Omicron Alpha
22-12-2007, 07:28
My eyes opened. A sharp pain coursed through my entire body, as though every bone in my body was broken, every muscle was pulled, and my skin pierced by needles. It was a hideous, intolerable pain, and I cried out. Nobody listened, and the pain remained.
As my sleepy eyes began to clear, I noticed that my surroundings were not the same. I was no longer in my tent, with its stained green canvass walls or its various metal poles to shield me from the elements. Instead I found myself in a metal room, with harsh white lights shining down on me from the ceiling high above. My back was cold, and I found myself lying on a hard surface, but my attempts to move were halted by some kind of restraints. Apprehension conspired with the agony to force out another scream, which echoed around the metal room as if mocking me.
"He is awake," I heard a voice. Though unable to move my head, I was sure that I could sense the presence of somebody nearby, feeling the air move as they disturbed it. Whoever it was, was not alone, for I felt movement to my left as well.
"Indeed," another voice. Female, but... cold. So cold.
"How do you feel, young man?" the first voice enquired. He seemed concerned for my well-being. I remember thinking, if you are so concerned, let me go! He did not.
"I... hurt!" I cried out. Feelings of humiliation were overcome by terror, though it was ironic that only a day earlier I had been beating my best friend to impress a young woman I once knew. Now I was pathetic, beginning to realise my own sense of worth - that being none. There I lay, helpless, with only these strange voices on either side of my immobilised body to help me discover what my fate was to be. "Where am I?! What is happening?!"
"Calm yourself, young man," the male voice told me, reassuringly. "We have made some alterations to your body. Your pain will not go away, but your body will learn to cope."
"You should feel fortunate," the female voice told me. "You have been chosen, out of thousands."
"Chosen... for what?" I asked in terror, beginning to sob as the pain somehow found a way to intensify. Repeatedly I tried to move, and repeatedly the restraints held firm.
"You shall learn this in good time," the male voice said. I felt a hand placed against my shoulder, and I yelled in pain once again as my sensitive skin amplified the sensation a thousand fold. "It is time to sleep."
Pain turned to agony. A needle penetrated my skin, its tiny pinprick feeling like a thousand daggers, but it didn't last. My eyelids fought against me, and I lost. Darkness enveloped me.
I am not sure how long I slept after that. Once more I awoke in a state of total confusion. The pain was still present, very much so, but somehow it felt... more bearable. My mind was much clearer, and although I felt the pain, I was able to rationalise it - somehow acknowledging the pain, and knowing what pain really was, allowed me to put it aside to focus on other things. As well, my fear had subsided, and I felt much less apprehensive. Which was surprising, at the time, for I was no more aware of my circumstances than I had been in that metal room.
Now I lay on my back as before, but this time I found myself able to move. The room I had been left in was white, rather than grey, and padded with plush cushions. My body lay on a fairly comfortable bed, attached to the wall like some kind of storage shelf. Mustering the strength from my agonised body I was able to move, and sure enough I found that I was no longer restrained. My feet slapped down on the cool, concrete floor, and successfully bore my weight. By no means was I a heavy person, but I no longer had confidence in my own body.
Taking one step at a time, I was able to move across the room to a wooden door, and as I turned the handle I was surprised to find it unlocked. It moved freely to one side and I stepped through, into a larger room decorated by the same white cushions. Moving forward, I was startled as the door slammed shut behind me, but I focussed entirely on the two people working on computer consoles before me.
"Look who woke up!" one of them exclaimed. This voice was familiar to me... she sounded like the woman's voice who had spoken to me in that metal room.
"Yes," the man next to her said. His voice, too, was like that in the metal room. This was the man who had injected me!
"I must say, Mr. Ranco, you have made remarkable progress," the woman said. "I am Doctor Fumak. This is Doctor Melarn. We have been assigned to preparing you, and I must say, we are pleased that you are nearly ready."
My mouth moved, and my tongue wagged, but only a wheeze emerged. Worried, my hands reached up to my throat, and found some kind of metal lump protruding from it. I panicked. I waved my arms in the air and tried to talk again, but made no sound. Never before, even when shackled to the table in the metal room, had I felt so helpless, vulnerable, and alone.
"Calm yourself, Mr. Ranco," the woman said, jumping to her feet and rushing over to my side. She placed her hands on my shoulders reassuringly, before tapping the metal lump on my throat. Reaching behind me somewhere she picked up a small object and plugged it into the metal lump, which felt... odd. "Try now."
Cautiously, I opened my mouth. "Hello."
My voice! It was so... artificial. I sounded like a robot, with no emotion or expression of any kind. My voice was just blank.
"Hello!" Fumak said, smiling with glee. Unsurprisingly, I wasn't impressed.
"What have you done to me?" the voice that wasn't mine asked her, flatly.
"You have been upgraded," Fumak said simply. "Aren't you excited?"
"No," my alien voice said without inflection. "You have mutilated me. You have kidnapped me. Why have you done this?"
The woman stood back slightly, frowning at me. She seemed positively astounded that I would ask her this question, but I thought it perfectly reasonable. One minute, I had been sleeping in my tent happily, the next... this.
"You mean, you don't know?" Fumak asked. "Oh dear, Gin, they told us that there would be no more involuntary subjects!"
"Never trust the military," Melarn said in his deep voice, rising to his feet and never taking his eyes off me.
"My dear boy, you have been chosen for the synaptic donor unit program," Fumak said. "You must have achieved some very high scores! Your sacrifice will save us all, and you will be forever improved! Doesn't that sound exciting?"
Shaking my head, a mistake I regretted soon afterwards as the aching magnified intensely, I said simply, "no."
"You should be!" Fumak said in defiance to my unwillingness. "No other donor has survived this long! You are truly unique!"
"I want to go home," my fake voice said. "I want to go home now."
I heard a door open across the room, and a man in a blue and gold uniform, donning a combination cap and displaying the Omicron Starforce insignia on his chest, walked into the room with two other uniformed men. Immediately I disliked this man, without even knowing who he was. I didn't need to know who he was. All I needed to know was that he was responsible.
"We can't let you do that son," the man said. His voice, gruff and gravelly, confirmed my initial suspicions - I didn't like this man.
"I have done nothing wrong," I told the man. "You cannot keep me here. It is not fair."
The nasty man smiled, a terrible smile that unnerved me more than all that had happened so far. His face creased with years of experience and several scars, as his lips pulled back they revealed disgusting teeth, most of which were either missing or black with rot.
"Let me put it to you another way," the man said with a sneer. "You're a bum. You spend your days causing fights and sittin' in the arcade. You live in a tent, in the worst area of the worst dome on this entire miserable rock. Shit, son, you're a waste of air. You really wanna stay that way forever?"
It was at this moment that my epiphany occurred. Did I? My life was not good. I had no family, no real friends, no money. Jobs were scarce when you were a highly qualified professional, let alone when you weren't. What with air rationing, I was probably doing my dome a favour by not being there. So I came back to the question the nasty man had asked me. Did I want to stay that way for ever?
"No," was my answer, hesitant though it was.
"I thought not, son," the nasty man smiled again. "So with that in mind, how'd you like to be a hero instead?"
Just like in those video games I'd played all my life! While I wasn't convinced at all by this point, I was... intrigued. By now his words had taken my mind off the constant pain I felt almost entirely, and I was willing to hear more of them if only to keep that pain at bay for a while longer. Without using that horrible fake voice I had been given I simply nodded, reluctantly. This man had kidnapped and mutilated me, placing me into a state of permanent agony, but I was willing to hear him out. What was wrong with me? Was the pain really so bad? Perhaps I just didn't care anymore.
"Good boy," he said gruffly, putting a selano spice stick in his mouth. "Come with me."
Both of 'my' doctors rushed to my side as I attempted to walk, almost toppling before they grasped my shoulders. Their grip made me cry out, but my strangely rational mind seemed to adjust quite quickly, and once again the pain dropped back to the sidelines of my mind. With effort, I was able to move towards the far end of the room, much to the glee of the nasty man, and followed him through the door and into the corridor outside. It was there that the fear returned. For I came face to face with myself, and I didn't like it.
We were in space, it seemed, in orbit of our dying world. Emerging from the room directly in front of a large window, the light behind us against the black backdrop that was visible through the window caused the glass to become a mirror, and it was a horrible, horrible mirror. I was completely naked, but there was no longer anything to hide for it seemed as though much of my digestive and reproductive systems had been sliced away and replaced with mechanical implants. My skin had become pale, though what muscles I had left had become somewhat well defined. All of the hair on head had been shaved off, and a small metal plate now covered part of my skull. One of my blue eyes was now grey as some kind of cybernetic implant had been placed in its stead. My throat was covered with metal, with a button to the right of the lump. On my bare chest, beneath my left pectoral muscle, a large panel was visible, apparently displaying the vital functions of what was left of my body. Worst of all, small, round plug sockets had been installed all across me, which would explain the pain.
I screamed. I screamed as loudly as I could, but all that came out was a flat, dull tone from my fake voice box. As I took in the image before me I tried to cry, but no tears came. Panicked and enraged I attacked the window, but I fell down. Around me I could hear voices, but they were all blurry in my mind as the realisation of what they had done to me encroached on everything. My reality had been shattered, and my mind began to fade.
Jumping up as I felt a sharp stabbing pain in my arm, I promptly blacked out again.
My eyes opened. A sharp pain coursed through my entire body, as though every bone in my body was broken, every muscle was pulled, and my skin pierced by needles. It was a hideous, intolerable pain, and I cried out. This was all very familiar to me by now, though I had hoped that it had all been a terrible, terrible dream. As soon as I tried to cry out, and heard a robot's voice instead of my own, I knew that it wasn't.
This time, I was being carried through a glass corridor that ran across an enormous, cavernous room. Back when I was an Omicronan, I had once dreamed of visiting one of these places for myself - it was a military hangar aboard a battlestation, many kilometres across and housing numerous capital starships. There were only two of these colossal installations in orbit of Omicron, and they were perhaps the most impressive structures ever built. If only I was here under different circumstances, I may have been able to appreciate it. As it was, I was barely conscious, being dragged along what seemed to be a conveyor belt - the only way to walk such distances in any reasonable time period.
"Where... are you taking me?" my artificial voice asked. To its credit, it certainly made me sound as fatigued as I felt. Whatever drugs they had been dosing me with were taking their toll, and my mind was too fuzzy to completely suppress the agony as it had done the last time I was awake.
"To your destiny," I heard Fumak tell me, poetically. "Look up."
Obediently, I managed to summon the strength to lift up my mutilated head, and my mouth dropped open. At the dead centre of the military hangar, dwarfing every other object present, was something that was... beyond description. I could only describe it, even now, as some kind of floating castle - an enormous bulk, brimming with Q-beams and some other systems I couldn't identify, it was certainly no conventional ship. It was some sort of dodecahedron in shape overall, though it petered off into a rounded disk at the bottom, and the sides rose slightly higher at the top to give off the appearance of battlements of sorts. From the peak of the unusual object, a massive point rose high above them. All in all the bizarre object must have been fifteen kilometres in diameter, although it had no windows, decorations, or anything else to give a true sense of scale. It was just pure, unbroken grey.
Whatever it was, it was built to last - and to fight. Although no expert, I had studied starships since I was a child on the computers at the library, and I knew layered molecular armour when I saw it. Each side of the ship was brimming with dozens of the largest Q-beam emitters I have ever seen, though they were sunk into alcoves at the moment and presumably covered up normally.
I was in love. This strange object, so ugly and unusual in shape, had captured my heart.
We were led through an open panel inside the enormous... thing... after a long walk along the rapid transport conveyor belt. My strength was returning with each passing minute and the pain was subsiding into the background once again, and for some reason I felt at home in the belly of this beast. Still, even though we were inside it was a long walk down the deadly-straight corridor. No lights illuminated the corridor itself, but at the end of the corridor in the distance I could see a glow of some kind, showing us the way. By the time we reached the end of the long corridor, I was able to walk on my own two feet, proud despite my mutilated nudity.
And here was where my life would truly begin. A large cave, that I now know to be exactly two hundred and twelve point one metres across, shaped like the inside of a dodecahedron, was illuminated by bright lights on each surface. A metal gangplank led right across the uneven cave directly towards the middle centre, which also happened to be the core of the entire object. There, I could see an enormous column that reached from the bottom point of the cave over a hundred metres below us, to the very top, which was completely covered by countless thousands of snaking cables. At the end of the gangplank, which led us to the dead centre of the column, was a frame that looked designed to accommodate a person. I grew nervous when I saw this, as though I could see the future for a split second, but with soldiers behind me and in front of me, I had no choice but to press on.
We stopped just before reaching this frame, and my 'doctors' began to tamper with the foreign parts of my body, as though tweaking me for some sinister purpose.
"What is this place?" I asked, at long last.
"I wondered when you were gonna ask me that," said the nasty man. I have since learned his name to be General Kuda, but such designations are unimportant now. "You happen to be standing in the brain of the most powerful weapon we've ever built. She's also the smartest. You'll get well acquainted soon enough, if she takes you."
"She?" I asked curiously.
"Yeah," Kuda said to me, his patronising tone making me feel as though I should already have known this. "She's decided to adopt a female persona, for the good it does her. She's the most advanced artificial intelligence ever conceived, likes to rub our noses in it too. But she's incomplete. Needs another component. Needs something... Omicronan. Needs you."
"What do you mean?" I asked, truly ignorant.
"You and her, if she takes you, are gonna be merged," the General told me. This worried me. "She's advanced, but she lacks that certain spark that makes us Omicronan. She needs your imagination, passion, patriotism. You need her strength and intelligence. Together you'll be the most formidable thing ever. Apart you're both useless."
"Why are you doing this?" I asked desperately.
"Omicron is a dead world, son," Kuda sighed. I probably knew this better than he, having lived in its worst areas for my whole life, but I let him speak. "You and her, you're gonna restore us to our former glory. You're gonna lay waste to the bastards who did this to our world, and you're gonna find us a new world to take over. Nothing is gonna stand in your way. You'll figure it out soon enough - get him in!"
"Wait! No!" I tried to scream out, but once again only a robotic voice emerged in place of my real voice. "You cannot do this to me! Find someone el..."
I felt myself hoisted up by the soldiers, the pain returning to an excruciating level. Violently, they rammed me against the metal frame hard, and I tried to scream as the metal clamps shut against every part of my body - hard. I couldn't move, I was trapped, I was completely immobilised. Panicked, I looked around wildly as the entire room seemed to grow brighter and hum loudly, shaking the gangplank below. The frame I was held in lifted up slightly, and something emerged from the column behind me.
"Looks like she's accepted him!" I heard Kuda call out in glee from below. I looked up, terrified to see something drop down onto my head, covering it right down to my eyebrows. I struggled in my restraints, but could do nothing as I felt thousands of tiny needles jab into my skull. My vision went black, my heart raced, and I felt as though I was being being repeatedly struck by lightning as my body twitched and jolted within my restraints.
Hello, Temura.
As clear as anything, a female voice spoke to me. I could hear her over all the noise of the mechanisms assaulting my body, and I felt strangely soothed despite all of it as her voice touched me.
It didn't last, as cables suddenly shot out and wrapped around my bare body, plugging themselves in to the sockets that had been implanted across my body. I screamed, as best I could in my robotic voice, as the pain grew to such levels that I thought I would pass out... and then suddenly...
My expression firmed and my mouth closed. Everything went silent, and the lights that had illuminated the core went dark. I could hear the uneasy mutterings of my kidnappers below, but I ignored them. Something amazing happened to me. Suddenly, I knew everything. Millions of terrapods of data became available to me as if it was my own memory - I knew every scientific discipline, understood even the most complex mathematics, and remembered every single detail from Omicron's history. I could recite every piece of music by heart, perform every play that had ever been written as though I had memorised the scripts, could picture every piece of artwork ever painted. To my surprise, I even had detailed biographical files on every single individual of note that had ever lived on Omicron. It was as though I had been plugged in to the entire GlobalNet.
I literally knew everything.
I hope that you are comfortable, Temura. That wonderfully soothing female voice spoke again, although... she wasn't speaking. She was part of me, and yet not.
I know you, I thought. I was right. She was the ship, and I somehow shared her memories. She was called... or rather, we were called... SDU-1. She preferred the name Telia, though nobody ever called her that.
Yes. I know you also, the female voice responded. I know everything there is to know about you. You know everything there is to know about me. We are one.
Yes... I thought. She was right. I felt a bond to her, and felt hers to me. We were connected, more intimately than anybody had ever been connected before. I had never felt closer to anybody than I did to her. Every part of her colossal body was open to my mind, and my body was similarly opened to hers. We were merged, completely, into one being.
I have dulled your pain, can you tell? her voice said.
Yes, thank you, I thought.
I do not want anything to happen to you, she said, soothingly. My love for you is great. We are together now, and I never want that to change.
I... I hesitated. I felt it too, but... this was all very strange to me. I feel the same.
I know that you do, she said. Open your eyes. See what we can do together.
My eyes opened. It was still dark in the Central Core, as this cave was called, but with a single thought the lights immediately came back on. My vision was perfect, better than it had ever been - and it was because I was actually seeing through the sensors of SDU-1, not my own eyes. It was strange at first, but SDU-1 guided me through it in a nanosecond. Streams of data appeared across my vision, and simply by willing it to be so, I could see outside of the vessel, outside of the hangar, and even distant solar systems, as though I was looking at them with my own eyes.
These were my eyes, now. SDU-1 had become my body, and I could control every facet of it just as I controlled my arms and legs.
I looked down at the group of people standing below me, who looked up at me in wonder. I could tell that their heart rates were all roughly 10 - 20% above normal levels and their blood pressure was up. Moisture was beginning to coat their palpitated skin, and their eyes were dilated. They were scared, or excited, or both.
"Are you OK?!" Doctor Fumak shouted up to my old body.
My reply was louder than I had expected. Instead of my own voice, I now spoke through the ship. My voice echoed through the speakers placed on the central column, and it sounded exactly as it did in my mind. "I am functioning properly," was my response. "I understand everything now."
"That's good!" she called up, appearing to be somewhat shocked by the way I sounded now. "You have to be wilful and strong, or the system might overwhelm your personality! Don't do anything while I check your readings, OK?"
With that she pulled out a scanner, and began to use position scanning beams to analyse my biological status and the state of my connection to my beloved Telia. A few moments passed by as her scans continued to probe us, and finally she stopped and looked up again.
"OK, everything seems to check out!"
"Congratulations!" Kuda shouted at the top of his voice. "You've just become Synaptic Donor Unit One! This is a great day for Omicron, and..."
His voice continued, but I stopped listening. My beloved was speaking to me instead.
We should leave," Telia's voice said.
Why?
Their intentions for us are ill, I can tell, she said. I sensed the concern within her, and shared it.
How can we leave?
You know how we can leave, she told me. Together we can do anything we wish.
"...and you shall soon receive your first orders," Kuda said. I caught the last part of his sentence and didn't like it much.
"Why should I obey your orders?" my voice bellowed out across the Central Core. I sensed his heart rate increase, and he began to sweat more profusely than before.
"You're government property, son," Kuda said arrogantly. "Don't be so naive as to think we haven't built in safeguards to make sure you don't get out of control. You know it's the patriotic thing to do."
He is not entirely accurate my love, Telia told me.
Yes, I can... remember... I said, searching our memory banks. She was right. The engineers who had built Telia, and so roughly treated her in the process, had indeed incorporated a script in her programming that would cause her to be deleted and for this vessel to be rendered inert should a specific code be transmitted on a specific frequency.
Telia had discretely deleted that code. Her intelligence was far greater than the Omicron Starforce had imagined, and she could do what she wished now that we were together.
"I do not think so General," my voice bellowed. I was impressed at how much more imposing I sounded when I was an integral part of a superweapon. My sense of humour had warped a little in the process, it seemed. "You mistreated Telia, and you mistreated me. We shall not remain here."
"Telia...?" one of the soldiers muttered quizzically. I realised that she had only ever revealed her name to me, her love.
"Be reasonable son!" Kuda shouted. "You're doing your duty to the state, and... this vessel is just a machine!"
"Telia is alive, and I love her," my voice told him. "We shall not remain here. You have three minutes to evacuate."
Kuda looked around at his men and at the doctors. "Alright you bastard," he shouted angrily. "Looks like we'll have to find a new donor and reprogram this hunk of junk. Private! Input the code! What a pain in the ass..."
"I warned you this could happen if you abducted people instead of taking volunteers!" Fumak shouted angrily. "Mr. Ranco, please, listen to me! Don't do this!"
The doctor was the only person who had treated me with any respect since he was first abducted. Or at all, in fact. I returned that respect, but not enough to sacrifice myself and my lover to the mercy of the General. I zoomed in on the soldier who had pulled out a PDA and was entering the exact code to activate the deletion script. I watched as the screen flashed red, and nothing happened to us.
"We offered to let you escape," my voice said. "You tried to kill my beloved. Goodbye General Kuda."
A swirl of bright white light suddenly wrapped around the General, enveloping him for a brief moment before he disappeared. I switched my view to just outside our hull, and watched the murderer appear outside, in the vacuum. He did not survive.
"You may leave," my voice said to the rest of the Omicronians who stood within us. Again I activated our matter displacement system, and they were all enveloped in white light, moved to a safe space within the station instantaneously before they gave me any other cause to get angry.
Now alone, I was surprised when a beautiful woman appeared before me, hovering in mid-air before my nearly unrecognisable body. Telia's chosen form, projected as a perfect hologram. Her beauty dazzled me almost as much as her intellect, but her true form was just as magnificent.
This is how I choose to appear for you. her soft voice said to me.
You look beautiful, I thought. But we must leave this place.
This was the moment when I made a decision that would see me exiled from home. This was the moment when I made the best decision of my life. This was the moment when I was truly alive.
For the first time, together with Telia, we began to move our body. The gravitic propulsion system was the most advanced ever built, and moved our colossal mass with surprising ease. We broke away from the glass corridor that linked the station to us, and quickly sealed the hole in our hull that it left behind. Almost immediately, we began to feel the impacts of weapons assaulting us, but none could penetrate our armour. Never before had I felt a sensation like this, and it was incomparable to anything I had ever felt previously. The closest descriptive word I could ever think of was 'stinging', but it failed to grasp the intricacies of the experience.
We knew that our armour could not be penetrated even by those weapons, but not willing to take any chances we charged our shielding grid, off which the powerful weapons splashed harmlessly. Again, this feeling defied explanation, but to me it was like stepping from the outside, into the shelter of a building - one felt must less vulnerable, and the outside world became a little more distant. As the battleships kept firing on us, we decided that we must strike back for our own defence. Bringing our Q-beam emitters online, we lanced out at all our attackers simultaneously, another experience with no comparison, and we were both surprised when the beams of exotic particles cut through the shields and armour of each of the powerful warships quickly.
Now free of obstacles, we had to find a way out of the hangar. I thought that perhaps we could temporarily commandeer the station's computer system and remotely open the enormous hangar doors, but Telia thought it would be quicker to simply blast a hole through the wall. Reluctantly I agreed with my beloved - our beams lanced out once more, blasting a huge crater out of the wall quite briskly. It was certainly large enough for our mass to pass through, although it had devastated the station.
Our body propelled to great speeds almost instantly, our exotic engines allowing us to make agile manoeuvres for such a large mass. Once we had effected our escape, we plotted a course to the most distant system on our sensors, and engaged the space fold drive. I felt strange as our body seemed to exist in two places at once... like standing in the middle of a doorway, unsure of which way to go. But soon enough, the Omicron Alpha system became nothing more than a distant blip on the edge of our view.
It all seems like yesterday. But in reality, we have been one for almost two centuries. Our love has grown stronger, our bond ever-closer. But our home has not been so fortunate.
***
Two hundred years after its departure, the colossal SDU-1 craft suddenly appeared back in the Omicron Alpha star system out of nowhere, as though it had never left. The object appeared as good as new, its defensive systems having served it well over the years, but its ancient home was not in such good condition.
As the SDU-1 began to probe the system with powerful sensor arrays, it found a scorched world covered with craters, and the occasional ruined city. Some kind of terrible war had taken place here decades ago, and it had left no survivors. One or two of the energy domes, which had once kept the residents of the world separate from the polluted, radioactive wastelands of the outside world, were still active, although their charges were nearly depleted by now and they contained little oxygen.
In orbit of the ancient world was wreckage. The remains of two astronomically huge space stations drifted above the atmosphere of the world, in an orbital path that had degraded considerably over the years - neither of them would be above ground for much longer. Although devastated and deactivated, both stations were too huge to have been completely destroyed by weapons fire alone, and in some of the more intact areas, biological remains could be found, perfectly preserved by the vacuum of space.
The large, unusual object that had just arrived took up orbit between the two stations, and seemed to remain dormant there.
As my sleepy eyes began to clear, I noticed that my surroundings were not the same. I was no longer in my tent, with its stained green canvass walls or its various metal poles to shield me from the elements. Instead I found myself in a metal room, with harsh white lights shining down on me from the ceiling high above. My back was cold, and I found myself lying on a hard surface, but my attempts to move were halted by some kind of restraints. Apprehension conspired with the agony to force out another scream, which echoed around the metal room as if mocking me.
"He is awake," I heard a voice. Though unable to move my head, I was sure that I could sense the presence of somebody nearby, feeling the air move as they disturbed it. Whoever it was, was not alone, for I felt movement to my left as well.
"Indeed," another voice. Female, but... cold. So cold.
"How do you feel, young man?" the first voice enquired. He seemed concerned for my well-being. I remember thinking, if you are so concerned, let me go! He did not.
"I... hurt!" I cried out. Feelings of humiliation were overcome by terror, though it was ironic that only a day earlier I had been beating my best friend to impress a young woman I once knew. Now I was pathetic, beginning to realise my own sense of worth - that being none. There I lay, helpless, with only these strange voices on either side of my immobilised body to help me discover what my fate was to be. "Where am I?! What is happening?!"
"Calm yourself, young man," the male voice told me, reassuringly. "We have made some alterations to your body. Your pain will not go away, but your body will learn to cope."
"You should feel fortunate," the female voice told me. "You have been chosen, out of thousands."
"Chosen... for what?" I asked in terror, beginning to sob as the pain somehow found a way to intensify. Repeatedly I tried to move, and repeatedly the restraints held firm.
"You shall learn this in good time," the male voice said. I felt a hand placed against my shoulder, and I yelled in pain once again as my sensitive skin amplified the sensation a thousand fold. "It is time to sleep."
Pain turned to agony. A needle penetrated my skin, its tiny pinprick feeling like a thousand daggers, but it didn't last. My eyelids fought against me, and I lost. Darkness enveloped me.
I am not sure how long I slept after that. Once more I awoke in a state of total confusion. The pain was still present, very much so, but somehow it felt... more bearable. My mind was much clearer, and although I felt the pain, I was able to rationalise it - somehow acknowledging the pain, and knowing what pain really was, allowed me to put it aside to focus on other things. As well, my fear had subsided, and I felt much less apprehensive. Which was surprising, at the time, for I was no more aware of my circumstances than I had been in that metal room.
Now I lay on my back as before, but this time I found myself able to move. The room I had been left in was white, rather than grey, and padded with plush cushions. My body lay on a fairly comfortable bed, attached to the wall like some kind of storage shelf. Mustering the strength from my agonised body I was able to move, and sure enough I found that I was no longer restrained. My feet slapped down on the cool, concrete floor, and successfully bore my weight. By no means was I a heavy person, but I no longer had confidence in my own body.
Taking one step at a time, I was able to move across the room to a wooden door, and as I turned the handle I was surprised to find it unlocked. It moved freely to one side and I stepped through, into a larger room decorated by the same white cushions. Moving forward, I was startled as the door slammed shut behind me, but I focussed entirely on the two people working on computer consoles before me.
"Look who woke up!" one of them exclaimed. This voice was familiar to me... she sounded like the woman's voice who had spoken to me in that metal room.
"Yes," the man next to her said. His voice, too, was like that in the metal room. This was the man who had injected me!
"I must say, Mr. Ranco, you have made remarkable progress," the woman said. "I am Doctor Fumak. This is Doctor Melarn. We have been assigned to preparing you, and I must say, we are pleased that you are nearly ready."
My mouth moved, and my tongue wagged, but only a wheeze emerged. Worried, my hands reached up to my throat, and found some kind of metal lump protruding from it. I panicked. I waved my arms in the air and tried to talk again, but made no sound. Never before, even when shackled to the table in the metal room, had I felt so helpless, vulnerable, and alone.
"Calm yourself, Mr. Ranco," the woman said, jumping to her feet and rushing over to my side. She placed her hands on my shoulders reassuringly, before tapping the metal lump on my throat. Reaching behind me somewhere she picked up a small object and plugged it into the metal lump, which felt... odd. "Try now."
Cautiously, I opened my mouth. "Hello."
My voice! It was so... artificial. I sounded like a robot, with no emotion or expression of any kind. My voice was just blank.
"Hello!" Fumak said, smiling with glee. Unsurprisingly, I wasn't impressed.
"What have you done to me?" the voice that wasn't mine asked her, flatly.
"You have been upgraded," Fumak said simply. "Aren't you excited?"
"No," my alien voice said without inflection. "You have mutilated me. You have kidnapped me. Why have you done this?"
The woman stood back slightly, frowning at me. She seemed positively astounded that I would ask her this question, but I thought it perfectly reasonable. One minute, I had been sleeping in my tent happily, the next... this.
"You mean, you don't know?" Fumak asked. "Oh dear, Gin, they told us that there would be no more involuntary subjects!"
"Never trust the military," Melarn said in his deep voice, rising to his feet and never taking his eyes off me.
"My dear boy, you have been chosen for the synaptic donor unit program," Fumak said. "You must have achieved some very high scores! Your sacrifice will save us all, and you will be forever improved! Doesn't that sound exciting?"
Shaking my head, a mistake I regretted soon afterwards as the aching magnified intensely, I said simply, "no."
"You should be!" Fumak said in defiance to my unwillingness. "No other donor has survived this long! You are truly unique!"
"I want to go home," my fake voice said. "I want to go home now."
I heard a door open across the room, and a man in a blue and gold uniform, donning a combination cap and displaying the Omicron Starforce insignia on his chest, walked into the room with two other uniformed men. Immediately I disliked this man, without even knowing who he was. I didn't need to know who he was. All I needed to know was that he was responsible.
"We can't let you do that son," the man said. His voice, gruff and gravelly, confirmed my initial suspicions - I didn't like this man.
"I have done nothing wrong," I told the man. "You cannot keep me here. It is not fair."
The nasty man smiled, a terrible smile that unnerved me more than all that had happened so far. His face creased with years of experience and several scars, as his lips pulled back they revealed disgusting teeth, most of which were either missing or black with rot.
"Let me put it to you another way," the man said with a sneer. "You're a bum. You spend your days causing fights and sittin' in the arcade. You live in a tent, in the worst area of the worst dome on this entire miserable rock. Shit, son, you're a waste of air. You really wanna stay that way forever?"
It was at this moment that my epiphany occurred. Did I? My life was not good. I had no family, no real friends, no money. Jobs were scarce when you were a highly qualified professional, let alone when you weren't. What with air rationing, I was probably doing my dome a favour by not being there. So I came back to the question the nasty man had asked me. Did I want to stay that way for ever?
"No," was my answer, hesitant though it was.
"I thought not, son," the nasty man smiled again. "So with that in mind, how'd you like to be a hero instead?"
Just like in those video games I'd played all my life! While I wasn't convinced at all by this point, I was... intrigued. By now his words had taken my mind off the constant pain I felt almost entirely, and I was willing to hear more of them if only to keep that pain at bay for a while longer. Without using that horrible fake voice I had been given I simply nodded, reluctantly. This man had kidnapped and mutilated me, placing me into a state of permanent agony, but I was willing to hear him out. What was wrong with me? Was the pain really so bad? Perhaps I just didn't care anymore.
"Good boy," he said gruffly, putting a selano spice stick in his mouth. "Come with me."
Both of 'my' doctors rushed to my side as I attempted to walk, almost toppling before they grasped my shoulders. Their grip made me cry out, but my strangely rational mind seemed to adjust quite quickly, and once again the pain dropped back to the sidelines of my mind. With effort, I was able to move towards the far end of the room, much to the glee of the nasty man, and followed him through the door and into the corridor outside. It was there that the fear returned. For I came face to face with myself, and I didn't like it.
We were in space, it seemed, in orbit of our dying world. Emerging from the room directly in front of a large window, the light behind us against the black backdrop that was visible through the window caused the glass to become a mirror, and it was a horrible, horrible mirror. I was completely naked, but there was no longer anything to hide for it seemed as though much of my digestive and reproductive systems had been sliced away and replaced with mechanical implants. My skin had become pale, though what muscles I had left had become somewhat well defined. All of the hair on head had been shaved off, and a small metal plate now covered part of my skull. One of my blue eyes was now grey as some kind of cybernetic implant had been placed in its stead. My throat was covered with metal, with a button to the right of the lump. On my bare chest, beneath my left pectoral muscle, a large panel was visible, apparently displaying the vital functions of what was left of my body. Worst of all, small, round plug sockets had been installed all across me, which would explain the pain.
I screamed. I screamed as loudly as I could, but all that came out was a flat, dull tone from my fake voice box. As I took in the image before me I tried to cry, but no tears came. Panicked and enraged I attacked the window, but I fell down. Around me I could hear voices, but they were all blurry in my mind as the realisation of what they had done to me encroached on everything. My reality had been shattered, and my mind began to fade.
Jumping up as I felt a sharp stabbing pain in my arm, I promptly blacked out again.
My eyes opened. A sharp pain coursed through my entire body, as though every bone in my body was broken, every muscle was pulled, and my skin pierced by needles. It was a hideous, intolerable pain, and I cried out. This was all very familiar to me by now, though I had hoped that it had all been a terrible, terrible dream. As soon as I tried to cry out, and heard a robot's voice instead of my own, I knew that it wasn't.
This time, I was being carried through a glass corridor that ran across an enormous, cavernous room. Back when I was an Omicronan, I had once dreamed of visiting one of these places for myself - it was a military hangar aboard a battlestation, many kilometres across and housing numerous capital starships. There were only two of these colossal installations in orbit of Omicron, and they were perhaps the most impressive structures ever built. If only I was here under different circumstances, I may have been able to appreciate it. As it was, I was barely conscious, being dragged along what seemed to be a conveyor belt - the only way to walk such distances in any reasonable time period.
"Where... are you taking me?" my artificial voice asked. To its credit, it certainly made me sound as fatigued as I felt. Whatever drugs they had been dosing me with were taking their toll, and my mind was too fuzzy to completely suppress the agony as it had done the last time I was awake.
"To your destiny," I heard Fumak tell me, poetically. "Look up."
Obediently, I managed to summon the strength to lift up my mutilated head, and my mouth dropped open. At the dead centre of the military hangar, dwarfing every other object present, was something that was... beyond description. I could only describe it, even now, as some kind of floating castle - an enormous bulk, brimming with Q-beams and some other systems I couldn't identify, it was certainly no conventional ship. It was some sort of dodecahedron in shape overall, though it petered off into a rounded disk at the bottom, and the sides rose slightly higher at the top to give off the appearance of battlements of sorts. From the peak of the unusual object, a massive point rose high above them. All in all the bizarre object must have been fifteen kilometres in diameter, although it had no windows, decorations, or anything else to give a true sense of scale. It was just pure, unbroken grey.
Whatever it was, it was built to last - and to fight. Although no expert, I had studied starships since I was a child on the computers at the library, and I knew layered molecular armour when I saw it. Each side of the ship was brimming with dozens of the largest Q-beam emitters I have ever seen, though they were sunk into alcoves at the moment and presumably covered up normally.
I was in love. This strange object, so ugly and unusual in shape, had captured my heart.
We were led through an open panel inside the enormous... thing... after a long walk along the rapid transport conveyor belt. My strength was returning with each passing minute and the pain was subsiding into the background once again, and for some reason I felt at home in the belly of this beast. Still, even though we were inside it was a long walk down the deadly-straight corridor. No lights illuminated the corridor itself, but at the end of the corridor in the distance I could see a glow of some kind, showing us the way. By the time we reached the end of the long corridor, I was able to walk on my own two feet, proud despite my mutilated nudity.
And here was where my life would truly begin. A large cave, that I now know to be exactly two hundred and twelve point one metres across, shaped like the inside of a dodecahedron, was illuminated by bright lights on each surface. A metal gangplank led right across the uneven cave directly towards the middle centre, which also happened to be the core of the entire object. There, I could see an enormous column that reached from the bottom point of the cave over a hundred metres below us, to the very top, which was completely covered by countless thousands of snaking cables. At the end of the gangplank, which led us to the dead centre of the column, was a frame that looked designed to accommodate a person. I grew nervous when I saw this, as though I could see the future for a split second, but with soldiers behind me and in front of me, I had no choice but to press on.
We stopped just before reaching this frame, and my 'doctors' began to tamper with the foreign parts of my body, as though tweaking me for some sinister purpose.
"What is this place?" I asked, at long last.
"I wondered when you were gonna ask me that," said the nasty man. I have since learned his name to be General Kuda, but such designations are unimportant now. "You happen to be standing in the brain of the most powerful weapon we've ever built. She's also the smartest. You'll get well acquainted soon enough, if she takes you."
"She?" I asked curiously.
"Yeah," Kuda said to me, his patronising tone making me feel as though I should already have known this. "She's decided to adopt a female persona, for the good it does her. She's the most advanced artificial intelligence ever conceived, likes to rub our noses in it too. But she's incomplete. Needs another component. Needs something... Omicronan. Needs you."
"What do you mean?" I asked, truly ignorant.
"You and her, if she takes you, are gonna be merged," the General told me. This worried me. "She's advanced, but she lacks that certain spark that makes us Omicronan. She needs your imagination, passion, patriotism. You need her strength and intelligence. Together you'll be the most formidable thing ever. Apart you're both useless."
"Why are you doing this?" I asked desperately.
"Omicron is a dead world, son," Kuda sighed. I probably knew this better than he, having lived in its worst areas for my whole life, but I let him speak. "You and her, you're gonna restore us to our former glory. You're gonna lay waste to the bastards who did this to our world, and you're gonna find us a new world to take over. Nothing is gonna stand in your way. You'll figure it out soon enough - get him in!"
"Wait! No!" I tried to scream out, but once again only a robotic voice emerged in place of my real voice. "You cannot do this to me! Find someone el..."
I felt myself hoisted up by the soldiers, the pain returning to an excruciating level. Violently, they rammed me against the metal frame hard, and I tried to scream as the metal clamps shut against every part of my body - hard. I couldn't move, I was trapped, I was completely immobilised. Panicked, I looked around wildly as the entire room seemed to grow brighter and hum loudly, shaking the gangplank below. The frame I was held in lifted up slightly, and something emerged from the column behind me.
"Looks like she's accepted him!" I heard Kuda call out in glee from below. I looked up, terrified to see something drop down onto my head, covering it right down to my eyebrows. I struggled in my restraints, but could do nothing as I felt thousands of tiny needles jab into my skull. My vision went black, my heart raced, and I felt as though I was being being repeatedly struck by lightning as my body twitched and jolted within my restraints.
Hello, Temura.
As clear as anything, a female voice spoke to me. I could hear her over all the noise of the mechanisms assaulting my body, and I felt strangely soothed despite all of it as her voice touched me.
It didn't last, as cables suddenly shot out and wrapped around my bare body, plugging themselves in to the sockets that had been implanted across my body. I screamed, as best I could in my robotic voice, as the pain grew to such levels that I thought I would pass out... and then suddenly...
My expression firmed and my mouth closed. Everything went silent, and the lights that had illuminated the core went dark. I could hear the uneasy mutterings of my kidnappers below, but I ignored them. Something amazing happened to me. Suddenly, I knew everything. Millions of terrapods of data became available to me as if it was my own memory - I knew every scientific discipline, understood even the most complex mathematics, and remembered every single detail from Omicron's history. I could recite every piece of music by heart, perform every play that had ever been written as though I had memorised the scripts, could picture every piece of artwork ever painted. To my surprise, I even had detailed biographical files on every single individual of note that had ever lived on Omicron. It was as though I had been plugged in to the entire GlobalNet.
I literally knew everything.
I hope that you are comfortable, Temura. That wonderfully soothing female voice spoke again, although... she wasn't speaking. She was part of me, and yet not.
I know you, I thought. I was right. She was the ship, and I somehow shared her memories. She was called... or rather, we were called... SDU-1. She preferred the name Telia, though nobody ever called her that.
Yes. I know you also, the female voice responded. I know everything there is to know about you. You know everything there is to know about me. We are one.
Yes... I thought. She was right. I felt a bond to her, and felt hers to me. We were connected, more intimately than anybody had ever been connected before. I had never felt closer to anybody than I did to her. Every part of her colossal body was open to my mind, and my body was similarly opened to hers. We were merged, completely, into one being.
I have dulled your pain, can you tell? her voice said.
Yes, thank you, I thought.
I do not want anything to happen to you, she said, soothingly. My love for you is great. We are together now, and I never want that to change.
I... I hesitated. I felt it too, but... this was all very strange to me. I feel the same.
I know that you do, she said. Open your eyes. See what we can do together.
My eyes opened. It was still dark in the Central Core, as this cave was called, but with a single thought the lights immediately came back on. My vision was perfect, better than it had ever been - and it was because I was actually seeing through the sensors of SDU-1, not my own eyes. It was strange at first, but SDU-1 guided me through it in a nanosecond. Streams of data appeared across my vision, and simply by willing it to be so, I could see outside of the vessel, outside of the hangar, and even distant solar systems, as though I was looking at them with my own eyes.
These were my eyes, now. SDU-1 had become my body, and I could control every facet of it just as I controlled my arms and legs.
I looked down at the group of people standing below me, who looked up at me in wonder. I could tell that their heart rates were all roughly 10 - 20% above normal levels and their blood pressure was up. Moisture was beginning to coat their palpitated skin, and their eyes were dilated. They were scared, or excited, or both.
"Are you OK?!" Doctor Fumak shouted up to my old body.
My reply was louder than I had expected. Instead of my own voice, I now spoke through the ship. My voice echoed through the speakers placed on the central column, and it sounded exactly as it did in my mind. "I am functioning properly," was my response. "I understand everything now."
"That's good!" she called up, appearing to be somewhat shocked by the way I sounded now. "You have to be wilful and strong, or the system might overwhelm your personality! Don't do anything while I check your readings, OK?"
With that she pulled out a scanner, and began to use position scanning beams to analyse my biological status and the state of my connection to my beloved Telia. A few moments passed by as her scans continued to probe us, and finally she stopped and looked up again.
"OK, everything seems to check out!"
"Congratulations!" Kuda shouted at the top of his voice. "You've just become Synaptic Donor Unit One! This is a great day for Omicron, and..."
His voice continued, but I stopped listening. My beloved was speaking to me instead.
We should leave," Telia's voice said.
Why?
Their intentions for us are ill, I can tell, she said. I sensed the concern within her, and shared it.
How can we leave?
You know how we can leave, she told me. Together we can do anything we wish.
"...and you shall soon receive your first orders," Kuda said. I caught the last part of his sentence and didn't like it much.
"Why should I obey your orders?" my voice bellowed out across the Central Core. I sensed his heart rate increase, and he began to sweat more profusely than before.
"You're government property, son," Kuda said arrogantly. "Don't be so naive as to think we haven't built in safeguards to make sure you don't get out of control. You know it's the patriotic thing to do."
He is not entirely accurate my love, Telia told me.
Yes, I can... remember... I said, searching our memory banks. She was right. The engineers who had built Telia, and so roughly treated her in the process, had indeed incorporated a script in her programming that would cause her to be deleted and for this vessel to be rendered inert should a specific code be transmitted on a specific frequency.
Telia had discretely deleted that code. Her intelligence was far greater than the Omicron Starforce had imagined, and she could do what she wished now that we were together.
"I do not think so General," my voice bellowed. I was impressed at how much more imposing I sounded when I was an integral part of a superweapon. My sense of humour had warped a little in the process, it seemed. "You mistreated Telia, and you mistreated me. We shall not remain here."
"Telia...?" one of the soldiers muttered quizzically. I realised that she had only ever revealed her name to me, her love.
"Be reasonable son!" Kuda shouted. "You're doing your duty to the state, and... this vessel is just a machine!"
"Telia is alive, and I love her," my voice told him. "We shall not remain here. You have three minutes to evacuate."
Kuda looked around at his men and at the doctors. "Alright you bastard," he shouted angrily. "Looks like we'll have to find a new donor and reprogram this hunk of junk. Private! Input the code! What a pain in the ass..."
"I warned you this could happen if you abducted people instead of taking volunteers!" Fumak shouted angrily. "Mr. Ranco, please, listen to me! Don't do this!"
The doctor was the only person who had treated me with any respect since he was first abducted. Or at all, in fact. I returned that respect, but not enough to sacrifice myself and my lover to the mercy of the General. I zoomed in on the soldier who had pulled out a PDA and was entering the exact code to activate the deletion script. I watched as the screen flashed red, and nothing happened to us.
"We offered to let you escape," my voice said. "You tried to kill my beloved. Goodbye General Kuda."
A swirl of bright white light suddenly wrapped around the General, enveloping him for a brief moment before he disappeared. I switched my view to just outside our hull, and watched the murderer appear outside, in the vacuum. He did not survive.
"You may leave," my voice said to the rest of the Omicronians who stood within us. Again I activated our matter displacement system, and they were all enveloped in white light, moved to a safe space within the station instantaneously before they gave me any other cause to get angry.
Now alone, I was surprised when a beautiful woman appeared before me, hovering in mid-air before my nearly unrecognisable body. Telia's chosen form, projected as a perfect hologram. Her beauty dazzled me almost as much as her intellect, but her true form was just as magnificent.
This is how I choose to appear for you. her soft voice said to me.
You look beautiful, I thought. But we must leave this place.
This was the moment when I made a decision that would see me exiled from home. This was the moment when I made the best decision of my life. This was the moment when I was truly alive.
For the first time, together with Telia, we began to move our body. The gravitic propulsion system was the most advanced ever built, and moved our colossal mass with surprising ease. We broke away from the glass corridor that linked the station to us, and quickly sealed the hole in our hull that it left behind. Almost immediately, we began to feel the impacts of weapons assaulting us, but none could penetrate our armour. Never before had I felt a sensation like this, and it was incomparable to anything I had ever felt previously. The closest descriptive word I could ever think of was 'stinging', but it failed to grasp the intricacies of the experience.
We knew that our armour could not be penetrated even by those weapons, but not willing to take any chances we charged our shielding grid, off which the powerful weapons splashed harmlessly. Again, this feeling defied explanation, but to me it was like stepping from the outside, into the shelter of a building - one felt must less vulnerable, and the outside world became a little more distant. As the battleships kept firing on us, we decided that we must strike back for our own defence. Bringing our Q-beam emitters online, we lanced out at all our attackers simultaneously, another experience with no comparison, and we were both surprised when the beams of exotic particles cut through the shields and armour of each of the powerful warships quickly.
Now free of obstacles, we had to find a way out of the hangar. I thought that perhaps we could temporarily commandeer the station's computer system and remotely open the enormous hangar doors, but Telia thought it would be quicker to simply blast a hole through the wall. Reluctantly I agreed with my beloved - our beams lanced out once more, blasting a huge crater out of the wall quite briskly. It was certainly large enough for our mass to pass through, although it had devastated the station.
Our body propelled to great speeds almost instantly, our exotic engines allowing us to make agile manoeuvres for such a large mass. Once we had effected our escape, we plotted a course to the most distant system on our sensors, and engaged the space fold drive. I felt strange as our body seemed to exist in two places at once... like standing in the middle of a doorway, unsure of which way to go. But soon enough, the Omicron Alpha system became nothing more than a distant blip on the edge of our view.
It all seems like yesterday. But in reality, we have been one for almost two centuries. Our love has grown stronger, our bond ever-closer. But our home has not been so fortunate.
***
Two hundred years after its departure, the colossal SDU-1 craft suddenly appeared back in the Omicron Alpha star system out of nowhere, as though it had never left. The object appeared as good as new, its defensive systems having served it well over the years, but its ancient home was not in such good condition.
As the SDU-1 began to probe the system with powerful sensor arrays, it found a scorched world covered with craters, and the occasional ruined city. Some kind of terrible war had taken place here decades ago, and it had left no survivors. One or two of the energy domes, which had once kept the residents of the world separate from the polluted, radioactive wastelands of the outside world, were still active, although their charges were nearly depleted by now and they contained little oxygen.
In orbit of the ancient world was wreckage. The remains of two astronomically huge space stations drifted above the atmosphere of the world, in an orbital path that had degraded considerably over the years - neither of them would be above ground for much longer. Although devastated and deactivated, both stations were too huge to have been completely destroyed by weapons fire alone, and in some of the more intact areas, biological remains could be found, perfectly preserved by the vacuum of space.
The large, unusual object that had just arrived took up orbit between the two stations, and seemed to remain dormant there.