Forerunner

by Isaac Hooke

  FORERUNNER

  Isaac Hooke

  For my Mother

  My greatest, most devoted fan.

  1938 - 2018

  Contents

  Books by Isaac Hooke

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  In Closing

  Copyright © 2018 by Isaac Hooke

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  www.IsaacHooke.com

  Books by Isaac Hooke

  Military Science Fiction - Mind Refurb Universe

  Forerunner

  AI Reborn Trilogy

  Refurbished

  Reloaded

  Rebooted

  Bolt Eaters Trilogy

  Reactivated

  Reforged

  Redeemed

  Battle Harem

  Battle Harem 1

  Battle Harem 2

  Battle Harem 3

  Military Science Fiction - ATLAS Universe

  ATLAS Trilogy

  (published by 47North)

  ATLAS

  ATLAS 2

  ATLAS 3

  Alien War Trilogy

  Hoplite

  Zeus

  Titan

  Argonauts

  Bug Hunt

  You Are Prey

  Alien Empress

  Quantum Predation

  Robot Dust Bunnies

  City of Phants

  Rade’s Fury

  Mechs vs. Dinosaurs

  A Captain's Crucible

  Flagship

  Test of Mettle

  Cradle of War

  Planet Killer

  Worlds at War

  Space Opera

  Star Warrior Quadrilogy

  Star Warrior

  Bender of Worlds

  He Who Crosses Death

  Doom Wielder

  Science Fiction

  The Forever Gate Series

  The Dream

  A Second Chance

  The Mirror Breaks

  They Have Wakened Death

  I Have Seen Forever

  Rebirth

  Walls of Steel

  The Pendulum Swings

  The Last Stand

  Thrillers

  The Ethan Galaal Series

  Clandestine

  A Cold Day in Mosul

  Terminal Phase

  Visit IsaacHooke.com for more information.

  1

  Jain became conscious.

  He stared at the infinitude of stars before him. He seemed to be floating in deep space.

  He had no body.

  He tried to lift his hands to reassure himself that his arms still existed, or to look down to confirm that yes, he had a body; but he could do neither.

  Either he was paralyzed, or—

  Am I dead?

  “No,” a deep male voice came from the darkness.

  A dark-robed figure materialized before him. His face was hidden in the shadow of an expansive hood. He held his arms with wrists aligned one atop the other inside their opposite sleeves so that no flesh was visible.

  Then where am?

  “Deep space,” the figure said. His voice possessed an aged, erudite edge. “This is the direct view from one of the forward probes. It’s of limited use on its own, but apparently your waking mind clasped on to the first signal source it could find. Conscious minds need a constant stream of external stimuli after all.”

  Where is my body?

  “Are you certain you wish to know?” the man asked.

  Absolutely.

  “Then look behind you,” the figure told him.

  How? I have no physical form.

  “Envision the rotation in your mind,” the figure said. “And it will be so.”

  Jain tried to imagine himself rotating, but nothing happened.

  It’s not—

  But then he realized the stars were indeed revolving in front of him, as if he were pivoting in place.

  Slowly a vast, gray form intruded upon the pinpoints of light. Cones of blue and white light fanned across the surface, sourced from running lights of some kind, illuminating a hull lined with small rectangular panels. He noticed that there were large, blackened areas that looked like blast damage of some kind. Scorch marks. A swarm of small—to his eyes—shapes moved about the damaged areas. They vaguely resembled ants.

  As the form continued to fill his vision, he realized it was a ship of some kind.

  The vessel was long and lithe, though the middle regions bulged outward to form pointed, triangular sections. The fore and aft were also tipped, giving the overall impression of a compressed diamond. Two cylindrical formations were affixed just underneath the port and starboard sides and topped with nozzles of sorts. On the dorsal portion, several superstructures of different shapes and sizes existed: thin towers, wide pagodas, satellite dishes, radio antennae, wicked-looking turrets, you name it. The blast damage was scattered across the hull and touched upon nearly all of the aforementioned features. At the moment, the repair ants were concentrated around only a few of the damaged areas—likely the higher priority regions.

  At the very front of the vessel was a large, menacing looking notch. It didn’t look like a blast crater, so he figured it was by design and probably fired some kind of nasty weapon. Thankfully, it wasn’t pointed at Jain at the moment.

  He stopped rotating when the ship had eaten up his entire view and blotted out the stars entirely.

  I don’t understand. Where is my body?

  “That is you,” the man said.

  Jain felt a rising horror emanating from deep inside of him.

  “Now might be a good time to dial down your emotional settings,” the man said.

  He had no idea what the man was talking about.

  I’m dead, aren’t I.

  It was a statement, not a question, because Jain now knew without a doubt that he couldn’t be alive.

  “No, you are not dead. Far from it. You are more alive now than you ever have been. And more powerful than you can imagine.”

  Jain simply stared at the ship, willing it, and all of this, to go away. Unfortunately, the scene remained unchanged around him.

  “Perhaps relocating to a friendlier environment would be helpful?” the man asked.

  Jain didn’t reply.

  All of a sudden, the vast ship winked out. The stars came back, but they were different somehow. Muted. Also, there was a grass horizon underneath them.

  He could feel the ground pressing up against his feet.

  The ground…!

  Jain looked down. In the dim light he spotted a body, to his relief. His body. He was naked, but didn’t care.

  He raised his hands and squeezed his fists.

  “I’m not dead after all,” he whispered.

  He glanced up once more to study his surroundings. He could see the dim outlines of rocky outcrops ahea
d of him, pushing up from the earth. Some of those outcrops were illuminated by lamps that shined from the ground nearby. Each lamp was a different color: there were reds, blues, and purples. Gentle waterfalls flowed over some of the outcrops, collecting in a pool in a basin below. The rocks, and the stars above, were reflected in the water.

  It was very peaceful.

  A throat cleared loudly behind him, and Jain spun toward the source.

  The hooded man stood among a copse of palm trees that grew next to the rocks and pool.

  Feeling suddenly self-conscious, Jain quickly covered his private parts.

  “Who are you?” Jain asked.

  “I am Xander.” The man lowered his hood, revealing the leathery face of an old man. Interspersed among the wrinkles were the scars of battle: bullet and knife wounds, laser and plasma burns. His hair was white, ruffled, and his straggly white beard reached down to the bottom of his neck.

  “You look like you’ve lived a hard life,” Jain said.

  The man smiled patiently. “Not at all. You were the one who gave me this face. And my name.”

  “Oh.”

  “I am your Accomp, you see,” Xander said.

  “A what?”

  “Accomp,” the man explained. “Your Accompanying AI. I am with you at all times. Essentially a virtual assistant built into your mind.”

  “So, we’re inside that ship you showed me?” Jain said. “All this?” He beckoned toward the landscape with one hand, being careful to keep his genitals hidden behind the other.

  “We are,” Xander said. “Though what you are experiencing here is a virtual reality, created by your mind.”

  “You keep talking like I don’t have an actual body.”

  “The ship is your body,” Xander said. “Your mind is the AI core of that ship.”

  Dumbfounded, Jain merely stared at Xander.

  “So I’m a robot?” Jain finally asked.

  “To be precise, you’re what’s known in industry parlance as a Mind Refurb,” Xander replied. “While still human, you volunteered to have your brain scanned for the opportunity to be chosen to pilot a starship. A hundred years have passed since that date. The original you, the human you, is long dead. But the machine you lives on, and will continue to live on ad infinitum, or until you are destroyed.”

  Jain considered that. The previous horror he had felt was gone, replaced instead by a kind of abject awe.

  “You’d think I’d be upset upon hearing the news, but it’s actually kind of cool,” Jain told the hooded man.

  “That’s the spirit!” Xander said. “Your mind was chosen to pilot a starship specifically because of its resilience to these particular circumstances.”

  Jain studied the nighttime environment around him. “This is a virtual reality you say?”

  “Correct,” Xander said. “None of this is real, in the traditional sense of the word.”

  “But it’s real to my mind in this moment,” Jain said. “If I can simulate a human body so completely that it seems identical to an actual body, then it doesn’t really matter if it’s real or virtual. It’s all a matter of sending the appropriate inputs to the brain anyway, isn’t it?”

  “Or in your case, the neurogenic subroutines mimicking brain function,” Xander said.

  Jain pinched his forearm and flinched at the pain.

  “Not only is pain simulated here, but your pleasure centers, too,” the robed man told him. “You can adjust the sensitivity of either up and down. I would be careful about setting both too high: a glut of pleasure can be cloying, and nearly as vexing as too much pain.”

  “Vexing,” Jain said. “A machine teaches me about the dangers of toying with pleasure and pain, and the best descriptive word he can come up with for pain is vexing.”

  “Pain truly is merely vexing for the likes of you and I,” Xander said. “Especially when you can turn it off.”

  Aware that he was cupping his genitalia at the moment, Jain decided he would have to test out those pleasure centers later when he was alone. Preferable with a virtual female.

  “Am I really going to live forever?” Jain asked. “What if I break down?”

  “You are a starship equipped with a state of the art repair swarm,” Xander replied. “If any of your internal systems break down, including parts of your neural network, the repair swarm will engage. The swarm itself will fix any of its members as their own parts wear down. It’s possible you will run out of materials at some point if you don’t properly manage your inventory, but doubtful, considering that the raw elements used in most repairs can be recovered with a visit to the appropriate asteroid. So, I stand by my claim that you won’t die from natural causes. But remember, I did say that you can be destroyed. And that’s an important point.”

  “I suppose so,” Jain said.

  He considered what it would be like to live for the next thousand years. And the ten thousand after that. And a hundred thousand following. His mind simply couldn’t comprehend the enormity of time involved in the latter instance. It frightened him, to a degree, the thought that time would march on continually, and he would see it all, if he was careful. At least until the eventual heat death of the universe.

  The end of time.

  How would he keep himself occupied for the next million years? Billion. Even trillion?

  Especially considering that he seemed to be completely alone.

  “The only downside is the lack of companionship,” Jain said after a moment.

  “You have me to keep you company…” Xander said.

  “Yeah, an AI,” Jain said. “Not even a real human. A part of my own neural core. How fulfilling.”

  “The VR environment is also capable of simulating scores of virtual characters, each running its own sub-AI in your neural network.”

  “Refer to my previous comment,” Jain said. “I need human companionship.”

  “Oh, there are other Mind Refurbs with you,” Xander said. “Or there were, anyway. They’ll have to be restored from the backups once repairs to their vessels are complete.”

  “Repairs?” Jain said. “We’ve been attacked?”

  “Good guess,” Xander quipped. “You didn’t notice the blast craters on your hull?”

  “Why don’t I remember anything?” Jain pressed. “Except bits and pieces of my distant past? When I was human, I was a SEAL, I think. There are other memories… but nothing about any of this. Nothing pertaining to the control of a starship. Why?”

  “You already answered that with your previous question,” Xander said mysteriously.

  Jain considered that for a moment. “We’ve been attacked, that’s why I can’t remember?”

  “Precisely,” Xander said. “You sustained damaged to your AI core. Luckily, that damage was restricted to those portions of your neural network responsible for engram storage. You—we—lost a sizable chunk of our memories. You fared worse than I did, but even I can’t remember what happened out there. My memory is also fragmented, and I recall the first few days after arriving in this system, but nothing before, or after.

  “Unfortunately, your Mind Refurb brethren didn’t fare as well as you and me. According to my scans, we lost two ships entirely, and the other five have been reduced to lifeless husks. Repairs are ongoing, but their AI cores are irrevocably damaged and will have to be replaced entirely. Once the cores are online again, we’ll have to restore their minds from the original backups—their last memories will be of their human lives. It will be a shock.”

  “No greater a shock than I felt, I’m sure,” Jain said. “Will they have to be retrained to operate a starship?”

  “All of the necessary knowledge is already built into their backups, as part of their mind image, as is yours,” Xander said. “They do have Accomps of their own that will help them out, as need be.”

  “Good.” Jain shook his head. “All damaged beyond repair. Are the AI cores located on the outside of the ship or something? Seems like they’re a little too exposed, wh
erever they are, considering we all went down.”

  “Actually, the AI cores are located dead center of the ship,” Xander said.

  “Oh,” Jain said. “So we lost two. That makes me feel sick to my stomach, considering that they could have lived forever.

  “That only serves to emphasize the point I was trying to raise earlier, that although you cannot die from ‘breakdown’ as you called it, you can still be destroyed outright,” the robed man told him.

  “Yes, and an important point it is,” Jain said. “We’re not immortal.”

  “No,” Xander agreed.

  He was about to ask why the lost two couldn’t be restored from backups, but then he knew the answer, thanks to a vague memory stored deep within his neural network core.

  “The backups for each Mind Refurb were stored aboard their respective ships…” Jain said.

  “Correct,” Xander said.

  “That’s going to have to change, going forward,” Jain told him. “First rule of backups: always store a copy off-site.”

  “Actually, we were following that rule,” Xander said. “The admiral had been carrying an extra copy of all of you for safekeeping. Unfortunately, he piloted one of the lost ships.”