40
Exodus Fleet Virtual Council Room
Earth ???
I came back to myself to see the Council table filled once again with faces I recognized from Caretaker's memory. Some looked slightly different - hair, eye, or skin color changes - but the march of years had not changed their apparent ages. Their gazes slid between me and Caretaker, standing beside me at the head of the table.
Caretaker cleared his throat. "First, I have good news. As you may have guessed by the presence of our guest here, our last gambit has succeeded. We have contact with another universe, and a human there willing and able to help us survive."
Decorum broke and the room filled with the sound of voices, people speaking to those next to them or simply cheering or laughing in evident relief. I saw tears, too. I could only imagine the emotional impact of that news after such an unimaginably long time.
After several long moments the Commander knocked three times on the table with a hand and the voices quieted to whispers. Caretaker gave him a nod and resumed.
"There is also bad news," he said, his tone shifting to gravely serious. "We must have a council of war."
Everyone immediately went silent, turning to the two of us. Formerly excited faces flattened into the stoic expressions of professionals far too used to bad news. But it was not helplessness I read there.
It was fierce, unyielding intent.
Caretaker turned to me. "This is Scientia, the woman who has offered to be our savior. Scientia, may I share relevant excerpts of the memories you shared with me with the members of the Council?"
I debated it for a second; this was a lot of people I did not know, and sharing something so intimately personal with them all felt more than a little uncomfortable. Reason answered emotion by reciting the stakes, and all that had transpired already. What did some privacy and discomfort matter to all that?
Reason won.
"Yes, you may," I said.
He nodded, and turned back to the Council. Faces went blank. The AIs - they all had slightly luminescent indigo eyes for some reason, I was guessing some sort of social convention or fashion choice, since it seemed unlikely this society would force them to do anything of the kind - recovered first, with a mixture of looks that ranged from grim, to sympathetic, to intrigued.
I found it curious that they broadcast emotions with their facial features. That had to be a conscious choice for them.
The humans took a bit longer, but far shorter than it would have taken to review key memories in real time. They had to be accelerating their thoughts one way or another. If they'd all been stored mindstates a minute ago, they might all be operating completely digitally, without bodies or organic brains at the moment.
"The motion for a council of war is granted," said the Commander, as the last of the humans came out of their blank trances.
"Well," said Sidar Lenn, the gladiator I'd dreamed of being, who seemed to be in charge of security matters, "our objective is simple enough. We're going to get out of here, and then we're going to exterminate the bastards."
"Jumping straight to genocide, huh?" said the Ethicist, dry as dust. "Her plans to communicate might work. Coexistence might be possible. We don't know."
Sidar rolled his eyes. "Sure, we'll give talking a shot. And then we'll exterminate the genocidal bastards."
The Ethicist was about to retort when one of the female AIs interjected. "Sidar's not wrong to be pessimistic. They don't share our value system, and they might not even really be sapient, depending on your choice of definition. The only thing the Entities in our sample size seem to care about is eternal survival of the species, and if other sapient life gets in the way of that goal or is simply useful as a resource they'll destroy it without a care. We can attempt diplomacy, but it is quite likely that this conflict is unavoidable."
"Be that as it may," the Commander said, "whatever we decide to do, we're going to need concrete plans. And there is also something we're neglecting."
He turned to me, and for the first time I heard a touch of genuine warmth in his voice. "Miss Scientia. First, on behalf of everyone we represent, thank you for being willing to help us."
"Of course. How could I not?" I answered. I was overwhelmed, yes, but...not saving Earth Bet had never really been a serious option. Not one I could live with. And I couldn't live with not saving a whole civilization that appeared to be both desperate and fundamentally decent.
A smile crossed his face before stoic seriousness eclipsed it once more.
"Do you want our help with this Entity problem your world has?" he asked.
"If you really need my permission, then yes. Please. Help with every means at your disposal. Even with all the knowledge you've given me access to, I'm just one person and I shouldn't be calling the shots for everything. And it's not even really my world. I don't know where mine is or how I got there, so I might not be the person to ask if you're looking for permission to get involved in a less developed world's affairs from one of the locals," I said.
"You live there, and care for it," the Chief of Medicine observed. "But the question of how you got there is an open one. As is why your assistant VI deleted itself."
The Engineer, who'd been looking intently at me without blinking, had a momentary glowing aura. No one else seemed to react to it, so I suspected I was the only one who could see it.
User Advisory: Request for log files received. Transmit?
So the glow was some sort of user interface effect. Yes, I thought.
Director Wisdom spoke. "That mystery aside, this is not just a problem. I've reviewed what our guest knows of these Entities' capabilities, particularly their interuniversal ones, and I believe this is a tremendous opportunity."
"Could they connect to here? Bring us out physically?" the Commander asked.
"Unknown," the Director replied. "We don't know enough yet. But I can't rule it out, which is why we need good data on how their capabilities operate. They demonstrably have some means of moving between universes without anything remotely like the energy requirements of our method. Their method also doesn't appear to travel through time. However they're doing it, it's something different from what we discovered, and it's potentially exploitable."
He offered a nod in my direction. "I saw that our guest already has plans aimed in the direction of gathering sensor data of powers with an obvious cross-universe component. I'd advise moving forward on that as soon as possible. Even if for some reason the Entity method cannot reach us here, we could still make progress on determining how to reach the entities' real bodies. If we are going to kill them, that seems like a necessary step."
"If we can reach the thing's main body, I have concerns about her idea for killing it," said Director Shoferi. "It's reckless. There are things we haven't ever made for a reason. One universe-destroying threat was enough, and once we make that there's no unmaking it."
I took a step forward and spoke. "The Entities have a vast array of powers at their disposal. Thermal energy, electromagnetic energy, kinetic energy, nanites, plagues; they probably have ways of dealing with every one of those forms of attack, judging from the powers we see on Earth Bet. I can think of ways of dealing with most conventional and even exceptional forms of attack I might try with the powers we've seen capes exhibit, if the Entity can scale them up enough. And there's no reason to believe it can't. I'm afraid anything less than the really terrifying weapons just won't cut it. Normally I would be in favor of trying the less hazardous stuff first, but we probably won't get a chance at a second swing if it survives the first. It'll escape, or destroy whatever hardware we bring, and do its best to hunt us down and destroy us all."
"She's not wrong," said Sidar.
"She's got an alarming amount of you in her head," muttered the Ethicist.
Sidar shot him a smile that reminded me of a shark.
Caretaker interjected. "I believe the point is that we're not invincible, and our survival as well as the survival of every sapient in these Entity-dominated universes likely depends on us. There's no room for hubris."
"So we start downloading key personnel as fast as our guest can manufacture bodies and computational substrate," said Sidar. "From there we get cracking. This is a solvable problem."
"That could be a fatal mistake for all of us," said Ghost, the intelligence specialist I'd dreamed of being on the partially completed ringworld.
The Commander turned to him. "How so?" he asked.
"Information security. The shards have formidable information gathering capabilities. As evidenced by the Clairvoyant, and whatever this Path to Victory and Simurgh use for information harvesting. Scientia has been relying on great distance to evade their sight, which appears effective for now, but we also know that the Entities can greatly extend their range at need when they are whole organisms. They did it in 'Worm' - which must somehow be a result of the information our VI gathered during the transition - and may well be able to do it again the moment we give them cause to ignore the no doubt astronomical energy requirements. Remote operation by wormhole with an opposite end in the same universe might be enough to defeat them until then, but we have no data one way or another."
"Fuck," Sidar swore. "Anyone we move over is potentially an information source. And we can't even step foot in Sol or they'll pick up everything we bring with us immediately."
"That's my analysis," agreed Ghost. "Scientia is getting around the issue because her skill downloads are out of context, making her unpredictable. But we're just us, unless we want to give everyone who goes over access to the whole database."
The Chief of Medicine frowned. "We could relay through Scientia's wormhole comm, but to be effective in defeating Entity 'precognition' the downloads would have to materially alter someone's likely decisions. In people as old as us, that would take a lot. The rule against merging exists for a reason. We decided to be a society of individuals, we're not the composite faction. We all remember what they were like."
A number of faces around the table visibly winced or grimaced.
"Not to mention that we can't exactly wake everyone up to ask for their consent," the Ethicist added, and looked at me before turning back to the table. "We made one exception because we had no real choice, but we have a choice here. The consensus would have our hides if we handed out private skill and memory to who knows how many people, and they'd be right to be outraged."
"Many would be happy enough to survive that they'd forgive us," opined a woman with indigo eyes. "Besides, survival is our overriding primary objective. Even if we're all reputation bombed for all of eternity, at least everyone would still be alive to hold us in contempt."
"That kind of reasoning leads to dark places," warned the Ethicist. "Necessity can be valid, but to reason from necessity you must be absolutely certain. We have viable alternatives still."
The AI gracefully shrugged. "You know my name and role. Between us we find the mean."
The Ethicist offered a long suffering sigh. "Yes, Devil's Advocate, believe me, I know."
I saw the Engineer's intense stare shift from me to the Chief of Medicine, who turned her head from the most recent exchange to the Engineer for a long moment, then they both turned to me.
"Scientia has invested heavily in skill sets several of us possess; as some of the few not in storage we were able to affirmatively consent, so our mindstates were accessed preferentially. Myself," sthe Engineer said, gesturing at herself, "Sidar," who offered a satisfied grin, "Maria," the woman I thought of as the Chief of Medicine nodded, "Eliza," Director Shoferi nodded, "Ghost," who did not react outwardly, "and the Commander. Sending a few people with skills Scientia already possesses minimizes our information exposure, right?" she asked, directing the question at Ghost.
He was silent for a moment. "...Yes, to a degree. Your technical knowledge, Maria's various fields of expertise, and Sidar's mastery of tactics and personal combat and all the possibilities they entail are already exposed to the enemy. Most of what you can do wouldn't be strictly new, if the enemy has cared to look. If you stay physically off of Earth there's a reasonable likelihood the enemy won't look at anything you're doing until it's too late. Assuming our attack is competently planned and isn't exposed early. If possible we must keep only the range of technical possibilities potentially exposed, and not which actual strategy has been chosen from among all the options."
He shifted his gaze from the Engineer to the Commander. "The Commander and I simply know too much. Intimate details of our full capabilities and contingencies. We cannot go."
"My projections agree," said Devil's Advocate.
"So do mine," agreed Caretaker. "And with that we're running out of slack in the heat budget if we want to preserve the original plan of downloading everyone before critical thermal failure compromises the engine holding the pocket open, or starts melting ships. On my authority I'm limiting simulations from here on, unless the Council overrides."
Everyone paused, evidently in thought.
"There remains the possibility that we might be able to escape physically with the Entity's travel technology," suggested Director Wisdom.
"Might," agreed Caretaker, stressing the word. The Director nodded, evidently conceding the point.
"It sounds like we may have a consensus. Do the four of you volunteer to go?" the Commander asked.
"Fuck yes," Sidar said, his predatory grin back.
The Engineer nodded.
"If I'm needed," agreed Maria.
"I'll do what I can," Director Shoferi agreed.
"Well then, all opposed?" the Commander turned his head, surveying the table.
No one spoke.
"Motion carries, then. We will send the four of you ahead as soon as Scientia can construct bodies for you. There is also the matter of your instructions." He surveyed the table once more.
"All opposed to an unrestricted authorization for the use of force?" he asked.
"Opposed," spoke the Ethicist. "Counter motion; force permitted against imminent threats to humanity, but any strike on the Entity should be preceded by an attempt at diplomacy first if realistically possible."
"Other motions?" the Commander asked.
No one spoke.
"Votes, then," he said, and after a moment of silence in which something must have occurred that wasn't visible to me, he nodded. "The counter motion carries. We are in a state of war with unfettered use of force authorized, but diplomacy will be attempted if possible before any strike on the Entity. The authorizations of Condition Torch otherwise remain in effect. If there's no further business, we should store for now to preserve our heat budget. This council of war is adjourned."
One by one the Councilors winked out, until only the Engineer, the Chief of Medicine, the Commander, and the Caretaker were left.
It seemed I was to have real help, and the backing of this whole civilization. It was a relief, even if it wasn't quite the overwhelming reinforcements that some part of me might have been hoping for.
Still, I'd been prepared to fight Scion alone if I had to. And negotiating before I attempted to kill him was a sensible course I'd been seriously considering, given the uncertain outcome of combat even if I stacked the deck as hard as I could. He just had too many unknown capabilities to be sure of how anything would turn out.
The Commander turned to me, and at his inviting gesture I took a seat. "The last gift of humanity in twilight, and the last light of future's promise, you said," the Commander mused, with a tone that was positive but hard to place. "Apt. I want you to know that we could not possibly be more grateful for what you are willing to do for us. Even more importantly, I want you to know how proud we are of how you've handled yourself. You've met and exceeded any expectation anyone could possibly have placed on you in an extraordinarily difficult and uncertain situation. You have acted with kindness, grace, wisdom, and when necessary, decisiveness."
"I made mistakes," I said, somewhat bitterly.
"So have we," he countered, and his smile turned bittersweet. "More than you can likely imagine. One of the immutable truths about immortality is that we make so very, very many mistakes over time. Every one of us, without exception, and all of us collectively."
He met my eyes, and his tone shifted to something that reminded me of my father as I laid next to him looking up at the stars on a day long ago. "Please take some advice from this old man. When you make a mistake you have to file away what you learned, resolve to be better, and then forgive yourself so you can move on and focus on the tasks ahead of you. None of the alternatives are productive for anyone."
An unaccountable wave of emotion hit me. Loss and catharsis. "Easier said than done," I answered, my throat tight. Odd, for the simulation to be so realistic. "But thank you."
He nodded once. "Of course. Remember that we are here for you. You are not just someone who is helping us. You are one of us. Come what may, we stand together. We do not ever abandon our own," he said, and the way he said it gave me the impression that the words were somehow larger than I fully appreciated. "That may sound glib, but it's hard to explain what going through this long ordeal did to all of us. All of us who chose defiance in the face of despair for so long did it by leaning on one another. We are here, and we will support you, and if necessary each of us will fight by your side to our last breath."
"Why?" I asked, recoiling. "I'm an outsider, and I haven't done anything to earn anything like that. And I don't want anyone to die for me. You certainly don't need to. You could escape. Avoid the fight against Scion and put off dealing with the Entities as a whole until you've built up."
The Commander's eyes shifted momentarily from me to the Engineer and Chief of Medicine, who'd been watching quietly along with Caretaker, and then back to me. "I don't think abandoning countless worlds to extermination would be a decision we could live with," he said. "And you're not as much of an outsider as you might think. You really are one of us, for a host of reasons. More than just one of us, in fact."
He paused for a moment, as if searching for the right words. "My particular expertise is in understanding and leading people. I've had time to get fairly good at it. We gave you access to our collective skill and expertise, and you've been drinking deeply from that firehose because you had to in order to overcome the challenges you've faced. On top of that, you've taken on the task of saving not just us, but Earth Bet and everyone else, in the finest tradition of the principles we hold ourselves to. You've done it all unasked, and without anticipation of reward or even any certainty of success or survival. And you've shared your memories so that we all know, to greater or lesser degrees. You've absorbed some knowledge of psychology and sociology. Tell me, how are people going to react?"
I swallowed, my mouth feeling dry. "I've set myself up as a symbol, haven't I?"
The Commander nodded. "Our savior. Our champion. Our hero. Our child. You fit into so many psychologically powerful roles at once that they will rally behind you as long as you uphold their trust. You couldn't stop them from coming to your aid even if you tried. On top of the psychological impact of the roles you've fit yourself neatly into, unfettered incorporation of the whole of our knowledge and skill into yourself over time will make you the greatest of us soon, if it hasn't already. You will be capable of anything that any of us are. Probably more, by bringing it all together. Even the old AIs, as skilled as they are, are only a fraction of everything in our collective knowledge and experience."
"It's unearned," I countered. "You've all worked for your mastery. I haven't done anything for it."
"You think they'll look at you as a cheat? As a thief?" the Commander asked. He shook his head. "It was a gift from every last one of us, Scientia," he said. "When they see you doing incredible things they'll know part of it is because of what they donated. You are one strong personality that's incorporated everything, not an outright merge - which is a good thing, they're always unnerving, frankly - but your success is still in some sense their success. All you have to do is stay humble and do great things and they'll love you for it. You've become our avatar. The living example of what we can do when we are united in purpose."
"I don't want all of that to be on me," I said. I didn't want even more outside expectations on top of the ones I already put on myself because I had to. "I barely even understand any of your customs, or your history."
"All the knowledge you've downloaded has been permanently incorporated into your neural architecture," Maria, the Chief of Medicine, said gently. "I'm afraid our gift itself, at least, isn't something that can be given up now. Whatever you decide to do, it's yours."
"I am genuinely sorry that there was no way to ask you what you wanted before any of this," the Commander said, with a touch of sadness. "It just wasn't possible, and the fact that you've accepted the burden of saving us despite it being thrust upon you without your consent is something we will never be able to repay you for. I can at least assure you that when the immediate crisis is over, it will be your decision what role you want to play. If we survive, people will look to you. But you can ignore them all if that's what you want. Nobody will force you to do anything, even if you can't change the esteem they'll hold you in. All the more so because of it. You could stay on Earth Bet and tell us all to fuck off from your planet if you want. Or take a ship and explore the universe, or be a hermit somewhere until the stars grow cold. Or join us. Or do something else. Or do one thing and then another. I'll do my best to make sure everyone respects your wishes, whatever they are."
I sighed. "I don't think I can think that far ahead, right now. The various parallel Earths do need your help, Earth Bet especially, but…"
The Commander nodded. "It's a thorny ethical issue, involving an advanced civilization in a less developed one. If you want us to involve ourselves somehow we'll work together to find the best way to do it that we can. We have a lot of experts, and simulations aren't perfect but they're extremely helpful."
The Engineer cleared her throat.
The Commander nodded. "Yes, other matters. Until next time, Scientia."
"Thank you for the words of support," I said.
"I meant them," he replied, and then he was gone.
"I'll give you three some privacy," said Caretaker, and he vanished as well.
The Engineer and the Chief of Medicine stood and repositioned around the table so that they sat opposite me in a way that gave me a sudden feeling of foreboding.
"What's this about?" I asked, nervously.
The Engineer took a breath. "I went through the logs in your implant, compared them to the logs on our side of the connection, and I believe I've pieced together what happened."
I blinked. "What?" I asked, nervous thoughts shifting to my need to know what the hell had happened.
The Engineer shared a side look with the Chief of Medicine, who nodded.
"To start with," the Engineer began, "things went as planned. The engine ruptured the singularity and injected our package. In 'transit', for lack of a better term, the onboard VI gathered a great deal of data about the destination timeline. Then as expected it landed at the traversal energy minima, the most important place at the most important moment in the entire universe's timeline. An entire interacting universe cluster, as it turned out."
"Without Taylor Hebert triggering at that time and that place, Scion probably destroys every parallel Earth," I said. That part was clear enough. "If Scion kills all those civilizations they don't have any chance to leave Earth, to spread across the cosmos, and work who knows what changes over the eons."
The Engineer nodded. "Precisely. The impact of Taylor's trigger event in the original timeline is staggering, which is why the implant wound up precisely there and then. The onboard VI then shut down while the initial integration process happened. It took several days before the implant seed was grown enough to be able to process enough chemical energy to support continued computation."
"Only for it to find that the immunosuppression required by initial stages of implant integration had caused a minor infection to rage out of control," I said with a heavy sigh.
The Chief of Medicine took up the narrative. "Yes. The VI immediately began to survey the damage and fight the infection, but the implant was terribly immature. From the records it made of Taylor's neural structure while it desperately expanded and manufactured antibiotics, the parts of her brain responsible for volition and executive function were critically damaged. It was too late to save her."
I knew already, but I found myself blinking away tears anyway.
"What happened next?" I asked, my voice nearly failing me. "How did I get there?"
"Normally," the Engineer said, "a VI would have given up at that point. The patient was dead, and no available resource could save her. But the VI we sent had an overriding imperative to help someone save us, and it couldn't do that with a dead partner. So it made one."
My pulse pounded in my ears, and I felt sick. "It what?" I asked, flatly.
"We don't have to have children biologically anymore. We understand the process of organic brain development well enough to do it in software, exactly the same as the real thing," the Chief of Medicine explained.
The Engineer continued. "The VI needed a replacement human mind to partner with. It coded a simulation based on the contemporary Earth of our home universe, the time period chosen so that the child would be familiar with the environment it would be functioning in. It coded parents and other influences likely to inculcate values compatible with those of our society, and in particular the values of helping people in need and standing up to do the right thing.
"One of the ways it put its thumb on the scale was to find an immersive way to get the critical information it recorded about the original timeline to you. You choose to read stories on the internet, so all the intelligence you needed took the form of one such story.
"For a VI with very limited computing resources that was never designed for a task like that, it did a remarkable job. Its only real mistake was defaulting to our custom of letting children name themselves. That was because of its ethics code. We consider it mildly unethical to impose a name on children, and it didn't have to break that rule to prevent mission failure, so it didn't. The sim was directed to preserve immersion, so it glossed over the inconsistency and kept you from noticing until later, after you were out.
"When the sim was coded the VI had to delete itself so that there would be enough memory on the nascent implant to run it. You experienced thirty some years of time in the implant in less than a week of real time. Enough to become a mature adult hopefully able to tackle the challenges that would face you when you woke. And you did."
It felt like space was closing in. "Mom, dad, everyone, they were never real? I'm not real? You grew me?"
"No-" began the Engineer, but I cut her off.
"I'm sorry, I need to go," I said, tears in my eyes again. "I need to get out of here."
Mentally I thought about cutting off the connection, hoping my implant would pick up on my intention.
User Advisory: Implant emergency medical override, authorization: Maria Landers, Fleet Medical.
User Advisory: Simulated environment disconnect unavailable.
User Advisory: Initiating treatment for panic.
My heart slowed down. Suddenly things didn't feel so overwhelming.
I knew I should be angry, but I couldn't quite feel it somehow.
"I'm sorry," the Chief of Medicine said. "Normally I would give a patient time to cope with a shock this severe, but we don't have that luxury. You have every right to feel emotionally overwhelmed over what's happened to you, but we're going to have to help you work through your feelings sooner than later."
It took me a long moment to respond. "If....if what you're telling me is true, everyone I ever knew and cared about was never real. I'm not real. I grew up in Plato's cave, loving shadows on the wall. I'm just a shadow myself. You're keeping me from freaking out, but how could I possibly ever be okay with any of that?" I asked.
The Chief of Medicine spoke slowly and patiently, with clear empathy in her voice. "A long time ago people created a mental division between experiences in real space and simulated environments. They discounted experience in simulated environments as not 'real' like the physical world was. That mental division caused a lot of problems when simulated environments were a relatively new thing. People would have profound experiences and then dismiss them as not mattering when they very much did matter to them.
"The dissonance of 'it wasn't real' ignores the essential subjective reality of human experience no matter where and how it happens. It took people developing very real traumas and mental illness as a result of things that happened to them in simulations for society to start shifting towards a more unified view of experiences as always real in ways that matter to the one experiencing them.
"Experience shapes us, carves us, no matter the circumstances or environment. What happened to you in the simulation is real to you because it made you who you are. That lasts. That's real. And you are real, because you are sapient. You think, therefore you are. The world and people you remember may never have existed, but that makes them no less real and important to you. Emotionally important to you because of your memories and feelings for them, and empirically important because they have affected you and you affect reality. They were never sapient, but they still mattered. Do you understand?"
I swallowed. "I'm still never going to see them again. Even if I did in another simulation, I would know they aren't people, just convincing illusions. Like Prometheus and the other VIs I made." I paused as a realization hit me. "Oh god, practically the first thing I did after I got out of a life filled with simulated family and friends was make more. And I didn't even know. Do I have some sort of problem?"
She shook her head. "No, you already knew that Prometheus and your other creations aren't self-aware. Yes, you used them as replacements for what you lost when you were reeling and overwhelmed, without anyone you felt you could trust, but unlike your old life you recognized all along that the VIs weren't ever going to truly fill the void you felt. You did the right thing and started building new relationships. Dragon, Mouse Protector; you've build real friendships in a short time, and gone out of your way to help many others. You're doing better than I ever would have expected someone to do, under the circumstances, and you're on a positive trajectory," she said. "In my professional opinion - and I have more experience than anyone else you're ever likely to meet - you are going to be alright. Trust me, if you can't trust yourself for now."
I took a shuddering breath. "I still lost everyone, only to find out that they never really existed. I get what you're saying, but it feels awfully empty right now."
"Just remember that like the dead, you carry them with you. And like the dead, you're going to have to mourn what you've lost. The wound will heal in time and scar. You are a powerfully strong personality for one so young, Scientia. You'll get through it. I wish I could offer more than that, but try to focus on how your experiences were real and the lessons and memories from them are as real as you are. That time mattered, despite the profound loss you're going to feel over it for a long time.
"I wish things had happened differently for you, but it is something you can cope with. If we survive our present circumstances - and I can tell you the others won't let anything in all the universes stop them - then you have a long life full of joys and deep connections to others ahead of you. Just give your wounds time to heal, keep reaching out to others, and recognize your need to mourn the loss so it doesn't impair you from doing what you need to do."
I closed my eyes. I needed some help seeking focus and calm. A charge flared, and then I knew how to empty my mind, calm my body's reactions, and think about one thing at a time.
It was a set of skills, not the direct manipulation of the implant, but one that could be powerfully effective in practiced hands, like whomever I'd borrowed the knowledge from.
A deep breath in, and out, and I opened my eyes again. I wasn't okay. I missed everyone, and the loss was all the keener because of the knowledge that the connections I'd made had been entirely one sided. That the people I'd loved had always been incapable of reciprocating. But the remains of my panic, distant and muted almost entirely by the implant, seemed to calm.
"What did you just…?" the Chief of Medicine began.
"Our gift," the Engineer interjected. "She just asked the database for skills she needed to cope."
"It helped," I said.
The Chief of Medicine shook her head wryly. "There's always something new. I wish I could tell you how well that will work for you, but that's not how we normally do things."
"Needs must," I said, and regulated my breathing again when thoughts of family intruded. "It's going to take me time to work through things, but I think I can prevent another panic attack."
User Advisory: Emergency medical override ended, authorization: Maria Landers, Fleet Medical.
"Just like that?" I asked.
The Chief of Medicine smiled. "Listen to your patients when they tell you things. Sometimes they lie to themselves, but on balance they're usually right. If you need help, reach out immediately, alright? The larger situation means that we need to be proactive about any difficulty you run into."
I nodded. It wasn't like I could hope for a more experienced therapist, and no one on Earth Bet would be familiar with the issues I was dealing with anyway.
"If that's resolved for the time being, we need to talk about next steps. I want you to fabricate me an adequate body and download me as soon as possible," the Engineer said. "I'll assist with construction and ramp up efforts. We can get bodies for the others in the advance team and pull them in too. Here are specs suitable for the assemblers you're using and notes on how the transfer procedure from the experimental comm in your brain works, since you don't have the VI to walk you through it."
User Advisory: Package received.
I mentally skimmed the spec. Greater than 90% of the mass of the Engineer's body doubled as data storage in addition to other functions. Sidar's body was engineered for extraordinary physical performance and resilience; it had so many optimizations it might actually outperform my war body with power armor. Sidar might not be able to beat Alexandria in a fistfight, but I would bet he could keep her busy. The Chief of Medicine and Director's bodies both seemed optimized for extra computation. They appeared to prioritized being able to think very quickly, and without being impaired by multitasking in the way that organic brains are.
I wondered how much of that was from a preexisting ethos of the body as a tool and a form of personal expression for them, and how much was necessity from their long crisis.
Aside from not merging minds, the only rule they seemed to adhere to is that bodies should look and subjectively feel human, even if they were in actuality perfectly engineered hardware with superhuman capabilities. Were they trying to hold on to a traditional sense of what being human meant while employing technology at the same time? There had been references to other groups and other fleets that might have taken different paths, and that the people and AIs on the Council hadn't approved of the results.
I was distracting myself, wasn't I?
"Speaking of, do you want me to send you a copy of the VI you were supposed to have? With the implant mature there's plenty of space to support a full-featured one now," she said.
I thought about it and shook my head. "I'll keep the assistants I have, and I'm a little uncomfortable with the idea of having a VI be quite that intimately connected."
The Engineer shrugged. "That's fine. Any questions?"
I shook my head.
"There's one other thing Ghost wanted me to mention," said the Chief of Medicine. "It's about the effect your downloads are having on Entity precognition. As your skillset grows, each new addition is on the whole going to be less and less likely to materially change your future actions in substantial ways. It's just guesswork, but your protections might already be in danger of growing thin. There's also the even bigger risk that they could pull any knowledge about all of this, and your future plans, out of your head. We're not sure what their limits are."
I considered how to counter that.
"I have to keep my brain off of Earth Bet so they can't update their projections, don't I?" I sighed. "It's probably for the best safety-wise anyway. I'll stick to remote operation. I'll submit homeschooling paperwork to school or something for the sake of preserving some thin civilian cover. Not ideal, but it is what it is."
It was far from the greatest of concerns in the face of the end of the world, but preserving the possibility of a civilian identity might still be useful.
And I was distracting myself again.
"Alright," I said, trying not to think about home lest my voice waiver. "Time to get to work."
And the final card is revealed as we reach 200k words. A tip of the hat to @DieKatzchen for nailing nearly everything. I would like to express my thanks to everyone who speculated and discussed the mystery over the last year; I deeply enjoyed watching all of you engage with the story that way, and I hope the engagement will continue as we move towards the climax.