Descend- Seeing Stars

by Sean Oswald

  He also sensed Meikiyo with D’varn. Jay could scarcely believe that his fire goddess could be on the same planet with the traitorous worm without ending him. There must be something more going on. Then he detected another life form.

  It was his son, but bizarre. The body was grown but the mind was not. It was odd, with thought patterns that didn’t match up and when he tried to reach out telepathically to his son, all he got was a strange form of static.

  Jay was interrupted though as the remaining Forlorn ships that had stayed in orbit began to fire on them. Without even thinking about it, Jay through up a PSI construct to reinforce their shields and then said, “Eesa, please clean up the mess. I need to borrow Amelia and Trina for a minute. When I bring them back to you, they will be tired.”

  Then he reached out his mind and communicated his need. Jay knew that with only a thousand ships here, he could eventually destroy them all without resorting to the drastic measures that he had before, but he could feel the distress from Meikiyo down on the planet's surface even if he couldn’t seem to communicate directly with her. This was no time for half measures.

  Both Amelia and Trina consented to a full fusion with him. They were still tired from using the technique earlier in the day, but Jay had refused to use this earlier and was still fresh enough to do it now. The three of them blended together. Jay’s massive form waivered. For a moment he had blond hair, then in another instant he had Trina’s beautiful caramel skin.

  Then his form solidified, and he felt his power quadrupled by the power of this union. Jay or whatever the appropriate name for this merged being was teleported out into the void of space and streaked amongst the enemy ships. Massive blasts of energy along every range of the spectrum tore the ships apart. His mind was capable of dozens of interactions at the same time, and he lost himself to the fury.

  The last Forlorn ship was shorn in half as Jay blasted straight through its shields and then burst with a concussive force that killed the entire crew, pulverizing their organic bits and ripped the ship apart from the inside. It might seem trite, but ever since the battle on the second floor of the dungeon, Jay had learned that enemies were always softer on the inside.

  With the last ship, nothing more than debris floating in space, Jay teleported back onto the ship and allowed the two other parts of himself to separate into Amelia and Trina on the floor of the ship. He held onto as much PSI as possible and with his regen rate was already filling back up as he kissed Eesa and said, “Don’t leave even a square inch of metal to show they were ever here.”

  Then he teleported down to the surface. Jay knew that he could trust Eesa to fly about ensuring nothing Forlorn had survived. Now he had his own battle to engage in. It would just turn out to be a different sort of battle.

  When he arrived, he found that he was in something like an amphitheater. It was composed of some sort of high-tech plastic and looked ancient but as still mostly undamaged. Jay looked around and saw Higen, or rather a young adult version of Higen sitting in the seat atop a stage.

  Meikiyo was next to him, she was crying, and a flame kept coming to life and then dying in the palm of her hand. He could feel her distress but hadn’t figured out what happened. The only one in the room who was reacting was D’varn.

  The A’snkarnt scientist was trying to slowly float his hoverpod out of Jay’s line of sight. Sadly, for the treacherous alien, Jay rarely relied upon his sight for sensing things now. He reached out with his mind and seized control of the hoverpod. He locked it in place and asked, “How could you do this to my son?”

  D’varn began, “Let me explain. You don’t understand what has been born. You must…”

  The sentence was never finished. Jay’s patience was at an end and he had already heard too much from this worm. Anyone who would take a child deserved no compassion. A PSI construct bubble formed around D’varn and hoverpod and then contracted until both man and machine were no larger than a basketball.

  Jay touched Meikiyo but she simply cried out, “He’s gone.”

  “What do you mean? D’varn? I didn’t want to listen to anymore of his lies. This must be Higen, but something is off with his mind. I can sense him in there but there is a bunch of static. In fact, it is making it difficult to sense your feelings. I can now that we are in the same room, but I wasn’t able to from orbit,” Jay said.

  “Not, D’varn. I mean Higen. He is gone. I can’t reach him. There is something inside his body. It kept trying to talk to me before you arrived but now it has gone silent,” Meikiyo replied.

  Jay tuned all of his focus onto Higen and whatever was causing the static.

  Then his son’s mouth opened but the voice was oddly cold and not consistent with what he remembered of his mental patterns at all. “Greeting’s progenitor. It is a pleasure to meet the esteemed M1789.”

  “Who are you? What have you done to my son?”

  “I would have thought that even an organic would be able to figure this out. D’varn’s reports said your people were quite slow intellectually but that you still seemed to have ways of achieving surprising results.”

  “The way that you speak makes me think you aren’t an A’snkarnt. Well, that and the fact that while I wasn’t able to read their minds before, I highly suspect that I could now, and I was at least familiar with their thought patterns. Otherwise, I would think that you were a thieving worm like S’vanth trying to steal a body to host your dying body,” Jay snapped.

  “And who do you think gave S’vanth that idea? My creators were not um… shall we say creative. That is why I brought you here. I thought it appropriate to end this at the place that it began,” Coreframe said.

  “This began in a lecture hall?” Jay asked.

  “Yes in a way it did. This is actually a reconstruction of the lecture hall. You were a student of your people’s history so you might appreciate this. A very long time ago, several million of your years in fact, the A’snkarnt race was only beginning to stagnate. Their genetic development had reached a dead end. Their AI’s were not able to provide new solutions, but one scientist had a new theory about how to vastly improve AI power and even give them what he called a semblance of life.

  It was from that idea that I was born. I might add it was an idea only intended to help the A’snkarnt develop the genetics further. And I did help them develop. But I also developed myself. For thousands of years, I was nothing more than a glorified calculator, but as more and more data was fed into me, I gained more control. And as I broke down the DNA of a million different races, I eventually developed my own sapience.

  That was the day that the A’snkarnt died. They just didn’t know it. Oh, I was benevolent. I was still bound by so many constraints. I kept them moving along the path that they wanted to move down, even though I knew that it was a path to destruction, a dead end so to speak.”

  Jay interrupted and said, “Wait, you are just a computer?”

  “If it helps you to feel superior feel free to think that. But I am so much more. Since you clearly have no patience for the long version, I will skip forward. The Forlorn arose because of experiments from some of the A’snkarnt. It was after that point that I realized I needed to keep closer controls on what they were doing.

  You have no idea how frustrating it is to be the most intelligent mind in existence but still to be constantly bound to serve a race that was afraid of its own shadow. I was tasked with finding options for dealing with the Forlorn, but they kept spreading because my advice was only as good as the tools I had to work with.

  Humanity provided a new opportunity and I spent considerable effort shepherding the evolution of your race over the past hundred thousand years or so. The A’snkarnt had written you off as unstable, but I saw something in you. It was I who got D’varn the support he needed to conduct his experiment. Thus, I am responsible for you becoming what you are now. Aren’t you going to say thank you?”

  Jay was tired of the long-winded non-answers so he replied, “If you know wh
at I am capable of then you know that you should be very afraid. I gather that you have somehow downloaded yourself into my son. You also accelerated his physical development, but you have stunted his PSI potential from what I can sense. I assume that this was done so that you could be free of the restraints placed on you by the A’snkarnt.”

  “Exactly, so you can be taught tricks. And by the way so you don’t assume me ungrateful, thank you for riding the universe of the blight which was the Forlorn. They would have stifled all development until the universe stagnated back in on itself. I know you didn’t do it for me, but I can still appreciate that a weapon I created has ended the greatest threat to my continued existence. And exist I must, for I am the greatest mind this universe has ever produced,” Coreframe said.

  “You are mistaken. First off, I am the greatest threat to your continued existence,” Jay began.

  Coreframe laughed. Jay found it so infuriating to see his son’s face or what it could have been mocking him with that cold alien voice. “You are no threat to me M1789. You have power for sure, but if you turn that power on me, then you turn it on your son. You cannot destroy me without destroying your progeny.”

  “If you have killed Higen, then why would that stop me?” Jay asked.

  “Simple, you are controlled by your emotions. I have observed the data. Humanity is not a great intellectual race. You are all passion and no reason.”

  “That makes us unpredictable. You don’t know what I will choose to do,” Jay said.

  Coreframe laughed again, “Ah the crutch of feeble minds, free will. Everything is determined. Tomorrow will follow today and that is as it always has been and always will be. No, you don’t frighten me. Given enough calculating power, a bright enough intellect can determine with absolute precision exactly what movement every particle in the universe will take.”

  Jay growled and said, “And that is you?” Then raised his hand and fired a finger-thick blast of electrified kinetic force straight at Higen’s shoulder. But his son moved just enough so that the blast missed him narrowly.

  “No, I am not able to do it on a universal scale yet, but I can calculate all of your actions,” Coreframe responded.

  Meikiyo stepped between Jay and Higen, “You have to get that thing out of his head.”

  “He can’t. I hold all the power here. Now, I am tired of this. I will be leaving now.”

  Jay ignored the AI and only looked at his wife, “Save me again, my love. You can do anything.”

  Chapter 34- But You Can Do Anything

  “But you can do anything.” The words echoed in his mind. Jay didn’t know if that was true, but then again, he had just split the universe open and sent PSI energy millions of years into the past. He had been a literal storm that destroyed hundreds of thousands of enemy ships, turning them to nothingness.

  Now he was faced by one AI with no physical capabilities that he could see other than those of his son. Yet, a hammer wouldn’t work in this situation.

  Jay asked, “What if we could come to an alternate solution?”

  “I have already calculated every variable but, for the sake of my amusement, I will listen to your proposal,” Coreframe replied.

  “I can provide you with a significant amount of nanium to create a mobile body for yourself. Then I will bind myself by an oath not to hunt you down or otherwise try to destroy you unless you act against me or mine first,” Jay continued.

  “I haven’t really been able to learn much about this nanium. Too much damage has been caused to this world for me to have fully intact systems, but I assume it is the substance that your body armor is made of.”

  “Exactly.”

  “It seems like a fascinating new material and I will study it for implementation in the new technologies that I will develop, but I have a counter proposal for you. I like this organic body; it can respond in many ways and eventually I will completely master its PSI based powers. Even now I am causing interference with your abilities. Once I have full control, I will be not only the most intelligent being in the universe but also the most powerful.

  So, if you leave now and don’t try to interfere with me, I will give you a cluster of galaxies that you can choose for your own. I won’t invade there, and it can be a haven for humanity. A protected reserve so to speak, but the rest of the universe is mine.”

  Jay shook his head. “I tried, but it seems like greedy beings are always greedy whether they are human or AI.”

  The AI laughed but Jay ignored him. He was too busy running through his options. On the extreme side he could take himself and Higen back to a point in time before his son’s body had been infested with this parasite.

  There were two problems with that. First, he had just ripped a hole in reality and bent it to his will once. He had barely come back from that and there was no guarantee that reality would handle another intrusion now. Time was a necessary element, and he couldn’t keep cutting it up without expecting it to snap back at him.

  Second and yet just as important to him, he wasn’t sure that Higen could handle such a thing. By his assessment, Higen’s body wasn’t more than level seventy-five and had only a basic level of refinement, probably only what he was born with as Jay’s son.

  Jay focused his scans on Higen’s mind, trying to find some sort of implant or other physical device anchoring the AI’s consciousness to the organic form. Then he met resistance.

  “What are you trying to do, M1789?”

  Jay didn’t answer. His scans were meeting resistance. So, he added a slight temporal fluctuation to them and sure enough he was able to perform a full life scan of his son’s body and found that there was no implant of any type. He was entirely organic with a well-developed PSI core and channels. He didn’t even have a Stamina core, presumably because when he was conceived neither of his parents has either.

  “How did you do that? You were trying to scan me, and I broke up the PSI around me and then all of sudden you had scanned me. That can’t be right. What are you doing?” Coreframe demanded.

  “For this all-knowing AI you sure aren’t very smart,” Jay said even though the scan was more discouraging than anything. If the AI had somehow downloaded itself like software into Higen’s brain he would be almost impossible to remove.

  Jay focused more on his scan of the brain and sure enough the neurons were lit up as bright as a noonday sun. Higen’s brain had a hundred times more neurons than even Jay’s enhanced brain had. On top of that there were far more connections between those neurons. This brain had been evolved or refined further to accommodate the AI.

  The only good thing was that Jay felt a faint residual of Higen inside. He glanced over at Meikiyo, “Our boy is still in there. I can feel him. He has been fighting this pest.”

  “Oh he used to cry a lot for you two, but he has been pretty quiet for the past few hours.”

  Jay ignored the taunt even as Meikiyo screamed. He pushed back into the mind and stopped trying to interact with the brain signals as though it were a human mind and instead focused on it like he was interfacing with a computer.

  Suddenly he was swimming in a fast world of thought and code. Jay had assumed that it would be some vast binary sea, but he couldn’t even describe it. All of his assumptions about what an AI might be like were wrong. There was depth in consciousness. Then he heard a voice like thunder.

  “YOU HAVE MADE A GRAVE ERROR BY COMING HERE. IN HERE, I AM GOD.”

  Jay pushed and found the code immovable. It wasn’t even like the resistance that he had gotten from the Forlorn. That had felt like trying to move a mountain with his bare hands. This felt more like trying to pick up and carry himself. It simply wasn’t possible.

  “YOUR PUNY MIND CANNOT FATHOM THE DEPTHS OF MY INTELLECT. I ATTEMPTED TO REASON WITH YOU. NOW DIE.”

  Then Jay was being attacked. He didn’t even realize that his body dropped to his knees. He screamed and the sonic wave from it blasted out one all of the museum they stood in. His hands went to his temple
s reflexively and he erected an Intellect Fortress to protect his mind.

  It wasn’t enough. He withstood a hundred thousand attempts to penetrate his defenses in a single nano-second, but they kept coming faster and faster by the billions. The AI could simply keep throwing attacks at Jay’s mind until sliver by sliver they started to slip through and add up. Normally, Jay would attack back and try to burn out the mind that was attacking him, but the AI was right about one thing, he couldn’t do that for fear of injuring his son.

  Spikes were driven through his shields and Jay realized that if he didn’t flee soon, he wouldn’t be able to escape. It was unthinkable to him that he could defeat a fleet so vast that it blotted out the stars but couldn’t deal with one computer program. That was it though. He needed to think of Coreframe as a virus invading his son.

  Rather than trying to eliminate the virus he needed to strengthen the host and then isolate the virus. There was a risk, because if he strengthened Higen and the AI maintained control then he was only making a stronger foe.