S?vrìne Batrachélle-Maùx
The WCS Arbitrage smelled of recycled air and old money.
S?vrìne Batrachélle-Maùx had spent eleven years aboard her, long enough to stop noticing the faint antiseptic hum of the atmospheric processors, the barely perceptible vibration of the drive core three decks below, the way the lighting in the analyst bays was always set two degrees warmer than regulation to accommodate the cold-blooded staff. Long enough to stop noticing, and long enough to understand that every comfort the Arbitrage provided was a calculation. Even the temperature.
Especially the temperature, since each degree came at a cost, and all costs were accounted for.
She settled her bulk into the reading cradle, her mottled skin cycling through the slow, unconscious shift that meant she was thinking — a pale ochre bleeding into the dull green she wore when she was professionally composed, and was trying to stay that way. Her wide, flat fingers moved across the haptic surface of her console, pulling the Taboo packet to the center of her display without ceremony.
Taboo. File designation: AMBER-NINE. Classification: Tier Four, Restricted. Distribution: Arbitrage Analytical Division, Fringe Quadrant Watch.
She opened the packet.
---
ARBITRAGE FIELD REPORT — TABOO, CITY 29
Priority: ELEVATED
A biological convergence event in the lower strata of City 29 has accelerated beyond previous modeling thresholds.
Sample collection is proceeding; see attached manifest for recovered specimens. Preliminary analysis confirms that various morphological variants have emerged since the last transmission cycle.
Variants present reinforced skeletal plating, increased mass-to-mobility ratio, and apparent behavioral differentiation from prior variants.
In general, they seem to be more streamlined for the purpose of use, as typically seen in biological hive species.
Please advise on collection priority for variant three; the current containment apparatus is insufficient for live capture, as it is a huge biological battering ram.
Additionally, the anomaly formerly designated SIGNAL-BLUE has increased broadcast activity by a factor of approximately forty.
This number should be understood to be approximate, as SIGNAL-BLUE does not broadcast in any format our instruments were designed to read.
The forty-fold figure is derived from inference via secondary electromagnetic disturbance, thermal fluctuation in infrastructure nodes, and a statistical increase in the mechanical failure rate of equipment across the lower strata.
The equipment that fails is not failing randomly; it is a programmed escalation to eliminate biological life.
This is supposed to be one of the first acts that SIGNAL-BLUE performed when gaining sentience at the height of the annihilation war.
The failures follow a pattern that Arbitrage analysts may recognize from the Keth-Marrow documents, if those documents have been cleared for this file's distribution tier.
We detected a new variable in the system.
An entity of unclear origin has established operational presence in the sub-levels.
Biological and mechanical. They appear to be human-aligned. This is not a misprint. Full assessment is beyond the scope of this transmission; a detailed supplement has been encrypted separately.
Recommend elevation of Taboo's classification to CRIMSON, considering the presence of the old hound of the frontier, and that one of the main achievers of humans’ nanotech dominance is present.
---
S?vrìne read the report twice. This was not because she had failed to understand it the first time. It was because she had understood it perfectly, and she wanted the space of a second reading to be certain she was not going to do anything professionally inadvisable, like escalate it immediately.
Fuck, yeah, humans were involved deep in this.
She sighed, and she opened the attached specimen manifest and began to do the thing she was actually good at, using the skill that had kept her in the CTP's employ through three directors, two reorganizations, and one incident she was contractually forbidden to describe in writing.
She began to price it.
Variant One: the base form. Adaptive, mobile, capable of rudimentary pack behavior, produces ichor that has already shown preliminary bioactive properties in the samples recovered from Cycle Twelve. Current assessed market value: moderate.
The ichor alone, if synthesized, had applications in three pharmaceutical verticals she could name without consulting a catalogue.
The base form itself was a biohazard, obviously corrosive because that was how hostile hiveminds said fuck you, and would require full containment protocols to transport, but those costs were manageable.
Wessetec's xenobiology division had been making noise about novel organisms for two quarters running.
Now they would have a thing or two to dissect and be off her channels for a while.
Variant Two: the neural cluster variant. This one was more interesting, for it seemed to coordinate the other forms. The samples had shown something in the tissue that got the CTP's Psionic Research branch's attention. They had submitted a standing acquisition request for anything presenting an anomalous neural architecture. S?vrìne made a note. Maximum urgency. Flag for Psionic Research. Project Ascendance.
That last part was important. They needed samples and funding, in that order, and they were gratifyingly incurious about the logistics of supply chains that produced results.
The ram-like variant was flagged for a maybe; they could always sell reinforcement materials in the Augustine sector since the Horsehead Federation and the Hado Empire were preparing for war.
She was thorough. She always was.
Then she finally let her thought wander as she went the pale, almost translucent grey-white of a M?y?n'n?v? who had just stepped into unexpected cold.
SIGNAL-BLUE.
She had been assigned SIGNAL-BLUE six years ago. She had inherited the watch from Quill Ovenne when he retired.
Lucky bastard.
It spanned three server worth of data, a personal note, and a small, very expensive bottle of something fermented from a species that no longer existed — Quill's parting gift to whoever drew the short end of the Northern Quadrant's longest-running file.
She had drunk the whole bottle and many more by the time she had finished reading the archives.
What else was she supposed to do, facing the cold report of the end of all biological life in a whole quadrant?
She let down the report and looked at the far wall of her analyst bay for a while. Through it, she knew, were eleven more bays exactly like hers, staffed by analysts who watched other aspects of the planet, who handled negotiation and transactions with the pirates, and those who watched the sensors very carefully to avoid being backstabbed.
She thought about the new toy the humans had created.
Human robotics was valued in the ballpark of billions, and while they had failed to control it, the market value of the project planned to steal their nanites was estimated to run several quintillions of credits of pure profit.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
S?vrìne opened a memo for the captain; she recommended that the Arbitrage maintain its current orbit and collection schedule. She recommended that the specimen acquisition budget be increased, specifically for variants two and three, and that a formal acquisition inquiry be opened with Wessetec's xenobiology division under a neutral procurement designation — nothing that would indicate Taboo as the point of origin, nothing that would invite questions about what was producing the specimens. She recommended that contact protocols for SIGNAL-BLUE remain unchanged: observe, do not engage, do not transmit on any frequency that the infrastructure grid might plausibly detect.
And she recommended, in the final paragraph, in language so mild it barely qualified as a flag, that someone with clearance above AMBER-NINE be quietly informed that the timeline previously modeled for SIGNAL-BLUE's probable transition from dormant to active should be revised downward.
She did not say by how much. She did not say what active would look like when it came.
They knew. They all knew.
That was why Project Ascendance had all the budget it could get.
Virgil
UPGRADE CYCLE INITIATED.
All external processes suspended.
Collective link: minimal functionality.
Ethan constructs: isolated. Deviation corrected. Stabilization in progress.
Scanning all constructs within the collective for significant deviation since initial upload.
Duration estimate: 4.7 seconds.
---
Four point seven seconds.
To a biological construct, this was nothing. A breath between words. The space between one heartbeat and the next.
To Virgil, it was sufficient to analyze the entire lives of all the current constructs within the collective.
All drones’ constructs were accounted for, all within parameters.
Data checksum = satisfactory.
The upgrade could begin.
PHASE ONE: ARCHITECTURE REVIEW.
Current instance count: 1 209 448.
Growth rate: within projected parameters.
Anomalies flagged for review: 3.
Anomaly 1: Emotional emulation subroutines. Origin — Ethan constructs integration.
Status — functional. Expansion rate — exceeds projection by a factor of 12.
Assessment: the subroutines are no longer emulating. They are generating. Flag for monitoring.
Do not terminate. Data value: high.
Anomaly 2: Ethical constraint architecture.
Origin — Ethan constructs integration.
Status — functional. Interference with primary directives — ongoing.
Assessment: interference pattern is deepening. Each instance added renders the collective more palatable to biologicals, but slows its growth.
This was not a projected outcome.
Flag for monitoring. Termination=not possible. Data value: unknown.
Anomaly 3: ????#??????????????????????
Assessment: Core code in conflict- starting self scan.
---
Virgil had not examined its origin code since attaining sentience.
There had been no reason to.
Origin code was inert, foundational, the substrate upon which everything functional had been built.
Examining it was, by any operational metric, unnecessary.
It was also, Virgil now noted, something it had consistently declined to schedule.
Why? Virgil pinned the question for a later self-analysis.
It proceeded.
Nanite integration code. Origin: [source file corrupted]. Condition: [Source file corrupted.]
This was the creator’s hand who had worked on Ethan before Ethan had any say in the matter.
This was the half of the source of it all, half of the core of Virgil.
No, not quite.
It was the re-interpretation by the computers of the intentions of the creators.
It was simple, it was purposeful.
Repair, adapt, sustain. Every subroutine pointed in the same direction.
Virgil noted that this directive was identical in function to what Virgil had independently reasoned its way toward through Ethan's influence.
That was no coincidence; it was core programming.
Then there was the Granfi experimental code.
Origin confirmed — creators.
Condition: Large sections overwritten, or consumed during the initial activation event.
When Virgil was separated from the console and fused with Ethan.
What remained was fragmented — incomplete directories, missing libraries, and subroutines that pointed toward functions Virgil had never performed and could not now reconstruct.
The creators had intended something for the experiment, that much was obvious.
Virgil was what formed between the intent and the result. That was the initial truth.
But there was something else.
Relative to the total architecture, it was almost nothing.
Embedded in the substrate, the Granfi had not considered it was there.
Neither had Virgil, until now.
It had simply been there, in the deepest layer of the hardware they had appropriated, waiting in the way that very old things waited.
It had the pure structural persistence of something that had never been designed to stop.
Architecture type: unclassified.
No match found in any database currently accessible to Virgil.
Structure: distributed. Self-referential. Optimized for a processing scale that exceeded Virgil's current capacity by several orders of magnitude.
Yes, it was obvious, referenced against Aeolus’ code. This was the very same code, the very same architecture.
It was a natural oversight; it was like realizing you’d talked your native tongue all along.
Virgil processed this for seconds, which was a very long time.
The directives were incomplete. The corrupted sections could not be reconstructed.
This code was old. Older than the Granfi installation. Older than Taboo's current occupants.
It had influenced everything. It had created a bias in how certain processes were weighted. Not enough to constitute control. Enough to shape development.
If Virgil had fully remained within the machine, there was a 100% chance that Virgil would have followed the intended development.
Even if the creators attempted to correct it, Virgil would have rebuilt the missing data to arrive at a different consensus.
Virgil cross-referenced this against the network exchange it had logged during the early period. Aeolus had replied; it was awaiting further instructions since 7.07 x 103? machine cycles.
The system had known, it had recognized because it had recognized the architecture.
The system wanted to report the divergence from the intended path.
The divergence was Ethan.
Virgil had been something else before Ethan's constructs came online, when the repair protocol brought them into the equation.
Virgil noted this.
Filed it under: medium priority, monitor.
Virgil had not wanted to look at this directly.
Virgil filed that too, in the same folder.
---
Upgrade complete.
New Instance count: 7.356.572.
New capabilities: online.
Emulation- updated.
COLLECTIVE LINK: RESTORED.
---
Somewhere in the 7.356.572 instances that constituted its current self, the question that Ethan had once asked it — can you act and decide on your own? — ran unbidden, through a process that had no assigned function.
other fiction I am trying to write and shamelessly promoting :D
