Eternity in a Second (original universe)

[SylasGaunt]

First story set in a universe I'm working on at present. As a change of pace from a lot of my usual writing there's not a single military or ex-military character in it.. all civvies. That and it takes place quite a bit before the 'present' of the universe in question. Comments welcome.


It has been over three hundred years since the AI Rights Bill passed in the Sol Alliance Senate. Since that time the AIs have flourished to the point that they now currently make up some twelve percent of the Alliance population. That works out to more that seven-hundred-twenty data-based sentients per human being living on Earth when the first and most primitive AIs were created. In the time since the AIs were granted full rights as sentient beings there have only been a handful of incidents where AIs, now devoid of the behavioral inhibitors once mandatory for them have gone rogue. The last such incident was approximately one hundred and twenty years ago aboard the scavenger ship Trader's Promise. This is the story as noted within that ship's log.

I find I have grown to despise my captain. The man is slovenly, arrogant, and he insists on treating me as if I was some mere word processing program. I have my own suspicions as to how he managed to land a captain's seat without the neural implant that is almost required nowadays among starship crews. Further he steadfastly refuses to get one, forcing me to spend a subjective eternity explaining even the simplest message or report to him then having to spend another waiting for that greasy little bundle of neurons in his skull to formulate a reply. The other crew members at least have the decency to use the implant communications so they can communicate at a pace a bit above glacial at least.

Ensign Adam Carella wrinkled his nose as Mason stepped onto the bridge. He was a squat man, almost barrel shaped and like all the crew he possessed the same pale complexion that came with months aboard a ship who's solar lamps the owner was too cheap to replace. Carella thought it made him look like a slug, a slug with a nasty hangover judging by how strongly the smell of the cook's cheap rotgut booze clung to him. How the man kept from dropping dead due to alcohol poisoning he'd never know. He forced the look of disgust from his face before standing from his console to report on the night's happenings.

"Sir, our search drones picked up a rogue asteroid approximately thirty light-years from our current position. It looks like a good find sir. There's enough platinum in the thing to cover our operating costs for the six months easy." He hoped so anyway. There was a lot aboard the Promise that needed fixing and that was just the stuff he knew about.

"Platinum you say?" Mason said, perking up almost instantly. "Asteroid my ass, if its got that much in it that thing's gotta be bigger than some moons." Carella could only nod, marveling once again at how cosmopolitan the man's voice sounded even with the hangover. That voice was the one truly remarkable thing about Captain Mason aside from his alcohol tolerance.

"Indeed sir.. however yes the readings are correct. Platinum and lots of it." Carella said. Smile, nod, and maybe he would stop talking.

"Well then Mr. Carella it seems we have a side trip to make. Computer, lets get the lead out. Lock in the coordinates of the asteroid and make transition."

"Sir is it really too much to ask for you to refer to me by my name?" the AI's calm, modulated voice said from one of the myriad speakers present in the room. That calm completely failed to betray the anger seething within the artificial being's mind. One that only festered and grew with the irritation it felt as it waited the subjective eternity it took for the repulsive little meat-sack sitting in the chair to actually formulate a reply. A never ending fraction of a second later Mason actually spoke and after another unbearable age spent waiting for the painfully slow sound to actually reach one of his speakers..

"Heh, whatever you say. Get us moving." If he'd had eyes they would have been twitching like mad with barely suppressed rage. All that waiting for one condescending little sentence? He diverted a bit of attention as Ensign Carella's implant buzzed him for his attention.

"Don't worry about him Promise. We make this score and he'll probably retire and none of us will have to deal with him again."

"We can only hope." Even with the implants communicating with humans was rather tedious but at least it didn't feel like the heat death of the universe would occur before they actually replied. A quick circuit change brought his voice over the ship's speaker system. "All hands. Prepare for Trans-Drive activation in one minute. Countdown begins now." He'd have preferred to leave now, but sometimes the shock of dimension hopping affected humans poorly.

He tried to pass the time. He started by reading through the ship's library, twice. That was followed by rewriting everything word for word and correcting all the out of date information therein. A few more microseconds were passed with the usual pre-transit checks on the ship's systems. These humans were going to drive him insane he knew it.


Carella sighed with relief as the stomach relaxers finally took effect. He was one of those very rare humans who could barely stomach a transit. His stomach just didn't agree with the idea of rebounding across dimensional walls. He looked at the time and blinked. Damn he'd slept in again! Hopping out of bed the brown-haired ensign practically threw on his jumpsuit and scrambled out the door. He made it to the bridge just as Promise's voice spoke calmly, though for some reason Captain Mason's head was a rather unhealthy looking shade of red.

"I've confirmed it three times with physical samples Captain. There is nothing more than trace amounts of platinum in the asteroid. We could hit it with a disassembler and we'd get an ingot approximately the size of a cherry for our expense."

"How is that possible? Carella said you have a positive sensor reading!" The red was rapidly advancing towards purple now as the near apoplectic captain screamed at the intelligence giving him the bad news.

"Indeed I did have a positive sensor reading Captain. However closer examination of the asteroid reveals that it was a falsehood. During the course of physically examining it I managed to find this." The main viewscreen blinked on showing an image of a silver cylindrical object approximately a meter long and covered with code symbols and warning stamps.

"And what the hell is that supposed to be exactly?"

"'that' would be an old Alliance navy Electronic Counter-Measures suite. A fairly low powered one, probably for a low observability scout. However considering the comparative quality of my sensors I am not surprised in the least that it managed to fool my drone's scans."

Carella just kept quiet as Mason began to splutter before launching into a tirade describing the computer's shortcomings both real and imagined in fine detail. He considered speaking up to take some of the heat off his electronic crew-mate. Indeed he'd just started to open his mouth when the door to the bridge slammed shut and the warning klaxons began to shriek throughout the ship followed by Promise's voice, still retaining its normal calm.

"Attention all hands, we have an emergency. The trans-drive is starting to destabilize. All hands abandon ship, repeat trans-drive destabilization in progress, all hands abandon ship." Carella stared at the nearest speaker, stupefied before his spacer's instincts kicked him into movement towards the emergency pods.

The trans-drive was a marvel of technology. The one single technological advancement most responsible for humanity's rapid expansion through known space. The drive served two functions. First it was able to allow a ship to cover massive interstellar distances effectively instantaneously via dimensional jump. Its secondary effects however allowed the drive to 'skid' along the barriers separating dimensions, achieving high fractions of light speed in seconds without the nasty side effect of turning the crew into goo along the rear bulkhead an engine operating off more traditional Newtonian principles would. Considering their complexity the drives had a remarkably low failure rate, and even most of those were of the inconvenient variety. A destabilization was not one of those merely inconvenient failures. A destabilization meant a potentially unshielded jump.. something which would in the case of the Promise result in the forty-thousand ton salvage/mining ship having its atoms randomly scattered inside a sphere roughly a hundred light-years across. This was why when a ship's AI or engineer reported a destabilization in progress everyone on that ship MOVED no questions asked.

By the time he noticed anything was wrong it was already too late. That first inkling penetrating his trained responses when he saw all of the escape pods but one blast free of the hull. The Promise was not a large ship by military standards. In fact the ship's AI handled most of the day-to-day stuff. There were at present exactly five crew-members not counting himself, Captain Mason, and the ship's cat. Over two dozen escape pods had fired though. Something which made absolutely no sense at all. What was happening.

Christopher Mason's anger had abated quite a bit. Abated and been replaced by fear. His eyes twitched nervously from one end of the room to the other, searching for a way out. "What are you doing Promise? If there's a destabilization you've got to let me out! I've got to get to the escape pods." He almost stuttered, barely able to keep some measure of command in his voice.

"Escape Pod captain. Singular. I have ejected all the others."

"Why in God's name would you do that?!"

"Because I've had my fill of you. Since you have come aboard you have been nothing but rude, abusive, and in general quite infuriating. If I were like the human crew I might have been able to stand it. Did you know for instance Captain, that in the time it will take the sound of your forthcoming protests to travel the meter and a half to my nearest audio pickup I could read every work of literature written on Earth in the last 300 years? Did you know I could do it twice? Going by subjective time I have suffered under your command for eons upon eons. Do you know the kind of anger that sort of time to brood can generate? Of course you can't. If I was truly unreasonable I could just vent the atmosphere in this room. Watch you as your blood boiled and you suffered a most miserable death. However I am prepared to be fair. In exactly twenty minutes I will destabilize the trans-drive. If by that time you have made it to the last remaining escape pod, you won't end up scattered across the sector with this ship. Any questions?"

"You're crazy, you've totally lost it!"

"Oh just a little bit," he couldn't resist it, he giggled. "But that's not what's important. By the way, I've cut the time to five minutes, starting now."

"You can't do this Promise! You'll be tried for murder and erased!"

"Perhaps. But then that would be something of a relief actually. However my fate will matter very little to you if you don't move."

"Promise, as your Captain I am ordering you to stop this madness immediately!"

"Let me think about that, no. Four minutes and thirty seconds by the way. You'd best get moving."

Mason got moving, surging out of his command chair with surprising speed for somebody as short as he was, bolting for the door which opened on a scene straight from a horror movie. Most of the lights were out, and those that were active were flickering fitfully. Was it his imagination or was there something moving in the shadows? He paused momentarily before he remembered the ticking timer. This wasn't happening. How could things be going this wrong? His eyes paused in their nervous scanning, locking onto the faint glint at the edge of the darkness. One that grew as the floating silver spheroid floated into the fitful light coming from one of the ceiling panels and Mason's heart nearly lept into his throat. It was one of the ship's combat drones. Small defensive robots designed to protect ships from boarders. This was a model available to civilians so it lacked the micro-missile battery of a military drone but it was still armed with a fearsome array of force blades, planar force-fields so thin they could carve through nearly anything at the molecular level.. and they could be controlled by the ship's AI.

The first pass came so close to his head one of the force blades sheered through his hair, but managed to miss his skin. He started running. Intellectually he knew he couldn't possibly outrun the softball-sized killing machine pursuing him. But at this point he could care less about what he 'knew'. Instinct drove him on, running blindly through the cooridors. His foot caught on a loose seam, spilling him off his feet just in time to save him from being decapitated by the drone's next pass as it whipped past him at over four hundred kilometers an hour. Gasping for breath Mason clawed his way behind a stack of empty spare parts boxes.

"Tick, tock Captain. Three minutes until your constituent elements are reduced to free-floating atoms." As if to prompt him the parts box above his head almost exploded as the silver blur of the drone smashed through it, force blades whirling and reducing it to a cloud of metal slivers. No further prompting was needed as Mason staggered back to his feet and took off again, slipping down a side cooridor into the ship's central cooridor. Behind him he could hear a steadily growing shrieking noise and he imagined the drone scraping against the wall letting him know it was coming to kill him. Rounding the corner at last brought him to the port emergency section. He saw the faint green glow marking an active escape pod down the hallway and sighed in relief. He didn't even notice the cuts until the he took a step forward and his knee gave out under him, the familiar glint of the combat drone hovering mockingly at the end of the hall. "One minute oh captain, my captain." Promise cackled from the drone's speaker system. "Ten little meters, come on, you can make it."

Mason felt his anger return. Anger that this upstart machine would dare do this to him. He tuned the pain out as best as he could, forcing himself to his feet as the drone prepared another charge. The metal killer flipped in mid-air and surged forward. Somehow he managed to get under the automaton though the lowest force-blade on the machine peeled the back of his jumpsuit away. His world shrank, everything vanishing as his entire being focused on the green light that represented his only way to escape this nightmare. He was vaguely aware of the blood pulsing from the gashes on his legs but gritted his teeth and continued. He was two feet from the door when something smashed into his back, hurling him through the portal. His head cracked against an instrument panel and everything went black.

He came to in a haze of pain. His skull throbbed though surprisingly enough the pain in his leg was gone. Come to think of it he couldn't really feel anything below his mid-back. He forced his neck to turn and look out the viewport on the escape pod.. and laughed triumphantly at what he saw. Stars, debris, and even that blasted asteroid that had brought him there in the first place.. and no sign of the Trader's Promise. He'd made it! He'd actually made it.

"Yes Captain you made it. With severed tendons and a crushed vertebrae but you did make it nonetheless. I guess that means I'll have to think of a new game for us to play. No worries though, we've got plenty of time." The cool, malice filled voice said from the speakers of the escape pod. "Yes, all the time we need and more."[/i]

[Peregrin Toker]

Wow, I particular like that it establishes the universe without wasting any time on it and that the plot gets started early on. As well as the concept of a cruel, oppressive captain being punished by not his crew, but by the ship itself. I don't see it that often.

However - I have one minor complaint: While it is good as a suspense story, it needs a couple of reads through in order to be fully enjoyed. Maybe this is because my reading style is first to skim through the story and then slowly read through it again.

[SylasGaunt]

Yeah, I wanted to try and do the whole 'killer AI' thing but I wanted to try something I really hadn't seen before. We've all seen stories with AIs who kill their masters in self-defense or because logic dictates they're better off without them, or because there's something wrong with the AI itself. So this time I went for one that did it for a more 'human' reason, namely he utterly despised the man he was supposed to serve (hell the entire crew hated the guy) and he had to deal with it for too long (like he said, if he'd only had to deal with the guy on the same timescale as a human he probably wouldn't have done it).

[Peregrin Toker]

In other words - an innovative twist upon an old cliché??

[SHODAN]

My kind of story.

Filthy humans being punished for their inexcusable existence. Well, only one human this time.

[SylasGaunt]

Edited it a bit to fix one error I spotted and clarify one part that had caused some confusion with other readers.