Ghrroaqq let out a burble of annoyance. Representative Naal knew barely anything. The effort to track him down and capture him had been nearly pointless. He had provided the name of the t’uk captain who had attacked Captain Jacob’s station, but that information was worthless because Naal had admitted he sent the captain to bring back Adjunct Xing’che to face justice.
None of those things were illegal, just poorly implemented.
When Ghrroaqq had asked the man if it was part of some larger plot, Naal looked genuinely confused. All of his biological signals indicated he told the truth when he said he didn’t know what Ghrroaqq was talking about.
Knowing that line of questioning was a dead end, Ghrroaqq had put a hold on the interrogation until he could reorder his thoughts.
That took a full day, but now he strode back into the interrogation chamber aboard his flagship.
“Representative Naal. I hope you had a restful sleep.”
Naal didn’t respond to the comment. He had been much less willing to speak after Ghrroaqq had asked about a greater plot. He might not actually know about the plot, but it was clear he knew the line of questioning was important, so he kept his mouth shut.
Unfortunately, he would not get the luxury to remain silent.
Ghrroaqq sat across from the secured man, and two medical technicians entered the room carrying small cases. They stood menacingly behind Naal.
Naal took both men in and turned back to Ghrroaqq. “What is this?” he demanded.
“They are here to help loosen your tongue if you refuse to cooperate.”
Naal scoffed. “Drug-induced interrogation? Even if that wasn’t against Astryx law, I doubt your position would survive such knowledge getting out.”
Ghrroaqq nodded. “You would be right about that.” He motioned for one of the men to step forward and place the open case on the table facing Naal.
Inside was a small triangular device.
Naal tried to jerk back when he saw what was inside the case. “Using that could kill me,” the man said as he struggled against the restraints.
“The probability of your death is low. You are much more likely to go insane when the merger begins.”
“It’s illegal,” Naal protested.
Ghrroaqq shook his head. “It’s illegal for the t’uk to use such a device, but not for me to use it on you. So, will you cooperate, or will I have to move to digital torture?”
“I’ll cooperate,” he screeched in desperation.
Ghrroaqq nodded at the medical technician. The man closed the box and returned to his position behind Naal. He was almost disappointed that Naal had agreed. He had never had the opportunity to use such an interrogation method, and he heard they were quite effective.
“Who did you report to?” Ghrroaqq already knew the answer, but it was an easy question to start with to see if Naal was going to comply.
“Supervisor Sael,” Naal said quickly.
He was telling the truth.
There wasn’t much known about the t’uk hierarchy. They didn’t allow outsiders on their home world, and most tended to have much too high an opinion of themselves. From what he had seen, the t’uk held outsiders who held lower positions with disdain. The only ones who didn’t show such contempt were the average t’uk workers, who seemed almost normal.
There was still a bit of superiority in everything they did, but it was earned, and those workers never really flaunted that when working with other species. They also loved to gossip and complain about their bosses, which seemed to be a universal constant.
So, while the universe at large didn’t have a good grasp on the t’uk hierarchy, Ghrroaqq did. He knew that a supervisor was someone responsible for an entire sector of space. The t’uk apparently had six supervisors. It was a position just below a councilor, and the current t’uk councilor had been a supervisor at some point.
Representatives were three steps below supervisors in the t’uk hierarchy as far as Ghrroaqq could tell, so why was one working directly with Naal?
“Is it normal for a representative to work so closely with a supervisor?”
Naal looked like he didn’t want to respond to the question, but one of the technicians shifted slightly, making the case clink against their white suit.
“Not as far as I’m aware,” Naal replied quickly.
“So why do you think Supervisor Sael worked with you directly?”
“I would never claim to know my Supervisor’s motives.”
Ghrroaqq smiled at the half-answer. It wasn’t a friendly smile, and Naal shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “But you do have an idea, don’t you?”
Naal swallowed. “I think he was grooming me to take over for him someday.”
“Hmm,” Ghrroaqq replied thoughtfully. “Why you? I have reports that claim you didn’t always see eye to eye with Supervisor Sael. You are also two tiers below. Certainly, there was someone more qualified for the position. What makes you special?”
Once again, Naal didn’t look like he wanted to answer, but just as Ghrroaqq was beginning to nod to the technician to prep the device, he spit out an answer. “Because I despise the eiraxins with every fiber of my being!”
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
Ghrroaqq scoffed. “That’s hardly anything new. Most species hate the eiraxins. I’m also sure there are plenty of t’uk who hate them just as much as you do. So give me something else.”
Naal looked panicked as he searched his mind for an answer. “My progenitor!” he declared. “He was a Supervisor before he perished in a transit accident.”
A transit accident. That seemed far-fetched, but Ghrroaqq pulled up the report, and sure enough, the man was telling the truth. The death of a t’uk supervisor had even reached outside of their home system.
There was a single picture in the news article, and it showed Naal’s progenitor, with Sael standing behind him and off to the side. Was becoming a supervisor some sort of hereditary position? Couldn’t be; otherwise, Sael wouldn’t be standing there.
It also didn’t answer the question of what the t’uk were up to. Naal clearly had no clue, and if Ghrroaqq had to guess, it was Supervisor Sael who had ordered the man’s death, so there was no love there. Assuming the t’uk even had such a concept. He highly doubted it since they called their parents progenitors.
“Where did your progenitor reside?” Ghrroaqq asked as an idea came to him.
“Tolarin 3.”
“Not Jastu?” Ghrroaqq asked in surprise.
Embarrassment flitted across Naal’s features. “He was an outcast because of something he said or did. He never explained what that thing was.”
“Is that residence still intact?”
Naal nodded. “My other progenitor still resides there.”
Ghrroaqq had his next destination. If he got lucky, there might still be data at the residence, and he would finally have the break he needed.
***
Jacob babied Abyss Pearl on the way back to the station. The attack had partially buckled one of the hull supports, which is what had ripped a hole in the hull. The patch was holding, but there was nothing he could do for the support until they got back to the station. He had Bob keep the transitions shorter than normal and told him to wait twice as long between transitions to reduce stress on the vessel. Jacob’s changes doubled the time it took to get back, but it was unavoidable.
Thankfully, there was plenty of food for the passengers.
Jacob left an avatar with them to monitor the ship and answer any questions, but most of his focus shifted to the station.
Barry had already transitioned most of the production to the satellites, and it didn’t even disrupt any of their other efforts. His ability to manage inventory and logistics really was insane.
Jacob watched as another cart pulled by a maintenance drone zipped past Melody’s massive airlock and into the ship. Each cart was filled with six satellites. With a cart arriving every half hour, it would take just over seventeen days to create more than five thousand of the satellites. That was the bare minimum number it would take to encompass the entire Earth. With the ones already in orbit around the planet and the ones Earth managed to produce itself, that should be more than enough, allowing some redundancy as well.
With Barry focusing on that and Bob busy flying Abyss Pearl back, Jacob turned his attention to his own projects.
The AI core was now the length of a head. It kind of looked like a lumpy, faceted football, with its oblong shape. After a certain point, he had noticed something odd about the core material. It grew on its own. It wasn’t much, just microscopic amounts, but it did grow.
Jacob had always wondered why Melody and the station’s cores were so oddly shaped and spread out. It appeared he now had his answer. It also helped explain why the station AI was not as capable as Melody. It wasn’t core size; if it was, the station AI would have been far more capable, as its core was nearly four times the size of Melody’s. It had to be the branches. Maybe they acted similarly to folds in a brain, allowing for more surface area in a smaller space.
He knew there was something about the material he still wasn’t seeing. Nothing about it was normal. Crystal shouldn’t be squishy, and squishy materials shouldn’t fracture like glass. It was almost like it had two states in superposition to one another.
That mystery would have to wait for another day. Jacob wanted to test the theory about the branches, but he also didn’t want to build something large enough to house a core of Melody’s size.
That meant getting freaky with geometry. He spent a few days running optimization algorithms to find the most compressed and surface-rich geometry he could, and the result would make M.C. Escher proud. Instead of branching out, the object branched in and through, creating a fractal crystalline pattern with the football core at its center. All in all, it was just over a meter and a half in diameter, but had twenty percent more surface area than the station’s core.
It wasn’t even close to the surface area that Melody had, but it was proof of concept.
Jacob had no idea if his idea would work, but if it didn’t, he could break off the outer layer and try again. Unfortunately, he couldn’t simulate an active AI in the virtual environment. So he had to figure out how to grow the crystal to meet his desires.
That took another ten days. Jacob only had five more before the shipment of satellites was ready, and he had to leave. He was hoping to have a backup plan in place before he left, but that wasn’t going to happen. He would just have to be careful.
The slowly rotating orb of core material was suspended in a similar gravitic field as the orbs on top of the combat drones. It was a necessary step in order for Jacob to manually insert fragments of the material into the core, slowly building it up like a puzzle.
The end result wasn’t quite as surface-dense as he had envisioned, but for a first attempt, it wasn’t bad. The new core still had ten percent more surface area than the station AI in a much more compact package. There was probably some downside to such a compact package, but he wouldn’t know immediately.
He took a breath inside his apartment and pressed the start button, feeding a copy of the basic AI into the core.
The AI loaded without issue and unfurled, growing to fit the space. Jacob recorded everything about the process so he could study it and look to improve it for later.
Once the AI kernel filled every nook and cranny of the core material, it settled back down, and a prompt appeared on the disconnected interface.
Jacob ignored the activation message as he ran through the provided diagnostics. Everything was coming back as green.
“Holy shit, it worked,” he laughed.
He pressed the activate button.
“Please provide code phrase,” a bland voice replied.
“Zulu, Charlie, Earth, Gamma, Six, Five, Two.” The phrase was just a random set of phonetics and numbers in English. It was just a small safety feature.
“Hello, Captain Jacob. How may I assist?”
The voice was still the bland AI default, but that was fine.
“Would my mind fit inside your core?”
“No, Captain. While I could prepare the core for a transfer, you would lose a significant portion of memories and operating capacity.”
Jacob was glad he hadn’t gone straight to transferring his consciousness. That would have been disastrous. He was also glad that his AI tweaks worked. He hadn’t been sure if they would.
“How much bigger would the core need to be?”
“Based on current core dimensions and the data you provided, my core would need to grow an additional fifty percent to handle the data. That would take approximately a year based on the growth estimates provided. Your core would have grown and changed in that time as well, and I cannot calculate how that would affect this estimate.”
Jacob had run into the same answer when he ran the numbers himself.
“If you manually added mass to my core,” the AI continued, “The process could be completed much sooner.”
Jacob already had that answer as well, but the fact that the AI provided it unprompted meant it was already smarter than the station AI.
“Thank you. That’s all I need for now. I will be providing additional tasks for you before I depart. For now, go into standby mode.”
“As you wish, Captain.”
Jacob left a low-powered connection for the AI core to use, but disconnected the main power. He knew from working with Melody that the AI could retain itself with even a minimum of power.
Now that he knew his process worked, he could iron out any issues on his trip back to Earth.
Jacob paused as a weird thought occurred to him. He was both coming and going to Earth at the same time.