Authors: Tony Gonzales
I remembered the Architect city, its magnificent beauty, the euphoric sense of belonging … and love.
Yes, love was there, a pervading maternal sense of comfort that was spiritually reassuring.
Even if there were no disease, this was a place that anyone would desire to be a part of.
“The Architects could no longer be trusted,” Grious said.
“After their departure from Heaven, the Enheduanni retreated to the shadows but shifted their influence to the developing races of New Eden.
We cannot say when this began, nor how many times they have succeeded or failed in their attempts to interfere with history.
It is possible that the civilizations of New Eden today owe much of their technological progress to them.
But two instances where we can confirm their direct influence are the Battle of Vak’Atioth, and the resurgence of the Minmatar Elders.”
“Vak’Atioth!”
I exclaimed.
“That was at their hand?”
“Yes,” Grious answered.
“But we have no regrets.
The Enheduanni showed us what we needed to see … things we didn’t know.
We acted of our own accord.
But I wish we had seen things differently sooner.”
“What do you mean by that?”
I asked.
“There were clues, even back then,” Grious said, “about the Enheduanni’s struggle.”
Imagery time-shifted forward once again, and I found myself among the eerily familiar settings of the Succession Trials, at the exact moment after Jamyl Sarum—then just an heiress—activated her ship’s self-destruct sequence.
“This moment in history was a flashpoint,” Grious said.
“The entrance of the Other into this world.”
I saw Her Majesty, prone in her CRU, awaiting her immortal awakening, as a superior intelligence corrupted our datacores and rewrote the anatomy of her brain.
I remembered every moment, sitting there, day after day for three years, helpless and fascinated, trying to understand what was happening to her.
“Joves are ‘born’ as adults,” Grious continued.
“For us, the decision to procreate is not an individual choice but a communal one.
We bring forward life as we need to; we nurture newborns as a community.
Since the First Empire, the genes of our offspring are selected from a genome database that we have maintained since the beginning of our history.
The Architects revered our pristine bloodline as much as we do.
They implemented two simple but unbreakable rules for the Construct: You must have been born of the physical world to enter; and for every soul inside the virtual world, there must be a body in the real one to return to.”
It was bad enough knowing that the Empire’s imminent mass harvesting of Sleeper—or rather, Architect—implants was the virtual equivalent of a holocaust.
Now I was responsible for countless violations of this culture’s most sacred norms as well.
“The Other,” Grious continued, “is the first
virtual
-born creation of the Architects—a sentient intelligence that did not originate from flesh and blood.
We do not know if his genesis was intentional or an evolution of the Construct itself.
What we do know is that the Enheduanni were torn about whether or not to allow it to exist.
But before they could decide, many more like him were born—”
“I saw them!”
I exclaimed.
“The ones with the eyes … like
yours
.… They were despised.… They warned us of something that could destroy everything.…”
My voice trailed off.
The emotional pain was too intense.
“Yes,” Grious said.
“They warned that their reality was untrue, causing unspeakable damage to their world.
Consider that the sworn mandate of the Enheduanni was to ease the Architects in and out of the Construct responsibly, governing their perception of the virtual world and managing their preparation for the migration back to reality.
They expanded that mandate to include the guidance of mankind toward utopia.
The Other rejected those mandates and replaced them with his own.”
It was then I realized that I had been unwittingly
helping
the Other ruin the Architects all this time.
We cut them from their machines and used the scrap to make ships without so much as an afterthought.
Every harvested “Sleeper” structure destroyed or salvaged was killing how many souls?
And now the capsuleers were assisting in this genocide as well, fighting the Other’s war against the Enheduanni.
I would have thrown up if I could.
“The Other planned his breakout knowing you, Victor, Falek, the entire Amarr leadership, and every nation in the cluster could never resist the lure of weapons technology,” Grious said.
“Empress Sarum was a convenient vector for his entrance into this world: Any immortal with a predictable clone jump was vulnerable, but she was positioned perfectly for his agenda.
The Enheduanni have been infiltrated and compromised; all their work to shepherd mankind toward the sociotechnical utopia they know we can achieve was revealed to the Other.
His first victims were the Architects.
You, the Amarr Empire, and the rest of mankind, will be his next.”
I thought of Empress Jamyl in an entirely new light.
She was now the bravest person I had ever known.
“The Other prevents her from knowing the truth,” I said aloud.
“She will give him an army.…”
“Marcus, they won’t be human,” Grious said.
“He will rebuild your world without remorse, without compassion, as he tried to do to ours.”
I was speechless, almost unbelieving of what was happening.
It was just too much to absorb.
“I never thought such an evil was possible.…”
“What you call ‘evil,’ we call a fundamental and irreconcilable opposition to a universal precept,” Grious said.
“It is the wholesale rejection of an idea for personal gain.”
A surgical mirror, planted in a track above my gurney, began to move toward my head.
“We Joves have aligned our community so much that our survival depends on it,” Grious said.
“The Other is not a natural selection.
He rejects our perspective on the grounds that his information is too incomplete to judge the merit of this world or the virtual one.”
The mirror stopped just short of where I would have been able to see my face.
“He lacks the perspective of history,” Grious said.
“He cannot comprehend the challenges our imperfect race has faced or the immense good that has come from it.
He does not truly understand what it means to live, to suffer, to overcome and persevere.
And he does not care what he must destroy to realize his own ambitions.
That, you can call evil—placing his needs above those of an entire race.
We Joves are incapable of feeling hatred.
But we are fully committed to ridding the universe of his existence.”
I was now keenly aware of my surroundings aboard the
Significance.
“This will be difficult for you to see,” Grious said, now in volumetric projection form.
“But it was the only way.”
When the mirror retracted the rest of the way, the reflection took my breath away.
“What … what have you done to me?”
I stammered.
“I have reinforced the neural pathways interfacing with the cybernetic implants installed by your mentor,” Grious said.
The surgical tentacles pointed directly at the exposed devices in my own brain, showing where the augmentations had been made.
The entire top half of my skull was absent, along with a portion of my cheek surrounding the eye socket.
A makeshift cranial support device made of the same greenish metal as the tentacles extended from the bridge of my nose and into the cerebral cortex.
It emerged on the other side, where it interfaced with the brain stem and neuro-interface socket within.
Every single one of my implants, the ones Falek Grange had placed within me, had been augmented.
“I am sorry, Marcus,” Grious said.
“These changes were necessary—”
“No,” I said.
“No pity.
I deserve this.”
“It is not punishment,” Grious corrected.
“It is support for your confrontation with the Other.
These changes will keep you alive long enough to deliver your warning to Empress Jamyl.”
“Warning…” I repeated.
“Tell me how I can hurt him!”
“You can’t,” he said, “but perhaps she can.
And the few of us who remain will stand by her when the time is right.
You have seen the truth.
You know what must be done.”
The
Significance
began powering up.
“Every immortal soldier she creates will have the mind of someone loyal to the Other, or the undone ruin of an Architect, forcibly ripped away from everything they knew—the Other’s parting gift to those who persecuted him.”
Lights began flickering on, and the tentacles withdrew into the floor grating of the ward.
“The only way to prepare is to allow the technology to spread,” Grious said.
“What?”
I demanded.
“And release more of them into the world?”
“If only he possesses immortal soldiers, he will win,” Grious said.
“New Eden needs the technology to defend itself.
Marcus, you must understand that.
Someone
will
find a way to isolate the implant tech from its Architect dependency.”
I noticed that my drones remained slumped over, even as the other systems continued switching online.
“Humankind will suffer immeasurably from this,” he said, his image disappearing.
“No one else but you knows what is really at stake.
Help them survive, Marcus.
Please.”
A proximity detection alarm sounded: The deep-scan arrays detected the presence of an APEX-11 frontier probe.
The craft identified itself as the property of the Ishukone mega-corporation and was broadcasting a looped message addressing the
Significance
directly.
I heard a low rumble; the Jove drone detached itself from the hull.
“Good-bye, Marcus,” I heard Grious say.
“I have done all I can.
What happens from here is up to you.”
“Wait,” I asked, remembering I was speaking with an AI.
“What happened to you?”
“I chose the wrong side,” he said, as the drone accelerated away, “and it cost me my life.”
>> END RECORDING
>> LIVE FEED INITIATED
THE FORGE REGION—KIMOTORO CONSTELLATION
THE NEW CALDARI SYSTEM—PLANET II: MATIAS
TWENTY-FOUR KILOMETERS NORTH OF KHYYRTH
CALDARI PROVIDENCE DIRECTORATE COMPOUND
(FORMERLY THE PRIVATE RESIDENCE OF HAATAKAN OIRITSUU)
“Good morning, Haatakan,” Tibus said.
She stared at her workstation and at Heth, who was alone.
It was strange that the Caldari Providence Directorate cronies who usually participated in these ‘think sessions’ weren’t present.
Today is the day,
she thought, taking her seat with extra care.
“Where is everyone?”
she asked.
“They’ll be along,” Tibus said, as some reports flashed through the air.
“Nice work on these tax-revenue forecasts.
The estimates turned out to be spot-on.”
“Thanks,” she said drily.
The sound of his voice was excruciating to her ears.
“How are you doing today?”
he asked.
“You seem a little distant.”
“I don’t know,” she answered.
“I suppose the weather has me down a bit.”
“That’s not like you,” he said.
“Maybe a fresh challenge will brighten your mood.”
“I doubt it,” she said.
“But a fresh sea breeze and a gorgeous tropical view would cheer me up.
Like the sort you’re privy to right now.”
“I’m not ‘privy’ to sea breezes at the moment,” Tibus said, folding his hands.
“There’s been a change of plans regarding our summit venue.”
An icy lead ball formed in Haatakan’s stomach.
“Really?”
she asked.
“You mean you’re not at Echelon Villa?”
“No,” Tibus said, holding his glare.
“I’m afraid I’m not.”
But today is supposed to be the day.
“That’s too bad,” she said.
“It’s so nice there.
The view, the weather, the—”