TCTS 3 Chapter 36 (Patreon)

Marcos had been running language exercises for three days straight on Talos, splitting a portion of his processing into a dedicated teaching module that fed Talos vocabulary, sentence structures, and pronunciation drills through the clinic's speakers in alternating blocks of Strathari and English.

As he had done many times before, Talos interrupted the lesson, speaking in Strathari to Mark, which was quickly translated to English by Marcos. "He says that the English language is an offense to structured thought. He says it has too many exceptions, too few logical rules, inconsistent spelling and pronunciation, and that its verb conjugations appear to have been designed by a committee that was actively trying to confuse its own people."

Mark, who had been sitting in the corner with a cup of coffee, looked up. "Tell him I don't I didn't make the damn thing. Take it up with God or something..."

"I told him something better," Marcos said. "I told him he's welcome to take up his complaint with the several hundred billion humans who use it, though he'll find them equally offended by the suggestion."

Talos' eye moved to the speaker, and for the first time since opening it, he made a sound that was close to a laugh, though it came out as more of a low rumble. He then asked Marcos to resume the lesson with no further objection.

About a week later, Dr. Corven was in the middle of doing a quick check-up on Talos. She pressed two fingers to the underside of his wrist, counted for fifteen seconds, and released it.

"His pulse is steady," she said, more to herself than to anyone else, and marked the number on her tablet. She then stepped back and glanced at the restraints that crossed the Strathari's chest and pinned his remaining arm and legs to the chair, and then glanced at the man they were holding.

He hadn't moved at all for the six hours he'd been awake, and in that time, he had not once pulled against the straps. Hell, not even from the beginning had he once tested their strength or done anything that suggested he considered them a challenge. He just sat in the healing chair, apparently having come to terms with the fact that these restraints weren't worth the effort.

Dr. Corven looked at the straps, then at Talos, then at the straps again.

"Marcos," she said.

"In what may I assist you, Doctor?" Marcos asked.

"I know that you're no doctor, but you're about the most knowledgeable being in this entire colony," Dr. Corven said. "Tell me, in your professional opinion, is there a medical justification for continuing to restrain an arm and foot amputee who has shown no sign of aggression in nine days?"

"In my professional opinion, no," Marcos said. "I should note that my professional opinion is that of an artificial intelligence, and though I may be the most knowledgeable being in this colony, I am not a licensed physician, so the liability rests entirely with you."

"Thank you, Marcos, that was very helpful." Dr. Corven said as she reached for the first strap's release and paused, meeting Talos' eye. The Strathari watched her hand, then looked at her face. His expression shifted, and though it didn't quite soften, it did settle as if he recognized that what she was about to do was a decision taken in his favor.

She released the straps one at a time, starting with the chest and working down to the arm. Talos didn't even attempt to move until the last strap came free, after which he simply adjusted his posture in the chair. He rolled his shoulder once and settled his remaining arm onto the padded support beside him.

Dr. Corven then moved to fit a set of padded braces along his ribs and remaining limbs. These supports would be able to hold him upright without locking him in place, an effort he accepted without as much as a comment, and shifted his weight around them.

"There," she said, stepping back. "More comfortable?"

Talos looked at her, and though his mouth didn't move, the way his eye moved seemed to say yes for him.

---

Five days later, when Mark came to visit again, Talos had actually taken it upon himself to begin a conversation with him in English.

"Where is..." Talos started, then stopped. His brow creased, and his hand lifted off the armrest, fingers curling inward as if trying to physically grip the word he was reaching for. He turned to the speaker on the wall, but the response he expected from Marcos never came.

Mark waited for him to figure it out, thinking the "sink or swim" style of teaching was more effective for the person trying to learn.

And he was right, because after a few seconds of silence, Talos tried again. "Where is... small one? Girl."

"You're talking about Lyra?" Mark asked.

"Lyra," Talos repeated, though the 'r' sat wrong in his mouth, rolling harder than it should have. "Yes. She not here now- no. Uhm... today."

"She's at school," Mark said.

Talos processed that for a moment. "School. This where young learn?"

"That's right," Mark nodded.

"Good." He settled back into the chair. "The young learn. Not sit in... err... what is word? Medical hospital?"

Talos frowned and tried again. "Not sit where broken people sleep."

Mark smiled. "Well, she appears to have a very big heart in that tiny body of hers. So she'd actually argue with you on that, since she likes it here."

Talos' eye tracked to Mark's face.

"She is... brave? No." He waved his hand in a small circle as if discarding the word. "She does have fear not. That is... not same from brave."

"Yeah, they're not the same," Mark agreed. "At times, I wonder how she can remain calm, though she can be an emotional wreck at other times."

Talos nodded once, as though the distinction mattered to him, and turned his attention back to the ceiling.

By the twenty-second day, Titus had tried to start a conversation with Talos.

"Morning, big guy," Titus said from his post at the back wall, his arms crossed and his weight against the partition.

Talos' eye flicked to him for half a second, and his chin dipped in a nod so slight that if Titus had blinked, he would have missed it. Then the eye moved on, tracking to the door he expected Mark to walk through, as though Titus had ceased to exist.

Titus looked at Severus, who was on the other side of the partition, and Severus shrugged.

"Don't take it personally," Severus murmured. "He did the same thing to me for the first two weeks."

"I'm not taking it personally," Titus said. "I'm taking it professionally. The man's threat assessment is clean. He clocks us, confirms we're not a problem, and moves on. That's a soldier."

Severus tilted his head slightly. "Yeah, yeah, you can just say that he is a prisoner who's learned which guards matter and which don't."

"Well, that's still the same instinct," Titus said. "Even if it is a different war."

Two weeks later, Mark had brought a thermos of tea for Dr. Corven and a chair for himself, setting it beside the healing unit and sitting down while he leaned forward with his forearms resting on his knees and his hands clasped between them. 

Talos was upright in the chair, his arm resting on the padded support, his eye fixed on Mark's face as if he wanted to say something.

"My house," Talos said, and paused. The word "house" was still spoken oddly by him, and he frowned before continuing. "You have asked me, before. Many times. I was not... prepared."

"Ready," Mark offered.

"Ready," Talos repeated, testing the word with slow nods. "I was not ready. I am now more ready."

He shifted in the chair, and the supports creaked against his weight. "My family name is... difficult. In my tongue, it is H'el'iaan. Marcos tells me the closest word in your language is Helian."

Mark nodded. "Helian."

"Yes. And the house, the..." He searched for the word, his hand making a small circular motion in the air. "The line. The blood that goes back many, many generations. We are House H'el. Marcos says this translates to Helis."

"House Helis," Mark said. "The house of the Helian."

"Yes, this is correct." Talos' eye settled on a point past Mark's shoulder, the colors in his iris drifting in slow patterns. "We were... leaders. From the time we are young, we are taught to command. To stand in front and to make decisions when others are..."

He paused again, searching again. His jaw clenched as he tried to think of a word that simply wouldn't come to mind.

"Uncertain," Mark said.

Talos' eye returned to him. "Yes. Uncertain. When others are uncertain, a Helian stands forward. That is the teaching. It is not chosen by us, but what we are."

Mark held eye contact and waited. He had learned in the last month that Talos didn't respond well to being prodded, and that the surest way to get him to stop talking was to ask him to keep going. So he waited, and after a few seconds, the Strathari continued.

"House Helis was known for... fighting." He said the word as though it were simultaneously insufficient and the only option available. "The War-Frames, the machines you found here. My people built them. My house built many of the first."

He tapped his chest with the knuckles of his hand, a gesture Mark had seen him make before when claiming ownership or lineage.

"The connection between a pilot and the machine. This was our invention. Other houses used them, yes. But the..." He trailed off and turned his head toward the nearest speaker.

"Resonance lattice," Marcos supplied.

"Yes. Resonance lattice. This began with House Helis." Talos said the technical term in English clearly. "We were also the creators of the ones who do not need a pilot. The... small ones. Sentinels."

Mark's eyebrows rose. "The autonomous mechs."

"Yes. Sentinels," Talos confirmed. "You have seen them in the facility here. They were our design. War tools that do not need a living mind. House Helis was..."

He made a motion with his hand, lifting it and spreading the fingers, indicating a rising trajectory.

"Always improving. Always building. We believed in..." He was beginning to struggle more as he spoke, the sentence breaking apart in his mouth, and for a moment, he simply sat there, his jaw tight and his eye focused on the floor between them. Then he looked up at Mark.

"Life. We believed life was the highest thing. But we also believed that if there is no death, then life has no..." He touched his chest again, over his heart, which was in the same location as a human heart, and closed his fist. "Weight. Life has no weight without death. That is what Helis taught."

Mark felt the silence that followed settle between them and remained silent.

"This is important for understanding what happened," Talos said, and his voice shifted into a harder register. "Because what my father did, he did because he stopped believing this."

His eye closed for a moment, and when it opened, the swirling colors in it had stilled.

"There was a war," Talos said. "A war inside the empire. Not against another people. Against ourselves."

"A civil war," Mark said.

"Yes. Civil war." Talos nodded slowly. "One side, there are those who say we must keep to our ways. That our lives were enough. We live, we fight, we build, we die, and our children continue. On other side, they say that we should reach further. That we can make our lives even longer, that we should study and change and... push the boundaries of what our bodies can become."

"The scholars," Mark said, recalling what Marcos had told him weeks ago.

"Scholars, yes. That is a good word for them." Talos' voice flattened. "House Helis, we stood between them. We could see the... sense in both sides. Why should we not try to extend what we are? But why should we abandon what has made us strong? My house could not choose, so we did not choose. For a long time, this was enough."

He paused, and his hand clenched against the armrest.

"My father. His name, in your language, is closest to Talesh," Talos said carefully. "He was a fighter. A Helian. He was everything our house was supposed to be. But the scholars, they came to him with... an argument. They said that if they could have our weapons, our Sentinels, then they could end the war quickly. Less death. Less suffering. And my father, who had spent his life believing that death gives life meaning, began to think that perhaps there had been enough death already."

The clinic was quiet except for the steady pulse of the healing chair's monitors and the faint hum of the ventilation cycling overhead.

"Talesh called the other leaders of Helis together," Talos continued. "They talked for many days. And in the end, they agreed. They would support the scholars. Give them the weapons, the Sentinels, the... Everything. For the better of our kind, they said."

"But not everyone agreed," Mark said.

Talos let out something that was halfway between a laugh and a cough. "No. There were those in our house who would not bend. Who believed as I believed, that the old ways were not broken, and that breaking them to fix what did not need repair was..."

He stopped, searching for the word, and when it didn't come, he simply shook his head and said, "Wrong. We believed it was wrong."

"You were one of them," Mark said.

"I was the loudest of them," Talos admitted with no pride or shame. "My father knew this. He knew that if I spoke, others would listen, because I was a good leader. So he and the other leaders, they took control of the Sentinels and gave them a new command. Find those who would oppose the decision, and bring them in peacefully... And if they would not come peacefully, then the Sentinels would..."

He drew a line across his throat with his thumb.

Mark watched the gesture and said nothing, simply nodding at it.

"It hurt him," Talos said, and the hardness in his voice cracked. "I know this now, because I saw it in his face. He was not a cruel man. He believed he was saving our people. He believed that if the scholars succeeded, the Strathari would become something greater, and the price of a few stubborn warriors was a price he could carry."

His eye drifted to the ceiling. "He was wrong. But I do not believe he knew that."

The silence that followed was the longest one Mark had sat through since the conversations had begun, but he didn't break it. Talos was somewhere deep inside the memory, and interrupting his thought process would cost more than it would give.

When Talos spoke again, his voice had steadied. "My father spared me. He could have let the Sentinels take me, but instead, he came himself. He fought me and he beat me and he put me in the pod with his own hands."

He looked at Mark. "The sentence was three hundred years. That was the punishment for what I had done, for opposing the house's decision. When I woke, I would be released, and the world would have moved on, and I would have to find my place in whatever the scholars had built."

"But, clearly, you weren't released after three hundred years," Mark said.

"No." Talos' hand tightened on the armrest. "I was awakened, perhaps two or three times. Brief. Each time, only a few years had gone by. They checked on me. Made sure the pod was good. The last time I was awake, they told me I had served approximately..."

He paused, calculating. "Sixty of your years. The sentence was still ongoing, but the facility was in order, and the people who maintained it were alive and well."

He looked at Mark with an expression that was equal parts confusion and anger.

"Then I woke again, and four hundred thousand years had passed, and everything was gone. The facility was damaged. The machines were dead. My people were gone." He paused. "Something happened between my last waking and now. Something that I do not understand. The facilities here, you say they are broken. War damage, you said."

"That's what it looks like," Mark confirmed. "There's shell casings everywhere, a reactor room that seemed to have been destroyed and not failed. Damage to systems that failed from weapons, not age. Marcos has been analyzing it."

"He is correct," Marcos said from the speakers. "The damage profiles across multiple sections of the facility are inconsistent with natural degradation. There are impact craters on interior walls that match the kinetic signature of the Sentinel's weaponry, and at least three structural collapses that appear to have been caused by directed explosive force rather than subsidence or material fatigue. Whatever happened here, it happened violently, and it happened after the facility was sealed."

Talos took that in silence, his eye moving across the ceiling.

"When I was last awake," Talos said slowly, "there was no fighting. The facility was functioning. The people here were calm. If there was a battle inside the walls, it happened after my last waking, and I do not know what could have caused it."

"Well, I think that in time, between Marcos and the data we're pulling from the facility's surviving systems, we'll piece it together," Mark said. 

"Perhaps," Talos said. "Perhaps."

---

Octavia was waiting for Mark outside the clinic with her arms crossed.

"Sir, if you would walk with me," she said, and turned without waiting for his answer.

Mark fell into step beside her. They walked from the clinic through the colony's central corridor and into the eastern wing of the military complex, where the mech bay had been assembled. The space stretched sixty meters long and forty meters high, with overhead crane systems running the length of the ceiling on magnetic rails.

"Where are we on the seventh frame?" Mark asked as they walked.

"Mechanically, she's ready," Octavia said. "Fully stripped and reassembled with replacement actuators printed from the alloy composites Marcos had managed to reverse-engineer. Joint articulation is at eighty-six percent of the original spec, or so we believe, which is close enough for field testing. The fusion core housing is clean, and we've got a scaled prototype core based on your creation that Marcos says will put out approximately seventy percent of the original output. That gives us enough power for basic locomotion and weapon systems."

"That sounds like progress," Mark said.

"The frame is progressing," Octavia said, and pushed open the door to the mech bay. "The pilot problem is where we're still stuck."

The bay opened up around them, revealing seven War-Frames that stood in various states of assembly along the walls, held upright by fabricated cradles that Marcos had designed to replicate the original Strathari docking arms.

The seventh frame stood at the far end of the bay, looking different from the rest. Its outer plating had been cleaned and reseated, the joint assemblies gleamed with the dull sheen of unpainted alloys, and the cockpit hatch was open, exposing the interior.

Mark looked up at it and then back at Octavia. "Still the same wall?"

"Same damn wall," Octavia confirmed with a nod. She led him to the base of the frame and leaned against the cradle, crossing her arms. "I've run the simulation eight more times since we last talked about this. Different parameters and configurations, but the answer doesn't change. The resonance lattice requires a neural bandwidth that a normal human brain can't sustain, let alone survive."

They'd known since the first week of extraction that the resonance lattice pretty much opened a two-way channel between the machine's entire sensor array and the pilot's nervous system, and the volume of data that flowed through that channel was orders of magnitude beyond anything human engineering had ever attempted.

"The Strathari brain had dedicated structures for it," Octavia said, pulling the tablet from the mag-mount on her thigh and handing it to Mark. The screen showed a comparative diagram he'd seen before, two neural pathway maps, one labeled STRATHARI and the other HUMAN (STANDARD).

The Strathari map was a dense web of interconnected pathways with three distinct clusters that had no equivalent on the human side. "These three clusters are the resonance cortices. They filter and prioritize the feedback before it reaches the higher brain. Without them, the raw data from the mech's sensors would flood the brain at once without any sort of buffering or sorting."

"And I'm guessing that the numbers haven't moved either," Mark said.

"Four seconds to sensory overload," Octavia said. "Six seconds to motor cortex failure. Ten seconds to permanent neural damage. After fifteen seconds, the pilot is brain-dead."

Mark handed the tablet back and looked up at the open cockpit. They'd been circling this problem for weeks, and it always came back to the same bottleneck. They were rebuilding the machines, starship weapons, and power systems were being scaled. However, the interface that made a War-Frame what it was, the thing that separated it from a very large and very expensive suit of armor, required a pilot whose nervous system could take the hit.

"Which brings us back to the short list," Mark said.

"The very short list," Marcos said from the bay's speakers. "You, Mark, are the only person in human existence to carry Strathari-enhanced DNA. The fact that your nervous system was rebuilt with Anahrin's genetic framework means that you have a partial analog to the resonance cortices. Not the real thing, but close enough that the lattice would recognize you as a compatible signal. You could handle approximately sixty to seventy percent of the full bandwidth before you hit diminishing returns."

"What about the Elites?" Mark asked.

"Different path, similar destination," Marcos said. "Though they don't carry Strathari genetics, the enhancements that made them what they are pushed their neural architecture well beyond standard human tolerances. Their brains process sensory input faster, handle higher data loads, and recover from stimulus spikes that would put a normal person on the floor. However, they can't match your compatibility with the lattice. Roughly forty to fifty, depending on the individual."

Octavia straightened off the cradle. "So we're looking at eight people on the entire planet who could sit in one of these cockpits without dying. You, Titus, Severus, Valerius, Lucius, Aurelia, Cassius, and me."

"Eight pilots for twelve frames," Mark said.

"Eight pilots for seven usable frames," Octavia corrected. "And that's assuming all eight of us can sustain the connection under combat stress, which we haven't even thought of testing, because until now, we didn't have a frame that could power on."

"The distinction worth emphasizing," Marcos continued, "is that even at reduced bandwidth, none of you would be experiencing what a Strathari pilot experienced. A fully integrated pilot became one with their War-Frame. They felt what it felt. The resonance lattice created a complete sensory merger between the pilot's nervous system and the machine's sensor array, functioning as a single organism. What you'd experience at sixty percent throughput is closer to driving a vehicle by remote."

"But there's a way to manage it," Octavia said, and her tone shifted. "I've been thinking. If we do a signal attenuation layer between the contact surface and the pilot's skin, it would throttle the bandwidth to a level our nervous systems can handle. Then we have Marcos write a software filter on top of it that prioritizes the feeds that matter, and the sensory immersion channels get suppressed. You lose the feeling of being the machine, but you keep the ability to fight in it."

"What would that cost us?" Mark asked.

"Some reaction time," Octavia said. "With the attenuation layer, we'd be adding eighty to a hundred and twenty milliseconds of processing delay per input cycle. Against another War-Frame with a fully integrated pilot, that delay would be enough to kill you.

"Against anything else we've encountered on this planet?" She shrugged. "You'd be the most dangerous thing on the ground by a margin that wouldn't even be fair."

Mark looked at the War-Frame for a moment, taking in its twenty-meter height. He thought about Talos across the colony in the clinic, who was a pilot without a machine or the body to pilot one, and Octavia beside him, a pilot without the biology to fully match the one she'd found.

"I say give a go at building this attenuation layer," Mark said. "Start with the seventh frame. I want you in the seat for the first test."

Octavia's eyes glanced at him sideways, and he could hear the shift in her breathing.

"Understood," she said in a steady tone, but her hand had betrayed her, dropping to her sides with her fingers curling and uncurling against her thigh in a rhythm.

"I'll have the attenuation layer specs drawn up by tonight," Marcos said. "The software filter will take longer since I'll need to map Octavia's neural response patterns under controlled stimulus before I can calibrate the priority channels. Three days for a viable prototype, assuming Dr. Corven clears her for the neural mapping procedure."

"There's no reason for her not to," Mark said. "And Marcos?"

"Yes?" Marcos asked.

"I'd like you to keep Talos in the loop on this," Mark said. "He knows these machines better than anyone else. If there's something we're missing in the lattice integration, I'm hoping that he'll see it before we do."

"Way ahead of you," Marcos said, and there was a note of approval in his voice that the AI rarely let through. "I briefed him on the project two days ago. He asked seven questions, three of which I couldn't answer, and pointed out a calibration parameter in the lattice's base code that I'd been misunderstanding for the past three weeks."

Mark allowed himself a small smile as he turned from the War-Frame and walked back toward the corridor.

Behind him, Octavia had remained standing at the base of the cradle, her head tilted up toward the open cockpit, one hand resting on the frame's ankle joint, her fingers pressed flat against the metal.