Herod had found the last week to be frustrating to say the least. His assignment had been to completely learn about graviton particle enhancement to inverted paired quark clusters, which led to axiom particle systems and jabberwork waveform interactions. The worst part was, he was supposed to learn it in two different ways. One, with the technology and technical knowledge of the time the information was researched then learn it again with modern knowledge of particle physics.

Which lead to constant headaches as one tried to keep the knowledge separate.

The others DS researchers were having the same problem. Having to work in their fields with the knowledge of the time period and then with modern knowledge.

It was not uncommon, during the 'socialization breaks' to hear two or three DS lament over the fact that the work seemed impossible, or redundant, or just plain a dead end of appear to be of no use.

Herod was working, the day before the weekly report meeting, when he 'felt' someone access the room. When he turned to look, 'Victor' stood in the virtual space, looking around with some curiosity. He examined each board as Herod studiously ignored him.

He claimed to be Legion, one of the famed Immortals from the Crusade of Wrath, but Herod had his doubts, as did a lot of the DS working in the facility.

The concept of Immortals was ludicrous, just as ridiculous as the idea that the Digital Omnimessiah was anything more than a badly damaged AI that had managed to survive the glassing of Terra. Just as outrageous as the idea of human 'psykers' or 'psychic warriors' that supposedly were wiped out during the so-called Crusade of Wrath.

"Interesting path to take. Perhaps you'll be able to figure something out that everyone else missed," Victor said quietly.

"We have access to what they knew back then but not how they had fit it all together. I cannot see how they went from 'neural patterns are recordable' to 'immortal' just based off of all what they knew at the time," Herod admitted.

"I see," Victor said, moving around and looking down at the data, which was streaming by at a comfortable rate for Herod to examine.

"You were there, how was it done?" Herod asked, feeling frustration at what felt to be an impossible project.

"I wasn't there for the initial foundation or initial deployment. I had to reverse engineer everything, every step, just like we're doing now," Victor said.

Herod looked up, doing his best to hold back annoyance. "If you reverse engineered the system, why don't you clue everyone else in on how it was done?"

Victor shrugged. "It took me ten years of constant work and I had access to an unfinished SUDS extension system."

"Why don't we have access to that? Having some of the hardware would be invaluable," Herod said, resisting the urge to start swearing.

"Because they planet-cracked the world it was on," Victor said. "That was the least of the Imperium's screw ups in that act. By the time the dust settled, nobody even remembered what I was doing, only that the Imperium had killed me by planet-cracking the world all of me was on."

Herod waved up an eVR chair and sat down. "How did you survive? Everyone says you were killed at the end of the Clone War."

Victor shook his head. "The Genome Crusade, not the Clone War. The Clone War was something else."

"Fine, the Genome Crusade, you were killed at the end of it."

Victor nodded slowly. "Yes, I was. As close as you can get without extreme measures."

Herod frowned. "Planet cracking isn't an extreme measure?"

Again, Victor just shrugged, his thick beard making him somewhat inscrutable. "Depends on what you're trying to do. Planet-cracking to get rid of a spider in one guy's living room is extreme measures. Novasparking a system because your favorite eVR soap opera had a commercial break is extreme. Planet cracking to try to get rid of me and the other Immortal that was there? A serious case of not bringing enough firepower to handle the problem," again, Victor shrugged. "The Crusade was over anyway. They'd destroyed my fleets, eliminated my armies, it was basically over when they planet-cracked me to remove evidence of what they had actually done."

Herod found himself interested anyway. "What did they actually do?"

"Kidnapped me. They wanted me to do something for them. I forget what exactly, things got a little exciting when the other Immortal made his displeasure obvious," Victor said.

"What other Immortal?" Herod asked.

"Osiris."

Herod shook his head. "Osiris? He was killed."

Again, Victor shrugged. "You know him as Daxin."

Herod just sighed, rocking back and forth slightly in the chair. "Neither name really seem to matter. Wait, are you claiming that this Daxin/Osiris survived being planet-cracked?"

Victor laughed, standing up and walking toward the door. "It wasn't the first time."

Herod felt irritated by the fact that before he could formulate a reply Victor was gone.

---------------------

Sweet Springwater-577392 sat down at the table in front of Herod, an eVR plate of food in front of her. Not that Digital Sentiences needed to eat, but the social time and the personal interaction of 'meal time' was important. Sure, they could exchange data at multiples of the speed of sound by just exchanging data-packets, but what made a Digital Sentience more than an eVI or a VI was the need for sociability, group bonding, and emotional connections.

"So what do you think of our host and all of his incarnations?" she asked Herod.

Herod swirled his 'pudding' with a spoon, mixing up the digital packets to change the flavor of the data. "I don't know, it's difficult to believe half of what he's saying, not to mention the task he's set for us seems impossible."

"What does he have you working on?" Sweet asked, smiling. "It doesn't matter if you tell someone in here, this is a Black Box, there's nobody to overhear."

"I'm not even sure. My two separate tasks right now are to understand subatomic particles and waveform interactions the same way they understood them prior to the Great Glassing and modernize the ancient formula according to modern scientific knowledge."

Sweet shook her head. "Whew. That's... an impressive task."

"What about you?" Herod asked.

"Dark Matter, particle types Zero-One-Alpha to Five-Nine-Omega, half of the dark matter particles that were known about prior to the Glassing and then working with those same particles and their interactions with what we know of now," Sweet said. She smiled and took a sip of her 'drink'. "Do you know what amazes me?"

Herod shook his head. "Enlighten me."

"That our parents figured all of this out, knowledge that we still have difficulty with thousands of years later, before they ever left their home planet, before they even achieved superluminal flight. They did it, not like everyone else with overwhelming proof, but on the scantest observational data. From dark matter to subatomic particle mathematics to observational energy functions," she sighed. "Can you imagine how heady it was, how awe inspiring, how exciting?"

"How frustrating," Herod said. "All they had was observational data. No actual proof."

"Wait..." Sweet looked thoughtful. "Observational data only," she suddenly stood up. "That's how they were forced to... without the mastery of... dammit, it was so obvious... had to figure out how and why the state changes occurred without... it's so obvious."

Without another word she jumped up and ran to the door, pressing her hand against the datapad and dissolving.

That was another thing Herod found annoying. You were allowed to manifest or de-rez in hallways, but not in rooms. If you manifested in one room you had to walk to the other one, even if it lost valuable minutes, instead of just rezzing in and out. You had to use pads to appear and disappear.

It was annoying and Herod was pretty sure it was a violation of his Rights of Digital Movement.

"You look pissy," Flowerpatch said, setting down her tray of salad and gelatin. She picked up a piece of pan-fried chicken and began shredding it with her fingernails.

Herod had to admit, Flowerpatch was annoying. She used particle disintegration technology to strip her food to the basic atoms and particles, using those particles to run her nanites. She didn't appear as a hologram, but actually used nanites as a distributed network to hold her awareness.

"My task is proving difficult," Herod admitted.

"Could be worse. Mine's giving me absolute fits. I'm not allowed to use any materials post-Glassing, any fabrication techniques post-Glassing unless I can validate my reasoning to our host," Flowerpatch said, shrugging. "During defrag sleep I keep having nightmares that I have justify the use of steel and bronze to him."

"Do you think we're really going to be able to do it? Rebuild the SUDS network, I mean? Not make steel or bronze," Vanishing Point asked, sitting down.

"It has to have been tried before. What makes you think this time will be any different than all of the other failures?" Herod asked, tapping his spoon against the side of his glass to refill it.

"Except now we've got Legion," Flowerpatch said, tilting her glass toward the rows of benches where nearly a hundred clones chatted, ate, and were relaxing. "Hard to believe that's all one man."

"You know, if he's still around, how many of the other Immortals are around?" Vanish mused.

"Daxin for sure. He helped some Tnvaru, I saw it on SolNet a few months back," she said. "Big ass full conversion cyborg, one of the old style," she glanced at where the clones were eating. "You know, everyone calls him a clinical immortal, as if that's why he's an immortal, but what do we know about the Immortals?"

"What does it matter?" Herod wondered.

"You know, that's the problem. They made the Immortals back then," Vanish said.

"After the Glassing," Herod pointed out. "So they aren't relative."

"Who's to say they aren't? Who's to say that the same technology, in some primitive Black Box, wasn't used to create the Immortals. If we knew how they did it, then maybe we'd know the limits of the technology," Flowerpatch suddenly stopped. "Wait, could that be it?"

"Could what be it?" Vanish started to say.

"Could it be that simple? They didn't know something was impossible, they kept going, kept pushing, kept searching, because they didn't know it was impossible, didn't already have the answers," she was standing up, stepping back from the table. "That's why we're doing it in two different ways. Not to work from the initial data to the data we have now..."

She turned and hurried away. "How could I have been so blind?" She touched the datapad and puffed into black mist.

"And then there were two," Vanish mused.

Herod just nodded. He felt like it was all of waste of time. The SUDS was lostech. All civilizations ever had lostech in their history, usually some kind of great work that nobody could ever figure out.

He sighed and paid attention to his meal.

---------------------

The room was quiet, the DS's giving off a slight sound of static that was the DS equivalent of shuffling one's feet and making uncomfortable noises.

Victor was sitting behind the desk, looking over the reports, stroking his beard and nodding to himself.

"If you understand all of our work, why are we even here?" Torturer asked.

"Because different viewpoints reveal data that is hidden from other viewpoints. One of us is the equivalent of staring at a flat dot and thinking that it is all of an object, where another viewer sees only a line, another only sees pig iron, another only the black paint, all of them are able to see the fundamental pieces of the iron rebar, but only if their data is merged do get closer to a whole picture," Victor said, still stroking his beard, without looking up from the data terminal.

"But if you have the whole picture, why us?" Torturer repeated.

"To continue my analogy and answer your question," Victor said, still not looking up. "I know it is a rebar, I know the rebar was used in construction, but I do not know how it was used, why it was used, or in what manner it was used, much less the other parts of the building."

He sat silently for a long moment then sighed.

"You are aware that you are supposed to be all consulting with one another and working as a team, correct?" Victor asked.

There were nods, murmurs of assent, and a few vocalized "yes" out of the group.

"Then we need a team building exercise," Victor said. He snapped his fingers and everyone found themselves in a blank eVR space. "Here's the deal. Each of you will be assigned your express goal. Let's check you for teamwork."

"But what..." Herod got out before everything dissolved again.

He found himself standing in the fleet command bridge aboard a ship that held the aura of being new and being thrown together in a hurry so it could be pushed into the string of battles it had barely managed to fight its way through. Immediately he had the eVR cold tickle feel of a data-download, which told him his objectives, his assets, who and what he was, and what part he had in the overall scheme.

Herod sighed. He hated military sims. Even being a Vice Admiral, he almost despised Real Time Strategy Games.

His fellow DS were all assigned Fleet Admiral status too, he saw that when he saw the "Active Players" list and checked it against the other leaders.

Well, at least his objectives were simple. Create a beachhead stable enough to deploy beacons, enable the Marines and Army to make planetfall, set up logistics bases. Keep the enemy fleet vessels from destroying his fleet.

At least the target was simply a planet and two moons.

He sighed again and went to work.

---------------------

"That was sub-optimal," Victor said softly. He shook his head. "Can any of you describe what went wrong?"

All of the DS's looked at one another. They had all achieved their objectives.

"Nothing," Flowerpatch said.

"How many of you recognized that simulation?" Victor asked.

Everyone's hands went up.

"That's why I pressed the attack so hard," Torturer said.

Victor shook his head. "If we had played it out, you would have lost the war. You took seventy-percent casualties, half of you lost your ships after podding your Marines."

"It's an impossible scenario! Even the Confederate Navy recognizes that!" Vanishing said.

"Like you could do better," Torturer said.

"Here," Victor touched his fingers to his temple and winced as he drew out a mass of code. He balanced it on his finger then made a tossing motion. "Feel free to relive that."

He stood up as the room began to slowly dissolve. "It's in real-time. I'll see you all in a week."

------------------

"Do you all understand why I showed you that?" Victor asked.

The room was quiet, subdued.

Of course, bearing witness to the death of 3.2 million humans, a million Rigellians, ten million Treana'ad, and 48,000 Pubvians (resulting in their race's extinction), as well as nearly 2 billion mantid, would subdue even the most jovial soul.

"No," Torturer said quietly. "You oversaw the landing. To rub in our faces that you did better in reality than anyone here did."

"That's your ego talking. Think. You're some of the most intelligent beings in the galaxy. Why would I have you do a simulation of the battle than show you my actions as Fleet Admiral?" Victor asked. "Note I wasn't in tactical command, I wasn't in command of the landing forces once they hit the ground beyond relaying objectives I could spot, note that I wasn't in ship command."

"Could you really stretch yourself that far?" Flowerpatch asked.

Victor shrugged. "I'm not sure of my limits."

It was Torturer, famed for being somewhat solitary. "You gave us the reason you were doing it," he said. "A team building exercise. It was to show us the difference between how we perform acting exactly as you knew we would, as individuals, compared to your overall individual within the team-work approach as well as looking for different ways of achieving your multiple objectives," Torturer looked at everyone. "He had the Clone Worlds ships break action, fall back, and reload their fast-growth tanks. It slowed the invasion, but enabled you to use the clones instead of dropping additional Terran infantry."

"Why didn't you stop the Pubvian Legions?" Flower asked. "You sent them into where the fighting would be the thickest, where the enemy would be in the most strength and would mobilize the most troops fighting."

Victor leaned back, putting his feet up on the desk. "Because it was either that or they were going to use their ships to ram the planet. Everyone overlooks one simple thing: they were already extinct. Already crazed. The ones that weren't killed or committed suicide had been driven completely insane by the Mantid attack into SolNet and the SUDS network. They were literally Screaming Ones. The ones who didn't die in the assault of Anthill became Idiots."

"Oh," Flower said, shivering.

"I just checked. All of our specialties slightly overlap other member of the research team's specialties, but we're all working by ourselves, we aren't working together," Torturer said.

"Now you're getting it," Victor said, standing up and smiling.

For some reason the biobod's smile made Herod think of burning planets.

Victor made a motion and several pieces of complex molycirc appeared. "These are the SUDS user interfaces, from before the Great Glassing until now. This is what goes into people's skulls to constantly update the master SUDS. This is a SUDS template applicator. That is a SUDS repeater. That is a SUDS local storage. These are all the pieces of the SUDS network we know how to manufacture and know what to do, although you'll notice the repeaters are largely a mystery on why they work."

Flowerpatch had gotten up, looking at the hologram. "Will we have access to physical copies, both used and unused?"

Victor nodded, still smiling.

"Get it together. You have one week, then I'll be expecting you all to be interlocked," Victor said.

----------------

MANTID FREE WORLDS

That was weird.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

What was weird, sis?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS

I could have swore...

...naw. I must be imagining things.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

AKLTAK GESTALT

Hey, Tnvaru, you here?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TNVARU GESTALT

Yes?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

AKLTAK

Some of your people want to stay on our world. The transport fleet stopped by to give everyone a couple of days in a gravity well. About ten thousand of your people stayed behind.

They're welcome to. It's kind of nice.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TNVARU GESTALT

Thank you. It was hard leaving our home planet, but there is nothing there for us any more.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TELKAN FORGE WORLDS

We'll stick with you while you figure out your place in the universe.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

they grow up so fast...