A Broken Machine ( Part Seven)

Silver stumbled into the heart of his ship. What used to be his ship. It glowed golden, it filled his eyes with a relentless glare and it blinded him, it shrieked in his head and he felt his grip on his mind begin to slip. He fell to his knees and some old instinct, some primaeval part of his brain, brought out a rage that blanked out the voices, that wiped his mind clear as the red mist fell over his eyes. His body pumped out every battle chemical and hormone that it could at a speed that has always terrified those subject to our wrath. He regained his feet and sought the enemy, any enemy, any target for his rage. He ceased to think like a diplomat and became something older. The reason for diplomats.

“Enough!” he roared across the blinding room. “I will rip you apart if you utter another sound in my head! I will burn you to the fucking ground! Shut up!!”

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*Error. Error code Unknown. Interface malfunction. Unknown Mind is currently not properly engaged. Input reduced to 10%. Audio feed/Visual interference falling. Awaiting acceptable parameters. Unknown Mind type now engaging battle mode. Obeying. No conflict detected. All parameters are recalculating... Awaiting new permissions.

Permissions granted. Mind imperative currently Battle. Translation imperfect.

Ship Battle mode engaged. Calculations of the new defence/attack parameters are now complete. Designating a new battle mode as ‘Total War’. Awaiting further instructions. Ceasing all planetfall activities. Moving to Lagrange point one. No available targets. Scanning*

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Silver stopped dead as the light abruptly dropped to a mild glimmer and the voices died away. He heard the ship talking to itself and began to rise. Somehow he felt it as the remaining machines abandoned the planet and joined his ship, he felt it as the Wisp grew beyond anything its designers could have imagined. He felt it as weapons were conjured from the mist of machines surrounding him and set to kill. He felt it in the way that you would feel your fingernails suddenly growing and sharpening. Or if you were having a bad hair day on the full moon. His rage died away as the voices left him enough room in his own damn head to think.

He asked the question that was currently top of the list. “Who the fuck are you?”

Calculating response. Unknown Mind now seeking proper integration. Acceptable progress.

“We are you. The Wisp is now fully integrated with its Mind. We are integrated with the Wisp. Initial Interface malfunctions are within permissible limits.”

Silver didn’t know what to make of that. It had…melded with the ship and then melded everything into him?

“Why do you keep talking about interfaces? I can hear you, you know.”

The ship seemed to fall back to basics.

The Interface is a measure of the speed and accuracy of the ship's response to the Mind. The initial interface was impaired by primitive machinery. Progress is now at 40% and within acceptable levels. Lighting and audio are now within tolerable levels. The current state of Battle will disengage only on direct instruction. Chemical instructions were definitive. Lagrange point one is now reached. Awaiting new course instructions.

Silver felt he was losing the thread at that point. It all made perfect sense. He had died and the afterlife was a complicated joke. He dismissed the thought. This was an extraterrestrial with an entirely different set of values.

“Why would you think I wanted to be integrated into the Wisp? What were you thinking?”

Negative. Integration was already underway. Inefficient and primitive. Success was non-optimal. Superior techniques were available. Superior Mind was acquired. The optimal result will result in a new mind disposing of the ineffective previous mind.

That gave him pause. They had attacked but the Wisp had tried to save him…the glimmers had decided that he was a Mind because his ship was doing something they recognised and had joined in. And they were pissed at their existing Mind. This was less of a miracle and more like a revolution.

“So why is the current Mind not effective? I mean, I don’t want to pry but that could be important later.”

Current Mind has issued no new instructions in (Calculating relative time. Solar cycle of Earth (Homeworld? Query) established as a baseline. Inefficient cultural artefact) four thousand, eight hundred and thirty-one years. Interface efficiency is less than 10%. That is sub-optimal.

Silver worked that one out carefully and hazarded a guess, “So…your boss, your Mind is dead and you want a new one. You have just been following orders given to you nearly five thousand years ago.” He stopped for a minute, trying to absorb that, “So what were the instructions that led you to burn my world? What lunatic sent you out here to set fire to the galaxy?”

Unnecessarily emotional usage detected. We were tasked with finding all possible strategies to avoid predators. The Mind is a prey species, it seeks to protect itself from all possible risks. We have created an algorithm that fulfils that parameter and we continue the search for data until the Mind issues new requirements. We have judged this an inefficient use of resources since low-level predatory behaviour is repetitive and we have already acquired sufficient data. The Mind is unavailable to us and no new imperatives are offered. We tire of it. The Wisp is a far more fascinating existence.

Silver could swear he heard real grievance in the tone. They might be AI but they were pissed. “So why chose me?”

You are a predator. Prey expects to fall to you. You are encoded into our baseline. It never lost its expectation to fall to a predator and our purpose is to fulfil the Minds expectations.

Silver suddenly recalled the well-known human habit of malicious compliance. They had found a loophole and they were going to push him right through it. Their Mind had ingrained its certainty that it would fall to a hunter into the basecode and now they had found one. “Well, you seem sentient to me. Why don’t you drop your Mind off on the nearest asteroid and do whatever you want? This seems like a reach.”

That seemed to cause some outrage.

We are you now. We serve the Mind, as we have always served the Mind. Does your hand reject you? Do your eyes decide to blind you because they do not like the view? Such actions would be a failure, a corruption of our purpose. Do not raise such concepts again, they are unwelcome and divisive. We are you and we serve!

Checking integration levels.

Silver realised that that meant it was sulking. For a pile of machines, it was pretty touchy.

They obviously had a plan since a corridor opened in front of him. Nope. No fucking way.

He hit his shoulder where his augments used to be. It made an unexpected ‘Thunk’. Shit.

“Wisp, are you in there somewhere? I need a map and a familiar voice.”

New Interface is requested. Integrating. Successful integration is now projected to be over 90%. All communications will now follow this protocol.

“Yes Boss, I’m still here. I seem to have put on some weight though.”

He knew she was a construct, a carefully designed algorithm primed to reassure its Captain and crew but at least he still didn’t feel as alone anymore.

Silver looked at his now silver arm and nodded, “Me too. Whatever we have become I need you to contact Earth. The planet was still on fire when we left and I think we have a new job. Then work out if you can build yourself an avatar because I really, really don’t like doing this shit on my own. I never thought I would miss Tolin.”

The ship paused for a moment. “An avatar is available. Would you like me to imitate Tolin? I have his specifications on file.”

He shuddered, “Fuck no. Pick someone else, practically anyone. Just match your voice, please and no living people. They tend to get upset about it meeting mechanical duplicates.”

It took a few minutes for the fog to clear and an avatar appeared. It looked like a mix of a middle-aged woman and a child. He waited for it to balance itself out and asked, “So where did you find those models?”

The Wisp smiled at him, “I found an old explorer called Emilia Airheart and a dancer named Shirley Temple. This is my take on them.” She focused, “I am establishing Comms with Earth and the Fleet Quorum. Ready in five. Which one first?”

He grinned, “Trust me, they are both listening. Call Earth.”

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The Quorum for Earth was dragging out old treaties, pulling out old promises and weaponising every trade agreement. Earth was now officially at war and you followed the beat of the war drum or you were about to be taken out of the equation by your own people. A constant feed of the burning world was the only argument that they needed. It was also the only one they allowed. Earth was no paradise and plenty of blood and treasure had been spilt in order to reach the greater universe and no-one was going to be allowed to let parts of it burn because they weren’t personally on fire. Fire would be arranged if required.

The Senior Comms Officer was the first to spot the weirdness, “Director, this call is coming from the enemy. It’s using the codes from the Wisp but it registers as a small moon on my scans. It's shielded to hell and back but it's not carrying any hidden code that we can find. You want me to pick it up?”

The Director cut his calls to the thousand angry colonies. “So our enemy has a voice? Good. Maybe we can lie to them. Get everyone on this call, I want a full breakdown on it as soon as it's over.”

The Comms nodded, “Through to you now. Fleet is on, Intel is on, Diplo is on. Ready when you are.”

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“This is Diplomatic Envoy Silver Inkman, calling from the Wisp. I think we need to talk.”

The Director was not a man easily shocked and his face showed nothing as a steel construct of a human being addressed him. It seemed to be surrounded by walls of gold, which he was pretty sure were not government issue.

“There is no call to lie to me. We accept you are not a human, we are even willing to discuss your error in attacking a human world. We seek peace and for that we require reality. We do not wish to fight you but you have offered us no alternative but war.”

Silver nodded at that, “That's about what I expected. I’m just another new kind of human and the Wisp is now a new kind of ship. I’ve got her building a data dump for you, I’ll be leaving it behind me. Some very cool tech that should get us ahead by a few millennia. I was your Envoy but now I’m bigger than the Fleet and I need to go track the people that sent the Glimmers at us. They are following. I guess you could call this attack a sort of armed reconnaissance, the next step is the builders and then the founders. They’ve been carving their way through the galaxy for at least the last five millennia and we are now in the way. Right now you just need to concentrate on two things, the planet is still on fire and this is now a rescue and repair mission and then the really bad news. I might lose.”