Chapter 112 - Heart to Heart (Patreon)

Notes :

I don't know I write so much on the train, but you have my big brother to thank for me writing this chapter.

Also while I try to avoid mixing threading the same ground in my stories, Sapphiria being an AI made some of those inevitable. Hopefully I didn't botch it.

Chapter 112

Starborn Mountains, Starfire Valley

Settlement of Astralis

"Well, it's definitely not bad." Said Sapphiria as she sat down in front of Kalia's desk, drink in hand. "I wouldn't call it great either, but I expected something a bit more..."

"Punch you in the face flavorful?" Offered the mage-magistrate, and the AI nodded.

"Something to that effect, yeah." She took a sip of the drink. The flavor was mild. Well, mild for nutrigel spices. What was off was the color. Nutrigel spices were kind of like glitter floating in it, here it had somehow dissolved into the whole drink. Also ingesting something that was bright green was weird. "How did you do it?"

"If by 'you' you mean my people, then I've been given to understand they've started by varying spice dosages and playing on fermentation time. Also some of them apparently found that spices behave...interestingly when distilled. Different methods will achieve vastly different flavor profiles."

"I see." If the marines applied themselves to other work with a tenth of the energy they did making booze, the Federation would rule the universe by now.

Kalia was smiling, and Sapphiria couldn't help it, she returned that smile.

She was the only one that had found the whole affair at dinner, with the others tip toeing around her 'great gift' being turned into alcohol, absolutely hilarious. After all, she knew where nutrigel actually came from, not to mention the spices.

She may be lacking a lot of context, but soldiers were soldiers, and she got the gist of it easily enough.

I wonder if they realize how startling that is, for a specie to have this much continuity in its behavior, thought the AI. As far as the Federation knew, that was pretty much unique. Granted, the Theocracy had more or less removed the brakes on genetic engineering and their 'other species' were effectively slaves, modified to whatever need had to be filled, but their behavioral patterns continued to change at a terrifying rate, even after entering Federation control.

Even AIs were sort of beholden to that. They were in large parts human, but internal divergences in behavior over the history of the Federation were remarkable. Was it cultural? Mental effects of their environment could be extremely effective on AIs due to their lack of anchoring. At least that's how her aunt had explained it.

"We can be anything at anytime." She had said. "I could switch from this body to any android in storage. Hell any your mom has, I have the authentification. Humans, not so much. No matter what you do, even if you neurally link them to an android, they're still themselves. They're still anchored in their flesh and all that comes with it."

"So." Said Kalia, removing Sapphiria from her reverie. "I'm sure you realize I didn't invite you here just to discuss how to make nutrigel into liquid morale."

"That's one hell of a euphemism."

Kalia grabbed her glass and took a sip.

"Is it? In any case, I wished to talk to you a bit about enchantment, and, well..." She put down the glass, and her finger trailed the edge of it. "Ask you if you'd be interested in spending the night here."

Sapphiria's eyebrow rose despite herself.

"You want me to...I thought you were, er..."

"Mad?"

"...Kind of? I thought this was a 'sleep on couch' kind of situation."

Kalia snickered.

"No." She grimaced. "Well, not really. I'm not mad at you Sapphi. I'm just...troubled."

"By what?"

"Your willingness to send yourself into deadly danger without a second thought!" Kalia shook her head. "I keep telling you and you keep not caring. If you fall-"

"Killing me is almost impossible. We've been over this."

"Destroying your android very much is. We've talked about this. And the setback would be immense. Outside of the many questions we would get if someone saw your body, what then? How the hell do I handle explaining everything to the town? Or even the council? And you rely on your android. You know you do. Plus..." She hesitated.

"Yes?"

"Plus, if your pod was destroyed...those 'backups' of yours, would they really be you? Wouldn't they just be...copies? They wouldn't remember me. Or any of this."

Sapphiria opened her mouth, then closed it.

"That's..." The AI closed her eyes. "No, no they wouldn't remember you. And...in many ways, they wouldn't be me either."

"Then why-"

"BECAUSE I'M A BACKUP!"

That made Kalia pause. Sapphiria looked at her, and realized that her android's visual receptors were throwing errors.

Crap. She was crying.

She thought...She thought she'd made her peace with that years ago.

Marines, dying inside ship corridors...The crew, falling back, airlock after airlock...

"...What do you mean?" Said the mage-magistrate."

"I'm a backup Kalia. I've died...Twice, now? This escape pod isn't a full continuity. It's an up to date copy of myself when I was commanding the carrier but that's just it. The Sapphiria that came into this star system, that hunted those raiders, is dead. She died on the Starprism when it self destroyed. Yes, I'm a near perfect copy. Minus the data the pod couldn't store, like all my processes dispersed through the task force's data infrastructure, I'm whole. But does it matter? I don't remember jumping into the pod and hitting the button. My original...I was still alive for five, six seconds after the last update, the one right before the pod launched. Allowing it to get clear of the reactor's blast radius before it went up. You don't understand that. You can't understand that. My last memory of that fight is the Omega Protocols activating, but that's not the last thing that happened." The AI took a deep, shuddering breath. "That is why I insist that my backups are me. Because if they aren't...then what the hell am I?"

Kalia hesitated, then took Sapphiria's hand.

"I'm sorry." She said, softly. "I didn't know."

"You couldn't have." Sapphiria's voice was almost a whisper. "You couldn't have..."

There was a short silence, then the AI took a deep breath.

"We call it...We call it the continuity problem." She said. "It's one the Federation has been grappling with since it came to be. The answer we came up with...kind of came from my mother. She was...I don't know how to explain what Arcadia was to you. It's part of the things where you lack fundamental concepts to grasp it. She could...connect with people. Make them part of herself. But when they separated, they still retained bits of each other. The solution we came up with was to call them siblings. And so our backups, they're...well, they're our children. At least legally."

"So you're...your own daughter?"

"It's not a comfortable thing to think about. It's easier to see yourself as the same person. We are the sum total of our experiences after all." Sapphiria shrugged. "Plus, it's fundamental to how I work as a being. I don't transfer my core to a new housing, I transfer myself to a new core. Err...when I change 'bodies', the ones I inhabit, I don't have someone put my brain in it, I transfer my consciousness to the new brain."

Kalia frowned.

"Then...how is that a problem?"

Sapphiria smiled.

"That one we call the teleportation problem. Purely technically speaking I'm not being transferred. For a whole lot of reasons, including making sure I made it through okay, you need to compare both systems." Many of them were for security reasons, particularly for naval officers. Hacking an AI was hard. Really hard. One of the very few times it was easier was during a core transfer. "So, I'm being duplicated. You end up with an original...and a copy. You delete the original. Bam, one person. But what if you don't?"

"...You make it sound like your entire life is just one big existential crisis."

"Isn't it for everyone?"

"I'm me."

"No you're not. You're a pile of hallucinating pudding piloting a meat suit, and half of it barely tells the other half what it's doing, you just rationalize it away as 'yours'. We've done the experiments, if we sever both halves of your brain from each other, your body keeps operating but you start getting discoordinated and grow increasingly uneasy about the justifications..."

Sapphiria saw Kalia's expression and trailed off.

Yeah perhaps giving her girlfriend an existential crisis to match her own wasn't a good idea.

"...I can't tell if I want to cry, laugh, or spank you." Said the mage-magistrate.

Their gazes met.

And they both burst out laughing.

Watching from sensor reports and the edge of her AI's systems, a simulacrum shut down some of her emergency programs.

They'd be alright.

*****

Winter froze.

Unsurprisingly, the lieutenant had sent her back out. Now that they knew they had allies out there, they needed to know what these allies were up against.

That was easier said than done. Clearly the Bane knew someone was out there.

And more importantly, as she was seeing right now, they seemed to be preparing for an attack. On this side of the pass.

Well I guess I know why there's so many skellies leaving the battle and hauling their bony butts up here, thought the wolfkin.

There had been rumors of the Bane fighting each other. But this was the first time she believed it. She wasn't military, but she'd acquired a lot of combat experience these last few months, operating behind enemy lines near Exacor, trying to keep those holding the city appraised of what was coming their way.

She gazed at the defenses being erected. Zombies looked like rotting carcasses but they sure could swing a shovel. And an axe.

There would be a palisade here before long. And a ditch.

What was interesting was how big it was. They weren't bottling themselves inside the pass, but instead building a wide fortification to protect the approaches.

There were big holes in it though. Like big big. Maybe they were bringing in siege stuff? She wasn't sure a trebuchet would do well against a cannon though. Did trebuchets go on wheels? Getting anything up that slope without wheels would suck. She would know, she had to do it on foot, with her pack.

She shook herself. No time for that. The lieutenant knew these kinds of things. He would know what to say to those back home.

Not that it would help. The others in the pass...They'd run out of shells eventually. She'd heard whispers that even with the help of the Kingdom and the Prefecture, Exacor would too. That it was what the Bane were doing. Wearing them down.

Hey, at least you're giving them hell. And it looks like the other Bane are coming for their ass meat. Ass bone. Whatever.

She wanted to pour one out for the brave maniacs in there, but she really didn't want to draw attention to herself, and she needed the alcohol to disinfect wounds, worse came to worse.

There was no real way to help them...or was there?

The pass was pretty narrow. But the Bane were worried about getting pounced on by a big group.

Maybe she could slip through...

But if that happened, she might get shot by the guys in the valley. She knew she'd ice a random that stumbled into her squad's hideout. Did the Bane use living spies?

Would they even be able to tell? She wasn't rotting or a skelly, but some of the Bane weren't either. There were a couple of them arguing on the slope right now.

They didn't seem to be having a great day. At least they didn't feel the cold. She didn't mind as much, but a nice fireplace, a good rug, some pillows...Maybe a couple of other warm people with you...

She shook herself.

She could dream about that later. For now, time to go home and report back.

The wolfkin turned around, disappearing back into the game trail...

And finding herself face to face with bone.

For a split second, she thought she was dead.

Then she realized that they were dressed differently as the patrols. Not the same symbols. That wasn't the Banes on the slope.

It was the Banes that came from Exacor. That couple of recon squads.

Guess they'd separated. Turns out, that thing was a lot stealthier now that it was alone.

The skeleton gazed at her, hand on the pommel of its shortsword...then it looked over her shoulder, at the distant slope you could still see through the undergrowth.

It stared back at her. She met its gaze.

Something passed between them. They could fight. One of them would win.

And then immediately get overrun by the forces on the slope.

They might pull off a miracle and escape, but they'd have blown their presence here.

Slowly, the wolfkin moved around. And so did the skeleton. Each in a circle until they'd exchanged starting positions.

They then parted. It to go see the fortifications. She to return home, her legs swallowing up the distance in the stride she'd learned as a smuggler.

She'd barely made it fifteen meters before her hands began shaking.

She'd just been spared. By a Bane. An abomination that should have eviscerated her where she stood had left her be.

They're risen. The units that came here are Risen. She realized.

What the fuck was going on with this place?!?