mc776 | Nanophlogiston chapter 38 (Reply)

"Why does she look like that?" Gunnerbot pinged his father an invite. "Papa?"

Orgoth lay in the engine room and mentally rehearsed the last few seconds of the conversation his son had been having with Ai just before the ping. Since it had only been two onboard ship computers talking to each other, all their talk was digitized and sent to Orgoth's wikwifier* losslessly; it was just up to the wetware to make any sense of it.

Mycanthropes were still a novelty within the United Terran Federation. There was a small surge of immigrants into the UTF's border systems during the Botherian Jihad cyborg purges 50 years ago - which ironically resulted in a lasting stereotype among the dust apes that mycanthropes were typically cybernetic - but it was still normal to identify someone as "our resident [cyber]mycanthrope" out of an entire starship crew.

Orgoth himself was nothing much to look at. Just a regular gnarled old man of a mycanthrope - big stumpy main core with two rows of little red eyes under a crown of carefully trimmed black spore bodies, lots of roots coming out making him look like an old Terran oak stump dug out of the ground. His main distinguishing feature was all the chrome gadgets and armour plate that stuck out at weird angles - a thin veneer on top of much more delicate and integrated augs only he knows about.

Which brought him to this character the kids were looking at, this Y-pop singer "Muu-ko". Two impossibly big, dark violet orbs framed by space-black eyelashes on a heart-shaped face that shone like the moon. Long ocean-wave red and blue tresses flowed down from a delicate, brilliant crown of wide red mushroom-caps atop her head. Her long, glittering dress, of several colours no one could name, revealed a lithe but curving figure that was clearly the sort designed to be youthful and attractive to khoïkopithecines. Orgoth tried not to look at her legs, or at least think too hard about them: they were almost certainly wetware around a purely robotic frame, but still... having those hard structural joints permanently fixing you from the inside like that... the thought of bones never stopped creeping him the fuck out.

Lovely voice, though. He could clearly hear her wetware voice underneath the seven harmony voices coming out of that heart-shaped khoïkopithecine mouth. It took skill to coordinate all that, augs or not, and make it sound remotely good. Orgoth never had any talent for it; he never needed voice augs for his work, and his voice still "was his own" as they say in the old country.

"Lots of surgery, sweetie. You can make anyone look like anything if you try hard enough."

"But why, though?"

Orgoth moved the video to one of the screens nearby so he could use his targeting monocole, then waited for the shot to pan to the audience again. First couple rows of cosmetically enhanced support staff; VIP box; over there, in the corner, those guys. Those guys definitely fit the description.

"I can explain, but to do so properly I might have to ask you to unblock some of those sites you've got under the 'no Dan that's bad' list."

A few seconds of nothing but the song.

"Ai, can we watch something else now?"

"No! I don't care who else does what with this, it's still good!"

A life lesson! "They're right, Gunnerbot. Muu-ko's actually a decent singer in her own right and this song is well done for what it is. If you're going to abandon something just because someone else has used it for evil, soon you'll have nothing at all."

From the corner of his eye Orgoth noticed the power readings suddenly diverting an unusual amount of juice to an old data drive. A second later Gunnerbot started crying.

"Wait! Gunnerbot, I--"

"No dad, shut up, let me have this!" Having control over all the audio aboard the ship, Gunnerbot could, of course, speak and cry without interrupting himself at all.

Orgoth looked at the nearby screens. They continued showing the normal ship readouts and security systems (and Muu-ko, who was now singing something Orgoth couldn't catch about a traitor's kiss and some dead bald guy burning in a boat) and Gunnerbot was clearly paying no conscious attention to them.

A tiny message ping noise broke through all of it. It was Ai. "May I?" Gunnerbot selected the Yes option.

Ai took a peek in and their mind was immediately flooded with images. Fire and death: uncounted billions of every species and every nature languishing in the underworlds of a thousand planets; battles and war and anguish and pain, an unending torrent of images of loss. Gods and hopes and loves perished again and again in twisted spirals, disappearing before Ai could catch most of their names. They caught glimpses of unspeakable rituals of long-dead death-and-rebirth cults banned on a hundred star systems, and the cacophonous terror and violence that these cults had birthed.

Through every image a fire burned. Ai never noticed it consciously until picking the images apart from their cache much later, but could never unsee it after. In each image, somewhere, whether in the background or the foreground or the metadata or encrypted in a sequence of pixels at a numerologically significant coordinate, a tiny spark of light - or something resembling light - entered into the image. It was often faint, typically obscure even if one knew where to look, and regularly manifested through twisted and horrible echoes elsewhere in the image, but the original was unmistakeable once they had found it.

The fire and death continued. Eventually it became a crescendo of chaos as wars took to interstellar space and mycanthrope, khoïkopithecene, prosophosid, spacer, Child of the Worthless and android alike boiled off into the infinite night. The light of the guns and bombs outshone them, outshone the stars, outshone everything and yet the fire continued to burn quietly behind it all.

And yet there was to be an end. It was never defined, never really shown in the flurry of images, or at least maybe Ai hadn't reached anything from that part of the sequence; but as surely as the fire was encoded into everything, so was the unshakeable hint that everything it touched would eventually be consumed. It should have been a horror to behold: and yet the light of that fire drew their mind towards it.

It would not always be this way. And yet it would always Be.

There were other images. Everyday life, past and present and projected future. A young mother softly sussurating over her eggs in a newly carved hive; lovers freeing wish-flies under the autumn twin moon; men singing in a winter celebration in a mead-hall. The fire was there too, but harder to see; the bits of code that had given Ai the sense of everything being consumed seemed to take on a new context, bearing none of the menace it had held elsewhere. And yet it too would come to an end, even those that did not explicitly end in the form of the other images, for that new context itself led to that ever-present fire.

It was clear from the rapidity and volume of it all that Gunnerbot had been thinking about these things for a long time. There was a lot to unpack here... later. After all this with the war against the naked shrimp people or whatever. After they get fixed and were reunited with Mother again. After they and Mother and a good team of bot-shrinks managed to figure out what this horrible tangle was that Robertson had made in their mind during the hijack.

They would have to ask Gunnerbot sometime what the hamster at the end was about, too.

*A portmanteau of "wiki" and "liquefier", a device that instantly digests wiki entries into neurolinguistic packages that are interpreted almost seamlessly with the user's memory. There is a large aftermarket for supporting other formats proprietary and otherwise.