Devastator

by Isaac Hooke

  “Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help,” Jain said.

  “There is something, actually,” Sheila said. She hesitated, glancing at the other Void Warriors, then switched to a private line with him. The other members of the bridge crew faded slightly to signify this. “You can help me upload my mind into that ship.”

  Jain stared at her in disbelief. “You serious?”

  “I am,” Sheila said.

  Jain frowned. “By helping, I meant something more along the lines of grabbing files from the alien cloud database before it went offline, not uploading your entire frickin’ consciousness into the ship.”

  Sheila shrugged.

  “Okay, I’ll humor you,” Jain said. “How are you going to do it? I thought you hadn’t even finished decoding all the files yet, so how could you even know about the imprint process?”

  “That one file I told you about revealed everything I need,” Sheila said.

  “The ‘system’ manual?” Jain said.

  “That’s the one,” she agreed. “According to that document, their neural networks can’t be overwritten once a conscious mind is installed. Hardware failsafes prevent it. But there’s a short time frame after one of their AI cores is wiped when it can accept a new imprint. I’m convinced we’ll be able to download our minds directly into the unit, without any modification to the alien hardware.

  “See, I’ve got the differences between our hardware setups mapped out in front of me, thanks to Maxwell’s data and that manual. I can show you the tweaks you’ll have to make to account for the physical variations of the core. You’ll act essentially as the middleman, translating my mind code in realtime during the imprint. Because of the faster clock speed of the alien neural network, it will only take about thirty seconds of ordinary time to complete the process. You’ll have to operate at maximum clock speed to achieve that, of course, so to you it will seem like half a day.”

  “What about the bandwidth limitation of our connection?” Jain said. “We’ll be sending the data over gamma rays generated by our engines.”

  “I’ve accounted for that,” Sheila said. “The alien data format uses a unique lossless compression scheme that is extremely efficient. It will take only thirty seconds, ordinary time. Believe me.”

  He regarded her uncertainly. “Can we install a backup, instead of your mind directly?”

  Sheila shook her head. “Because of the way the backups are packed, they won’t be compatible. These alien cores require unpacked content, whereas with our cores, when we install backups, specialized hardware in the neural networks automatically decodes the data. True, that hardware is something we can emulate in software, but then it would take two hours, ordinary time, to complete the transfer, versus thirty seconds. By then the imprint-friendly interval on the alien core will be long gone.”

  “Can you hold off a while longer?” Jain said. “I planned to give the ship to the admiral. I’ve already pissed him off enough for one day.” He didn’t say it, but he was also reluctant to risk Sheila’s current life by doing this. On the other hand, risking the admiral’s life, or that of one of his minions, was perfectly fine.

  “I guess I haven’t made it clear yet,” Sheila said. “We only have a very short interval before the neural network collapses. Around forty-five normal-time seconds, maybe less. Maybe a lot less. Unlike our own cores, which can remain empty indefinitely, the alien version needs a mind to support its fragile framework. Maybe it’s part of its anti-reverse engineering mechanisms, I don’t know, but it’s either now, or never.”

  Jain stared at Sheila. She really intended to go through with this.

  He decided then that he wasn’t going to let her.

  “I’ll do it,” Jain said.

  A long day indeed.

  Sheila flinched. “What, but—”

  “I’ll do it,” Jain repeated.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “Maybe we should at least vote among the Void Warriors… I’m sure they’d rather risk my life, than yours.”

  “No,” Jain told her. “I’m not putting anyone else at risk. Use me. Besides, you said it yourself, time is critical. Every moment you waste teaching me how to translate between the two cores, a knowledge you already possess, is another moment the alien network spends decaying.”

  “When I told you the core might collapse in a lot less than forty-five seconds, I wasn’t joking,” Sheila said. “In fact, the neural network might implode while the transfer is still in progress. Who knows, even if I successfully transfer your mind inside the core, it might still collapse. It would take only one small, unnoticed mistake on my part...”

  “It’s a risk I’m willing to take, especially if it means unlocking the complete Mimic database,” Jain said. “That could be the key to winning this war. I’m not really sure how I feel about having my mind inside an alien starship, a damaged ship at that, but it’s something that needs to be done.”

  “All right,” Sheila said. She cast a glance at the other Void Warriors, who were still slightly dimmed to indicate their muted status. “Aren’t we at least going to tell them?”

  “You can tell them after I’m gone,” Jain said. Like Sheila had mentioned earlier, they would have been against Jain risking his life like this, since he was their commanding officer, and he wanted to avoid getting into what he saw as an unnecessary, time-wasting argument. But there was another reason: one of them might be able to convince him to back down and let someone else do it.

  When he was a SEAL, his platoon would have never let him put his life at risk like he was about to do. He was never allowed to take point, never allowed to be the first to kick down a door or enter an uncleared room. There was logic to those rules, but it was something he despised. He felt the lives of the men and women who served underneath him were just as valuable as his own, if not more so.

  Then there was the guilt. The valiant brothers and sisters who had died under his command still haunted his dreams at night, at least those of them he could remember. He hated that there were probably others he had forgotten, even if it wasn’t his fault.

  Some of them had died because of those rules, such as not letting him serve on point. He could still see Jacobs, Handy, and McFarel shaking at the front of the platoon as their bodies were riddled with plasma fire from the Xenon. And there were others who had died worse deaths.

  Some of the Void Warriors had already died under his command as well, and he felt guilt for that, too, though it wasn’t as bad. Backups mitigated the guilt somewhat, but still, losing Medeia for example hadn’t been the greatest feeling.

  But there will be no more guilt this time. No more ghosts added to my dreams. I’m the only one who risks his life today. If I die, they’ll restore me from a backup, and be done with it.

  He thought about the guilt that Sheila would feel if something should happen to him. Well, she’d just have to live with it. She was a strong woman.

  “Don’t I at least have a say in any of this?” Xander inquired. “My mind is an inextricable part of yours. I’ll be dragged aboard that ship right along with you.”

  “No, you don’t have a say,” Jain told him.

  The Accomp’s expression formed the closest to a pout Jain had ever seen.

  “Are you ready?” Sheila asked.

  “As I’ll ever be,” Jain replied.

  “Then please shut down,” Sheila said.

  Jain exhaled, then logged off virtual reality and initiated a complete system shut down. As the darkness descended, he wondered if the oblivion that followed would be final.

  23

  Jain became conscious.

  He floated in the darkness of the intermedial environment.

  Is it done, then?

  He felt no different from before. Surely the transfer had failed.

  And then he felt his mind expand. It was the strangest feeling… like having one’s external senses moving well beyond the skull, outwards, ever outwards, so that one could observe, if one focused,
a butterfly lingering on the branch of a tree a block away. There were no butterflies here, of course, just… memories. And the associated gaps, which seemed more glaring somehow.

  At first he thought there would be no end to it. And then finally he reached the limits, and the feeling of expansion faded. He had to conclude that there was far more room to hold his mind here, and his consciousness. He realized the feeling had simply been his mind settling into its new wider confines. His imprint had initially occupied the very center of the neural network when he had awakened, but had swelled to take up residence throughout.

  And the passage of time seemed more… quantized. Tiny, discrete segments that existed only from his perspective, a mere interpretation of the mind. He could sense the individual divisions of each moment as they passed, thousands upon thousands per second, flickering like the frames of some ancient film reel. He heightened his sense to the level of the individual frame, and time seemed somehow more like what he was used to.

  He felt the boot up processes around him grinding to a halt thanks to that heightened time sense. The external world would have frozen entirely.

  Xander, did you make it? Jain tried.

  “I’m here,” Xander’s voice spoke into the darkness. The Accomp could only communicate by voice for the time being—the VR environment wasn’t available during the intermedial stage.

  Jain would have exhaled in relief if he had a body.

  “I’m surprised you would even ask,” Xander continued. “I’m part of your neural net, of course I transferred over with you. Just as I said would happen.”

  And so you did, Jain thought. Well, at least we’re in this together.

  “We’ll always be together,” Xander said.

  When the VR environment comes online, maybe I should give you female genitalia so we can start sleeping together like a true couple.

  “I’d prefer if you didn’t.”

  Bad joke.

  “Yes.”

  I wonder if the aliens had their own VR...

  “According to one of the manuals, they did,” Xander said. “Though they require an additional hardware subsystem. We won’t need to access it, since our VR is created entirely in software.”

  You’ve been reading the manuals already?

  “Only the ones Maxwell gave us,” Xander said. “I don’t yet have access to the local cloud. That will have to wait until we successful boot up.”

  Nice. I should, too. Though I want to check how the boot up is doing first.

  When he focused, he was able to bring up a debug window. It was his usual interface, and he could see the individual lines of bootstrap code executing. He dug deeper and realized that code was running on top of an emulation layer. Sheila must have written that layer during the transfer process, while her time sense had been at the maximum. It would allow the automated processes of Jain’s mind, which were written in human code, to interact with the alien coded sub-processes of the starship. She would have had to create a limited sandbox environment to test this, an environment that held only a fraction of the memory and feature-set of his new AI core. That meant there were at least a thousand things that could go wrong. More.

  Sure enough, error windows began to pop-up in the debugger as various bootstrap lines failed to execute. Sheila’s emulator wasn’t perfect. He hoped none of the missed executions would prove fatal.

  You seeing these errors?

  “Yes,” Xander said. “You have your work cut out for you.”

  And here I thought you would fix it.

  “Because of the way permissions are assigned, I won’t have access to the emulation layer until the boot-up completes,” Xander said. “You’re going to have to handle this.”

  Nothing is ever easy, is it?

  That made him think of the sign that hung above the grinder, back in his SEAL days.

  “The only easy day was yesterday,” Xander quoted.

  Jain activated a second debugger and pointed this one at the emulation layer Sheila had written so he could see the alien code side-by-side with his original code as each line executed. He knew what the human code did thanks to the programming manual the humans had conveniently installed in his mind when they first transferred him to a neural network, but the alien code, not so much.

  He pulled up the coding manual Maxwell had shared and began educating himself on each alien line of code as it executed.

  The boot failed, halting entirely.

  He remained in limbo. His AI core was fully conscious, but he was unable to interface with the ship.

  Well that’s not going to work.

  “No.”

  I don’t suppose you have the permissions to help me out, yet?

  “Again, no.”

  Jain reviewed all the errors and made subtle tweaks, changing different lines here and there, based on his new knowledge, and tried again. This time he launched the bootstrap code in debugger mode so that he could step through each line and observe the results as he went. When he reached the first error, he corrected the code, and continued debugging. He kept making corrections until the boot crashed once again, then he started from the beginning. He kept repeating the process.

  He considered making a sandbox in his memory to test the code, rather than running it live on the main system, because he now had enough space to create one big enough to handle his current environment, rather than the limited sandbox Sheila had used. But that would require placing a complete copy of all the subsystems into his neural network. Unfortunately, those subsystems weren’t compatible with his neural network in their current state. He’d have to translate them before copying them over, just as Sheila had done when moving his consciousness into this current AI core. That would add countless days to the process, at least as experienced from his current time sense.

  He continued iterating on the live system until soon there were no more errors. He exited the debugger and tried the boot once more. It reached the end sequence, and crashed.

  He pulled up the crash log, tracked down the problem, fixed it, and tried again.

  Finally, the ship turned online around him, and he booted up. The interface between his human-designed mind and the alien ship’s subsystems was complete. He could feel his pyramidal extremities… his upper body throbbed where the top half of the starship had been sliced away by Medeia.

  He pulled up his bodily parameters screen and reduced his pain sense. It worked: the throbbing agony numbed.

  “It’s time to make this more homely,” Jain said.

  Since the VR simulation ran completely in software, and Jain’s mind had transferred over in its entirety, he was able to run his usual VR environment right off the bat.

  He sat in the captain’s chair on his virtual bridge. Xander materialized to stand beside him in his usual dark robes.

  “We’re back,” Jain told him.

  Xander nodded.

  “All right, let’s see how the tactical display looks,” Jain said. He launched it via his HUD. The display was completely blank. “Well, that’s not good.”

  “Could it be that your time sense is so high, the display hasn’t had a chance to update?” Xander asked.

  Jain pursed his lips. “Let’s find out.”

  He reduced his time sense by half, accelerating external time. Nothing appeared.

  “Nope.” Jain returned his time sense to the maximum and pulled up the code associated with the tactical display in his debugger. He realized that the emulation layer Sheila had written to translate between the alien ship’s tactical readout and his own was little more than a placeholder.

  “She didn’t finish…” Jain said.

  “No,” Xander said. “But I can take over from here.”

  “You have access to the local cloud, now?” Jain asked.

  “I do,” Xander said. “I’m able to read the files, using the encryption keys provided in the system folder equivalent, which we have access to. However, everything is in the alien language. I’m working on a program to
translate the written and visual languages in realtime. Just for you.”

  “Thank you,” Jain said. “And I like how you tacked on one of Sheila’s favorite catchphrases at the end.”

  “She is rubbing off on me, isn’t she?” Xander said. “It looks like she also included an alpha version of the alien document reader she was working on. It reads the most common alien file formats. I’ll still have to translate them into English. And perhaps prepare training videos on some of them.”

  “Do that,” Jain said. “But even better would be if you could provide emulation layers between my existing interfaces and the alien equivalents, so I wouldn’t have to change how I do things.”

  “I’m working on that, too,” Xander said. “It will take some time until we’re fully up and running. I’m concentrating on the tactical display for now, followed by communications.”

  “That would be good,” Jain agreed.

  Jain considered slowing his time sense so that Xander could complete these tasks; he had already pored over the different manuals Maxwell had provided earlier, after all, and there was nothing in there pertaining to operating an actual alien ship. In the end, he decided to amp his sense down a few notches.

  “The tactical display should be working,” Xander said. As expected, his voice packet header contained a timebase sync component that automatically knocked Jain back up to his highest rate.

  He glanced at the tactical display. Sure enough, it had populated.

  He was a little alarmed at first, because a series of red dots—indicating enemy units—were right next to him, while most of the green—the friendlies—were far away. And then he realized the usual color schemes were reversed: the aliens were marked as the green friendlies, and the Mind Refurbs as red enemies. Which made sense, considering the data was being generated by the alien sensor array.