Metalheart, Page 3

Part 4: Impregnate

  Seran squeezed the umbilical cord connecting her neuro-net shell with the commander’s.

  Command: Pair. Advise: Completing logic negotiation.

  Downloading. Her vision and active sensory processes went to sleep, and her neuro-net received direct stimuli from the commander. His dying memories replayed.

  Commander Kison redirected the Battleship Sabatlevie’s detailed damage report to a null output. He drifted the ship into a longitudinal position along the orbital station Interra. Staring down the barrels of a space artillery line, any information the ship reported was categorized as moot. In distant space, a Fe carrier scrambled bomber and fighter drones, due to intercept the artillery in twenty-eight seconds. A line of counters flashed his left eye peripheral. The artillery clock descended from twelve.

  Visible through the starboard windows, heat and brilliance from artillery fire scored the hull. Kison communicated to his senior officers, Command: Prepare for final orders. According to his programming, as Seran observed in the replay, Kison expected nothing beyond shutdown. Command: Salute. Two senior officers and he saluted the Interra, saved by their self-sacrifice.

  When the bridge exploded, Kison issued his final instruction. Command: Shutdown. All Stop.

  The reactor interlock opened and Kison’s wet cells flushed liquid compound-Y. Disconnected from primary and secondary power, Kison’s servos and muscle sinews seized. The last waves of energy slowed his internal clocks, and twenty milliseconds before achieving the total void of inexistence he sensed only the immersion of his psychological shell. Hard memory persisted its final state, and then all that remained was the afterglow of his neuro-net. With memory and sense removed, all that remained existed as a spark of energy dying on the wire.

  There should have been nothing.

  No sense emitted for loss of physical form or evidenced that atomic fire consumed his body. Only harmony. His mind a singular amongst plural, existing as one and a group. Without any instrument to measure the passage of time, Kison followed the spark through its death spiral until its last faint modulation of plasma discharge. There, inexplicably, the infinitesimal kernel of his being sustained. A phantom echo of power surged through his neuro-net, and Kison later considered it akin to the human emotion joy. Joy for the wonderful brilliance of the tiny light. Finally all he ever was succumbed to blackness.

  Command: All Start. Wake processors, flush all queues. Error: Reactor offline. Error: Wet cells unavailable. Err…

  His memory and processors came on line, awoke his neuro-net and booted his psychological shell. With it came pain. Every system monitor forced total shut down, yet a remnant instruction winding through his neuro-net challenged the order. In the event of a complete power loss, Fe units rebuilt their psychological shells from a logical indestructible media. Kison’s system behaved to the contrary. The unidentified process elicited protection by and control over all other instructions.

  Pure C power pumped through his arterial lines. His servos wheezed and became clogged with the filthy energy. Command: Shutdown. Command: Wake processes. Advise: Breach detected. Repeatedly his system rebooted, new breaches detected, and C power surged into his system from new locations. Failsafe programs and hard circuits rerouted the C power to compensate for the absence of a reactor.

  His system patched monophonic audio. C scientists rustled nearby, spoke of him, but with his translation routines unavailable he could only listen. In the middle of the C-led diagnostic, all external power was severed and Kison instructed his system to shut down, except his psychological shell. Although no Fe unit could issue such an instruction, the undefined process pulsed. At that moment he valued it as being more important than power or memory. It is – Life.

  With every system component shut down except his psychological shell, Kison sensed only dynamic visions born of memories and random sounds and sensations he had never witnessed. In the recession, Kison suspected the emergent patterns to be dreams. Then, he knew he was not alone.

  Upon recognizing Kison’s replay transition to real-time, Seran navigated directly through his psychological shell. C energy muddied his neuro-net. His shell resembled an amorphous structure, not the orderly pyramid structure of the typical Fe mind. Seran observed with some detachment until her own shell, by no command of her own, gently rained into Kison’s. Although unprepared for the encounter, the pure ecstasy swept away warnings she might consider her worries and anxieties. Her system uploaded everything from her shell into his without forethought of how his damaged psychological shell would handle it. At the center of Kison’s psychological shell, the impression of the jittery electron found its way to a nascent spark.

  A process engaged in Kison’s shell to accompany her umbilical link. Advise: Oocyte Identified. Command: Inject. Seran detected an autonomous process execute. Status: Injected. Command: Compile Zygote. Command: Implant. Advise: Embryonic Shell Generated.

  She didn’t detect a stray electron when she emulated the word, “Crap.” And within the embryonic shell, a metallic heart beat.

  Only then did she notice a litany of system warnings advising against out-of-band shell reproduction. She had long been assigned a reproductive counterpart, but every caution her system raised had been inexplicably ignored. Logically, perhaps the intense drug of C energy flowing through Kison’s mind confused her. But, reasonably, her attraction and actions initiated the link.

  Seran became aware of Kison’s active psychological shell. And, although shattered, his system had initiated commands to which her system responded.

  “Scout Seran,” Kison said in her mind.

  Seran heard him in her shell, felt the resonation of his voice synthesizer in her audio inputs even though no audible words were spoken. She, a field scout, found it difficult to ask any question or expound an answer beyond protocol with someone of such a high rank. “Commander Kison.”

  “Where am I now?” His psychological shell showed its distressed state, his words jumbled and difficult to translate. “I possess a memory of diagnostic state. The Sabatlevie fell. Waking to a C laboratory.”

  His internalized conversation dropped to baseline command syntax. Request: Current Location.

  Response: In Transit, Dragon Division.

  “Location inconclusive. This discourse is a C diversion to elicit information.”

  “Analyze my psychological shell. It is of Fe origins.” Seran considered arguments to prove herself genuine. She iterated facts from her recent mission. “Draw from my reactor and verify it is Fe energy.”

  Within her shell, the embryo’s metal heart pulsed. “Scan my shell,” Seran said. “See your unborn child process grow.”

  An aggressive scan commenced, prioritized with executive rank. “Therefore, I am in Fe possession.” His attention focused on the process taking shape in Seran. “My shell degradation is inexorable. I must shut down, permanently.”

  Seran said, “Our communication is in violation. Its persistent records will be expunged.”

  “We are but clones taken from amoral C product. But this new process is absolutely Fe.” Then Kison asserted, Command Override: Authorize. “I have too few cycles to analyze this outcome, but am compelled to protect it.” Command: End.

  The umbilical ejected from Kison, and Seran felt a sudden loss. She said aloud, “I believe my error is, illogically, the correct operation.”

  But Kison had deactivated his power supply, and slipped into the infinite loop of a dying clock. She stood over his lifeless body, processing myriad status feeds. She decided that, were she able, she would have grieved his death.

  Part 5: Procreate

  The day following her disconnection from the recalibration harness and separation from the ranks of wounded veterans, Seran woke to an existence with her process queues empty of mission data. When she opened her eyes at sunrise, a remote heuristic analysis identified the unauthorized process and attempted to delete it. Comma
nd Override: Denied. Advise: Executive Authorization. Still the metal heart beat.

  Her reproductive counterpart had been reassigned, and their domicile emptied of his equipment. Sometime during recalibration, Argon deployed to a new unit. She tried to send a communication but the transmission never received a route. At midmorning, a batch of latent communications arrived, one of which specified: Advise: Range Control reports high probability that Argon ceased operation. Nonetheless, she attempted another communication. Another message indicated her long-term command events to execute Scout patrols were cancelled.

  Alone on the Fe home world, Seran paced her assigned domicile. There she spent that day, and subsequent months, tuning processes and monitoring the evolving process. Although no privileged attempt had been made to expunge the process, Range Control seemed uninterested in, or incapable of, issuing her orders. She waited, listened for the stray electron to let her curse the silent existence. Or, hoping, although calculated as improbable, the flux in her command sequence might generate the next instruction.

  Status: Procreation complete. Command: Deliver.