Chapter 11, Lighting the Fuse

An earlier time, when Shizuka was still recovering and recharging. She looked at the stasis pack in her Unarmored hands, carefully imagining absorbing power from it without activating her claws.

"Is this the new normal for me? Should I consider this the same as eating?" She thought. Sidonians after the Ochiai disaster only needed to eat less than 3000 Kcal per week per person, the rest of their caloric intake covered by photosynthesis from the solar spectrum. Nagate was an outlier, requiring daily food for his extreme metabolism, but... He even drank tempura dipping sauce straight from the bowl!

"Stop thinking about Nagate, you're a Gauna." An amorphous copy of her own voice said. So, her focus shifted to the unliving standards she experienced as a Gauna. There was a lot to experience, but next to zero consciousness to process until now.

A popular story book to scare kids into behaving themselves was titled The Hungry Gauna, about a Gauna that ended up eating everything and everyone because it cannot communicate with sapient life forms. Now, she could say from first hand knowledge that Gauna never felt the need to digest physical matter. Assimilation was closer to a from of digital storage conversion, using terminology she learned in computer science class. She shouldn't have chosen to postpone it like English to make way for more piloting...

"How do you feel, Shizuka?" Nicole was trying to make some conversation, having noticed she must be lonely staring at the stasis pack, "Regaining the use of your body is difficult, don't exhaust yourself, don't go rushing outside head first. "

"Thank you, Brennan-san. I'm fine."

"Just call me Nicole. So, I've heard Nagate talk about you before you woke up. All I can understand is, he really likes you. We're safe here and rescue will arrive soon... Are you comfortable with telling me your story?"

Shizuka dreaded the idea of telling her story. It was not simply guilt for what or who she became, but also the unspeakable nature of the holistic insight she experienced. She put down the half-empty stasis pack and reached for a cup of water, drinking and chewing on the straw to reestablish some humanity.

O& OS Identity integrity full, diagnosis unnecessary

"Nicole-san, please record this. Maybe not even myself has a full picture, but I hope this can help people understand... Or, research Gauna."

"Of course. I'll turn on audio log and text to speech." Nicole braced herself for venting. She has dealt with many teenagers back on earth, counseling for a trade school. A teenager from another universe who died at least twice and murdered at least dozens would be a worthy challenge.

"Hoshijiro Shizuka, pilot number 702, trainee number 336. This is my story of being assimilated by Gauna."

"I think successfully coming out of such a hard experience is worth being proud of. You have a strong personality, if you're religious, I'd say you fought well to keep control of your soul."

"Thank you... I'm not religious, doctor. If I ever believed there is such a thing as a soul I learned to deny it. Nagate told you about the time when we were drifting in space, right? All the time in the survival capsule I was thinking about the unpredictability of the world and mortality. His piloting skills, superhuman recovery, the Type 17, all helped him survive the first battle and chase after certain death. Everyone who died in the two battles ahead of it was top of their classes."

Nicole listened, it was a similar feeling of emptiness many people spoke of before joining Unitology.

"Personal effort, choice, material conditions, nothing mattered. I always knew my part will not be noteworthy in the war for humanity's survival, but every thought I had was chained by the guilt that I doomed the best pilot Sidonia had in a century. It felt too random for him, but he was unshakably confident that following me was the right choice. For the 11 days we were outside of all human contact, my belief grew strong that there couldn't be any reward from cosmic justice for him trying to do good. Have you felt it before too, Nicole-san? Hard work ending with no result, no hope for improvement?"

"A few times, Shizuka. I'm really, really sorry to hear this." She left her chair and sat next to Shizuka, who was inhumanly calm, "Though you haven't given up, I know you aren't giving up. Your personal efforts all worked in the end! There's no cosmic justice, but you still helped him and saved me!"

"Thank you, really. I know I still wanted to fight for a worthy cause. I felt happy the entire time after our rescue, and then? Doctor, being assimilated by Gauna is facing the evidence that I have a soul and they have put me into a Gauna core. Maybe I am all three cores, they kept my consciousness alive in a digital form."

"Oh... It must be very painful."

"I hated it. Inside the Gauna system, I didn't see the face of any god, I saw even more proof of the universe's random, inhuman nature. Not only we die without meaning, we live without meaning either! Gauna don't have identity or sentience, everything was only physical response to outside stimuli. I was transferred from the Gauna that ate me into the Mass Union Ship not for any strategy to understand humans, it's just decoding and transcribing data for them. It was pure luck I was here, not Eiko. ...The universe's rules for pain and death are random."

"Nagate said you believed in the possibility to communicate with the Gauna, and he himself had hope in Gauna becoming more human, because of you."

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Shizuka was alarmed at Nagate becoming softened. Would he begin to develop second thoughts about the mutants on Ishimura at inconvenient timing too?

"Even as a Gauna, it was hard to make sense of this extreme difference between the two forms of existence. Gauna did not evolve from organic matter, they didn't even evolve from the same atoms and molecules!" She was good at physics, but the knowledge from her firmware was too primordial for human words, "They were built with material from the other half of the Big Bang, first as a form of pure information, not matter. A Gauna's observable existence was a small part of its entirety. Information and energy formed structures like the first organic particles formed amino acids, and then these structures became Gauna cores."

Nicole patiently listened to the technical knowledge, wondering what comments Kyne would have beyond his Unitologist cosmology.

"We... Humans think Gauna are attracted to Hyggs particles and reactions, but it's different. Hyggs reactions will cause routines in Gauna cores to move across spacial dimensions towards them, like iron atoms towards magnetic fields. Human are a source of information, cores will collect information because of automatic expansion and construction routines. New cores form within the Mass Union Ship when there's enough code material, there is no conscious thought involved in death nor birth. They weren't more complicated than bacterium. Sidonia has been fighting a force of nature, everyone knew that. However, the Gauna's nature is closer to a part of gravity than thunder or rain. How do you fight gravity?"

Shizuka felt the doctor put her arms on her shoulders, a loose thought developed in her head, imagining noises like slapping an empty oil can. Empty inside, code in replicated human flesh!

"Don't be too hard on yourself, you just pulled your soul back from the randomness you hated! You've won, and collected very useful knowledge nobody else could have understood. Don't give up. We'll take control of things together."

"Thanks, doctor. My existence in the Gauna system was a subroutine used to control the copied Guardian. They could understand hostility before they developed identity and consciousness. The relation with Kabi is... Strange. To human eyes, Kabi kills Gauna cores, but they chase after Kabi. From what I could tell, it was actually like information within the Kabi changing the material state of Gauna beyond physical. The automatic defense mechanism still resisted it, maybe not all forms of contact were permitted. Kabi and core structure can be converted from Ena, like... My Kabi claws."

"You've sure learned a lot of things, Shizuka."

"Gauna... Also collected many from my subconscious thoughts. Ena was supposed to be pink or white, but 'my' core knew I preferred red. My hair grew longer, but this last reconstruction restored my old look at assimilation. I heard humans call me Benisuzume, so one Gauna core copied information from my brain about the insect red hawk moth and made itself look like one. There used to be 702 written on my own face."

"It was all beyond your control..."

"It wasn't. Maybe, I even had the power to snap out of Gauna nature? On the first day of revival I had conflicting emotions, both fury and relief, because my perception of the universe is proven in the worst way possible. If there was a choice of joining the heartless primal chaos, I pressed yes and gave my control to my worse human nature."

"Oh, god. You're really blaming yourself for everything..."

And now, facing a vision of pure darkness with only the red glow of the Marker at its center, Shizuka stood firmly and giggled for the first time since shedding her Gauna form. It was a sound that even Nagate feared to ever hear again. The Marker spoke to her:

SUMUS HIC IN MORTE, NOSTER SANCTUS EST.

INFERIOR LIFEFORM, WE KNOW YOU HAVE STOLEN POWER FROM US. COWER AND ASK TO BE MADE WHOLE. WE ARE THE SOURCE OF LIFE AND WE COLLECT THE PAYMENT OF DEATH.

"Heh heh heh heh. Pain and death aren't yours to control."

////

BOOM!

Nagate felt his ears almost blown apart as Benisuzume broke through the sound barrier in her dash to reach Kyne. The scientist was safely snatched away from his human shield position in front of Mercer, practically deaf, but safely out of range of the nailgun. Her calculation was extremely precise, decelerating at the peak and reaching a safe speed when she reached the hostage.

Everyone in the hangar received differ amounts of disorientation, the ones with helmets being the luckiest; Nicole had the misfortune to compare this second sonic boom with the first one she experienced in the stasis room - just as painful.

And then, the skirmish ignited. The humans were sensible enough to find more defensible positions, while the hybrid cyborg Gaunamorph Brant stepped out in the open in search of a better firing position. He exchanged some brief words with Mercer, who couldn't hear anything, only pointed at some doors in the distance in frustration.

Pulse rifles and electromagnetic pistols began firing; the security team was able to regain their senses fast enough and aim at Brant, who shrugged off the projectiles and began to charge his own particle cannon appendage.

"Tanikaze, can you hear me?" Nagate was startled by the first thing he heard after tinnitus ended being Benisuzume's voice from the RIG radio inside her armor, heavily suspicious that she could be a hallucination.

"Don't listen to her. She is a copy, I'm the one you've known." A voice answered right on cue, "The time to make us whole has arrived. Sumus hic in morte, noster sanctus est."

He shook his head and tuned up the helmet speaker's volume from his arm PDA screen. The other Shizuka's voice was too clear, with faint echoes bouncing on his soul.

"Channel open. Hoshijiro?"

"...Clear." There was a shiver in her voice at him addressing her by name, "The artificial Necromorph has a faster Hyggs regeneration speed than... Mine."

A blast of raw thermal energy hit one of the commuter doors, melting it into red hot slag; another shot followed, punching a wide hole at its molten center. He began calculating what would be the intended target at these angles.

"Do you need a distraction to take on him?" The mission was still his top priority, no matter what his partner was. If she could follow teamwork rules until now, so could him. Nagate expelled all concerns for himself, leaving only thoughts of protecting assigned objectives within the operation area, "Fire support? Should I come evacuate Kyne-san?"

"Don't try to engage him in melee, I will try to remove his Ena through particle cannon resonance." Shizuka flew to a higher level catwalk as she spoke, putting him behind some heavy cargo boxes for cover.

"Roger that. Where is the core on him?" Nagate fired his submachine gun at Mercer. This successfully drew attention from Brant, who circled around his master to provide cover with armor plates grafted into his regenerative muscles. He began looking for exposed killzones he could lead the artificial Necromorph into.

"I can't see one. He isn't like a Gauna..."

"Fine. We'll manage."

Shizuka launched her left eye's partic beam, also targeting Mercer, at minimal output. The scientist ducked, and fired a stasis beam in response, narrowly missing her. He jumped off the walkway, hiding under the Kellion, daring anyone to hit the shuttle in collateral damage.

Nagate realized Brant wasn't prioritizing in chasing after ground targets such as himself or the security guards. More confusingly, the cyborg ignored the red flying humanoid either, only dragging his heavy torso around, pointing the fleshy high energy appendage at some spots on the hangar walls he struggled to locate.

BOOM!

As the cyborg's Hyggs energy finished recharging, the floating bright light of active particles converged at his biomechanical cannon. A blinding light developed inside, indicating a higher energy output level - the precise bolt of red punched biomass and Ena into the source of the light. Interfering particles at critical state cascaded into a sickening, dense explosion.

The sizable bloody hole torn open was instantly covered by glistening orange and gold energy, which then solidified into brand new material substance.

"Only a fool wants to kill the dead!" Mercer jeered in the public RIGlink channel, "The power of Convergence is bigger than your alien weapon, the Marker has even blessed it! Kneel, we will find a proper use for you."

"There is no Gauna core on him." This time, Shizuka's call contained audible, human worry for Nagate, as if she anticipated him charging over to carve the cyborg with his stasis spear. It felt like listening to Tsumugi.

"She thinks I'll rush him?" He thought to himself, feeling a surge of exhaustion, "Just one more thing she did for my sake since the first day..."

"Nagate!" Kyne screamed into the radio, shaking him out of looming guilt-filled memories, "Son, I think the Marker can supply energy directly to Harris."

"...Do we still have time to destroy the Marker?"

"Tracking system says it's coming towards us."

"Are the Necromorphs carrying it?"

"Or Mercer's followers moved it. Doesn't matter. Your Type 17 Tsugumori is still in this hangar, it should have enough change, right?"

"I think so."

Kyne shared a waypoint on the far side next to a cargo mover platform, a familiar shape of the humanoid robot's torso covered by spacefaring fabric: "When the Marker is here, destroy it. Shizuka! Buy him time to get in."

"Mission understood." They replied together.