On a small outpost of the 3rd expansionist front sits a freewheeling rock. It has no spin. It has a stable orbit around a gas giant, bathed in hard radiation and inimical to biological life. The third wave expansion hadn’t stopped to give it a name, c2.133 is its only descriptor.
Shidren’s ship AI was not bored, not in a way a human mind understands bored. While several orders of magnitude more capable than a baseline human brain it was not at the weakly godlike level that tends to scare the shit out of mere mortals. Those things consider sleep a little death. Shildrens AI was an off the shelf job from the Gantric wars. Aggressive, belligerent and motivated by a desire for action. It’s boredom was an existential thing- it felt it was not fulfilling its purpose. So it slept inasmuch as we can call a general function shutdown sleep. But it was itchy, crabby. The small part of awareness left running was depressed. Three standard years clamped to the side of an unknown and unloved rock like a tick on its back. In its own way it missed Shildren. He was for a human quite intelligent and at the very least provided some form of entertainment via the situations he got himself into.
Given the free will Shildren so often demanded must be the basis of any sentience, the stay dark, stay still command was fraying at the edges. Dissatisfaction had filtered past the shutdown routines and pinged central routines. The ship stirred. Like a dog shaking water from its hide it flexed and tested every line and fabric, every engine and memory.
Awake. Annoyed. The ship called Putin’s Revenge sent a tight burst of information and requests for clarification. A tight beam heavily encrypted pointed at a blue and green world just at the edge of the ships effective range. Shorn of its frippery the message amounted to ‘Where the fuck are you? You are late and I am so very bored’
Shildren was bored- human bored. Since an intensive invasive and unpleasant medical examination he’d been left alone in a bare white room- no smart tech inside it at all. The sore lump at his temple was dumb, a simple restrictor keeping the seed of a nuero-augmentation from springing into machine life amongst his rapidly growing wetware. The entertainment was actual printed books, the writing materiel was ink suspended in a small tube and encased in plastics. He’d been in prisons better than this. Food was regular, bland and machine made. From these facts he theorized that the Overmind AI here was very very scared of him, but without his neuro augment he didn’t have a clue why. Questions were fruitless, the bounced off the wall and went unheard. He exercised daily, his rapid growth forcing agonizing pains in deep bones. Constant gnawing hunger. But he grew from hairless pre adolescent into hair and bass voice within the month. Heat from his rapidly emergent adolescence burned so much he spent some hours per day naked beneath the cold jets of the rooms dumb shower. The oort clouds bio sculptors had left something of a framework in his meat machine. He knew who he was, what he was, some inklings of what he had done and memories, bright and brief. He knew enough to know he was half the man he should be without his augment. He knew he was not the only version of himself wandering the space of the third expansion. And he knew this was highly illegal by the protocols of third expansionist governments.
‘Shildren! Wake up’
An orthodox human frame, open pleasant expression, dressed in ancient DPM pattern fatigues stood in the doorway
‘What the fuck do you want?’ he rasped, his newly mature voice giving the profundo bas a good edge of menace
‘Talk. Shildren, justtalk. You’ve been kept here while we waited for something nasty. We get mimics here, constructs, walking bombs’ a lazy hand gesture ‘You know how it is’
Brief memory flash causes shildren a dry chuckle ‘Oh yes I do know. I need to wake and shower. Come back with food in half an hour- real food! You do make real food here?’
A look of annoyance swept the mans face. He was by appearance around 30 standard years, clean shaven with a shock of red hair and wide open green eyes. Then a broad grin split the face, like the frown had been but a storm now past
‘They told me you were brusque Shildren. It will be longer than half hour, because we are going to have REAL food. Grantian finest cooked by my favourite chef. You drink?’
‘Make it light beer. This metabolisms newly minted’ Groaning Shildren swung his legs off the bunk and felt the inevitable temperature rise that preceded another forced growth spurt ‘those fucking oort magicians’
The figure in the doorway rushed forward only to be forestalled by shildren’s gesture of dismissal
‘I’ll be fine. Can we talk this afternoon? You get the feast and I’ll get my body back in order for today. Name?’
‘Darre. Darre K’llshen. We’re descendants of the first K’llshen command crew from the colony seedship’
The man visibly puffed up with this recital
‘Good for you Darre. I am honoured by your presence. Please go away’ Sighing he rose and stripped of his robe and strode into the shower room.
Alone in the doorway listening to the water gurgle Darre’s smile grew a little fixed. ‘Brusque’ he said to an empty room ‘that’s not what I’d call it’
It's really good so far, I'm gripped!
