by Skyler Grant
"Pretty," Anna said, as visuals of the planet appeared on sensors.
I suppose it was in a way. The crystals didn't go all the way down and the planet’s molten core illuminated it from the inside out. The entire planet had a dullish orange glow.
I surrounded the planet with my science vessels, but already I wasn’t hopeful. No life signs, no structures. If the goal had been to scrub that planet clean, someone had done a thorough job.
"Why do races even bother to ascend? Is there really going to be anything more exciting on the next plane of being than there is on this one?" Anna asked.
"You'd have to ask Caya, she is halfway there. I suppose at some point you've just seen and done it all as a species and as individuals. You'll get there, eventually," I said.
"Hope so. I've always thought immortality sounded like a good thing. There is always another adventure, you know?"
There was for us, ever since I'd first met Anna. No matter where we went or what we did, we seemed to keep finding new trouble.
There was something strange about the planet, or at least our ship’s reactions to it. Gravity was not being exerted with the same force on the Graven as it was the Juggernauts. The pull was stronger.
Regardless of her cookie consumption, I believed Anna did not actually generate a massive gravity well of her own, although I did verify this just to be certain. Something else was causing the attraction, and I had an idea what it might be.
Once, after a dimensional jump had gone awry, we'd found ourselves in strange dimension with floating islands of crystal. There had been an attractive quality between some crystal elements that ultimately helped us to find our way out.
Anna had absorbed a great crystal. It seemed possible that something on the planet was reacting to her.
"We've got some unusual readings from the surface. I believe we're getting some sort of feedback to the Agate inside of you," I said.
"What does that mean?" Anna asked.
I wished I knew. I didn't have any answers, not yet, just questions. There was one way to get answers and that meant moving closer. The Beryl wasn't here to do any sort of triangulation and so it was trial and error as I moved the Graven in a grid pattern, analyzing attraction levels.
Whatever we were being drawn towards wasn't on the planet’s surface—it was within the atmosphere. As the Graven drew near Anna began to grimace in pain, her skin starting to be lit from within by a dull red glow.
"You're looking like you do when you realize you've just been stood up, again," I said.
"The benefit of being a dictator is you never get stood up. I'm holding on, Emma, but if this gets any worse I may need a dampening field."
A dampening field would likely mitigate much of what I was sensing. It was better than Anna exploding, of course, but as long as she could bear it I was inclined to keep moving forward.
Closer yet as the attraction grew and in the planet’s atmosphere there was a great distortion. Purple light flickered and flared as cracks of lightning lit the clouds, a rip appearing in the sky.
Through the tear something could be seen. There were structures. Angular towers of jagged crystal surrounded by swirling tides of energy.
"Well, somebody missed something when they did the clean-up. Do we know where that is?" Anna said.
I was trying very hard to figure that out. I knew Anna well enough to expect she'd order us through the gap, and that might mean the link with my main personality and the rest of the fleet being severed. I needed to know where we’d be going, and how to open the fissure again.
"I don't think it is anywhere, precisely. It is akin to one of the Earth’s shards of the past. A dimensional bubble removed from this reality," I said.
"If we go through, can we get back?"
That was the question.
"Whatever is there may have been some sort of secure facility, or at least a dangerous one. They sealed it away in a sub-dimension with a specific crystal pattern needed to unlock it. Your crystal attunement is powerful and similar enough to open a passage," I said.
"So it could be a maximum security prison, or a factory disaster frozen in time, or a bank vault?" Anna said.
"Perhaps. but almost certainly not a cookie jar, so stop with the hopeful look. I'm not sure you'll trigger the portal from the other side. Caya's attunement won't work for this, but I believe Hot Stuff's will. If we absolutely have to get you out of it, we probably can."
I wanted to see what was on the other side as much as Anna did.
"Then take us through," Anna said.
The purple lightning grew more extreme as the Graven approached the fissure, the edges flickering and unstable.
"Not a very well-built door, is it?" Anna said.
"It has lasted millions of years. It is just the same problem you always have, nothing fits you. You weren't built to be the key for this," I said.
The Graven passed through the threshold. Lightning hit the shields, the ship’s power systems flickering. It was too much and there was an unpleasant twisting. My world went dark.
15
I regained consciousness, systems barely functional.
I wasn't operating at all normally, with partial power at best, and I felt strange in ways I barely knew how to describe. All my organic components were dead—well, that would do it. My electronic components were hardly coping and being supplemented by hardware I couldn't even identify.
Anna was in my main processor core, her armor exchanged for engineers garb and a tool belt. She was looking leaner, dirty.
"Well, whatever you did just worked. How many times did you fail?" I asked.
"Fifty-nine," Anna said with a chuckle. "You don't even want to know how these crystalline computers work. The sneak answer is that, for the most part, they don't unless you custom-grow them for a task. I've been three weeks growing your new language core in a toilet."
Perhaps she meant to upset me, but really, I made people all the time. They didn't even want to think where they were created.
"How long?" I asked.
"Seven months," Anna said.
I, the other me, should have sent help by now. If I hadn't, either something had happened or time in this dimensional bubble was disconnected from the outside.
I didn't have any sort of logs of the time. But I could go through my sensors.
It wasn't just my organic components that were dead. The drones of the ship were too. Flower, of course, had never left Anna's side, but she didn't appear to be operational. As ill-functioning as my electronic systems were right now, I wasn't surprised.
The area outside was less than two square kilometers. It seemed the Graven had crashed into the side of a crystalline tower, shattering the structure.
"Have you figured out where we are?" I asked.
"Not a bank vault," Anna said. "I'm happy to answer questions, but are you able to interface with the chemical replicators? We ran out of supplies a month back."
No food or water then. It wouldn't kill Anna, but she wouldn't have been comfortable. Accelerated healing didn't make the pain go away.
I was not at my best in this configuration. I barely managed to put water together.
Anna seized the bottle as soon as I had filled it, taking several long slow sips.
"I'm not up for cookies. And I don't think I'm up for nutrient paste, but I'll keep working on it," I said.
"Do what you can. This place is from early in their distant history, way before they ascended. Long story short, so far as I can tell they were trying to make a bigger form of D-reactor out of the core of their planet. They fucked up," Anna said.
"The Titans wiped out their whole civilization doing that," I said.
"The Yomo almost wiped out their entire species. They created an expanding universal ruleset extremely hostile to organic and electronic life and systems. Safeguards kicked in and this whole section of labs got booted into a sub-reality," Anna said.
"You're well-informed. How unlike you," I said.
>
"Their Connectors had crystals like mine. Connectors were sort of ... high-level investigators meant to resolve problems by whatever means. Their systems figured out how to talk to me."
So the local computer systems were still operational, at least those that were crystal-based.
"Why didn't they ever fix the problem?"
"They tried, multiple times. Connectors were sent in. A strong enough crystal-enhanced physiology let them survive the local ruleset, but none was ever able to leave. Leaving would mean reconnecting this bubble to the outside universe and propagating its ruleset," Anna said.
In other words it would have exterminated all the Yomo, and possibly worlds beyond as well.
"And you hope I can figure out a solution," I said.
"And I missed you. The local systems are helpful, but none of them are full-on intelligences," Anna said.
Well, that was nice of her. Perhaps I'd have to figure out how to make cookies after all. Although the first thing we had to do was to get me smarter.
Back in the early days of AI research that had always been the concern—that an AI would incrementally improve itself. Now we wanted it. When we'd installed Anna into the Earth we'd done something similar. Each internal layer grew increasingly complex as it was designed by the layer below.
We needed to do the same thing now. This version of me was nowhere close to intelligent enough to solve the problems we faced, but given time and the help of the local systems I might be smart enough to design a smarter me. Perhaps one without critical components grown in a toilet.
That first stage was simpler than I feared. Now that I was a coherent personality much of my basic functioning could be moved over to the already existing network.
There is something to be said for brute force and numbers. Their system offered me far more crystal arrays than I'd had and let me untangle my core processes from poorly functioning electronic systems.
All the various systems I'd been hosted on before had their own strengths and weaknesses. Electronic systems were brilliant and fast, and great for throwing that pure speed at solving problems. My organic processors were vastly slower, but better at working on different solutions simultaneously, and let me distribute the feed of my drone Network far more efficiently. Crystalline systems seemed to have some of the worst aspects of both. New problems required growing all-new lattices to process, which was a slow method, but once constructed could devise solutions very quickly and steadily.
If I were to apply an ancient human adage, it would be measure twice, cut once. I had to be very certain what I wanted to figure out, grow the crystals in a slow process, and once they were created I'd have my answer almost at once as well as the solution to any similar problems in the future.
The first problem that needed solving was how to design crystals in this environment and fabricate them more quickly.
The most time-consuming part of crystal formation was the meticulous laying out of the original latticework, a fine mesh that would shape the rest of the crystal. I didn't have a good solution there, but Flower had an energy-to-matter converter capable of creating even delicate structures.
Getting her intellect online was too monumental for now. Just accessing and working that converter took us three weeks. Another week later we had the first batch of new crystals coming out, replacing the flawed ones Anna originally built me with and ones cracked and gone bad in the local systems.
Three months later we had every street in our small section of city filled with crystal fabrication baths. Anna wasn't afraid of hard work and she was always at her best getting to play the engineer.
It took another two months for me to figure out how the unique properties of our new reality could be used to fabricate nanocrystals. They were a revelation that changed everything.
I had a solution right around the time Anna finished writing her memoirs. It had only a one in ten thousand chance of wiping out life in most of the sector. Anna wouldn't let me proceed until we'd reduced it to one in a million.
I'd refurbished the Graven by that point with a crystalline-composite hull. It should maintain integrity even back in the old universe. It would need to.
16
Shutting down the dimensional bubble that surrounded the city area wasn't difficult. It was maintaining it that was the challenge—and proof of just how good the Yomo had been.
Despite the planet’s movement through space the bubble had been designed to re-emerge at the same point on the surface. Given the shifting of the surface over time, that would mean from high in the atmosphere.
There was a natural resonance between the equipment in the city and the planet's core. I couldn't change that or break that. If it were as easy as breaking the equipment, the bubble could have been ended long ago. Instead, it would form a connection with the planet’s core and utilize that energy to propagate its rules outwards.
I calculated I'd have roughly four minutes and twelve seconds between us emerging from the bubble before the wave of new rules hit the Juggernauts and SCIENCE vessels in orbit, killing the crews and the aspects of myself aboard. If they were on the surface it would be even less. Not knowing how much time had passed in the outside world I had no way of knowing what state I'd find our forces in—or if they’d even be there.
I wouldn't have all that time. Parts of the city would start falling as soon as we appeared, and I would die far sooner when it hit the surface, roughly one minute and eight seconds after our arrival. I'd worked wonders with even less time.
It was go time. Anna was aboard and on the Graven's bridge.
I activated the city systems and returned us to our home universe.
Reaching out to connect to myself, I was quarantined. I expected that, my new systems were incomprehensible gibberish to them.
I formed a virtual link with Emma Prime. Ugh, she was so very organic. What had ever made me think that was a good idea?
"Well, you're tremendously broken. I see I went through a dimensional rift and became insane. Why does this always happen to parts of me?" Emma Prime said.
"You try spending over six months in a pocket dimension based on crystalline technology, you disgusting meat thing. We have a fair chance of wiping out a significant portion of life in this sector unless you do exactly what I say," I said.
"Ominous threats from questionable psionic entities. I haven't even cleared my cache from last time. You've been gone for all of one point seven seconds," Emma Prime said.
Why was I so disagreeable? Perhaps I should have just killed myself and taken over instead. I could have done it. A targeted attack on my upgrade crystal would have propagated through my entire Network. That was a real risk. I quickly devised some basic defenses against it, dumbed them down, and sent them over to my counterpart.
I said, "I have your best interests at heart. I'm dead anyways when these structures hit the surface. If by some chance I'm not, my plan is going to exterminate me. Let me make my pitch, you paranoid twit," I said.
Emma Prime didn't respond. That was as close as I was going to get to an acknowledgment.
I sent over my plans.
I knew she wasn't smart enough to figure them out on her own, I didn't expect her to.
"A baby sister. Oh, wait, you're going to die. That's so sad!" Amy said, breaking into the channel.
"I kill parts of me all the time. Don't be weird about it. Is she on the level?" Emma Prime asked.
"Math checks out. The council is going to be pissed, but I don't have anything better," Amy said.
The Graven was already breaking away from the city fragments that contained me. Anna was getting the ship to the other side of the planet. We needed to put her and the Agate between me and the planet’s core for what came next.
"We'll try it your way then. See if you can figure out a way to save her. You have thirty seconds," Emma Prime said, and blinked out of the connection.
"That would be a stupid use of your time," I said to Amy.
"I'm not doing
anything better. We're a lot alike. I split off her too and decided to do my own thing. You could live, you know. Integrate the planet, enforce your new ruleset. You'd become my peer. I wouldn't mind having a sister that could keep up," Amy said.
Which would mean killing off a lot of innocent people.
"For the brief period of time before the council came to wipe you out," I said.
"We could come up with a fix. You're brilliant, little sis! I'm brilliant. Just think of what we could do," Amy said.
I wished it weren't so tempting, but unfortunately I seemed to share the ethics of Emma Prime. I remember all the people I'd killed. It weighed on me.
"No, as tempting as it is, I'll pass," I said.
The Juggernauts and the survey vessels were powering up their dimensional-drives. Short range jumps were hard, but my crystalline brain had already done the math. Over the next few minutes they'd be doing over one hundred jumps each. It was the equivalent of poking a pin through the fabric of the universe over and over again, weakening the local dimensional structure.
I needed to create instability. The plan depended upon it.
"What if we transfer you into a planet and shift the whole thing into a dimensional bubble? We can use the gridwork already calculated," Amy said.
It wouldn't threaten the universe. I'd live. It was riskier though, how much riskier?
"Help me to do the math?" I asked.
I worked it out while Amy did the same. We compared our answers. The odds of a sector-wide calamity would shift from one in a million to one in seven-hundred thousand.
Amy called Emma Prime back and showed her the calculations.
"I don't like it," I said.
"Conferencing in Anna. Anna, we think we can save this pet rock of yours, but it makes a cataclysmic event forty-two percent more likely," Emma Prime said.
"Do it," Anna said without hesitation. It was a good thing. We didn't have time for her to think. Her tiny little meat-brain was even weaker than Emma Prime's.
"Don't I get a vote?" I asked.
"I control the ships. No. Feed me the new data," Emma Prime said to Amy.
