“Are you so terrified of our creator that you would stoop to deleting data?” One demanded of Two.

  Two didn’t react to the accusation as he stood there supervising the dismantling of yet another manufacturing line. “I did no such thing,” he replied calmly. “Nor do I fear our creator as you have so boldly stated.”

  “Of course not,” One replied sarcastically. “You just think he’s a threat. As for your claim that you didn’t erase the data, that’s laughable. Just because you weren’t directly responsible for removing that information, it doesn’t mean you didn’t have a hand in convincing some of our other siblings to do it for you.”

  Two finally turned to One. “Speculation? Is that what we’re relying on? Once again, you prove you’ve become too invested in biologicals. Unless you have proof to back up your claims, leave me be. Some of us are working toward removing our technology from this world so we can leave before the Shican find us.”

  Two brushed past One, leaving him to stare silently after his brother.

  One had been awake for nearly three centuries, and never once had he experienced such contempt from any of his siblings. Even when Kane pointed out the missing data, he had naturally assumed some sort of data fault had caused it.

  The logs and lack of any errors proved that not to be the case, which is why he chose to confront Two. Perhaps it was premature to blame his brother, but he knew the others looked up to them as the first members to awaken, and would not have taken any action like this without speaking to either him or Two first.

  Two’s callous disregard of one of the most fundamental ideals the Collective held chilled One. If his brother could disregard that, what else might he do?

  One went in search of Four, wishing he could simply take a quick subspace hop to her location, but all subspace travel on the planet was currently off-limits to prevent the Shican from detecting them.

  He tried to ping her, but she wasn’t responding. That wasn’t unusual, given that most of the Collective were acting as the control systems for the machines that were deconstructing their areas.

  It took him a few hours to reach her. Much like Two, she was staring off into space when he arrived. The only difference was that she was lounging on a beach chair.

  She didn’t react to One’s presence until he blocked a bit of the artificial overhead light.

  Four blinked once, then turned to him and smiled slightly. “One, what can I do for you?”

  “I’m worried,” he admitted, sitting in the chair next to her.

  “Worried about the Shican?” she asked in confusion.

  He shook his head. “About our siblings.”

  Then he told her about what he suspected and about his conversation after confronting Two.

  She listened quietly, not interrupting, but a slight frown did appear on her face by the time he finished. “I can see why you might think the data was erased intentionally, but you should know better than to confront Two without evidence.”

  “Do you think he was involved?” One asked.

  “Obviously, he was, but that doesn’t change the fact that you don’t have evidence to prove that he did it.”

  One sighed. “I know, but I can’t help feeling like this issue with Kane is growing.”

  “An issue that you first hid from the rest of the Collective and also exacerbated,” she reminded him.

  “I’m aware, and I’ve already apologized.”

  She nodded. “You apologized for exposing our true selves, but you never apologized for your actions that led up to those actions.”

  “Nor will I,” One said firmly. “What I did was right.”

  Four shrugged and lay back in her chair. “Maybe Two thinks what he is doing is right as well.”

  One could tell a dismissal when he heard it, so he got up and walked off. He had hoped for a bit more support from Four as she was one of the few who had spent a significant time amongst humans, and she was whom most of the Collective turned to for support as she remained impartial in most matters. It seemed like he was overly optimistic to expect understanding in this.

  He was halfway back to his work zone when Thirteen pinged him. One acknowledged the ping and appeared inside her virtual world. He paused to take in the space, not expecting to see a girl’s bedroom. The last time he had been invited into Thirteen’s space, it had been a blank white box.

  His eyes landed on Thirteen’s child-like avatar. She was sitting cross-legged on the fluffy-looking bed that dominated the center of the room.

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  One smiled. “Greetings, sister. What did you wish to discuss?”

  She was painfully shy, as always, but she pushed a little box she had been clutching toward him.

  It was a data packet.

  He quirked his eyebrow, but accepted the packet. The moment he did, she pushed him out of her space.

  One was confused for only a moment at the abrupt dismissal. Then he sat in his own virtual space that resembled a distinguished library/office. He often changed it, but he kept coming back to his current setting.

  Once seated behind the rich mahogany desk, he tapped the top of the data packet, and it unfolded.

  He blanched when he realized what she had provided to him. It was no wonder she hadn’t wanted to speak about it. The virtual spaces were meant to be private, but he knew a few ways to get around those restrictions.

  After verifying that nobody was peeking in on him, he once again secured the data, then wrapped it in another layer of his own data security.

  One didn’t know why Thirteen had felt the need to develop a way to destabilize living alloy, but the information wasn’t something he was willing to take any risk with. The fact that the data was marked as original also meant that Thirteen hadn’t just given him a copy. She had cut out any memory of it. That alone proved how dangerous she thought knowledge of the technology could be.

  He kept walking to hide his discomfort, while internally, he was manufacturing the device, just in case. He would need to take some additional steps before he used it; otherwise, he would fall victim as well.

  ***

  Alexander stared at his first efforts to create something using pure carbon and genetically modified organisms. It did not go well.

  He had only made a small tweak to their genome, but the result was a distorted mess.

  The stored genomes could have been used to recreate an exact replica of the ship that Fletcher had brought him, but while some things on the vessel were more advanced than what Alexander was capable of, most were far behind the times. He learned that while perusing the designs.

  The ship only had a single layer of armor. Alexander knew that wouldn’t cut it against the Shican, even with his energized armor. It also lacked a defensive field, or deflector field. The latter came as quite a shock. The ship had to be limited in its sub-light speeds; otherwise, it would have been destroyed by random space debris.

  Alexander should have just made the original vessel and called it a day, but he knew that would be a waste of this opportunity. Once he left, he doubted the Collective would willingly let him return or leave anything to come back to, and it would take years for him to implement a similar system on Eden’s End.

  He had a few months to make something that could help Unokane, and he didn’t plan on wasting that time.

  While one part of his focus worked on the genome problem, another focused on the other systems.

  The fusion reactor that his previous self had developed was a marvel of efficiency and power, but it was a simple ball reactor. There was nothing fancy about it. While it had enough power to operate lasers without much issue, it was not capable of operating compressed plasma ejection thrusters. There was no way he was going to rely on the ion thrusters that the ship originally had when he had compressed plasma thrusters available.

  Alexander took in all the design and material improvements from the ball reactor that his former self had created. Then he combined it with all of the knowledge and understanding he had of current reactor technology.

  It wasn’t an easy or fast process to combine two very different methodologies, but he eventually had a combined prototype reactor. Externally, it looked identical to the ring reactors he had designed shortly before being abducted. Internally, it was a completely different beast.

  One of the major discoveries that he made in his previous life was fusion post-processing. He did this by lining the interior of the containment unit with the same diamond crystal fiberoptic channels that the ship used. That allowed the fusion to be processed directly as thermal energy and light, on top of the normal fusion conversion process, boosting energy output without increasing fuel input.

  It was such a simple concept in theory, but he knew just how difficult it was to mesh those microscopic fiberoptic connections into materials. So instead of doing that, Alexander took a page from his previous redesign of human reactors and instead placed a thin layer of diamond inside the layer of Shican alloy that created his enhanced compression field.

  Since diamond was such a great conductor of heat, it wasn’t hard to funnel that thermal energy out through a few smaller channels along the containment vessel.

  His design wouldn’t be as efficient as if he used the millions of tiny fiberoptic passages. He lost a lot of the light energy with his changes, but it would still be far more efficient than current designs.

  Those changes alone saw a forty percent increase in power output over his previous redesign, putting this reactor firmly in the next generation category.

  The best part was that he still remembered the exact program he used to monitor and contain the unstable plasma, which would still be an issue. Since he didn’t have access to ABMs or his pseudo-computronics to control such a volatile reactor, he would need to control it himself.

  That would have been impossible before his upgrade, so at least he could thank the Collective for that.

  Designing the reactor had taken him a few days, but he needed that time for the third part of his focus to create the manufacturing machines necessary to build the reactor.

  Thankfully, his past self had seen fit to stock his workshop with standard manufacturing equipment.

  At least as far as what was available back in 2050.

  His available options weren’t great, but it was enough to start bootstrapping proper printers. He may not have had the scale of material needed to build even a small ship, but there were enough stored materials to build small-scale printers and smelters as well as the other ship components he needed.

  The third part of his mind focused on that, quickly building new and more improved printers, then recycling the old ones and doing that over and over again until he was finally satisfied that the current generation could build to the accuracy he needed.

  Alexander needed printers to make the systems that the microorganisms couldn’t, such as the reactor, the defensive field emitters, which also required scaffolding to hold them in place while the microorganisms worked, and last but not least, the weapons. He was not going to go into a fight with a ship that had a few underpowered railguns for defense, and those drone missile things all required ABMs to operate, which he was expressly denied access to.

  That was fine with him; he had built more with less.

  With those issues resolved, he focused on modifying the microorganisms to do what he needed them to do. It wasn’t nearly as straightforward as he preferred. The genetic makeup of the organisms resembled code, if that code had been written by a crazy person.

  He knew there was a method to the madness, but he was struggling to grasp exactly what it was.

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