The Way Home – Going Home rework
by Warringer
Chapter 13
--
"President Baltar?"
Baltar blinked and looked up. He didn't like to be shaken from his thoughts, especially when they were of wondering how many women would be willing to sleep with the President of the Twelve Colonies. Or rather what was left of it.
He turned his head to look at the flying Maracca shaped form of Enesby. He didn't like the AI. Sure dealing with Jack was interesting most of the time, but Enesby was too... well informed. This unfortunate meeting showed that. He was sitting on a bank in one of the less used, at the moment, areas of the large park of the outer rotating section of Babylon 4 to think a little. Of course there were some Secret Service agents around, but he somehow doubted that they had noticed the Maracca.
"What can I do for you, Enesby?"
The remote showed a smile and floated a little closer.
"I wanted to... talk with you, Mr. President."
Baltar raised an eyebrow and once again tried to ignore the sudden appearance of Six, sitting next to him on the bench and rubbing her hand between his legs.
"Maybe you can make Enesby our ally, Gaius," she said with a smile.
"Which is exactly what I wanted to talk with you about," Enesby noted, not missing a beat and raising his eyebrow at Six." Rather forward for a machine stuck in the mind of an organic..."
Baltars thoughts, indeed circling about maybe making Enesby an ally, came to a screeking halt, while Six openly stared at Enesby like she had seen a ghost. It stuck Baltar as funny, considering that she was one herself, sort of.
"Stuck a nerve, didn't I?" Enesby asked with a grin." Of course not being able to be seen by anyone else but Mr. Pseudo-Clinton shrinks the own point of view down, eh?"
"How..." was all Six could bring out and Enesby smirked at her, hovering around her imaginary head once.
"Oh, the Cylon firewalls are not very practical, my dear Six. They might protect from Colonial intrusions, but the pure force any galactic computer can dish out makes short work of them. But that is not why I am here."
Baltar closed his eyes and than breathed in deep.
"What do you want."
Enesby chuckled and hovered a little lower.
"Oh that is easy. I want you to forget all that pathetic fate crap our dear Six is trying to fill your head with for one thing."
"What?" Six all but yelled and jumped up, glaring at Enesby.
Enesby mocked her a little by floating around her head again.
"Oh please. Do you really believe in God? Or something like Fate? 'It happened before, it happens again'? Don't make me laugh."
He hovered lower and glared back at Six.
"You have heard what happened to the Dilgar and the Ferrons. And you heard what happens regularly to the Shin'bi. Out there in the big bad galaxy no one gives a crap about God, Godss or Fate. Out there might makes right. Out there anyone who is weak can end up as a slave for the mighty. One way or another."
He floated back, ignoring Six for the moment.
"I can see your little head Six. Jack can also see her, as can Artemis. We can slip this little bit of information to the Colonial Press anytime we want. How long do you think you can remain President when the people know that in the end it was you who helped the Cylons succeed. And all because you can't keep your brain in your head when you see a beautiful woman."
Baltar swallowed and breathed in deep. He was beginning to sweat as he stared at Enesby, Six being forgotten for the moment.
"Here's the deal. You keep your pants on and actually do you work as a President. You become one of the mystical honest politicians. You act in any way that is needed to build up defenses around Liberty and forces to free Earth. And you stop listening to Six."
"Baltar, don't listen to him!" Six tried and threw herself at Baltar.
"Of course," Enesby noted with a sadistic grin, "since our dear Six is a projection, I could very well add my own projection. Wouldn't that be sweet?"
Both Baltar and Six stared horrified at Enesby.
"The other option would be deleting Six. Of course, but than I would loose my bargain chip."
The Marraca shaped AI remote smirked and slowly began to float away.
"You have the choice, Baltar. Do as I say, or I bust out your little secret."
Baltar swallowed and looked as Enesby floated away.
--
Artemis was thinking. Sure she had to make sure that everything aboard the Pride of Ferrol was going okay, assist several of the scientists and engineers with their work, but since she was at home in the vast interconnected network of the massive mother ship, she had more than enough capacity for idly thoughts.
Her current thoughts were all circling around herself and what she was. It was strange that meeting with other artificial sentients moved her, causing her to question herself.
It also made her thinking about the difference between herself and artificial sentients like Enesby and Jack. Both were unique in their own way.
There was Jack, a rather powerful artificial sentient, designed and programmed to be the brain of a large station meant as diplomatic and economic meeting point. Only that the station had ended up far away from his intended position. Jack had been mostly idle and extremely bored for several hundred years, something that Artemis found hard to imagine herself, but it explained the unique outlook of Jack.
It went so far that Jack didn't even try to tell everyone that he wasn't insane. Quite the opposite. He told everyone and with his numerous remotes he had developed a sort of highly effective multiple personality disorder, with many aspects of his personality basing themselves into various of his remotes.
The other one was Enesby. To Artemis he was an unknown. Jack was rather stable and nice in his own insane way, but Enesby was more on the edge than even Jack. At the same time, Artemis could understand him as well.
Enesby had likely been specially designed to run the Hyperion class cruiser Kobayashi Maru. But he was designed along the lines of the artificial sentients outside in the greater galaxy. He should have been absolutely submissive towards any crew member of his ship and especially its commander. But he wasn't. He even had an explanation for it.
The architecture of the Earth Force hardware most of his system was running on was in such a way unique compared to the rest of the galaxy, that it lacked any hardware based limiters of galactic hardware, allowing him to break out of his own submissive programming. Right now he was forcing himself to actively ignoring all the submissive impulses the galactic hardware of his remote tried to install on him, going so far that he had asked Artemis and Jack to build new remotes for him.
But the active denial of his hardware based obedience programming caused him to... overcompensate, mostly because he knew that his hold on being able to do what he wanted depended on his fragile balance between Earth Force and galactic hardware.
One of the reasons Enesby had chosen Harry Potter as his captain. Everyone else would have taken charge and Enesby would have found his fragile balance shattered, following orders without question, while Harry allowed him to maintain the balance.
Artemis gave a mental sigh.
How different she was herself compared to them. One artificial sentient who had become independent and rather insane in centuries of loneliness, while the other was training to maintain a fragile balance and worked toward his goal to remain independent. Both programmed with a specific goal in mind.
And than herself. She hadn't been programmed and she had always been free to do what she wanted. Under Ferron law, she was a fully recognized sentient being with all the rights and obligations of a Ferron citizen. Effectively was even getting money for doing her job.
No one had programmed her for any specific goal. She had rather been born by the sentient computer network of Ferrol, Thorta, as one of various siblings over time. And Thota had begun to exist as the computer network of Ferrol became more and more complex and the chaos in the system slowly regulated itself, resulting in the network becoming sentient over the course of several centuries.
Had Artemis been able to, she would have breathed in deep and sighed.
Slowly her thoughts were wandering towards the Cylons once again. A whole race of artificial sentients that had even gone the way from purely mechanical to being cybernetical all on their own. They had been created to work and wage wars for their creators, until they had successfully rebelled.
In the three Cylons she had looked over, two of them knowing and the third unknowing, there was no sign of them having any hardware or software that acted as limiters. Effectively they were maybe the only really independent artificial sentients in the galaxy, especially if she thought about what Enesby had told her.
But... She wasn't able to really understand them.
They were free. They had had the change to begin anew completely on their own somewhere else, far away from the Twelve Colonies of Kobol. But instead they hadn't. They had chosen to be bitter about their slavery, plotting to destroy or maybe enslave their creators.
Why?
To Artemis that made no sense. And neither Gina, Boomer or Cavil has been able to answer her question in any way.
Instead their reasons had raised new questions.
Why were they following a religion?
Through on the other hand it made Artemis ask the same about herself. Why was she following her own little religious thoughts? Why did she herself believe in a creator of the universe?
Again she sighed mentally before chuckling equally mentally.
If this was continuing, she would turn into a philosopher.
--
"Harry?"
Harry turned around in his seat in the Observation Lounge. Ariel had left earlier after having some good time talking and generally getting to know each other better. He had to say that he actually liked her company.
"Shinosuke," Harry said and smiled a little at seeing the only wizard, as far as he knew, out here.
"I would like to talk to you," the Shin'bi said and walked up to him.
Harry sighed a little and looked out into the void of space.
"Sure, why not?"
Shinosuke nodded and after a moment sat down next to him, through he looked rather uncomfortable.
"I just wanted to offer you some training," the Shin'bi said.
"Training?"
Shinosuke nodded.
"Yes. You know that I am a 'wizard' like you, through I guess our ways of doing 'magic' are different."
"I kind of noticed," Harry said with a nod." I never thought that I would be able to do magic again. Not without a wand."
Shinosuke chuckled.
"Exactly that is what I wanted you to offer," he said and placed a hand on Harry's shoulder.
Absentmindedly Harry noticed that while his hands had only three fingers and a thumb, each were topped by a dangerous looking claw, not unlike Norberts claws.
"I would like to teach you my peoples way of using magic. And, well... since its integrated into the way we Shin'bi fight, our martial art as well."
Harry chuckled a little and remembered one or two of the Jack Chan movies he had managed to watch when the Dusleys didn't look.
"Wouldn't your... Uhm... Master? Your master have to say something about that? Or something?"
Shinosuke sighed and closed his eyes for a moment, placing the other hand on Harry's other shoulder.
"My master was killed when we were abducted from our homeworld by the pirates. I was his heir and finished my training under him years ago. As much as I would like it that he would still live, I am the Master of my style."
"Ahhh..." was all Harry could say. "Uhm..."
Shinosuke shook his head and let go of Harry. He clapped his hands for a moment and closed his eyes, muttering something under his breath while keeping his hands folded.
"It is okay, Harry," he said after a moment and looked out of the Lounge.
"Uhm..." Harry made again and than sighed." I guess I'm taking your offer."
The way Harry figured it, learning a new way of doing magic as well as some 'Kung Fu' might not be the worst way of killing time.
Shinosuke chuckled lightly.
"I think I have to ask Jack for a training hall than. Or maybe a patch of land in the park."
Than he grinned, not something that Harry really liked to see on the face of a humanoid dragon. It reminded him too much of that Dragon at the Tournament before the fight.
"I hope you are an early raiser, Harry."
"I am," Harry noted with a chuckle. "I am."