The generators sequence, p.1
The Generators Sequence, page 1
The Generators Sequence
Short Stories from the M&W Books Newsletter
M. David Scoble
Copyright © 2020 by M. David Scoble
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover design by MiblArt.
https://miblart.com
Moogi and Wil Books, LLC
Baltimore, Maryland
www.mandwbooks.com
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020905973
First Edition
Created with Vellum
For Joy, Alexander, and Elysia.
For Moogi and Wil, as they journey on the other side of the Rainbow Bridge.
For Zachtaloctl and the Truffinator.
Contents
1. Twilight Rising
Verdant Sun
Awakened
Survivor
Prey
Predator
Predicament
Pirates
Frying Pan
Fire
Twilight Rising
2. Windfall
Aftermath
Assignment
Emerging
Hard Landing
Weapons
Attacked
Report
Caution
Wounded
Caspar
The Hunt
Windfall
3. Overburdened
In The News
Mission
Contact
Evidence
Bad News
Smashed
Take The Risk
Double Agent
Worse News
Doublecross
A Convenient Solution
Overburdened
4. Earthed
A Bath in Juno
Running on the Wheel
A Visit with Aunt Tuti
Mixed Messages
Thinking Out Loud
Amelie Nitara
Cat Call - Collared
A Night with the Snakes
A Viper with the Snakes
From the Cradle
To the Grave
Earthed
Afterword
A Request from M&W Books and M. David Scoble
Acknowledgments
About the Author
1
Twilight Rising
Verdant Sun
The Vedic cruiser rotated out into our dimensional space, shedding imaginary 9th dimensional particles that confused our simple sensors. The soft sensors were not fooled. Simple sensors without imagination spat out errors, soft sensors let their minds go beyond impossible math.
Cleared hot. Simulated ranging complete. Fire for effect.
The orders came in through the linked network to every gunner and soft sensor on the Verdant Sun. Particles and anti-particles streamed from dozens of locations on our hull, all bound for the Vedic ship. The gunners had freedom to select the fire they laid out, particles or anti-particles, whatever they thought had the best chance of penetration. Vedic ships were hard to kill, so the gunners tried to be unpredictable. They weren’t.
Our simple sensors confirmed the Vedic sent out multiple waves of particles to negate our anti-particles. They splashed out strange quarks, Higgs-bosons, and other, more unusual particles that distorted our beams. Tiny flashes of light winked on and off between the Vedic cruiser and the Verdant Sun, then our weapons went silent. The fight was over; the Vedic was in our linked network. Our soft sensors, gunners, and probably half the organic crew was gone. The simple system would euthanize them now. Weapons that refuse to fight are dangerous. The simple systems took over. The inorganic weapons began firing, expending fuel, precious stores of rare gases, material we could not replace in this star system. The simple system injected inbresol into my spinal implant, waking me from the twilight awareness where I slept. At least the simple system knew this was an emergency.
Emergency system on-network. Verdant Sun acknowledges command transfer. Tristan 08 in command.
I was in charge. The linked network was worse than I thought. I was fully integrated into the network, and I could tell the simple system had euthanized all the organics except for me. I was the only mind keeping the network alive, so I let it die. No sense in talking to a dead ship. No sense leaving a door for the Vedics to come in. It was time to leave. The fight was lost.
I released a marker buoy from the hull and began rotating into higher dimensional space. The 9th dimensional particles began to collect around me. I had just moments to get out. The marker buoy would take care of things from here out, and I needed the Verdant Sun to be gone when it did. And in the next moment, it was. Anti-climax. I was in the imaginary dimension beyond the physical universe. The marker buoy should have detonated. Scorched the system we had been guarding. Hopefully, the Vedic cruiser was caught in the destruction. Usually they were not. I didn’t understand why or how they avoided it. The marker buoys created a tremendous space-time distortion, releasing destructive forces not unlike a supernova but without a star’s mass. Yet Vedic ships almost always seemed to escape destruction.
Not that it mattered now. I was on my way home. I saved a dead ship. Again. Emergency over. Until the next one. I wondered what it would be like to save a living ship, or just to be awake and walking on a living ship. Something like that had never happened to me yet, not in 50 years as an Autonomous Organic Emergency System. What would it be like to see another human?
The ship rotated back into real space, the Hartnell system. The simple system injected the sedative drugs into me and I entered twilight again.
Emergency system deactivated. Hartnell control established. Command transfer complete. Tristan 08 in stasis.
Good night, my sweet.
Awakened
They removed me from the Verdant Sun when they decommissioned it at Hartnell Station. Ships that survived a Vedic incursion were always decommissioned and broken down for analysis. I was just one more system removed and analyzed. Removed from the Verdant Sun’s simple system, my handlers cased me in a temporary transport network. Autonomous Organic Emergency Systems were integral to warships, but removed from a warship, an AOES was a class 4 military asset and required a full network connection with sedation. Twilight status, as if I had never left the simple system.
The new network was rougher than the Sun’s simple system. Temporary networks were crude compared to the full suite of life support and tactical assets I felt when I was integrated into a ship. It was a difference that I recognized, but only just. The crude temporary network kept the right levels of sedation in my system, and that was enough.
They analyzed me along with the corpse of the Sun, my actions measured, evaluated, and judged. I passed muster and entered deep sedation as the transport network injected ketamine into my spinal ports. Ketamine was a sign that they judged me serviceable and ready for reinstallation into a ship. There really were only two other options, decommission or storage. I would be decommissioned if my actions been judged in error, or had they had found me obsolete. I would have been euthanized just as the system had put the organics on the Sun down. Storage was worse. An AOES doesn’t like to think about the boneyard, but as I exited twilight and entered the disembodied sleep of ketamine, I only thought about the next ship, the next mission, and with luck, remaining in twilight until I was obsolete.
Emergency system on-network. Incandescent Vision acknowledges command transfer. Tristan 08 in command.
Shit. I was in charge. Again. How long had it been since Hartnell? I queried the ship’s linked network for a time adjustment. The response was immediate. Seventeen years had passed, not bad. 6,125 standard days, 360 standard days in a year, a handful of hours, minutes, and seconds. Curious.
I had taken precious moments to request the time adjustment and unbelievably the simple system had allowed me to dwell on its response.
I had taken the time to soft think about it, organic thinking and consideration. The fight must have already been over. The simple system would never have allowed me to query the linked network for that kind of information, let alone think about it if there was an ongoing emergency. Another activation, another dead ship, but nothing for me to do this time.
I swept through the sensor suites, simple sensors, artificial algorithmic sensors, finally the soft sensor links. The response was immediate and positive from the simple sensors. The algorithmic sensors paused, considered themselves mostly functional and replied in the affirmative. The soft sensor links all returned negative. The crew was dead, not a big surprise.
Curiously, the live sensors reported an undefined emergency condition. Vedic technology signatures radiated all around the Incandescent Vision. Not large signatures, rather many smaller signals, Vedic tech suffused the space around and inside the Vision. The condition was undefined because the system had recorded nothing like it before. Ever.
I brought up all eight of my remote drones, cycled the full sensor and weapon compliments. The shear volume of Vedic signatures around the Vision was something I had never experienced, no AOES had. I relayed a system call to the algorithmic sensors, find the 9th dimensional particles.
The response curve was flat. Query response plane. Also flat. There were precisely zero 9th dimensional particles in the system. Impossible.
The Visi on had arrived in the system via submersion drive, there had to be traces of the higher dimension, I queried the algorithmics again.
Response conclusive. No presence of particles outside of normal physical parameters.
Shit. Mystery. I disliked mysteries.
If there was no threat, no Vedic ship despite their tech signatures being everywhere, then there was nothing left to do but return to station. I queried the navigation for the closest destination.
Epsilon Colony, was the reply. Prison system. Great, prison systems, epsilons, were not hubs or suitable harbors for advanced ships. I queried the Vision for its ship designation and classification.
Epsilon Transport Incandescent Vision. Alpha 9.
A prison transport ship. Alpha 9 meant end of life. Well, this was a new experience for me. Tristan 08, AOES for a prison transport at the end of its life. Could anything but obsolescence be in my future? Probably not.
Fine. Dead crew. Nearly dead prison ship. At least I could bring one last ship home. I queried the drive system. Engines needed to begin the submergence protocols to rotate out of real space. The sooner, the better. Time to get this life over with.
Response negative. The engines were not on the linked network.
I sent a remote out to manually activate the sequence.
The video link that came back surprised me. Another surprise, another mystery.
The engines were gone. The remote recorded open space where the engines should have been, open, empty space. Hard vacuum.
I queued the stasis pod to release me. I had to see this with my own eyes.
Survivor
Detaching from a stasis pod is a pain in the ass. Literally. The spine is integrated into the stasis pod through nodes in the L4 and L5 vertebrae. Tiny claws, latches, and fluid links itch like a sandpaper enema when you decouple the spinal nodes.
I sent the remotes out to survey the rest of the ship. I didn’t need any more surprises. I didn’t expect it to take very long, an Epsilon Transport was not a large vessel.
I made my way to the engine compartment. The nerves in my legs were not responding properly yet, so I let the simple system take over my basic movements. Regular blood flow would restore soon, then the nerves would work right and there would be no errors from my human systems. The numbness in my limbs made it hard to walk.
My remote hovered in the air just inside the engine bulkhead. The heavy doors seated in the bulkhead where closed, hard vacuum lay beyond. I walked to the wall-mounted monitor and observed the image beyond the door. Empty space. The entire compartment was missing. It almost seemed as if the engine had been unbolted from the rest of the Vision. I queried the simple sensors. The concentration of Vedic technology was exceptionally high beyond the bulkhead doors.
I instructed the monitor to steer its sensors around the whole of the missing compartment. The sensor panned across the space, a cubic hectare of missing engine. Then I saw it. The engine. Zoom. Pan left and up. Zoom.
No doubt about it. Three kilometers and moving away from the Vision at a meter per second, there was the submersion engine. In free space. Shit.
It shouldn’t have been possible. Submersion engines are not actually bolted into a vessel, they are an integral part of the vessel’s body. I supposed with enough time and power an engine could be cut from a vessel, but a quick time adjustment request from the linked network let me know that less that four minutes had passed from the inception of the emergency condition to my full activation as the Autonomous Organic Emergency System. Normally, command transferred to the AOES in under 10 milliseconds, but the linked network did not consider this a combat emergency. This was an undefined emergency, and now I knew why. It was impossible in the time given for the engine to be removed and drift over 3,000 meters away from the Vision. It had to be the Vedic tech.
I received a ping from one of my remotes. Motion detected. Organic.
I requested video and a data review.
Motion detected. Organic. Video link established.
What the hell was going on here. The video link showed a flash of movement, too quick for identification, but there were definite organic traces left behind. Maybe skin cells, hair. Hell, scales for all I knew. I tasked remote Zero-5 to collect a sample and begin analysis.
I contacted the ship’s manifest. If there were crew still alive, this would be a first for me. Actual human beings. Others like me, but with less hardware. I could turn over control to them, go back into stasis.
Twenty-seven crew were on the manifest. All accounted for in the logs. All deceased. I sent the artificial algorithmics a task to locate the crew by their implants, find the closest integral sensors with a suitable angle. Send me the video links when complete. Algorithmic sensors were very good at that sort of task. I turned away from the bulkhead and its monitor, took a step and received the completed task from the algorithmics. Twenty-five video links. Twenty-five positively identified corpses. Where were the other two? I requested the remaining two crew links and their biometric data links. Nothing.
One of my remotes pinged an alert. It had entered the cargo bay and decided an executive decision was necessary. I opened the remote’s link.
The cargo bay had been converted into prison cells. Very large prison cells. Not entirely unexpected. The Incandescent Vision probably started life out as a normal cargo vessel, not an Epsilon Transport, Alpha 9. I didn’t care enough to look it up in the Vision’s service logs.
What I cared about was the size of the prison cells. They were large. I sent the remote to the first cell, queried the external monitor. The image showed me the reason the remote needed an executive decision. The prisoners were dead. Dead non-humans. The holding cell contained an Evo-ape. An Evolved ape species from old Earth, a citizen of the Earth Sphere. A critter. The Incandescent Vision was a prison transport for intelligent animals from the only other human civilization in space, the critter loving Earth Sphere Systems Alliance. Damned critter-lovers.
Prey
I received the remote’s analysis of the organics. Evolved feline. Skin and fur samples. At least seven degrees of evolution past the base animal. There was a smart critter loose on my prison ship.
I requested a protocol summary from the linked network. Authorized the use of complex systems. I needed to know what to do. I may never have had a ship survive in 67 years as an AOES, but I always knew what to do. Meeting another human was easy, turn over control to any competent human authority, but a prisoner? Not covered. An Evo-feline prisoner? Not even close to covered. Another undefined emergency.
The first analysis came back. Secure all captives.
I could do that. I toggled all my remotes into non-lethal modes. Calibrated electric stimulation. Limited pharmaceutical options, two of my remotes carried extra sedatives for my systems if the stasis pod failed. I could use the drugs in this situation. I authorized conversion of the sedatives to offensive use. Now, to secure the captive.
I arrived at my remote six minutes later. This section of the Vision was crew quarters, the remote held position where it had detected the prisoner’s motion, skin, and fur samples. I closed the bulkheads between the crew quarters and the missing engine compartment as I passed through them. Lock everything down so the prisoner couldn’t double back and surprise me. If the thing even knew I was on board.
