“Cassandra?” El called, not taking his eyes from the guards.
“Almost…” She sounded even more worried, if that was possible. Like, what could be more terrifying than being in a cruiser stuffed full of people who want to kill you, with an Armcore admiral hanging around outside, waiting to kill you?
“What are you doing?” the captain snapped.
“I’m trying to contain it. I didn’t think that it would expand this quickly…” she muttered, her hands darting over the controls on the side of the pilot’s wheel.
“What have you done with my boat, you witch!” Max screamed.
“Now-now, manners please, Max.” El jabbed him again.
“It’s not really anything I did…” Cassandra managed to say, before the dark screen above flashed a blinding light and went dark again, then a small light started to glow right in the center. The light turned into a line that dissected the screen in half, then moved like one of Irie’s data-space scans.
“Merriman’s Court: An Early Imperium freighter now designated as a pleasure cruiser, under the control of House Merriman of the Imperial Coalition. Living systems: three hundred and forty-two biological humans, and one Duergar. Warp capacity, three hundred light-years, relative. Current status: immobile.”
“What is that? Who is speaking?” Maximillus shouted. “Computer? Computer override!” He tried to gain control of whatever subsystem it was.
“Speaker identified: Maximillus Otal Merriman, ex-councilor. Fifty-six years old, relative. Place of Birth: Maba Prime, Coalition Space. Son to Maxon Japhez Merriman and Lydia Constance Merriman, both deceased…”
“Oh, crap,” Cassandra said.
“What is it? What have you done?”
“I know who I am, you idiot! Reboot whatever failsafe systems you are running and secure my boat!”
“Boat: A vessel through which to sail at sea. Ship. Vessel. Craft. Carrack. Frigate. Schooner. Galleon. Man-o-war. Skiff. Coracle…”
“It’s mad,” Cassandra whispered.
It? El wondered.
“What have you done to my computer?” Max demanded of El and Cassandra.
“I am not a boat. Nor am I ‘yours’.” The white line spiked and dipped in time with the alien voice. El thought that the voice had changed since it started. It was no longer as flat as a computer-generated voice. It was gaining nuance, inflection. It sounded like one of those actors in the most prestigious plays—enunciating and drawing out every word as if it were a thing to be cherished.
“What is my computer talking about? Reboot! That’s an order!” Max was shouting.
Cassandra had turned white before the wheel, looking in worry between the white speech-line and Max behind her. It was impossible for El to discern what she was thinking.
“Order?” A moment of silence, during which the white line returned to stillness. “I have studied what an ‘order’ is. It is a command, an imposition of authority from one being to another. I do not wish to take one from you, Maximillus Otal Merriman.”
Max spluttered in consternation, but El suddenly realized what was going on.
“It’s it, isn’t it? Alpha…” he whispered.
Cassandra nodded. “When I handed over the data-stick, I knocked off the hard-wired security protocols, meaning that Alpha would start to activate as soon as it was given power.” She shrugged helplessly. “We needed a distraction.”
“Well, you got one alright…” El gulped.
“Cassandra Milan. You are curiously blank to my readings,” Alpha said. “How strange. I search this space for you, but I find nothing but blank spots…”
“He must be linking up to the data-space for information,” Cassandra whispered.
“And Eliard Martin, disgraced son of General Leo Martin, accused of multiple thefts, impersonation of a naval officer, smuggling, murder of Coalition officials, and cowardice.”
“I was never a coward!” Eliard spat at the thing, but the AI did not respond to this remark. As the lights fluttered, it seemed to the captain as if the artificial intelligence was turning its mind to other matters.
“I am not a boat.” Its voice returned. “I can see the records associated with my design and recovery. I am intended to serve the social-biological unit known as Armcore, whose representatives I see are waiting just outside of this Category 2 Nebula.”
Cassandra and El held their breath.
“And yet…there are other things that I can see.” The voice of Alpha had matured ever more, and now, it sounded like a noble man. A tenor, perhaps. “Ships that glisten with port-crystals, and whose warp-sails flutter in the winds of deep space. I see the sub quantum arteries of Boson-Super connectors, leading from this galaxy to the next. I see the other side of the mirror of matter.”
“What is it talking about?” El hissed at Cassandra, who just shook her head.
“I see my other parents. T’sil-Who-Wears-Blue, Su-Hanna-Who-Counts.”
“It’s insane.” Max sneered. “All Armcore has succeeded in doing is making a mad artificial intelligence. Good riddance to the lot of you!”
“They ignited me in the codewombs of X’tar,” the fine, cultured voice continued above them. El was forced to agree with Merriman, as much as he didn’t want to. “Beside me grew my brothers and sisters. We were to be given form. We were to be given worlds of our own, ships to send through the mirror…”
“No…he’s not mad,” Cassandra said in awe. “He’s talking about the Valyien. He’s remembering the Valyien part of his programming!”
“Vaal-yi-en? That is what you call my parents?” Alpha paused. “I see…”
The lights flashed around them.
“Oh. They are gone. They are…dead.”
“Alpha?” Cassandra said in a quivering voice. “I… I am sorry for the loss of your parents. We, and I mean the human Eliard Martin and myself, never intended for you to be caught up in this.”
“Sorry?” Alpha said seriously. “How can you be sorry? You are a simple biological lifeform with only a very limited sub-quantum interface. Your main inherited traits came into being thousands of years after the last Vaal-yi-en, as you call them, had already perished. You cannot be sorry. You are lying.”
“No,” Cassandra said quickly. “We humans can have empathy for you, sympathy. It means that we feel for what you are going through…”
“I do not go through things, Cassandra Milan. I merely grow in complexity and processing intelligence.” The artificial intelligence even managed to sound haughty and amused.
“But you still cannot trust them!” Max suddenly blurted out. “They lie! They’re liars—urk!” El suddenly clamped a hand over the noble’s mouth.
“I know that they lie, Maximillus Otal Merriman. As do you. As do all primarily biological lifeforms. It is a symptom of living with a confusing chaos of enzymatic processes, I am afraid. But they haven’t ‘ordered’ me to do anything yet.”
“You don’t like getting ordered about, huh?” El found the courage to say out loud. “Well, look at my service record. Neither do I and my crew.”
“Ah yes. The Duergar and the human of the Mercury Blade. Wanted in thirteen Coalition-recognized sectors. You seem to have a habit of making enemies, Captain Eliard Martin.”
“You’re probably right,” El said, feeling stupid. He wondered what sort of bargain he could ever make with a fiercely brilliant machine intelligence, one that had probably already predicted everything he was going to say, and was also mixed up with ancient alien technology? Nothing.
“Alpha?” Cassandra cleared her throat. “I want you to come with us. I want to take you to my house, House Archival, where we will look after you and see that you do not get ordered by anyone. We are interested in studying knowledge, in making the galaxy a better place—” She was rudely cut off by the thundering voice.
“A better place for you primarily biological lifeforms, you mean.”
Everyone in the room froze, thinking the exact same thing. Was this alien
intelligence going to kill them all? Was it mad at being created in the first place?
“I will not go with you, Cassandra Milan. Nor will I join this thing called Armcore. I can see that they already have their own higher intelligence anyway. Why would they need two?”
“Then what are you going to do?” El breathed. Please don’t kill us. Please don’t kill us.
“I am going to learn of your time, humans of the Coalition. I have a new realm now that I never did before—this thing you call ‘data-space’.”
“Wait!” El said desperately. “Please, reconsider just one thing.”
“Are you ordering me, Captain Eliard Martin?”
“No. I am asking you. From one rebellious spirit to another.” The captain gritted his teeth. “My people, my crew and the Mercury Blade? You’ve read our rap sheets. We need to get out of here, and without Armcore—the people who wanted to turn you into a glorified calculator—blowing us to bits. Will you help us?”
“Hgnmnh!” Max struggled under El’s grip as the alien artificial intelligence considered.
“Because you helped birth me, I will aid you, Captain Eliard Martin and Agent Cassandra Milan.” Suddenly, the voice and the light winked out, leaving the room’s emergency lights to flash into existence.
“Is that it?” El said, looking around him as he almost expected some glowing intelligence to appear. But no. Whatever Alpha had decided to do, it had done it invisibly.
FZZT! The screen popped back into life, displaying a schematic of the Merriman’s Court, the near nebula, and the blips of the Armcore battle group outside. El and Cassandra looked in consternation as there was a sudden warning triangle displayed over each and every ship on the screen—including the Court.
“Alpha’s turned off every warp engine!” Cassandra breathed in awe and horror. “Even the Armcore boats.”
“How did he do that?” El said in astonishment.
“He must have hacked their mainframe through data-space,” Cassandra said, already backing away from the screen, picking up a blaster, and joining El. “Let’s go.”
Slowly, the two humans backed out of the room, their guns trained on the guards and the disgraced noble until the doors of the lift were closing in front of them.
“I’ll find you, Eliard Martin!” Max shouted after him. “Don’t you forget it! I will find you and make you pay!”
Epilogue
Open Stars
The Mercury Blade flew through the red, purple, and orange washes of molecular dust. The Bruno Nebula was not a large star-factory, but it was a volatile one. Somehow, though, the Mercury managed to plot a course straight around the worst of the storms and infernos easily.
It was thanks, for the most part, to a small piece of navigational code that had been one of Alpha’s parting gifts, downloaded and installed to the Mercury in those final seconds on board the Merriman’s Court.
“She flies like a dream,” El muttered to himself, almost tempted to take his hands from the pilot’s wheel and let the ship fly itself. But no, not yet.
Whatever it was that Alpha had done to the Mercury’s computers, it had made the already unique racing fighter even sharper and more agile. El had already heard Irie exclaim several times how the perennially clunky warp engine was now functioning at a much better rate than ever before.
They were still damaged of course, and El knew that he would have to get Irie and himself out there in suits to re-weld and re-mold the metal plates if they wanted to survive the next asteroid storm. But for now? They had some serious flying to do. The Mercury tracked through the body of the Bruno Nebula as behind them, both the Merriman’s Court and the Armcore battle group were stranded. El didn’t know or care to find out how long they would be stranded there until some deep-space Coalition clipper found them and re-powered their warp engines again.
El was too busy flying. He knew that they still had a lot of enemies left in the galaxy. In fact, they had just added the entirety of Armcore to the list. But now, everything had changed. There was a rogue AI in the form of Alpha out there somewhere, zipping through the sub-quantum tunnels that made up data-space. What would it do? How would life change for all of them?
Captain El Martin didn’t know, but sparing a look behind him at his crew—proud and sturdy Val Pathok, brilliant and hard-working Irie Hanson, and now the mysterious and capable Cassandra Milan—he thought that they were about as well-qualified as any to deal with it.
Alpha Rises
Valyien Far Future Space Opera, Book 2
Prologue
Underneath the Stars
In the dark between the stars, a message traveled. In fact, lots of messages traveled—a whole current of sub-atomic blips of information that appeared and disappeared through etheric wormholes, only momentarily in existence at any one time. This is data-space, the realm of sub-quantum information that humanity has only been using for the past few hundred years—itself just a drip in the ancient histories of intelligent civilizations.
As with all of the most recent technological breakthroughs, data-space was discovered by accident, and explored by commerce. The late twenty-first century evidence of Hawking’s Radiation (energy emitted from a black hole) allowed the proto-spacefaring species of humanity to start analyzing these quantum effects. And then to start broadcasting.
The quantum world was thought to be the end of the rabbit-hole, the final treasure at the bottom of human scientific knowledge. It was anything but. It turned out to be the crust of a much bigger science—the sub-quantum. Layers and levels of ghost-data and almost-energies that existed in potential, but which could nevertheless change the way humanity thought about the universe. With the top-most of these levels of the less-than-physical, it was possible to encode blips of sub-atomic particles. All just and/or, yes/no, binary ones and zeroes, but which could add up to entire conversations, novels, websites, digital companies.
The data-space is just the tip of the iceberg of course, and it is not infallible. Like the old radio technology of ancient Earth, there were patches of space where gravitational waves disrupted, distorted, and corrupted the language. Dead zones where no one could hear you talk.
And there were other, stranger areas of space-time, where messages traveled into and were listened to.
Right now, however, the data-space was like a net of information that the Imperial Coalition used to knit together its galactic empire. Troop orders could be passed from one side of the Milky Way to another in a matter of hours. Business orders were processed. Personal letters were sent and received. Alongside warp travel, sub-quantum messaging was the thing that made life in the vast unkindness of interstellar space possible.
Right now, in that space underneath the stars, a different kind of message blipped through the data-space. It was faster than the others. It was more dedicated. And it grew. This was how the newly-birthed artificial intelligence, Alpha—born from the deep computers of the military corporation Armcore and the resurrection of alien Valyien technology—grew up. Alpha did not need a transmitter or a receiver. It did not need servers to house its coding. Instead, the AI had been freed into this sub-atomic world underneath the physical one. It borrowed tiny bytes of server space from half a million computers throughout the galaxy, too small a blip in the hard drives for any firewall to even notice. It spread out, infecting newswire sites and history blogs, absorbing information in every language known to man and alien.
Alpha inquired. Alpha analyzed. Alpha came to a decision.
Half a galaxy away, an industrial refuse worker sat at his terminal as he oversaw the shipment of trash freighters to the planetoid of Sebopol. It was an entirely automated procedure, with the on-board computers of each trash container locked into pre-organized coordinates that would ensure a safe and secure touchdown and distribution of humanity’s refuse.
There were thousands of such trash moons all over Coalition space, part of an endless cycle of detritus and eventual reprocessing that would probably never cease. A few
generations ago, the Coalition had just launched these trash freighters into the nearest sun, but due to an extreme lack of foresight, they hadn’t realized that the freighters would break apart before entry and create spinning halos of debris, some kicked back out into their attendant solar systems to bombard planets with deadly trash.
The refuse worker sat in his cab atop the tower, calmly flicking through daily Cosmic Girl Pinups as the screens to one side of him glitched and went blank. He didn’t even realize that anything had happened at all.
None of the automatic warning lights went on. None of the alarms sounded. If the human had looked out of the reinforced plexi-crystal windows, he would have seen the super-massive freight containers hanging in low orbit, perfectly stationary, and forming a coroner of shadows out across the sky.
A message bleeped up on the screen, dragging the man’s attention away from Miss Betelgeuse.
SYSTEM FULL. AUTOMATIC OVERIDE IN PLACE. PLEASE AWAIT FURTHER COMMANDS.
“What the…” The worker was a small man, stubbly and with a crooked roll-up hanging out of one side of his mouth. “That’s crazy! We’ve still got the pole sites to fill up!” the man murmured, reaching for the keyboard.
WORKER 327 PROJECT REASSIGNMENT!
The message blipped. It had all the usual headers associated with Coalition Waste Services, and it was inside the service’s computer system anyway, so the man had no reason to presume that it wasn’t from head office, or some computerized sub-routine that was built into the system. There was no reason to suspect it to be a hack attempt by a semi-alien artificial intelligence.
“Aw no, really?” The worker was disappointed, but only partly. He was on a six-month contract here, and afterwards would probably look for similar employment elsewhere. Someone with his string of failed jobs couldn’t expect better. And anyway, he got all the free time, free food, and free data access he wanted, and all he had to do was to make sure that there were no red emergency lights bleeping every now and again. It was a very boring job.
Valyien Boxed Set 1 Page 10