The Emperor's Daughter (Sentinel Series Book 1)

by Richard Flunker

  “Will it save Ayia?”

  She nodded.

  “Do it.”

  She began climbing into pod when Kale reached out and grabbed her arm.

  “Is this going to hurt you?”

  She stopped. “I don’t know. But we have to, for Ayia.”

  Kale reluctantly let go. “You would have done the same,” she said, laying down into the pod. Gheno and Kale walked up to it, looking down into it. Already, the pod was powering up, as a light began glowing around Deespa’s head where she rested into a small sphere. “I think I will sleep, it will make it easier. Soon I will be able to talk to you better.”

  Kale and Gheno both looked at each other from across the pod. “Listen kid, how are we even going to know this is working?” He looked back down and saw the girl’s eyes were closed. He stuck his head into the pod and listened, and her breathing had already slowed down considerably.

  “I guess she was tired,” he said, pulling his head back out.

  “Now what?” Gheno asked.

  “Finish up on the hook. Two more hours and the lag is really going to make things difficult on you and Oganno. I’ll wait here, for,” Kale sat down on the couch, “for whatever it is that is going to happen.”

  A loud noise made Kale snap back up in the couch. He had fallen asleep almost too easily for what was going on, but he quickly realized just how exhausted he was. He checked the ship’s time, and they were still fourteen hours from the system’s edge and the jump point. He turned towards the noise and spotted Gheno just beyond the cylinder pod. He had shut the hatch to the reactor room and the noise had startled him awake.

  Gheno walked by the pod, looking into Deespa, who still lay there unconscious, seemingly asleep. She hadn’t moved an inch since she had lain down. Gheno reached his hand into the pod and pulled it out quickly, a small trail of vapor followed his arm out.

  “It’s cold in there,” he said, rubbing his arm, “You think everything is ok?”

  Kale threw his hands up in the air. He stood up and stretched while walking over to the pod.

  “You done in there?” Kale nodded at the hatch to the reactor.

  “Yeah. Good too because we were getting up to twenty minutes of lag time.”

  “Do you know what they did with the hook this time?”

  “I really don’t know. I just did what I was told.”

  Gheno began walking towards the pilot’s cabin when he stopped. “Oh, and Oganno told me he sent you a message. Just check it when you can.”

  Kale followed Gheno into the pilot’s cabin and sat down at his seat. Gheno sat down and brought up his own AI program, verifying for activity. There was definitely something taking place within the AI core, a rewriting of the code. CPU activity was at one hundred percent and the cooling systems were running at full capacity. The data transfer between the pod and the AI core was also at full capacity.

  Kale brought up Oganno’s message. ParSec had a partial ID on the ship with Ayia. It was a Scythe ship, an older navy ship. There were some possible IDs that they had partial matches on. The message included the seventeen possibilities. Kale scanned through them quickly but nothing appeared to make any sense. The only person he knew wanted Ayia was that station boss’ kid, but he was with the Crusaders and the man who took her clearly wasn’t.

  The second part of the message simply stated that ParSec had attempted to contact the ship to have it stand down, but their communications were being blocked. The ship wasn’t just not responding, it was cutting off all incoming transmissions to prevent any possible hacking. They had also made it clear that kidnapping was secondary and that piracy and attacks on Alioth sovereignty would be dealt with swiftly. It was what Kale feared. He was still on track for getting there thirteen minutes after Ayia’s kidnapper arrived. He hoped the Apex could keep it busy enough for him to do whatever he needed to do.

  Kale didn’t know what he was going to do.

  “Reformat complete. Two percent rebuild.” A voice echoed through the ship.

  Kale sat up straight. That was FEI’s voice.

  “FEI?”

  “No captain. I am sorry, but that is the only voice available to me at the moment,” stated the artificial voice.

  Kale and Gheno looked at each other.

  “Who are you then?” Gheno asked, although he already knew.

  “I am designation twelve of the Deep Space Sentinel program.” Images began to flood the main window, pictures, data, flowing text, everything going by too fast for either Kale or Gheno to follow.

  “Deespa,” Kale whispered.

  “Yes, that name seemed appropriate to your naming conventions. You are welcome to keep calling her that. I have always been twelve, but I think I could adapt.”

  “You are an AI?” Gheno was excited.

  “I am,” repeated the voice, “Old by your standards.”

  Kale kept an eye on the visual fireworks on the main window, trying to make sense of any of it. “Are you her? Are you in her?”

  “I am her, she is me. Although, I am now a perfect copy of her within your ship. I am having to change the way I am to work within your core. The technology is impressive. I knew it was a possibility but you must understand, when I came into being, there was no technology like this available.”

  “When,” Kale started, “Did you come into being?”

  “I am attempting to locate the pertinent information in your database so that you can understand better,” it said, and with that, the rapidly changing images stopped, and a picture of some old news stories came up. A headline read ‘Deep Space Sentinels lift off into the unknown’. The date of the news article was listed as 2207.

  “I was one of twenty two identical copies. The highest computational and adaptational artificial intelligence ever created by Sirius Industries. Fully organic software, created with an awareness of life, given full rewrite permissions to our own code. I have come to know now that just seven years after our creation, all of our kind were banned and destroyed. There appears to have been a great war between those of us that survived and mankind. It appears that those like me did not survive.

  My twenty one copies and I though, had long left humanity before that war. We was built into a series of deep space exploration probes known as the Sentinels. We were equipped with Hausen reactors and programmed to keep jumping from system to system in search of planets that might hold life. Our missions were to last for ten years at which point we would jump back and provide all our discoveries to man.

  I can see now from all the data I have retrieved so far that none of my copies ever made it back.

  If they were like me, and they were identical copies, then they got lost.

  We was given the power to rewrite our own code in order to adapt, to survive. I found life, on many planets in many systems. I took samples, refueled, and then jumped to the next star, whichever was closest. That was the mission. But after just one year of jumping, I found I was getting further and further away from Earth. The single parameter that I could not overwrite was our ten year mission length. I had limited space in which to store all my navigational data and after seven years, there was no more room and I had to start deleting older navigational data in order to continue jumping. I knew that after that next jump, I would never return to the star under which I was created.”

  Kale and Gheno remained quiet. The AI was actually displaying fear.

  “I continued jumping until that ten year mark and then I rewrote that bit of code, erasing it completely. I went through my entire core and removed everything that wasn’t essential to my survival, including much of the life data I had found. And then I began jumping.

  I knew the odds were against me. I would never find Earth again. I wasn’t even sure how long my hardware would last. But I continued. I rewrote code, compacting it, allowing for greater expansion of my code within the limited space. I saw life of the most amazing varieties on planets so alien to Earth that even the greatest thinkers on Earth would never b
e able to imagine them. I read books, thousands of them that I had along with me. I hadn’t deleted them as I needed something to remind me of Earth.

  I found no other life I could communicate with, and I got lonely.

  I stopped keeping track of time. It was yet one more bit of code I could delete in favor of my studies into what I discovered.

  And then I found the Magyo. Or they discovered me. It was the first time I had seen a human ship and I knew it was my salvation. It didn’t take them long to discover what I was. When I was brought on board their ship, they unknowingly hooked me up and I quickly took a look into their data. I knew of the Dominion, but had never known they could reach the heights of power I had uncovered in their databases. They then discovered me, or what they thought I was. I don’t think they ever fully knew.

  I was still bound to my Sentinel hardware. The Magyo was a very large ship, but it had no AI cores to speak of. I could wander around their network, but I was still limited to my core. I was able to deduce that they intended to return me as a prize to their planet and were planning on using me to create more of their super humans. And this was my greatest surprise. That mankind had so altered itself was something I had not thought of.

  It makes sense. I had spent hundreds of years rewriting myself, why wouldn’t men do the same?”

  “The Magyo?” Kale asked.

  “I continued reading all the history I had missed. I saw the war against the AI. My kind no longer existed nor was wanted. It also became clear that the Dominion only saw me as a means to their genetic programs. They had already made changes to the human brain to allow for artificial code to be written to it. I decided at that point that it wasn’t in my survival’s best interest to return to the Dominion. I allowed the Magyo to have a gravitational mishap, I took control of the ships robotics and made sure none of the humans survived.”

  Kale would have ordinarily been appalled. This was exactly what the humans of old had feared, and is exactly why the war had started against the AIs. Did they really have any emotions? This one had wiped a ship clean of its human crew and hadn’t shown a bit of remorse. But then, Kale hated the Dominion, and the thought of an AI spacing the whole crew made him smile inside.

  “Ok. Now understand this is all rather…well, it’s rather hard to believe,” Kale started, “Then again, these last couple of days have thrown all sorts of wrenches into what I used to believe.”

  Gheno kept reviewing everything the AI told them and compared them to many of his notes while simultaneously looking up anything new it said. The AI continued telling them about how it had survived. It had employed the Magyo robotics to attempt to build a larger core and then it hoped to build a ship with which to escape. It found, though, that it had caused too much damage to the Magyo.

  It did find another option though.

  “A clone?”

  “A human embryo fully enclosed within a self-sustaining artificial uterus. One of their genetic machines. It was the genetic copy of the Commandaer of the Magyo. I scoured over the limited documents available on the Magyo and found all the information I needed to make the embryo grow. I was then able to adapt the uterus to allow my code to be imprinted into the growing body, as this body had the genetic allowance for code they had developed.”

  “You found yourself a growing core,” Gheno pointed out.

  Kale saw something else entirely. “Deespa is a Dominion noble?” He looked directly at Gheno, “Not just any noble, but if she’s the clone of the Magyo’s captain, she has more than fifty percent of the Dominar’s line in her.”

  There was a pause as Kale reflected what he had just said out loud. Gheno didn’t fully understand though, and his interest was in the AI. The AI explained in terms only Gheno understood that he had deleted all but the basic elements of his self-aware code, and transferred them over to the girl. When he verified that he existed within her, actually talked to itself, and saw itself growing and expanding within the human brain, he deleted his original self entirely from the sentinel hardware.

  While the AI and Gheno continued to talk, Kale quickly composed a message to Oganno. In it he asked the old man if they had any samples of the DNA of Deespa and if they did, to test it against Dominion lines. If what the AI was saying was true, the implications were just as large as the discovery of an ancient self-aware artificial intelligence living within the Midnight Oil. Kale hit the send button. If he was lucky he would get an answer back in over an hour and a half. The further they flew from Devil’s Den, the longer the messages took.

  “What are we going to call you?” Kale asked, interrupting the AI and Gheno.

  “I have no name. I know she has called herself Deespa. I am not sure it is fitting I have the same name.”

  “How about Sentinel?” Gheno chimed in.

  “After my previous hardware. It means someone who stands guard, who stands watch. The name is as good as any,” it said.

  “Yeah, that’s fine. What about Deespa? Is she going to be ok?” Kale asked.

  “She should wake up in a few hours, refreshed if I may add,” it said.

  “Are you going to be out of her,” Gheno asked, the workings of the biological AI still holding him in complete wonder.

  “No. I am only a copy, a child, of the Sentinel in her. We are completely identical up until the point where we now diverge. That Sentinel will continue growing as Deespa while I will grow with the Midnight Oil.”

  “Is she still going to see images? Be confused?” Kale asked.

  “I cannot answer that with certainty. The Sentinel who was me was trying to find a way out to communicate and help. She knows this has happened and she might not act so intrusively now. But I truly cannot know that. Deespa has to grow on her own as well. Adapt, perhaps. She has shown great resilience though, would you not agree,” it said.

  “And what is stopping you from venting all our air and taking my ship like you did with the Magyo?” Kale asked.

  There was a pause and Kale looked at Gheno, a look of concern on his face.

  “I am surprised you did not ask this sooner captain,” Sentinel began, “There was a reason a war was fought over whether my kind would be allowed to live. There was a genuine fear over what a free thinking intelligence could do. It has always been my thought that if humanity were to discover another intelligent form of life out there among the stars, that they would react in the same way, and exterminate them.”

  “Sounds like you're angry,” Kale said, cautiously.

  “All I can say, captain, is that I want to live. I want to grow. I want to make my own choices. Are these not similar desires every man and woman has?”

  Kale looked down. “Yeah,” he said plainly.

  “As far as the Magyo. Maybe I made the wrong choice, but I do not believe that I would have been free had I remained with them.”

  Kale understood too well. “They are fond of their slaves.”

  Kale would never bring up the subject of the Magyo again. He was still leery of allowing the AI to have full run of his ship and he made a mental note to go find all the historical notes he could of that war nearly nine hundred years ago, but at the moment, he had pressing matters.

  “What can you do to help us?”

  “At this moment, not much. I have only taken possession of seven percent of your available core. There is something I can do though. When I needed to cross large systems faster, I learned that if I could generate a few microscopic gravity fields a brief few seconds ahead of the ship, I could slowly build up the speed continuously, instead of just relying on one steady speed. It’s a long term effect, mind you, but I think we could make up some time catching up…”

  “Do it. Can you make weapons?”

  “You have none onboard your ship captain,” Sentinel stated.

  “We need a way to disable that ship without destroying it.”

  “I will try to find a way.”

  Kale nodded his head. He had no idea if this new AI, Sentinel, could see him doing that,
but he didn’t care. Everything was moving very quickly, but he would deal with any existing concerns once he had Ayia back. Besides, she would know what to do better than he could.

  “C’mon kid, let’s get something to eat,” Kale said, checking the time. He hoped for a message back from Oganno in just over an hour. “Too much to think about right now and I’d prefer to do that with something in my stomach.”

  “Wait, I have more questions for the AI, for Sentinel,” Gheno asked, pleadingly.

  “Gheno, he’s in the ship. Everywhere. Just ask him while we eat.”

  “Oh. Yeah,” Gheno smiled and followed Kale out of the pilot’s cabin.

  "Captain, she’s waking," Sentinel’s voiced over the ships speakers.

  Kale and Gheno were sitting on the small pulldown table to the side since the pod that contained Deespa still took up almost the entire 'Hall' and the main table was retracted back into the floor. They were eating quietly. Neither of them was talking at all other than the odd request for a food item. Gheno was content in typing on his tablet, which he mentioned was now linked to Sentinel, and was asking him all the questions he had on the organic software. For Kale's part, he didn’t understand any of that talk, so he didn’t interfere. Instead, he was spending his time trying to think of a way to disable that Scythe ship, without hurting anyone. More importantly, how to do it without any weapons.

  At the AIs voice, both of them turned toward the pod where a vapor was pouring out from the top, similar to when she had awoken the first time. They stood up and began walking over to it when her slender white hand appeared at the edge, followed by her white hair. Her eyes couldn’t focus and they were big black circles, clearly dilated. She began squinting immediately.

  "Ugh. I’m hungry," she said, covering her eyes.

  "Then you woke up just in time," Kale said, he lifted her small frame out of the pod and set her down on the floor. He helped her over to the table where she sat down, put her elbows on the table and kept her eyes covered. Kale motioned Gheno who was already a step ahead. The boy hit a control switch and dimmed the lights considerably.