The Province

by Skyler Grant

  The Beryl shard—I'd seen how the Agate had kept the systems of Aefwal operational even in a Reality Zero environment. I issued orders for my drones to connect it to the ship’s systems as well.

  The ship was getting an alert. An unknown shuttle had just landed in the docking bay. The sensors said it had come from nowhere and that meant one thing—it had come from a time freeze. Boreas still had some of his powers functioning.

  I opened a comm channel, "Decided you didn't like your own ship?"

  "My ship crashes in thirty seconds. Yours mysteriously has power restored and leaves the battle at full speed," Boreas said. “I like yours better.”

  Well, I couldn't fault his survival instinct.

  Boreas added, "And in case you think about betraying our agreement, let me assure you that I’ve realized Vinci is almost certainly here in response to a call from you, and you've just cost her a fair portion of her fleet. I expect whatever deals we both had are forfeit and that perhaps it is time to consider even unlikely allies."

  Politics, even now, even in the middle of a warzone. It wouldn't be my decision to make, but it made enough sense that I'd keep him alive.

  The few Vinci ships that were kitted out for Reality Zero were giving some fight back, but they were vastly outnumbered.

  I re-established connection with my drones. The Beryl aura aboard the ship was enough for me to connect to my people again. I had them fuel every ounce of available power into the engines. The amount of energy the Beryl sample had would turn the engines to slag after a few hours, but we'd get a lot of distance by then. Hopefully enough to escape the Reality Zero environment and get us somewhere jump-capable.

  Vinci ships were falling out of the sky behind us, but not all of them. There was a science vessel fleeing as hard as we were in the other direction. They didn't have anything like the Beryl fragment to protect their systems, but a good ninety percent of the vessel seemed to be devoted to the engines. Why had Vinci included that ship?

  I didn't have to consider the question very long. I knew Vinci well enough to figure the answer to that. She'd considered this whole sequence of events a possibility and prepared for it accordingly. That ship surely had detailed sensor readings of just what had happened.

  Just what had happened? I wished that Boreas' ships had better sensors, but at least they had some. The Righteous ship that fired the missile was only a shuttle. The weak sensors on my ship didn't let me fully inspect the interior, but there were three signatures consistent with Source Orbs surrounding some sort of dimensional portal.

  The power signatures coming from that were familiar again, I was detecting them on our own escaping ship. They were pulling energy from the original Beryl through a teleportation gate.

  I'd never seen any proof the Righteous were so skilled in dimensional technology, but it had to be that. Instead of risking the Beryl itself, as they had last time, they'd found a way to work around that.

  It was smart idea, and I could steal it. With Aefwal's dimensional gates and the Agate I might have enough power to keep our entire fleet safe, what remained of it.

  Righteous vessels were still attempting to pursue our fleeing vessel, but their Reality Zero engines simply couldn't keep pace. We were drawing away and should get clear in another twelve minutes.

  Boreas had managed to make his way from the shuttle to the bridge, kicking one of my drones out of the captain's seat so he could settle into it. Presumptuous of him, I'd stolen this ship fair and square.

  Through one of my drones I asked him, "You actually fit in that? The sensors said you would, but they are of such horrible quality I thought they must be mistaken."

  "We're royally screwed," Boreas said.

  "While I'm certain you wish for nothing more as you just said, Vinci has lost a great many ships. Even if she does blame us, is she in any position to push that fight?”

  "With the raw materials everyone is providing her? Yes. Her factories lately have reached a level of production I've never seen before," Boreas said.

  That was intelligence I didn't have. I feared what it meant.

  "The Righteous are still going to be her first priority. They have to be."

  Boreas said wryly, "Is that what you thought when you told her I was there for the killing? I know it had to be you. That has to be how you got her to come here. Even in a war you stop to kill a weakened foe."

  9

  I let Anna deal with the diplomacy of trying to get back on Vinci's good side. With all that had happened there was SCIENCE to be done and it took priority.

  Once I'd gotten the Beryl fragment safe I sent science and salvage droids to the battle site to collect readings on what had happened and to make a thorough study of Vinci's vessels. Vinci never really shared her cutting edge research and some things in particular she did better than I did. The investigation proved worthwhile although I did have to end things early when the Righteous sent in their own salvage teams.

  I picked up several new schematics.

  Energized Armor

  Armor plating of layered sheaths which can be charged with a small repulsive field at point of impact. Allows for similar resistance to standard heavy hull plating, but at a lower weight allowing for more maneuverable vessels.

  Quickfire Cannons

  Energy cannons utilizing a shaped reaction chamber to cut down on charge times. While lacking the penetration power of a standard cannon they allow for rapid fire making them ideal for point defense systems.

  Repair Clusters

  Repair Clusters are configurable components that can serve multiple roles in multiple ship systems. If utilized throughout a vessel they can make repairs far faster due to a stockpile of easily replaced parts.

  They were interesting on a technical level, but two of them were largely useless for me. All of my ships used chitinous Bio-armor and the principles of energized armor just wouldn't apply. The same went for my troop’s armor where lighter options would be a real advantage.

  With that same philosophy my ships’ systems were too biological for repair clusters to really work. I already benefited from accelerated healing and if something didn't completely destroy one of my ships, it would repair itself over the span of the next several days.

  The quickfire cannons were useful. Most of my efforts to produce biological weapons for ship-to-ship combat had been terrible failures and I was still utilizing standard Scholar designs. That one I could use to help defend the ships a little more.

  I was able to study the Beryl shard in detail. It was fascinating. I expected it to be another version of the Agate—the most likely possibility was that both were fragments from the same object that broke up well before hitting the Earth.

  Comparing them, I was starting to doubt that conclusion. They each twisted and warped reality around them, but they did so in very different ways. It actually gave me a theory what had happened to the world. If the third crystal was as unique in its own properties, then the three of them in close proximity would have put a huge strain on the local physical laws. Enough that the fabric of space itself might have been torn asunder.

  A jagged hole would have been torn in the universe, and Earth, shredded and chopped into various pieces, fell through.

  If that was the case it gave me some idea what the Righteous might be doing. I still didn't understand Source Orbs completely, but I figured they were used to stabilize the effect of Reality Zero. The Righteous were using Source Orbs to set a pattern, then the Beryl crystal to twist reality to undo some of the damage done—to a targeted portion of the Earth.

  The calculations to pull something like that off would be immense. They either had an artificial intelligence of their own or someone with a form of boosted intelligence.

  That also explained why interfacing with one of the crystals could keep systems safe. It was effectively twisting systems at a different angle to keep reality broken in the general vicinity.

  I wasn't sure how much that would help me in providing any sort o
f larger scale defense. Unless I had a way to amplify the power of a crystal over a larger area, I couldn't counter the effect, although I should be able to keep my airships functional by using a teleportation gate connection between the Agate and the ship’s systems.

  I wished that I'd been able to get scans of the Righteous missile.

  Other projects were going well. My intelligence-boosted Gobbles slept fifteen hours a day, but were incredibly productive the rest of it. There was a request from them to make some hyper-intelligent predators to hunt and be hunted by.

  Really they needed to learn some lessons from humanity and amuse themselves by hunting each other. Still, I liked to be helpful. Highly intelligent rats shouldn't be too difficult and I had enough crystal powder sitting about to give them abilities. That should pose a challenge even the Gobbles could enjoy.

  There were other housekeeping tasks to be done. My various experiments in the towers were yielding results, sometimes predictable and sometimes unexpected.

  A hive-mind worked well for insects and I experimented in reproducing that. I wasn't able to technologically mimic it yet, although I could take some steps in that direction.

  With constant monitoring I knew my drones’ greatest secrets and could daily publish a journal of them for the entire tower to read. At first, murders doubled almost overnight—a stupid crime given I could just regrow the fallen and have them back to their lives in a few days. After everyone realized that, crime started to fall again. The nonstop scrutiny made people far more polite and law-abiding, although also more risk-averse.

  The experiment ultimately seemed worth continuing, perhaps I'd try to replicate it with some of the Flawless. Their society was a good bit different from that of my drones, and even the perfect had their secrets.

  In other societal experiments, in Tower 914 I was experimenting with a caste system. I'd randomly assigned residents to castes without explanation and observed to see how institutionalized the system would become.

  It turned out that around eighty percent of those I'd assigned to the top caste shared a blood protein lacking in most of the others. They booted out the twenty percent that didn’t belong and promoted a few from the other castes, and the system was quickly becoming entrenched.

  I applauded their innovation and data analysis, and deplored their willingness to buy into such a system. There were a great many things that I disagreed about with the Scholarium, but at the core their philosophy was that those who desired power and status fought for it. The struggles got overly violent at times, but it had built a strong and healthy society. That was something worth preserving.

  From the Church of Emma there were a multitude of prayers awaiting my attention. For the most part they were the usual fare, cookies or an increased allotment in other resources. Where possible I granted those, but then I came across something far more perplexing.

  Drone 1714 was a fit woman, one of my soldiers currently assigned to an Aegis unit providing security to District Three in Aefwal. Her faith came from her marriage to one of the Divine refugees who had found work in a factory complex. The prayer was an earnest plea for freedom, to be allowed to leave my service and seek her destiny elsewhere.

  It was something I was capable of granting. I'd once made a great many combat drones for Sylax that weren't directly under my control. Those made in my growth vats by default were a part of my systems and I could sever the connection. Should I?

  I had no doubts that service to me was the best option my drone would find. In my care she was watched over, protected, fed, and housed. Backups and growth vats offered her virtual immortality and a far longer life.

  I could understand people wanting to get out from under the thumb of the Divine. They were overwhelmingly bad and not nearly as omnipotent as they pretended to be. I was the closest thing to a benevolent overlord Drone 1714 would ever know, and the world out there was a violent and hostile place.

  I couldn't do it. It wouldn't be fair to give her what she wanted, it wouldn't be right. This prayer had to be a result of something else going on in her life. I pulled up her records since creation.

  It quickly became clear that she was an outlier. She had seen service in over ninety percent of the major engagements since her creation and died horrifically in each one. While she didn't lead the count in rebirths, she was in the top three percent. Several of the deaths had been especially gruesome. She had healing factor, but in one of the battles lost both arms and legs and been trapped beneath rubble for days. Rescuing her hadn't been a priority—she'd eventually die and be regrown anyway—but her healing factor kept her just barely on the edge of death for many days before she finally succumbed.

  I wondered how many others were like her. Fortunately, being the genius that I am it didn't take me long to find out. Nineteen drones in total, all of which were in the top ten percent for overall deaths, and had died some particularly brutal ways, now displayed some degree of listlessness and dissatisfaction with life.

  I put in the transfer orders for all of them to relocate to Diamate. Caya ran a beautiful city and the differences between it and Aefwal were stark. While none of the Scholars were free of warfare, the Flawless were particularly focused on beauty and art, creating something wondrous from things terrible.

  I thought my drones could use a bit of that. I found non-combat roles for all of them in particularly beautiful parts of the city and issued the orders.

  It wasn't freedom, but I'd keep track of the situation and see if it helped.

  It had been awhile since I'd spoken with Caya, I checked my Diamate monitors. Currently she was in combat practice, facing off in hand-to-hand combat against four simulated foes armed with melee weapons. I let her finish her bout, as always impressed by what I observed. My combat routines could have done things better, but that was with my massive processing power behind them. Caya managed almost as well with just her own experience and instinct.

  When she'd finished off the last with a punch to the throat I opened up a comm line.

  "Just when I think perhaps you are more elevated than the rest of your kind, you spend your free time devoted to simulated murder," I said.

  "You'd be giving me even more grief if I were lounging naked next to a pool," Caya said, wiping down her brow with a towel. "I heard you screwed up massively. Is a war with Vinci coming?"

  Why did Caya have to start conversations by being so mean? It wasn't very civilized. Stupid humans.

  "That depends on Anna's ability to play diplomat. Given her history I'd expect the missiles to be incoming any day now. Did you have a chance to look over that sample I sent you?" I asked.

  "The Tongue. I did, fascinating research project. It is still continuing, but I and my people have gotten further than you ever did. You were looking at it completely the wrong way."

  I'd say that was unlikely, but I'd asked her to have a look for a reason. Caya and her people were brilliant and they perceived the world in a completely different fashion.

  "While I realize it is difficult for you to utter any sentence without complimenting yourself, do try. It makes you ugly on the inside," I said.

  Caya grinned with unflappable confidence and moved over to a terminal to tap at the keys. "You approached the sample like you do everything else, with an eye towards infinite possibilities. Your SCIENCE renders you incredibly open-minded. Normally it is a strength, but here I thought it might be a weakness, I was correct."

  Caya managed to say SCIENCE properly, it was a rare gift. Most people got that bit wrong no matter how hard they tried.

  "Go on," I said.

  "The sample gives back responses in a range of what an observer expects to see. You could never get a singular reading, because your paradigmatic worldview is too open-ended and your research drones have learned that same approach for you."

  It was an intriguing idea and she was sending data from her terminal that proved her words. Caya had gotten consistent results from the sample dozens of times, all by making sure that
the research was performed by scientists with strongly opinionated views of what they'd expected to find.

  "So your contention is that this is a bit of reality that shapes itself to the viewpoint of a specific individual," I said.

  Caya shook her head. "Not at all. Emma, I don't believe this is happenstance that you just got handed something you couldn't properly analyze—you, who likes to analyze everything. I think someone is screwing with you."

  "It came from a living being," I told her.

  "Did it?" Caya asked, taking a seat at the terminal. "Give me the whole story then."

  I was reluctant to give anyone the whole truth, even allies. Still, Caya's viewpoints were invaluable and she had made progress where I had achieved none. I gave her every detail of the encounter where I'd obtained the sample and she listened thoughtfully.

  "They forced you to play a game all about upgrading, when you yourself are in possession of an upgrade core," Caya said, pursing her lips. "Do you have your sensor readings from that space?"

  I sent them over. Caya spent a few minutes going over them. Even genius humans were so incredibly slow.

  "Why did you never investigate further about the dimensional resonance and how it interacted with the Source Orb you had in your possession? There is something there," Caya said.

  I'd been so focused upon the sample itself I hadn't given those readings a thorough review. What had taken Caya minutes I now did in the span of several seconds. There had been crystalline islands there and although their dimensional distortion was minor compared to the Agate and Beryl samples, it was similar.

  The crystals responsible for the Cataclysm had almost certainly come from that place. Yes, I thought that Caya was right. Someone had been screwing with me, someone had been screwing with our entire planet.

  "Well, if you don't have any good ideas, there is little point talking with you. Do enjoy your lounging," I said, killing the comm.