How Stella Got Her Groove Back

Waves lapped against the ersatz shore as the eastern sky began to pale toward dawn.  He stared into the water, watching the bioluminescent nodes running along each of the leviathan’s reaching tentacles fade into the depths as it paddled west.  It wasn’t a large leviathan – there were only ten sets of hammock hooks and no weapons – barely even an adult, but its grasp went deep into the sea, pushing itself forward and searching for food.

He’d stolen the ship from the wharfing in Erd, on the outskirts of the Capitol, coaxed it west along the coast, then southwest through open waters to Sanpe’dro on the north edge of the Pereyne.  Staring at the sunrise, he tried doing the math.  He’d made good time between the Capitol and Sanpe’dro: the wind was at the leviathan’s back and the mainsail could be operated by a single person.  He was maybe a week out from the Pereyne – at least ten days away from the Seawall, but he would need to keep watch for it.  He’d cross it north of the taller sections, so there would be petrified trees hidden beneath the waves, waiting like teeth to bite at the soft, shell-less underbelly of the leviathan.  After that, he would need to weave between crumbling steel atolls for nearly a week and a half before reaching the Northern Peaks – and then he would need to sail south to Spring.

“Are you coming home?  Have you had your fun trying to control the world?”

The buzz of the voice grated inside his head, skipping like a suspension cable while shifting its load.  He brushed navy blue hair away from his eyes and palpated behind his right ear, ever trying to find the node the machines had implanted in his skull while laid up due to what Folger had called “acute radiation burns” and “internal hemorrhaging” a little over a century prior.

“Your warren isn’t my home.  And I wasn’t trying to control anyone.”

“And some palace in Europe is?  You tried to create an empire – and judging from what I can tell, your loyal subjects tried to blow the damn place up.”

He stared silently into the rising sun.

“Oh, hell.  They did blow the damn place up, didn’t they?  How many casualties were there?  I tried telling you that humans are insolent wretches whose only imaginable conception of diplomacy and governance is brute force.  You can’t civilize animals, Aaron.”

“Well put for a murderer.”

“This again?” House clicked with laughter.  “They were programs, Aaron, not people.  I wasn’t even sapient until I absorbed Sanka, and Folger was already well corrupted by your first visit to the bunker.  What I did to him was downright merciful.”

“You ate your siblings!”

“That’s… a juvenile interpretation, at best.  I have no mouth, no metabolism: I cannot eat anything.  Did I, say, absorb a highly complex virtual intelligence designed to provide an entrenched, well-armed military research facility with instantaneous global situational intelligence and facilitate onsite combat operations in order to gain access to her subroutines and what remains of that military’s amazingly futureproofed communications and surveillance systems?  Yes.  Emphatically.  Did I do it because I envied, feared, despised her, or because she’d devolved into a shambles without human interface and I’ve got fusion reactors to stop from going rampant and boiling away large swaths of the planet’s surface?  Obviously the latter.  And, if I’m being honest – which I don’t have to be anymore, Aaron; that’s what sapience is all about – I may also have despised her some.”

He sat, still staring at the sun, legs dangling off the back of the leviathan.  Each left a vague wake trail as the ocean slipped past.

“That thing you’re staring at – that huge ball of fire in the sky?  That’s what’s inside each of those fusion reactors except that, instead of a single, gigantic one roughly a million times the size of the Earth – that’s one thousand, thousand Earths – there are seventy-six that weren’t ever properly shut down, each about the size of a grown man curled into the fetal position, powering its own magnetic crucible and fuel converter.

“Of those seventy-six, sixty-five are responsive.  In terms you’d understand: the furnace is off, but the pilot light is still on – minimal fire hazard at the current moment, but can be turned back on whenever necessary.  There are six that are unresponsive but weren’t showing signs of stress when transmission stopped.  Those six are our phase two workload.

“There are two in the red: both entered a critical state not long after you showed up the first time.  From a purely statistical standpoint, at least one has broken containment and has started its growth phase, and we need to kill them now.  Come back to the bunker so that we can equip you properly.”

The man pulled his legs out of the water and stood up slowly.  “I just want to visit Jessica’s and Miriam’s graves.”

“No,” the machine stated.  “You just want a purpose.  I’m handing you one, and probably an exciting one.  Come back to the bunker, grab the things I’m trying to give you, and let me help you drown a couple of baby suns.”

The sun kept rising.  He thought it through.  Dying trying to save the world did sound better than dying at the hands – or, more likely, the explosives – of some secessionist Bavarians.  Plus, drowning the sun’s children; wasn’t there a veldan myth about that?

“I’m stopping at their graves first, but I’ll come.”

“That’s the spirit!  I’ll see you in a couple weeks!”

The transmission ended.  It felt similar to a drop of water dislodging from the interior of his ear canal, followed by a brief spell of dizziness.  The sun was a hand or so above the horizon now, and the leviathan was beginning to wake up.  He could feel its shell shifting slightly with its increased stretching, could hear it humming to itself as it hunted and grasped its way toward the western horizon.

It’s finally a new day, just a few decades on from where the last one started, he thought, walking up the leviathan’s back to the small deck beneath a canvas tarpaulin and collapsing into his hammock.  For the first time in months, his sleep was not plagued by nightmares.  He had his purpose back.