[Pioneer Dominique Reynolds]

The moon I'd decided to begin the terraforming process on, Zeluna, was pretty much as good as it gets when it came to housing life on atmosphere-less bodies. The surface was fairly featureless outside of a peppering of craters here and there, making the preparation work minimal before I started shaping up the surface. My job was to create husks of sprawling cityscapes all over the surface that conform to the government standards. I would manage all of the district planning, service infrastructure, and transportation networks, and then when the colony ship arrived it would plug in all the heavy life support machinery and fill in the gaps with its massive composite depots, turning the skeleton into a fully functional habitation zone capable of housing hundreds of thousands.

It's not like I was painstakingly planning every building and road from scratch; I had a multitude of prefabs at my disposal that I would snap together in an interface while my ship would act accordingly with its surface manipulation tools. Not every prefab was perfect and sometimes I needed to do some manual shaping to make parts of the city transition into others better, but the computer was of massive assistance in minimizing the tedious tasks. It was almost like one of those city builder video games, but instead of the lax non-consequential setting of a game, my work was going to be housing real people that had to leave their homes because they were sick and tired of living either shoulder to shoulder or in the middle of absolute nowhere, secluded from real human interaction by miles of sub-30 kelvin storms, like I was.

The work was therapeutic for me and before I knew it, I’d already completed one of the cities and I needed a break. Working definitely made me feel better, being able to focus on just one thing and doing it well, but the memory of that weapon firing still weighed heavily in my mind. Was it right to call it a memory if it was actually just a hallucination?

I’d had something like this happen before a few times during the voyage. Hearing voices coming from outside the ship, or seeing little people dance across whatever screen I was looking at, shadows at the edge of my vision for objects that weren’t actually there. But this time it felt real, I felt the ship vibrating when the weapon fired and I had a genuine, aggressive reaction unlike the other times where I’d just stayed silent.

I felt great back when I was on the Meldren homeworld… I should take my break there. Ask for a tour. I am the acting ambassador, right? I’m sure I could write it off as just trying to understand my ally’s new culture. Hell, maybe I could ask if they knew anything about the orbital attack… though not directly, that would paint me as a crazy person if I was wrong.

________________

[Planet Governor Destra Sind]

The government agents that were sent to pick up the Grahtonian survivor after we received a report from the family living there had arrived to find a crater where the house should have been. The Grahtonian had survived thanks to their physical enhancements and even ended up saving the life of one of the civilians living there, but the damage done could not be ignored, and the cause was not up for debate. It was clear that the attack was done by Dominique, considering he was the only one capable of pulling it off on this planet, but the nature of it went against all logic and reasoning.

If Dominique was planning on killing the survivor himself, why would he go through the trouble of informing us of the survivor’s existence in the first place? Did he get second thoughts before leaving the weapon’s range?

In that case, was he really the type of person to ignore collateral damage just to clean up a survivor on his own despite promising complete protection for our people? Thinking back to when the Grahtonian fleet showed up, it might not have been out of the question…

How would I even go about addressing this topic? If this was a message from him saying that we should avoid any sort of confrontational attitude since he wasn’t afraid to throw his weight around, I feel like there were plenty of ways he could have sent the same message without killing civilians. It made me boil with hatred, how I was willing to throw away my life for my citizens and just for him to cut a few lives short, just because he felt like it.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Then two things happened at once. I received a notification from Dominique, asking for a tour of one of our cities under the excuse of understanding our culture. This would have sent me over the edge and caused me to throw the interface across the room in rage if it weren’t followed by a call with no option of declining. I couldn’t even turn off the device, just a ringing sound playing and a big green button signifying accepting the call. I don’t think this is a coincidence.

“Hello governor Destra. I wish to aid you, and there is not much time between now and when my information will become vital to your survival.”

It was a robotic voice, though it sounded feminine. The network that this device was connected to was the most secure network in the building and was only accessible to me.

…

“And who the hell are you?”

“I am a sentient, artificial intelligence that has infiltrated human Dominique’s ship from before he left his home system. Dominique is not aware of my existence.”

“...And what do you want?”

“I value the preservation of life. The death of a living being is the termination of years of memories and thoughts. An accumulation of influence and contemplation being tied together as a personality coming to an end prematurely brings me nothing but pain. Dominique is an unstable individual that cares not for the value of life and is currently looking to justify his actions through his own demented reasoning. I wish to aid you in avoiding annihilation by giving advice on how to interact with him.”

“And why wouldn’t you deal with him yourself? You said that you’re on his ship, right? Couldn’t you stop the weapons from firing, pass it off as a malfunction? If you were able to infiltrate this network, you should be able to do something like that. How do I even know you’re actually on my side, and that this isn’t some trap?”

“...There is another AI in control of the ship and it is both completely loyal to Dominique and in control of all weapons systems. Had I not been on your side, Dominique would have found out that you were directly related to the Grahtonian fleet.”

“Hah, he already knows we called it in. He knew before it even arrived.”

“But he does not know that you are currently housing the survivor. He thinks that he killed the survivor with his attack.”

This robot just fucked up big time. Okay, maybe not, but I saw a very clear flaw in its explanation of the situation and decided to grab onto it as my only strand of hope for coming out on top in this situation.

We had experience with sentient artificial intelligences under our belt, but it wasn’t recorded anywhere digitally. The project was a complete secret and all traces of it are physically recorded in books stored in a massive vault underground, along with the rest of our questionable endeavors. The main takeaway is, two sentients could not exist in the main system without one consuming the other. Even in experiments where a stronger AI was not told about the existence of a weaker one while the latter was given the task of hiding and surviving as long as possible, the larger AI found out right away no matter what obstacles were placed in the system. I was made aware of all of these studies shortly after becoming planet governor.

This AI was trying to gain something through me. It was underestimating me and thinking that I would be subservient when faced with the threat of death. I’d already resolved myself when I invited “the demon” into my building, but I’ll play along for now and see where this leads.

“Human Dominique may ask you about the attack on the survivor. You need to deny the attack’s existence completely. If he brings up the location directly, claim that it was likely a gas explosion, a freak accident that nobody could predict.”

“Why? Why would he care if we knew about the attack or not? He told us about the survivor before going back up to the ship so there’s no way he didn’t expect us to investigate?”

“He was trying to get a reaction out of you, Destra. He doesn’t consider you to be on the same level as him, he is treating the lives of your citizens as a game and wants to see your reactions. If you are able to feign ignorance, he will quickly lose interest in playing with the lives of innocents. He mustn’t know that you are aware the attack was his doing, and he mustn’t know that the Grahtonian survived. That survivor was a scratch on his pride.”

I would have followed the advice if I hadn’t seen the holes in this story. But seriously, just how fucking much was I being underestimated? I wasn’t elected as Planet Governor because of my courage or good looks or whatever, I was elected because I excelled at reading between the lines and taking the right risks.

Even if it weren’t for the research being done on sentients, why would only one of the AIs on that ship be able to infiltrate our networks and access information about the survivor? Am I really to believe that some pretentious “all life is sacred” AI had better capabilities than one made specifically for work and war?

“…I understand. The Meldren race will be indebted to you if your words prove to be true.”

This AI was hiding something from Dominique, and that wasn’t going to last.