Chapter 041: Exploration

The Equality Front is a major right-wing faction composed of surviving democracies. Its members are typically socially progressive (sometimes extremely), and economically they lean strongly socialist, with either fully planned economies or any form of strongly restricted economies (such as state capitalism or very strong interventionism).

They see themselves as descendants of the Union of Progress and Freedom, and both the Good Will Revolution and the Revolutionary Committee of the closing years of the Solar Commonwealth, and persevere in their goals to establish a democratic - and secular - form of socialism over the entirety of Mankind. On the other hand, they are known just as much for their tendency to be extremely open and often rather creative when it comes to sexuality.

While democratic and legitimately concerned with the well-being of their inhabitants (while opposing all forms of exploitation, such as slavery), the EF rarely cooperates with the APD. After all, it was the first Alliance for the Preservation of Democracy that defeated the Union of Progress and Freedom during the Third World War (and through an alliance with the fascist Iron Pact, no less). This feud continues on for centuries now.

The Equality Front also has a troublesome relationship with the Res Publica Christiana, over its secularism that often reaches the level of open persecutions of organized religious groups with intention for any societal changes alongside their doctrine. As a result, very few groups out there (primarily the Forever War or the Pact of Steel) are evil enough to warrant the Front, the Alliance and the Res Publica working together.

Encyclopedia Galactica

Book 2, page 145

***

Shuttle 03

05:19 06.08.2610 STT

Ensign Christopher Hall

“Alright, folks.” Christopher announced once he checked the data. “We’re approaching the target. A supply ship. I also just got a message from Colonel Nowak, that they found absolutely nothing alive aboard the battleship, so I do not expect any resistance on this. But stay focused, we all know how the ‘everything is going to be fine’ moments normally end for us.”

A wave of chuckles. Ananti didn’t join, probably slightly lost over what it was supposed to mean. Cycle, in the meantime, saw enough films about troubled groups of humans to - probably - think of it as a film reference and laughed too.

“We didn’t have time for joint combat training.” Christopher said. It made him incredibly angry. Sending them like that, and away from the main force, was just a recipe for disaster. What was Keller thinking? Was he even thinking recently?

Unless it was a field test of whether Christopher actually deserved his recent promotion. It would make sense, in its own weird way. What better way to test someone’s mettle than to send them on a lone journey, where they had to react to unexpected things on their own? Although he wasn’t a cadet anymore, so there was no Chief Tiaa watching over his shoulder.

“So we’ll consider this to be our training exercise.” Christopher continued. “Kivanna, you are staying outside of the ship, keep the shuttle ready in case something unexpected happens.” He didn’t add ‘again’, but it was strongly implied.

“Okee!” Kivanna seemed relieved to not take part in the boarding. Christopher could understand that.

On the other hand, wasn’t she unusually cheerful? Maybe she just liked flying things around. She was technically a starfighter pilot in training, to which she volunteered after joining the crew. So that was certainly an option.

“For the duration of this mission, we are scrapping the standard communication protocol.” Christopher continued. “Mostly because nobody on this side of the gate should even know that we exist, much less who we are.” The real problem was that having Cycle and Ananti learn in a hurry the numbers of the others was just going to be a pain. Cycle could probably write a witty computer program to do it automatically, but Ananti? No way. “Any questions?”

There were a few. Christopher replied to them as well as he could. Tiriel seemed to be looking at him with some strange expression on her face, but she didn’t say anything at the end.

Eventually Kivanna announced that they arrived. Once more space boarding. He couldn't believe that he used to be amazed by that.

***

TCS Long Road, Upper Spinal Corridor

05:57 06.08.2610 STT

Ensign Christopher Hall

The transport ship was large, but that concluded its list of interesting traits. No weaponry, minimal crew. Little more than a large cloud of cargo containers built into a ribcage of the ship itself.

They failed to land in the hangar proper, as it was naturally closed. They crossed through a few meters of void and entered the ship through a nearby airlock. No resistance, no movement, systems mostly dead.

A perfect type of boarding mission. You just had to get to the engineering, restart the reactor, hack the main computer and voila. Mission successful. Bonus points for running diagnostics on the whole thing from there, to make sure that nothing suddenly explodes. Tiaa had Christopher go through simulations of such actions ad nauseam.

They continued walking through the empty corridors. Cold, empty, airless. Occasional remains of the crew members. When the ship was knocked out, there were at least a few dozen people aboard. Before the cold and airlessness made the ship actually empty, they had enough time to notice what was happening and try to get out.

Christopher wasn’t sure if they had anywhere to ‘get out’ to. But it didn’t stop them from trying. They might have been villains, but it was still a rather horrible way to die.

They were going through a long corridor near the entrance to the Engineering section, when suddenly Ryan froze.

“Wait!” He shouted. “I think I hear something? Give me a second.” Christopher simply stared at the engineer for a few moments, wondering if there was a single other officer in their fleet who wouldn’t shout back at someone who acted like that.

Suddenly pausing in the middle of a combat operation and spending a while with an ear to the wall. Not saying what happened. Of course, there was no air so no noises - which made Christopher immediately figure out that it had something to do with Ryan’s technopathy. But it was still something to be reported instead of letting your team leader figure it out.

The fact that your boss could read people’s minds was no reason to not speak yours.

“What is he doing?” Cycle asked. They didn’t have time to introduce it to all the peculiarities of the team.

“Our dear friend Ryan is a pervert.” Tiriel announced. “Since he spent the last few hours preparing for the mission and then in the shuttle, he is in dire need of some sexual misconduct. As you can see, it got so bad that he is willing to even grope the ship’s walls.”

Ryan interrupted his investigation long enough to stare daggers at Tiriel (or at least Christopher suspected that it was the reason for his pause and moving his head to face Tiriel - the helmet made things complicated). Cycle in the meantime looked like it just understood something important.

“Oooh, I see.” The Sidhe said finally. “It has something to do with humans referring to ships with female pronouns in some languages, right?” Christopher was almost certain that Tiriel let out a loud and very undignified giggle, but cut the microphone before he could be sure. Ananti laughed loudly in the background.

“Don’t listen to her.” Christopher decided to intervene. “It was just a very weird joke. Ryan is a technopath, and I’m sure that he is about to uphold standard and rather sensible rules for field operations and inform his commanding officer what he just discovered.” This woke up the engineer.

“Right, my bad.” Ryan said. Christopher was pleasantly surprised that the engineer's voice indicated some actual remorse. “I think I heard… damn, stupid sorcerous terminology.” He mumbled something resembling a curse.

Christopher thus far knew only telekinesis and meta-empathy. The former was rather straightforward, but the latter was counted into the stranger powers. He understood Ryan’s plight - he had issues properly describing some of the things he did with the meta-empathy. Good example was the ability to forcefully induce an emotion onto someone (like he did once or twice with the Endless in the Echelon Base).

The closest term he found to properly describe the action was ‘screaming an emotion into someone’. Everything other than that just didn’t feel right. And he wasn’t even sure how to discuss this with someone - other meta-empaths like Innocent understood, but had similar issues with wording certain things.

And technopathy was supposedly ten times weirder than meta-empathy. Cue Ryan’s current problems with trying to describe what he felt.

“I think I heard some activity in the computer systems.” He finally announced. “I’m just not sure what it was. But I’m certain it wasn’t just random, uhm, chatter of computer systems. It was something more, errr, active.”

Wonderful. Complications.

“Man, how do you even survive on the Echo if you hear every ‘random chatter of computer systems’?” Tendrik decided to ask, while Christopher reported the finding to the fleet. He didn’t expect anything back, save for a standard ‘message received’. The report was too vague to act seriously on it.

“You know that slight white noise sound before you sleep?” Ryan replied. “Well, it’s just like that, only permanently. If there is no serious activity from time to time, I start to hear the background noises. Which are something like said white noise, just, uhm, less…” He sighed. “Ok, I’m just going to give up at this point.”

“You know, you make me not want to awaken technopathy now.” Christopher said, prompting the engineer’s chuckle. “Alright, does anyone has a clue how close we are to Engineering?” They had no schematics for the supply ships of this class. But some things were universal.

“If the structural analysis of the ship made by folks back on the Echo is correct, we are almost there.” Ryan answered. “To the end of this corridor, then we turn left.”

“Wonderful.” Christopher replied. “Let’s go and be done with it.”

***

TCS Long Road, Engineering Deck

06:14 06.08.2610 STT

Ensign Christopher Hall

They entered the Engineering cautiously. It was the most sensible place for an ambush - after all, whoever landed on the ship had to go there, and rather quickly. Preparing a trap on every single possible entry point was impossible, and so was an ambush enroute. But the possible destinations were very few, and Engineering was the most likely place.

It was a long hall, filled with computer screens and terminals. There were a number of doors and elevators leading to the ship’s main reactor, computer core and so on.

The room was dead cold and airless… but the lights were on. Some of them, at least. And some displays actually displayed something, even if most of that was gibberish.

“Not. Good.” Tendrik said, right as Christopher gestured to everyone to stop and spread around. They were way too easy targets if they simply stood right in front of the entrance.

“Tell me something I don’t know.” Christopher replied, while trying to figure out what to do. This wasn’t part of the plan.

“During the late Humanity 2.5 Project, there was an actual idea to create some sort of slime people.” Tendrik suddenly announced. “But the scientists gave up after deciding that there is just no way to make internal organs, veins and so on transparent, so that everything they created would end up looking like nightmare fuel.” Christopher paused and stared at the programmer in shock. “What?”

Christopher decided that Tendrik’s cybernetic part had to seriously mistranslate his ‘tell me something I don’t know part’. He had absolutely no idea what the cyborg heard, nor why he thought that it was a good idea to start talking about things like that during a field operation. Some things just existed beyond the outer edges of his cognition - and he wanted them to stay like that.

“Way to ruin the mood.” Tiriel commented. “In more ways than one.” Christopher couldn’t agree more. But he had work to do.

“Guys, this is a potentially dangerous situation.” Christopher took advantage of nothing else happening to fix the situation at least a bit. “It’s nice that you aren’t afraid, but at least treat the situation seriously.”

“Fine, fine.” Tendrik replied. “The good part is that nothing seems to be happening, and some minor computer activity is possible in the circumstances. The ship’s on emergency power, despite many months passing by, yes. But if the EMP blasted the whole thing like the Captain suspects, it’s understandable - it kicked out even the things that were supposed to be powered by emergency generators. So it lasted for much longer. Besides…” Christopher was about to ask why it was Tendrik talking instead of Ryan, but he was interrupted.

“GET DOWN!” Ryan shouted suddenly. Christopher obliged immediately, and so did all of his teammates. He hid behind a computer terminal, right in time to watch more lights spring up to life… and several intimidating gun turrets descending from the ceiling on the other end of the hall.

The turrets didn’t open fire. Instead, both the Recovery Team and them aimed at each other and remained like that, in a growingly awkward silence.

“Ryan, talk to me.” Christopher, his eyes focused on the turrets.

“I heard the activation order for them.” The engineer replied. “No order to fire, though. I think… it’s an AI. Class-Two, most likely.”

The sapient AIs. The Seekers used them mostly for infiltration work. There was no intrinsic value in sapience other than being able to make decisions quicker, and that was useful only when they didn’t have human oversight. Seekers’ ships were mostly assisted by particularly powerful Class-One AIs, which lacked the sapience.

Why would one be here?

“Wait, I think it’s trying to communicate.” Tendrik suddenly said. Christopher sometimes forgot that he was in charge of the team's communications. “The quality is trash, though. Give me a second to clean it up a bit.”

It was a voice recording, and so decimated by static that Christopher could barely understand what was said. Something about the Guild… and something about a faction. Was the AI asking what faction they were from?

“Tell it that we are from both the APD and RPC.” Christopher replied. He had no idea why the AI would be interested in that, but with so many machine guns facing them, he had little choice but to try to figure out a peaceful solution.

The answer was two words, although extremely distorted. RPC. Whom. The mystery thickened. Some of the lights in the room died out.

“Tell it that I am from the RPC and that I am a noble.” Tiriel’s voice interrupted Christopher’s deliberations. “I think I know what it wants.” Of course, she didn’t include the description of what it wants. Christopher sometimes suspected that after a few centuries of war, the entire Mankind was just pathologically unable to not try to make fun or otherwise play their roles in the face of danger.

“Fine.” Christopher acquiesced. He had enough trust in the elf to go with it. “Tendrik, send the message.”

This time the AI’s answer was a text one, and addressed directly to Tiriel. The AI officially surrendered and asked for political asylum. There was also an official sounding statement that the guns were there only for self-defense, as without them they could just dash towards the computer core before the AI would be able to react. The AI even apologized for scaring them with the turrets.

There were some grammatical errors in the text. Plus a lot of typos. Christopher’s image of AIs took a serious dive.

“Tiriel.” Christopher asked, still hiding behind the terminal. They weren’t going to leave their hideouts over a simple message like that.

“The APD is much more trigger happy against people blacklisted from the Confederation than the RPC.” The elf replied. “At least the hawkish members. The RPC takes in asylum seekers from these countries, though not without a proper trial. Which means a high possibility of execution, just not a summary one. Similarly to APD doves, but I guess that going for the RPC is a safer bet here.”

This made sense. The RPC was ruled in a rather authoritarian way - everyone knew that when the Catholic Church said to jump, all the governments of the RPC members asked how high (save for those who instead jumped the highest they could). This unitarianism of beliefs and hierarchical structure lowered the chance of some randoms just blowing the AI up because that particular country of the APD was more hawk than dove.

Especially when you were facing a noble, so a person whose standing depended entirely on their perceived moral value. It meant that there was a fine chance of said noble not double crossing you randomly. Way to ruin your image, political standing and so on. Still a dangerous bet to be made.

The AI could simply ask what countries their APD members were from, but it really didn’t look like it was in a talkative mood.

“Tendrik, tell it to retract the turrets.” Christopher said after a few seconds of deliberation. “They are making me anxious.”

They got another malformed letter twenty seconds later. The AI said that it couldn’t do that, as it no longer controlled the turrets. The entire security system crashed.

“Does it think we are stupid?” Christopher lashed out angrily. It was an incredibly straightforward way of trying to get them to leave the hideouts to shoot them easily in the open.

“Uhm, boss?” Ryan interrupted his tirade before it started for real. “It said the truth. What’s left of the computer system of this ship is going into a cascade failure. I can attest that the turrets are offline, and the security is deader than dead.”

“Cascade failure? Why?” Christopher asked. They still remained hidden by the cover - there was apparently no one brave enough to be the first one to leave it.

“The computer system was heavily damaged during the attack, and lack of maintenance for several months didn’t help.” This time it was Tendrik that replied. “I believe that the AI shut itself down to lessen the strain on what was left. It reactivated when the remnants of the security system detected intruders, which is probably what Ryan felt earlier. But now the computers are dying under the AI’s weight, and… well, it’s dying with them.”

“Yep, that’s it.” Ryan agreed. His technopathy finally had a time to shine, and he was taking full advantage of it. “It has something like five or six minutes of life left.”

The AI concurred with that assessment with another text message. A single ‘yes’ and a long series of ‘help’. Someone was seriously panicking. Christopher could understand that reaction.

“Alright, fuck it.” Christopher stood up from the cover. Nothing opened fire at him. The others did the same a short while after him. “Any ideas on how to save it? I know nothing about AIs, nor about modern computers.”

“I… I don’t think we can do it.” Tendrik’s voice was filled with sadness. “We don’t have any computer spacious enough to hold it, and everything aboard the ship is just a heap of junk without a few weeks or months to patch it up. Maybe we could upload its personality matrix to the shuttle’s computer, but it would be just its memories and personality, not an ego. Enough to make a copy, but…” This time the AI didn’t comment. It either couldn’t send a message anymore, or was busy facing its inevitable demise.

“Yes, we can.” Tiriel announced in the resulting silence. When all heads turned towards her, she sighed loudly. “Christopher, it seems, has already forgotten about how spacious his personal computer was. Am I correct?” He almost facepalmed. He had, in fact, forgotten.

He quickly told Tendrik his PC’s specs.

“Oh, damn.” The Mechanist was fascinated. “You could fit not one but at least two AIs of this caliber. It should work.”

Another text message from the AI. This time completely unreadable.

“Isn’t it dangerous?” He was going to have a potentially rogue AI on his implant.

“Nah, the whole system is wired to not let the PC be able to control your body in any way.” Tendrik replied. “Nobody wanted another Admiral Kaneko. All that it can potentially do is alter your perception, for example by displaying us some spooky space monsters, or hiding a hole in the floor or other dangerous thing from you. For as long as you have that in mind, you should be able to carry it for a while without problems. Even if it is hostile.”

“Fine, then let’s do it. Uhm, how do we do it?” Christopher decided. If Colonel Nowak didn’t find anything live on the battleships, then the AI in front of them could be a priceless source of information. Letting it die would be a horrible waste.

“Well, we need to get to the central computer room, and… wait, how much time does it have left?” Tendrik asked. Christopher sighed loudly. That’s why he wanted people to report about things in the proper order.

***

TCS Long Road, Engineering Deck

06:32 06.08.2610 STT

Ensign Christopher Hall

A quick sprint and some complicated computer sorcery later, Christopher could sigh with relief. The AI was transferred together with approximately 95% of its data bank - the rest was destroyed when the computer core died. With a lot of visible electric discharges, no less.

“Anything changed?” Tendrik asked him, in a worried tone.

“Nothing, as far as I am aware.” He replied. “Any idea how to check what the AI is doing?” Cycle raised its hand.

“Let me connect to your PC, I can check its status.” The Sidhe said. It made sense to Christopher - the Cycle was pretty close to being an AI, was friendly (almost too much) and had much better tech.

“Fine, do it.” He was letting a surprising amount of machine intelligences into his body that day. He wasn’t sure what to think about it.

There was a kaleidoscope of windows opening and closing on their own for a short while. Christopher let it happen. He was patient enough. And he wanted some answers.

“Well, if I were to describe its state by comparing it to humans…” Cycle said finally. “...I’d say that it is currently curled in a fetal position in the corner of the room, crying profusely both from existential terror and relief that it avoided death. I’d give it a while to get itself together.”

It sounded like a good idea to Christopher. If only because the AI in question was presently residing in his head. He really didn’t want to go on a rampage, whatever the others were telling him about the result. Admiral Kaneko's case - that even he was aware of - was enough nightmare fuel.

It was going to be one more case of a situation that he was going to repeatedly return to in his thoughts, while being utterly terrified of his own actions. He had enough terrifying call-backs to the battles on the Hastati and Echelon Base. Tiriel wasn’t the only person having problems with their own bravery.

“Great, so we’re done here, then.” He clapped his hands. He forgot that there was no air, which meant no sound. Stupid mistake, but understandable for someone who was so deep in his thoughts. “Actually, I’ll ask about it just in case. Anything left from the computer system of the ship that we can access?” It was their primary mission, to begin with.

“Nope.” Tendrik replied. “It’s deader than a zombie that just had its brain destroyed. This ship will need to have a majority of computers replaced to fly anywhere. Data’s mostly lost even on the computers that still work.”

“But we have a possible informant.” Ananti commented. “So the task failed successfully, I guess?” Christopher chuckled. It was a good summary of the result of their first mission. He could only hope that Captain Keller was going to be satisfied with it.

Even if he wasn’t, Christopher wasn’t going to cry due to that. Getting away in one piece, despite receiving rather idiotic orders, was going to be enough of a success. And he was actually ready to tell that to Keller’s face, if the Captain forced him to that.

“Fine, then let’s go back.” Christopher announced. There was a brief chatter. Cycle seemed saddened by the lack of action scenes. Tiriel, Ananti and Ryan - to say it delicately - didn’t agree with the Sidhe.

They were almost back to the hangar, when Christopher saw something that shouldn’t be there. And things got complicated again.