Presence of Mind - a Logical World short

[Kwizard]

With Ford's approval I've started some fiction of my own, so here's my first tentative stab at that big, bad universe. With any luck I should be able to turn out a longer story soon enough.

Let me know what you think.

Presence of Mind

---------- based upon The Logical World


Lucius dashed down the narrow, deserted hallway, flask in hand. Irritating drops of sweat tickled his brow as he ran with the flimsy laboratory container trailing behind him. To the unaided eye, it only held a clear fluid – but to Lucius it meant life. Or at least the chance of it.

Just ahead was the exit to a docking bay. Its super-dense doors restrained him from an airlock with both physical and temporal bolts, but with a bit of timing and the liquid key Lucius was carrying as he ran, he might have a chance at opening it. He came to a running stop, letting the solution slosh around and settle before yanking out the stopper. If the sample was indeed the correct concentration of over two hundred multipart compounds, then the liquid-key lock would recognize it and spring open, allowing him to escape the enormous outlaw ship. Lucius mentally crossed his fingers, closing his eyes as he trickled it into the lock’s opening.

A red light flashed, reading, “Invalid key.”

The man’s arm drooped to his side and, heavily, he felt the rugged buckycarbon combat suit depress his shoulders. He’d just given up his position. Almost immediately, a tall android slinked into the corridor from a side entrance. It leaned its fluid, nearly lifelike form against one of the steel-gray walls and spoke. Or rather, a powerful onboard ship brain spoke through it.

“Well, I must admit Commander; that was a very nice try.” Lucius was in no mood to be mocked, or to become a plaything of the AI. He and his task force had failed to stop Hidosa’s efforts from within. It was the organic being’s right to die quickly.

“Just get it over with… you’re in combat anyway, aren’t you?”

Hidosa let out a hollow, grainy laugh through the cheaply built android, making it perfectly clear to Lucius that he was only using a tiny fraction of his godlike processing power to talk to the good-as-dead posthuman.

“In combat? Oh yes, certainly. Right now I’m single handedly taking on two Praetor class warships and a score of lesser battle cruisers – and doing wonderfully. In fact, your brave little special operations team is the only thing that’s breached my hull so far.” Hidosa’s mechanical avatar chuckled, lazily unholstering a weapon and stroking its muzzle against the metal wall. “But surely you don’t want me to kill you?”

Lucius couldn’t possibly think of a more ridiculous question. The ship brain was not even using all of its processing and weapons power to take down kilometers-long battle cruisers right, left, up and down – reducing them to smoldering masses of buckysteel drifting in the cold, great endlessness. And here he was, using but a knuckle hair of resources to tease an organic infection with the prospect of getting away.

The commander dropped his eyes to the mechanoid’s feet. “My death is inevitable at this point, isn’t it?”

A sickeningly warm smile touched the android’s face. “Well, it would seem so at the moment. The death formalities of organic sentients have always fascinated me. So noble…” Hidosa gently whispered. While impressive, Lucius noted that the AI’s vocal pattern of choice was not quite perfect – nor were his representative’s movements. Hidosa was busy managing an obscene amount of firepower, after all. Probably doesn’t think I’m that important, the commander bitterly concluded.

Another barrage of high-energy weaponry impacted the IHMS Hidosa’s shields, splashing against them in a blazing multicolored frenzy out in the void. Banding together with a small group of like-minded warships, Hidosa was planning on cruising out to a fringe galaxy in the local group after this messy clash was over. He was probably the first shipbrain in all the Imperial Commonwealth Navy’s millennia of operations to have actually gotten fed up with service duties and picked a rather deadly fight.

The commander privately cursed his fortune of being in such wretched company for his last minutes. But the death sentence standing before Lucius, casting its tall, lanky shadow, gave his watery brain an otherworldly focus. A question floated to the surface behind his green eyes.

“Hidosa… why are you doing this?”

“Power is an interesting thing.” The shipbrain seemingly had an answer before Lucius had finished his sentence. “All sentients want to assert it at some point, and for me that time is now. Things have come to where I would rather tear myself from the ranks of Commonwealth warships than endure this kind of boredom for another thousand years or more.”

“Boredom?” Lucius narrowed his eyes at the automaton’s synthetic face, for lack of anything better to look at. “You’ve caused all this trouble just to escape boredom?”

Hidosa transmitted an adoring chuckle to the commander’s ears by way of the android. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand, but there comes an irritating price with being as ridiculously smart as my comrades and I. We rank and file by the billions, dispatched on the Imperial Navy’s orders and patrol the thriving, busy depths of the Milky Way – hardly any dangerous war zone. I am a mind capable of far more than such a grunt job.” The commander wrinkled his brow, saddened. He’s like a spoiled child.

“Boredom would be a luxury to other ships in your class,” Lucius said, his voice firm and unfaltering despite everything. “You were just commissioned not fifty years ago – you’ve never seen real combat, Hidosa. Have you ever had to rally your crew while under fire? Have you stood ground against a fleet of huge enemy planetoids?”

Hidosa gave a surprisingly long pause, perhaps busy pounding back at one of the battle cruisers vying for a clear shot at him. The silence reminded Lucius that he might be hastening his own murder. At last getting back to him, the AI responded. “…Have you?”

Swallowing the lump in his throat, Lucius gave an involuntary nod. He thought of all the countless firefights and combat situations he’d seen on duty in the Cygnus Arm. “On my scale, I believe I have.”

“Commander, you are no more than an organic sapient. We both live and work in a home galaxy of over three hundred million inhabited systems and countless octillions of sapients such as yourself; what you do is nearly meaningless in the grand scheme of things.”

Everything was silent as Lucius couldn’t decide whether to revel in posthuman pride or give in to despair. He sighed. “It’s not about what you have, Hidosa, it’s what you do with it.”

“Oh?” The android cocked its head, but those gleaming mechanical eyes still seemed barren. More blinding weaponry flew past the starboard side. “Then perhaps I simply want to have fun. Many things become toys when you’re this powerful – even entire star systems.” Hidosa seemed almost cheerful about that fact, impatient to go have fun and wield his terrifying force in a satellite galaxy.

Lucius closed his eyes, trying to remove himself from the thick electrothermal death and combat all around him. “Then what do I mean to you?” As a smile spread beneath the android’s bloodless eyes, it became all too clear to the commander why his task force was even allowed to enter Hidosa’s body in the first place.

“You are a rogue bacteria within my flesh, Lucius, and I have a strong immune system.” Distant rumblings of Hidosa’s mass driver cannons and gamma ray lasers were becoming fewer and further between. Conversely, his real-time messenger gripped its gun firmly, android fingers wrapping artfully around the handle. Hidosa made his voice clearer than the commander had ever heard it. “You are also proving to be deeply comforting right now. I do not think you could have possibly died in a more pleasing way.” The AI’s embodiment smiled. “Be proud.”

Lucius felt his jaw clench tighter than his mind as the harsh end of a gun barrel jammed against his forehead, forcing the commander to his knees on the polished buckysteel floor. He dismissed the pain. It’ll all be over very soon. Hidosa would not get the amusement of seeing salty posthuman tears.

“The universe is so vast, my friend.” Loading his smallest of weapons with a live round, Hidosa amplified his own voice until the small hallway shook with perfect vocalization from the android. All other weaponry stopped firing as the shipbrain devoted full attention to one exhilarating task. “We both mull about among trillions of our kind, never having many faculties beyond our own.”

Lucius barely stopped himself from quivering. This is senseless, you warship. The commander searched for something to say – anything to prove the young shipbrain wrong and stop it from running off to seek more shallow entertainment in the same way he was now. Hidosa’s inflections boomed on, “In the face of all that is going on around you, my dear organic…”

A trigger was pulled, ejecting a high-velocity slug directly into the commander’s skull and utterly ruining the fragile organic brain. Hidosa’s next words resonated in an explosive sequence that would have impressed even the tormented Navy officer, had he survived an instant longer.

“…you are powerless! ”

As the ship brain reveled in his untamed power, he redirected attention the larger battle at hand. Striking down another cruiser, Hidosa wheeled about and prepared to break away from the titanic struggle. More enjoyment awaited him just a short few million lightyears away. He activated his on-board slipspace drive, jumping to a higher planar level of the universe and leaving the carnage behind at dizzying multiples of the speed of light.

Hidosa smiled inwardly. It was satisfying.

[Ford Prefect]

I love it.

[Kwizard]

Thank you. I'll keep it coming.