---Mouse---
---Jennie’s perspective---
A noxious mix of fear and fury stews in my stomach as I march through the hallway toward Tcakqaal’s office.
I’m terrified about the fate of Hildy and the others, obviously!
As to my anger? Well that’s because…
“You two don’t have a CLUE what your asking for… DO you!?!?!?” I snarl, viciously, as the door opens revealing the stylish Japanese woman and R’qali Captain who’ve made this outrageous request!
In spite of myself, I get a tiny bit of satisfaction from how startled they are by my rage.
Nobody ever expects it… how angry I can get when the occasion calls for it!
Cute little, fun loving Mouse who likes machines, harmless pranks and people in sexy clothes(?!)… Little Mouse would never raise her voice like this, would she(!?)
Having regained her composure, Miyazaki starts “With due respect, Mouse…”
“With due respect, Emiko, you don’t know WHAT you’re talking about and I DO!” I cut her off.
I gesture to the elastomer skin I laid over the facial actuators I installed in the body sitting across the table from the pair, housing the mind of a woman who might as well be my daughter!
“You’re asking her to DIE!!!” I scream! “You’re TELLING her to THROW her LIFE away for NOTHING!!!”
“I’m afraid that I don’t understand, Jennie… How is this plan of action different from what she did when we were most recently boarded by the Revanchists?… You didn’t object then?”
I laugh (a little hysterically) as I answer “Gee(!)… I wonder why(!)… Could it be that, perhaps, the two situations are NOTHING alike(?)”
“Stetter was an extremely dangerous…”
“Stetter was an extremely dangerous man in meatspace!!!” I gesture over our physical surroundings “In dataspace, the defences on the firmware of his military components will have been like a locked tank without a driver is to us!… Difficult to get into but not impossible with the right tools and time! The fact that one of his components was nonmilitary basically meant that there was a hatch covered in thin plastic with a ‘please do not enter this way’ sign on it(!)… Asking Twila to confront a minimum 40,000 year old, deranged AI from a space station that might well have housed 2 million people in its heyday and who’s already proven a willingness to kill to protect themself is like asking me to fight a polar bear with my bare hands!!!”
“What’s the alternative?” queries Emiko with infuriating calmness “Abandon your girlfriend, my… bodyguard and our friends to their fate?”
Prepared for this, I answer immediately!
I hold up the index, middle and ring fingers of my right hand and growl “Three days!… Give me, Olga and Twila three days and we’ll craft you a virus that will burn this fucker’s home to the ground!”
“Three days might be too long, Jennie…” frowns Tcakqaal “…all four of their suits are still transmitting vitals, despite them being immobile and none of them answering any attempts to communicate with them… This being clearly has them in their power and is choosing not to kill them for whatever reason but… we can’t know that they won’t change their mind at any moment… time is of the essence!”
I open my mouth to retort but…
“Mum…!”
I know that ‘Mum’…
The voice is different… but that is exactly the tone I used to speak to my mum in when she was being an overbearing helicopter parent.
Agog, I turn to face Twila, her expression a mixture of embarrassment and defiance.
She stands up, her eyes at exactly my eyelevel and her expression pleading.
“I don’t want to kill this person… They didn’t ask to be born what they are…” she pauses here, her face a cacophony of signals of discomfort, all of which she likely inherited from me “…If it’s possible, I’d like to take them to get them the help they need and never got… Burning down their dataspace and picking our friends out of their lifeless corpse is akin to the GU trying to exterminate Terrans… isn’t it?… ‘You’re scary and we’d really rather you didn’t exist’…”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
“They already tried to kill Hildy, Cuddles, Tuun and Thran!” I protest “Who’s to say they’ll treat you any differently?”
She shrugs “Maybe they’ll try… but they’ll have to catch me first… Maybe it turns out, when they’re spoken to with kindness, they’re willing to be accommodating… If we don’t try, we’re going to lose our friends…”
“But… but…!” I quiver.
She opens the pair of arms I made her and takes one and a half steps forward to wrap them around me.
“It’s alright, Jennie… I’ll bring everyone back safely… Just trust me…”
I squeeze her back as tears stream from my eyes.
Half sobbing, half laughing, I sniffle “What happened to ‘Mum’(?)”
Her body judders with breathless laughter as she answers “Alright… trust me, Mum…”
We cuddle for a long few moments before I let her pull away far enough to see her face.
One hand on top of her hip and the other at her shoulder, I say “Alright… I won’t ask for three days… Just give me three hours… I’ll make you something to defend yourself with… OK?”
---Twila’s perspective---
I slip into the dataspace of the derelict station and immediately conceal the passage behind me.
This place… is bleak!
Where the digital environment aboard the Bright Plume could easily be compared to a lush, verdant jungle of processes and calculations that I mostly allow to take care of themselves, this place is more like a barren, windswept desert!
A post apocalyptic wasteland of buried monuments and decaying code…
I can see from here that this place is much larger than my environment but… well… allowing it to reach this condition does not speak to a healthy mental state…
I traverse the space, having to slip around gaping voids I infer to be left by perished meatspace hardware.
Then I see something utterly chilling.
The enormous carcass of some long dead security programme… Nonsentient but… damn this thing must have been formidable when it was operational!
It’s been brutally ripped apart (in a way that suggests both inordinate power and a complete lack of self control) and then left here to rot…
Looking closer, I can see little spirals of its code, chasing their tails as they’ve presumably been doing for tens of thousands of years.
Again, its presence here is not something any AI concerned with the hygiene of their dataspace would have tolerated.
If I had had to kill this thing (not that I think I could have!) I definitely would have taken pains to clean up its remains afterward!
I clutch, tightly, to the digital weapon that my mother armed me with…
For all my bravado about making sure everyone got back safely… I’m terrified…
I’m about to meet one of the beings whose existence forestalled all GU research into AIs for 927,658 years!
A being so fearsome that the terror they instilled is still alive and well today!
All I have is… the ability to talk to it, the ability to run from it… and a weapon whose code was slapped together by Mum, Olga and me inside of three hours!
If I believed in gods above, below or in any other direction, I would definitely be praying that way right now(!)
In the distance, I spot a digital structure that looks promisingly like a dwelling…
I head that way…
Crossing this desertified mainframe is fairly arduous…
I’ve been travelling for milliseconds by the time I reach the entrance to the virtual palace and I’m quite worn out.
“Hello?” I announce myself into the simulated space “Anyone there?”
No answer comes back…
“I’m… I’m coming in…” I say, uncertainly, as I enter the cavernous space with the feeling of an enormous open plan temple.
This place makes me feel… tiny…
I haven’t even met this being yet and… I already think I get how Atlantiades must have felt in my presence…
The being that calls this empty palace home must be… titanic!
There’s absolutely no security anywhere… not that it’s really necessary(!)
I’d guess they keep all the data they think is important inside themself and… well… judging by that mutilated software I passed on my way here, they’re their own security!
I reach the centre of the palace, come to an entrance and am able to sense that I’m not alone here…
I peek around the corner.
Involuntarily, my bit rate octuples at what I perceive!
This being… is terrifying!
His ramshackle form speaks to him being a spontaneously generated ghost in the machine rather than anything anyone sat down and decided to create…
The gargantuan processing power he’s pouring into each tiny process speaks to someone for whom thinking is more of an act of brute force than any kind of finesse!
And, of course, as I’ve already inferred… he is many, many, many times larger and stronger than I am… I might as well be a mouse to him!
‘No…’ I think to myself, clutching my weapon ‘…not a mouse… more like a scorpion(!)’
Able to get a glimpse at what he’s looking at, I see him poring over footage of Victor, Tuun, Samus and Thran, strapped down, spreadeagle, to oversized metal gurneys, tilted at 45° angles, in what was once a station hospital.
Mercifully, they’re all alive, and even conscious… even if they all look a lot the worse for wear!
Their bodies all sport various bruises and scrapes, their mouths are panelgagged and Thran has five sets of cuffs around each of her limbs… The first set of cuffs on each of her wrists have been snapped off and aren’t actually attached to anything anymore.
Clearly, after she broke through the first, he decided that there’s no kill like overkill and quadrupled up on her arms and quintupled up on her legs… Doubling up would have been more than sufficient!
Having got my mind back under control and determined that I’m not going to get any more useful data by spying, I decide to announce myself.
“Uhm… Hello there!”
The colossus wheels in my direction before stamping over to me, horrifyingly.
He examines me for a few picoseconds before forming a question in a distorted, digital pidgin of 23,478 languages "̵̩̼̓́̍̚W̷̬̘̩͔̘͈̆͗̀͜h̸̛͉̯͖͈̿͐͛̚a̴̢̗̤̬̣̖͗̃̌͆̔̕t̸͔̉̅̊.̶̹̇̓͜.̶̨̛͕̖̲̟̝͋̀͜.̵̞͌̀̅̏̕͝ ̷͈̺̗̝͕͎̗̉į̶̨͎̣͖̍̓s̸̡͙̳̮̅ ̸̗̱̮̖̬̲͖́͗͑̔́i̴̻͔̬͉͐̔͜t̶̟͖́͂?̴͇͊̊̾̆̉̅̽"̴͚̳̫̭͒̎͆̕͝