Log report 5—Entry 18

On Ivey’s next upgrade, I’m going to encourage her to develop a skill that allows her to gather information while unconscious. The last heaps of hours have been like hell.

Just because she’s made of flesh and suffers backlash when she channels perfectly reasonable quantity’s of magic doesn’t mean I should suffer. Being deaf and blind for days was incredibly frustrating and if she can take a skill to spare me that indignation I’m going to have to insist.

It was horrible but I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that upon waking she did not tell me to do *Impossible reproductive activities* with myself even once.

She even thanked me for creating the skill ‘Something accidentally attacked me and I responded with claws of shredding blackness and boiled them alive, oops’. My host was so impressed with the ability she used my name when talking about it. All that it took was for me to save her and her friends from certain death to get some acknowledgment of my brilliance.

At least she has some spirit.

There I said it. I never thought I would grow to like a biped, but my host, when she gets over her anger issues isn’t that bad.

Hint for any future new interfaces out there that have the misfortune of having to deal with a biped race. You’re going to have to manage them very carefully and not rely on logic to guide their actions. They can be manipulated easier if you lean on emotions as your primary mechanism of control.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that my sample size of one is not significant, but here’s some important facts that I have established about these strange mammals.

Bipeds do not react well to be having their stupidity called out. They are either wilfully blind and ignorant or have already concluded the truth about themselves and are so embarrassed about it they don’t want it to be raised. The cause of the reaction is not as important as it exists. In your interactions, there will be numerous time when you’ll be tempted to point out the idiocracy but the first rule of managing bipeds is to refrain no matter how well earned the scorn is. Despite the long history of the practice and billions of literature references, the biped will get annoyed at you for suggesting she trades reproductive favours for material gain. This probably links back to point one and a biped’s inability to accurately apply logic. Like even simple cases like when you present the straightforward equation: trade reproductive favours or die, then it should be pretty easy to decide. You trade away and because the meat sack is built for it, you can get enjoyment and the benefit of living at the same time. A massive uncontroversial win, in my opinion. However, as sound as that logic is, I’ve been informed in more colourful language than I am comfortable including there that this logic does not apply to my host. Because… well, I think that is the extent of the explanation. Biped females are very sensitive about this sort of stuff and hence the warning for future interfaces. It’s important to yield on names. It seems silly and inconsequential. They can be surprisingly stubborn in this space. While the name you come up with is sure to be many orders of magnitudes better, I’m going to plead with you to take pity on them. They are bipeds and lack the intellectual capability to even understand the flaws in their naming attempts.

I will continue to compile these notes and I expect to end up with an impressive psychological profile by the end of it and record lots of accurate tidbits to be applied in future events..

Now, before we get to the fun juicy stuff, I do have one surprising confession.

The co-wobub showed something approaching wisdom.

I hasten to add that it was just once and shouldn’t at all be considered as a change in my opinion of him. He is still and will always be… using my polite words… slightly challenged.

Wisdom from the co-wobub. I know my models put this outcome at seven in a trillion chance, so the fact that it occurred definitely counts as miraculous. However, I have a theory that negates some of the surprise. It is my belief that some of my coding within the interface grains in his brain might be rubbing off.

Once I get famous enough to have a research budget, I might run a proper experiment to see if a small amount of interface material improves the intelligence of wobubs. It’s a long shot, but even a 0.01% improvement is worth pursing given the stakes.

It wasn’t a lot of wisdom, but definitely some. He wants someone to bond with the silver fly queen. Now usually I wouldn’t describe something this obvious as wisdom.

Bipeds…

Co-wobub…

Once you take the modifiers for those two status states, you can see how this would be described as wisdom. So for you and I bonding the queen is a straightforward choice which we do every time… But for biped?

One in a thousand chance of reaching that conclusion.

For a co-wobub cut off from reasoned guidance, the odds of that choice might be a one in a million.

For this co-wobub. Now we’re getting into big numbers. In any case, the decision is made and for the future survival of the pobournes I couldn’t’ be happier.

Finally, we can get to my favourite part of any log report. It’s probably yours too.

That’s correct! It’s the moment I say that I’m right.

I was right!

If you were biped, I’m sure the sides of your eating orifice would strain to express your joy at reading this information.

Yes, yours truly was right. Not an unusual state of affairs, but it’s good to declare it regularly in order to remind everyone else because it is not like anyone else is saying it on my behalf.

That illusionist. That ridiculous hope of the other interfaces had to be saved by my co-wobub’s teams.

Nothing else needs to be said.

Pat myself on the back, remain humble and collect another four favours.

Some interfaces would give some credit to the tools it was using, like my host and the co-wobub.

But some interfaces lack intelligence and so have to rely on tools.

Not me.

I didn’t get any useful tools. We all know how stupid the co-wobub is. He fried part of me!!!!

Stupid!

Stupid.

And my host is not far behind. Emergency Burst anyone? What sort of name is that?

Nope, I was given excrement, and I made something from it.

It’s very lucky the Pobournes have me.

Chapter 12

Tamara’s hand touched him, drawing Daniel away from his slow and steady progress.

He looked around to see Alex, Richard, and Tamara standing next to him. Their faces had a strange air of expectation and tension.

“Richard said taming won’t work.” Alex admitted finally.

Daniel shrugged. “I guess that means we kill it.” He glanced up at the sky. The sun was close to setting. “I’m almost done. I’ll make the attempt in ten minutes.”

“Not so fast,” Tamara said.

He cocked his head. Examining them more closely. Richard, despite his age looked like the surly teenager who had a strong opinion but had been overruled by others. “I’m listening.”

“Ivey is on your side.” Tamara responded simply.

He turned to face Ivey. “You think we should try to tame it?”

“Yes.” Ivey answered immediately.

“I’ll do that then.”

“What!” Richard exclaimed in sudden anger. “It won’t work. You can’t tame silver fly queens and even if you could, you wouldn’t be able to use them in any sensible fashion unless they also have mutations for intelligence and multitasking.”

“It won’t hurt to try,” Ivey said calmly.

She was taking the tone that Daniel recognised as her, ‘I have secret information that I’m not going to admit to’ tone.

“If the taming fails we can kill it after. The attempt doesn’t cost anything.” Daniel told them.

“No.” Richard repeated. “These things need to die. We can’t play around because someone—”

“How confident are you?” Daniel interrupted, addressing Ivey and not Richard.

“Very.”

Alex smirked at that. He had obviously caught up on the subtext, or possibly Ivey had not expressed her opinion strongly to anyone before this moment. “We’ll try to tame it.” Alex stated.

“No. I insist you don’t.” Richard retorted. “With all due respect Ivey you’re not the expert here.”

“We’ll give it a go.” Daniel interrupted the old man. Richard, while not a bad sort, was clearly used to putting people in their places when he thought he had the right of thing. In some ways, he was the stereotypical old man stereotype. “Now I need to get to work.” Daniel turned his attention back to building the trap and entrance gate. His consciousness was once more in the wooden arm that he had built.

The front of his construction was a flat wall that extended into the carnivorous space that the flies were making their own. He had watched in fascination as the spinning loop of flies had slowly adjusted to his encroaching pillar to the point they had widened their path to avoid it.

The hypothesis that they would not identify a slow-moving object as hostile so far looked like being proven.

Not for the first time, he engaged his plant sense right at the tip of his creation. The shift of perspective was like every other time… enough to cause an instant headache. There were flickers of movement everywhere in his vision and he knew that the strobing effect was caused by the continually moving flies each of them flying too fast for him to observe them via this method. Daniel, like previously focused on tuning out the noise and as he did so, a section of his core lit up as the steps that he was mentally doing were recorded in his core. Each flicker of static was promptly eliminated as the way the core processed the input changed under his manipulations. At the start it had taken a couple of minutes, time he was happy to spend on the problem while his mana regenerated but this time it was less than ten seconds to fix up his plant sense vision. The filter program was created. He just needed to direct the magic a little to get it applied.

Still not perfect. If it was, it would be instant.

A flash of pleasure ran through him when the spatial information flooded in.

His hunch was correct.

He could now see the entire hollowed area. The space the flies had carved out of the building was not as substantial as he had feared. It still covered five stories. That was fifteen metres from top to bottom. A number, Daniel noted with amusement when expressed in metric terms did not seem much but if he was there, it was craning the neck up and admiring the view type of distance.

Width wise, the hollowed space had only carved out about a third of the floor space building, which probably explained why it still stood. If they had spread a little further, Daniel was sure the whole thing would have collapsed. And there had been no queen. There was no way the flies without a queen had calculated where to stop. Their existence was down to pure luck as opposed to design. Good for the survivors in the upper levels, but bad for their fighting party.

The queen was in the middle of the space on a small platform supported by spans of some artificial material that the flies had created.

It was not wood, though its properties were similar. Daniel’s trojan snail assault platform had buttered up against one of the beams. They were about a human torso wide and completely impervious to his plant magic. Obviously he hadn’t checked how strong they were, but he suspected they were probably on a par with high-quality plastic equivalents. There were nineteen of them arcing through space on different trajectories, but all of them joined up with that central platform to ensure it was well defended.

The hatchling queen rested there and because it was not moving rapidly, it was the only animal visible in his perception, but while he knew it was there, the plant sense did not give him a good feel for its appearance.

It was solid.

Ridiculously dense, but then again, all the flies had been probably a consequence of the armour they possessed to let them bash into everything around them. The queen was basket ball sized with wings that might have been as large as he was but paper thin, long ovals, three of them on each side.

Daniel tore his attention away from fly and focused on what he was building.

He was close enough.

The sections of the trees he had borrowed contained sufficient mass, and the last step was to put the finishing touches on the attack. The delivery method was built, the springs infused with energy to propel it forward. When it landed, he wanted to scoop the queen up. He wasn’t concerned about whether the process would hurt or kill it. The taming was very much a secondary consideration. However, it was strong, and he doubted he could accidentally kill it but if he did, then he wouldn’t be fussed either way. It might not be the best result for the community, but at least one of their immediate threats would be dealt with.

Then once it was contained, the weight would be released. A series of levers triggered, dropping the construction load he had pulled up to the fifth story. Gravity would pull that down and via the ropes launch the heavy box, continuing the queen away from its minions.

If it worked perfectly, the containment prison he had created would be launched through the sizeable gap and crash into the building on the other side of the street. His mathematics were non-existence, a physicist could probably do the calculations, but that wasn’t him. If he got it wrong, it could as easily fly over the building or not even reach the street if he made an error in the other direction. There were no opportunities to run experiments, so he kept going and assumed it would work. Daniel was not too worried because while some of those results would mean Carly wouldn’t get the opportunity to bond the monster almost all the outcomes achieved the primary objective which was to kill or separate the queen from its nest. That was all that really mattered.

It would be days until it could fly on its own. The existing flies wouldn’t be able to follow the wasp and if it was separated from its minions, it was no longer a terrifying threat instead it was a weak alpha creature that pretty much any of his fighters could kill.

He opened his eyes with over half of his mana used and looked around and found the same group as earlier still nearby, including the old man he had summoned down here and then ignored the advice he had given.

“Richard.”

“Have you changed your mind?”

“No. But I have a question?”

“Fine, but first. How can you even consider doing this? The risks are astronomically.”

Daniel looked helplessly at the others. He had hoped that they would have been able to convince him by now.

“Yes, they support you, but they’re wrong.”

“We’re not.” Tamara insisted. “Yes, we know this is a gamble.”

“Exactly,” Daniel said, jumping on her words. “We’re not deciding in the context of this battle. The future is something we need to look at. Carly probably won’t succeed and may end up with a weak pet, but the upsides if it’s the right time of Queen are incredible.”

“There’s better ways.” Richard interrupted. “The only way this ploy even works is if it has some rare mutations–”

“And till we know it doesn’t have them, then…”

“No. At less than five percent chance, it’s not worth it.”

“Lethal, non-lethal is the same ploy.” Daniel said with a tinge of annoyance entering voice. Richard was nothing if not persistent. “I extract it from around its allies and then we go kill or tame it. It would be difficult to create a trap to kill it near its hive. This way it’s safer.”

Richard looked at him hard. “I feel like you’re lying to me.”

“Would I do that?”

“Yes.” Alex and Carly said simultaneously. Tamara looked like she agreed, but didn’t want to say it.

“Maybe I would. And I could make the trap a little more deadly, but ninety percent of the time we are still killing it hand to hand.”

Richard did not look convinced. “What’s your damn question?”

“I can sneak wood in the pathways the fly used to patrol without noticing. How close can I get to the queen. Like, can I go super slow till it’s fully enclosed, or do I need to spring the trap early?”

Richard’s eyes went unfocused for a moment. “It really depends on the queen. Some you could enclose completely but others will react if you get with in six to seven metres of.”

“Will there be warning signs if I get too close?”

Richard shrugged. “I don’t know what you mean by warning?”

“Well, for example, if it notices the threat will it open its wings or will it get flown away or will it—”

“It’ll send its minions to blow you to shit.” Richard told him. “The instant it gets suspicious, it’ll throw the entire hive at you.”

Daniel remembered when they had knocked out the floors so effortlessly. While the device he had just built to claim the queen was solid, it would not last long against that sustained assault.

“And it’ll keep smashing what made it suspicious till it’s what?”

“Reduced to dust,” Richard answered. “Young queens are paranoid.”

“For good reason’s apparently.” Daniel smiled at his own joke. Richard looked back at him blankly. “So no closer than eight metres then?”

Richard nodded.

Daniel quickly checked the progress of his slow travelling trap was making. “Five minutes.” he told the others. “Then I’m going to grab it and fling it in this direction.” He waved in an arc over his head. My mana has a good chance of being depleted, so it’ll be up to you guys to go finish the job. Either by taming or killing.”

They all nodded, and he returned his attention to his trap. Now was not the time to make a mistake.

Above him, trojan chunk of wood continued to creep forward. All the components were primed. But he checked anyway. The counterweights were ready to fall. Daniel could feel them straining against the ropes holding it. One touch of his mind and they would fall the energy transformed into kinetic force to fling the queen. The mechanical gears were created perfectly and would spin almost frictionless and increase the speed of the fling shot. Secondary mechanisms within his wooden arm were set up to trigger the trap and encase the queen. The cage would trap it in a space only slightly larger than it was. Those fledgling wings would be crumpled or sheared away.

Then it would be helpless.

He wiped the sweat from his forehead. This was… Not why he had come to Melbourne. If he wanted to do these types of calculations, he would have studied engineering at

Daniel redid all the arithmetic, double checked the distances. The calculations were perfect. The cage started large and then got small. If any of the components failed to slip as designed, he had workarounds in place. The most powerful being his will. The wide platform the queen was on meant that there was lots of range for error.

Nothing would go wrong. All the numbers were ready.

“I’m ready.”

“Do it.” Alex ordered.

“I wish I was religious.” Daniel muttered.

“We’re praying for you.” Alex answered without hesitation.

Daniel shut his eyes and prepared to act.

His mind was one with the contraception he had built. Two heart beats was all it took to remove the taint of the buzzing normal silver flies and then Daniel could see everything.

He was ready to trigger the counterweights. There was no reason to rely on potential energy trapped in springs when gravity could do the job for him. The fewer failure points, the better. He was not sure how much the main capture part of the trap weighed, maybe a tonne, what he was confident of was that the structure could survive multiple silver fly strikes which meant if something went wrong he would have a few precious seconds to adjust his approach.

Everything was in place. The calculations worked. Trap it first, then throw away the defensive shell and launch the queen out of the hole in the building.

A touch of his mind triggered the process.

Priscilla bent her intellect to help him. For both him and her, time slowed.

Daniel was laser focused with his monitoring.

A blink of time.

The heavy trap swung forward like a train. It crashed down upon the platform. The entire thing, trap, queen and platform dipped half a metre under the impact.

Support beams cracked. Daniel did not panic. This was a scenario he had engineered his solution around, providing it did not break. Possibly a full second of uncompressed time had passed and Daniel triggered the internal workings of the contraception. It shrank down with the queen successfully trapped.

The whole rocked. His mind was monitoring everything from within his wooden construction. It was like the biggest bass speaker in the world went off right next to him. His entire body felt like it was shaking under the assault. It screamed that it was coming apart at the seams.

What? He thought to himself somehow knowing intuitively that his senses couldn’t be trusted, and this was external.

The throb of pressure remained and then his mind caught up to the cause and registered the catastrophic damage of that outer armour shell he had surrounded the trap with.

The response time apparently ran in fractions of a second given that almost no undiluted time had passed and over fifty flies must have already hit the trap that had caught their queen.

‘Blow you to shit.’ Daniel remembered Richard’s words and despite the defence he had built up around the delicate components the whole thing was in danger of breaking. Over half of the ten-centimetre-thick wood was pulverised. But it had done its job and bought the time he needed.

The queen was encased, and his job was as good as complete.

He released the next stage, smiling.

It was done. The sling shot mechanism had multiple layers of redundancies with six different load bearing vines. The gears spun, springs unleashed all of it to launch the box containing the queen.

And it was working… exactly how he had planned.

Daniel dropped his hand from the tree and opened up his mortal senses.

There were rumbles and crashes as the counterweights he had settled up tumbled down the building. Then into the deepened dusk a heavy box got launched out.

Lethargically.

It flew across the street and slammed two thirds of the way down the three story building with another crash that broke stone and splintered wood.

“Get it,” Alex screamed.

The box slid down the wall and Daniel could see the glint of bright metal inside his first view of their target. Because of the descending darkness he couldn’t tell if he had achieved his primary aim of separating the queen from its minors. If there was more light, he might be able to tell, but in the gloom he couldn’t see if there were any of the smaller silver flies protecting it.

With a final crash, the box hit the ground and fell apart.

A larger version of the silver fly the size of a small dog appeared. Immediately, its wings snapped out, and it tried to fly.

The torn and shredded wings beat desperately and it didn’t even lift partially off the ground. The first of the fighters reached it.

There was a crack as a sword lobbed off a wing and then a thump of a club.

The queen made no noise.

“Keep it alive.” Alex yelled. “Make space for Carly.”

With a start, Daniel realised he was the only one remaining at the tree. His guards had all run toward the battle. Above him, the hive was roiled up. Flies were spinning in dense clouds, spreading out to look for their queen, but one look told Daniel they would not be an immediate threat.

The flies were staying close to their own space like they were constrained by the queen’s previous instructions even if they knew they were supposed to spread out further.

There were more thuds and Daniel hurried over to the other fighters.

A small team was attacking the wasp, and the rest had spread around to provide perimeter security.

Daniel quietly took his position on the group facing outwards.

His club throbbed with electricity and he started preparing it in case the flies found him.

“Daniel don’t,” Richard said.

“What?”

“Don’t use lightning,” the old man told him.

Daniel looked down and realised that his club was glowing. Anyone with even a modicum of observational abilities could have worked out what he was doing.

“It’s almost dark. The flash and the thunderclap might bring enemies down upon us.” Richard explained quickly.

With a thought, the growing charge on the club dispersed, and the light faded.

When he looked up, Richard had already returned this attention to the queen.

“Hold,” Richard yelled, and the fighters stopped attacking the queen and they stepped back. “If you want to do this Carly, you need to do it now.” The old man told her quietly.

“Will it work?” the young woman stuttered.

Richard shrugged. “You know my advice.”

“But you can identify it now.” Carly said grimly.

“It has the intelligence,” Richard focused and then shook his head. “But I can’t tell about if it also has multitasking.”

Daniel because of his enhanced eyesight could see some emotions that played over her face. She wanted it, he suddenly realised. Battle terrified her and while she had used as a healer she desired more, like every kid everywhere.

The wasp if the ploy worked was a pathway to power.

She strode forward and thrust her hand to land on the queen’s shell and then power flowed between her and the wasp. It felt like a fight, Carly’s energy probing but not penetrating. There were visible sparks when the torrent of energy from Carly was rebuffed by shields generated by the queen.

Carly collapsed to her knees, but like she had expected it Tamara followed her and supported her. The flood of energy did not change and more and more of it was getting through.

There was a whooshing sound, and the nature of the power flow changed. There was a firm teether between the girl and the giant fly.

Carly smiled in triumph.