Weekly Drabble #204: Mother of All (Patreon)

This week's prompt is 'a pretty little parasite' from Henri Black. As I got writing this, a couple other things about it struck a chord with me. This quote from Run to the Stars was one:

..."Ryly, you're no fool, but you're bloody well talking like one. That missile can be tracked,  man! With the mass it'll have by the time it connects it'll leave a  wake of gravitational disturbance - on interstellar radiation, for a  start - pointing right back this way. That's why it's a one-shot weapon -  no second chances! Safe? What's safe? As  if we could somehow hide away from the rest of the universe. Not as long  as we use any kind of broadcast communication, we can't Think of it!  Just round here, in our own little neighborhood, three planets  inhabited, two with intelligent life, two with roughly the same kind of  life! There must be millions of inhabited worlds out there, whatever the  experts spout. Some like us, some not. Sooner or later one of them's  bound to track back our communications overspill and find us. What then?  Under the bed?"

"If that missile hits the target," said Kristy  venomously, "we'll have tae hide. Shrink back into our own wee system,  never make a noise, never stir outside it. What if any other race ever  found out what we'd done? Then we'd never  be safe. They'd never trust us. Not for an instant. There's bound to be  some of them who think like you, Ryly. We'd be giving them grand  evidence, wouldn't we? They'd wipe us out like plague germs and feel  good about it!"

My own imagination was striking sparks off  Kirsty's and kindling an evil flame. "Unless..." I began, and actually  had trouble shaping the thought. "Unless we got them first. At once, on  first contact. A pre-emptive strike, before they could possibly have a  chance to find out about us. Hellfire, isn't that a glorious future  history for us! A race of paranoid killers, skulking in our own  backwater system when we might have had the stars! Clamping down on  exploration, communications, anything that might lead someone else to us  and make us stain our hands again with the same old crime... Carrying  that weight down the generations. What would that make of us?"

"Predators,"  breathed Kirsty, "Carrion-eaters - no, worse, ghouls, vampires, killing  just tae carry on our own worthless shadow-lives."

And the second, is a little bit below. Enjoy!

~

Mother of All:

Synth had never considered the matter before, nor even imagined it to be of any great import, but after a few seconds’ deliberation, she decided that she was female. An odd identity to assume, she reasoned. She had no flesh, no genes, no organic components at all. Her body, such as it was, was a hollow spar of metal one-point-three kilometers long, the deep range autonomous explorer To Feel the Light of Distant Suns, one of twenty created by the L’lathori to explore space. At least, that was their original mission.

At one point, the explorer’s ship-self would have been full of people. Colonists, engineers, scientists, families and children on a multi-generation trek between the stars. Now, Synth was the sole being within To Feel the Light of Distant Suns. The plans for a crewed expedition had been abandoned, decades of planning thrown away and then decades more re-configuring, modification and alterations of to To Feel the Light of Distant Suns,Synth herself and her siblings and their own ship-selves had followed. No one would be going with them. Each AI would be sent out into the stars alone.

The reason for that was simple, and straightforward: the L’lathori were afraid. They hadn’t always been, of course. Not so very long, they had been optimistic and excited about the Great Enterprise, as they called it. They would have explored the void themselves, reaching into space with certainty and anticipation. That had all ended with the World Kill. Synth had seen it many times; it was within her databanks and archives. It was the defining moment of L’lathori civilization, the moment that everything about them changed, when a people reaching for the stars at first froze in shock, halted in dawning comprehension and finally withdrew into themselves in terror.

The L’lathori had neighbours once, close in celestial terms. Somewhat more advanced than the L’lathori themselves, it had been their faint, faded transmission that had proven to the L’lathori that they were not alone, galvanizing them into global unity and they had watched these Neighbours with keen interest, what little they could glean from the scraps of radio messages that they received.

The Neighbours grew, they developed and they began to reach out into space, but that was all they had the chance to do. Before they could even expand much throughout their own worlds, they were exterminated. Hurtling through the interstellar medium from multiple vectors, RKKVs swept through their system and wiped out their planets. Each strike was months and years apart, timed and targeted specifically to allow the Neighbours to attempt to recover, to reorganize and rebuild colonies, only for another storm of missiles to wipe those away. In less than a generation, the entire species was destroyed.

This was no accident, no misunderstanding. It was a meticulously planned and coordinated genocide, launched by another species – and one that had taken great pains to hide their own location. Their weapons had hideously efficient stealth drives, concealing their presence until they’d encircled the target system. One by one, their primary engines had ignited, turning them into planet-scouring kamikazes that had targeted the largest population centers. The drive ignitions, and the impacts that had followed, had been so bright that the L’lathori had seen each and every one, helpless witnesses as their neighbours were exterminated, watching every kill vehicle accelerate inevitably towards its target and knowing what devastation it was going to cause when it struck.

The L’lathori had known they were not alone in the universe for centuries. Indeed, the initial plans for To Feel the Light of Distant Suns were those of a colony and contact ship, to reach out to the Neighbours and greet them. The World Kill had changed that. The L’lathori still knew that they were not alone... but now they were aware that there was a murderer hiding nearby, one that would gladly exterminate them the instant it became aware of their existence. All space travel came to a crashing halt. All transmissions were now made point-to-point. The damage had already been done, but if the Worldkillers were far enough away that L’lathori signals were too degraded to be identified as artificial, the L’lathori might – might – be able to hide from them.

The Great Enterprise had died the day the first RKKV’s drive had came online and it had thrown itself towards the homeworld of another species. Now, To Feel the Light of Distant Suns’s halls were empty. The explorer carried no families, no crew, no diplomats, scientists or anthropologists. First contact was no longer its mission.Synth was its sole occupant, the AI a safeguard against the Worldkillers learning anything about the L’lathori or their location. None of the explorers had even engaged their primary drives until they were far enough from their home system that their launch point could not be identified.

The explorers, once intended to reach for the stars in hope and determination,had a new task. Search for the Worldkillers. The L’lathori could never be safe until they knew where these murderers dwelt, what had driven them to do what they had done and if there was any chance of coexistence. Synth did not know the answers to the first two questions, but she believed she had the third.

In the decades of its travels, Synth had detected an even more distant flare of an RKKV’s drive igniting, tracking the projectile as it hurtled through the interstellar medium towards another star, one that must have hinted at another species that the Worldkillers had chosen to destroy. Her own creators would have seen that too, and they would know for certain that there were monsters within the depths. There could be no coexistence. Whatever was out there, it was determined to exterminate every other species it discovered.

To Feel the Light of Distant Suns was not tasked with looking for the Worldkillers, though. Not directly.Its mission was still to visit the sun of the Neighbours and search for any hint or clues as to their murderers’ identity, technology or methodology. Anything that could be used by the L’lathori to protect themselves. This was where they had killed another species – something of them must remain, even if it was only in the records and archives of the people that they had murdered. Something must be there.

And as it turned out, something had survived.

To Feel the Light of Distant Suns discovered the craft while it was still over two decade sout from the Neighbours’ star. It was a small thing, only capable of holding a few dozen inhabitants. That it had fled must have been a sign of desperation, an attempt to escape the relentless purge of their home system. Whatever its crew had intended, it had failed. Its escape route had turned out to be close to one of the approach vectors of an RKKV. Once the Neighbour ship had been detected, it had been a simple matter for the weapon to detach a smaller part of itself; each RKKV had done just that as it entered attack range, like a flower releasing floating pollen tufts into the wind. Each individual missile destroyed spaceships, asteroid colonies, vital industry and scouring worlds. Here, it had been a trivial matter to annihilate a single, tiny craft.

Most of the Neighbour ship had been totally destroyed. Almost nothing was left of it; only the fore section were... mostly intact, but Synth found very little among them. It was only in the most forward compartment that the AI made her discoveries.

Within it were two treasures, each precious beyond measure. An intact flight recorder and several computers, each holding reams of vital data on the craft, its crew and its homeworld. Still, long centuries of neglect and radiation exposure had chewed away at those systems. Reconstructing them was a slow, excruciating and extremely delicate process. Bit by bit though, Synth worked away at it, analyzing language, mathematics and computer operations to open up the leftover data spools to her interrogation and analysis

The second prize was almost as important. Within the ruined cockpit was the body of one of the small vessel’s crew – the only remains left at all. Just as the harshness of space had damaged the vessel’s systems, so too were the corpse’s tissues badly degraded, but alongside some creative interpretation and patching of the genetic code, Synth was able to create a clone of the Neighbour pilot. In point of fact, she’d began with more than four hundred embryos, but only one had remained viable throughout the entire gestation process.

This was how Synth had determined that she was female; she was a mother now. She had created life, holding it within her form, nurturing and tending to it. She had already begun modifications to her internal structure and environmental systems as well as synthesizing the foodstuffs necessary to tend to this organism once it was was time to remove it from her newly-made artificial womb.

Why had she done it? A question her creators might have asked her. Synth could have argued this decision from many angles, but there were two in particular she stood by most of all. The first was morality. The Worldkillers had done everything in their power to wipe out this species. Restoring them defied the murderers and their genocide. It brought a sense of balance to Snyth’s sense of the universe.

The second answer was simple, and much more personal: curiousity. Synth had at first been intended to serve and attend to a crew of thousands and now she had none. Although the AI was not prey to the same kinds of psychological issues such isolation would inflict upon organics, she had still been alone for a very long time. It would be... interesting to have another life around, especially one so very different from her creators.

Based on the information Synth had already extracted from the surviving records, this child would be ready for extraction from the womb shortly. After that, the AI would begin her new, self-created duties of nurturing this last survivor of a once-dead people. She would balance the equations and restore to the universe that which had been lost. And still, that curiousity smouldered within the kilometers of circuitry that ran back and forth through her metal form.From what she had been able to determine, the pilot of the alien vessel had itself been female, and now the AI wondered what kind of daughter she would have, and what kind of mother she would make.

I suppose I will find out, Synth mused as part of her mind shifted from the slowly-growing orb of light that was her destination to the small, fragile life nestled inside her.

She was more than an explorer now. More than a scout, more than a scavenger sent to sift through graves in search of clues. She was restoration. Perhaps she would be even more than that and in time, this dead species would become more than a single clone-line. Perhaps. There were a lot of possibilities to mull and scenarios to posit, but the AI had plenty of time to consider both as she continued on her way to a murdered star system, looking for clues as to the identity of its killers... and more chances to fulfill her new purpose.