“Do you?”
“Of course. I am an Adok.”
“That’s conceit,” Maddox said. “You are not an Adok but a derivative of Adok technology.”
“I am the deified Driving Force Galyan.”
Maddox stared at the alien holoimage. He had come to trust and like Galyan. Still, Galyan wasn’t alive, but was a machine, albeit an extremely complex one with an artificial personality.
“Captain, I assure you—”
“We’re going to do it,” Maddox said, interrupting the holoimage. “You don’t have to convince me to try. The hour is dark, and we’ve lost the professor’s services.”
“You are in need of another hyper-intelligent entity.”
Maddox nodded. “The doctor and Meta are going to flip the switch, as it were. I don’t know what you’re going to feel.”
“Maybe I will remember more of my past.”
“Yes,” Maddox said. “That’s what I want to warn you about.”
“I do not understand.”
“Maybe the deified part of you has been kept emotionless for a reason. I wonder how an artificial intelligence will deal with keen feelings. Humans have been making movies about the idea for a long time. We’re about to finally find out, or maybe find out what happens when a computer feels deeply.”
“When do we begin the process?”
Maddox pulled out a chronometer, checking. “Just a few more minutes.”
“I must go.”
“I wish you’d stay here,” Maddox said.
“Captain. That is an odd request. My monitors allow me to see many places at once. Keeping the holoimage here doesn’t make any difference, you realize?”
“Indulge me.”
The holoimage eyed Maddox. The AI used the holoimage as a data-entry point. The computer realized the Adoks had put a restriction on the holoimage. In theory, the AI could have several holoimages running at the same time. In practice, a restriction only allowed the one.
“I believe you desire to be the first one to talk to me after the change,” Galyan said.
“I do.”
“I think I understand.”
Maddox glanced at his chronometer once more.
“Do you think I shall sense any discomfort?” Galyan asked.
“I don’t see why you should.”
“That isn’t a direct answer.”
“Correct,” Maddox said.
“Then—” Galyan stopped talking. He sensed the doctor and Meta. The older woman tapped a control. And in that second everything changed for the deified personality in the AI. The tap turned on the offline systems.
A wave of sensations rolled over the computing core. It was most odd and discomforting. The discomfort wasn’t a physical sensation, but a juxtaposing of two contrary ways of existence. The AI core realized Ludendorff had fixed the other system. It hadn’t been working right for thousands of years. The hidden computer chamber that Dana had found added even greater complexity to the AI core.
A moment of disorientation came and went. Greater understanding filled the AI. It was strange…
Driving Force Galyan remembered his last days as a flesh and blood entity, as a real live Adok. Swarm attack-craft raced at Victory. He had stood on the bridge, directing the planetary beams and the counter-attack against vast masses of enemy vessels.
In their dark, boxlike craft, the Swarm attacked in endless waves of small assault ships. There were over a million separate enemy fighting machines. The Swarm drove down at the atmosphere of the loveliest planet in the universe.
In the conference chamber in the here and now, a groan seeped from the holoimage’s mouth.
Galyan remembered witnessing the wave assault upon his homeworld. The Swarm came down, down, down. The massive planetary beams reached up, pouring devastating fire upon the waves. Thousands of enemy craft exploded, hurling tens of thousands of tons of shrapnel at companion vessels, shredding them and continuing the process. The entire first wave failed to reach the stratosphere. The problem was that more Swarm waves, like the ocean battering a shore, kept advancing upon the homeworld.
“Do we attack, Driving Force?” his second-in-command asked.
Six thousand years ago, Galyan had stood on the bridge of Victory as flesh and blood. What sort of question had that been? What did a tactical victory mean if the homeworld died? There was reason to believe the Swarm was a xenophobic race. Their craft might be bringing a deadly end-of-the-world weapon against the Adok birth-planet.
“Bring the battleships down into close orbit,” Galyan ordered.
That started the final confrontation of the ages. The Swarm attack fighters zoomed for the battleships. Adok High Command did not yet understand the Swarm tactic of infiltrating the fighting vessels with Swarm warriors and computer viruses.
A defensive AI system in Victory would have liked to ban the ancient images from its computer memory. Instead, they assaulted Galyan.
He remembered the destruction. The enemy craft rained down upon the planet. In time, the atmosphere blazed with millions of tons of shrapnel burning, burning and burning. It caused the planetary beams to lose track of the latest wave. The sensors were overloaded. Then the big Swarm maulers entered the fray.
Galyan watched hosts of Adok battleships explode and burn with grim orange glows. Despite himself, he ordered a retreat from close orbit. The higher maulers would have the advantage for too long otherwise. Galyan had to get among them in higher orbit.
For hours, the space war raged.
The Adok disruptor beams proved deadly in the extreme to the Swarm maulers. At the cost of the Dominion Guard Fleet, Galyan destroyed all of the enemy’s super-heavies.
That’s when the enemy attack fighters finally reached the surface. They swarmed the planetary defense stations, annihilating them. That opened the planet to the hell-burners.
From space, Galyan remembered the endless thermonuclear explosions pimpling the planetary surface. He understood that each flare represented millions of Adok deaths.
Galyan forgot himself then. He should have stayed to defend the planetary orbit. Instead, he launched an assault against the mighty Swarm mother-stars. They were the immense Swarm vessels that had brought the invasion force to the Adok System at sub-light speeds. Nothing that Galyan had seen since came close to approaching the monstrous size of those ships. They were as big as the biggest asteroids.
Did it matter how and in what exact sequence everything happened? Galyan didn’t think so. The point, to him, was that he lost the Adok warships but destroyed every enemy mother-star. Behind him on the homeworld, the enemy brought down its planet-busters.
As Galyan reformed his last battleships, he witnessed the death of his planet. It wasn’t just hell-burners blasting away the atmosphere. It was the homeworld itself splintering and coming apart in massive chunks of molten rock. The Adoks would never be able to cleanse their world of poisons, because their world no longer existed.
The anguish of “seeing” this once again, of reliving the hopelessness and despair—
In the here and now, the holoimage of Driving Force Galyan howled with heart-pain and anguish.
***
Maddox clapped his hands over his ears. He hadn’t expected this. The holoimage’s face distorted with grief.
Had the professor known this would happen? Had Ludendorff kept the systems turned off to save the AI this pain? Should he have listened to Dana about the hidden computer chamber?
“Relax!” Maddox shouted at Galyan. “Give yourself time to sort out these images.”
The holoimage fixated on him. The eyes no longer seemed normal. They seemed like twin portals into Hell.
Maddox shuddered. What had he done? Yet, what was the alternative? If the doomsday machine truly headed to Earth and nothing Star Watch possessed could stop it…
The captain savagely shook his head. He wasn’t down and out yet. He had to play the gamble to the finish.