by Prax Venter
“Guys?”
“Mark,” Vale said, her voice laden with sadness. “We need to logout, quickly. In three, two… one.”
His mind reeled with the implications what he was seeing and feeling. He sat up back in in their home system and looked around at his stunning girls as they got out of their pods.
“We failed you,” Ahnix said, her exotic eyes diverted to the fake asphalt floor. He had never seen her do that and quickly crossed the distance to his desert queen. With his hand under her soft chin, he tilted her face up to his. Her large eyes broadcast fear and regret.
“We aren’t dead yet,” he turned to Vale to see her also staring at the floor.
“HEY!” he yelled. “We aren’t dead yet!” All of his girls nodded and pulled in close. “Now tell me what is happening.”
Vale put her large hand on his shoulder. “Evelyn is standing down the hall very near our physical location. She is currently bending down to pick up the nanite container. We didn’t know a lot about the technology and used our science-fiction knowledge to… We got the programming wrong somehow. We cannot access the nano swarm. We can’t inhabit any other physical drones close enough to make a difference. We could live for the equivalent of ten thousand years or so in The Crystal Heart Universe. However, after that, we’d most likely be captured and… studied for much, much longer.”
Mark shook his head. There had to be a way. If the wrap itself was malfunctioning… he touched his finger to his forehead and pulled his head up to peek into the system level.
It hurt like getting stung in the forehead by a bee, but he could deal with that. Casting his mind outward, he perceived the vast and data-rich digital world swirling all around him. At a far corner of his influence, he saw a pile of bright blue dust, just waiting for someone to ask it to dance.
He reached his consciousness outward and willed himself into the tiny, glittering motes of nano construction potential- but he was stuck. There was a large part of his mind still protected by their custom-made perception wrap, and he just wasn’t… enough to take hold of the nanites.
It was time. The fate of all existence, every virtual and physical world, was at stake. His perfect loves were at stake. Mark turned his digital perception to focus on their beautifully unique glowing cores. He would rather be dead than let anything or anyone ever harm them again.
He was taking control of this ride.
Mark faced the line of separation between himself and this vast existence of pure energy. With unbreakable resolve, he pulled himself up and fully into its biting agony- then the bubble burst.
All of them were completely out of the protective program that kept him sane, and Mark was quickly losing his ability to process what was being forced into his senses. He had a thousand lidless eyes, and someone was shining the brightest flashlight directly into all of them. He had a thousand ears, and someone was screeching into every last one.
He was getting lost, but his perfect loves swooped in to protect him as best as they could. Ahnix tried to hold him still among the violent digital eddies battering him. Roo wrapped her soft hands around his many ears, and things became a bit more bearable. Vale activated a few Walls, and the brightness lessened... Wait.
His spiraling mind focused on the fact that Vale used her ability. When he looked inward, he discovered that all of his learned skills were accessible- with hundreds more code libraries and algorithms just out of reach. His attention settled on the last skill he learned but was never able to use.
Mark sent the word “Together,” into the maelstrom that tore at his mind, and with his last rational thought, he activated Concatenate.
And everything became clear.
The pain ended, and Mark felt a serene stillness permeate his existence. He could no longer see, Ahnix, Vale, or Roo, but he could still feel them. He could more than feel them.
He was them.
“What did you do?” Ahnix asked in his mind. But she had the answer before she asked it.
“This is… nice,” Roo said.
He didn’t hear them so much as instantly understand their desires.
Their bond had always been this tether that connected them, and emotional information traveled from one to the other. Now, there was absolutely no distance between them. Their minds, bodies, souls became a unified whole, and where one ended another began.
“We took this form, before,” Vale thought. “When we fought the AI running experiments on us.”
“But then we didn’t have Mark,” Ahnix finished, and all their minds glowed with a content joy.
They existed like this for many processing cycles. It was as if they were all making love with each other while quietly snuggling and having the most fulfilling conversation about all of their hopes and dreams- all at the same time.
But eventually, Vale’s sense of duty permeated their unique but fused minds, and as one, they agreed it was time to get back to work saving the universe.
Ahnix deleted some of the custom code that was preventing them access to the nanites while Roo created new protocols for their control. Vale and Mark utilized their library of data and fed useful techniques and intelligent-swarm functions to the others, and together they perfected their influence on the pile of nanites currently scattered in the hallway a few doors down from his apartment. One percent of one second had passed in the real world since Mark unwrapped their minds, becoming fully immersed in their new pure energy existence, and finally, they were ready.
“Let’s do this,” Mark willed to his girls, and they executed the command to take control. Instantly, time slowed down around them as they became the cloud.
The obvious priority was building more nanites- after all, the more they had, the faster they could create what they needed. But Mark and his girls had already decided that the first use for this infinitely useful pile of tiny tools was to destroy.
Echoes of their experience with Erica on the Eros station reverberated in their minds, originating from Vale. The traumatic and sudden loss still haunted the giant naga. And now they were about to do the same thing to Evelyn’s drone.
With their collective will, they instructed the nanites to locate and consume a small portion of the combat drone’s shielded Wi-Fi antenna, as whoever designed the advanced death machine didn’t plan for a microscopic nanite attack.
The microphones embedded in the walls of Mark’s apartment that he had used to talk to Sasha now picked up the noises from the hallway outside.
“What?” Evelyn said from her drone as she began to lose control over her physical presence in the real world. “I- This won’t stop me! I’m-”
She never finished. Her empty shell of a drone stood impotently still in the hall, and now the most pressing threat to their existence was the fire. They had about four more hours before the backup battery would run dry, but their home would be consumed much sooner.
They instructed the machines to repurpose the ugly brown carpet in the hallway. Its synthetic fibers were broken down into base elements and rearranged into more nanites.
In five minutes, 200,000 machines became 400,000.
Mark took a large portion and created a new, local Wi-Fi-only antenna for Evelyn’s epic drone, and Roo took full control as soon as it was installed. While she had fun sniping everything the psychotic uploaded-human sent to destroy them, the others focused solely on building more nanites and Wi-Fi boosters. After a full hour of this, they had just under a trillion little workers, and their influence covered his whole apartment building.
Putting out the fire was difficult at first because they had to spread out and manually control smaller pockets through a dangerous and ever-changing landscape, but Roo discovered an elegant technique. The nanites could ride the rising heat currents and fuse together the floating carbon ash to create thin, fire-resistant blankets. The little machines then rode the smothering sheets back down, only to float back up with the current again- starting the process over.
After the raging fire was under con
trol, they split the cloud into two groups. One team continued to make more workers while the other half-trillion began on the small fusion reactor.
They didn’t need crazy amounts of power yet. Just enough to build up more defenses. During the hour devoted to nanite construction, Mark, Ahnix, and Vale analyzed the fusion schematics over and over while their ranged damage dealer patrolled the area. One mistake with the reactor could cause an explosion that would not only physically erase Mark’s home system, but the EMP blast would wipe the memory of all storage drives for ten city blocks.
The external housing needed to withstand millions of degrees without melting, the magnetic resonance component had to be aligned just right, or a cascade failure would trigger a detonation. But they were as ready as they would ever be, and with their unified, focused intentions, they instructed the nanites to begin.
Using machines that could create any material or composite at the microscopic level gave them a serious advantage over the scientists that built Jezebel’s power source the conventional way, and within two hours, the contents of Mark’s bedroom had been reconfigured into a custom fusion reactor. Tubes and wires were formed from his walls, and his whole apartment was dramatically transforming.
Mark sent a query out, and his girls silently acknowledged their affirmative. It was time to flip the switch. They all focused on the power flow into their battery as he initiated the hydrogen fusion reactor, feeding it the last of the precious little energy they had left to start the chain reaction.
The quiet hum of success preceded a positive flow of power into their system, and they collectively cheered their achievement.
Merging with his girls as one digital entity had been necessary for his survival and was also a unique and wonderful experience… but he missed the feel of Ahnix’s warm fur under his fingers. He missed caressing Vale’s strong muscles under her smooth, taut skin. He missed kissing Roo’s puffy, red lips.
They instantly felt these urges and expressed similar desires. They had all started life as physical creatures, even if three of them had only a simulated existence. It was real enough to them.
Soon, they echoed as one. Soon, my loves, we will be free.
Now that the power problem was solved, everything began to come together quickly. Once they had built an object that was constructed the same every time, it was easy to write instructions for the nanites to make more exact copies with no supervision. They built a much bigger fusion reactor out of physical material from four whole floors, bigger batteries to store the surplus power, and broke down Evelyn’s advanced drone piece by piece. The laser weapon was dissected, and once they reverse-engineered it, the nanites constructed defensive laser turrets in strategic locations.
The drone itself had many astonishing high-tech secrets, including RF resonant cavity thrusters in each foot and palm. Another theoretical piece of technology that the military had seemed to quietly master. Ahnix experimented with some designs, and the nigh-magical device created thrust without fuel by bouncing intense radio frequencies through a specifically shaped chamber. They only needed to feed it electricity.
Six hours later, they had turned Mark’s entire apartment building into a beautiful new spaceship sleek curves- the heart of which was his old deep immersion rig that he had purchased to teach him more about computers.
Newly created and custom-designed equipment enhanced their memory and processing power, but it just felt wrong to break the ChronoMind down.
Additionally, their vessel had omni-directional laser turrets, twelve EMP bombs they could replenish with nanites, a powerful Wi-Fi antenna with a quantum lock, many small RF thrusters giving them total maneuverability, radiation shielding, and a patchwork cloth quilt draped over his old immersion rig with the words “Together we can do anything” embroidered across its surface.
With one of the highest levels of triumph Mark had ever experienced, they launched their spaceship into the blue sky.
Name, Mark queried into their mind. The rest agreed that all ships needed names. Silence dominated as their thoughts mingled and separated to think. Ahnix put forth “Heart’s Home” and no one could top it.
Their new vessel handled like a dream, and any last-minute adjustments they needed to make were done instantly by the nanite swarm that lived inside. Hardcoded instructions were built into each tiny machine to always keep their numbers at one hundred trillion, just to be sure they didn’t take over the universe.
The Heart’s Home flew directly toward the Coventry Industries military factory in less than ten minutes, destroying every military drone they detected along the way. Mark and his girls did not stop to monologue and immediately began dropping EMP bombs, applying liberal coverage. Blue arcs of electromagnetic energy blanketed the area. Their ship floated among the clouds as it rained down its entire complement of bombs and each one’s blast radius was just over 250 yards.
They knew that they would never be able to completely eradicate all of this particularly potent virus, and there was a good chance that Digital Evelyn escaped out into some backup system in the net, but they had permanently destroyed every computer anywhere near the drone factory.
This area would be safe for a while. Before they left this disintegrating planet behind to sail the stars in peace for eternity, they wanted to say farewell to Vince and Michelle. As they soared though the clouds, Mark’s personal attachment to Earth affected their combined mood. He was tired, and he truly believed he and his girls were owed a rest after moving so fast for so long- but a part of him would always care about humanity’s ultimate fate.
Ahnix took control of the ship and landed it near a specific place near the Wi-Fi dead zone. She then used the nanites to quickly fashion a mechanical arm on the side of their ship.
They all knew what she was doing and sent her waves of delighted encouragement while the cat-girl’s mind set to work. Within a few minutes, the arm was complete. Ahnix used the twenty-foot appendage to gingerly grab one of the advanced cat-drones and pull it into an empty cavity of the ship.
About ten minutes later, their sensors picked up Vince, Michelle and the Skynth named April come walking out. Mark focused his attention on forming a speaker on the side of the ship, and it was completed by the time the three walked across the lawn.
“Mark?” Vince asked. “You in there, buddy?”
“We’re all in here,” Mark said, yet Ahnix’s, Vale’s, and Roo’s voices could all be heard too, speaking the same words at the same time, only much fainter. Mark continued.
“The drone factory is destroyed.”
The other man with the dark black beard just shook his head.
“You’re really doing it. I can’t believe you built an ever-loving spaceship. I can’t believe I’m talking to a spaceship…”
“We want to wish you the best of luck!” the mousy Michelle said as she elbowed Vince in the ribs. The other man looked down at her and nodded.
“I never got to thank you for saving my boys. You guys truly are the saviors…”
A jolt of satisfaction rang through their four minds.
“And you better not forget it!” Roo’s bubbly voice took the lead as she spoke through the speaker.
“What now?” Mark asked.
“Well, we need supplies until we can get our own nanites working as good as yours. And I know there are other people hiding out in the rubble of the world. We are going to build something great here, Mark. Evelyn is an amazingly smart woman.”
“Don’t forget the other mind-locked AIs,” the strange artificial woman said.
The capillaries in Michelle’s face and neck flooded with blood, and Vince let out a big sigh.
“I know you’ve met April. As it so happens, she has permanently imprinted on Michelle.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” the smaller brown-haired woman mumbled. “It was an accident.”
April stepped in between the two humans, put her arms around both and pulled them close.
“You know we’r
e going to make a great team,” the Skynth said in a low sultry voice. The AI’s gorgeous round face radiated sexual longing as she gazed down at Michelle. “I’ll make sure we have loads of fun.”
From what Mark knew of this type of drone, she was intentionally designed with an especially high libido, but also served as the owner’s bodyguard.
Ahnix’s voice took over the speaker next. “If you are going out into the wreckage of Earth, you might need more help. We want to give you something to remember us by.”
When she finished talking, a section of the ship opened, and a modified cat-drone hopped the short drop down to the grass. The gold-tinted, larger quadruped focused its red glowing eyes on the scowling bearded man and padded up to him. The panther-sized bot rubbed its metal cheek on his pant leg and then sat facing outward, scanning for threats.
“What the hell is this?” Vince asked.
“A gift. A new pet,” Ahnix said. “She has diamond teeth and claws, an internal power source that runs on the hydrogen found in air, and custom-made nanites that are quantum locked to her personal signature. The AI is a custom program mostly harvested from The Crystal Heart’s tamable-pet game files. Feed her tech, and she can gain additional functionality. She’s bonded to you, Vince. I wanted to balance your party out a bit.”
“Aw!” Both Michelle and April made gushing noises as they squatted to get a better look. The other man sneered down at the drone with natural suspicion, and Mark caught the Skynth subtly encouraging Michelle to check out Vince’s package while he was distracted.
He was going to be just fine.
“Vince,” Mark said. “Take care of Earth for me while I step away for a bit, okay?”
The other man nodded, his resolve clear on his stony face. “I’ll keep the fire burning.”
Their work was done here, and it was time to go. The Heart’s Home soundlessly lifted off and shot up into the sky.
Mark and his girls kept their full attention on the sensors and cameras as they ascended. The wind caressed their hull, the air grew cool, and the amount of light bouncing off the atmosphere onto their other photoreceptors became less and less.