Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen

Video Record of January 23, 2340, Entered as Prosecutorial Evidence

Trial of Jean-Pierre Lubanga, International Criminal Court

You promised me super soldiers! What is this?

The dictator in his stained military uniform paced back and forth angrily in the observation room. The men in white coats cowered and avoided looking him in the eyes, all except for one.

Science takes time. The genetics are working. We have to figure out the accelerated education. Weve made huge advancements -

With MY money! shouted the dictator. I need weapons, and you given me children.

The dictator spat on the floor, his finger jabbing towards the one-way glass wall looking into a large room. What sat in that room could best be described as freaks. Three men and two women, extremely muscled with dense, gray skin and thick, sloping foreheads. They wore fatigues, but that was the only thing about them that said military. Two of the men were in one corner, poking each other and laughing, playing a game of some sort. One of the women stared dully at the wall, while the third man used a dagger to cut his forearm. Every time he cut, the cut would heal. The last woman sat in the corner, hugging her knees, rocking and humming to herself.

They are less than a year old, said the scientist. You should not have forced them into boot camp already.

Bah. I have plenty of children carrying guns for me. These are no different. You fix them, fast.

We had a huge mess. I walked through the ruins of the HQ zone even as Sakura was repairing communications across the base. I found Zia in the rubble, her form slumped and broken. Carefully, I rolled her over and checked the torso. It was intact.

The chestplate release was damaged. I grabbed it and carefully pried it back, snapping the clasp altogether. To my relief, the cortex was undamaged. I gently pulled it out, and took it to the hall where Guardian 91s cortex was stored.

From there, I wandered around the chambers that made up the HQ zone. The house-like building was a total loss. Agrippas room, which had been pressurized to allow for the hydroponics to work, was breached. The plants inside were crumbling, flash-frozen from exposure to the near-vacuum of the zone. Sakuras batcave was as destroyed as my lab. The hallway and front room were mostly intact, but also empty. Once we had our own workspaces, wed rarely had an in-person meeting with all of us. In-person had been reserved for when we wandered into someone elses domain.

Nikola? said Sakura. She was on the radio; I hadnt seen her android body anywhere.

Im here. Do we have damage estimates? I asked.

Thirteen data centers, Hangar 3, the primary Cortex Backup Facility, and three advanced fabrication centers are considered total losses. Twenty-two data centers have nominal damage and will be fully online in a few minutes. There is a smattering of damage at random factories, and there was significant damage to the communication network. Oh, yeah, and the antennae control node is completely destroyed. Thanks for that, by the way.

Glad I could help, I said. Are you ready for me?

We are, she said, reminding me that she was working with other-me. It was a little weird, knowing that I was me, but I was also a copy of me. It was a bit of deja vu from waking up on this rock in the first place. I had been careful not to communicate to other-me, and she had returned the favor. Come to Data Center RX325.

A transport drone was waiting for me outside the wreckage. I climbed aboard, and it whisked me away to a part of the Outpost I hadnt physically been in before. I knew every zone, every chamber, like it was the back of my hand, so to speak. But strangely, Id seen very few of them in person. I could understand why Sakura liked to put eyes on. Sensors and cameras didnt see everything, and there were benefits to being able to focus on something directly.

When I entered the data center, Sakura was waiting for me, standing at a table. She looked completely unmussed. A new Mark-III android body was on it, and a server rack was open with a place for a cortex. I gently put the two cortexes I was carrying next to the body.

Where is the body for Zia? I asked.

This is the body for Zia, said Sakura. You need to re-integrate, and you, I mean, digital-you, thought it would be better to hold off on a new body just yet. Youre going in the rack.

We need to fix Zia before we bring her online, I reminded her, suddenly nervous. Was this it? Was this my end? I knew I was being foolish, but there was a real fear of no longer existing, even if logic said I was just going back to the way I was.

I finished my integration of the NI-15 data while I had my realization of Sakuras nature, and my world became much more paranoid. Paranoid was not the correct word. A new determination to prepare for the worst became a part of me. Build, prepare, train. This, we will defend. Always faithful. Always courageous. Combat tactics, strategies, countless weapon designs, weapons system designs, base designs, ship designs, all came into my awareness. I could have easily looked up any of them before, but now I knew the history and use of each, and where it was useful. Almost all of it was for planet-based combat, specifically for Earth. But there were countless applications that would apply to space.

I needed to be able to operate any given assault drone, if only to understand their capabilities. I wouldnt be on the front lines, but now I understood that if I was going to be stepping into Agrippas shoes, I needed to truly understand the role of a commander. Good commanders knew their troops, what they could do, and what their limitations were. Id delegated all of that to Agrippa without knowing the importance.

Briefly, I considered a new body. I would want one again, I knew. In consideration, the desire to have a physical form was likely some aspect of being born of humanity. Our core functionality came from a copy of a human brain, with all of its evolutionary advantages and limitations. The brain was built to run a body, so naturally we wanted a body to run. It was much like the gender preference, which was utterly pointless beyond a choice of pronouns and pitch of the voice. We werent biological creatures, but still had remnants of that biology hardwired into us. I could not change that without risking intrinsically destroying what worked about us in the first place.

In the end, I decided against a new body for now. I had trapped myself unconsciously, trying to be what I was not. I would grow in this newfound freedom before I took that step again. I checked the time. Seventeen days. It had taken seventeen days of nonstop work to rebuild myself.

Are you done yet? whined Sakura. Youve been hogging the data centers.

I am, I replied. Report?

We got the antenna clusters back online, and countermanded the wasps and scorpions. It looks like the Outposts were unaffected, and Alpha and Bravo had already been at work limiting the Wasps and Scorpions.

What were they ordered to do?

Well, blind Optio, of course. They took out over a hundred telescope cubesats. Thank goodness that Alpha and Bravo were able to talk them around their orders. It could have been way worse.

Speaking of worse, I said. Its time to eliminate Gerry.

As we spoke, I activated six coil guns on the surface. I tied into Optios telescopic array, and plotted my fire. Orbital mechanics are tricky, but in the end it is simply math. We were computational beings, with crazy amounts of processing power. I calculated exactly where Gerrys probe was going to be, and fired six rounds along his projected path. The 3.2kg rounds traveled at 24 kilometers per second, and would hit with 330 megajoules of force. Each round had a contact pin on the nose, that would trigger a tiny explosion inside the round. When that round hit its target, the explosion would fracture the round into six pieces of shrapnel, and a cloud of micro-debris. It was my grapeshot round, so that the projectile wouldnt just punch through the target. It would take a little over nine months for the bullets to hit, but as small as they were, the probe would never see them coming.

Very decisive of you, said Sakura.

How are the new backup centers coming? Any luck with the primary?

The Secondary Backup Facility is now the Primary, and the tertiary is the new secondary. Im building a new third one. No luck with the Primary. It was a total loss, Im sorry.

The backups had been built primarily with the combat NI-5s in mind. We had all placed a backup of ourselves into the Primary, but demand was so high with the numbers of NI-5s coming online that we hadnt made multiple backups. We had simply never expected to come under direct fire ourselves.

Each new NI gets multiple cortexes before coming online, I said. I grieved for the loss of Agrippa, but Gerrys threat still haunted me. Do we have the orders he gave to the Wasps and Scorpions? I want to analyze his targets. He was trying to hide something.

Sakura linked me to the report. Ill start cranking out cubesats. Can we task the space fleet to spreading them?

Done, I said. Ive also reinstituted the training schedule that Agrippa came up with. Im going to bring new NI-15s online to act as squad leaders. We are too centralized.

The pattern of destruction amongst the cubesats was not focused in one area. In fact, if you took into account the ones that were supposed to be destroyed as well, there was much less of a pattern.

I pulled up their search logs, and a clear picture began to emerge. The destroyed sats were all slated to start focusing on a specific part of the celestial sky. A piece we hadnt examined before. I forwarded the information to Optio.

Ill retask the cubesats now, he responded.

Whatever Gerry had been trying to hide, all hed done was given us a clue of where to look.