The research wing aboard the Meliorem Vitam was silent aside from the occasional clicking or whirling of machinery. As Ava typed away at her terminal she shot a quick glance out the window and did a double take. When had it become night time? Ava queried the main system through her neural link.
TIME:3:23AM LT/ 11:56 ST
Hm, later than I expected. Ava thought to herself. One of the few downsides of removing her need to sleep was that her body’s internal clock had all but stopped functioning. She shrugged, there was little point in returning to her personal quarters, it would be simpler to pull an all-nighter and try to get some rest later. She set an alarm for herself as a reminder in her subsystems.
The distraction had taken just enough time that her terminal chimed with good news. The Twin king’s gene coding had finally finished. Ava clicked her manipulator appendages together in excitement as she twitched her head, activating her memory recorder.
“JUBILANT GLEE: THE PILEMINARY TESTS ARE COMPLETE. WITH THIS, WE SHOULD BE ABLE TO BETTER UNDERSTAND THE MYSTERIOUS QUANTUM ANOMALIES THAT THE SUBJECT WAS ABLE TO MANIFEST.” Ava spoke aloud through her chest speaker as she read the terminal screen. While it was true she could simply transfer the data directly into her neural flexmatrix, she preferred the act of reading the data slowly. It helped her digest the information while also allowing her to savor the experience.
She froze mid scroll. Her optical implants seized for seventy three milliseconds as her mind tried to process what she was reading. Leaning forwards she blared from her speakers. “ALARMED INTRIGUE: SUBJECTS GENOMES ARE HEAVILY MUTATED. COYFUL REMARK: I WAS ABLE TO PROCURE A SAMPLE OF STANDARD TWIN DNA THROUGH ALTERNATIVE CHANNELS FOR COMPARISON. BEMUSED CONJECTURE: THE DNA OF THE SUBJECT IS…” Ava narrowed her sensors. “THE DNA IS IN A CONSTANT STATE OF FLUX. RAISING ALARM: THERE IS EVIDENCE OF RECESSIVE ALPHA SERIES GENES BEING ACTIVE. HYSTERICAL CONCERN: IF TRUE THEN THE SUBJECT MUST BE BROUGHT IN FOR FURTHER STUDY, AT WORST HE MUST BE EUTHANIZED BEFORE HE CROSSES THE POINT OF SINGULARITY.” Ava’s pumps that acted as her lungs were expanding and contracting rapidly as she hyperventilated. Warning sigils appeared over her vision as her subsystems tried to calm her down before she went into cardiac arrest. Standing slowly, Ava looked down with dread. “FEARFUL ADMITTANCE: THIS COULD BE A POSSIBLE OMNIAPEX SCENARIO. -I HAVE TO WARN THEM ALL-”
Ava turned to run for the door as she stopped in her tracks. Something was wrong. She compared her vision with her memory backup from earlier; the door was three millimeters out of place. Someone was in the room with her. She gulped, although it was a redundant gesture that hadn’t been needed in centuries. A quick scan of the room revealed nothing out of the ordinary, and yet Ava couldn’t shake the feeling that she wasn’t alone. Despite her abandonment of her humanity, she still knew to trust her gut.
“CAUTIOUS GREETING: I KNOW YOU ARE THERE.”
For a moment there was nothing, but after Ava refused to move there came a sigh from behind her. She wanted to turn and look but her sensors warned her that the figure was holding a weapon to her back. How had they snuck in? Ava hissed as the answer came to her. Magic, of course. Blasted occult nonsense. The stranger spoke in a confident tone, by the pitch it was most likely a man.
“That’s disappointing. I thought I had hid myself pretty well.”
“PITHY STATEMENT: THE DOOR WAS THREE MILLIMETERS OUT OF PLACE.” Ava said with a shrug. While she had the man talking she queued a distress call on all frequencies; her subsystem cried out in alarm, there was no signal.
The man laughed. “Pretty handy device if I do say so myself.” There was something in the man’s other hand, some makeshift jamming device that seemed shoddy at best.
“TIRED QUERY: WHAT DO YOU WANT? IF YOU WANT IMMORTALITY THEN I AM SORRY TO TELL YOU THAT THAT IS NOT FEASIBLE FOR MANY REASONS THAT I DO NOT THINK YOU WOULD UNDERSTAND.” Ava said as she tried to sigh, it came out as a garble of static. Over the thousands of years she had been a Genesmith she had lost count of the people that had tried to bribe or threaten her for her services. Some wanted her to cure an incurable disease, most just wanted to not die. While it was true that Ava had extended her life to its absolute limits, it had come at huge costs, some of the parts needed for the process were lost completely to the ravages of regression.
“I’m not here for that.” The man said, something about his tone was changing, growing more serious.
After a long pause Ava felt her shoulders drop. “RELUCTANT ADMITTANCE: YOU MEAN TO KILL ME.”
There was no response from the stranger, just the deafening silence. While it was true that Ava knew that one day she would die, she honestly never thought it would come at the hands of an assassin in the night. Something about the indignity of it caused her to fill with anger. “BITTER REMARK: WHY? WHAT DOES MY DEATH BRING YOU?”
The assassin reached over and inserted something into the port of the terminal, the screen flickered as its cores were burnt to dust. With a deft hand the man stole several of the samples that Ava was studying and pocketed them. Still the man refused to speak.
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“DESPERATE PLEA: IF THIS ABOUT SOME RESEARCH I WAS DOING, I WILL STOP. I WILL DELETE MY MEMORY OF WHICHEVER SUBJECT YOU WANT, JUST TELL ME WHICH ONE.” Ava screamed, her speaker sounding more strained than usual. But the man remained silent as he tensed his body to deliver the killing blow.
Ava knew that she was about to die. She wanted to defend herself, but something about the man told her that it was futile. Against a trained assassin she could do nothing but thrash against the cruel fate she was to meet.
The blade came down as Ava screamed, her real voice ringing out through the speaker for the first time. The man froze mid swing, the blade resting gingerly against Ava’s neck. He seemed to be pantomiming to himself, acting out a conversation with no one. With a slouch of his shoulders he lowered the blade. “You have been granted a chance at mercy.”
Clutching her shaking hands to her chest, Ava whispered in confusion. “TREPIDATIOUS REPLY: WHAT DO I NEED TO DO?”
“If you agree to serve my master, you will be given the opportunity to live. You will store any memory of this night in your mind, when my master wishes it, you will be given a code phrase that will awaken your memories of this agreement. At such time, you will serve my master and devote yourself to our mission. This is your only option at salvation; I would take it if I were you.”
Ava’s mind went blank. The ramifications to this deal were outlandish to the extreme. She was to offer herself in service to a mysterious figure that she knew nothing about and whose goals could be anything. “HESITANT CLARIFICATION: WHAT IS THE GOAL OF YOUR -CORRECTION- THE MASTER YOU WOULD HAVE ME SERVE?”
The man’s voice rose in fervor. “We have been given the holy task of lifting mankind from the mud and squalor that we find ourselves in, to cast off the shackles of the corrupt court and pave a new path for humanity! Aren’t you tired of serving false gods that wallow in hedonistic delights while casting their judgment from above? You were there on the old world, you witnessed its fall, surely you can see that we are walking that same path to oblivion that we walked all those years ago. If we continue to blindly follow the will of the Celestial’s then humanity will never again rise to its true potential!” The man spoke with a practiced flourish that made it clear that this wasn’t his first time preaching these sentiments, he was obviously quite enamored by whatever zealotry this so-called master was spewing.
With a shudder Ava fidgeted. “REMORSEFUL REBUFF: I AM AFRAID I CANNOT HELP YOU WITH THAT. THE GODS, THOUGH FLAWED, ARE NOT BEINGS THAT MORTALS CAN STAND AGAINST AND HOPE TO BEAT. IT IS STILL IN HUMANITIES BEST INTEREST TO SERVE THE CELESTIALS AT THIS TIME.” She closed her optical units, preparing herself for the inevitable outcome.
Surprisingly the man did not strike her down immediately, instead pantomiming again to himself.
The man leaned in close to Ava and whispered something impossible.
She whirled around to face the man with such vigor that he flinched back in surprise. For the first time she could see him properly. He was an average height, with a slender build, wearing black leather from head to toe and a mask that covered his face. “DEMAND: HOW DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THAT!?” Ava shouted with such force that the nearby beakers hummed. The man had known of something that had been buried and forgotten by the sands of time since before they had made planetfall. Something that had the power to bring the very heavens crashing down in a blaze of retribution.
“Does that mean you will accept my master’s terms?” The man said, regaining his composure.
“IMMEDIATE REPLY: IF WHAT THEY SAY IS TRUE, I WILL GLADLY BEND THE KNEE.”
The man nodded, sheathing his blade as he relaxed. “Good. Then as we discussed, you will bury these memories until you are needed. Your activation phrase will be ‘When the shadows grow long, the meek shall rise, and the heavens shall tumble.’” The man made to leave without another word.
Ava shook her head for a moment. “SURPRISED STATEMENT: THAT’S IT? I THOUGHT YOU WOULD WAIT AND ENSURE I FOLLOWED YOUR INSTRUCTIONS.”
With a laugh the man continued. “Now that you know what we have on our side. My master is confident that you will follow through with your end of the bargain. If for whatever reason you fail to do so, I’ll know.” The man vanished in a puff of inky black smoke.
It took Ava three seconds to deliberate with the notion of trying to weasel her way out of the deal before she accepted that it was worth the risk to find out more about this master that knew of things that should have been erased. Ava backed up her memories and stored them in a directory in her subsystem that wouldn’t be flagged by any of her sensors, she wrote a code that would constantly monitor her auditory sensors for the activation phrase. When the time came, she would be ready to remember.
All that was left was some house cleaning. She flagged her terminal for repair citing malfunction, she also made a note that several samples had been disposed, there was no way to know which the assassin was after since he took so many, but Ava had a hunch that she shouldn’t try and dig into those fields again until a later time. She left a note to herself that she was going to refocus on some old work for the time being, hopefully that would cause her to lose interest for long enough.
With everything in order Ava sat down and began the process of deleting her own short term memory banks. Her body convulsed as she wiped her mind of any notion of the last day's work, her hope was that she would awaken and think that it was a memory leak issue of some sort.
Ava opened her optical sensors with a flutter. She looked around in confusion as she queried her subsystem for the time.
Time:3:34am LT/ 12:07 ST
Hm, later than I had expected. Ava thought to herself as she turned back to her terminal. With a shock she found the terminal had shorted out, a frustrating setback. She went to put in a request for a service and found that she had already done so, well that was a surprise. Rooting through her memory banks she found a lapse of the last day or so. Must be a memory leak, I’ll have to get that fixed. Ava shrugged as she settled in for work. No sense going back to my quarters when it’s so close to the start of my next shift. She thought to herself for the second time that evening.
