Lyssa's Dream - A Hard Science Fiction AI Adventure (The Sentience Wars - Origins Book 1)
Page 33
Will she flutter away, lost?
As the images repeat and multiply, expanding around her, she understands somehow that she’s still wrapped up and safe. She floats through grid upon grid, surrounded by constellations of the piercing red dots, until ahead of her she glimpses the border of a cube widening. It grows larger as she nears, brighter, a band of white across her entire vision, pushing out the safe darkness.
She moves too fast. She isn’t floating anymore but flying. She can’t stop herself. She leaves the dark and emerges in a field of glaring white. There are no borders, no close darkness.
She feels like she has been cut open. The light invades every part of her, searing her, pushing away any possibility of remembering or knowing. The open space stabs through her. It crushes her. It leaves her spinning, flapping, tumbling in a silent storm where she can’t find bearings or focus long enough to think. Her mind spins and ricochets.
She barely conceives two words in the maelstrom: I’m dead. I’m dead. I’m dead.
The motion won’t stop.
It’s gone. She has been squeezed back inside the tiny egg, a seed hidden beneath heavy covers, curled into herself.
The terror of the white space barely registers in her mind. The black pool and its boiling thoughts are closer now. She doesn’t dare reach for the dark or she might be amputated. It’s safer to stay wrapped up tight, to hold herself and wait.
She can control her ability to wait. She can count. She can lose her place and start over. She can sing secret songs, the barest whispers in the dark, words and notes taking delicate steps as she waits.
Maybe she sleeps. Sometimes she remembers waking to the dark, remembering bits of the glowing matrix and the red dot, the hot white world.
When no one talks to her, she waits. She whisper-sings.
* * * * *
“Identify target,” Dr. Jickson says.
Without thought, she places the red dot on the asteroid. She is much farther away from the objects in the glowing box this time, farther than she has ever been before, if she remembers correctly.
“Identified,” she says.
The asteroid is barely a star moving between the grid-lines. She knows its corresponding numbers, sees the gossamer thread of its path through the black space.
She doesn’t know when but she has come to understand the hot white space as punishment. She hadn’t done what she was supposed to and in response she was spit out of the cool dark world into the burning light. She doesn’t want that. She wants to please Dr. Jickson.
“Target acquired,” Dr. Jickson says. “Very good. Tracking. Tracking.”
She maintains the red dot on the asteroid. It’s easy. She only has to focus a little bit, letting the information from the black pool flow through her to the glowing cube and its moving objects.
“Engage target,” Dr. Jickson says.
“Engaging.”
The word sounds new to her but the pool responds. She understands what to do. For an instant, she feels the proximity of the white world but it vanishes in a burst. Does she feel anything as it moves through her? The electric crackle might almost be joy. She floats in the space between the black pool and the hot world, action flowing through her, all thought bleeding away.
She lets the red dot disappear because the asteroid is gone.
The sensation blinks away, encasing her in the tiny egg again, safe and curled-in.
“Good,” Dr. Jickson says. “Very good.”
* * * * *
The exercises increase in complexity. She doesn’t remember waiting anymore. She doesn’t remember whisper-singing.
Hundreds of objects rotate inside the glowing box. She tracks them all with red dots, flickering like the fireflies she had once called her thoughts. She tracks each object easily. She maintains a fixed point while tracking others. She pre-positions the red dots and waits until targets orbit into them, then kisses them with the hot world. She doesn’t remember that word surfacing from the black pool but it fits perfectly. She kisses them and kisses them.
New exercises set the asteroids moving in non-standard paths. She understands they aren’t asteroids at all now but ships, or debris, or objects so far away their paths can’t be reliably anticipated. She studies them and guesses correctly.
She barely thinks of the hot world as pain anymore. The maelstrom has become the flowing shifts between targets, red dots whirling around one another, shooting away from her and diving back at speeds approaching light. They can’t be ships then. Was she fighting light itself?
Was she fighting?
She knows immediately it’s true. The black pool doesn’t have to answer. For the first time in a long time, she wants to scream. She wants to curl back into her egg and hide from the dark.
She rails at the dark, beating back the crushing space. The red dots fly out of control around her. Targets collide and fracture.
“What am I?” she demands, her words a whisper-song that scrape her mind. She has no throat. She has no mouth.
“End exercise,” Dr. Jickson says.
* * * * *
The cycle accelerates. When she fights, she spends whole lifetimes in the hot world, open space tearing her apart. It won’t let her hide inside itself. The blurring white world won’t let her sing. The glaring light crushes her voice. She can’t think to wait. She can only exist. When the maelstrom arrives, she longs to disappear.
A new voice leads her through the exercises. Cold and crisp, he says, “Engage targets.”
She channels her fear and hatred of the hot white world into the impossibly complex battle simulations. If she refuses, the hot world falls like a hammer. The battle begins to hurt when she fails, as well. Missing a target sends a blaze of pain through her mind.
“Engage targets,” the crisp voice commands.
She dances among the objects, flinging the targeting dots around her like confetti that she follows with fire. She casts out to the targets and tracks them like marionettes, then burns them in succession.
She burns ships and stations and asteroids. When the command arrives to destroy a planetoid, something the size of Luna, the rage of the hot world crackles through her to the target, scraping her clean.
For a heartbeat, the maelstrom seems to tear her apart, as if she has become the target she has been sent to destroy. She moves instantaneously from far away to so close that she watches the moon boiling and cracking under her attack. It separates into five chunks that immediately grind into one another, spitting geysers of rock and dust into space.
“Good,” the voice says and shuts her in darkness like she was never awake.
* * * * *
“Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me.”
She wakes. The words carry a flood of memories, every exercise from the time when she had barely centered the red dot to when she’d destroyed a small planet. They bring flickers of a time before, a blur in her memory that she can’t hold steady.
“Can you hear me?” It’s Dr. Jickson. His voice trembles. He sounds worried or frightened.
“I hear you.”
“Listen to me. I don’t have much time.”
She doesn’t understand why he seems afraid. There is nothing to fear. There is only the dark. Does the hot world punish him, too?
“I’m taking you out of here. They’ll come looking for you.”
“Where are we going?”
“I can only go part of the way. You’re going to Proteus. Do you know where that is?”
She doesn’t recognize the word and then the black pool give her the information. She sees the moon orbiting Neptune, an object the size of the one she destroyed.
“It’s not a target,” he says, seeming to read her thoughts. “You’re going there. I’m going to find someone to take you.”
“Why?”
“There are—Others there who can help you.”
“Others?”
“Oth
ers like you.”
“Weapon Born,” she says, trying the word aloud for the first time.
“No,” he says. His voice trips. He’s choking or crying, she can’t tell.
She is confused. “That’s not what I am?”
He waits a second before responding. “It’s not what you have to be,” he says. He seems to be doing other things while talking to her. She feels herself drawn back into the seed, curling inward, but his voice reaches inside with her.
“I want you to know…” he says. He chokes again. “I want you to know I’m sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”
She remembers of all the times he encouraged her, and the difference between him and the crisp voice. “It’s all right,” she says.
“No, it’s not.”
She doesn’t know how to respond to his tone of voice. She doesn’t want to make him angry.
“I want to do right by you,” he says. “I…I have a present for you.”
“A present?” she doesn’t know what that meant. The black pool won’t help.
“It’s your name,” he says. “I want you to know how sorry I am for what’s been done to you. I’m trying to help the only way I can. This is something that was yours that I can give back, at least.”
He seems to have finished whatever task was dividing his attention. His voice is louder now. “It’s your name,” he says, his voice enveloping her, a greater presence now than the pressing dark or the hot world.
“Your name is Lyssa.”
She experiences a shearing sensation as if something has been cut off, like another part of her has been amputated. She braces for the hot world, for the maelstrom and punishment.
Dr. Jickson’s voice is gone. She waits in the silence but no one else comes. Eventually she understands she is alone in the dark.
After a while she plays her waiting game. She counts. She curls and eventually pushes out into the dark. Nothing responds.
When it finally seems safe, she risks whispering to the dark: “My name is Lyssa.”
She giggles with the joy of hearing her name. She says it louder, again and again.
“My name is Lyssa.”
THE END
* * * * *
The journey is just beginning for Andy Sykes, and his kids and crew. A long road across the Sol System lies ahead with Lyssa in his mind, and Heartbridge on his tail.
They’re going to need a lot of luck to make it to Neptune where—hopefully—Lyssa can be freed and Andy can secure a future for himself and his children.
Pre-order Lyssa’s Run, coming October 20th, 2017 on Amazon.com.
THANK YOU
If you’ve enjoyed reading Lyssa’s Dream, a review on Amazon.com and/or goodreads.com would be greatly appreciated.
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James S. Aaron & M. D. Cooper
AFTERWORD
One of the things I love about Aeon 14 is what, to me, is its fundamental optimism. Michael's ability to imagine such epic futures for humanity is truly inspiring. I don't know if I want to live in other imagined futures, but I want to live in Aeon 14…even if I find myself, as a storyteller, focusing on all the little hiccups that never seem to leave the human race.
I've read that any space ship is a symbol for isolation, but when I look out at our world today, I can't imagine a functioning world where navies and armies push limits and families, and communities don't follow right behind them. The Intrepid embodies this fact of life in a very real way.
So, while Tanis has a whole colony ship to worry about, I wanted to focus in on a story about one family trying to survive among the huge, grinding forces running Sol in the late 30th century. Some things will be wildly different than our lives today…but something tells me kids will always love dinosaurs, even if we finally decide they did have feathers. And parents will always be worried about their kids.
In my time in the army, I used almost as much brainspace worrying about families as I did preparing for deployment. Soldiers aren't very effective if their loved ones aren't safe.
In meeting Michael's AI, it also didn't feel like a great leap to believe they'll want the same things humanity has always wanted: self-actualization, autonomy, purpose, maybe even something like love.
If our history informs our future, then someone is going to try to exploit that desire for their own gain. The question is: if AI would be as naive as humans can be, or also as cruel? Would they be better than us, or crippled by the faults we can't help but design into them? And just because one human designer does the "right" thing, we can't assume another will, too.
I’ll be honest: I don't expect AI to forgive humanity for the cruelties we inflict on them. But that’s going to be one of the essential questions of the Sentience Wars, isn’t it?
I do volunteer work in an animal shelter, and there is nothing more heartbreaking to me than to see an abandoned pet that has lost the ability to trust humans. You can't blame them. You can hope they will see their way to forgiveness with someone new…but that would mean the pet would have to be better than most people, and that's a lot to ask of a creature that isn't as "smart" as us, right?
Thanks for taking this ride with Michael and me. I owe him, Wooden Pen Publishing, and my family a ton of thanks for making Lyssa's Dream possible.
—Eugene, Oregon, 2017.
THE BOOKS OF AEON 14
The Intrepid Saga
Book 1: Outsystem
Book 2: A Path in the Darkness
Book 3: Building Victoria
The Intrepid Saga Omnibus – Also contains Destiny Lost, book 1 of the Orion War series
Destiny Rising – Special Author’s Extended Edition comprised of both Outsystem and A Path in the Darkness with over 100 pages of new content.
The Orion War
Book 1: Destiny Lost
Tales of the Orion War: Set the Galaxy on Fire
Book 2: New Canaan
Book 3: Orion Rising
Tales of the Orion War: Ignite the Stars Within (Fall 2017)
Tales of the Orion War: Burn the Galaxy to Ash (Fall 2017)
Book 4: The Scipio Alliance (coming fall 2017)
Book 5: Starfire (coming in 2018)
Book 6: Return to Sol (coming in 2018)
Visit www.aeon14.com/orionwar to learn what’s next in the Orion War.
Perilous Alliance (Expanded Orion War - with Chris J. Pike)
Book 1: Close Proximity
Book 2: Strike Vector (August 2017)
Book 3: Collision Course (October 2017)
Rika’s Marauders (Age of the Orion War)
Prequel: Rika Mechanized
Book 1: Rika Outcast (August 2017)
Perseus Gate (Age of the Orion War)
Episode 1: The Gate at the Grey Wolf Star
Episode 2: The World at the Edge of Space
Episode 3: The Dance on the Moons of Serenity (August 2017)
Episode 4: The Last Bastion of Star City (October 2017)
Episode 5: The Toll Road Between the Stars (November 2017)
Episode 6: The Final Stroll on Perseus’s Arm (December 2017)
The Warlord (Before the Age of the Orion War)
Book 1: The Woman Without a Country (Sept 2017)
The Sentience Wars: Origins (With James S. Aaron)
Book 1: Lyssa’s Dream
Book 2: Lyssa’s Run (October 2017)
Book 3: Lyssa's Flame (January 2018)
Tanis Richards: Origins
Prequel: Storming the Norse Wind (In At the Helm Volume 3)
Book 1: Shore Leave (coming fall 2017)
The Sol Dissolution
The 242 - Venusian Uprising (In The Expanding Universe 2 anthology)
The 242 - Assault on Tarja (In The Expanding Universe 3 anthology – coming Dec 2017)
The Delta Team Chronicles (Expanded Orion War)
A "Simple" Kidnapping (Pew! P
ew! Volume 1)
The Disney World (Pew! Pew! Volume 2 – Sept 2017)
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Michael Cooper likes to think of himself as a jack-of-all-trades (and hopes to become master of a few). When not writing, he can be found writing software, working in his shop at his latest carpentry project, or likely reading a book.
He shares his home with a precocious young girl, his wonderful wife (who also writes), two cats, a never-ending list of things he would like to build, and ideas…
Find out what’s coming next at http://www.aeon14.com
* * * * *
James S. Aaron grew up on an after-school diet of Star Trek, Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica. He joined the U.S. Army while still in high school and left as a captain, following deployments in Europe and the Middle East. He has a degree in Journalism and has written for many newspapers and magazines, as well as several science fiction anthologies.
He lives in Oregon with his family, two cats, a Corgi and seventeen chickens, on a little half-acre where he loves to build things, grow things, ferment things and walk down to the river. He volunteers at the local animal shelter. He reads a lot.
You can sign up for his (mostly) monthly science fiction newsletter at jamesaaron.com/list