In the end, I’d managed to convince Jophixa to approve me for the upgraded implant that allowed for a sort of cyber telepathy. It really wasn’t all that much of a deal killer for either one of us, but we each had our default stance. Hers was that it wasn’t needed; the likelihood that I’d even be in contact with any Giobhioni systems for even the basic implant to do anything other than translate was minimal. It was a waste of resources in a time when they needed to get the station fully operational and ready to move.
My argument was that we couldn’t plan on things going the easy way. We couldn’t count on my getting back in time to warn anyone from cracking open that ship, nor that anything else wouldn’t go wrong along the way. This mission to get me back to Commonwealth space might pull them into more prolonged contact with other worlds in an effort to combat this plague.
I mentioned absolutely nothing about my desire to learn more of their technology, or be able to keep in contact with Stacy. The thought of not talking to her anymore really depressed me.
So, in the end, Jophixa agreed that it was better for me to have the higher grade implant to begin with. Better to be prepared for the worst, I’d argued, and it spoke to her security officer paranoia.
I had been informed by the good Tsaki that while the installation of the implant was a relatively mundane, simple procedure, I was still to be under medical supervision for at least 36 hours afterwards, at least 12 of those unconscious. They needed to observe the integration of the implant into my gray matter. It wasn’t uncommon for there to be some minor rejection issues, but they had the means to deal with it. It was just part of the process.
When I woke up some twelve or so hours, I thought, later, it was to hear some smooth instrumental dark country music playing, and Tsaki Gwatri swearing quietly at a monitor. “The neural link integration could not be this pronounced or widespread at this juncture Commander.” I noticed with a small smile that I was “hearing” his voice, and understanding it; the translator was working at least. “I had to keep him sedated longer to be sure it wasn’t doing any damage. I thought at first there was some kind of rejection cascade triggering anomalous growth in the connections, but none of the usual treatments did a thing! Thankfully the progress has backed off to normal levels now, but at this point, the implant has interfaced with far more of his brain than a Xixra level implant should. I’m going to have to insist you send someone along on the trip to monitor his brain activity, if for research purposes if nothing else. Even the highest level implant specs I’ve ever seen don’t integrate to this level.”
I wasn’t a doctor of course, but I was an engineer. I’d encountered enough in the way of anomalous equipment behavior during my time in the Salvager’s Guild to understand the man’s insistence. You just have to find the source of the weirdness, or it’ll nag at you forever. “At least I’m not a vegetable, or a psychopath, right Doc?”
The room went completely silent. After a moment I tried to sit up to look over at them, silence like that to a joking question was not a good sign. Unfortunately, I found myself in some sort of restraints. “Ok, you guys are worrying me here.” I said, trying to keep my voice calm, “Why am I restrained? Doc, you said this procedure was about as simple as trimming toenails, or so it seemed. Why did you go quiet, and why do you have me strapped down.”
“The straps were just part of the procedure, sweetly!” Stacy’s voice said, as if a speaker were right next to my head, even though I knew I was not in my EVA suit, I’d had to take it off for the procedure. “Please calm down. They are uptight because they think the implant is acting all funky, but it’s not!”
“What do you mean the implant isn’t acting all funky, when they think it is? Do you know what’s going on?”
Suddenly, both Jophixa and Tsaki Gwatri were standing over me staring down at me. They were both wearing expressions of both concern and annoyance. They looked like they were about to demand what was going on, but I scrunched my eyes in a way I hoped they’d interpret as a request for a few moments. “You’ve got them pretty freaked out Stacy,” and at that, their faces eased off a bit, but looked no less demanding of answers, “Maybe you should explain it to all of us at once so I don’t have to play broken telephone?”
“But I just got a chance to talk to you all in private and…” I heard her sigh. An AI, pretending to sigh, geesh. “Fine, fine. But you better be prepared for some dirty talk later mister!” Her voice switched from sounding right beside my head to coming from the room’s intercom system. “The implant is fine Tsaki, it’s just not an implant you’ve seen before, not even from the highest levels of military usage. Look, I got bored during all that time you guys were asleep ok? I started tinkering. One of the things I tinkered with was some of the implant designs.”
Gwatri scowled, “You arranged for me to inject an untested, unproven implant into a sentient being’s brain? Do you not have any ethics subroutines? I’m going to note this into the records for the Gsaltro teams to look into when they start doing their interviews with you.”
The noise that came from the intercom speakers can only be described as something rudely biological. “You think I’d risk turning Thomas into a spentra worm Tsaki? And let that choice bit of mind wrapped up in a delectable yummy package go to waste? Please! That implant went through over a thousand years of virtual testing, plus numerous tests into cloned Ataksi primate subjects. Speaking of which, when you unseal Cybernetics lab 24-B, please don’t startle them. They are good boys and girls, and remarkably smart for their species.”
I watched as Jophixa performed the very human ritual of rubbing at the bridge of her little green nose (it seems our species have more things in common than basic looks). “Alright, so you developed this new implant all by your lonesome, over a thousand years, and made sure it was safe.” She began in a long, suffering tone that made me wonder if the waking of the other personnel was causing her some headaches, “Why did you decide Mr Aacen here just had to have it so badly that you needed to arrange it behind our backs? And what exactly does this new implant do differently that it seems to have completely integrated itself into his brain?”
“Well you see,” Stacy began, then launched into a long explanation that included large amounts of neurobiology that I did not understand. What I did understand, however, had my eyebrows attempting to reach the back of my skull.
The implant, it seemed, did everything the good doctor had originally planned to provide for me, but went a bit farther. Seemed I was going to get a HUD built right into my vision now, no need for my suit’s visor. Handy for those times when I wasn’t in my suit. Sure, there were augmented reality goggles or contacts for that, but this was built right into my brain!
The communications range was also going to be greatly increased, due to the fact that the implant included a tiny bit of quantum entangled matter; its entangled partner being installed within Stacy’s own communications equipment. Stacy really hadn’t liked the idea of being told she was going to be staying put when I left, and wanted to be able to keep in touch. Bringing out this implant she’d developed was her way to basically be going with me, but not really.
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But wait a minute. “Hold up!” I tried to sit up again, and was once again stymied by the restraints, swearing under my breath before saying, “You actually got an Ansible working? Quantum Entanglement communication? Our engineers have been trying to get that past the theory stage since I don’t know when! There have been numerous times some scientist or another has said it’d never be a practical method for actual communication at long distance.”
“I, uh….”
“How did you test it Stacy?” Jophixa asked. “How do you even know it works?”
I looked over at her. Could it be that Stacy had also developed this tech during her long time alone? By the Light, 3000 years of boredom and loneliness and all the knowledge of her people at her disposal…what else did she tinker with?
“Well, I don’t know for sure what the latency will be at interstellar distances,” she explained, “but I, uh, hid one half of a quantum pair in a bit of debris and umm, arranged for it to be blasted out towards the Heliosphere. Since it really wasn’t much more than a bit of the same rock that encases the station, it was not a breach of the isolation protocols, not really. The quantum signal from it allowed me to track its position with no latency. It left the Heliosphere a couple centuries ago.”
Another monumental sigh burst from Jophixa and she just shook her head for a few moments before saying. “I’m going to guess you have quite a few more of these surprises for us? No, don’t answer that right now. You can explain it to the research teams I’m going to have auditing your ‘experiments’. By the Maw, you’re going to set everything on its end, aren’t you? Self actualized artificial consciousness, and you’ve spent 3 millenia in solitary research and development! I guess this little adventure Thomas is taking will be a true test of your Ansible, won’t it?”
“Yes Ma’am”
“If that’s the case, do you have another one handy we could install in the ship so the rest of us can communicate with the station, or with Thomas if needed?”
“I do have another ansible pair set up Ma’am” Stacy sounded rather meek at the moment, and I was wondering why. She hadn’t sounded so unsure since she revealed herself as an AI to me. But when she continued, I understood a bit, “I have to let you know ma’am, Thomas’ people weren’t far wrong on the usefulness of this technology. For point to point communication, if it works, it’ll be wonderful at keeping in touch over great distances. But the logistics of a full communication could get terribly complex. You can’t just patch into someone’s frequency. You have to have one half of a paired particle with the person you want to communicate with, or have a relay that shunts comms from one pairing to another. The number of pairings that would have existed back before…As I said, the logistics would be a handful.”
“Regardless,” Jophixa replied, “it’d help our people keep in touch, and make our outside communications damned secure while we are feeling things out. This makes me feel better about a fair number of things, Stacy. We’ll get that ansible installed, and then the mission can get underway.”
I cleared my throat at that, having been wanting to bring something up for a couple days now, but not having a moment to. When Jophixa turned to look at me I gave her a smile, “I’ve just been meaning to ask, as it seems you’ve been dancing around the matter.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah.” I said, “I mean, at least for my people, it’s kind of important for a ship to have a name. But that beautiful Lady that your commander designed, so far as I know, doesn’t have one.”
This got me her third great sigh since I woke up, “No, she doesn’t have one. If the commander had one prepared, he hadn’t recorded it anywhere. I…just haven’t been able to think of one that I think he’d have appreciated.”
“Can I make a suggestion?” I asked, and when she nodded to me, I smiled a bit shyly, feeling suddenly awkward all of a sudden, “would you consider ‘Elegance of Light’?”
The smile that lit up her face told me she liked it.
----------------------------------------
By the end of the next day, I found myself settling into a new set of quarters on The Elegance of Light.
Jophixa had decided to move me from the cramped quarters she’d originally shoved me into, and assigned me the “VIP” quarters that mirrored the captain's quarters. Both of which were on the underside of the ship, and were positioned behind the two large circular viewports like the eyes of the manta ray the ship resembled.
I wouldn’t say the suite was opulent, but for a ship of this size, they were larger than one would expect, with its own sitting room, separate bedroom, ensuite restroom (with shower!), and even a small beverage kiosk. Giobhioni didn’t have anything like camellia sinensis trees for a proper cuppa, but they had this brew made from a powdered isopod called a graptak that had a remarkably pleasant flavor, and was quite soothing to the nerves.
This was going to be a trip unlike any he’d taken previously. Even as lead engineer on previous salvage runs, his quarters were at best closet sized, at worst, he was bunked down barracks style with the rest of the crew. This wasn’t any salvage run though, this was a race to prevent a plague.
A plague he still didn’t know anything about. None of the Giobhioni wanted to talk about it, but it seemed more like the subject was just that fecking dreadful for them to discuss, rather than them not wanting to fill me in. Stacy for her part said she’d tell me more once we were on our way, she was a bit paranoid that, at this point, she might do something to fuck something up.
She was rather giddy about the current situation. She’d told me she was all prepared to copy herself into the Elegance’s computer core so at least a copy of her could come along. But putting her ansible into the comms system meant she could be as good as here with us anyway. Theoretically, if the latency was as minimal as she expected, she could even pilot the ship.
Earlier that day, I’d met two of the others that would be going with us. Tzaki Tratsa was almost a gender swapped duplicate of Gwatri. Wizened, steely eyed, and sharp tongued. She’d insisted on being the one to come along when Gwatri had asked for volunteers to join us and monitor this new type implant that Stacy had arranged to have stuck in my head. I expected to be dragged to the medical bay at least once a day to be put under the scanners for daily progress reports.
Be’tsar Toftra Prexiu was a youngster among the giobhioni here on the station. One of the youngest in fact, but also probably their best helmsman or pilot of any ship up to a destroyer sized vessel. He had spent most of his days in the time before as a test pilot, putting new designs through their paces and pushing their envelopes.
He’d actually done a lot of the testing on the Elegance of Light, so was intimately familiar with just what she was capable of. I found myself greatly reassured by that fact. He had the characteristic cockiness of a test pilot, though, but that was to be expected. It seemed that no matter what the species, test pilots were just like that. Riding death’s horse to the edge of the envelope day in, day out, tended to do that to a person, right up until their postage got canceled.
We were still waiting for our last crew member to come aboard before we got underway. Jophixa hasn’t told me anything about who was going to be taking command of the ship. I’d enquired several times, but she just wouldn’t say anything about it. I’m sure it didn’t help that this was technically her ship, the legacy of a departed friend, and she was going to be handing it off to someone else to command into a universe so much different than the one they went to sleep in.
“Thomas Aasen to the bridge.”
“Guess it’s time to meet the Captain,” I said out loud, not really to anyone in particular, “Hopefully they aren’t too much of a hardass.”
As I left the room, I heard Stacy chuckle in my ear. “You have no idea how hard their ass is.”
Rolling my eyes, I headed up to the command deck and stepped onto the bridge. I gave a nod to Tofra who had glanced over his shoulder at me, then tilted his head at the command chair. Which slowly turned to face me.
I had noted when I entered that whoever was seated there was another Giobhioni woman, with purple hair in their distinctive undercut hairstyle. But I was shocked to see Jophixa seated there when the chair turned far enough around. “Jophixa?”
“That’s Captain while on the bridge.” She said sternly, and indicated a seat next to her, “Take a seat, we will be underway shortly, and then I will explain.”
I shrugged and took a seat. It was her station to command after all, and if she thought it was more important to head up this mission, leaving someone else in charge in her absence, it wasn’t my place to lecture her. MOST men learned that lesson more than a century ago. “You know Captain,” I said as I sat down, “I’ve been meaning to ask; How exactly are we getting this ship off the station? Are we pretty deep inside the planetoid?”
She just grinned sideways at me, and said “Be’tsar, signal Control we are ready to disembark.”
“Yes Captain”
I watched in awe as, after the alloy hangar doors in front of us opened up, the rock beyond it took on a slight glow and simply…vanished, creating a long tunnel that ended in a small scrap of starfield. “What the hell?”
Jophixa simply chuckled and said “Take us out Be’tsar”