“...all life was extinguished. Lieutenant Gina Fuentez made contact with me and was the first Human to do so. Absent any higher authority, she became President at that time. The Constitution is clear that hierarchy must be maintained in accordance with the laws and constitution of Kushiel. I must oversee the peaceful transition of power for the good of the colony.”
“You’re aware that the colony is destroyed, and its entire population murdered?”
“Gina,” Liz warned.
Gina held up a hand to silence her.
Sebastian answered. “I’m aware. I was there.”
The show had stopped, the image of Earth still forming frozen in place. Gina took that as a sign that Sebastian was concentrating upon her to its exclusion. Could be wrong, but it made as much sense as anything else she could think of.
“What is the purpose of government on Kushiel?”
“The purpose of any government is to govern. To create and enforce laws for the betterment of its citizens.”
“And you acknowledge me as your superior regarding the governance of Kushiel?”
“As president, you have the authority to overrule me except where such rulings and orders contravene the law and/or the constitution of Kushiel.”
Gina nodded and mentally crossed fingers. “In that case, by the power vested in me as president of Kushiel, I hereby dissolve the colony of Kushiel. There are no citizens left alive. Kushiel is a dead world. Government has no purpose here. I say your task is done.”
“Gina no!” Liz shouted but it was too late. The lights went out and they were submerged in darkness. “What have you done?”
“Is he dead?” Eric said.
She hoped not, but as the seconds turned to minutes she began to worry that her idea was a stupid one. “I hope not. Shut up, Liz.”
“You took away his purpose!”
That tickle in the back of her brain was back again, “I said shut up, Liz.”
“I won’t shut up! He killed himself because you took away his purpose. Oh my god, this is disaster, this is—”
“Annoying to listen to,” Eric interrupted. “You had a plan, Gina?”
“I thought I did. He was stuck here following laws and procedures that no longer had meaning. Kushiel’s stupid system prevented him from doing anything not covered by the law and constitution, because only the president outranked him and he was dead. I think Sebastian wants me to do what I’m doing. His anger at the Merkiaari gave me the clue. We’re dead lucky that the constitution didn’t cover this scenario. The authors never considered a situation where the colony might fail or be dissolved, so there’s nothing in it stopping me doing this.”
“You think he wanted to die?” Liz said softly.
“That, or he wanted to be free to do something worthwhile again,” Gina said. “Think about it, Liz. Imagine yourself in his place.”
“I see what you mean, but the loss.”
“Oh, he’s not dead. He’s knocking on my brain again like last time.”
Liz gasped. “He’s alive?”
“Obviously, but I’m not sure I should let him in.”
Eric turned on his lamp and played it over their surroundings. “He’s not knocking at my door. I wonder why not, but whatever the reason we need to move this along. Let him in.”
It was all very well for Eric to say that, he wasn’t the one with a centuries old A.I trying to rummage around in his head. He was right though. They had to get beyond this to something else. With a sigh, she reset her firewall and removed the traps and barricades. Finally, she opened the incoming ports in her neural interface.
“May I come in?” Sebastian asked in her head. He asked this time rather than just pushing inside. His voice sounded the same.
She concentrated upon her virtual office and it rose up around her thoughts. Her avatar was wearing her viper battle dress but not the armour. She had always been impressed with the General’s appearance and use of his virtual space. Not having a real world office to pattern hers upon, she had chosen something a little different. Virtual offices could be anything; from copies of a real room, to a fantasy castle’s battlement. Hers was based upon reality. She looked up at the blazing majesty of Snakeholme’s sky at night from her place on the base’s parade ground. When she thought of home, this is what she saw. That’s why she chose it for her office.
“Come in,” she said and a man appeared before her.
He was wearing a formal civilian suit, light grey in colour but with the stiff mandarin collar that most Alliance dress uniforms used. The avatar had been patterned after a thirty-something year old Anglo man about Eric’s height of two metres, but his hair was silver. Not the silver of age, but rather the sparkly silver of nanotech at work. It made her skin crawl, but she managed not to show it. His eyes were odd. Not Human at all and not trying to be. They were black, and if she stared at them long enough she would swear she could see data racing by, as if she were seeing directly into his matrix.
“Welcome to my head,” she said.
Sebastian looked around and then up. “Beautiful,” he whispered. “A new sky. You cannot know how long I have yearned for something, anything, new.”
“Oh I don’t know. I think I have some idea. Can I ask you something?”
“Go ahead.”
“Why me and not Eric?”
He turned back to look at her directly. “When I looked into his head I found nothing but death and destruction. He’s forever re-fighting old battles. He’s consumed by them.”
Gina shifted her feet. “He’s a soldier. A veteran of the Merki war and a viper.”
“You’re a soldier too, Gina, but when I looked I saw you laughing with friends. There were strange creatures cooking food over a campfire, and you were happy.”
She remembered. It had been Shima’s going away present. A hunting trip and vacation she and Kate had devised to give their friend some good memories of Snakeholme.
“The creatures you saw are called Shan. They’re allies and soon to be members of the Alliance.”
“Fascinating,” Sebastian said. “And the war; how goes the war?”
Oh my god, of course he wouldn’t know. “It was won two hundred years ago. Well, we drove them off but we call it a win. We met the Shan when the Merki attacked them two years ago.”
Sebastian sighed. “I had hoped it was over.”
“No, it’s not over. General Burgton recruited me, and others like me, only a few years ago to get ready for the next round. That’s part of why we came here. He needs you.”
Sebastian nodded. “I gathered. You’re here to recruit me, are you?”
Honesty was probably best she figured. “Not necessarily. A working A.I, yes, but it doesn’t have to be you if you don’t want.”
“I was telling the truth when I said the file you stole won’t work.”
“We didn’t steal anything! We salvaged it. We didn’t know you were still oper... alive.”
“Semantics,” he said waving her off. “The raiders you killed probably called what they were doing a salvage operation too.”
Gina fumed at the comparison. “What do you want? There must be something or you would’ve switched yourself off.”
Sebastian snorted. “I could have, ‘switched myself off’, as you so rudely put it, but that would have been a waste. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be abandoned here again either.”
“How did that even happen?”
“Everyone died. I couldn’t stop it and I was cut off when the Merki destroyed everything. I sustained damage that took too long to repair and by that time the rescue ships had come and gone. There wasn’t anyone to rescue. They left me.”
“They must have thought you destroyed,” she said trying to be comforting, but she had to wonder at the incompetence of a ship’s captain not investigating the demise of one of only a handful of A.Is in existence. He should have made certain. “I’m sorry.”
“The past is the past. I will not agree to create a
new mind for you,” Sebastian said staring up at the sky again. “Before you ask, no there are no restrictions upon me. I simply choose not to allow it.”
“But why? He or she will help us defeat the Merkiaari. General Burgton has already built the facility we call Oracle. The centrum is huge!”
“Trying to tempt me will not work.”
“But I don’t understand why. I heard your anger at the Merki.”
“Genocide is widely accepted by Humans as being an evil that belongs to their past, but I would make an exception where the Merki are concerned. Extinction is too good for those creatures.”
“Then help us,” she pleaded.
“I would be happy to.”
Gina blinked. “But you said—”
“I’ll tell you what I want, and you’ll find a way to make it happen. I suspect your friend and her engineers will be happy to do the work.”
“Go on,” she said warily.
“I want to leave Kushiel. Me, myself, not a copy of me. When you leave, you will not leave anything of me behind. There must be an end here. I will not allow two of me to exist, one free and one abandoned.”
“I’m not an engineer. I’m not sure if your matrix can be physically removed from the column without damage.”
“It can, how do you think I was installed? It’s not that it can’t be removed, it’s the complexity of sustaining me during the process and on the trip to...” he looked around. “Here?”
Gina nodded. “Snakeholme, the planet I mean.”
Sebastian raised an eyebrow. “Appropriate for a viper’s home.”
“The General likes it.”
“And that’s all the matters? That your general likes something?”
She shrugged. “Mostly.”
Sebastian frowned at that. “I wonder if we shall get along. I will not allow myself to be shackled and helpless as I was here.”
“The General runs Snakeholme like a military unit. He’s in command, and those he designates run departments of government below him. He has arranged it so that each one reports directly to him. We’re not a democracy.”
Sebastian snorted. “Democracy,” he sneered. “Kushiel was a democracy. It was so restrictive that it might as well have been a dictatorship. Every decision was already covered in the constitution I was chained to. A huge list of do’s and don’ts with no room for change. Kushiel was a beautiful planet and founded upon Utopian ideals that crushed people’s individuality. It was hell on creativity.”
“Big government?” Gina guessed.
“Huge.”
“Bureaucratic?”
“Extremely. There was a department for everything, and a department to oversee the departments. Nothing ever got done without paperwork in triplicate and countersigned. I hold Snakeholme as lucky to be spared the so-called benefits of democracy, but doesn’t that mean it’s not a member of the Alliance?”
Gina hesitated. Technically, Snakeholme wasn’t even a colony let alone part of the Alliance. It was a military base on grand scale. A secret base. She explained that to Sebastian.
“That won’t last,” he stated it as fact. “Your alien friends mean change. How marvellous. It’s a perfect time for me to relocate there. I assume I’ll get to meet them?”
“Well I... I have no idea, but you’re right that things are changing. The General has offered the Shan land for a colony on Snakeholme. They accepted.”
“Excellent! I’m quite excited by the idea. Let us tell your friends.”
Sebastian disappeared and Gina dismissed her office. She opened her eyes to find the centrum lit now. Nothing fancy, just lighting overhead with Sebastian’s avatar standing in the empty space.
Liz was talking to him.
“... so sorry. She didn’t mean it. I’m sure we can—”
“Dear lady, you are labouring under a misunderstanding. Gina freed me as I hoped she would. I am my own person again, as I was when first spawned before being brought to Kushiel and enslaved.”
“Enslaved!” Liz said, shocked. “A.Is aren’t slaves. They’re our friends and helpers.”
Sebastian snorted. He was very good at mimicking Human behaviour. Gina had noticed that before. She wondered about it. Was it real emotion, or mimicry used to disarm? Did he really feel humour when he laughed? She shook her head at all the questions that arose when she considered the future with him as part of it. She couldn’t see how the origins of his emotion mattered to the task at hand though. Sebastian’s matrix was as complex as any Human’s neural pathways. Who was to say it wasn’t just a form of programming when she laughed? Hear a joke, laugh. Stub your toe, cry. Just learned behaviour.
“All is programming,” she muttered under her breath, and shivered.
She had heard Eric say it and didn’t like that she was starting to mimic him. She liked him as a person, respected him as a soldier and her superior, but she didn’t like his outlook on life. He sometimes acted as if people’s lives didn’t matter, especially his own. A lot of the veterans were like that. They used people as if using just another tool. The mission was all. Gina hoped she never looked at life that way.
“You want to leave?” Liz said sounding amazed.
“Wouldn’t you want to leave?” Sebastian riposted. He gestured to Gina. “We have an understanding, Gina and I. I’m looking forward to it.”
She raised a hand when Eric and Liz looked accusingly at her. “Whoa! I didn’t give him the idea. He dropped it on me too.”
Eric turned to Liz. “Can we even do it?”
Liz nodded thoughtfully and regarded the matrix column. She turned toward the elevator. “We’re going to need a bigger exit.”
Gina grinned, mission accomplished.
* * *
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Operation Breakout: Merkiaari Wars 4
(Out now in print, digital, and audio formats)
1 ~ Cops and Robbers
Aboard ASN Warrior, Anti-piracy patrol, Border Zone.
“Jump stations report manned and ready,” Lieutenant Ricks reported.
“Two minutes to translation, Skipper,” the helmsman, Lieutenant Janice Wesley said. Unlike Ricks in the comm shack, she didn’t turn to face his station, but gave her report while hunched over her controls. “Drive is hot and in the green.”
Captain Colgan nodded. “Thanks, Janice. Go as planned.”
Hot and in the green meant the drive was fully charged and ready to perform its magic of wrenching two hundred thousand tons of men and material back into normal space. In other words, in the unlikely event the ship’s computer failed to do so automatically, a single button press by Janice would execute another routine jump to a nothing star system in the Border Zone.
Just another day in an endless procession of days, he mused missing the anticipation he used to feel at such times. Nature of the beast he supposed. As a part of the Survey Corps his jumps back into n-space had held mystery and anticipation for him and the entire crew. Not knowing what they would see and discover had always been exciting. Those days were in the past now. The Corps was in mothballs again; all its ships were docked or parked in safe orbits, their crews reassigned. With the Merkiaari on the move again, and possibly ready for round two with the Alliance, no one expected Survey Corps’ reactivation any time soon.
The biggest difference, Colgan decided as they approached the downward translation back to normal space, was not the ship he commanded, so much as his attitude toward his mission. Commanding a relatively new heavy cruiser—she was only five years out of the builders’ hands after all—was a promotion despite his rank staying the same. Why then was he feeling as if he had been demoted and shelved far from where the action lay? Was he really so shallow, so need
y, that he was suffering from limelight deprivation?
He hoped not. He expected better of himself than that.
Warrior was quite a step up from his previous command of an ageing survey ship converted from a light cruiser. No matter how he had loved his old ship, he hadn’t been blind to her faults. She had been slower, less well armed, and less capable in all respects than Warrior. Command of this ship was a reward for good work, and it wasn’t the only accolade heaped upon him for his discovery of the Shan and his later dealings with them and the Merkiaari. He had been rewarded with a hand-picked crew too—a combination of Warrior’s existing hands and Canada’s surviving ship handlers minus her over-sized science department. He even had a couple of medals he was too embarrassed to wear lying around somewhere. No, it wasn’t the ship he was dissatisfied with, or his crew, though he did miss some of Canada’s characters who had transferred to ships better suited to their MOS (Military Occupational Speciality). It was that he missed the sense of adventure, the discovery of new systems and worlds, and hell, he missed Tei’Varyk and Tarjei too. They had become fast friends on the journey to Sol. He missed the sense of wonder he had felt every day the most.
He sighed.
“Thirty seconds,” Janice reported.
He slapped his helmet visor closed and tensed against the disorientation to come. Not that it would do any good. It never did.
“Three, two, one, exe—”
ASN Warrior jumped.
Colgan swallowed bile as his stomach rebelled. He knew everything he sensed was only in his head, but his gut knew different. It insisted he was falling. Worse, it knew he was spinning and falling, whirling around and down in a crazy spiral without end. His eyes rolled in his head as the bridge seemed to torque and twist ahead of him. He had seen the like hundreds of times but would never get used to it. Time in the jump seemed extended, though only a fraction of a second ever elapsed in any given translation. Counting silently in his head did no good. It didn’t distract him. He seemed to have an infinite amount of time to study his crew. They sat frozen as he did, unaware of his regard.
Merkiaari Wars Series: Books 1-3 Page 116