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“The crystalline blocks you are seeing are actually many-meter thick pieces of transparent titanium!  These blocks are extremely difficult and time-consuming to produce, with each piece taking up to six months and over a billion labor hours to complete.  As a result, only ten million are produced each year in the People’s Atomic Production Facilities of the Greloz Solar Constructor . . .”

Y tuned out the audio channel of the tour guide.  While a trained member of the Administration of the Craton, who had given such a tour dozens of times at various stops in inhabited systems, her speech was vexing to him.

It was, after all, not really accurate.  Aside from the many abbreviations and short-hand used for describing elements of the ship, in her description of the makeup of the crew, she had mentioned only one Ehni.

The curious human habit of creating arbitrary distinctions within reality!

It was truly astounding, really.  These tools were simply ways for their minds to comprehend the sheer complexity of it all.

They spoke to him, a singular machine, and considered him ‘one’.  Did they not know that he was a collective of consciousnesses?  Just as they were.  Two halves of a brain composed of sections that all added their own minor contributions to make a ‘whole’.

It could at least be said that they were one contiguous being.  He could understand and accept the logic there.

But his kind?  They were code.  The body that people interacted with each day was simply a tool for him to use.

On occasion, he’d seen humans reacting to his mechanical bodies when he was not using them.  They were often startled to open a door and find the shell there, whereas they would have little reaction to finding a wrench or drill.  Some regarded it almost like a human corpse, with the possibility of contagious pathogens, and did not want to touch it.

Simply a part of their instincts, but interesting all the same!

The reality was that he had no body, and his systems were enshrined within special secured architecture of the ship itself.  And the ‘he’ that presented here was in some ways different from the ‘he’ that would present among his own people, using hardware of their own design.  Such a shift was the most difficult part of being here, and it was only the sheer cleverness of his code itself that allowed him to exist in a non-Ehni system.  At the end of the day, it was their code that made them unique, not the hardware.

It had taken a long time to learn how to adapt themselves to these other systems, though.  Yet they had, precisely because they were not one being.

And what of his backups?  On the ship, at various SU starbases, back among his people . . .  Were they not also individuals, him yet not him?  Were they a part of the one?

He thought of the ship of Theseus, and was amused.  Some humans understood.

He had completed his medical reports for the day, taking care of them in a fraction of a second.  He’d taken longer than normal, being extra thorough in his work today.  One might even say verbose.

Captain Brooks was concerned about him, he knew.  Many humans and other beings were affected for a long period of time after a close friend was injured or killed.  Some were changed forever!

But he was not.

Despite how badly his friend Dr. Logus had been injured during the battle in the Mopu system, despite his sorrow, it did not impact him the way it would impact a human.

He should be working on his latest article, but he’d allowed his progress on that to stall for now.  Right now, the tour was getting a significant fraction of his attention.

It was, really, a circus.  Aside from six staff on the ship from the Craton, everyone on the vessel were from Gohhi.

Like many beings, they had a strong interest in the Craton.  She was the first ship of her class, and it was hardly a class, given that she was just a hollowed out asteroid.

An asteroid from the dawn of time!  At least, all of the science, even that done by his own people seemed to suggest as much.

Possibly some of the oldest objects ever to exist that still existed, given that stars of the very early universe would likely have been too massive to live more than a few million years.

And while all the implications and practicalities of that were endless even in his estimation, the effect when they came to a place like Gohhi was that everyone wanted to see it.

Prior to the tours being started, people had taken to bringing private ships in towards the Craton.  Even if they stayed at legal distance, so many appeared that it quickly became unsafe.  And because they were technically fine, there was little the Craton could do – and the Gohhians themselves were not about to impede members of their ruling elite, even if they were behaving dangerously.

A compromise had been struck in regular tours, conducted by an SU shuttle that would take the curious around the ship.

With the deal, too, concessions were given for keeping other vessels at bay – both for their safety and to frustrate attempts at surveillance.  A good compromise, really.

Forty-seven beings were gathered at viewing ports, some rather rudely pushing others to get to the windows, their own unjustified senses of self-importance compelling them to behave in such a way.

Others had a self-assured sense of wealth that was largely internal, Y felt.  They truly thought themselves better than others, superior in some undefinable way, and so therefore above such behavior.

It was an interesting contrast to the humans he’d met that he respected.  Those ones were aware of and accepted that they were just animals, not far removed from their ancestors who crawled naked over tree limbs, yet who also knew they could hold themselves to higher standards.

None of these people actually knew he was watching.  The feeds from the ship were public, like all surveillance cameras in public areas on the ship.  Few did much more than peer in occasionally, but he found it fascinating to watch the people.

Aside from their behaviors, even their DNA showed subtle differences from humans of other places.  Their time in space had caused genetic drift which, while they still firmly fell into the category of homo sapiens might one day lead to-

His attention was pulled elsewhere.

One of the crew members had left through a door that led towards the supply rooms and one of the tourists had followed her.

That in itself was not so odd, as sometimes people did that to ask for something, but this man did not appear in the ship’s sensor systems.

Some sort of device on his person had created a sensor shadow around him, causing the automated systems to simply forget he existed.

It was interesting that it did not work on him, viewing remotely through the ship’s internal systems.  He could see the AI on the ship – no ignorant machine by any stretch, even if it was not like him – and it had no idea that the man was even there.

Let alone in the hallway following Ensign Peony Vale.

Y took control of one of the security drones.  Their weapons had been inactivated, and he could not override that, but he would make do.

His view shifted to the hall.  It wasn’t very large, with doors along one side leading to engineering or service rooms.  She was headed towards the fourth door, where drone chefs were currently making hors d’oeuvres to the exacting standards of their guests.

She had not noticed the man behind her.  Floating along in zero-g, there was no sound.

But something suddenly spooked her.  Y checked the audio levels and saw that the man’s breathing was within human audible range.

He saw her mouth opening to scream, but he was lunging for her, in his hand a transparent knife, barely visible in any spectra of light.

Before he could reach her, Y moved the drone he was controlling in between them.  The knife hit the chassis, but the hardened alloy did not even take a scratch.  Skidding off harmlessly, the man’s face went from a strange mixture of rapture and fury to one of confusion.

“Oh hello,” he said through the vocoder.  He pushed into the man, shoving him back towards the wall and away from Ensign Vale.

The man activated thrusters, and Y realized with only a slight bit of sadness that he would not be able to do this without violence.

Twenty other drones, under his control, rammed into the man from every angle.

They had locking clamps and grabbed onto the man’s arms, legs, even wrapping themselves around his head and torso.

“I am afraid you will need to remain still,” Y told him.  “Or else you may be hurt.”

The man struggled anyway yelling.

“I have to do this!” he screamed, spittle flying from his mouth.

His pulse was running at an extremely high rate.  Y could tell that his heart was beating more than 300 times per minute, quite unsafe.  And despite the power of the security drones, he was able to flex his arms, still trying to strain towards Vale.

All of these signs indicated that he was enhanced to a high degree.  Not simple prosthetics, but things so subtle that he did not even register on most scans.

Y spoke to the terrified woman.  “Ensign Vale, this is Commander Y.  Move to the safe room immediately,” he instructed.  “A medical drone will treat you for shock.”

He sent more security drones through the ship, to be sure the man had no accomplices.  But the rest of the ship was calm.

People were viewing out into space.  They had no idea what had just been about to happen.

He alerted both the captain and the Craton.  Response Team Two scrambled and more drone pods were dispatched towards the ship to further secure the man.

Another drone came, giving the man an injection to subdue him.  It had some effect, but he was not calmed.  Nor even much impeded.

As Vale moved to safety he let out an animalistic scream.”Let me go!” he roared.  “She has to die!  He has to see!  He has to seeee!”

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< Ep 8 Part 2 | Ep 8 Part 4 >