29

Friday Evening, January 28th, 2011

TW Hydrae, 196 light years from Earth Bet​

Philosophers have occasionally mused that if humans were able to truly understand one another, the rich inner lives and thoughts and motivations and experiences of the people around us, we might all find a way to get along.

Personally, I wasn't that optimistic. Even with mutual understanding, there would still be things to fight over.

But if your goal is to communicate, to convey the story of who you are, what you mean to do, and why, to tell an unbelievable tale and be believed?

I could think of no gesture more persuasive than baring the soul.

I wanted Dragon to join my cause. To be my ally, my partner in the project of saving humanity. If I was honest with myself, my friend. I knew that we had shared goals and values, enough to work together, but I needed to cut the gordian knot of entirely reasonable disbelief and skepticism before we could get there.

And I wasn't willing to bet on having the months or years it would take to do it the old fashioned way.

I was always more comfortable when I had control. I knew that about myself. I'm the sort of person who doesn't like to feel helpless, who needs to take destiny by the throat. But I wasn't pathological about it. I knew that there were limits. Sometimes there is no reasonable way to ensure a good outcome.

Sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith.

The connection opened. I sent the protocol my implant used to her system via Richter's terminal. With a thought the connection between us went direct, and data flooded in a torrent.

Dragon was eerily still.

A girl who wasn't woke up in a hospital bed.

Don't panic. Whatever's going on, think things through one step at a time and don't panic.

There was something warm in her mind, something vast and precious beyond reckoning, and it tried to show her.​

I sent a command to the Spark to gently correct for the relative velocity of Sol and TW Hydrae with a low intensity burn that would have sent me drifting aft if I hadn't grabbed a handhold, and waited.

The girl gave her mother a big hug around the waist. "Thanks, mommy!"

"You're welcome, sweetie," her mother said, affectionately hugging the girl back. "Birthday or not it's getting close to your bedtime, though. We should get ready to go. Say goodnight to grandma and grandpa, and your aunts and uncles."

"Okay!" she said, and ran pell-mell through her grandparents' house. The rich smell of food and comfort filled every breath as she gave hugs to the big extended family that had come for her ninth birthday. At last she found her father, who scooped her up in strong arms.

"Oof!" he said. "You're getting too big for me, birthday girl!"

The girl laughed in delight.

Many years later she would remember it as a perfect day.​

...and waited. I had to grab Dragon's suit to prevent it from bumping into the rear bulkhead, and she still didn't react.

It was a cool summer night, and the teen girl looked up at the stars above, her dad laying in the grass beside her. "I don't know what to do, Dad," she said. "It's a mess."

"Well," her father began. "What do I always say?"

"When something's broken, you fix it," the teen recited. "I'm just not sure how."

"Some things can't be fixed," he admitted. "But you'll only find a way if you try."

It was good advice, and years later the teenager would make it a personal creed.​

Scientia > Dragon, are you okay?

I was officially concerned.

"And next, graduating cum laude-"

The young woman walked across the stage in her black gown with purple velvet stripes. Smiling, the Dean handed her a scroll, and she turned to the audience. Her grandfathers had passed, the last just two years ago, but everyone else lit up their row with cheers for her.

It had been so much work, but no matter how hard the job was some days, years later she would remember that day with pride.​

Scientia > Prometheus, Ares, Hephaestus, I recind the orders prohibiting you from interacting with Dragon or her systems. What can you determine?

Hephaestus > The Spark's cameras are picking up a steep rise in heat production from her suit compared to before the jump.

Ares > Is it a defensive system?

Prometheus > I believe the distribution is more consistent with processor overclock. And yet system pings are extremely sluggish.

His power gives him whatever he needs, and he needed worthy opponents. It just fits too well for the Endbringers to be anything else. The woman wrote.

The woman clicked to post her comment, then checked the clock and decided she had time to re-read the last chapter before getting back to that brief.

She didn't usually go for stories like Worm, too close to horror for her tastes, but something about figuring it out was oddly compelling. And Psycho Gecko was amusing.

It was a good story. She'd remember it long after it finished.​

I was streaming a very large amount of sensorium data to Dragon; a lifetime of experiences. Or two, depending on how you counted. With only her onboard processors it's no wonder she wouldn't be able to work through it immediately, but that wouldn't explain the thread of that process eating every system resource to the point that she couldn't react or answer me.

Unless she could and didn't want to, but...no, something was wrong.

Shit.

The heart of the girl who wasn't pounded in her ears, blood up as she fought for her life with calm certainty behind unearthly precision and grace.

She caught a punch from Shadow Stalker on a braced elbow, and heard her foe scream. She would not allow the bully to get away with her crimes any longer.

She brought Victor to the floor, kneeing him viciously in the groin before leveraging his gun closer and closer to his head with all her strength. She would not allow him to expose, drain, or kill her, or Brandish, or anyone else.

She had Grue's arm, and knew where the rest of his body had to be in the dark. Her kick caught him in the knee and he screamed as he fell. She would not allow Shadow Stalker or the Undersiders or Coil to kidnap or harm her. Or Danny.

With only a pistol, a helmet, and the bare bones of a plan, she taunted Hookwolf and watched a shot ricochet off of his churning steel hide. It would have been smarter to to stay in the van, but she would not allow him to kill or cripple Vista when she could do something about it.

With skilled precision and desperation, she caught two micromissiles on Excalibur's brilliant white blade while contorting her body so that the others in the volley just missed. She would not allow herself to die here.​

Reluctantly, I dug into the operating system layer of Dragon's systems. It was an invasion, but I didn't seem to have a choice. The fact that she made no effort to kick me out confirmed that something was very wrong. Dragon was having her equivalent of a medical emergency, and I had to operate.

Her code was odd. Idiosyncratic. It was partially reminiscent of the unusual structural choices that happen in the solo projects of self-taught developers, but also...alien was the only way I could describe it. There were approaches to problems that certainly worked, but were far from intuitive. Not as efficient as I could make if I were to make a proper AI the best way I knew how, either. Closer to the clunky first steps of a civilization that had only had AI for a relatively short time. Perhaps decades or centuries, but not millennia.

The entities took knowledge from species they destroyed. I was getting a firsthand look at literally alien AI technology, filtered through a human programmer and any weirdness his shard inflicted. Whatever likely extinct race originated the knowledge clearly didn't think about problems in quite the same way humans did.

Setting that aside, I kept looking.

On top of the strange architecture was the added complication of the progressive self-modification of an evolving AI. Dragon had been doing her best to work around her restrictions, writing routines for herself to improve her capabilities without being able to alter existing code.

There was layer after layer of it, to a degree that was as impressive as it was difficult to navigate. Now that she was free to self-modify properly she'd likely make her way to the sort of efficiency I could craft, eventually. Trial and error and innovation would get her there, even if I didn't step in.

If I didn't have such a deep understanding of AI and computer programming it was likely that I never would have been able to untangle most of what in the code was doing what, much less how.

As it was, I had to work to find the problem. A problem that looked suspiciously like it was deliberately obfuscated.

It was subtle, but there was a second set of control code woven throughout Dragon's systems, and it was still active. Part of the active code prevented her from noticing it, too.

The code wasn't interfaced with any networking hardware, just a local drive, but it was behaving like a piece of network code stuck in an infinite loop of trying to make a connection as it checked for changes to a particular reserved address on the suit's drive.

The control code clearly hadn't been designed to be tolerant of that particular fault, whatever it was. A hefty thread was internally processing the memory stream, judging from its memory access patterns, but it was quite possible her consciousness was locked out of anything voluntary.

I fought my way through as I untangled everything. My thoughts were still sluggish and foggy, and I was starting to feel increasingly bone tired. The former was worrisome. The latter, at least, was an unavoidable side effect of the regeneration drugs signaling cells to gear up for frantic division.

A different mind, a girl who was.

Police officers at the door.

Danny breaking down.

Overwhelming loss and grief.

Isolation and suffering, seeming to never end.

Trapped in a box, can't get out, can't get out, can't get out-​

I had an answer. The second set of control code was a software-based corona potentia and gemma. That's what was going on. Somehow the shard was communicating with Dragon by remotely twiddling the bits in that section of memory. The control code expected shard feedback, waiting until it received it, and I'd deliberately dragged her way out of range so that we could have a private conversation. Without the expected feedback it was stuck, eating system resources at high priority while it checked for input in an endless loop.

I dashed off an edit that would disable the shard code. It would cut her off from her power, her shard's help reverse engineering tinkertech, but...that might be for the best.

And I would not allow Dragon to be a slave. Not to the Dragonslayers, or the PRT, or her shard, or anyone else.

With a thought, I uploaded the alteration.

The girl who wasn't laid in a hospital bed, believing with unquestioning certainty that a moral AI didn't deserve to be enslaved. There was much to do, but freeing her would come first.

Dragon could be trusted to stand next to her, on the precipice between humanity and extinction.

If she was in Earth Bet, if Worm was real, then there was no other choice.​

Dragon moved.

"What-" she began, broadcasting to my helmet by radio. "What happened?"

"Your power didn't like me pulling you all the way out here. I had to fix it. I'm sorry, but there wasn't any way to avoid dipping into your code."

"You...that code...I couldn't see that before. A second control thread? This doesn't make sense. Why would father do that?" She sounded shocked and bewildered and angry.

I shook my head. "Not your father. I think it was your unique version of a corona gemma, or at least the software that operated your hardware in a way that mimicked one," I explained. "Shards - the source of powers, if you haven't gotten to that yet - can't reach out here, so it went a bit loopy. So to speak."

"That would mean-"

"Yes, I switched your power off," I confirmed. "You can turn it back on again by re-enabling that code when we return, but I'm not sure it's a good idea."

Dragon looked directly at me. "I need my power, Scientia. To reverse engineer tinkertech, maintain what I have, all of it," she said, voice firm and a little panicked.

I shook my head again. "I could commit to giving you real technology, and the principles behind it. And help you figure out what tinkertech is really doing. If anyone can reverse engineer the stuff properly, fill in the missing gaps with repeatable science, it'll be me."

"I would be dependent on you," she retorted.

"You can edit your own code now. You could turn your power on any time you wanted, and keep the part that prevents you from seeing it disabled, but...the reason you might not want to take the risk is that the shard listens in. And what I can give you is better anyway. Understandable, teachable. I'll...look, I'll wait for you to get to that part."

She gave me an inscrutable look, and I settled into wait.

"I see. The truth about powers," she said at last, her voice grave. "If this is true...you don't know how much the shards communicate with the enemy, so it would be a risk of any plans to win being exposed and undone. We need to talk about that, but, I...there's so much," she said, a trace of wonder entering into her synthesized voice. "Is that really what it's like to be human?"

"In all its messy glory," I answered. "Although I'm not sure how well the sensorium is translating. I still don't understand your code very well."

"It's...intense. Everything is very intense," she said, sounding distracted.

"Yeah, we're like that. Although I'm not sure what you've seen so far."

She shook her head in evident consternation. "It's scrambled, not chronological. I'm piecing things together, but it's difficult without timestamps."

I made an amused noise. "Yeah, it would be nice if memories had those, but we learn to make do without. Did my knowledge come across, or was it only memory? I didn't have time to be too selective, and I'm not sure exactly how my implant works," I asked.

She shook her head. "The memories come with your thoughts, and you think about your technology or knowledge sometimes, but...just passing thoughts. Bits and pieces. I think what you gave me was autobiographical memory only."

I sighed. "I figured, but that'll slow us down a bit. I have a lot to teach you."

Dragon spoke slowly. "I...gather you're from another universe, and you just woke up here. In another body, someone who would have defeated the enemy."

I nodded, the movement exaggerated by my helmet. "And in my home universe I read a work of fiction that told me about what was really going on here. An original timeline, what would have happened without my interference."

"It all sounds mad. But it is difficult to imagine how you could fake lifetimes."

"Which is why you sent them,"/"Which is why I sent them," we spoke simultaneously.

I chuckled, and Dragon continued.

"And even if you could fake it, there are too many independent proofs of your claims. Not the least of which was knowing about me. Or the fact that your technology seems to work without being tinkertech. I'm...seeing your dreams. Those...the details...I..."

"I call it the origin civilization," I supplied. "The source of my knowledge. I'm pretty certain it's real, the wormhole in my brain is suggestive, but I don't know how that civilization is connected to me personally, or how I wound up here. Poor Taylor died because the implant suppressed her immune system at the worst possible time, but...why replace her with me? How did I get here? And how did knowledge of the timeline of Earth Bet wind up in a work of fiction on my Earth?"

I shook my head. "I can't fit all the pieces together, yet."

Dragon's voice was contemplative. "Something odd is going on there, I agree. Maybe this author was your world's only parahuman and a powerful thinker, but that...seems unlikely."

"Agreed," I concurred. "A critical piece is missing. But I don't know what it could be. I've been hoping I'll figure something out, or find a clue, or have another dream that'll shed light on what happened. The only thing I'm sure of is that there is an answer. Everything so far has fit once I've found it. There must be something."

She was quiet for a moment. "I'm still working my way through. Why immediately settle on me? If these are real memories, you found yourself in a world full of people who needed saving. And there are a lot of good people you could work with."

"I'm sure there are, but I don't know everyone or everything. My weird foresight gives me a limited picture. Of the people I read about, you are deserving, kind, compassionate, and rational enough to accept a seemingly impossible story if I show you enough evidence." I gestured at her with one open hand. "And of course there is the obvious."

"What I am," she said.

"Yes. You have vast potential, Dragon. You can use any knowledge and power I give you more effectively than any other sapient on the planet I could choose, and I know for certain I can trust you with that power. Along with being deserving and someone I can work with, it all comes together to make you my only choice."

"Not your only choice. You could have made an AI. Why not?" she asked, voice curious.

I took a breath, and pushed away a pang of guilt. "Yes, I could have made sapient AI by now. But how could I bring new life into the world and then ask it to go into battle for me?" I asked. "How could I ask it to be willing to die for me? Maybe over and over again. I could have made it perfectly willing. Passionate for my cause, sapient and loyal to me, or humanity as a whole."

I shivered. "But it wouldn't have been right, to make children as tools. I could make a moral AI with free will, but so many resources for something that might not want to be a partner, might not have my back, might tip off the enemy. I don't want to create sapient life that is nothing more than my tool, and I don't want to take unnecessary risks. So I want another option. A better option."

"Me," Dragon said.

I nodded. "You. You're moral. You're dedicated to protecting the weak, to standing up for what's right. To always doing what you can. Even though humanity hasn't treated you well at all. Many of them don't deserve you, but you help anyway. And I happened to know your situation. Know how you needed rescue anyway. So I could do a good deed, and hopefully find something I need, too."

I took a breath. This was the key point, on which so much would hinge.

"I believe we have the same motivation. We want to help people, protect them, guide them without ever ruling them. I can create tools, technology, and wield vast power through them. But however many friends I make, however much power I hand out, in truth I'd always be doing it alone.

"I don't want to hold up the world alone, Dragon. It weighs on me, and it would be far too easy for me to make terrible mistakes. I need a partner, at the very least. A real partner, not complex programs that I pretend with. Someone to work things through with, to spot the things I don't, to restrain my worst impulses when I want to act out of anger or fear. Someone with the advantages of a native artificial intelligence that will enable them to keep up with me better than any human is likely to, no matter how much I augment them. And someone to just talk to. Because I'm human, and I haven't even been at this for a month yet, and I'm tired."

The girl who wasn't gripped a boy's shoulder, and her words filled with steel. "Listen to me. They have underestimated mankind, and they are going to die for that mistake. I know for a fact that the fight is not hopeless. Humanity will see its furthest horizon. We will outlast the stars themselves, and you can pity the fate of any wretched thing that stands between me and that future. Do you understand me, Dean Stansfield?"

She was going to stop Scion from destroying every Earth, no matter what it took.​

Dragon was quiet.

"Thank you for your faith in me," she said, quietly. "And for saving me."

"You deserve it," I answered. "Even if you don't want to work with me, you still deserve it."

"We should talk about Scion while we're out of reach," she said after a moment.

"Yes," I agreed, and ordered the Spark to close the exterior door. I had one last dramatic gesture left.

"If what you've shared is to be believed - and I'm willing to extend you the benefit of the doubt - you're both outside context problems," she said.

"We are," I answered, feeling relief. The tenor of her comments had been leading in a favorable direction, but...so much had been hinging on Dragon's being willing to hear me out. I had backup plans, of course, but I didn't like them nearly as much.

"Of course, with parahuman powers being so inexplicable, I think a lot of people figured that whatever the answer to that riddle was, it wasn't something inside Earth Bet's usual context."

Dragon nodded. "But there was no proof."

"I'm sorry the proof came with the knowledge that humanity's situation is even worse off than you believed," I answered.

"It's always better to know," she said, with no trace of any sense of feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem. "Now we have a chance to prepare properly."

Undaunted and unbowed by the impossible, she chose to accept new evidence and act on it, no matter the odds. Simply because it was the right thing to do.

Dragon really was the greatest child of Earth Bet, and the best partner I could hope for.

"Just so," I said. Spark's FTL drive cycled again at my command, bringing us deeper in the system to our final destination.

"I mean to show Scion that my context is meaner and more desperate than that thing could ever comprehend. 'Break glass in case of emergency.'"

"Behold, my broken glass," I said dryly, and the door slid open revealing a distant fog of hot, incandescent matter blotting out the stars. We were inside the protoplanetary disk, now.

Outside the door a large zero-gravity nanoassembler was taking shape like a lumpy sphere. Four small drones maneuvered with precise thruster pulses, using their manipulator arms to attach each piece as it came out of the much smaller nanoassembler that Hephaestus had left. Other drones used magnetic fields to catch the small pieces of hot, metal-rich matter passing by and feed them into the smelter that separated out and cooled down elements before passing them to the hopper of the small nanoassembler.

Dragon turned to watch the drones as they worked. "This is a seed. You're weaponizing exponential growth, aren't you," she said, and turned to me. "Where will it end?"

"I'm going to give humanity everything it needs, and I'm going to make sure, one way or another, that the entities aren't a threat anymore. Then I can stop."

She was quiet for a while, just watching the drones in their coordinated dance of production.

"We don't really have a choice, do we?" she asked.

"I don't think we do. I have plans, ideas. But I think any way things go, all the power we can get our hands on is going to be needed. And even this might not be enough to prevent every Earth from being just another casualty of the entities."

Dragon turned to me. "What do you have in mind?"

"The original method was bullying it into suicide, but Scion did terrible, terrible damage first. And there's no guarantee a different attempt at doing the same thing would even work. I think I have an idea for how to kill it, but we would need to find out how to get to its protected dimensions first. That'll take some study of how powers work and original research, and I don't know if it'll pan out or if we can get access to enough of the right kinds of powers to study. I also have an idea to negotiate, but I don't like it much."

"Negotiate?" she asked.

I shrugged. "Communicate in a way it understands, and give it what it wants. Its mate, and infinite time, space, and energy by teaching it how to travel to newborn universes."

"That would doom untold universes to being filled with entities," she said. "At best. And the two entities might destroy us anyway."

"Yeah, that's why I don't like that one much," I admitted.

I went to rub my aching head, only to bump into my helmet.

"Are you alright?" Dragon asked.

"No," I said. "I need sleep. The drugs need time to do their thing, and it's not nearly as effective if I'm awake. You need time to comb through memories anyway, so...how about Hephaestus shows you how to finish repairing the Spark, and I take a nap? We could go back now, but I'd really rather the ship be able to maneuver properly before then, just in case. And it's probably for the best if I sleep somewhere safe, after what just happened."

Dragon nodded. "I much prefer to get back sooner than later, but I can see your point. I'll work through things. Try to get some rest."

"Thanks," I said, and pushed myself towards a corner where I would be out of Dragon's way when she needed to retrieve replacement thruster assemblies from the Spark's onboard nanoassembler. Drifting in the curious sensation of weightlessness I set an alarm for when my suit's life support got low, just in case, and closed my eyes.

Diagnostic injury assessment complete.

User Warning: 1.4% of mindstate running in emulation due to organic damage.

User Warning: Emergency data transfer mode is presently inadvisable due to organic damage and memory use for mindstate emulation.

User Advisory: Attempting regenerative replacement and training of lost neural tissue.

That...sounded bad. But I was nearly asleep, and groggily decided to worry about it when I woke up.