Reclaimer [03] -
-o-
Jenny slapped me again. Ow. What the hell, Jen?
"I think he's coming out of it, Captain…!" she said. Turning back to me, with her hand still raised high, she asked "Nemo? Can you hear me? You're fine. Everything's fine. You're not in danger!"
"Anyone else feeling anything strange?" Captain Nobel asked around. "Burning sensation? Clammy skin, maybe? Anyone?"
"No, sir." Not even Jacqueline Thompson, the most sensitive amongst the two Gaian crews. "We should be well out range…?" she murmured with doubt. But I was still trashing on the floor.
"I am always in range!" I gurgled out, as if my voice was made out of sandpaper. Gah. My brain was on fire.
- ORDER_ANTARCTIC_BASE:PRODUCTION || MISSILE_SILO
- CANCEL ORDER
"Yes! Nemo, can you understand me now?"
"Blurghaben."
"Hit him again, Jen."
No, Jen, don't do tha- WHAP!
"Hello?" Nobel leaned close, watching my dilated pupils start to contract, and his face brightened. "There we go. Welcome back, Commander. Don't do that again, Jen. From this point on, looks like he's going to start enjoying it."
It took all my strength to sluggishly raise my right arm, and then even more painfully slowly extend the middle finger of that hand.
"Sir!" Jen exclaimed. "Oh, thank goodness. You were in seizure or something. I was… I was so worried." The first two fingers of her right hand were bloody. It looked like she had to jam her fist into my mouth to keep me from biting off my own tongue. And that was why she had to slap me back to my senses with her left hand, perhaps using more force than necessary.
I blinked. "Thank you, Jen." I smiled at her. My outstretched hand I moved towards her cheek. "Sorry. I've always been such a burden to you."
"It's okay…" she whispered back. She raised her bandaged hand to mine.
"How swee-"
I nodded at Jennefer, silently begging for her patience to go on a bit longer, and then turned to Nobel, instantly switching my smile into a livid scowl. "That was not a medically sound wake-up measure, you asshole."
"Mind Worm attacks aren't epilepsy, Nemo. We don't know how it works, there's no one way to knock someone out of psionically-induced paralysis."
I huffed and let my head fall back to the cold metal floor.
These people…
Are they really the least nutbar society on Planet? It's not too late to reconsider...
"Nemo, please take it easy for a while. We can handle this. This isn't the first time we had to try and fight off some Isles of the Deep, you know." Jennefer said. She raised her right arm and pumped her fist in sporty enthusiasm, only to wince from the bite wounds opening up. Her bandage blossomed with fresh red spots. "We have more than enough flame guns to go around."
Captain Nobel sniffed and turned his back on me. "No need to feel ashamed if you're this vulnerable to psychic attack, Nemo. It happens."
"Sir, next wave incoming!"one of the crew shouted.
"What's happening?" I hissed as I slowly got back to my feet.
The main screen showed two Isles of the Deep flanking the Matilda. Tentacles with tips blooming like flowers made out of teeth waved at us. The Isles screamed.
- ERROR:MIND_SHIELD:BUFFER_OVERLOAD
"Aagh, what the fu-!" I screamed as I clutched at my head. It was like something trying to tattoo the gray matter inside my skull. I staggered against the central holographic table.
The tentacles bulged and squirted out a glob of Mind Worms at us.
Flak guns! Why don't I have flak gu… oh. Right. Molecular armor. Shrapnel does nothing. It's too primitive to still be in my database.
A writhing screeching pink mass splattered against the bridge window. I blanched.
"How… how long has it been?"
"Not more than fifteen minutes. The ship went into automatic evasive maneuvers while you were knocked out," Nobel responded. "We've repelled several waves of these exploratory Worm attacks so far."
"Bulkheads… NBC sealed…" I gasped.
"They're melting through with some sort of super acid. They're getting through the air vents. I've never seen them this aggressive before. Usually they'd just paralyze and swarm ships not this sort of standoff bombardment."
Spore Launchers inside the Isles of the Deep alternated between explosive pods and carrier pods.
ARM Molecular Armor is rated against close kiloton nuclear detonations. What the hell, Planet? Why are you so unexpectedly hax? No, I doubt it's just some caustic substance. Resonance Fields? "Something's keeping them away. What-"
- GROUP_ORDER: AUTH_ARMCOM: to LURKER_SUB:[T]0004-0010: TARGETS DESIGNATED
- GROUP_ORDER: AUTH_ARMCOM: to LURKER_SUB:[T]0004-0010: RAMMING SPEED
- RESPONSE: LURKER_SUB_[T]0004: YAY
- RESPONSE: LURKER_SUB_[T]0007: ME FIRST
- RESPONSE: LURKER_SUB_[T]0009: WAIT UP
- RESPONSE: LURKER_SUB_[T]0010: PLS NO SELF_DESTRUCT
- RESPONSE: LURKER_SUB_[T]0006: FLOATING THING LET ME LOVE YOU
Ookay. That's, um, handled?
Lurker submarines usually have barely sapient clone control brains. They are patient, yet enthusiastic. Many T1 biocomputers aren't based on human brains, but spliced animal brains. Lurkers are psychopathic dolphins of fusion and chrome.
- ACTION: LURKER_SUB_[T]0011: PING PING PING PING
Construction Sub, where are you? Please be less weird.
-RESPONSE: ADV_CONST_SUB_[T]0001: FHTAGN
-o-
I want you to imagine this -
That you have been asleep for a very long time. You are warm and comfortable under a thick wooly blanket. Outside, it's raining. The air is cold, the wind screaming and rattling at your windowsills. In response you only snuggled deeper under the covers.
You sigh and you dream. Sometimes you kick out in reflex from whatever secret wonders you are experiencing and press upon the verge of waking up, but never do you truly rouse.
For a long, long time, yours is a sweet somnolent existence.
And then, one day, someone slides into the covers with you.
You don't know who it is. All you know are needy limbs, supple shivering flesh, silken skin rubbing against your own.
On instinct, you open your arms and pull tight. And you receive a relieved sigh in return as your visitor snuggles deeper into your embrace. You breathe in the grassy scent from the hair pressed against your cheeks and feel hot breath upon your neck.
You wonder if this is yet another dream.
You have been alone for a long, long, long time.
Now, who was it that I was describing?
Are you Planet, the long-lost daughter of the Manifolds?
Are you the ARM Commander, the last son of a murdered galaxy?
Don't ask me.
I still don't know.
-o-
So it was that I said to Captain Nobel, "I can't do this."
We watched the T1 Attack Subs ram the Isles of the Deeps, making noise, doing everything to distract the aggregate creatures by pretending they too were living beings.
The Isles of the Deep retaliated by sending probing psychic attacks at the subs. I winced each time, like sandpaper scraping across the insides of my skull.
But this time, the Lurkers didn't just shut down and float belly-up like dead fish. Before, they were just machines, whose logic processors could be disrupted by whatever quantum Manifold voodoo magic.
They had Morale now. They were... insulated, more or less, by direct communion with ARM's quantum foam. Emulated biobrains were much more vulnerable to psychic attack, yet paradoxically also the best formed to resist. Cybernetics and meatware could run checksum on each other.
As designed these brains did not really possess any individuality. In fact, the response I was receiving was my own brain 'translating' digital input into responses that encapsulated each platform's ability to carry out my orders. Words are... inefficient. All within the command radius should respond literally at lightspeed with teleported signals.
- AUTH_LORD_PRESIDENT: Increase_Suppression_Radius
- RESPONSE:LURKER_SUB_GROUP_001: AYE AYE CAPTAIN
I still don't know why these things are responding the way they do.
Now fusion-driven water jets wrestled against island-sized masses, and won. Isles of the Deep were large and oddly well-armored with ablative crusts that work well against lasers and absorb kinetic impact, with internal chambers that channel explosions. But the fact remained that they had to *float*. The Lurkers were enough for this nonviolent response.
This only spurred the Isles to bombard the Matilda even more as they were slowly being pushed away from our course.
*Splut!*
A squiggling mottled pink mass slapped against the bridge's windows and slowly trailed down in a streak of corrosive purple slime.
I licked my lips. "I could kill these Isles of the Deep so easily. So very easily. A few torpedos, and we're done."
"Why don't you?" Nobel asked. "None of us would blame you for that. Conservation is one thing, but so far we have minimal impact on Planet's ecosystem."
"Because it's BEAUTIFUL..." I replied with a heavy sigh. The lamprey-like jaws of a Mind Worm suckled at the armor glass closest to my face.
"Fair enough."
I pointed at him with double pistol fingers. "I don't need you to pander to me. I fully recognize that my feelings on this matter are nonsense."
"No, no, I'm completely serious about this. Nature is as much fang and claw as it is big eyes and fluffy fur. I respect your respect for the vital links in the ecosystem." He turned aside to his crew and said "... all we have to do now is to just hold on and fight for our lives. That's fine. We're fine with that.
"We've done it before behind a low-slung hydrofoil hull, it's bound to be easier with corridors as chokepoints and a heavy armored hull to hide behind."
Captain Nobel imitated my pistol hands, then pointed his index fingers up and began to sway from side to side as if shaking a pair of maracas. "Did you know that Mind Worms *pop* under the heat of high-intensity flame guns? Pop-pop-pop, it's like a party!"
"Damn it, Nobel! I let you guys on this ship because I needed someone to call me out when I'm being a dumbass. It's... it's not fair to risk your lives for just my sensibilities. Don't you even care? Are you capable at all of being serious about anything?!"
He paused and narrowed his eyes. "Why do we laugh, Nemo?" he asked.
I looked from him to the others on the bridge. No one seemed to be laughing. "I... don't know?"
"I mean you, me, humans. Why do we laugh? Most other animals treat the baring of teeth as a sign of hostility. But not us. Not dumbass human beings. Why do we do this, Nemo?"
I frowned. "Laughter..." Oh. Oh! I get it. "Relieves stress? Is that what you're doing? Laughing in the face of danger?"
Mind Worm psi attacks were mitigated by high morale. And what is morale? There are many ways of maintaining cohesion and enthusiasm in the face of peril. Many are the ways people use to relieve their anxiety.
Laughter defeats fear.
I mumbled "Is that why you treat everything with such frivolity?"
"That's part of it," Nobel dared. What an impudent mortal, but with a method behind his madness, speaking to a madman in his own language. I too am a danger. "I want you to understand me Nemo. I want you to understand... that Beezelbub has a devil set aside for me. For you." he hissed through cleched teeth in a too-wide grin. "For meee."
I rubbed at the bridge of my nose. "Seriously?"
Splut. He pointed aside and looked at the wriggling spore from the corner of his eyes. "These things think they can stone us and spit in our eye-aih. Don't think you can love me and leave me to die-aih." He smirked at me. "Oh sweet baby. We're gonna get out. We're gonna get out run out of heeere."
It can't be that fucking simple, can it? Keep an ear worm in your brain so that the mind worm has no room to get its hooks in? It sounds plausible, one of the ways to discipline one's mind against the nameless terror. Music has always been mankind's oldest way of hacking its own emotional state.
I looked up with a haunted gaze. Music was *irrelevant* to galactic warfare. Culture died early, smothered in its sleep. We needed no reason to fight than the fight in itself. CORE existed, thus ARM sought to match and surpass it in brutality. Non-essentials were purged, for without victory, there was no meaning. First, to survive, the living would wait.
Yet it is our works that define our identity, as much as our physical features and senses do.
I wondered how much of ARM culture and the arts really really remained, packaged and encrypted in the quantum foam. I was a civilization in myself, but I had no songs to sing. Ah! How I envied these lost children of Earth.
There had to be a solution that did not involve rampant murder. The Arm Commander had spent too long doing nothing but killing, being a pacifist is one choice that simply *did not exist* until all was lost and *he* became *me*.
And I laughed. I laughed until my stomach hurt (and still what an exotic feeling that was, to have internal organs!) and I had to slap my own face to get my subconscious nerve impulses under control.
I pondered my options. The easiest way out of this was to simply throw myself overboard. The Mind Worms were attracted by the telepathic communications focusing on my consciousness as the control node.
Hah. As if I should fear pain and death by horrible dismemberment. No, in fact that made me all the more curious. How would it feel to have worms burrow into your skull through your eye socket? The ARM Commander *chassis* was irreplaceable. The biological command interface? Disposable.
Why am I so affected by Planet if I am neurochemically incapable of fearing for my life?
I raised my hand up to my face and stared at the signet ring on my finger. I cast my mind out - past the terrifying buzz that was Planet's insistent demand for acknowledgement - and commanded:
- AUTH_LORD_PRESIDENT: Priority_Set_One:Transport_Gaians_to_Deirdre_Skye_All_Unharmed
- AUTH_PRIMARY_ARM_COMMANDER: ORDER_SET_ESTABLISH
- ORDER_SET: ACTION_01 - OVERRIDE HARDWARE GOVERNORS
- ORDER_SET: ARM_TRANSPORT_BARGE_MAXSPEED:120%
- ORDER_SET: ACTION_02 - PING ARM_CONSUB_01
- RESPONSE:ARM_CONSUB_01: PINGBACK NULL
- RESPONSE:ARM_CONSUB_01: IA IA CONSTRUCTION COMPLETE
The deck lurched beneath our feet.
I would not murder these Isles of the Deep just to save these humans, no matter how much I relished their company. I could not fault Planet for mere curiosity. Not one or the other, I choose both! I clenched my fist. The sensation of my fingernails digging into my skin felt as if worlds away.
My pulse beat at 96 Khz.
My breath was the ebb of the oceans.
My fingers were a thousand whirring nanolathes, my mind a fracturing multitude.
I had far more in common with Planet than with any human being.
I laughed.
And in the distance, a massive floating platform glowed green.
