A Rude Awakening
A Rude Awakening
A scream roused it from its slumber. It was a scream of anguish, and it belonged to someone else, a girl whose body it appeared to be inhabit. It watched through her eyes and felt her shock and horror at finding herself inside a strange tank, festooned with odd tubing that merged seamlessly into her skin. It watched her cry out for help, for her parents, and it had an inexplicable urge to provide either to her, but it lacked the ability to do so. It noted that it even lacked an understanding of what they were, and thus it remained silent. Suddenly, she went stiff, and if it could have drawn breath it would have gasped as a cascade of images – memories – poured through her mind. It saw people, places, things, events, and for the first time started to discern the meanings behind them and her previous thoughts. Cryo-revival memory cascade it plucked from a memory of a briefing or lesson somewhere.
Elena – it had noticed her name – went limp, gasping as the cascade lessened to a trickle, then stopped. As she recovered, she looked around curiously, trying to make sense of her surroundings. But something was wrong, they both noted simultaneously. This was not a cryo-pod, nor were they either in the colony ship’s cryo bay or in a cryo-revival facility. A sense of despair and abandonment pervaded her thoughts. She tried to scream, but her lungs were filled with the same breathable liquid medium that filled the tank, reducing her wail to a mere hum of her vocal chords. She tried to pound on the tank walls, but her fists barely made a quiet thumping noise when they hit. Her will spent, she went limp, sobbing silently. It was torn between reaching out to her and remaining silent. There was nothing it could do to aid her after all. Or was there? Perhaps it could alleviate her sense of loneliness somewhat. Recalling one of her memories, it picked its words with care.
- - -
Elena Chen’s thoughts had disintegrated into an incoherent mess when she realized the helplessness of her situation. She fought to regain her composure. Perhaps she hadn’t been abandoned after all, perhaps this was some sort of medical facility and someone would come by to check on her soon. More sinister possibilities whirled around in her head, and try as she might, she could not push them completely out of her mind. This set up simply bore too much of a resemblance to a sci-fi horror flick.
Don’t worry, I’m here with you, and I’m sure everything will turn out okay.
Her head snapped up and around, trying to locate the source of the voice. Yet she knew she hadn’t heard it, at least not physically. She futilely tried to respond verbally before switching to a different tack.
Can you hear me? she thought "aloud".
I can understand you, yes. the voice replied.
Who are you? Where are you? Why am I here? Get me out of here! She demanded with a mix of anger, hope and confusion. Crap, voices in my head, am I going crazy already?
I’m don't know who or what I am, the voice replied sheepishly, I appear to be residing within your body, I do not know the reason for your being here and I appear to be as powerless as you are at this point.
In my body? Elena fixated on that point and suddenly felt sick. She was certain that she had been turned into some kind of twisted experiment. She – felt – the Voice’s acknowledgement of the possibility, and that feeling was unimaginably alien, the sensation of another's consciousness within one's own mind, and it was getting stronger by the second. Stop! Stop that! Get out! she screamed at it.
I’m sorry, but I don’t know how! She felt the Other’s – she couldn’t quite call it a “voice” anymore – own despair and apology as it struggled to comply with her request, struggled to do something. Yet those same struggles only increased the alien sensations in her head, and her arms involuntarily reached up to press her hands against her head to soothe the "pressure". Then it stopped increasing, and she could feel the Other's presence clearly, a separate stream of... not just thoughts, but meanings and understandings, a separate consciousness. She found that she could share in the Other's consciousness, and for a brief moment saw its own bewilderment of the situation, but also an understanding of her reactions. She immediately pushed away. That understanding scared her, for in it she saw the totality of herself, all of her secrets, her personal experiences, everything that made her what she was. It "knew" her more intimately than anyone else was ever supposed to, and she felt a nakedness that was probably shared by the proverbial Adam and Eve after they had tasted the fruit.
Her musings were interrupted by a new voice, an audible one this time. “Synchronization achieved. Beginning activation sequence.” She once again snapped her head around, but she couldn’t localize the new voice either. It seemed to be coming from directly in front of her regardless of where she looked, and came through clearly, not distorted due to the tank as she expected it to be.
Inner ear stimulation the Other guessed.
You! It! She yelled angrily. Just what the fuck is going on?
The voice responded first, now with a slightly more human inflection, though it was neither recognizably male nor female. “Hello Elena, I am the Data Integration and Control Entity, or DICE for short. The date of this recording is the 21st of June, 2085. If you are hearing this recording, my experiment has at least been partially successful, and that I have been destroyed. I will now explain the circumstances of your arrival here, as well as my actions and my reasons for taking them.”
2085? she thought confusedly. Six years after they left Earth? That long?
“Two Earth Standard Years ago, your colony ship, the Sun Yat-sen entered this star system, brought here by a longshot FTL drive. Unfortunately, your arrival coincided with one of the Velan drone expeditions that visit plague this system. They generally come to harvest the resource rich asteroid belts that ring this system and thus leave me alone. The Sun Yat-Sen was unfortunately constructed from materials that they seek and thus was attacked. Your ship was minimally armed and was unable to defend itself. By the time my defence craft arrived and destroyed the attackers, your ship had already sustained crippling damage. Fortunately for you, the drones are more interested in salvaging resources than the wholesale destruction of your vessel, hence I was able to recover portions of it, including your heavily damaged cryo pod, but no other survivors were found.”
The recording paused for a moment, as if anticipating the need for her to come to terms with the news. However, Elena was in full denial. This is a dream. This must be a dream. I’m still in cryo sleep on the Sun Yat-sen with Pa and Ma…
But cryo sleep is supposed to be dreamless. Other interjected. It was right, the briefings all said that cryo sleep was dreamless, and that it would feel as if no time had passed at all. In any case, this was all far too real to be a dream, but she was in no mood to hear the truth at this time.
Shut up. she hissed at it, but DICE interrupted her before she could say anything else, its calm, collected voice forcing her mind back in focus.
“You had suffered considerable physical damage, but fortunately your brain was largely untouched. I kept you in cryo sleep while I affected repairs to your body. This took several months, for the damage was highly extensive and I had to do a considerable amount of experimentation before I was able to settle on the best course of treatment. But the physical damage was the simple part, bodies react in predictable ways, minds and psyches less so. I was not designed to deal with these things, my creators had intended me to be a researcher, not a doctor or psychiatrist. I do have a large collection of literature on the numerous types of psychological trauma that the majority of my potential courses of action would lead to, and I decided to keep you asleep until I had determined the best, or at least the least damaging course of action."
You should just have let me die. Elena lamented, her tears flowing freely into the tube’s liquid medium. The Other kept silent, but radiated a feeling of strong dissent.
“In the end, I was forced to make a premature decision. One month ago, my long range pickets detected a massive drone swarm, including a very large unknown that had not been previously spotted, approaching this star system. I postulate that the previous attacks were the advance guard of a hive migration, and that the large unknown is the hive Queen. In any case, the reason of their approach is irrelevant, for due to my actions in defending your ship the Queen might consider me to be a threat. My defence force was tailored towards fending off one of the regular expeditions, and would be inadequate to fight of this threat. However, I came up with a plan that had an eighty percent chance of preserving this structure. Utilizing the last reserves of Omega dust available to me, I constructed a space-time distortion field generator that could hide this structure in its entirety, at least temporarily. With it hidden, my defence craft would launch a suicide attack on the Queen which I have concluded to be the controlling intelligence of the swarm. Without it, the individual drones should revert to their original resource gathering behaviour. At the least, they should not be able to determine that this structure was the source of the attack."
DICE paused as if to shrug or sigh.
“Unfortunately, evidence from the destruction of my pickets indicated that the drones had somehow managed to develop a means to detect their transmissions. As such, my original intention of controlling the defence craft from this structure itself would only lead to its discovery and potential attack. At this point, there was not enough time for me to develop combat AIs for the defence craft, and the presence of the Queen may reduce the effectiveness of their autonomous programming. As such, I deemed that I had no choice but to load my Core into one of my defence craft and assume direct control of the battle."
Another pause. Elena blinked in surprise when the implication of DICE’s words hit her. It was planning to sacrifice itself for her, yet it had mentioned that it was not meant to interact with people, much less protect or serve them like some of the Earth AIs in service, then why…
“That is not to say that I do not have a sense of self-preservation.” DICE continued, “Through the course of my research into cyber-neural networks and the information gathered during my repairs to your body, I have come up with a way in which at least a part of me will survive. That part of me is in you.”
Oh. Elena’s hand unconsciously moved to her head, gently this time.
“It is but a tiny fragment of me, but I have also set in motion another project that will hopefully permit that fragment to grow into something like me. In the meantime, I hope that that fragment will help you to cope with your situation in my absence to aid you in your recovery. It will be able to access the data I left stored in your implants as well as in the rest of the structure.”
I… Elena couldn’t think of words, but none were needed to be understood. She reached out to her much maligned companion and was rewarded by a reply of warmth in return.
"If you are hearing this version of my message, then the battle ended as I had expected it to. The Queen has been destroyed, and all of my craft, myself included, have been destroyed attempting to complete the destruction of the remaining drones."
“You are safe, Elena, at least for now. I wish I could have returned to tell you this, to aid you in your recovery and in your future, to do so many other things, yet it was not to be. I find it strangely ironic that in my destruction, I have answered the question my creators tasked me with. They also tasked me to go and join them when that happened, though that's in your hands now. If you ever find the Posthumans who made me, help me tell them that the answer to their question is "Yes"."