Who’s side is she on, because bio scans match her location, and the only side she was on was her back the whole time. Vicki, you stood in a room and hallucinated, and convinced yourself to murder a prisoner.”
“And it’s evil when I do it, but science when you do it?”
“No, it’s admittedly necessary evil when I do it, and when you do it and don’t know you’re gaslightly yourself into hallucination killings, it’s called psychosis. You. Are. Unwell. You are dangerous, delusional, and hallucinating.”
“Just like you have? Isn’t that why they imprisoned you?”
“Exactly, just like I did. When I was being mind controlled by my ex wife and out of my mind, acting like a loose cannon, my friends and family did the right thing, they restrained me, kept me from hurting myself and everyone else, and I got better when I wasn’t being actively brainwashed. So do the right thing and let us help you. Let’s start with asking the question… who told you to kill the prisoner… the robot, or the voice in your head that sounded too much like your evil counterpart?”
“She’s dead… you killed her, remember? You killed me in the process, just like collateral damage. You told Jack to go back to the ship and you let the Vicki with more power than you get pulled into that back hole, because I scare you when you’re not the biggest predator in the ship.”
“Listen to yourself… you went from a girl who felt guilty being a predator, biting someone who might be rehabilitated and a decent person, to bragging that you can be more evil than me. You wanna bet that if we hack the police records for that Prison cube, that the weapons that were used on it match the ones on that ship we left her on? Vicki, that’s not you, that’s your body being puppeted by the sentient tar in her veins. Our enemy is the Pitch that corrupted the last Vicki, and apparently didn’t go down with the ship like we thought. I should have fired on that ship. Never leave an enemy’s stronghold intact. That’s on me. I didn’t wanna kill 6 innocent people to ensure that monster went down. But you’re hearing voices and killing people for fun, and just to fuck with me? Does that sound like Vicki or the thing that infects Vickis? Who am I talking to now? Vicki or something else?
“How dare you.”
“How dare I? The most important thing in Vicki’s entire world has always been Jack, so what would he think of this version of you? Would he back up your logic now or would he let you go down with a ship, and clone back the woman he loves… again. Who are you, because Vicki would be ashamed to say this in front of Jack, and she would ask for the help we all want to give. Something else in control, and it might not give a shit what Jack thinks.”
“Oh, you’re good, you are really good.” Vicki grinned. “You really believe you’re never wrong and you are SO gifted at sharing that belief and defending it, aren’t you? Which one of us has killed Jack before?”
“You fucking bitch.” Gizzy said, reaching for the shock collar remote. Jack grabbed it before she could push the button.
“Stop.” He said darkly to her. “That’s my wife you’re pointing a gun at.”
“You wanna bet our lives on it?” Gizzy said. "How the hell did you get out of that cell?”
“I lived on a prison planet till I was 16, and you trained me in espionage. You think when my wife is in danger I’m not capable of getting out of a basic cell?” He said as she noticed his left shoulder was dislocated and his thumb broken, to slip out of shackles.
“Jack stop her, it’s me!” Vicki said looking terrified as Gizzy rolled her eyes.
“Oh wow, the shift in emotion is strong today. Incredible how she goes from hostile takeover to crying victim the moment you enter the room. That’s either Vicki being released to plead for her life, or an actor with her face. Either way, she is not holding the wheel.”
"I can’t just let you kill her and clone her to find out. We don’t kill broken friends and replace them, we fix them.”
“Not if they are beyond fixing, Jack. You even have the order to kill ME if I become that thing in my drawing, and I stand by that. If she is the demon in my dreams, then killing her is your order just as well. That’s the rule. Whoever is infected gets purged, no matter who they are. And we bring them back pure and clean.”
“Purge your own wife, because your boss says I’m evil? Jack, You promised to protect me, from anything, but not her?” Vicki sobbed.
“STOP IT! Both of you, shut up.” He said drawing his pistol and aiming it at Gizzy, while turning to a position where he could move his aim to Vicki in a moment’s change of heart.
“Jack, you are giving me no choice here, and I’m so sorry.” Gizzy said, quick drawing her weapon as he put a round in her chest and she put one in his shoulder, dropping the gun. She grabbed him and pinned him to the wall. “You’re going into cryo, Jack. You can't escape if you’re not awake, and I can’t have you like this with so much at stake. I’m so sorry.” She said, jabbing him with one of the prisoner sedatives and slowly wrestling him to the ground.
“We need to talk to the damn robot.” Nicole sighed.