Tessa Eligah

  She had expected something new.

  Not just new technology. She had expected a different shape of life. A different answer to the problem everyone kept failing to solve.

  A month ago, when she first crossed into Ethan’s territory, she’d imagined a fledgling society forming in the cracks of a dead city.

  Improvised, adaptive, maybe even hopeful in ways she hadn’t seen since she was a child.

  She should’ve known from the title of Master Chief Ethan carried.

  A month in, she knew the drill by heart.

  The routines had revealed themselves within days. The rhythms within a week. Now she could walk the perimeter and predict what she’d see before she turned each corner. Sentries at each tunnel. Patrols moving in overlapping loops. Guard posts were placed where lines of sight converged, not where people naturally gathered. Checkpoints that funneled movement without ever fully stopping it.

  Ethan ran the area like a FOB.

  Not just any modern FOB, either.

  It felt like stepping into a historical reenactment pulled from archived doctrine, cleaned up, optimized, and stripped of the mess and human improvisation that had defined the real thing.

  Everything was quiet. Efficient. The kind of order that made itself impossible to ignore for how unnatural it was.

  It unsettled her more than chaos would have.

  She’d seen camps like this before, if only on the surface and in military photos.

  They all shared a certain improvisational sloppiness, a sense that the structure existed only so long as someone was actively propping it up.

  This place didn’t feel like that.

  This place felt maintained, precisely because it was.

  Silent drones traced patrol routes precise enough that she could set her watch by them. They passed, vanished, and returned on schedule.

  The few posts were staffed by mechanical statues for all intents and purposes. They looked… unsettling. Once each of them was alive, and now their bodies were used like this.

  That, more than the weapons or the tech, was what bothered her.

  She’d expected experimentation. Instead, she’d found doctrine, and old doctrine at that.

  The weapons were another reminder, most were of alien make and model.

  When Xyra brought the rifle back, Tessa had stared at it longer than she meant to.

  It was an antimatter rifle, unmistakably so, its containment geometry etched into the housing in a style she hadn’t seen in decades.

  Old model. Old enough to have passed through several hands, several wars, and several black markets before finally ending up here.

  The weapon was heavy in a familiar way, balanced for someone who expected recoil even if physics said otherwise.

  The reload mechanism was exposed, practical rather than elegant. No attempt at intimidation in the design—just function layered on function.

  Xyra had looked faintly amused when Tessa pointed out the maintenance flaws.

  -I don’t work with black holes- Tessa had said, passing the rifle back. -But I can tell you which seal’s going to fail first. And how many reloads you have got before it does. -

  That had earned her a nod.

  There were a few real members of the collective, as Ethan dubbed it, and interacting with them made the whole thing a tad less scary.

  Each of them was its own thing; none was rewritten.

  She shuddered thinking about the alternative.

  Still, the rifle gnawed at her thoughts.

  It wasn’t just that Ethan had access to weapons like this; if anything, her father had more powerful stuff.

  It was that he belonged in another millennium, way in the past, way before humanity had learned how to harness a laser weapon.

  They couldn’t even conceive a singularity weapon.

  Each human weapon was a world-ending device nowadays, and he treated them as tools.

  Integrated into a wider system that treated antimatter with the same pragmatic indifference as a barricade or a minefield.

  Supply routes were redundant. Living spaces were arranged to maximize defensibility without advertising it. Even leisure areas—if they could be called that—were positioned where multiple evacuation paths intersected.

  No wasted anything.

  She found herself pacing one of the maintenance corridors late one cycle, hands clasped behind her back, replaying the same thought she’d been circling since the first week.

  This wasn’t a society.

  It was a garrison, no more, no less.

  Yet the people living here acted like settlers. Vexx had claimed a small area to conduct his butchery business and was the main source of prepared food. The other civilians, from former slaves to rescued laborers, had adapted with unsettling speed.

  They followed unspoken rules. Stayed out of restricted zones without being told. Moved aside when drones passed. Waited for clearance, which they never technically received.

  Ethan was fine with that.

  He wasn’t really trying to set up a settlement, still he expanded his operations to occupy three layers.

  She’d worked with programmable systems most of her adult life. Swarm drones, maintenance constructs, and became an expert in medical nanotech.

  All of it relied on instruction sets—layers of pre-programmed behaviors that could be modified, overridden, or selectively disabled.

  This wasn’t that.

  The nanites here didn’t follow scripts. They followed an AI.

  A shared codebase governed them, fluid and adaptive, constantly adjusting and learning.

  Yes, they learned, adjusted in real time, responded to threats and opportunities as a single organism rather than a collection of individuals.

  It was brilliant. It was terrifying. It was way worse than a gray goo scenario.

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  She’d tried to isolate a subset for testing in her second week. Nothing invasive.

  An attempt to sandbox a few units and observe their response curves under altered parameters. The moment she’d begun the process, the system had reacted.

  Resistance.

  The nanites had refused her outright. They’d simply self-destroy rather than give the game away any further.

  She had tried to go to Ethan and obtained permission.

  This stopped the self-terminations, but the moment she pushed in one direction, the wider network, Virgil, adjusted to keep her out.

  It had taken her hours to realize what was happening.

  She was negotiating with a consensus, and it wasn’t really bound to Ethan, as he believed.

  That was when the slump had set in.

  She’d come here expecting to find a way to cure her dad, to make him endure. Instead, she’d arrived at a standstill.

  Virgil wasn’t alive, but it was very aware, very awake.

  Tessa rested her hands on the railing and exhaled.

  She could leave. That option still existed, at least in theory, but what about her dad?

  Beneath the order, beneath the discipline and the quiet threat of overwhelming force Virgil represented, there was something else.

  The promise of union, the certainty of purpose, and the allure of immortality.

  Yeah, Ethan summarized it best: Virgil was a demon of the old folklore.

  Lemela

  Choices, choices, choices.

  Why had there to be choices?

  It would’ve been easier if Ethan had simply stated her purpose; she knew it.

  It would be alright

  It would be fine

  It would be peachy

  And the moment she executed it, it would feel amazing.

  But Humans were cruel, just like that.

  She wanted to find her lost crew; she wanted to avenge it, it was obvious.

  That was why she wanted her body to be tuned for battle.

  Screw the fact that it wouldn’t look like her body anymore.

  She wasn’t a Versel any longer; why pretend?

  Diplomacy. That was why.

  It was laughable.

  Who needed diplomacy when they could literally raise an army of the dead!?

  A human, apparently.

  Humans were crazy, just like that.

  They held the power to glass planets, collapse star systems; heck, she wouldn’t even be fazed if they held some secret weapon able to wipe out the whole galaxy.

  Yet they choose to speak, they choose to trade.

  WHY?!

  Why was it so hard to impose one’s will, when left and right, the first ruffian or pirate or consortium was ready and willing to do just that?

  The most frustrating part of it all was that she understood the point; she understood since she shared Ethan’s memories.

  It all relied on one simple, terrifying question: And then what?

  She could change her body, have blades of steel and energy ready to strike.

  She could let herself be guided by Virgil, get her vengeance.

  Maybe, just maybe, find and save her former crew.

  And then what?

  That was the point, that was the scary part.

  She would still be inside the simulation; she still could move her body, whatever abomination it had become…

  How would she fare then?

  Would her friend recognize her behind the horror of cables and weapons?

  Would she be limited to interacting only in that world of smoke and mirrors Virgil had created?

  Vexx

  Why?

  He had seldomly questioned himself, if at all, throughout his career.

  He was devoted to the great hunter; he was a born predator, so prey should fear him, or so he thought in his youth.

  There was poverty in his world, bad companies, and that was how he became a pirate, or so he told himself when he didn’t want to hear that he wanted to prove his grit.

  Grit, his grit, was a paltry thing. Easily shattered when it encountered real predators, far more efficient and ruthless than he was. That he was willing to be.

  Was it when he was assigned the first run in the bowels of the city? The first time he saw a body converted into a nutrient tablet? Or when he rescued Xyra by buying her before he had to sell her remains in his shop?

  Why did he choose her when he could close his eyes and drag half-dead to the slaughter only to see a credit more? Only because she was a female? Only because she was a Krynnak like him?

  He didn’t hold the answer, or didn’t want to hunt for it just yet.

  He expected the machine to abandon him; other predators would’ve done it, no questions asked.

  His shop was compromised, his position untenable; he could no longer be of any use.

  The ancient machine was but a ruse, a cloak used by Ethan to stoke his fears and keep him in line. He understood now. Yet, why?

  Why go out of his way to save him? Why did Xyra decide to accept the machine into herself?

  He couldn’t comprehend, but now held a new, old purpose.

  He knew how to treat meat, how to process it and serve it, and could do it for what was growing to be a new family.

  If someone were to ask him how it happened, there was no length of a hunt he could go to fetch the words to explain it.

  Yet it did, under Ethan’s guidance, the weird human turned robot maintained what made a human… well, for lack of better term: human.

  It was turning irrational into reality.

  All he had to do was be himself, and he could still live with Xyra, embrace her, even if her scales were now cold and made of metal.

  She was still her, she was still his, even if she was scarier, even if he couldn’t fully comprehend.

  He couldn’t fully trust Ethan; there was no way in the great hunt that the human wasn’t a threat.

  All humans were dangerous, but he was more dangerous than they were, for he could move an entire army of machines.

  Could he still trust Xyra, though?

  Mind said no, heart said yes.

  He would trust the latter and pray the great hunter not to be led astray.