To feed this new star Mega’s crews had been sucking up and compressing all the hydrogen and helium they could get their hands on.
For the longest time, the brains had discussed the why. Why make a new star? Why make it here? They’d settled on warming up this part of Solus to expand pleasant habitable zones.
As to the why they might need all this new energy. They’d decided the only plausible reason for so much energy was to generate even more energy. The Dyson swarm would be used to power a kugelblitz farm which in theory would give them limitless energy.
Mega wasn’t too concerned with the intricacies of the science. The project was insane, and he loved it. And if it worked transhumanity would become a Type - II civilisation, ready to conquer the galaxy.
If it worked. So far things were working fine. But they hadn’t really tried anything special yet. Nothing was ready. All the components were being built and tested, and nothing would proceed until they were sure they wouldn’t destroy themselves or the system.
They’d just been collecting materials and building factories and bases. The easy bit. The tricky bit would come later.
The stellar reactor’s activation would create a severe gravitational disturbance. To contain it, an array of gravity dampers would be deployed around it. The problem was the amount of energy necessary to contain even the smallest of star’s gravity far exceeded anything produced by conventional methods. Mega remembered hearing the plan for the first time. He’d laughed. The new sun would have to power the Dyson swarm which had to power the gravity dampers. It was ballsy. Mega liked it.
The brains were led by Stephen Hawking’s Awesome Ghost. SHAG for short. That’s what he called himself. Someone had copied the man’s mind before he died and waited for the singularity to merge the copy with an AI. Mega had gotten him an epic customised body perfectly suited for space science. They were close. It turned out they’d known each other back on Terra.
Mega had a different name back then, and a different body. Still, Shag had eventually recognised his mannerisms. His personality was invariably the same. Mega knew he could change the way he looked but not who he was deep down. But inhabiting a war machine made him as safe as can be from any unsavoury characters from his past. Not that they’d come to get him here. People only ventured this far out to leave Solus or work on the outer rim projects.
Mega resided on what was referred to as Eris base which was actually a collection of space stations orbiting the dwarf planet. It was the only decent place to live this far out. But space station life was space station life, there was something about a planet that a space station just couldn’t simulate.
Eris base was built from the bounty of its namesake planetoid and companion moon. The moon was gone, and the station was made out of the hollowed out planetoid. Mega lived in a pimped-out duplex with Shag. Though neither of them could fit in it with their massive bodies. They had smaller bodies inside. They just parked outside and beamed in.
Living with Shag had been great. The guy was smart. Probably one of the smartest beings ever by now. But he was also great with the ladies. Mega’s wife had died when she was young. Then the war had come. Since then things always seemed to get in the way of love. He could count his sexual partners on one hand when he left Terra. Since he’d met Shag and they’d gotten a pair of sexy humanoid bodies, they’d been pulling like horny teenagers. They were celebrities in their own right. Known in every corner of the outer rim.
All wasn’t rosy though. It had recently become clear they were going to run out of materials. The Eris star’s size had been calculated so that it could be contained and still warm the outer planets. And though it would be smaller than Pluto the raw materials required to build the swarm, farm and factories exceeded the total mass of the belt objects and Oort cloud.
Shag had gone to Terra to petition the Council. He was going to try to convince them to let him cannibalise Mercury for its rock and Jupiter for its gases. This would also enable them to gradually re-purpose all the gravity dampers used in the Jovian system. Mercury was a scorched husk and Jupiter was a nightmare to navigate. Shag seemed confident when he left.
Mega had awaited his friend’s return and the good news for days. Instead, he’d received reports of chaos in the inner system and an actual space battle. That’s cool. He just hoped his friend wasn’t caught in the crossfire. Shag had wanted to make the trip in his humanoid body so people would recognise him. Mega would have just beamed his mind over and used a rental body. Faster trip. Seemed like the best way to travel when it was an option. As close to teleportation as they’d gotten so far. Shag wanted his body. And he’d said, rightly so, that a month or so of travelling didn’t mean much in the life of an ageless being.
The Eris spaceport didn’t get a lot of traffic. Even the Solus Express only came once a month and it mostly transported goods and supplies. Mega had sent Arnold, his AI, to the spaceport to check arrivals all day every day for the last week. No ships had arrived.
When Mega received word that a spacecraft was on approach, he’d been justifiably excited. He rushed over to see its arrival.
The ship was a thing of beauty. This was no convert job. This was a modern spaceship. In fact, it looked like one of the brand new Council patrol ships he’d seen on TV. Except it’d been painted black and had different markings. Jolly Rogers. Pirates. And this spacecraft had a ram, and it seemed like spare rams were stored in an added compartment beneath the ship’s belly. Mega couldn’t be sure, but pirates loved to ram ships and the paint job was pretty conspicuous.
From what he’d seen on clips of the Battle of Ceres these new Council ships outmatched anything built before them. Mega hoped they were peaceful. He caught himself wishing they had Shag aboard.
The ship did not dock or land in the spaceport. Though it was big, the port could accommodate it. The ship preferred to stay in orbit above the city. This worried Mega. Why would they need to be ready to leave in a hurry, unless they were up to no good? He watched the ship waiting for something terrible to happen. A shuttle departed and headed down to the port. Mega’s eyes followed the craft, and his curiosity led him to their landing spot.
He was not discreet, and he knew that well. He couldn’t walk the streets of Eris in this form. Not without causing chaos. He instead hovered above the hustle and bustle for all to admire. He was usually fine with being the centre of attention, it just wasn’t great for inconspicuous surveillance.
“Arnold I’m going to stay back. I’ll land in a bay not too far. You get closer and just follow them.”
“Why? I can already tell you Shag’s not aboard.”
“I think they might be pirates.”
“So what? Only…”
“Just do it!”
Arnold mumbled some German insult and floated off towards the approaching shuttlecraft. Mega landed behind a pylon a couple of bays down hoping nobody would notice the giant robot peeking from behind a comm tower's metal frame.
Mega felt responsible for the safety of the Eris system. Though that was easy enough when there had been no notable problems in the last decades. Eris was the furthest out of the trans-Neptunian objects, and most of the old Council fleet erred in the area protecting the Homegate. Piracy was non-existent this far out. Something’s up.
Grand Designs
The flight to Eris had markedly improved after Dave’s self-ejection. Rick was also very much in love. He’d been getting a whole new kind of erection. Love erections. They were different, better, and no porn could satiate him. Only Moon. The problem was they came frequently, and at inopportune times, and unfortunately more often than Moon or even he wanted. The thing had taken on a life of its own.
The love, or lack of blood to his brain, had helped Rick all but forget about their hellish week. But there were stark reminders. The funeral had been one. Everyone had taken turns to say some words about the ones they’d lost. There were also the times when he’d walk into Moon sobbing. She’d wipe her eyes quickly and pretend
like everything was alright. Sometimes Rick would hear Gary’s lament. He’d tried to cheer him up a few times. And it worked. For a while.
But that was the thing with grief. It came in waves. You could keep building that emotional sand castle, and you had too, but the waves would wash it away eventually, and you’d have to start again, you have too.
Rick still grieved for his father. At first, it had been more of an abandonment thing. Now that he knew the truth his feelings had evolved. But the result was still the same. He’d build up his life, ego, happiness and all the little blocks someone needs to collect and assemble for a supposedly happy life. Then he’d have a bad day. The waves would come and wash everything away. Back to square one.
Grief, depression, and all the other fun psychosis that people pretended not to have all worked the same way. Knocking down what people built emotionally with traumatic events or memories. And as weird as it seemed to Rick he’d come to the conclusion that the solution and the problem were one and the same. People. Rick’s loneliness has spawned all other issues. And actually connecting with people seemed to have solved them. In part. Sometimes. But that was still better than not at all.
◆◆◆
Rick had started training with Brock. He thought the virtual world training programs would be like a video game, thought it would be fun. It wasn’t, and he didn’t enjoy himself. At all. Rick soon found out he felt everything in the virtual world. The perceived pain felt very real. And he felt a lot of it.
Until that fateful training session, Rick’s life had been filled with psychological pain. He’d always thought that was the worst. Like an itch, you can’t scratch. He was wrong, physical pain was an incredibly humbling teacher. He remembered every time in his life where he'd complained, taken something for granted, disparaged the hardworking. He remembered because he needed somewhere for his mind to escape the relentless ordeal of training with Brock. He did three one-hour sessions. To Rick, they felt like three one-year sessions. What Brock called light exercise. The beginner stuff.
Rick had been pumped when he materialised in the simulation. Brock had pointed to a temple at the top of a winding staircase around one of those mystical pillar mountains from Chinese legends. Rick had started up the stairs enthusiastically but had quickly become tired. That’s when he knew he’d been tricked. This was no video game. Turned out it was a pain simulator.
For all his bitching and whining Rick needed the training and the discipline. And each simulated day was an iota more bearable than the previous. It was working, strengthening his mind and resolve, as well as his body. The neural converter worked with his muscle memory actuators and stimulators to convert virtual gains into physical ones. His body constantly ached since his training had begun, but Moon had noticed the changes. Worth the pain. She was obsessed with his buns and kept grabbing them. Rick played the objectified victim for her when she did, and she loved it.
All was well, as it usually is before problems. They’d reached the system undetected by any Council ships. Mostly because, as Diego liked to remind them, he was an outstanding pilot and knew all the best routes. The first Council fleet had finished its pacifying mission on the outer rim. For a decade now it had served and protected transhumanity’s wildest scientific experiments on the outskirts of the system. The fleet was usually spread thin as it needed to cover the dozens of AUs that separated the dwarf planet systems from each other. Diego had assured them they’d reach Eris undetected and they had.
Rick had been mesmerised on approach. The grand works he’d witnessed throughout their adventure had impressed him. Each and every stop on their voyage had revealed more ambitious designs. But this was different. The scope of what was being attempted here baffled him. A planet being transformed, giant space factories and reactors and more robots than he’d ever seen. Billions, buzzing everywhere, some incredibly large. Rick could see few ships. The people were the ships out here.
The top of Eris was gone, like a soft boiled egg that’d been cracked open and its inside devoured. The largest space station in existence had been built around and inside of it. Eris’ moon, Dysomnia, was gone. Devoured, like half of the Kuiper belt and space debris past Neptune.
“But why though?”
“Why not?” Moon had Rick there.
“You say they’ve been on it for twenty years already. Just collecting materials and building the stuff they’ll need. But they don’t actually know if they’ll get anything to work.”
“Twenty years is nothing on the grand scheme of things! With unlimited energy, our civilisation could spread to the far reaches of the Universe.”
“Would that be a good thing?” Gary’s spark was gone, only dark words in his recent contributions.
“I guess that depends.” Moon seemed done with the conversation.
“On what?” Rick asked, but his attention was waning.
“Everything.” Moon left it at that, Rick was satisfied enough and his gaze returned to the pharaonic constructions on the road to Eris.
He understood the gist of everything now. They were collecting a lot of stuff to make a small sun and more stuff to capture that sun’s energy to power a white hole farm that would produce even more energy. Because aliens made them do it. Seems reasonable. Rick wanted to meet the nutcases behind this project.
◆◆◆
Diego brought the ship in orbit above Eris. Brock was on edge. They still hadn’t had any news from the resistance. The guys on Mars didn’t know much more than they did and Pops was gone. Rick wasn’t even sure there was any resistance left. He’d kept that thought to himself though. A depressed Brock was not recommended.
This was their last chance to get in touch with anyone from the resistance before leaving the system. Brock still had the Mr Food blueprints and dino embryos. Or at least Rick thought Brock still had them. He found himself thinking about their mission again. He’d obtained his freedom and upgraded himself, also got the girl. Rick didn’t care about the rest so much.
The whole premise of the resistance was confusing to him. He’d found the colonies were nothing like he’d expected. Not better. Not worse. Just different. True, he’d observed extensive orbital farming operations around the planetary systems. They were here too. But it was clear that the information that did make it to Earth was filtered. Whatever Rick thought he knew about the solar system was sketchy. All he’d ever heard was word of unrest in colonies. He’d expected to find rag-tag outposts on barren lands during his travels. Space peasants. Instead, he’d found advanced societies with needs on par with Earth.
The needs of Eris were different. It was the furthest of the outer rim dwarf planets. Rick felt something strange when he disembarked from the shuttle. This world felt lonely. So far from the Sun. So far from everything. Dark. Removed. Alien. This was the farthest any of them had been. Even Diego had to admit he hadn’t been to Eris before.
They had no plan. Brock was just going to ask around in bars until they found something out and Diego would do the same. Rick had joked that he should probably do the same. He was told to keep his helmet on and mouth shut.
They hadn’t made it twenty metres into their well-structured plan when they were accosted by a Smartcube. The AI had a 3D model of an eighties action movie superstar. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Rick loved watching that guy’s movies growing up. Some of the best memories he had.
“Hi, excuse me. Sorry to bother you. I’m Arnold. My friend would like to speak with you.” He had the same heavy Austrian accent. Rick loved that.
“Why doesn’t the shifty bastard come himself?” Rick’s eyes widened as he realised Gary responded.
“Excuse my friend’s tone. We’ve had a tough journey. But his question is valid.” Brock with the save.
“My friend simply can’t fit down here. He’s rather large. Come with me, please.”
It was fucking Arnold Schwarzenegger, or at least bits of him imbued into an AI. Rick followed and tugged on Moon’s hand; she pulled back. Moon was exchangin
g worried looks with Brock and the AIs. Rick knew what they were thinking. He’d thought it too. How could someone already know they were here? Nobody could have beat them here in a spaceship. But information travelled quickly... Rick gave them all the “come on after all we’ve been through what else could we possibly lose” look, and they followed the cube. They didn’t have to go far. Arnold led them to parking bay a bit further down. No ship was waiting for them. Instead, there was a giant robot. Rick had to crane his head to the maximum to see its head. His sensors told him the thing was fifty-one metres tall. Having a conversation was going to prove difficult. He started wondering if he’d been recognised and this was a prank show. The robot’s voice came out of a speaker near the ankle. How thoughtful and humiliating at the same time.
“Hey, Rick. Good to see you…” That voice. It was digital, but Rick knew it.
“Um… Hi, giant robot… Have we met?”
Instead of an answer, a small projector somewhere on the robot’s leg beamed the hologram of a human. Rick was speechless. The hologram spoke.
“They call me Mega Prime now, son…”
Uninvited Guests
Rick was silent. He stared at the hologram of his father. The man he thought had abandoned him. The man he’d recently discovered was murdered by the same people trying to kill him. That man was standing before him. Well, a hologram, beamed from a robot’s ankle. What the fuck? He had questions before. But he’d begun making his peace now. The Universe and its fucking spanners.
Rick was falling, down a deep dark hole, and he tried grabbing onto branches made out of questions but couldn’t grasp any. He was falling. He felt Moon’s hand grab his and he was back. His father’s hologram was still standing there. He should probably say something. Something cool and mysterious.
“Do you have somewhere we can talk?”
“Meet me at my place. Arnold will lead you there.”
Space Shenanigans Page 19
