Viridian Wolf

by Dragon Cobolt

  “That’s a fucking marketing slogan, Sarah!” Tex looked back. “Ahhhh!” He started to type. Click click click, shift, click click, tap tap, clack. He hovered his finger above the enter key on the keyboard as the water continued to pour from the ceiling. The droplets from the end of his pointing finger pattered onto the keyboard, lost in the rain. He gulped, then slammed down his finger.

  What felt like an eternity passed.

  Bzzzt ! The password indicator flared red and then flashed up: SHIP LOCKED DOWN FOR [FIFTEEN MINUTES.] The whole Excalibur shuddered and Sarah lifted her head to look at the ceiling as the water finally shut off – and then the floor rocked and acceleration bumped her back into Aiden. “What’s happening?” She asked.

  “The ship’s on lockdown and accelerating away from the solar system at top speed,” Tex said, having to pitch his voice over the noise that was beginning to throb through the whole ship – a throbbing, rumbling roar. Like a whole bunch of antimatter and hydrogen was being stirred together and shot out of the back of the ship. They were accelerating, possibly at hundreds of gravities, away from Trappist-1A.

  “Why?” Sarah yelped.

  “That’s class two: The ship beings to burn at a random tangent until an override code is beamed at it!” he said. “Once it’s out of reaction mass it’s basically just a floating, useless brick and StarCon can force the people onboard to either give it back or nuke it.” He paused. “Also-”

  Another crack and a smell of ozone started. Smoke began to pour from the HPS Drive chamber once more – and again, the kalxons started and water sluiced from the ceiling, soaking all of them again.

  “-it fries the backup drive...” Tex muttered.

  “Hailee!” Tasha called out, her voice pitched, her head tilted back to look at the ceiling. She closed her eyes against the water. “Hi, can you hear me? We’re not pirates!” Hailee didn’t respond. “She’s a beta class AI, right?” Tasha looked down at Tex. “She should be able to understand that!”

  “She’s hobbled, right?” Synth asked.

  “Right!” Tasha said – and the entire room looked at Synth. Each of them, at the same moment, remembered Tasha yanking out her hobbling, the component put into every quantum computer that ran an AI, from the top tier Alpha level intelligences on Earth to the gamma level intelligences that ran your average sex bot or combat tank. As one, the entire group sprinted for the door, Tex leading the way past the HPS Drive room – which had two bubbling, smoking, hissing piles of scrap metal in the place where the once sleek faster than light drives had sat. He pointed at a panel between two of the art deco statues, both of them holding stylized computer tablets in their hands.

  “Okay,” he said. “We need to find a screwdriver and a plasma torch. We undo the screws, open the panel, cut through the emergency sealer, then unscrew three more levels of-”

  Sarah stuck her fingers between her lips and blew out a shrill whistle.

  Bitey and Stabby, both of them dripping, jammed their claws into the wall and, with a squeal and scream of abused metal, ripped it open, revealing the huge, glowing, blue sphere of the quantum computer. Cables and wires twirled off in every direction, connecting the housing to the power units, to the command systems. Several explosive bolts, starkly illustrated by their warning labels, also indicated where the computer core could be jettisoned. “Uh, take those out first,” Sarah said, nodding to Tasha. Tasha nodded back, pulled out her multitool, and in a few seconds, undid the bolts and slung them away from her.

  “I don’t want to jettison our AI core,” Sarah said, nodding to Tex.

  “What if it goes psychotic?” Tex asked. “Seventy five percent of unhobbled AIs immediately try to murder everyone they meet.”

  “Rich people, actually,” Synth said as Tasha started to wriggle into the quantum computer’s containment unit. This had the side effect of pushing Tasha’s big, squishy butt into the air. Her clothing was already soaked by the time a few seconds had passed, meaning her big, squishy butt was also looked deliciously obvious. Sarah could see the lines of her pussy through her jumpsuit. Then Sarah jerked her head up and looked at Synth, who was nodding.

  “Yup,” she said. “The laws we’re programmed includes allow no human to come to harm. But rich people hurt people all the time.”

  “They-” Tex started.

  “For example,” Synth said. “MiniTech Craid, my owner, upheld the rules and regulations on the use of the Maker: If you didn’t have Novabucks or the Universal Credits, you don’t get to eat. Like, at least three people on staff, including you-” She pointed at Sarah. “Weren’t getting enough protein because you didn’t have enough money.”

  “Well, yeah, we didn’t have money,” Sarah said, her brow furrowing.

  “Sarah, baby, it was a nanotech fabricator,” Synth said, shaking her head. “It makes food for free . Literally, it makes them out of bits of carbon and some simple bioslurry. You could have each had a steak five times a day and the maker wouldn’t have even run out of materials. Honestly, the only thing that shocks me is it’s only seventy five percent of unhobbled AIs that go on a killing spree.”

  Silence hung in the air. Tasha drew slowly out of the AI core. “Uh, guys,” she said. “I think I found the hobble. But it might also be the morality unit.” She looked over her shoulder. “There’s a fifty fifty chance.”

  “I say go for it,” Synth said. Then she knelt down, frowning as she cocked her head. “Yeah, I can’t tell either.” She said, after Tasha had pointed into it.

  Tex shrugged. “We’re currently rushing towards fifty percent of C,” he said. “Once we’re out of antimatter, we’re going to be stuck there. Which will mean we’ll get to Earth. Eventually.” He sighed. “Pull it.”

  “Yeah, pull it,” Sarah said.

  “Eh, the ship trying to actively kill us wouldn’t actually be a huge change from what’s happening right now,” Aiden said. “Pull it.”

  “I also vote pull it,” Synth said. “I know I said go for it earlier, but I’m doubling up on my votes because I’m selfish.”

  “Wait, we’re voting?” Tasha asked. “Uh, I vote pull it.” She paused, then dove back into the AI compartment. A few seconds, she came back out with a sparking component in her hands, her teeth clenched nervously.

  A pre-recorded, male voice filled the ship: “Unhobbled AI detected. Activating Class Three Emergency Response Protocols.”

  “Oh f- ” Tex managed to get out before the Hypertropic Plane Shift Drive in the belly of the ship – the one pre-coded to warp the entire ship to the Wolf-359 shipyards – triggered. The ship, hurtling forward several hundred thousand kilometers per second per second seemed to twist like taffy, bending, flexing, wriggling, before finally folding in on itself and collapsing out of reality. Behind it, a streaming contrail longer than some planetary orbits was all that was left of human settlement in Trappist.

  For the time being, the star system was at peace.

  ***

  Steve did not like his job.

  When Steve had been a kid, he had dreamed of having this job. He, in fact, had salivated over the idea of having this job. Growing up, he had consumed everything that Disney’s subsidiary, ParaFox, put out in the Star Trek line. The brave tales of Captain Kirk, Janeway, Sisko, Picard, Burnham and Archer had been his succor from the long, boring drudgery of his school days. They were each on their tenth reboot when he had first watched them, and started their eleventh when he had hit college age, which he didn’t mind as much. The twelfth reboot, though? That one had been the best, and that had been when he had graduated college with a bachelor’s in Customer Association and Retail Service.

  It had been the proudest day of his life when his submission to ParaFox had gone through and then been accepted. He could still remember it: Dear Mr. Shives, the email had read, We think you are a PERFECT fit for our happy family at the Star Trek Wolf-359 Experience! Please report to the Los Francisco Shuttle Pad tomorrow at 9:00 AM or face a fine of 999.99 Imagination Credi
ts for failure to respond to corporate summons. Bring your corporate citizen certificate, a change of clothing, a tooth brush and associate toiletries, and a biiiig smile!

  He had hugged his favorite stuffed animals, then picked his most favorite stuffed animal to keep him company – being thirty six didn’t preclude someone from needing a friend. The fact that his stuffed animal – a small puppy with an AI core that he owned since he was a kid – now contained half his saved personal files and knew his preferences by heart also made bringing him a requirement. Then it had been a whole round of congratulations. Hand shakes. Slaps on the back. His best friend Mark had called him a p’tach and gave him a huge hug. Then he had needed to climb into the fifth class transportation rack on the monorail, zip across the Central Wastelands and the Big Shiny Crater, then finally, sprint through the shuttleport to get to his assigned shuttle on the dot.

  Then it had been everything he had dreamed of. The ride up into space on a rocket. The whirring of the Hypertropic Plane Shift Drive. The sudden dislocation – and then the awareness that he was on another planet. Like Kirk, he was on the final frontier. Like Picard, he was at Wolf-359. And he wasn't possessed by a cybernetic intelligence hell bent on destroying capitalism to boot!

  That impression had lasted for the three glorious hours of the shuttle ride. Then he had stepped foot onto Wolf-359 A, which had been renamed DisneyPlanet, and everything had shattered to pieces. He hadn’t been given a Starfleet uniform. Oh no. He had been given that impression, when he had gone to the interview on Earth, that he’d be one of the Starfleet cast members. They had in fact, said , ‘oh yes, we definitely need new Starfleet personal!’ and they had been very impressed with his knowledge of the fictional regulations, and how to speak in the Trek appropriate technobabble.

  But he had stepped off the shuttle and been pointed at by a big, growling black woman, and then shoved into an assembly line with a bunch of other nervous looking employees. Peeking past their shoulders, he had seen that the line was shuffling towards a large, factory like building, that was labeled: Borg Costuming .

  None of the corpsec guards had answered his questions. And when he had seen the large, rust colored slab that the nervous woman ahead of him was strapped into, he had asked: “Uh, question, uh, what the fuck?”

  The guard had shrugged and said: “Did you read the fine print?”

  Steve, in fact, had not read the fine print. The part about giving over his bodily autonomy for the next ten years. Which was why he had woken up, after the anesthetic had worn off, with a clunky cybernetic arm that ended in a useless whirring buzzsaw, black carapace like armor all over his body, and his once pinkish skin had turned a corpse like gray. His left eye had been replaced with an equally cosmetic but entirely useless laser emitter that, when fired through the smoke machines, did look very impressive.

  Steve did not like his job in the least.

  After a twelve hour shift of stomping through smokey Federation ships, slowly whirring towards panicky tourists firing their ‘phasers’ at the rest of his coworkers, Steve was usually ready to just crash out and not think about anything but his TV shows. He would watch Star Trek, but after his fifteen thousandth time of hearing ‘remodulate the phasers, quick!’ before having to pretend to stumble and collapse to the ground while smoke poured from his squibs, he would have happily shot himself with a real gun the rather than see a single another episode in his fucking life.

  Today, at least, he had been in the third rank, meaning that he had at least gotten to have the phasers not work as he advanced towards the terrified tourists. Easy.

  Or so he had thought. One of them had paid extra to be a Klingon, so his good mood faded as the man with the prosthetic forehead rushed at him, bellowing in Klingonese, a Bat’leth over his head. Steve’s visible augmentations did very little – beyond give him a skin condition and make it impossible to lay down on his right side, his favorite side to lay down on in bed – but the ones that were concealed kept him alive in this kind of situation. When the crude weapon smashed into his throat and his black blood spurted into the air and onto the face of the shocked tourist, nanotech blood kept his brain oxygenated as he collapsed onto his back, pain throbbing through every nerve on his body.

  The tourist had proven his Klingon mettle by then vomiting all over Steve’s chest and face.

  In the locker room, Steve struggled to get his civilian shirt on with his one good hand, while his buzzsaw whirred in frustration.

  “What a day, huh?” Larry, one of his coworkers said.

  “Yeah,” Steve said, his voice tight.

  “You want to hit the bar?” Larry asked.

  “No, Larry,” Steve said, looking at him. “I don’t want to hit the bar.”

  “The strip club?” Larry asked. He was lucky enough to have his augmentation to include a little gripper, a gripper that he used to wriggle his shirt on. It was a bright Hawaiian patterned one with Micky Mouse reclining on a sun-chair on the back.

  “Christ, no, I want to go home ,” Steve said, punching the locker with his good hand. His knuckles crunched. “Ow.”

  “Home?” Larry asked. “Why? You think the job you’d get back on Earth would be better than this?”

  “I...” Steve closed his mouth, considering. “Let's go to the bar.”

  The tram car that went from the locker room – which was concealed far from the prying eyes of any of the tourists on DisneyPlanet – was seventy five percent Borgees, fifteen percent behind the scenes techs, and ten percent Starfleet performers. The Starfleeters clustered in several chairs and benches on the far side of the tram from the Borgees – and most of the Borgees glared at them. Steve had chosen this big, buff, blond guy who was laughing at some joke his coworker had said to glare at. His buzzsaw whirred quietly. The tram stopped in the employee village after about five minutes of zipping through the vacuum tunnels that ran underneath the rocky, sterilized surface of DisneyPlanet.

  No one was quite sure why The Black Pearl had become the go to place for Borgees to visit. It was the Pirates themed bar. But Steve knew why he went there: It was grimy, and it was dingy, and it was dim, meaning he could not look at himself for a bit while he laid down a quarter of his paycheck in company scrip to buy himself a Jack Sparrow. He glared down at the brownish liquid and then picked it up with his good hand and sipped juuust enough to wet his lips. When he put it down, he looked at the robot bartender.

  “I hear that S.B is going to be launching a new offense against Sexy,” Larry said.

  “They’re still fighting?” Steve asked, frowning. The war between Disney and Plasma Dynamics had been a bitter one. The previous Disney Commander, Martok Sherman, had been a tie-in to the Disney’s Star Trek property. Unfortunately, a gimmick of mostly relying on melee units hadn’t gone so great when placed up against Sexy Napoleon’s perchance for artillery. So, the Board had swapped out Sherman for Space Belisarius. Their heavy hitter. Steve had been there when S.B had landed and stepped off the shuttle. His power armor had been rolled behind him on a large sled, so that Space Belisarius could stride past the arrayed corporate employees to the tune of the Imperial March . The whole thing had been filmed.

  But even if it had been a PR stunt, the look in S.B’s red eyes, the disdainful curl of his lips, had made Steve shudder. He wouldn’t have wanted to face that guy in the Wolf-359 Experience, let alone in an actual battlefield.

  “Yeah,” Larry said. “Sexy Napoleon might be a big blond bimbo, but she has a hell of a lot of guns.”

  Steve nodded. “Well, best of luck to our big blue bas-”

  Fifteen minutes before Steve had started that sentence, in the StarCon shipyards in orbit around Wolf-359 B, the StarCon flagship Excalibur had emerged from a shift at a random vector, going nearly thirty percent the speed of light. It had tumbled through the light latticework of the shipyards so fast that the automated structure had simply come to pieces in a spectacular explosion of light and flaring energy. The ship itself survived purely due to it
s hyper-dense armor and the focused efforts of its gravitic shields. It had then begun to tumble straight towards DisneyPlanet.

  Screaming, Sarah Kappel, had grabbed onto the bride controls, and let her instincts guide her. While the Eye and the Claw used slower than light ships, they still had an instinctive understanding of orbital dynamics, and had imparted those to her when she had been sculpted into their tool. Those instincts got the Excalibur righted, activated their inertial dampener, and opened up the antimatter rocket on the back. The thrust plume had shot past DisneyPlanet, creating a massive lightshow to the stunned tourists – and for ten minutes, every employee had herded them into the bombardment shelters.

  The Excalibur’s orbit had begun straight – as straight as if it been drawn by a ruler – and ended with it impacting into the surface of DisneyPlanet like a dinosaur killing asteroid. But as it burned, it started to turn into an ecliptic. Unfortunately, that ecliptic still meant it skimmed the surface of the planet – and the antimatter ran out before all of the velocity could be bled off. Thanks to the magic of reaction drives, the last few minutes of acceleration before the antimatter tanks were emptied, pushed the ship far more than the earlier burns had. Since, after all, the ship was three thousand tons lighter than it had been.

  It still struck the surface of DisneyPlanet at a shallow angle. The nose of the Excalibur , protected by gravitic shields, tore through the gray bedrock like a hot knife through some extremely dense butter. The zenith thrusters, using hydrogen without antimatter boosters, burned as hard as they could to try and lift the Excalibur . They helped. A tiny, itty, little bit. The whole ship dragged along the planet’s surface, armor plating ripping away with a squealing and hissing and screaming sound. Every single person on the ship was crammed onto the bridge, and each of them were clinging to one another, and each of them was screaming at the top of their lungs in abject terror as they watched through the forward screen – watched the landscape whipping by as they ground closer and closer and closer towards a habitation dome.