Di stared at me from across the table. When she heard that I was planning on going to space she had asked me to meet with her, so now we were sitting across from each other in the living room of our house. “So now you’re running off to space, Greg?” she asked with a look of disappointment in her eyes.
“You wanted to take some time apart, so I thought I could use the time to...wait, you called me by my name. Does that me you now accept that I’m Greg?”
She nodded. “Yes, you are Greg, but this isn’t about that. Deep down I think I always knew that. But you went off and did...this,” she waved her hand at me, “without even talking to me. And now you want to run off to another planet without even telling me.”
“I did tell you, though. I told everyone.”
“I should know first, though. Switching bodies was a major life decision, and you left me out of that, and now you’re building the first human town on the moon, and I have to hear about it the same time as everyone else?”
“You said you wanted some time apart, and weren’t even sure who I was. Wouldn’t that mean that you don’t want me to contact you?”
“No, of course not. I...” she stared at the wall for a few seconds. “I should be a part of your life, but it’s like you don’t want me there.”
“Of course I want you there,” I said, leaning across the coffee table to grab her hands. “I just thought that you were mad at me and didn’t wanted to be around me.”
“And before that, with the body swap thing?”
“I...I guess I didn’t tell you until afterwards because I didn’t want you to stop me. I needed to do this. We needed to find a way to save lives.”
“You say that, but was that really the reason?”
I had to think about that. Originally, I had looked into it for that purpose, but now I wasn’t sure. “I think I was just afraid.” I said, surprising myself.
“Afraid of what? Of me? Of a relationship?”
“Of Death. I killed thousands with one attack that they couldn’t protect against. Before that people were getting slaughtered by beings that will either torture you to death or think nothing of killing you, many of which were far stronger than us. And they are what the GCA considers expendable troops, not the good troops. I needed a foolproof way to survive, for all of us to survive. That was the only one I could find, even with its risk. No other skill could fully protect us, even if we can come back from severe injury. I could build a defense against attacks like Angel of Death, but they can always make something different that I haven’t thought about. I would be in an arms race against a foe that knows science and the System far better than I do. I can’t win that race, so I did the one thing that might win it. I copied the Norse gods and made myself immortal. And I can do the same to the rest of us too.”
Di sighed. “What if we don’t want to be immortal? What if some of us expect our lives to end at some point, and are okay with that?”
“Then you can choose when to let it end. Just stop making clones. We should have that choice though, so our lives can’t be permanently taken by another person.”
“And what if we are meant to die? What if there is something out there, like a god, that decides our time is up?”
“If they are really a god, I don’t think we could stop them. But even aliens that we once thought were gods can’t really kill us like once we have a clone.”
Di knew Greg didn’t believe in any gods, but she did. Somewhere out there had to be some higher purpose, some higher being to give us purpose. She sighed. “We’ll talk about this when you get back from playing astronaut.”
I stood, then had an idea. “Why don’t you come with me? The ship is designed to carry up to six people, so there’s plenty of room.”
Di shook her head. “I’ve never been into the whole sci-fi space colonization thing. I’ll see you when you return.”
I nodded. “Goodbye then.” I said, then turned and left. Behind me, Di started crying, though I had no idea why.
Unknown location:
Screams filled the underground facility. This was where betrayers went, where those that broke their contracts with the GCA or failed their missions were punished. Thanks to the medical equipment and the nanite injections people rarely died, and thanks to the skill of the punishers it was even more rare for subjects to betray their masters a second time.
The two and a half meter tall man opened the door to see a naked Sea Alf woman covered in scars strapped to the table. She had returned months ago to beg forgiveness for her failure in a simple raid on some backwater planet. Seeing that the woman was asleep, the tall man pushed a button on a console, flooding her brain with the sensation of pain, jolting her awake with a scream. He waited a few seconds for her heart rate to slow back down before looking her in the face. Not that they couldn’t bring her back if her heart gave out, but there was no point in wasting money on it if you didn’t have to.
“Lord...Lord Vidar.” she said, pain covering her face. “Please, forgive me. I failed you, and I know it. But I still don’t know how I could have lost. The enemy must have cheated. They must have used some sort of...” Vidar pushed the button again, holding it for three seconds before releasing it. The pain she experienced was the maximum her species could, and rather than allow the System to suppress the pain like they would out in the field, he had her nanites force her to stay awake despite the pain.
“You still refuse to take responsibility for your failure.” he said. “but I have decided to give you a second chance.” Previously she had been assigned to lead thirty thousand troops against some meaningless city, killing and torturing its people while taking all of the resources they could carry. This would force the city to surrender and give the GCA a new influx of worker-slaves. The planet in question had proven quite resilient, with none of their major cities and only some of their smaller cities surrendering, but that was common among worlds that had experience in war, especially ones where terrorism was a common tactic. They could just try again later.
This Alf, whose name Vidar hadn’t bothered learning, had reinforced their resolve with her failure, however. Somehow, a small Alf colony of only a few hundred, backed by a few hundred local mercenaries, had managed to draw her away from her mission and wipe out the vast majority of her forces. The only ones to survive had been the ones that she sent to attack the city as she was ordered to do, and only a few of them survived. Not that the other commanders didn’t also lose the vast majority of their troops, but they had at least completed their objective of sowing fear into the hearts of the locals. This Alf had only served to give the locals hope with her defeat.
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“Please, my lord. Tell me what you wish of me, and it shall be done.” She closed her eyes and tears streamed down her face.
Vidar nodded. “The Alf village that destroyed your forces is looking for recruits. You are to join the colony and learn of their defenses, as well as how they managed to defeat you. After that, you will act as an agent for whichever competent commander we send for the next assault. Only once the village falls will you be allowed to return.”
The Alf woman began shedding tears of joy. “Thank you my Lord. I won’t fail you a second time.”
“See that you don’t.” responded Vidar. “For if you do, only the suicide of all of your clones can save you from pain that will make your time here become a pleasant dream.”
Greg’s perspective:
I waved goodbye to the cheering people as I entered the ship. News agencies from across the planet had sent crews to film the launch, as this would be humanity’s first space colony. Many of them were concerned that I was going alone, but as I had also been a major trader on the Market and had been the one to inform them about the GCA attacks, they saw me as just a glory seeking entrepreneur. Like the post System version of a certain Space X-ploration and electric car company CEO, only I was sending myself into space instead of an electric car. The original had survived the plague and the System’s awakening, but had fallen into obscurity, as his company and its few surviving employees struggled to adapt their patents to the new technology the System brought with it. I was certain he’d make some sort of a comeback, I just didn’t know when or how much of a comeback that would be. Who knows, maybe I’ll overtake him as the world’s richest man one day. Hopefully the people of Earth would actually survive long enough for that to matter.
While I didn’t expect any trouble, I had Tim prepare my clone anyway. The cryopod would watch its brainwaves and, if it detected the heightened levels that indicated a soul was trying to animate it, the pod would wake me up. The only way that would happen, though, is if something went horribly wrong.
I closed the door to the ship behind me and started the launch procedure. The reactor was full and at full power. The hydrogen fuel was full. The power reserves were at full. That last one was the most important. The reactor didn’t produce enough power to counteract Earth’s gravity, so I would need to draw on the reserves to get into orbit. Once there I could run entirely off of the reactor if I wanted to, even with the warp drive online. Though I would need to upgrade the reactor if I wanted to do that with the Warp Drive 3 I was hoping to install.
Seeing that everything was ready, I floated off the platform, activated the engines and turned down the interstate so that I would have a straight shot into space. I then burned the engines at full throttle, making it to orbit in less than a minute. We had set up the press area to make sure that no one would be injured by the engines, but they still would have gotten an impressive video.
I pulled the Hyperspace Communications Module out of my inventory and plugged it into the communications console. While I had taken pains to make sure that the ship couldn’t be tracked through hyperspace, the press crew had insisted that I send them periodic updates and do interviews. So I would plug it in, but leave it on standby/listen mode any time I wasn’t talking with them.
Once I was in orbit I set out for the moon. After verifying that the initial burn put me on the correct course, I turned on the warp drive, cutting a three day trip down to fifty minutes. Once there the drive automatically disengaged and I executed a deceleration burn to go into orbit. There I sent the press another update that I was in orbit and shifted the ship into a polar orbit. While mineral scans of the moon had already been done by space probes, compared to what this ship was capable of they were barely worth having. Soon I had over a dozen decent spots picked out for colonies. The first was in Shackleton crater. With only a one kilometer range for a one way teleport I had to lower my orbit until I was practically skimming the surface. As I passed over it, however, I sent one of the standard World System Cores to the center of it, then ordered it to start the pre-programmed basic colony which would serve as our source of water and hydrogen.
The Core would essentially start digging out storage areas, then put the different storage facilities in them. It would then start building more mines, processing facilities, Generators, and progressively higher tiers of nanite forges until it had a Tier 10 nanite forge, which are usually the main workhorses of industrial planets, able to produce almost twenty billion a day worth of System products. As it expanded the industry and storage it would build landing pads and a settlement capable of supporting at least ten thousand people. The only difference with a public settlement and a secret one is that the secret one would use nuclear generators, fission at first, then fusion, then anti-matter, to produce their power, and that the secret one would be completely cut off from hyperspace.
I traveled to the next four sites, periodically dropping teleporter orbs in random locations or on mineral deposits, and put World System Cores on those four sites as well, notifying the Press after each core was placed. I then set down on the surface and started looking over the data that was coming in from all of the scans. Hopefully one of the teleportation orbs would find a cave soon, so that I could start building settlements there. As each Nanite Forge would take five days to make one the tier higher, it would take at least forty days to reach the maximum size. And that was assuming that they didn’t hit supply or power bottlenecks, which they most likely would. I doubted it would be ready in less than two months, though the settlement might be ready for people to start to move in a week from now.
Fort Solinan:
Sarla stepped out of the archway that had sent her here from the homeworld. It had taken her a few days to fully adapt to her new body with its radically different implants. This one was almost entirely organic, like the bodies of most of her people, while her old body had many cybernetic upgrades to make it vastly superior to this one. Her mission, however, required that she delete all of the old programs that enhanced her in unusual ways so that the recruiter could look over her status and verify that she was who she said she was. While adapting she had trained the skills a colonist was supposed to have exhaustively, until she had the skills one would expect from a mage.
Her job would be as a combat mage, accompanying the troops in their training as they entered something called a ‘dungeon’. Apparently it was some kind of training facility which the local Alfinoids built in order to guarantee that their troops could handle any situation that they might face. The local Lord, an unremarkable man named Tarn, had formed an alliance with one of the native settlements and arranged to use their militia’s dungeon. As that was most likely the locals that helped against my assault, it pleased me that everything was going well. They suspected nothing.
Apparently everyone was talking about how the mayor of the nearby Human settlement, the local sapient species of Alfinoids, had set off that morning to go to the planet’s moon and build a settlement. Apparently it was their first space colony. Not surprising, seeing that they only had full access to the System for a few months. On many worlds the powerful people already knew about the System and had already at least colonized their local system before they allowed the common people to know about the System. That’s how it happened on the Homeworld. The powerful people kept the System to themselves for over a thousand years, using it to build settlements across the entire planet before one of them let the secret of their power slip and they were forced to give access to the System to their serfs in order to not lose them to the nobles that did. Once half the people on the planet had access, the System introduced itself to everyone, and the tidally-locked planet became a proper System world. That was over ten thousand years ago, and the Nobles still had the power, with some of them still surviving from before the System came to everyone on the world.
Sarla, though that wasn’t her name at the time, grew up on one of the first colony worlds, settled eight thousand years ago by one of the original Nobles. It was a water world, with only a few mountain tops and volcanoes providing land to live on and an extremely long 107 hour day. The temperature fluctuated from far below the point where the sea froze to almost the point at which the sea water boiled, though once you got deep beneath the surface of the water the temperature stayed almost constant. For that reason, everyone lived in the cramped underwater domes and could only go to the surface just after sunrise or sunset.
She had been an orphan, one of the surface salvagers who left every morning to pick the plants that regrew during the intense heat of the day. One day, after she got back to the door late and the local Lord refused to open the door and let her back in, she was forced to bury herself in mud and leaves to survive the heat of the days, barely surviving with extreme sunburn, heat exhaustion, and starvation as she was picked up by the salvagers that came out just after sunset. It was at that point she vowed to kill the Lord of the city for what they did to her.
She eventually managed to get a job on another world, having learned magic so that she could treat her own severe pain caused by the scars of that day. The local lord was desperate enough for people that they were willing to pay for the expensive nanite treatment to regrow enough of her skin that she could be useful to them. She served them loyally until they started encountering a corporation that also wanted to build on that forest planet. There was a war with the GCA and the Lord sent her and her fellow troops to kill the enemy. For some reason, they were captured and not killed.
The GCA offered her a position as a commander in their military if she would serve them and taught her about their vision for the future, where everyone was given what they needed to live, and received extra if they performed better. She agreed to join them, helping them take over the settlement on the planet and even to set up on the world where she was born. She lead an increasing number of their troops, being rewarded more and more with each battle she won, until she managed to capture the Lord that had trapped her on the surface two decades earlier. She had him chained to a tree at sunrise and turned the settlement over to the GCA for one of their managers to run.
She was then reassigned to lead a group of thirty thousand on some world named ‘Earth’ that had just been connected to the System. It should have been an easy assignment, after all the locals called their planet ‘Dirt’. How intelligent could they be? She marched her troops toward the city she was ordered to assault, only to be attacked from the side by some stupid Lord and his human mercenaries. She thought she would make quick work of them, but somehow the locals had descent weapons and training, and were able to wipe out most of her forces before she got troops inside their settlement. She knew she would win, however.
Then her troops started coughing up blood, screaming in pain, and collapsing. Whatever it was didn’t seem to affect her though. It must be because she was an Alf, and because the settlement that released the biological weapon was an Alf settlement they wouldn’t make a weapon that could affect them.
As she couldn’t win the fight now by herself, she returned to the GCA base. Her superiors would need to know about this weapon. When she reported it, she was referred up the chain of command all the way to General Vidar. When she told him, however, he considered her a failure. Worse, she was a traitor that couldn’t even win a simple battle and instead made excuses.
He spent the next month or more teaching her why she was wrong, and she wouldn’t make that mistake again. Either she would complete this mission or she would die trying. Multiple times if she had to, even to the last clone.