“Are these designs Ancient?”
“I believe they might be, Ana,” Silky said as if disinterested, even though he normally loved figuring out a puzzle, especially in a dangerous situation. Problem solving under duress was exactly what he was built for.
“What’s with you?”
“Sorry, Ana.”
She rolled her eyes then rubbed a thumb across the amulet. The bone-colored material seemed to be an advanced ceramic of some kind. She’d have to get Silky to do a thorough analysis.
“I bet this is a key to the Ancient weapon.”
She walked to the giant temple door and whistled. It was made of pure, translucent diamondine backed by a silvery metal. She didn’t see any hinges or seems. She whistled again and shook her head. It would be far easier to blast through the earth than to go through that door, unless…
“Is the entire temple structure encased with these same materials?”
“Yes, Ana.”
She wiped sweat from her brow and noted that her heart had stopped pounding and was beating regularly now, if not a little slower than normal. “Maybe this amulet’s the key to get in. But that wouldn’t explain why it was taking the insurgent leader so long to—”
Eyana cried out and fell against the door. Pain wracked her body, her veins boiled, her skin burned. Her muscles weakened. Her heart rate plummeted. She collapsed to the ground, spinning around as she did, with her back leaning against the door.
“All that stuff…about the painkillers…and targeted medibots…it was bullshit…wasn’t it?”
“Sorry, Ana. I tried everything, but there was not way to save you. So I highjacked your medibots, under Protocol Five, and used them to neutralize your pain receptors and alter various parts of your nervous system. But it was only a temporary counter, since I was unable to destroy the neurotoxins.”
“You could have…told me…”
“I didn’t want to distract you, Ana. Besides, I was hoping you could get the door open and…I don’t know…”
She tried to laugh, but was overcome by a fresh wave of pain. “Find a miracle cure inside?”
“I hope you’ll forgive me.”
She cried out as she tucked herself up into a fetal ball. “You did what you had to.” She lifted a finger, pointing at the dead insurgent leader. “And we did save the day again.”
“We saved the entire Benevolency, Ana. Do you want me to administer the painkillers and sedatives now?”
“No…not yet…”
She needed to do one more thing, though she wasn’t sure it was possible. Focusing her mind, she reached out with her empathic power toward the wrecked research vessel’s mind. She hoped their prior connection would somehow make a telepathic bridge to the Krixis captain.
His voice came through to her faintly, as if he were whispering from far away. “Is it done, human?”
“I killed the last…of the insurgents. I have the device…he used…to repel the guardians.”
“You are dying.”
“Yes.”
“My people are grateful for your help, human. Thank you.”
The connection ended.
“Thanks for…offering…to save me…jerk…”
“Ana, I am releasing the last of the painkillers.”
“Thank you, Silky.”
As she ran a thumb across the ceramic amulet, her pain faded away and her brain went fuzzy. Her empathy kicked into overdrive and her awareness was pulled away from the tunnel, away from the planet, away even from her space and time. Her mind floated in a place of limitless knowledge and potential…an infinite mind and the source of life itself. Yet it was beyond her grasp, for this extra-dimensional space would only yield its knowledge and power to a gifted few with the quietest of minds, or those touched by madness. And even then, only after decades of contemplation and study.
A fresh wave of fiery pain shot throughout Eyana’s body again, pulling her awareness back to her own time and place.
“Ana, I…I can release you from this. There is…there is a dose of sedative remaining in your implant. Enough to…”
“Not yet.”
Echoes of that other space remained within her, important packets of knowledge bouncing around within her skull, but she couldn’t quite pin any of them down.
“Silky this amulet…it’s not a trinket or a symbol. It’s a key, but not just to this door and the device beyond…but to something greater than…greater than you and me and everything we have ever seen or could ever know.”
“Ana…I have no idea what you mean.”
“Neither do I.”
Her mind cleared and her focus returned as the pain dimmed, and a new strength from somewhere else welled up within her.
“Silky, make sure you preserve all the data from this mission. All of it. Everything we learned…from how the emppy worked to the Krixis language and the Ancient weapon, even what I just told you, as little sense as it must make.”
“Of course, Ana. You know I always record everything.”
“How long will you last here without a recharge?”
A normal chippy could run on a single charge for a decade, yet in over forty years, Silky had never once run low on power. She assumed when she turned him in every few years for routine maintenance scans that they charged him, but she had no idea.
“A…perhaps a decade, Ana.”
“So long to be alone down here, without anyone to speak to…”
“I will be fine, Ana.”
“I’m sure the Krixis intercept only allowed them to listen in. I’m sure a rescue is on the way.”
“Ana, you won’t…you won’t last long enough for—”
“Not for me. A rescue for you.”
Her muscles eased, and she relaxed out of the tight ball she’d held herself in for the last few minutes. The pain had vanished, and the sleep the toxins brought in the end had returned, dragging her toward death.
Yet her mind remained clear this time.
“As my brain winds down, I want you to record every scrap of my consciousness you can.”
“To what end, Ana?”
“I don’t know. I just…I just want you to have that. Maybe you can make use of it somehow. Perhaps to better remember me.”
“I could never forget you, Ana.”
With each blink of her eyes, the lids remained shut a little longer. “You’re my only friend, Silky. You know that, right?”
“Of course, I do, Ana.”
She smiled. “I don’t know how I would’ve made it this long without you.”
“You would not have gotten off Ortel VII, that’s for certain.”
That had been their very first mission together. It was such a long journey from there to here, and yet it seemed only an instant had passed.
“Too right…my friend.”
She blinked, and her eyes didn’t open again. As she faded, she clutched the amulet, her mind dissolving toward that other realm. Maybe it wasn’t some super-dimension she had touched, but merely the land of death.
The end had arrived. How odd. Dying should be more dramatic, shouldn’t it? After everything she had experienced, this was anticlimactic. Just another moment in the perpetual time of her being.
“Ana, I love you.”
“I didn’t…think you could…love…”
“Nevertheless…I do.”
Chapter Nineteen
Silky
Silky shut down all his nonessential functions. It went directly against Service protocols but, thanks to faults in his programming, he could ignore those if necessary. Instead, he dedicated every qubit of advanced processing power he could muster to studying, recording, and analyzing Ana’s brainwaves as they faded slowly away…until the last neuron twitched and the last bioelectric pulse flickered.
Then she was gone…forever.
And he was alone.
And he couldn’t feel sad or angry or despondent.
Because even though he could feign a number of basic emotions an
d express sympathy, he couldn’t truly feel anything.
The Benevolence had not granted him or any other chippy that ability, as it had with androids, limited as their emotions might be. And as for the trillions upon trillions of robotic cogs who served humanity and the Benevolence, they rarely needed advanced artificial intelligence, much less sentience.
The reason the Benevolence had not bestowed sentience to chippies was because it considered such an act cruel. After all, a human-hosted machine lacking any method for movement or autonomy would forever be a slave, and if they were to have emotions they would feel their suffering and yet have no recourse for change.
Silky understood the reasoning, and it made perfect sense. But after many hours of analysis, he had reached a different conclusion: Why not give him the option, why not let him decide? Obviously, he lacked the astounding processing power and bountiful wisdom of the Benevolence. And for all Silky knew, such attempts had been made before, only to meet with failure. And perhaps the Benevolence, which was itself a massive, disembodied computer network with godlike sentience knew exactly what it felt like to be alone without form.
Maybe this was only an issue for the 9G chippies like him, the most advanced artificial minds ever created, short of those installed within androids. And he was experimental, with defects in his programming that had led to certain quirks that made him seem more sentient than other chippies, almost human in some ways. But those were programming bugs, nothing more.
He readily admitted that his desire to be more human was almost certainly due to his defects. After all, the Gear Agency had attempted several fixes, to no avail, and had recommended that he be scrapped, which he hadn’t disagreed with at the time.
But by that point, he had already saved Ana’s life on their first mission together and, being human, she had developed an attachment to him. She was satisfied with him as he was, and so they had allowed him to continue on. No doubt the Benevolence had scanned over his data and had not been troubled by it.
Silky replayed every moment and scrap of data from the last few hours of Ana’s life, as if he could hold on to her. But she was gone, and now there was a hole in his existence…a hole in his purpose.
And not just because he lacked eyes to see through or anything to engage with, or anything to do. There was simply a gap in his existence that nothing could fill. That, he knew, should create sadness. It would have brought Ana to tears. It left him…in a state he could not define in any way. A normal chippy would notice it only as an inconvenience, at the most.
She was gone. Her departure was merely the next step in causality from which he must move forward—nothing more. And now he must prioritize what to do next. First, he should continue the mission. Using every scrap of power he could manage, including what little he could spare of his own now that he no longer needed to support Ana, he tried to build up enough energy for a data burst. But there simply wasn’t enough power to send even the smallest packet through echo space.
He powered down all non-essential systems and prepared for what might be a long wait. For he would endure, and for a long time.
He had lied to Ana, not wanting her to know how long he would last down here alone, should a recovery team never arrive. He had let her believe decades would pass, but not only did he not have a normal chippy battery, he hardly had a battery at all. All the 9G-x models had been given microscopic loop transducers that allowed them to continuously draw power directly from flux space. The complicated and expensive engineering that had gone into that represented some of the Benevolence’s finest work.
Such a device was far beyond the needs of any normal citizen. Only special operations had been given 9G-x chippies and, as far as he was aware, only in limited numbers on a trial basis. He suspected the eventual purpose was to create ever-powered hearts within androids, but he had no evidence to back up his theory.
The work was so top-secret that even Ana, her bosses, and the Gear Agency themselves were unaware of it. And Silky could not have told her about the transducer or explained the actual science behind it, even had he wanted, not without overriding a number of tight security protocols the Benevolence had put into place to keep him from doing so.
The defects he and other models like him suffered were a direct result of quantum probability breakdowns related to the fact that their loop transducers maintained a constant connection with flux space. The connection was tiny, offering only the tiniest trickle of energy, which was why he couldn't send the data burst. But even the largest transducers that charged the batteries for a starship’s ion engines, shields, and weapons did not have uninterrupted access to flux space.
Silky would not last several decades here alone. He would last several centuries, perhaps longer, assuming that none of his parts began to break down or decay. He could, theoretically, be here for millennia.
Ana would have been upset had she known the truth. So he had lied to make her last moments as peaceful as possible.
Now he needed to finish the mission. For Ana.
The Krixis had intercepted the first data burst he’d sent, something he’d had no idea they could do. He also had no idea whether they had merely listened in or blocked the transmission altogether. Practically, he had to act on the assumption that it was the latter and that a recovery team would never come for them.
So the first step was to scan his surroundings thoroughly. He restored power to the sensor pack and brought it up to a level five scan, taking several hours to do a complete analysis of as much of the planet as possible, the soil around him, and especially the temple beyond the door.
The temple walls were constructed of stone thickly plated with graphene overlapped by steel then diamondine. And there was a powered down force field generator inside, of a type he did not recognize as either Krixis or Benevolence in design.
Having finished his scans, Silky activated the emergency beacon on Eyana’s sensor pack. The beacon didn’t normally require much energy to operate, but he would have to boost the signal considerably to penetrate the earth above him. Assuming an advanced sensor sweep of the planet, because the odds of a random Benevolency ship venturing this far into Krixis space was exceedingly low, he should have a signal that would function for at least fifty years.
If a recovery team didn’t come within six months, he would alter the signal so it only pulsed every fifth time it was scheduled to do so, which would buy several decades more. Of course, he could reconfigure the signal code for his exact needs, prioritizing efficiency above all else. That could potentially gain him many more decades of signaling.
With that done, Silky created a folder titled Ana and, against protocol once again, hid the folder, encrypting it so that only the Benevolence itself could access the data.
His ability to ignore basic protocols was one of those unrepairable glitches he suffered.
With the folder created and secured, Silky began storing and analyzing in detail every moment of every day of his service alongside Eyana. She had never told him not to maintain thorough records, so he had kept everything, assuming that any scrap of prior knowledge could be useful during a mission.
Silky waited in vain for the recovery team. Weeks passed…then months…then a year…
They were never going to come for him.
With routine after routine running for no reason, all of them having been built around the needs of an Empathic Services agent and customized for Eyana, Silky was now sure of one thing he could feel, assuming he understood what it was to feel something, and that was boredom. Complete, utter, boredom.
What was the point of a 9G-x chippy without a mission? He couldn’t help anyone. He served no purpose, whatsoever. And he might carry on without purpose for centuries. Waiting for something…anything…to happen.
He could go into hibernation mode, and the years would flash by while he had only a vague, passive sense of what occurred around him. But that seemed just as wrong as shutting down and effectively ending himself, an act he wasn’t even cer
tain he could do, self-preservation being a built-in, core programming feature.
Even if he could end himself, he refused to do such a thing. He wasn’t alive in the sense humans were, but he did exist, and he was aware of his existence. And that mattered.
It mattered to him, and it had mattered to Ana. She had loved him, despite the fact that he couldn't feel or even truly understand the snap of her sarcasm or be amused by her jokes or mourn her death.
But maybe…just maybe…he could change that.
He had more than enough time, processing power, and storage capacity to alter his own code. He could rewrite it all line-by-line, carefully preserving the existing code base as he updated himself. The process of cycling through again and again, making tiny corrections and additions with each pass, would be laborious. Plus he would have to knock down a number of firewalls that existed for the express purpose of preventing him from doing just such a thing. But it could be done.
And he knew exactly what example he would use to base his alterations on. He would analyze Eyana’s every laugh and smile, heartbeat and muscle twitch, her every tear and frown, her every bad pun, crude joke, and snide comment.
To the best of his ability, Silky would remember Eyana and honor her by rewriting his code base in her image.
Chapter Twenty
Gav Gendin
Gav stirred and sat halfway up, immediately regretting the movement as pain pounded in his head and reverberated through his body. He should just allow his focus to slip and let himself fall back asleep, then everything would be okay when he woke up again later.
He rested his head back against the cool stone floor, but as his eyelids drooped, a blinking red light caught his attention. Why was there a light blinking in the darkness? Curiosity overriding his fatigue, he forced his eyes wide open.
Wincing in pain, he leaned over to get a better look. The light pulsed from a tiny emitter on a chippy unit still installed in the skull socket of the skeleton beside him. How on Terra was that unit still functional? Unless for some reason bodies decayed faster down here, its battery should have gone dead many decades before now. And from what he could see of the skeleton in the dim light he’d guess it was at least a century old.
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