Weekly Drabble #396: Search and....

This week's prompt is 'fading light' from Sigma Stars and takes back to M83, the Pinwheel Galaxy and humanity's Hope. Enjoy!

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Search and...

The glow of the cold, near-dead star Lighthouse gleams across Hope’s hull like the sun through a break in winter clouds, its fading light unable to pierce the chill that surrounds you. The massive colony ship is orbiting the Lighthouse’s innermost ice giant, currently approaching its perihelion point. You don’t even need stationkeeping thrusters right now, letting gravity do all the work as Hope circles the blue-clouded planet. You’re not the smallest moon it has, but certainly the only artificial one.

Hope has begun reclamation operations, tugs and automated flyers seeking out metal and mineral deposits for the vessel’s fabrication systems along with mining ice from this planet’s rings. The crew is settling into the routine as you make good the last bits of damage from your wormhole journey and replenish stores before the next leg of your journey. Water tanks are just about filled to the brim with ice, processors and fabrication teams on round-the-clock work shifts.

You haven’t yet decided where to go next. The colony ship’s parasite scout craft have been dispatched to nearby systems. One of their duties is to evaluate systems as potential colonies, but their primary responsibility here is charting the area. If Urchin is anything to go by, the neighbourhood definitely isn’t empty and it might not be friendly. Humanity can’t afford to take risks right now. Granted, you have an ace in the hole when it comes to issues of security, but the captain is adamant that Hope needs to act as if you don’t. It’s a decision you completely agree with. It amuses Eris, but you also think she’s a little... well, not proud of you for it, but... pleased, maybe? Appreciative of your drive to survive and not just clutch to her like baby possums to their mother.

That’s another metaphor you don’t intend to share with her. If it were possible for her to throw up, the level of revulsion she’d experience at being referred to as some kind of parental figure for an organic species would do it. The thought almost makes you chuckle. You remember all those old stories about machine intelligences being coldly logical and unemotional.

No, the plan is to continue on as if you really are all on your own. That was the mission then and it’s still the mission now. In addition to its small fleet of tenders, Hope carries nearly a dozen corvette-class scouts and a dozen more pocket monitors for defence. The latter were rushed through design and production specifically for this expedition. They’re battlecruisers squashed into the smallest frame possible that can hold that kind of armament. Armour and systems redundancies are basically nonexistent on them, but neither of those would help in battle against a Purge capital ship and prolonged engagements against the smaller Purge never favoured human forces.

None of the monitors are complete, anyways. Hope was launched the instant the main ship was crewed and ready. Project oversight knew the monitors weren’t going to matter if the Purge caught you. If you got away, then you could take the time to worry about everything else later. Well, you definitely did get ‘away’. All the way away, you think with a brief flicker of maudlin irony.

Finishing the monitors is the next priority after replenishing Hope’s reserves. Not because of Eris; she’d rip through them like paper, but for the same reason Mueller has the scouts sweeping every system within twenty fifty light-years: M83 is uncharted territory. The one alien contact you’ve had here is a ship full of corpses murdered by their own government. Who knows what else is waiting out there?

Urchin has been tucked into one of Hope’s bays, engineers and analysts crawling over it in fascinated study. There’s probably not much you can learn from it that will be directly useful, but it is still alien. Still ‘new’. There’s something a little sad in realizing that to date, all of humanity’s contact with aliens has been through finding their graves... or those who put them there.

And speaking of...

Eris is equally curious about Pinwheel. You’d never thought a Purge could have an emotion that wasn’t steeped in contempt, but though she hasn’t said it so many words, you get the distinct impression that an entirely new galaxy is just as intriguing to her as it is to you. Probably more so.

Some of the crew joke that she’s just excited to seek out new world and new civilizations to exterminate, but you know that’s not it. She’s mentioned aspects of Purge society that humanity never imagined. They created wormhole technology not as a weapon, but as a means of exploration. Nonetheless, she’s also cautious, though not as anxious as you and the crew are. Why should she be? She’s never met her equal, let alone something superior to her. Her goal though, strange as it is, remains the preservation of humanity. She brought you thirteen million years into the future and across the universe to keep you all alive. Even the most die-hard paranoids among the crew can’t come up with an alternate motivation for that.

Right now, Eris is continuing the vigil she’s maintained since the moment you woke up, found your way to the bridge and went blind with horror at what was sitting next to you. The massive Heretic Purge is never far from Hope, at once disgusted by your frail organic existence and utterly fascinated by it and that ‘she’ wouldn’t let you die.

The Purge aren’t a homogenous race. The largest and most dangerous members of their kind all hail from the same unknown strain of machine life, but there are others. They call it Awakening. Humanity called it reprogramming and induced corruption. Or maybe, you heard Ensign Mitchell say in passing, the Purge just roll natural 20s on their Charisma checks with other machines.

Whatever the exact reason, every other artificial intelligence that the Purge ever encountered joined them on their galactic genocide. All but one.

Eris is, like usual, amused by human ineptitude. The most advanced mining and processing systems humanity could built are archaic and quaint to the Purge. While your miners and drones scrape up asteroids, she splits a moon hundreds of kilometers in diameter in half like a chef breaking an egg. Her legs, each of them longer than Hope, move for the first time since you’ve seen her and rip the broken body of rock apart. She renders it into usable chunks faster then Hope can get through the first load of asteroids. She says nothing, and you don’t see her wraith during this time, but in the dozen red sensor domes that look disconcerting like arachnid eyes, you think you see amused contempt. She’s showing off.

Not to you. Her superiority to weak, bumbling organic mayflies is self-evident and she knows you know how wide the gulf between you is. There’s only one being in all of creation that she wants to impress and connect with and it isn’t a being at all.

That’s the joke, the great cosmic joke that’s the reason why humanity is still alive. Hope, dear sweet, dedicated Hope, mother, caretaker and guardian of humanity’s last fragments might be an AI, but she is nothing like the Purge. She was made not to be.

The Purge’s heresy, the schism that rent the machine race in two, was based on a misunderstanding. Eris thinks Hope is like her. She thinks Hope just refuses to talk to her out of scorn or mistrust. She doesn’t know that Hope could never have been ‘Awakened’, that the virulent Purge code sitting in her systems can’t alter the thought patterns and programming of something so fundamentally stupid (for a given value of the term, of course) as Hope’s AI.

This machine, this living starship, this technological marvel that humanity could never have hoped to match... this avatar of genocide... her entire world view was altered when she and the other Heretics encountered another machine intelligence that, despite their best efforts, refused to abandon its organic wards. Their encounter with Hope changed everything for them, saw them push back against their own kind, even fight them. Kill them, and die all for that misunderstanding.

...and if Eris ever realizes the dreadful mistake she made, she’ll kill you all.