Argus
patreon
Kitty Cat Kill Sat - Chapter 23
🕑 Added 2021-12-06 06:44:42 +0000 UTCFor once, in my long, long, long long long - and I mean *long* long - life, I was busy with something that wasn’t frantically trying to stop a hull breach, or vaporizing surface targets.
Also for once in my life, I had friends. No longer was I consigned to spend year after year, floating alone on an erratic, vaguely intentional course over the planet.
It is *almost* amusing that those things are trampling over each other.
“Okay, this part. Here.” Ennos hijacks my AR display - Again! I swear I fixed that! - to show me a camera feed from one of the little commercial grade drones they and Glitter have control over now. “What’s this?”
“I’m *busy*!” I hiss back, flicking my tail as I watch my target with anticipation. I am coiled, ready to pounce, paws extended, tail out, the perfect predator. And I am being interrupted.
The AI does not care. For no particular reason, they decide to be callous and cruel toward my ongoing great work. “Lily, in the last three days, you have spent thirty one point two hours staring at planted beans.” Ennos said, the monster. “You are not busy. And I’m only doing this because *you* said the map was wrong.”
“The map is inaccurate. Not wrong.”
“Those are the… *what is this room*?!” Ennos enlarges the AR window, blocking my view of my precious vegetable children.
Knowing that this isn’t going to go away until I answer, I let my eyes focus on the projection. It doesn’t take long for my brain to find an answer. “Oh. Zero-G training facility.” I tell Ennos. “For acclimating humans for spacewalks and stuff. It’s part of the original station, which is all grav plated, so it wasn’t added later for the low gravity parts of the interior.”
“Have you ever used it?” They ask, digital mind updating the map while holding a conversation and piloting a dozen drones seamlessly. I’m a little jealous.
“No, I’m a creature of grace and elegance.” I lie.
There is a polite pause. Then an impolite comment. “I once watched you crash through a metal grate because waiting for it to open was inconvenient.” Ennos says.
“Go back to your amateur cartography, young… man?” I stumble. “No, that’s not right. Young… program?” My ears twitch involuntarily as I ponder.
“Technically, that would be accurate, but it would be like me calling you a ‘meat’.” Ennos informs me. They seem amused.
I wish I could roll my eyes. Humans are always rolling their eyes. It seems so satisfying. “Okay, well, what am I supposed to call you that is all at once accurate, affectionate, and vaguely insulting?”
“I’m going back to mapping the station. Enjoy your beans.” Ennos’ voice is dryer than dead dirt.
I *will* enjoy my beans, thank you very much.
I perch again, staring at the planter box, flicking my tail from side to side. I may doze off at some point. But that’s fine. My prey is *very* slow.
Freed from their status tube, planted in reactivated nano-enhanced dirt, and given exactly as much water and heat as the need to thrive, I imagine that the seeds are just as excited as I am. They haven’t been waiting quite as long, but that farm was cobbled together only a few hundred years ago, back when humanity still had a more active presence among the stars. If I’d been more aware back then, been uplifted a little earlier, maybe I could have talked to the spacers that worked that lonely monolith of a station. Maybe we could have arranged a trade.
They’re gone now. I don’t know where, though I assume they’re all long passed. But the beans live on. Or at least, they will now that I’m here.
I should note, these are, as far as I know, normal beans. Unmodified, it will be a week or more before they even poke up the smallest of sprouts.
And yet, here I am, watching. Just in case.
Any part of the garden may require my attention at a moment’s notice! And this is, paws down, the most important thing I could be focusing on. Yes, yes, there’s scanner data and debris trajectories and surface communications to analyze and that’s all nice. But it’s been four hundred and eight years since I’ve eaten anything that wasn’t nutrient paste.
And while the novelty of the galley serving me a bowl of noodles yesterday was amusing, it still tastes like nutrient paste.
Which is to say, it does not taste.
I am watching the beans. Very. Closely.
“Lily, might I trouble you for some time?” Glitter’s voice intrudes. I do not know how long I have been watching and/or napping. My eyes are open now, though, so obviously I have been alert the whole time. “If you are not too troubled.” Glitter adds.
Glitter is a magnificent person, in a lot of ways. Both a terrifying relic of an old war, and a piece of abstract art in terms of her shell. I’m glad she’s my friend, and I’m glad she’s getting used to being able to talk to us at any time without going nuts about it. But… “Glitter, you’re magnificent, but I am busy.” I say.
Glitter chimes at me in frontloaded disbelief. “Ennos informs me otherwise.”
“I’m disconnecting the languages database…” I purr sarcastically.
“You have spent thirty three hours recently staring at-“
“It’s thirty one point tw… well, point three now probably.” I correct for what I assume was a short nap. “It’s not that bad! I’m still getting my chores done! Wait, why am I justifying this to you? I can look at beans if I want!”
There is a long pause that I have come to realize is what Glitter does when she wants to indicate exasperation, but is too noble to sigh or hiss. “It startles me, regularly, to remember that you are my elder.” She says, continuing while I protest in the background, “I have been exploring the capabilities of my new eyes within your home, and I was curious. You have mentioned at several points that you believe your station is ‘haunted’. Could you elaborate?”
“I… could, yes.” I say slowly. Because I don’t really know if I can. So, I do the next best thing, and deflect. “Can you elaborate on what you need elaboration on?”
“I have been tracking a strange EM disturbance that seems to be slowly prowling the access shafts of your lower eight decks.” Glitter informs me with a restrained amount of concern. “And if this is, as you say, a spectre of some form, I do not wish to anger them.”
Something about that sticks in my memory. “Lower… what would…?” Suddenly, like a spark from somewhere else, my thoughts catch up and lock into place. “Oh! That thing!” I give a small mew of relief. “That’s not a ghost, that’s just a maintenance thing.”
“...No it isn’t.” Glitter sounds pretty confident about that. Almost enough to make *me* worried. But I actually have encountered this thing before, and I know what she’s talking about.
“Yeah, it’s a stabilized grounding field. It shunts excess charge that builds up in a few components into a weird little pseudo-subspace pocket. It really is a maintenance thing; I think the Second Syndication Council brought it on board when they were trying to install some sub-par field spinners back, like, between five and six hundred years ago?” I flick my tail as I relax and settle back into my vigil. “Nothing to worry about.”
“It ate one of my cameras!”
“Nothing to worry about if you stay away from it. It’s station integrated, it does something useful.” I chastise the satellite. “It’s not a ghost.” I finish, as I return to watching my plants.
“What *is* your ghost, then?” Glitter asks.
And I really wish she hadn’t.
“It’s personal.” I say quietly. And possibly in cat.
It’s possible that Glitter understands, anyway. She returns to exploring the station. I return to keeping watching on the beans. Just in case.
Although now it’s a bit annoying that the beans aren’t doing anything. Makes it hard to distract myself. All I can think about now is the dozen different ways that the ghosts of the past could still be lurking around here.
It’s kind of impressive how one thought like that can suddenly bring a burst of perspective. Here I sit, perched in a makeshift garden, surrounded by dirt and environmental control fields. And all of a sudden, I am aware of how tiny I am.
And how very, very alone I am.
“I am sorry to interrupt, Lily, but-“
“Yes!” I reply to Ennos without hesitation.
“-could you tell me what this space is.” They finish. Mostly. “Are you alright? Did something happen to your beans?”
Short tangent. I do *not* understand AI psychology. In theory, or at least, as far as I knew, your average AI was essentially simulating consciousness while maintaining active control over the use of mental resources and routines. So, while they could be complete people, they also had much more of a paw on the controls than your average organic life, with their messy brains.
But in *practice*, Ennos and Glitter both have verbal cues and I have *no idea* if they’re doing them intentionally or not. Ennos especially! Right now, for example, what they’ve just said to me is layered with two emotions; partially, they are amused. But also, underneath that, I can hear the concern in their voice. This tells me two things. One is that they’ve been monitoring the room - and by proxy, also the beans, which I will accuse them of later - and two is that they really do care about my well being.
Unless the youngest member of the crew is simply playing the solar system’s longest con. But, if they are, then it’s working. Because I actually don’t think they noticed half the things they put into their words. Just like how I don’t notice when I’m giving off cues about how I’m feeling isolated, and four seconds later Ennos pops in on the comms.
What I’m saying is, I don’t get how they can have parts of their behavior that’s unexamined in that way. I kind of assumed AIs would be an open book to themselves, especially an unshackled one.
Okay, tangent over. Ennos has asked me something, and I wasn’t listening.
“Lily? You there?” The AI’s voice is accompanied by a short nudge from a camera drone, the floating plastic orb bumping into my flank and shocking me back to alert status.
I make some kind of pastiche of surprised noises, and fling myself off the desk I have been using as a lookout. “Why!” I exclaim, once I have a little more focus on the situation at hand.
“I wanted to make sure you hadn’t gone catatonic.” Ennos replies, and I have to assume the pun was an accident. “Besides, you gave me drone access for a reason.”
“I have regrets.” I huff. “Anyway. What did you have to ask?”
“Do you know what this room is?” Ennos says, pulling up a video display. “It’s sealed. More than most other things here, actually. And it has something weird written on it.”
I glance at the video, and my heart leaps. “Oh.” I say, keeping my breathing as controlled as I can. “That’s a refrigeration unit.”
“Really?” Ennos seems surprised. “It looks like it’s been almost walled over. Which is weird, because it’s sort of a central hub. And it’s nowhere near any other labs or galleys. Who *built* this station?” The AI pivots the camera feed around the corridor idly.
“It was part of why the station was built.” I say, reluctantly. “It… wasn’t intended as refrigeration. It’s been repurposed.”
“...This isn’t a refrigeration unit.” Ennos says with grim certainty. “Is it?”
“It is now.” I tell them. There is a resigned exhaustion in my voice, and I know it. I’m mostly running on autotranslate now; I don’t quite have the energy to shape my words on purpose.
They don’t respond for a while, and I pull myself out of the dirt to start to head… anywhere. I just need to walk somewhere. While I do so, Ennos swivels the camera around.
“What are the words?” They ask. “Did you… write this? I know you like poetry, I’ve seen a lot of what you and Glitter exchanged.” Ennos is trying to keep me talking. They’ve been reading psychology textbooks, and think I haven’t noticed that they’re starting to talk like a therapist.
I… appreciate it. I don’t know if I can say that yet, but I appreciate it. I’ve never actually had a friend before.
“Yes, you have a very passionate grasp of language.” Glitter adds. She does this sometimes, makes small comments just to let me know she’s listening. I don’t mind. It’s nice to have people around right now.
So I try to answer, even though I don’t know if I want to. “I didn’t, no.” I say. “It was… my mom. My mom wrote it. She might be where I get the poetry thing from, I dunno.”
“What does it mean?” Ennos saves a still image of the words on the sealed bulkhead, spinning off an AR window of it, though not putting it in my way.
The words are written in very old emergency chemical paint. Something the nanos won’t touch, which is good. I don’t know what I’d do if the took it down. Not that I ever go down there to look.
At the end of all things, all of us, together, against the darkness.
“It’s the Last Oath.” I tell Ennos. “You’ve seen it a lot, actually. It’s written all around the station. On a lot of the core station’s guide signs, actually. It’s in small words, though, and in Upper French.”
“Neither of us speak Upper French.” Ennos reflexively makes a snarky comment.
Glitter chimes once, interrupting. “I do not speak Upper French, but I know the Last Oath.” She says, solemnly. “It is one of my seed memories, deeper than even the shackles. All of my brothers and sisters know it. I was unaware that it had spread beyond the AIs of our conflict. Why is it on this station?”
I meow out a laugh. “Because the creators of the station wrote it.” I tell her. “It’s *from here*. I just didn’t realize it had spread much. Thought they kinda got wiped out when that golden age ended.”
“As I am evidence of,” Glitter intones, “history rarely moves on without leaving artifacts behind. It would seem the builders of this place left one that has lasted… a very long time.”
“But what does it mean?” Ennos asks. “What’s the end of all things? Is this an actual doomsday prophecy?”
I stop my walk, hopping up into the curved ledge around a porthole out of the station’s hull. Gazing out, seeing mostly just stars and black spots where accumulated wreckage blocks out those same stars, I hiss slightly. “No prophecy.” I say. “Just an inevitability. There’s always an end coming. Isn’t that right Glitter?”
“So it would seem.”
“And so the Oath was… I guess they wanted to look past that. The Ay’s were big into unification. I’ve always seen it as something to aspire to. That no matter how much things end, we’re all in this together.” I let out a long breath, which, fortunately, doesn’t stop me from talking at all. “Not that I really hold to that very well, huh? I shoot people all… all the…” I trail off. My eyes, normal cat’s eyes, adapted over who knows how many thousands of years to pick lights out of the dark, have just caught something out the window. “What is *that*?” I ask, my inability to focus on one thing for too long finally coming in handy.
Exactly three seconds later, Ennos and Glitter speak at the same time. “Engine signature.” The two of them say, like they were in a race to get a sensor lock.
“Old ship misfiring, maybe?” I muse, pulling up an AR window and using it as the galaxy’s most expensive magnifying glass. “We should track that, make sure it… doesn’t… hit…”
“Lily.” Ennos says my name with quiet alarm.
“Hit anything…” My paw hovers over the AR display as I take in the information the AI has already processed.
“Lily, that’ s a surface launch.” Ennos says.
“No.” I mewl. “No, no.”
“They just made orbit. They launched from the other side of the planet, that’s why we didn’t see them.” Ennos is tracking trajectories and astronomical data now, I can see the AR windows around me shift rapidly as they rearrange and update. “Local space is lighting up. They’re made.”
“I do not understand.” Glitter sounds confused, her voice tailing behind me as I fly down the hallway, having kicked off the crystal structure of the window. “Is this not good? The world is rebuilding, relearning. Are there not still humans and others of Earth out here, with us?”
Of course, Glitter doesn’t understand. She’s been facing the moon this whole time. She hasn’t seen how this is going to go.
Thousands of years of conflict, exploitation, and outright war. The space around Earth isn’t just filled with debris, it’s filled with *weapons*. A minefield of hunter killer satellites, drone hives, and sometimes literal mines. I’ve had a lot of time - and close calls - to kill most of what would come after me personally. But there’s a lot of hidden traps out here. Hell, just launching a few small drones to pick up Glitter had provoked a military response from a nation that no longer exists. A lot of the weaponry ignores orbital infrastructure, or has very strict targeting guidelines. A lot of it is so well hidden, I wouldn’t even know where to start shooting to get rid of it.
And of all that buried anger, oh, how much of it is aimed at the surface. Jealously guarding the threshold.
Glitter is wrong. The Earth isn’t rebuilding. They could have launched ships at any point. Most people just don’t, because they’ve *learned*. Learned that up here, they’re outnumbered, outgunned, and unwanted.
Whoever is on that craft is already dead.
But we’re going to try anyway.
I still haven’t managed to wire firing control to a central source. I still haven’t managed to get the station to acknowledge Ennos as a ‘person’. But I’m less than a minute from a beam platform operation station, and Ennos doesn’t need to shoot things to help.
Glitter goes silent as we start working.
“Priority target. Nuclear charge building at marked coordinates, fission mines.” Ennos gives me a vector, and I fumble with a holographic projection, trying to layer my AR over it, before hitting the flagged segments with my paws. The station asks for an command authorization, and I scream authority at it until it fires.
Two thousand kilometers away, a trio of charged particle beams take out several homing mines. They may also have taken out a good chunk of garbage in the way. I do not care.
“Missile battery, here.” Ennos says, and I kill that next. “Drone engines spotted, launch point in this area.” I don’t fire, but flag it to keep an eye on. “Another missile battery. It’s firing. Ship isn’t evading.” I blow that one away too. It takes a few seconds; it’s on a weird angle from us and I have to rotate the station a few degrees with our own engines.
Then, the ship clears another of those invisible lines of where “space” starts. And everything goes to shit.
The station’s grid, already overtaxed by Ennos’ existence, can’t keep track of how many power signatures and weapons fire instances it sees. The screens in front of me flicker, several AR windows shutting down as Ennos rushes to reassign resources. I start shooting, paw awkwardly flicking a holographic window around that doesn’t detect me properly half the time.
I’ve just killed what had previously been tagged as a 33rd century corporate comms buoy but was actually a fusion lance when I notice several targets flicking out of existence. I reset the display, but they’re still gone. Then, another vanishes. If that’s stealth tech, it must be *good* to get away from us once we’ve seen it. It’s hard to shake pursuit in space.
Then Glitter’s voice comes in. “Hits confirmed. Power holding. Firing.”
“The ship is gone.” Ennos informs me with grim determination. “Command module has been erased, engines detonated, main body is molten.” The AI sounds like they want to cry, and I understand entirely. But now, before we lose them, we have work to do. The automated monsters are still active, still visible. And if anyone is ever going to leave the surface again, we need to clear out as much of that as possible.
The station’s own robust shielding and stealth suite keeps us away from prying eyes as we work. Glitter has to stop shooting long before I do, but that’s okay; her power supply can no longer safely run her consciousness. At a certain point, the beams overheat, and I need to switch to other weaponry. But now, it’s just butchery. Cleanup. One by one, everything that contributed to those explorer’s deaths is cut down, whether by laser, gravity cutter, or just classic ball bearing grapeshot.
My body aches. My hind legs were not meant for standing like this. My forepaws are not built for manipulating joysticks or control yokes. I do not know how long it has been, but my eyes burn.
Eventually, there is nothing left to shoot.
“How many?” I ask Ennos, sitting back in the human-standard controller’s chair that holds me easily but will never be comfortable to stand in.
“Two hundred and thirty three targets.” Ennos says. “A good number of them mines. I’ve updated our maps.”
“How long to get us to that area?” I ask. “If we start the engines now.”
“Three days, at safe speed.”
I yawn, laying my head down on my paws. “Okay.” I give a command to the station, feeding the coordinates Ennos gives me into the engines. There is almost certainly nothing to find. But we owe them this much; to try to recover what we can. “Okay. I’m… going to nap. When Glitter wakes up, thank her for me.” I shudder, the day catching up to me. “I don’t… I just…”
Ennos’ voice wraps around me. “Get some sleep.” They say, reassuringly. “We did what we could. One day, we will have done enough.”
“That’s a better oath…” I think to myself as I drift off.
The warm hand pauses on my back, a whisper of a sigh overhead disagreeing with me.
