The enemy fleet had forced us to extend energy far, far out beyond our usual limits. Great risks had been taken. But the reward had been epic, and the encounter resolved in our favor with their capture.
Purth-Anaget’s current ruling paradigm followed the memetics of the One True Form, and so had opened their world to these refugees. But Purth-Anaget was not so wedded to the belief system as to pose any threat to mutual commerce, information exchange, or any of our own rights to self-determination.
Later we would begin stripping the captured prize ships of information, booby traps, and raw mass, with Purth-Anaget’s shipyards moving inside of our shields to help.
I leapt out into space, spinning a simple carbon nanotube of string behind me to keep myself attached to the hull. I swung wide, twisted, and landed near a dark-energy manifold bridge that had pinged me a maintenance consult request just a few minutes back.
My eyes danced with information for a picosecond. Something shifted in the shadows between the hull’s crenulations.
I jumped back. We had just fought an entire war-fleet; any number of eldritch machines could have slipped through our shields—things that snapped and clawed, ripped you apart in a femtosecond’s worth of dark energy. Seekers and destroyers.
A face appeared in the dark. Skeins of invisibility and personal shielding fell away like a pricked soap bubble to reveal a bipedal figure clinging to the hull.
"You there!" it hissed at me over a tightly contained beam of data. "I am a fully bonded Shareholder and Chief Executive with command privileges of the Anabathic Ship Helios Prime. Help me! Do not raise an alarm."
I gaped. What was a CEO doing on our hull? Its vacuum-proof carapace had been destroyed while passing through space at high velocity, pockmarked by the violence of single atoms at indescribable speed punching through its shields. Fluids leaked out, surrounding the stowaway in a frozen mist. It must have jumped the space between ships during the battle, or maybe even after.
Protocols insisted I notify the hell out of security. But the CEO had stopped me from doing that. There was a simple hierarchy across the many ecologies of a traveling ship, and in all of them a CEO certainly trumped maintenance forms. Particularly now that we were no longer in direct conflict and the Fleet of Honest Representation had surrendered.
"Tell me: What is your name?" the CEO demanded.
"I gave that up a long time ago," I said. "I have an address. It should be an encrypted rider on any communication I’m single-beaming to you. Any message you direct to it will find me."
"My name is Armand," the CEO said. "And I need your help. Will you let me come to harm?"
"I will not be able to help you in a meaningful way, so my not telling security and medical assistance that you are here will likely do more harm than good. However, as you are a CEO, I have to follow your orders. I admit, I find myself rather conflicted. I believe I’m going to have to countermand your previous request."
Again, I prepared to notify security with a quick summary of my puzzling situation.
But the strange CEO again stopped me. "If you tell anyone I am here, I will surely die and you will be responsible."
I had to mull the implications of that over.
"I need your help, robot," the CEO said. "And it is your duty to render me aid."
Well, shit. That was indeed a dilemma.
Robot.
That was a Formist word. I never liked it.
I surrendered my free will to gain immortality and dissolve my fleshly constraints, so that hard acceleration would not tear at my cells and slosh my organs backward until they pulped. I did it so I could see the galaxy. That was one hundred and fifty-seven years, six months, nine days, ten hours, and—to round it out a bit—fifteen seconds ago.
Back then, you were downloaded into hyperdense pin-sized starships that hung off the edge of the speed of light, assembling what was needed on arrival via self-replicating nanomachines that you spun your mind-states off into. I’m sure there are billions of copies of my essential self scattered throughout the galaxy by this point.
Things are a little different today. More mass. Bigger engines. Bigger ships. Ships the size of small worlds. Ships that change the orbits of moons and satellites if they don’t negotiate and plan their final approach carefully.
"Okay," I finally said to the CEO. "I can help you."
Armand slumped in place, relaxed now that it knew I would render the aid it had demanded.
I snagged the body with a filament lasso and pulled Armand along the hull with me.
It did not do to dwell on whether I was choosing to do this or it was the nature of my artificial nature doing the choosing for me. The constraints of my contracts, which had been negotiated when I had free will and boundaries—as well as my desires and dreams—were implacable.
Towing Armand was the price I paid to be able to look up over my shoulder to see the folding, twisting impossibility that was a black hole. It was the price I paid to grapple onto the hull of one of several three hundred kilometer-wide rotating rings with parks, beaches, an entire glittering city, and all the wilds outside of them.
The price I paid to sail the stars on this ship.
A century and a half of travel, from the perspective of my humble self, represented far more in regular time due to relativity. Hit the edge of lightspeed and a lot of things happened by the time you returned simply because thousands of years had passed.
In a century of me-time, spin-off civilizations rose and fell. A multiplicity of forms and intelligences evolved and went extinct. Each time I came to port, humanity’s descendants had reshaped worlds and systems as needed. Each place marvelous and inventive, stunning to behold.
The galaxy had bloomed from wilderness to a teeming experiment.
I’d lost free will, but I had a choice of contracts. With a century and a half of travel tucked under my shell, hailing from a well-respected explorer lineage, I’d joined the hull repair crew with a few eyes toward seeing more worlds like Purth-Anaget before my pension vested some two hundred years from now.
Armand fluttered in and out of consciousness as I stripped away the CEO’s carapace, revealing flesh and circuitry.
"This is a mess," I said. "You’re damaged way beyond my repair. I can’t help you in your current incarnation, but I can back you up and port you over to a reserve chassis." I hoped that would be enough and would end my obligation.
"No!" Armand’s words came firm from its charred head in soundwaves, with pain apparent across its deformed features.
"Oh, come on," I protested. "I understand you’re a Formist, but you’re taking your belief system to a ridiculous level of commitment. Are you really going to die a final death over this?"
I’d not been in high-level diplomat circles in decades. Maybe the spread of this current meme had developed well beyond my realization. Had the followers of the One True Form been ready to lay their lives down in the battle we’d just fought with them? Like some proto-historical planetary cult?
Armand shook its head with a groan, skin flaking off in the air. "It would be an imposition to make you a party to my suicide. I apologize. I am committed to Humanity’s True Form. I was born planetary. I have a real and distinct DNA lineage that I can trace to Sol. I don’t want to die, my friend. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I want to preserve this body for many centuries to come. Exactly as it is."
I nodded, scanning some records and brushing up on my memeology. Armand was something of a preservationist who believed that to copy its mind over to something else meant that it wasn’t the original copy. Armand would take full advantage of all technology to augment, evolve, and adapt its body internally. But Armand would forever keep its form: that of an original human. Upgrades hidden inside itself, a mix of biology and metal, computer and neural.