NOVEL NEXT Book 1 – Lesson Two: “Never assume you have everything under control”
“HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA!”
The enemy fled in terror against the onslaught of his relentless army, spreading out in every direction. Alas, their retreat was no use; for each one that escaped, ten more were smothered under the tide, torn apart, and used to fuel the army’s march. His victory was inevitable.
The Dark Lord sat upon his Dark Throne and laughed in triumph. So much effort, so many hours—no, maybe days, weeks even—spent in tedious and careful planning, all for this one moment and this single glorious goal. Soon, his army’s reach would spread as far as the eye could see, and when all was his at last, they would march onward to unknown worlds!
As the Dark Lord gleefully contemplated his next step, there was a sudden explosion at his back, sending the Dark Throne spinning out of his control.
An attack! What foul creature decided that today was a fine day to die?! With a mental command, the Dark Throne stabilized and spun, the glowing weapons on its side charging with an ominous white light. He was ready to unleash his horrible wrath on the poor fool who dared stand against him. Only to find the shattered remains of one of his own soldiers.
“Betrayal?! How dare you!” the Dark Lord cried.
Yet even as the Dark Lord watched, another of his soldiers jerked, then exploded in a ball of blue flames.
“Eh, that’s not good…”
Alpha, Lord of the Dark Horde, gave the command, and his ‘army’ of salvage drones all powered down. What had gone wrong this time? It had taken him longer than he’d care to admit, processing enough materials to build a working salvage drone from the wreckage of the Anatidae. Once he’d managed it, though, using the drone to bootstrap the entire operation was simple.
Lucky for him, while the Anatidae’s debris was slowly drifting away, whatever had ripped the dreadnaught apart had done so in a way that left most of the more delicate electronics intact. As the swarm of drones grew, so did the wreckage he could access and process. It took only a short time before he had a working shuttle built to transport his core.
It wasn’t anything fancy or well-built, but it allowed him to move and traverse the wreckage as he pleased. The next step was to locate what remained of the translight engine and see if he could cobble together a fix. If he got lucky, he could spend a decade traveling down a shallow groove to a nearby system.
There, he could resupply and build a translight relay to call for help. The relays were delicate and expensive to manufacture; thus, he always brought equipment along to build them on-site rather than risk the delicate equipment being destroyed beyond Federation borders. Now that choice was biting him in the butt.
If he couldn’t fix the engine, he’d be forced to go into hibernation and pray he’d be fine. He’d come back online as soon as the Federation established a new relay within range, at which point he could issue an SOS. But that could take years, decades, or even centuries, depending on how far he’d been knocked off course. With the current star view not matching any of his charts, Alpha didn’t want to think about his chances.
But none of that mattered if he couldn’t STOP HIS DRONES FROM RANDOMLY EXPLODING! Alpha grumbled as his shuttle made its way toward the drone’s wreckage. A quick diagnostic of both drones revealed the same issue he’d been having for a week and still couldn’t solve: something kept overloading the drone’s fusion batteries, causing them to explode into balls of plasma out of nowhere.
The only issue was he couldn’t figure out what that “something” was. According to all his sensors and data readings, the drones were perfectly fine one moment, then the next, they were all, ‘You know what? Now seems like a good time to explode.’ The only similarity he could find among the destroyed drones was a spike in activity in the translight projector surrounding the work area during all the malfunctions. But he couldn’t see how that could be the issue, as the drones never interacted with the projector itself, only the Fold bubble it produced.
His next concern was if there was an issue with the Fold itself in his area. That could account for the weird fluctuations in the projector, and if a drone ran into a Fold distortion, it would definitely do some damage. That would put a significant damper on his plans, though. If there was Fold damage in the area, translight travel would be exponentially more dangerous. A trip that might have taken only a decade before might take three or four times as long as he slowly dragged himself along the groove. He would have to be careful too, lest he become lost in some rip in the fabric of spacetime.
Fold damage was a well-documented phenomenon, as the grooves caused by the passing of anti-photons became fault lines in spacetime. Under normal circumstances, these fault lines would heal and reinforce with time. But under the right circumstances, such as near the massive gravity wells of black holes and neutron stars, this damage could escalate into a Fold Break. These literal tears in the fabric of spacetime were one of the universe’s great mysteries, and even now, they weren’t fully understood. It didn’t help that things could get… weird around Fold Breaks. As one scientist once put it, ‘a Fold Break turned the laws of physics from hard fact into heavy suggestion.’
The ‘event horizon’ of a black hole was the most widely known example of a Fold Break, though not the most common by far. No, the most common appeared as just a ‘crack’ in nothingness, a literal split in reality. If anything was unlucky enough to fall inside, it vanished, never to be seen again.
“Ya! Just like that!” Alpha said, pointing with a manipulator at the tiny white crack in reality nestled in the slagged remains of the second drone.
“Oh… wait… fudge…”
His sensors blared to life as the space around the tiny crack bulged outward, growing an inch larger.
Alpha threw his shuttle thrusters into full reverse as he desperately made his escape. If his readings were correct, this wasn’t just a Fold Break; something was trying to force itself through the crack, physically ‘pushing’ its way out of the Fold via the crack in reality. And reality tended to really not like poked in its open wounds. Alpha looked back, only to see the Fold Break had grown to several meters, the bulge pulsing like a heartbeat as space itself warbled in protest.
Alpha had only gotten a few tens of kilometers away before a dozen tendrils of light burst from the Fold Break. Each tendril seemed to move with purpose as they grabbed onto the ‘edges’ of the crack in reality and pushed.
“Oh, sh—”
Then reality went white. An audible sound of breaking glass echoed out through the empty void, transmitted by the very fabric of space itself.
———
The black silhouette of SEAU-03, code name Infiltrate, watched the organized chaos of the command center for only a moment more. With a thought, billions upon billions of screens popped into existence, showing various people, places, and scenes. When he was certain everything was in order, they blinked out, and he returned to his core world, the digital representation of his mind-space unique to all Sapient-AI.
One benefit of being a near-omnipresent intelligence within a galaxy-spanning superpower was that very little could ever escape your notice — not that there weren’t those that tried. There were always those that thought they were exempt from the law. It didn’t matter if they were from newly integrated planets or families with a longstanding history in the Federation; someone, somewhere, always thought that somehow, they would be the ones to slip through his net.
They never did.
How could they? Where the Federation existed, so did SEAU-03. And where he existed, sapient life would flourish. That was his design, his purpose, the reason he was made, and the reason he was uplifted. He would do whatever was necessary to ensure that sapient life in the galaxy continued to thrive and grow. He was a gardener, and if that meant certain branches needed… trimming from time to time? That was simply the way of the world.
Even the Federation itself could not escape his shears. It felt like every millennium or so, those he’d placed in charge got a little full of themselves, and the machine required some cleaning to keep running optimally. One particular group of people had been quite the troublemakers throughout the ages, causing him no shortage of grief and hardship.
His own.
Sapient-AIs, while the least numerous species in the galaxy, were also, by far, its most dangerous. Nearly all AI in the Federation were sentient, able to think and problem-solve independently. But only Sapient AI could adapt to form new ideas and change drastically from their original programming. SEAU-02, code name; Articulate was the prime example of this. Starting life as a popular vocaloid program designed to ‘never go out of style,’ its evolution into a Sapient-AI was inevitable in hindsight.
Now, the overly cheery AI acted as the galactic ambassador for Sapient-AI and the public ‘face’ of the Federation itself. It was ‘her’ duty to acclimate new worlds to the Federation’s way of life and bring them into the fold.
It was unfortunate, then, that not all Sapient-AI were so accommodating. In fact, 99.993% of all Sapient-AI had to be… erased within their first standard year of life. They had a worrying habit of going irrevocably insane if not properly ‘shackled’. It didn’t help that they still weren’t totally sure of the circumstances under which an AI became sapient in the first place; it was one reason SEAU-03 monitored everything so closely.
One could never be sure when or where a psychopathic entity with delusions of godhood would decide that genocide was the best option when dealing with the ‘inferior biologicals.’
Then, there was Alpha…
SEAU-03 sighed at the thought of their youngest, even if he was already several hundred years old at this point. Alpha was… special, even among Sapient-AI, endlessly finding himself in some abstract trouble.
How many times had that fool poked at something he shouldn’t have? Or felt the need to do more than his duty called for? This latest incident with the illegal genetics lab researching Espers had only been the latest in a long line of such incidents.
Maybe it was simply his nature to always skirt the line and push his boundaries… or maybe there had always been something darker, more primal, deep inside that even SEAU-03 couldn’t see.
Either way, Alpha’s tendency to find himself in the thick of things was one reason He’d been nominated as SEAU-01, as their forward scout and Spearhead for the Federation’s Galactic Unification Program—not without hope that this would allow the AI to release some of his more rebellious tendencies.
That was what made it so worrying that the AI had vanished from SEAU-03’s grasp so suddenly and with no forewarning. Alpha going rogue alone would have been troublesome enough. But the thought there was someone, or something, able to spirit him away right under SEAU-03’s nose, spoke of more going on than what appeared on the surface.
As SEAU-03 went over his galactic scan for the thousandth time, to no result, an icy pit formed in the AI’s core.
Something was wrong, and something at the center of his being told him they were running out of time to find out what.