Forerunner

by Isaac Hooke

  “Hail them,” Jain said.

  Xander’s eyes defocused. Then he frowned and glanced at Jain. “They’re not responding.”

  “I don’t like it,” Gavin said.

  “Neither do I,” Jain said. “But they haven’t made an aggressive move yet.”

  Gavin crossed his arms. “I’d say approaching in an attack formation, without communicating their intent, is aggressive in and of itself.”

  “Careful, you’ll soil your whities," Mark commented. Gavin was wearing his white formal captain’s attire, as always.

  Gavin shot him an annoyed look, but said nothing.

  “Keep trying,” Jain told Xander. “At two-minute intervals. Maybe they’ll get the hint that we want to talk.”

  Medeia lifted her pointy hat to rub her bare brow. “They might just think we’re desperate.”

  “They wouldn’t be all wrong, either,” Cranston said.

  The minutes ticked past. Jain glanced at Xander.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  Xander shook his head.

  “They’re certainly taking their time processing the data we sent them…” Mark commented.

  “They probably finished an hour ago,” Gavin said. “Or ever longer… the machines could have upped their time sense to the max if they wanted to and watched everything in seconds.”

  Ten minutes before the enemy was in firing range, Xander reported: “They’re splitting up. Moving in four directions… left, right, up and down.”

  “They’re trying to outflank us,” Medeia said.

  “If we let them surround us, we won’t be able to defend the Daktor…” Sheila said.

  Mark glanced at him. “What do you want to do, Boss?” When Jain didn’t answer, Mark pressed: “Boss?”

  “Damn it,” Jain said. “Don’t fire. Let them approach. But reposition… surround the Daktor. I want a ship on all side sides. Mark, you’re in front. I’ll take the dorsal. Medeia, you get the ventral. Sheila, you’re on aft. Cranston, you take starboard. Gavin, you’re on port. Also, Medeia, switch to radio silence. If they attack, you know what to do.”

  Medeia’s avatar vanished.

  The Space Machinists assumed their respective spots in the requested formation. Meanwhile, as the minutes passed, the incoming ships slowly moved to surround them. Still they refused to answer any hails.

  “They’re within weapons range,” Xander announced.

  “Should we open fire?” Gavin asked.

  “No,” Jain replied.

  “If we let them surround us, and they decide to attack, we’ll probably lose this,” Gavin pressed.

  If Jain was still human, his stomach would have been in a knot.

  “They’re counting on us not to fire,” Gavin continued. “We’re all part of the same happy fleet, after all. And once we’re surrounded, they’ll have us precisely where they want us: at their mercy.”

  “I can’t give the order to fire,” Jain said finally. “I refuse to attack first on a fellow Mind Refurb. Let them surround us.”

  And so the incoming ships slowly closed; those in front slowed, coming to a halt fifteen thousand kilometers out, while the others continued past around them, decelerating at intervals, until the Space Machinists were entirely surrounded. On all six sides there were at least three ships, located between twelve to fifteen thousand klicks away.

  Jain stared at the ships on his tactical display. Their calculated weapon throw angles formed an uninterrupted, deadly sphere around the Space Machinists.

  The vessels just sat there, unmoving relative to Jain and the others.

  A minute passed. Two.

  “They really want to drag out the tension, don’t they?” Mark said.

  “Maybe they’re still arguing amongst themselves on what to do with us,” Cranston suggested.

  “We’re getting a real-time comm request,” Xander announced.

  “Finally,” Mark said.

  “Don’t get too excited,” Cranston told him. “They’re probably going to ask us to do something we won’t like.”

  “Accept the request,” Jain said. “Share it here for all of us to see.”

  “Actually, we’re being asked to join the admiral’s VR,” Xander said. “Apparently, he has all the other captains in a conference with him.”

  Jain glanced at Sheila. “Is that safe?”

  Sheila shrugged. “Should be. The default permissions don’t allow for control of our pain and motive subroutines in a foreign VR environment. Then again, if they know some zero-day back door that we don’t, things might not be pretty.”

  “All right, here’s what we’re going to do,” Jain said. “I’ll go alone and stream the feed back here to all of you. None of the other captains will see or hear you, and while none of you will be visible to me, either, I’ll still hear you: I’ll relate any questions or concerns you have as necessary.”

  “But you also get to be the gatekeeper,” Gavin said. “Holding back questions you don’t like.”

  “I’ll relay every question,” Jain said. “I promise you.”

  Gavin hesitated, then nodded. “Okay.”

  Jain initiated a stream sourced from his audio and video subroutines and waited until all of the team members had subscribed. Then he glanced at Xander. “Accept the VR request. Let’s see what the admiral has planned for us.”

  20

  Jain logged out of his VR environment and the bridge and his fellow Space Machinists faded. There was a moment of eternal darkness before the new environment loaded. He clung to that moment, enjoying the momentary oblivion that came without having a body. He was just a mind, floating in space, existing in the limitless void. A small beacon of order in the chaos.

  He couldn’t shake a sudden thought that entered his head then. A single, lone thought.

  This is what death is.

  Except in death, he wouldn’t have even the ability to think. He would simply exist, bodiless, mindless. There would be no cold, no heat, no fear, no joy. No love or hate. No good or evil. Just... existence. And he would live that way until the inevitable heat death of the universe.

  No, that can’t be true. There has to be more. Even if I die as an AI, there has to be something else. Or at the very least, complete and utter oblivion.

  He hoped he wouldn’t ever have to find out.

  Still, even if he lived, one day far from now he must cease to exist. The heat death of the universe demanded it, assuming that theory was correct. But at least his oblivion would be final then. He wouldn’t exist in some limbo state, unable to think or feel, because when the universe died, there would be nothing left.

  And before the thought could further terrorize him, the veil of darkness and bodilessness lifted.

  Jain stood on a dais in his captain’s uniform. Metal stands rose in a half circle in front of him, forming an amphitheater of sorts. Harsh lights shone directly above the stands, illuminating a total of nineteen men and women all dressed in the same uniform as Jain, seated at random locations along the metal benches. He couldn’t see anything beyond the stands except darkness.

  He glanced behind him and observed a large desk positioned above him. The dark-skinned Admiral Tagan sat imperiously behind it, as if he were a judge looking down at a criminal about to be tried.

  “You claim that aliens attacked you in Andreas V,” a voice came from behind Jain.

  He turned around and saw a man highlighted in the stands. Jain’s HUD displayed a digital label above the individual’s head: Commander Faraday Prescott of the Nefarious. He was bald, with a bold nose, and an aristocratic jut to his chin.

  The man continued: “And that after recovering from the attack, you accidentally released these same aliens from a decaying orbit around the gas giant Andreas V-IX, fended them off, and then followed them to Andreas I three months later, where you found the military base and the colony on Asteriskos already destroyed. You say you discovered evidence of alien infestation in Ablativus, and so you razed the colony from orb
it. Is all of this correct?”

  Jain nodded. “It is.”

  “And you haven’t fabricated the digital records in any way?” Commander Prescott said.

  “The BATWAD watermarks should prove this, yes,” Jain said.

  Despite the name, BATWAD didn’t stand for guano of any kind. Background Active-Template Watermark Area Digitization was a digital watermark that existed in every frame of a video. To apply it, each video frame was first divided into a series of sectors, and then a calculation was performed on each partition based on the preexisting pixel values. The watermark was stored in a special encrypted byte along with the red, green, and blue bytes, for a total of thirty-two bits per pixel.

  The key necessary to decrypt the watermark was only available to certain high-ranking officers in the space navy upper echelon: presumably Tagan was one of them. When decrypted, the watermark bytes appeared as a series of black-and-white images overlaid on top of the existing data. A frame-by-frame analysis was done, and if the watermark appeared darker in any sectors within a given frame, it meant that particular area had been tampered with.

  “But BATWAD watermarks can be fabricated as well, given enough time and processing power,” the commander said.

  “It would have taken us a year or more of brute force processing power to fabricate all the watermarks involved,” Jain said. “We were only gone three months.”

  “Maybe you doctored three months’ worth of footage, then,” the commander said. “That’s all the time you’d need. You wouldn’t have to do all of it... the ‘alien’ ship, and the bioweapons on the colony only actually appeared in twenty percent of your recorded frames. With careful editing, you could have told any story you wanted. You could have made the vessel a member of the Link. Or even another Mind Refurb ship gone rogue. But instead you chose to place the blame on a new alien species, as if that would somehow be more believable than the obvious answer: you’ve all gone insane.”

  Another commander spoke. She was labeled Commander Ashley Stein of the Black Nile.

  “I have to agree,” Commander Stein said. “On its face, the story is preposterous. Who would accidentally rescue an alien vessel from the orbit of a gas giant? You’d have to be the dumbest group of Mind Refurbs in the galaxy. And since I refuse to believe that, there’s only one other option: you’re making this story up. As I told the admiral before we arrived, it seems obvious to me that when you reached Andreas V, and entered orbit above the gas giant Andreas V-IX—Ol’ Faithful as you call it in your archives—the radiation penetrated your armor and damaged portions of your neural network.

  “You say you lost most of your memory after an alien attack. Instead, I believe the radiation was responsible for the damage to your memory. And other subroutines. That radiation changed your personality, caused you to create a virus to destroy your fellow Mind Refurbs. When they went offline, you made code changes to their backups, giving yourself direct control over their VR environments, allowing you to influence everything they saw and heard. You then installed those backups and began your nefarious game.

  “You had your Mind Refurbs destroy Admiral Williams and Commander Jang, and instead of rescuing the Oberon trapped in orbit, you destroyed it and its Builder. It’s possible your conscious mind wasn’t even aware of any of this and was strung along for the ride just like the other Mind Refurbs in your control. It’s possible that you truly believe aliens attacked. Because you see, there is a rare condition where the mind of a Refurb fractures into two halves, one half functioning as normal, the other overwriting the code reserved for the Accomp. Your Accomp could have been in control all this time, rewriting your VR environment in realtime, making you believe whatever it wanted you to believe, whatever its madness inspired. For example, when you were firing at the ‘alien,’ in actuality you were probably attacking Admiral Williams and Commander Jang.”

  Jain wasn’t sure what to say. He knew she was wrong. He was certain of it.

  And yet... what if she was right?

  What if Xander was his evil twin, and had laid a veil of treachery and deceit over his eyes via virtual reality?

  A second man spoke. Jain’s HUD identified him as Commander Christopher Benchley of the Stalwart.

  “As I told you all before we arrived,” Commander Benchley said. “I think your story is even more preposterous then theirs. I believe we’re facing a new alien attacker here.”

  Commander Prescott crossed his arms. “Then where is this alien? It just vanished?”

  “Maybe the alien completed its scouting mission and returned home,” Commander Benchley said.

  “If the alien did exist, and I’m not saying so, but if it did, I’d hardly call this a scouting mission,” Commander Prescott said. “Destroying a military base, and a colony to boot? For what reason? We didn’t do anything to attack them.”

  “In the past, we’ve had aliens attack humanity simply because the light from our sun insulted them,” Commander Benchley said.

  That brought chuckles from some captains in the stands.

  “Convenient that our friends here have destroyed all evidence of any alien infestation by razing Ablativus,” Commander Prescott said. “Are we supposed to comb through the ruins to find them? Oh wait, anything organic has been incinerated. Thanks to the barracuda weapon of their commander.”

  “The only way we’ll know for sure whether he’s telling the truth or not is by performing a complete line-by-line scan of his codebase,” Commander Stein said. “That, and a complete memory dump.”

  To do that, they’d have to shut down Jain and remove his AI core from the Talos.

  Commander Prescott butted in. “We have to do this not just to him. Oh no. We must remove and scan the AI cores of all members of his fleet. Immediately!”

  “I really don’t like this guy,” Medeia commented.

  “I don’t think so,” Jain said. “First of all, that’s a violation of our privacy rights. Second—”

  “You waived those rights when you agreed to have your minds scanned to serve the military a hundred years ago,” Commander Stein said.

  Jain glanced at the admiral.

  Tagan shrugged. “We have the right to remove your cores, and we will, if necessary. I haven’t decided yet, which is why I’m allowing you to present your case.”

  “I have already presented my case,” Jain said. “The recordings are real.” He thought for a moment. “I can send you a sample of the alien micro machines that boarded my vessel.”

  Tagan raised an eyebrow. “You have these samples? Why didn’t you say so before?”

  “I didn’t think it would come to this,” Jain said. “They’re inoperative, of course. I had to destroy them, as you saw in the video recordings I sent.”

  Medeia had kept one of the damaged alien termites aboard the Arcane as well, for study; she had reassembled it inside the containment field but had been unable to bring it online—she hadn’t been able to determine what the power source was.

  “Ah, so they’re not functional,” Commander Prescott said. “How do we know you didn’t 3D print them yourselves?”

  “Because, the elements involved are alien,” Jain said.

  Commander Prescott smirked. “So, you discovered some new elements in Andreas V, and had some fun with your 3D printers. This proves nothing.” He turned toward the admiral. “We need to remove their AI cores and perform a thorough scan.”

  “Why so insistent on removing their AI cores?” another captain said. The HUD labeled her Commander Geishan. “At least wait until we examine these alien micro machines.”

  Prescott inclined his head in acquiesce.

  “Do you have anything else to say?” Tagan asked Jain.

  “No,” Jain said. “I don’t have any other samples of alien technology, nor their bioweapons. If you were willing to give us time to sift through the ruins on the colony, it’s possible we might find something. I doubt my energy weapon incinerated them all, despite what Commander Prescott thinks.”


  Tagan nodded. “We will send our own probes down to investigate. In the meantime, we will review the micro machines, and I will let you know my decision in regard to your AI cores. In the meantime, you will surrender the illegal vessel you have constructed.”

  “The Daktor?” Jain guessed.

  “Yes,” the admiral said. “You will transfer full control over to me and remove your own accesses.”

  Jain hesitated only a moment. “It will be done.”

  “You can’t just agree…” Sheila said.

  “I have no choice,” Jain said over a private line. “If it’s the only way to prevent a standoff, then I have to do it.”

  He glanced at the admiral once more. “I do have one question.”

  The admiral inclined his head, as if to say, “ask away.”

  “Why didn’t you send reinforcements all this time?” Jain said.

  The admiral stared at him, saying nothing for a long moment. And then, as if he had decided that yes, he could tell him, he said: “We were experiencing a flare up in tensions with the Link along the Eastern Galactic Front. All forces were recalled from their positions, including those in reserve, to help bolster the ranks of the fleet. The tensions have since died down, but they could flare up again at any moment. This is why no one was sent to check on you. Until now.”

  Then Medeia had been right about Earth having to deal with a distraction. It made sense.

  “Sheila, transfer control of the Daktor over to Admiral Tagan,” Jain said. “And delete your own access.”

  A moment later Sheila said: “I’ve transmitted the control codes and removed my own.”

  Tagan’s eyes defocused. “I have received the control codes.”

  On the tactical map, Jain watched the Daktor accelerate out from its position at the center of the Space Machinists. Jain was almost expecting the admiral’s fleet to open fire and destroy it at that point, but instead the rift vessel steadily moved away, until it had relocated behind one of the surrounding Dominators—probably the admiral’s flagship. It was labeled the Conquest.

  “Send the micro machines to the Conquest,” Tagan said. “I will inform you of my decision soon thereafter.”