Authors: Tony Gonzales
For now, it was time to move on to other matters: The
Morse
had just arrived with a capsuleer in tow.
Mordu was impressed with the incident report: The encounter had been handled well by its captain, Jonas Varitec.
The man was ready for higher-profile assignments, and Mordu intended to reward his competence by sending him to evaluate a contract opportunity in the Amamake system.
The Minmatar had appealed directly to the Legion for assistance in their war against the Amarr Empire.
If Jonas accepted the work, he’d be entitled to a percentage of any contracts awarded there.
He was sure the captain would leap at the opportunity.
The damaged Federation Navy Myrmidon was latched to its berth in the hangar, and Mordu could see the pod gantry extracting the capsule from its hull.
He very much wanted to meet the immortal floating inside of it.
* * *
TATIANA CZAR WATCHED HER
Legion escorts peel off as she approached the X-70MU stargate.
They probably assumed that the capsuleers who patrolled this area would almost certainly detect and attack the vessel.
She expected as much.
But her death would only be an annoyance at worst.
12
GENESIS REGION—EVE CONSTELLATION
THE NEW EDEN SYSTEM
>>
SIGNIFICANCE
MISSION LOG ENTRY
>>BEGIN RECORDING
Is there anything more tragic than the corruption of genius?
It seems criminal that the essence of what one
is
and how one should
think
could be determined by a societal devotion to a
meme,
a
belief,
and a
cause
.
Let’s say the
meme
is the Amarr conviction that the Divine and the Empress are one and the same; that the
belief
is that an all-powerful God has chosen Amarr to rule all things; and that the
cause
is the holy crusade to convert all of humanity to this faith.
Now imagine that Empress Jamyl is the embodiment of all these things and that this figure is loved not so much for her divinity—though there are plenty who believe such rubbish—but for the
idea
of what she stands for: a savior born to lead an underachieving nation fractured by a human, and thus imperfect, royal caste.
The sheer power of the public’s devotion to this myth has aligned billions of people under one banner.
Would it not crush their hearts to learn that she admits the burden is too great for her to bear, that she knows she cannot possibly live up to the expectation of such blind adoration, and that she is wise enough to accept that doing good must sometimes come at the cost of doing great evil.
And because of this, one swears allegiance to her, unconditionally, no matter what the consequences.
Spare no pity on such a fool.
I once considered myself wise to the ways of the universe—a man of science, resolutely guided by the moral code of Amarr.
Today I remain a disciple of science and devoted to the absolute destruction of the Amarr Faith and, so tragically, the Empress who presides over it.
I imagine this admission begs the question: What does it take to turn someone so violently away from his convictions?
To answer this, I shall start by playing back a memory to my attentive audience of drones, who very much wish that I would sleep, rather than continue to torture myself.
>>MEMORY PLAYBACK: LOG 313
>>NUERO-MIMETIC FOOTAGE ENGAGED: JROR, MARCUS, DR.
>>LOCATION: W-SPACE
>>NEAREST CELESTIAL REF.: QUASAR J142847
>>313.10
… Long-range visual inspection of the discovery reveals a symmetric central hub encircled by a secondary concentric hull.
Eight superstructures aligned with crossing spokes emerge perpendicular to the primary disk, which measures almost 6.5 kilometers in diameter.
The structure is at least twelve thousand years old, but remarkably, still appears to be generating power.
The task force dispatched from the Matriarch Citadel has arrived and is approaching cautiously.
Several heavy drones of unknown origin are orbiting the structure.
Each is nearly as large as a battleship—probably sentinels, programmed to drive away intruders.…
>>313.16
… We are suffering catastrophic losses.
The AI behind these machines is extremely advanced, and our ships have no reliable countermeasures for their weapons.
The drones are using beam technology we’ve never encountered before, carving our cruisers to pieces with ease.
Space is littered with tumbling wrecks and dead servicemen; the drones are even attacking ejected lifeboats.
They are savage things, cruel and remorseless.
The fleet commander wants to pull his forces back, but even if I could allow it, they are still doomed.
The Sleepers have blanketed the area with gravimetric jamming … the engines of our ships are now crippled.…
>>313.25
… Drones stopped their attack the moment she arrived.
There is no discernable reason for why they should have.
The Archangel Guardians are with her, but neither she nor her escorts ever fired a weapon.
She apologizes for not coming to our aid sooner but sounds weak and confused.
I hope she has the strength to maintain control long enough for us to complete the mission.
On my command, three dropships are launched.
Each is carrying a dozen heavily armed men.
Their task is to board the Sleeper structure, and I am to accompany them.
The sentinel drones are circling again, much faster than before.
Their weapons are still primed.
But they allow the dropships to pass, seemingly against their will.…
>>313.28
… These commandos are well trained and supported by drone tech of their own.
But we don’t know what to expect once we’re inside.
Given what we’ve just seen, I doubt it will be enough.
Scouting ahead of us, the first two teams are unable to find suitable landing spots, and their attempts to use shaped charges for a controlled breach all fail.
I was about to report failure when the bottom center of the hub dilated like an iris.
Our pilot informs that the other two teams will board first.
We watch in silence as they slowly ascend into the aperture, which appears capable of opening much wider.
The fleet commander advises us to hurry.
Reinforcements are unavailable, he explains, as the wormhole through which we entered is highly unstable and in imminent danger of collapse.…
>>313.41
… The air is too thin to breathe without survival suits.
Commandos cautiously move out as the dropship’s sensors blanket the area in search of movement.
Finding none, they signal for me to come down while others prepare my equipment for transport.
I am terrified to discover that this place is instantly familiar.
There is a distinctly organic appearance to the interior; huge spiral designs resembling Fibonacci sequences flow seamlessly into other patterns stretching as far as I can see, covering the entire hangar.
Taken all at once, this place seems eerily alive.
The forward teams discover stranger patterns emerging from corridor floors and blending into bulkheads.
A soldier remarks that some of them appear to be moving.
I hear a shout, followed by gunfire.…
>>313.49
… The attackers have no weapons.
They are not wearing masks.
Their eyes are completely black—no whites in them at all.
Errant beam fire nearly kills me.
A rifle barrel is punched through a man’s chest.
Another man’s skull is crushed by his own detached helmet.
Blood splatters across my mask, making it difficult to see.
An explosion knocks me to the floor.
There is absolute silence, and I am surrounded by death.…
>>313.60
… My wounds are serious, but Empress Jamyl urges me to press on.
Only six of us survived, but the attackers are dead.
Miraculously, my equipment is still intact.
Pain roars through my back when I try to walk.…
>>313.83
… We discover a massive circular concourse lined with sealed containers.
Each holds a specimen in cryogenic storage.
The commandos are struggling to load the dead onto the hoversled.
Nine of these Sleeper aberrations managed to kill thirty armed men with their bare hands.
We do not know if or when more will awaken.
But my orders are explicit.
The nearest subject is cryogenically frozen but attached to a cybernetic implant coupler that extends from the brain stem into what outwardly appears like a solid block of metal.
Mass-spectrometer analysis reveals that the material is a hybrid composition of metallofullerenes—individual germanium and palladium atoms suspended within a carbon icosahedron fullerene.
A third material, possibly a molecular alloy, is also present but cannot be identified.
This block extends directly into the bulkhead, which appears to be made of the same material.
Very low voltage electrical activity is present.
The bizarre anatomy and physical composition of the subject makes it impossible to determine if revival is possible.
Subject weighs 68 kilograms and would stand 175 centimeters tall.
Its sex is indeterminate.
Genetic analysis of the attackers is complete, and two of my suspicions are confirmed with absolute certainty: The Sleepers are human, and the Joves are their descendants.
The soldiers want to execute as many frozen specimens as they can for “precautionary measures.”
Inwardly, I admit to wanting to do the same.
But there are probably hundreds, if not thousands, more.
Unless we can get them all at once, there is no point.
Better to just leave this cursed place as quickly as possible.…
>>313.115
… Cutting away the entire pod—including a segment of the attached bulkhead—depletes six plasma torches and takes nearly three hours.
By the end I can barely stand from the pain, and the notion of being surrounded by dormant killers is driving us all to the point of madness.…
>>313.131
… Every Sleeper corpse, including the cryogenically preserved one, is now safely aboard the
Significance
.
Empress Jamyl and her Archangels depart in silence.
For my own safety, I am instructed to return to the New Eden system and begin my research.
As I prepare the
Significance
for warp, a fireball blossoms on the Sleeper structure.
It seems the fleet commander couldn’t resist the urge to exact his revenge.
His actions will cost him his life, as my ship is the last to exit before the wormhole collapses.…
>>STOP MEMORY PLAYBACK
>>RESUME LOG 743
It was the brain that Empress Jamyl was after.
After thousands of years of evolution, the Sleepers decided that four lobes weren’t enough to meet their cognitive-processing needs.
Among other changes, this civilization reengineered themselves to add a fifth lobe to the cerebral cortex, combining and enhancing the functions of the thalamus and hippocampus.
The extra gray matter was integrated with a curious slab of material encapsulating the brain stem and extending to an implant cavity that penetrated the skull, very similar to the neuro-interface socket that capsuleers use to communicate with machines today.
Even with the assistance of the most advanced AI available to science, it took years to model the anatomy and inferred biochemistry.
In summary, the
Sleeper brain
was refactored to route memories to a solid-state recorder.
Therein was a feat of supreme biotechnical advancement: a fullerene-based quantum computer embedded within the brain, which can continuously record the memory of consciousness.
This device is integral to the anatomy, which can retrieve information from quantum storage faster than it can from organic brain matter.
The fifth lobe incorporated a densely packed cluster of neurons that branched into a neural network extending to every region of the brain.
With the state recorder and its complimentary anatomy, it was possible to enable full memory-only consciousness transfers without the overhead of transmitting massive volumes of state information, such as neuron configurations and firing sequences.
It differed wildly from capsuleer technology, which relies on a huge, cluster-wide infrastructure of receiving and assimilation stations to support the cumbersome transfer of state data.
With Sleepers, it was possible that only a fractional volume of differential information would be needed to move a person’s essence to another clone,
if
that clone shared this brain anatomy, and depending on the storage capacity of the implant itself.
What was remarkable was that the gene needed to grow this fifth lobe from an embryo was present in the specimen’s DNA but switched off.
Like some grotesque mutation, the brain would develop with four truncated lobes and a cavity where the thalamus and hippocampus should be.
At some point, a live test subject must have been raised with the gene switched on so that the growth pattern of the fifth lobe could be recorded and used as a template to assemble the organ from raw biomass later on.
Which meant that this subject—and probably all the others in the Sleeper station—were clones, identical copies artificially grown in vats not too different from those used in clone production today, with the cerebral implant added during the appropriate phase of gestation.