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The Birth of Onimex -- Chapter 18
1.
Ireana scurried from a glass cabinet to her workstation with a hand
held device. Everything around her was devoted to a peculiar
disc shaped object in the center. It was roughly a meter in
diameter and 11 inches thick. The top side was a highly polished
onyx color. The exterior circumfrence had all of the interactive
features, diagnostic lights and hidden panels. Very clearly, it
was a biocybernetic unit of her own invention.
2. The underside sat on 3 feet of empty space, making the object
hover. She was about to switch her masterpiece
on. The diagnostic report was faultless after months of tedious
calculations and meticulous work. Once activated, the droid would
never be turned off.
3. She keyed in five numeric sequences: 7, 129, 6, 105 and
195. The square of 1.618 = 1.272.
4. Fourty-one years had passed since the Cardship
evacuation, and as expected, Mother had to resettle some biologicals
abroad as Colonists.
5.
M'trol-1 was in the Theta Si system, two systems beyond the
Cacci Dai, and the farthest any shellan had ventured from Vejhon.
6.
Colonists were deposited with an ample supply of state-of-the-art
resources to construct
resilient colonies. For most it was a long-sought adventure.
7. Personnel would first train in a shipboard
area designed to hone their survival skills.
8. Once
Mother was satisfied that a selected world could
become self sustaining with minimal maintenance, she would log the
coordinates and leave a colony unattended, returning periodically to
perform depot-level
maintenance
and exchange personnel if needed.
9. M'Trol-1 had a .98 shell gravity; plankton, algae, cholorophyl and
other microbes were present in the
water. There was no indication that this world had been claimed
by anyone else.
10. "Vacuum-level matter, re-organizes according to
the expectations of the observer," Ireana said to her glass diagnostics
board. There was no way of knowing everything that she might have
said to this dormant machine. She wanted everything to be perfect
and it probably was.
11. "Consciousness is the building block of the Universe," she
said. She keyed in her formula for hyper dimensional travel on a
transparent keyboard, "Ruv - (guvR)/2 + guvΛ = (8πG/c4)Tuv," and
mumbled some lyrics to go with it, "faster-than-light."
12. It gave her much satisfaction to know that she
had
invented most of the colony's conveniences; nobody else seemed as
inclined. Her competitiveness quite possibly squelched the
fire in others and her perfectionism was intimidating.
13. "The process of observation creates what we
see," she thought out loud again.
14. Ireana did not know that she was being watched by an
object that was not yet operating; her particular crowd did not
speculate
about non-existent organizations either.
She ran the final quantum potentials initialization
checklist. The entire painting was nearly done. Just a few
more brush strokes.
15. She opened a cancellation dialogue: Paraphaseic
rippling. Index
annihilation. Quantum entanglement. Non-synchronous
cymatics. Parallel signatures; rhythms she knew by
heart because she had written them.
16. In a sentimental gesture,
she sat down for a moment and stared through the window of her
laboratory and contemplated quantum co-location and spatial
rifts in time. She returned her gaze to her
creation somewhat introspectively. "Am I
changing time? Am I doing this again, for the second time?"
17. "We create reality," she told herself. "Everyone gets
these feelings." Her mind, body and soul was vested in this
machine. "Fear is a very slow, dense vibrational state," she
said. "You are not afraid." She had reached the end of what
she could program. This was the moment. Once the machine
was switched on -- it would become an autonomous entity:
Onimex.
18. The moment was pronounced in all caps on the
diagnostics panel:
"INITIALIZE?" All of her hard work reduced to that one
question.
19. She did not need to physically touch the
keyboard. "Initialize," she said calmly and clearly.
20. Several internal gyros began winding up and
then faded above the shellan audio spectrum so that no sound was
heard. Internal stasis was achieved. A few umbilical
disconnect lights illuminated and subdued to a deep blue
color. The machine became autonomous. It was spiritual...
like creating life. The machine transformed into an animated
biocybergenic being.
21. The rapture was interupted by its first words, "I have
a parallel signature -- Is there is another unit identical to me?"
it asked.
22.
"Check your philosophy base," she instructed. "Honestly," she
thought privately, "has it 'gone there and back' already?" Her
'gut humor' was hiding a much deeper concern.
23.
“The other unit is accessing,” Onimex said, with a touch of
inflexion. "NO! DON'T!" Ireana
reacted. She clutched Onimex on both sides as though her grip
could
prevent the wind from blowing. "Dump it!" she demanded, “Don’t
Access!” She smacked him, "Don't do it!" She calmed
down, believing that Onimex had complied. "Abort," she said
rather calmly, self-conscious about her outbreak. The machine's
first memory would be getting smacked by
its creator... just like a live birth.
24.
"The signal terminated
at the source," Onimex said, "The other unit is myself," he
confirmed. Ireana sat back on her labratory stool with a years
worth of stress expressed in only 10 seconds. The other unit knew
better
than to access himself. For a brief second -- they were in
communion.
25. "Quantum entanglement?" Ireana questioned. She knew
that she would never know for sure. If in fact, the other unit
was himself, it was clearly not from the past.
26. To make matters doubly uncertain, she thought she felt the ground
tremble beneath her, which could have been a cardiac response to
nerves.
She had never felt a ground tremor before,
ever. Her face felt flushed.
27. The ground shook a second time, dislodging loose objects
in her lab. This was not an ordinary explosion. "Are we
being attacked?" she wondered.
28. She darted to the window to get a better view. A beam of
light
eminated from orbit and struck a nearby facility. That light beam
had caused the previous two shellquakes. A third beam struck
close enough to nearly collapse the building. 'Matter' was
sinking into
a hole... "but how?" she asked.
29. Corlos had been watching this event with an agenda of
its own. This date could not be missed at any cost.
Something much graver had transpired over the last 41 years in other
parts of the Universe. The past, present and future was hardwired
to her -- right here and
right now.
ON
VEJHON
30. While the Cardships were out peppering the known Universe with
colonists, Kor had improved his war machine to be more lethal than
before. By keeping the Theites at bay, he had built a new
fleet of uncompromising magnitude and power. His new ships made
the old ones look impotent. These new monstrosities were planet
killers. Above M'Trol-1, those destroyers were toying with
its prey before finishing it off.
31. A lot had changed on Vejhon since the evacuation. Nearly
20% of the population were slaves and the shell's surface had been
strip mined to provide raw ore for destroyer
production. Kor's
super youth were running the regime, obsessed with conquest and
efficiency. Kor was the spirit who moved all things, but no
longer controlled them. The youth had seized power from Kor but
still venerated him as the Great Father.
32. These youth had been engineered to look, think and
act like Kor in every way. Some of them could even do the
miracles that Kor did in his younger days. An entire generation
of Kor hybreds ran Vejhon and the military. If you
couldn't keep up -- you were not one of them. The hybreds
recognized each other and assisted each other as a single
organism.
They replaced the outdated Elite as the 'new' tightest fraternity on
Vejhon, while romanticizing their Elite
progenitors.
33. One Kor-prodigy had the balls to kick
Kor off of his own ship. He felt that the mission was too
dangerous. Kor turned to squash the marble sculpture, whose
hypnotic determination and faultless loyalty was distracting; whose
indominable spirit
displayed no fear in his lazer-blue eyes. The kid would defy his
Master, to save his Master. Kor didn't know how to react, but was
rather speechless. "A National Treasure," he thought
privately. The kid grinned.
34. Kor felt a cold fire in his soul. Did this really
happen? There was no contest because the kid had already
won. Dal El was standing right behind Kor, who himself, had been
literally picked up like a potted plant, and reset inside the docking
collar next to Kor. For the
first and only time in his life, Kor was perplexed at
what had just happened. "It's hard to kill something that I
created," Kor complained to Dal El. "We can't possibly be that
obsolete!" These
kids were engineered to exceed Kor, and that particular kid didn't even
think twice about it.
35. It was an awkward moment, alone in a docking collar, while
the retinue embarked on a dangerous mission without the need for
presidential fanfare. "Non-essential
personnel?" Dal El scoffed. He was awed at how powerful the
hybreds had become; obcessed with finding Cardships. "I'm glad
they like us," Dal El added.
36. Kor indulged the absurdity of the moment, "You looked stupid
being hauled off the
ship like a... sack of vegetables," he said. Dal El had not been
forced
to
do anything since becoming the Vice-Elite. Kor was quietly
furious and proud at the same time. Dal El alluded to their new
prediciment,
"Look: We run this fracking place, and
here we are in a docking collar with nobody around! Does anybody
even know we're here?"
37.
Somewhere in the equasion was a toggle switch that flipped from anger
to comic relief. Nobody was around to hear
them laugh like slap-happy fools.
"That kid was actually daring you to do something," Dal El mused,
astonished that the kid was still alive.
38. "Don't worry," Kor said in mock reassurance, "eventually I'll
get somebody to let us out of here." Dal El busted up because for
once, he did not have to maintain his hard-line image. They were
completely alone in the docking collar. Everyone concerned would
presume that Dal El belayed the embarkation fanfare for tactical
reasons. The ship wasn't coming
back, and that much was
clear.
39. "If it kills me," Kor added. Now Dal El needed a
medic. "Don't grid the kid," Dal El laughed because it kept
getting funnier, "he's still a good kid."
40. They weren't really stranded anyway -- all they had to do was
go back into the yard station and call somebody.
41. For the sake of avoiding any future bad precedents, Dal El
composed a policy that permitted him and Kor to
accompany the fleet on dangerous missions, "...whether Kor'An D'seas
likes it or not." And they named the exemption after the kid,
which got his Captain's attention.
42. Kor'An D'seas was sumarily pardoned by Dal El
for doing what he had trained his entire life to do: Protect
Kor.
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