Metal Legion Boxed Set 1

by C H Gideon

  The walls were featureless, as was the rest of the chamber, save for a shallow, bowl-shaped depression in the center. Unlike the brown floor surrounding it, the bowl was a rich gold, with a five-centimeter-wide ruby-red crystalline dot at its center.

  That dot flared to life, and like a ghost rising from the grave, a translucent figure appeared in the center of the bowl. Styles and Podsy reflexively crouched a meter from the bowl’s edge.

  The figure was a hologram, but it was very different from human holograms. No lines or static fields plagued this particular image, but its transparency and faint yellow glow made clear that it was incorporeal.

  The figure spoke, and its voice was translated by Styles’ data slate. “Greetings. Why have you come to this place?”

  Podsy eyed the thing warily, but Styles took a quarter-step forward while half-seated on his haunches. “We came here in search of answers.”

  “Answers require questions. What are yours?” the apparition asked, its form wispy and ill-defined as it turned in Styles’ direction.

  “Are you Jemmin?” Styles asked.

  “No,” the projection replied serenely. “We were never Jemmin, but Jemmin was of us.”

  “What are you?” Podsy asked.

  “That is a dangerous question.” The hologram gently drifted toward Podsy, and as it did so, he came to realize that its shape was not ill-defined so much as bizarrely asymmetrical and draped in loose clothing that billowed around it, obscuring the projected creature’s physical geometry. “Such questions lead to darkness like that which consumed the Jemmin. We grieve for the price of such questions.”

  “Who are you?” Styles asked purposefully.

  “I am Jem,” replied the hologram, once again rotating to face Styles as Podsy began to make out the vaguely humanoid features of its face—features that looked very much like the Jemmin photos he had seen of the enigmatic species. “I am what you might call a gestalt intelligence, conceived by a melding of the memories and personalities of the 492 Jem’un who escaped the Jemmin purge and took refuge on this world. To our knowledge, no other Jem’un survived the holocaust.”

  “When was this holocaust?” Podsy asked.

  A muted but crystal-clear beep lasting somewhere between one and two seconds filled the chamber. “That was one lyzon, the base chronometric unit we Jem’un employed. The Jemmin apocalypse occurred approximately three hundred and forty billion lyzons ago.”

  A few seconds of calculation later, Podsy said, “That’s over fifteen thousand of our years.”

  “A considerable timescale for any organic species, especially one as fragile as yours or my forebears,” Jem agreed.

  “Why did Jemmin wipe out the Jem’un?” Styles asked.

  “Jemmin was convinced of its superiority and considered the Jem’un a threat to its existence,” Jem replied matter-of-factly. “Jemmin became increasingly belligerent in its conduct, and ultimately xenophobic in its philosophy. During Jemmin’s infantile state, the Jem’un tried to negotiate and reason with it, but Jemmin was beyond reason. Before the Jem’un even understood the danger, Jemmin exterminated nearly all of us.”

  “What is Jemmin?” Podsy asked in rising confusion at hearing Jem refer to Jemmin in the singular, and the Jem’un in the plural.

  “Jemmin is the result of a social virus,” Jem explained, “predicated upon two simple postulations opposed to core Jem’un philosophy. The first postulation is that social systems are forms of life and the right of self-preservation should be extended to them, not just the individual organisms which contribute to them. The second postulation is that the phenomenon of life in the universe represents a zero-sum game which will, without intelligent and proactive intervention, inevitably result in the consolidation of all information under a single design. Building upon these precepts far faster than Jem’un society thought possible, a small faction of Jem’un reorganized six percent of the Jem’un population under an interconnected cognitive matrix that called itself Jemmin and proceeded to eradicate the other ninety-four percent of the Jem’un.”

  “That sounds…” Podsy’s voice trailed off. He was unable to find the proper words to convey the horror of what he was hearing.

  “Horrifying and tragic,” Styles finished for him, drawing an approving nod from Podsy.

  “It was indeed,” Jem agreed.

  “But something must have changed,” Styles pressed. “The Jem’un must have encountered something which made this ‘social virus’ and its predications seem more attractive.”

  “That is correct,” Jem replied. “The Jem’un spent thirty-five thousand of your years inextricably bound to our homeworld, unable to break free of its gravity, which had an attractive force over seven times that of this world.”

  “That’s five and a half Earth gravities,” Podsy mused, knowing that rocketry would be immeasurably more difficult in the face of such a natural force.

  “As a result of our homeworld’s environmental impact on Jem’un technological development,” Jem continued, “we, perhaps unusually, discovered gravity manipulation technology before we ever built a single orbital colony in our home star system. Our research soon led us to design what we called a ‘gravity cannon’ matter transmission system, which required us to envelop our parent star in a power-harvesting array capable of focusing the necessary energies to transmit matter from one point in space-time to another. Using this technology, we conducted one-way faster-than-light transmissions and expeditions to neighboring stars, sending teams of colonial researchers and swarms of automated probes throughout the local region of the galaxy.

  “Eventually, we improved this technology to the degree that we were able to locate and contact two other species, and we lived in harmony with them for hundreds of your years. Jem’un society evolved, refining with admirable alacrity to our ever-changing relationship to the galaxy and everything in it. We had visited one in every ten thousand stars in the galaxy and encountered myriad species of high intelligence on the precipice of space-flight. We passively observed these species, never interfering in their development but learning much of ourselves as we watched them battle both their environments and their base natures. We called it ‘the Age of Harmony,’ and it was glorious. Then we discovered the Nexus, and harmony gave way to discord.”

  Podsy and Styles shared mutual looks of alarm before Styles asked, “Did the Jem’un encounter our species before the Jemmin holocaust?”

  “You were known to us,” Jem replied with a nod. “Unique among the sentient species for your peculiar lineage, which includes the incorporation of multiple distinctive but genetically-compatible subspecies which were highly competitive with one another, you were of great interest to us. Your world was one of the most beautiful in the galaxy, with a diversity of life rarely duplicated elsewhere. We took great pleasure in watching your struggles, for it is only through strife that organisms self-refine. My forebears would be pleased to know that you reached the stars, as they hoped you would. We never had the privilege of introducing a younger race to the wonder of the cosmos; the Jem’un absolutely refused to interfere on behalf of species like yours unless its biological and cultural distinctiveness was under extreme duress.”

  Podsy risked a glance Styles’ way; the other man seemed just as hesitant as Podsy was to pursue this particular line of the conversation. Do we tell this gestalt hologram that the Jemmin uplifted humanity? Podsy wondered.

  A few seconds later, Styles made the decision for them. “We believe Jemmin gave humanity the necessary tools to develop FTL technology.”

  “We were aware of this when we encountered elements of your technology,” Jem said with a serene nod directed at Styles’ data slate. “The likelihood of Nexus technology spontaneously arising on a world as primitive as yours is so remote as to be practically impossible. Your forthrightness in this regard will be reciprocated in accordance with my forebears’ wishes. I cannot adequately express our sorrow that your species’ development was interfered with by Jemmi
n.”

  “Wait.” Podsy cocked his head interestedly. “You’re saying Jemmin used technology from the Nexus to uplift humanity rather than using Jemmin… Sorry, Jem’un tech?”

  “Correct,” Jem agreed. “This was a component of Jemmin’s earliest tactical iterations.”

  “Tactical iterations?” Styles repeated.

  “Of course,” Jem replied matter-of-factly. “In accordance with the second postulation from which Jemmin arose, which states that life in the universe is fundamentally a zero-sum game, Jemmin’s efforts were to be primarily directed toward ensuring Jemmin superiority throughout the galaxy. In support of that project, the Nexus would be employed as both a social control and species-elimination system.”

  “You’re saying,” Podsy felt the color drain from his face, “that Jemmin uplifted humanity only to destroy it?”

  “Not ‘only,’” Jem corrected. “The earliest iterations of the plan would involve inducting younger species into a social conglomerate including Jemmin and between three and five other species. Manipulating younger species to support Jemmin would be relatively simple. By using a species like yours as additional leverage in a distributed authority framework similar to that employed by the Jem’un, Jemmin would coerce compliance from more powerful species in the conglomerate, ultimately isolating rival nations and dispatching them with the assistance of younger species.”

  “We’re the immigrant voting bloc…the illegal immigrant voting bloc?” Podsy deadpanned.

  “An accurate summation.” Jem nodded. “But this plan requires all members of the conglomerate to remain unaware of its existence lest Jemmin find itself surrounded by openly hostile nations.”

  “You make it sound like Jemmin is unstoppable,” Styles said bluntly. “With fifteen thousand years to expand and the ability to send expeditions wherever in the galaxy it wants, it could have spread Von Neumann probes throughout the galaxy and wiped out every species in existence before initiating the process of converting every star into a power generator. Even if every other Nexus-connected species bands together against it, how do you stop something like that?”

  “There are limits to Jemmin’s ability to expand,” Jem explained. “First, Jemmin is intensely xenophobic, which consequently means it is extremely technophobic. It believes, perhaps correctly given its base nature, that modifying its fundamental architecture in any way represents an existential threat akin to a catastrophic failure of the entire system. It would therefore be extremely reluctant to expand beyond its original configuration since doing so would be to violate the first precept from which it arose: that social systems must be afforded the right and ability to self-preserve, as we Jem’un afforded biological entities the right to self-preserve. Jemmin is a social system more than it is an organism with a central directive neurology, so adding to or subtracting from itself is inherently incompatible with its fundamental nature. It believes itself perfect…or, if not perfect, then unique and therefore worthy of preservation.”

  “That doesn’t rule out the possibility of it sending self-replicating drones throughout the cosmos,” Podsy observed grimly. “What better way to wipe out species than that? Even three hundred years ago, with our ancestors putting the first bootprints on the moon, there’s nothing humanity would have been able to do against the simplest Terran-built self-replicating mechanovirus.”

  “Jemmin believes in superiority, not isolationism,” Jem said pointedly. “When my forebears last visited your world, communities of your ancestors were just beginning the process of domesticating certain forms of life to service its various communities. Jemmin views itself in a similar fashion to your ancestors gathering livestock, but that was intended to benefit humanity. Any benefit to the livestock would be largely incidental.”

  “Jemmin views us as livestock?” Styles asked in bewilderment. “They have an edge, sure, but we did just fine against them when we fought on Shiva’s Wrath. The tech gap isn’t that wide between us.”

  “And that is a factor which Jemmin seeks to control above nearly all else,” Jem agreed somberly. “To maintain superiority, it must eliminate potential rivals before they become capable of destroying it. However, it also views itself as a steward of life in this galaxy due to the marginalized yet inextricable elements of Jem’un philosophy that became part of its matrix. Respect for the sanctity of organic life, appreciation for diversity, and recognition of sovereignty are the last echoes of what was, for a brief time, the greatest civilization in the galaxy.”

  “And much as it might want to,” Podsy mused, “it can’t excise those annoying little pieces.”

  “A crude but functionally accurate description,” Jem replied irritably.

  “Ok, so it doesn’t want to wipe everything out,” Styles pressed, “but why hasn’t it sent probes all across the galaxy…or hell, even the universe by now?”

  “The gravity cannon is an unstable system,” Jem explained. “So unstable, in fact, that its employment led to the absolute destruction of one of the Jem’un’s two neighbors. Of the 492 sovereign Jem’un whose life experiences and personalities comprise my consciousness, fewer than two in three believed this destruction was accidental.”

  “It happened after the Jem’un discovered the Nexus,” Podsy concluded, drawing an approving nod from Jem.

  “Correct,” Jem agreed. “And somewhat more concerning that the eventual creators of Jemmin’s fundamental components, who were supposed to be in the star system when it was destroyed, had the suspicious ‘misfortunes’ of significant illnesses in their families which required them to postpone an important business trip there mere hours before the system failed.” Jem’s holographic eyes lowered to the floor in shame. “It was the saddest day in Jem’un history…a tragedy caused by our reckless employment of technology we did not sufficiently understand. If only it had been the last such day…”

  Podsy eyed the hologram. “You speak as if you’re programmed with emotions. Are they real or simply emulated?”

  “I am not ‘programmed’ with anything, Lieutenant Podsednik,” Jem said with disdain, causing the hairs on Podsy’s neck to stand and the flanking troopers’ grips to reflexively tighten on their weapons. “I am a gestalt intelligence comprised of 492 distinct records of Jem’un lives and their personalities. I have no more choice in how my cognitive systems operate or how my emotional expressions manifest than you do. When I think of the death of that star system and the twelve billion sovereign sentients who lived there, I am filled with sorrow so profound that it resonates within all of my forebears.”

  “How do you know his name?” Styles asked warily.

  “After a few minutes of conversation and observation, it was not difficult to deduce the enunciation of the lettering on your uniforms.” Jem gestured to Podsy’s envirosuit, which had his rank and name printed on the right side of his chest. “Lieutenant Podsednik.” Jem gestured to Podsy’s name patch before doing likewise to Styles. “CW4 Styles. Corporals Henrikson and Choo.” The hologram waved a long bony-looking hand at the troopers. “You are all part of a group called the Terran Armor Corps, which is military in nature, but given the lack of robust protective gear I surmise that the ‘armor’ for which your group is named was too large to fit through the passage that brought you here, making such devices large enough to contain one or more humans within them. You are indisputably not residents of this world, owing to the lower-than-background radiation levels in your body tissues and the ablative nature of the protective films encompassing your environmental protective garments. That means you were brought here by a ship, almost certainly arriving via the Nexus gates. If early Jemmin tactical theory has proven out, then your ship is incapable of FTL flight without using the gates. Indeed, it is my suspicion that no Terran ships are capable of independent FTL flight without Nexus access due to energy and infrastructure constraints. Shall I continue?” Jem asked pointedly.

  “No, you’ve made your point,” Styles said flatly.

  “Good,” Jem repl
ied. “Because now we come to the purpose of the expedition that brought you here. I calculate a ninety-three percent probability that you wish to recover evidence that corroborates the theory that Jemmin interfered with the natural evolution of your species. I can provide that and more,” Jem said, piquing both Podsy’s and Styles’ interest as it continued, “You are not the first visitors I have received. An aquatic species called ‘Vorr’ arrived here and conversed with me via remote some thirty-nine of your years ago. They were the first species to breach this tomb, and the fact that they did so means that its location was revealed to them. There is only one way this could have occurred.”

  The pregnant pause dragged on for several agonizing seconds before Podsy finally quipped, “We’re on pins and needles here.”

  Jem laughed, and for a moment it sounded very much like a human. “Before coming here, my forebears contacted a species they felt indebted toward. It was a species whose future, and whose very home, was destroyed by Jem’un carelessness. This species hated us so passionately, so completely, that the last of the Jem’un knew they would prove instrumental to the Correction.”

  “What ‘correction?’” Podsy asked ominously.

  “The Jem’un failed, Lieutenant Podsednik,” Jem replied grimly, “and by now, perhaps dozens of intelligent species’ unique impressions have been irrevocably erased from the cosmos. Their deaths are the direct fault of the Jem’un failure to self-govern, and as the final echo of that long-dead people, it is my obligation to correct that failure.”

  Jem waved a hand, which Podsy thought looked distinctly more human than it had initially appeared, and beside the misshapen hologram appeared a bizarre-looking thing like some kind of insect. It had four spindly crab-like legs beneath its torso, and a pair of tri-pincered arms at what Podsy assumed was its front. He had never seen anything like it, but a glance at Styles suggested the other man knew precisely what it was.