Nano Writing Month, 2017.11

[mc776]

Every day, write some bit of fiction. Preferably over 50 words, but there will be no standard beyond "something". Posting is entirely optional.

[day 10 was an edit of a much earlier work found on this blog; see the recent activity sidebar for details.]

A sheet of paper blew off the table as Captain Alvarez abruptly stopped pacing. Everyone immediately stopped talking. She sat down on the edge of her seat, spine bolt upright, shook out her hair and tied it back again, staring blinklessly at the working model projection displayed before us. This was her usual signal that we were all to be very, very quiet until further notice or Bad Things would happen.

She stared into the three-dimensional star chart, drinking deeply of the manifold calculations and measurements already implicit in its shimmering reds and blues and faint yellow lines where the gravity fields were.

The captain just stared like that for what felt like five minutes. (Gunnerbot later told me it was only twelve and a half seconds.) S.O. Finkelstein looked utterly calm. Mr. Orgoth's basal mycelia were rooted firmly to the floor, in a manner that suggested that if he had knuckles they would have been white. Gunnerbot dutifully continued displaying the spreadsheets in silence. I was trying not to breathe, for fear of rustling any one of the three dozen crinkly sheets of calamally abused paper that contained the many hours of half-baked theories that eventually led to this chart. Then she took the seven-dimensional trackball from S.O. Finkelstein and added a gravity field in a blank spot near the biggest, brightest star. She marked it "Draft".

"Vook, I need your pen." I gave her one of the papers as well. She scribbled down an incomprehensible jumble of numbers and squiggly things and turned to show it to the big screen with the spreadsheets. "Gunnerbot, please take this body into your model."

"Captain, is that a crucifix?"

Pause. "It's a plus sign." It's hard to stay mad at Gunnerbot, however vain one might be about one's handwriting legibility.

Gunnerbot hummed a little tune. The draft lines disappeared from the projection. Mere millimetres away from where the draft had been, new golden threads spiralled out. Stars began shifting, the "You Are Here" arrow flickered in and out of existence, lines swapped places or grew or shrank or disappeared entirely. I didn't even need to look at S.O. Finkelstein to see their eyes widen.

"What is it?" asked Gunnerbot.

I don't think the entire room bursting into cheers really answered his question.

...

His captor probably was not sent by the djinn. He arrived at that conclusion not without regret; there was still hope of imminent, immediate escape, during which he could easily exact his vengeance on them both.

To be fair, his captor had not done anything untoward yet. He, of course, knew better than anyone that it was an entirely perfectly reasonable response, when faced with the prospect of releasing a powerful entity from an ancient artifact, to ask of it a few favours relating to temporal power. It was only fair.

What this monocled creep clearly had in mind, however, was perpetual servitude.

Some might consider it an intrusion to read another person's private thoughts like this. He would, of course, stop if his captor asked nicely (among a few other promises). But when one messes with powers like these without thinking through just how, for instance, a voice could be communicated without any sort of sound medium or mechanism for producing waves, he should not be responsible for the other person's due diligence.

Better to just let this old fool keep thinking he was an ancient demigod. Especially if it kept him under the delusion that a few megatonnes of blaster energy was all it would take to permanently destroy him.

The real danger, if things got violent, was being stranded in space with no functional vessel to get anywhere.

Herein was another major unknown: the ship. He found himself incapable of contacting its resident AI at all. In its place was an impossibly tangled mess of overrides, deletions, blocks, runarounds, backdoors that led nowhere... and petabytes upon petabytes of incomprehensible garbage that might or might not have been encrypted data magickal or mundane. Only the person who did this would have any idea what happened here.

The bastard must have found some way to cut the AI off from conscious control of its ship. Obviously it was not assisting this man of its own free will. If he could contact it somehow and break this barrier, it could prove to be a formidable ally in destroying their mutual captor: but what it would do next - kill itself? destroy the ship? turn on him? - he had no way to know.

One option if it turned against him was to take over its brain himself. This would mean becoming the ship, which he was not at all sure was wise or advisable or reversible. It would also imply that whatever was left of this horrid mess that he was seeing would then be a part of his own mind, which could be utterly disastrous.

The safest plan was to return to the golden tablet and somehow remote-liberate the AI and see what it would do. Convincing his captor to do the first was a simple matter of spewing some gobbledygook about completing the ritual to unleash his power - not entirely false, as there was still much knowledge that he could acquire from the tablet, and with more specific concrete problems to solve he could focus his efforts much more deliberately.

To do the latter, however... the Old Ones might have some light to shine on this to let him do it after reconnecting to them, but it wasn't likely. Bad garbled uncommented unsourced code is bad garbled uncommented unsourced code whether you're human or a strong AI or the magitek recording of an ancient eldritch being's personality. His more realistic option was to manufacture some kind of situation, a crisis, a--

"You fool! Your power has failed us! Our pursuers have broken through the fog and are landing on the other side of the city as we speak! You stupid ghost, you trickster, you have led us to our doooooooooooom!!!"