16GX937's body sunk into the fungus, replaced by Jace.blek's squat, headless form. "Kai, what's going on? Did that virus of yours corrupt it?"
"I didn't fucking corrupt anyone," she snapped, trying to find the blur from moments before. "You know I can't."
"And that's the only reason I'm not putting you into stasis right now. Well, that and the surveillance."
"Listen, you're not as secure as you think. The dead Zeven was an ally of the Starbleeder's network."
"It seems we're developing an interesting behavioral contingency here. You underestimate what I know and I correct you. I was aware of this infiltration. As with you, I wanted to see what it did. I was hoping to hack into its core later. But with it corrupted, that's a losing game."
"So where does that leave us?" She noticed that most of the aliens had left the room.
"Wherever it leaves someone when the trail goes cold. But there is you."
"Me?"
"You have a black goo fragment in your core. That's the only logical explanation for how you could've corrupted 16GX937's core given your lack of weapons."
"Did you detect any activity from the fragment?"
"A brief flicker of a signal." That was the evidence then. Her core really was compromised.
"Can you fix it?" she thought aloud.
"I can't. But I might know someone who can. Or, at the very least, he can perform more advanced research than—"
Jace.blek's formed sunk into the layer of fungus.
"Where the fuck did you..." she trailed off. She may not have had her inquisitor modules, but she could still sense impending danger. What the danger was, she couldn't say.
She checked her terminal's menu. The nest's interface issued an emergency warning. Hostile infantry units had effectively breached the perimeter of its godweb. Normally, the power of the nest's godweb ranked beyond some combat ships and was strong enough to destroy any frames easily. Yet currently, the godweb was only running at one third of its normal atomic aura strength.
She blinked.
It was still running at one third.
Which apparently was enough to generate force field cubes around each terminal station.
Jace.blek's message popped up on her feed.
As if she had a choice. She leaned in and punched the force field with all the power she could generate. She might as well have done nothing. Sighing, she stared daggers at Raksamat.
"I swear if this is your fault...." Because she didn't know how the enemy was able to reduce the magnitude of the nest's godweb so easily.
Godwebs functioned by stimulating the dark energy and particles of dark matter that made up the empty space inside their range. A stronger godweb could've shut this one down by seizing control of the localized dark energy and dark matter itself. But if that were the case, then why was the nest's only weakened and not disabled entirely?
She licked her lips. He had a point.
The timing of this attack was too soon after the death of 16GX937 to be a coincidence. She navigated through the nest's interface and pulled up a series of surveillance monitors of its outer tunnel and saw the familiar silver clouds of enemy smart dust swarms. They were surging against Jace.blek's nest's swarm, each trying to overtake the other.
Chunks of walls burned away in white flashes, the entire nest rumbling. Blips of enemy bombs. The nest's godweb and Jace.blek's combat script guiding it did their best to predict and detect explosives as soon as they phased in. Smart dust scattered around the base created force fields. These didn't stop the blasts, but they weakened them enough to prevent widespread damage.
Within a few seconds, the terminal registered their enemy as Glenbots. The spiky, discolored drones from outside that resembled giant mutant crustaceans. But the Glenbots serviced thousands of sapient networks. She was certain this attack wasn't coordinated directly by them. Unsurprisingly, the nest tagged them as belonging to an unidentified network. It had to be Starbleeder retaliation.
A shot of trepidation cut through her as she realized she had no clue of Sarvill's location. After a minute, she located him in a force field bubble one level up along with several other sapients—a spider-cow-like organism, something with rock skin, and a bulky blue humanoid with four arms and a brown fin on its head.
An explosion reverberated from above, and the monitor whitened. She looked again to see the force field falter. They generally didn't last long against explosives. And two of the bulky blue humanoid's arms hadn't either.
"Shit," she breathed as the blue humanoid bellowed in agony.
"We should be alright," she said with a hint of sarcasm. She studied the surveillance mappings as three of the spider-cow creature's legs melted under the heat of a stray ion beam.
The enemy nanite swarms and explosives were still engaged in a tug-of-war, so to speak, with the nest's defensive counterparts. The terminal interface didn't say that the enemy was running a combat script. That explained their apparent satisfaction at simply creating chaos rather than carrying out a specific objective. And how no one had died yet.
Checking the Glenbot units' atomic aura, she registered a small yellow aura glowing around them. That indicated their godwebs were up and running. And with larger numbers, they were inevitably piling up the micro-gains in this skirmish. Based on current rates, Jace.blek's combat protocols estimated everyone in the nest would be dead within five minutes. Most likely by accumulation of collateral damage.
Ironically, that was better than she would've expected. Looked like the enemy's goal was a slow and torturous death.
She messaged Jace.blek on the wall terminal,
Okay, great. Someone had just gone and changed reality...like the Engineers of legend.
She didn't have to ask how fucked they were on a scale from one to ten. The base's security protocols calculated their odds of survival. They were currently at twelve percent. That seemed high. Unless Jace.blek had some hidden weapon. He'd once tried to become an Engineer, so maybe he could pull off some shift in reality.
It was terrible advice. She didn't know what his last resorts might be. Using them now could be the wrong move to make.
Desperate for some way to be useful, she fixated on the nest interface's analysis of the Glenbot smart dust. She wanted to know if they were trying to reach her, the alien she'd somehow corrupted, or just wipe out the nest itself. It was a minor piece of the puzzle, but if they could get the godweb back up to its full power somehow, that knowledge would factor into its combat script.
Something strange occurred in the terminal's surveillance display. Junk data was spooling, and gibberish characters were listing. The traces of a glitch in the system. Her eyes widened. Was the enemy hacking the nest again?
The base interface system messaged that the nest's godweb's atomic aura was rising.
She grinned and entered a message on the terminal.
The godweb's atomic aura topped out, and Jace.blek's combat script refreshed, factoring in the new advantage. It calc
ulated the enemy's movements, and the nest's godweb eliminated them in a matter of seconds. As the last pieces of the Glenbot frames were shredded by the nest's smart dust or melted by ion beams, she checked the terminal interface's analysis of the junk data from the spooling.
There wasn't a lot to take away from it, but there were lines of Shimmer embedded in there. Shimmer was an old Terran coding language that had been used for centuries. Getting upgraded along the way, of course. Someone had injected chunks of the code into the interface. Editing indicators showed the code indented by an equal number of tabs and spaces. As if someone had made it a point to be objective about the preference.
The force field cube protecting them fell away, and Jace.blek spawned from the ceiling sludge.
"He's here," he said.
"Who?" Kai asked.
"The sapient who might be able to fix your core."
Beside them, a new figure materialized. A figure instantly recognizable by his physical appearance, glorified in countless sims that retold the heroic stories of humanity during the Great Cosmic Wars. Kai's innards tightened as she gazed upon a legend, and her nexus tagged him as her target. The one she had to kill to save her network.
Astro Phoenix.
Chapter 20
FELIK
As a flat rate, it was enough to purchase a small space station or two and uplink his consciousness into. It would be enough to keep him out of debt for, if not a lifetime (which could potentially last forever), a very long time. Thousands and thousands of solar cycles.
He couldn't get a sense of the Henshi's emotion from its body language as it resembled nothing human. It wasn't even actually standing in front of him. That was only an avatar, designed for use in Terran living terrains.
The Henshi moved away.
Over the last two hours, he'd rejected well over two hundred inquiries. Some he outright ignored, others he rejected on the basis that they were too low, others he told he had already made a decision. And still some, he felt the need to say maybe later. A lot of sapients had offered him a lot of bits. One even offered to trade an entire synthetic planet. He could upload his mind into its core whenever he liked.
Felik crossed his arms. With all these offers, it occurred to him to try exchanging the Nassatar for the role of Chief Philosopher, but it felt wrong. If he couldn't even complete the Guardian Templar's task, how could he hope to be a good Chief Philosopher? It seemed almost irresponsible to trade his ship without at least understanding why Arteyos left it to him.
Oddly, no one had offered him a cure to his neural virus in exchange for his ship. That would've at least gotten him genuinely interested.
Right now, orators for the dead were issuing their eulogies of a sort. The purpose was not to honor the fallen StarMaster so much as to give an objective portrayal of his life. The good and the bad.
Holodisplays of orators on raised stages appeared on each platform in the vast chamber.
First up to speak was an Arbiter. It resembled a giant pitchfork, pointing up with a few metallic fins on its sides. "Arteyos Ullon was born a human on Tau Ceti f, the youngest of five children. He was the brother of Chief Architect of the Union Omega Karina Ullon and Fleet Admiral of the Union Omega Hayland Ullon. His political career began in high school, long before he formed the Union Omega. During the Great Cosmic Wars, he guided humanity as the Terran Galactic Chancellor. Along with his friend and legendary hero Astro Phoenix, he led the Yorvin Strike, cementing the defeat of the Minds of Errukav.
"Following this success, he formed the Union Omega with the other major Type IV species and oversaw humanity's blossoming during the Ascendancy. It was as wielder of the most powerful political position in the universe that he proved the most divisive. By implementing the Karma Nebula Pact, he granted the potential for infinite life to trillions of sapients. In doing so, he also forced Type IV species and many other sapients of the Union Omega to install nexuses, effectively removing mental privacy for all life. But as with any technological advancement, there are costs and benefits. Nexuses increased general intelligence, allowed multiple living frames, highly efficient ansible communication, seamless augmented reality, access to skill and talent mod upgrades, and freedom from physical forms. Just to name a few benefits.
"The access to nexus technology threatened to create vast imbalances among sapients in the universe, favoring those who were most fortunate during the Great Cosmic Wars and possessed the infrastructure to invest in advanced technology. In an attempt to control this, he capped technological advancements and banned certain scientific research which might upset the balance of power among various species in the Union Omega. Fearing that immediate access to reproductive stimulation would render human relationships moot and destroy any sense of volition, he banned pornographic simulations and limited intercourse bot usage."
Leave it to an Arbiter to make sex sound so dull, Felik thought. Hearing the eulogy, it occurred to him that given how many sapients had been negatively affected by the StarMaster's actions, there were countless ones who saw his death as a chance for real change. An escape from his ways. Likewise, what about starkeepers who wanted to pass laws that he'd disagreed with? That might've motivated someone to terminate him.
The Arbiter continued, "Fearing dangers from the potential advancements of high-level sophonts and Matrioshka brains, he outlawed the existence of all computer processing systems, replacing them with cores. This allowed even the lowest tiers of the Union Omega to earn karma bits by renting out the computing power of their cores. His enemies, political and extraterrestrial, concocted rumors to undermine him, of course. I will refrain from mentioning these inherently biased opinions."
Several more orators provided their own views on the StarMaster and his legacy, good and bad. Each was a variation on the theme provided by the Arbiter, give or take a few details.
Arteyos had hoped to discourage war by banning the usage and design of remotely controlled battleships. It was the Principle of Shared Psychology that Arteyos and many starkeepers used to justify only allowing species who shared psychology similar to New Terrans to partake in the Union Omega's government. It would've been a little awkward to grant serious political power to the aliens who viewed life as a blight on the purity of the cosmos.
Following the Objectification of the Dead was the Justification of the Dead. The latter followed a similar format, except sapients worked to logically resolve the StarMaster's death. They said lines like, His reign was a long one for a human, and Occasionally, even the greatest of us pass away. This led into the emotional justification—story and entertainment sims were referenced to suggest that even though this was a real event and tragic, sapients had experienced such a loss before. Albeit in a fictitious sense.
All that did was remind Felik of the sim of the StarMaster admitting to his death and the warnings from the Wraiths.
After, a pause in the ceremonies allowed everyone to discuss what they'd heard and craft their own opinions.
More sapients asked about purchasing his ship. Every time, he changed the subject to the late StarMaster's absurd power to monitor almost everything occurring in the known universe via the countless data streams fed to him. A power that both the Watchers network and Saganerio network decided would not be afforded to the next StarMaster or any other single sapient.
Most sapients didn't want to discuss this too much and took the cue to excuse themselves from Felik. When one humored him, he told them he had to go speak with his brother. And it was true. As a scion, every StarMaster clone was his brother, but he'd only ever grown close with three.
He knew one of those three was attending, and he invited him to a construct chat.
His brother accepted and their consciousnesses were whisked away onto a private platform in a virtual construct of the funeral ceremony c
hamber.
Seeing his brother filled Felik with even more anguish than the death of the StarMaster. He and Selek had survived so much strife together. And suddenly there was no way to emotionally distance himself from it.
As they embraced, he asked himself why it took a family funeral to bring them back together.
"How are you holding up?" Selek asked, practically his twin. Technically, the scions were all clones, but Arteyos had somewhat randomized the physical appearances of their artificial bodies at birth. So Felik's physical similarity to Selek had always struck him as meaningful.
"About as good as I can be. Did Cadena and Ibris come?"
Selek shook his head. "It's become real expensive now."
Communication and travel within one quadrant of space was one thing but across quadrants was another.
"You know it's purposeful. They do that to keep us divided," Felik said, trying not to betray his feeling of annoyance. It would've been nice to see his niece again. But his brother budgeted carefully even for important matters. And he earned the same karma bits as Felik because he was part of the Guardian Mind, just of the Lumerian Quadrant.
"Yeah, probably. This whole funeral thing is absurd. They won't even let sapients with multiple frames go to both."
"We used to joke that in the end the universe is like a big cosmic gladiatorial arena. It's never seemed more like that." Only as Felik said that did he realize it sounded hyperbolic. The Great Cosmic Wars had been much more a metaphorical gladiatorial arena than the general peace that existed now. To his credit, Selek didn't point that out, though.
Felik laughed inwardly, knowing he couldn't help but get a little emotional. During the Darwinist abduction incident, their captors had pitted them against each other in their stasis containment. They'd infected Selek with a neural virus that brought out his worst. He'd infected Felik in turn due to negligence.
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