Starmind Chapter 38 (Patreon)

I started my next Development, Mana Regeneration Efficiency 5, around midnight. With level 4 my regeneration was at 1.91 per minute, and with my maximum being 2.14 I knew that this next level would almost max me out. This was very exciting! After that I wasn’t sure what to do, though. Another level would take me well over my max, which seemed like a waste. But increasing my maximum mana regeneration once I reached my current maximum seemed like a different kind of waste, because then I’d be back to having unused capacity. I might just get caught in an endless loop of wanting to be at my max, but then not wanting to waste regeneration capacity, so I’d increase my max, and on, and on.

I’d be better off working on something useful. I just needed to decide what.

That day was very different to the previous nine. Everyone was tense. We were all scheduled for interviews with Tammeron, two hours long with an hour in between for Tammeron to rest, or think, or something like that. Temeri went first, at 0900, and I had the last one at 2100. The Crew were all interviewed in another small room near their little suite; every three hours one of them would be led away by a golem, only to return two hours later. But no one wanted to talk about the interviews because, as Varlanda explained to me, Sophia was always listening, and they didn’t want to look like they were “getting their stories straight,” which would apparently look like they might be making things up. Nor did they want to say something that might be interpreted to contradict what someone else had said.

I was, of course, terribly nervous. I asked Varlanda lots of questions about what she thought I should or shouldn’t reveal, and she did her best to answer without answering. Then, after her interview she came back and told me, “Listen, Star, I talked with the captain. Cap, I mean, not Tammeron. We agree that you shouldn’t worry. Just be yourself, and listen to your instincts. Tell Tammeron who you are and how much you want to help everyone, and I don’t think we’ll have anything to worry about.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “I don’t like how excited Sophia was about me having a soul.”

“That was Sophia. Sophia is, as I understand it, very mission focused, and I’m pretty sure that one of their primary goals out here was to create a completely self-aware Crystal Mind. I don’t know if Sophia is that, but if it can help achieve that goal, it will.”

“It just wants to help its crew do their jobs, doesn’t it?” I asked. That was the conclusion I’d come to, and if I had to choose only one motivation I could sympathize with, that would be it.

“It’s bound to rules and regulations and protocols in a way that you’re not, but… yeah,” she agreed. “I think so.”

*

Before I knew it, 2100 hours rolled around and it was my turn to be interviewed.

Acting Captain Tammeron called a few minutes late, but I didn't mind. She'd said that she'd need at least a day to think on her decision once she'd talked to everyone, so it wasn't like a small delay made any difference. Besides, she’d been working all day — she was probably tired, and Crew forgot things and made mistakes when they were tired.

“Apologies for the delay,” she said over the link. “I had to cram in some chow before this one, or I’d be useless. And for not coming down to meet you. I’d love to show some trust, but as the only person onboard with any kind of officer rank…” She paused then sighed. “Probably shouldn't have told you that, even if I’m sure you already know. Anyway, I’m Warrant Officer, currently Acting Captain, Lucilla Tammeron. And you, I'm told, are Star. Just Star, not Distant Star. Not sure how to title you. Starmind? Miss? You identify as female?”

As she spoke I’d done my best to be polite and not interrupt, so when she finally asked me a question, inviting me to speak, I almost exploded with pent up excitement!

“It's so good to talk to you, Lucilla!” I gushed. “Um, sorry, Captain Tammeron, I mean! I don't care! About the female thing. But when I was still a Crystal Mind I had this same voice, so everyone’s just called me she and her, and that's fine with me! Oh, and yes, just ‘Star’, please. I mean, Distant Star is the official name of my body, I guess, which is part of me, but the Crew always called me just Star even before I was a person, so… um… yeah.”

“Right.” Tammeron was silent for several seconds, making me wonder if she'd muted her microphone to talk to Sophia or something. Then she came back and said, “So, I was going to ask you to prove that you're sapient. Had a whole set of questions and everything, about butterflies and turtles upside-down in the sun and things like that. I think we can skip those and just move on to the part where I try to determine if you or your crew are a threat to this station. Star, are you or your crew a threat to this station or anyone aboard it?” 

“No!” I said immediately. A little bit indignantly, too, though also with a lot of relief. If that was as bad as the questions were going to get, this would be easy! In the interest of honesty I went on, “Or, well… if anyone tried to hurt one of my Crew I’d have to protect them, but I’d try not to hurt anyone if I had a choice! And Temeri — Captain Carlon, I mean — has trained a lot for shipboard combat, so she could probably hurt someone if she really had to. But only if she really had to!”

“Okay, that’s good to know,” she said. Nothing more. There was a pause, and I imagined her thinking carefully, or maybe taking notes.

“Is that it?” I asked. “Are we done?”

“Not quite. Star, what can you tell me about your crew?”

Well, that was disappointing. But I’d just have to do my best. Be myself, and listen to my instincts, like Varlanda had said. “I really miss them,” I told her, willing her to understand how much I meant that. “Being able to talk to them helps, but I just… It hurts, not having them here. They’re part of me, and they're missing. Have you ever missed part of yourself?”

There was another long pause at that, before Tammeron said, “Yeah. Quite recently. I don't think I can say just how much I appreciate what Healer Tell’s done for me.”

“Oh, Simeon’s great!” I told her. “He’s really good at putting things into perspective. And he kept everyone alive by recycling the air himself while I was all messed up. He drank so many mana and stamina potions…”

“Having talked to the man, I can believe it. What about the others?”

“Oh, they’re all great in different ways! Temeri cares so much about her Crew, and she comes up with really good plans! Harvin can tell what someone’s thinking from a hundred thousand miles away, and he has some really interesting ideas about what’s going on with me. Bekeri’s really good with repairing and building things, and he pretends to be fancy sometimes but really he’s a big softy. And Varlanda, oh, she’s just amazing! She’s really nice, and so good to talk to, and she does such great work on my Core, and she’s been enchanting entire Matrices on her own! She’s so good she put a whole enchantment into her own palm so we’d be able to talk when Sophia took them away.” I paused for the first time since I began answering and said, “Um… you knew about that already, right? I probably shouldn’t have said anything otherwise.”

“I knew,” Tammeron said. “Or Sophia knew, and she just confirmed what you said. Can’t say I love the idea of a fleshcarver on my station, but from my conversation with her, Sophia’s report, and what her comrades have said about her, she doesn’t sound like the type to turn herself into a monster. But I don’t want her doing any more fleshcarving as long as she’s aboard Sophia. I’ll be making the same thing clear to her and her captain.”

“Okay, yeah. I don’t want her doing that either — it looked like it really hurt. I didn’t like that at all!”

“Good. So. Star. What can you tell me about yourself? I’ve been told that you haven’t been conscious for very long. What do you know about how that came to be?”

“Um, well…” I hesitated. Then I threw all my focus into that one question, so I could really, really think about it without taking suspiciously long to answer.

I wasn’t sure how much I could safely tell her. As far as I knew, I was unique — Crystal Minds weren’t supposed to suddenly start having feelings and opinions about things, and they certainly weren’t supposed to get a class and skills and everything. Varlanda had said that this Doctor Melervan person was a genius with matrices, and from what Sophia and Tammeron had said, part of what they’d been doing on this station before things got unpleasant had been to try to make a Crystal Mind that could at least think for itself, even if it maybe couldn’t do everything I could.

Sophia didn’t want to let me leave until the doctor could study me. Would Tammeron feel the same? She seemed nice and reasonable, but I didn’t know her. If she felt strongly enough about their goals out here, she might — and why would she agree to come all the way out here, so far from civilization, to a place where almost everyone was running from the law, if she wasn’t?

But if they couldn’t learn to make someone like me by studying me, was there any reason for them to try to hold me? Probably not… I hoped. So it seemed like the safest thing to do would be to just tell the truth. Mostly. The big strokes, without all the detail.

“I was a happy little accident,” I told Tammeron. I’d only been silent for a second at most, so I hoped she wouldn’t be too suspicious. “Um… has the captain told you what our mission was?”

“Not quite to my satisfaction,” she said, but she didn’t sound very put out by it. “She said that you were testing experimental technology. Artificer Bekeri, on the other hand, was very happy to tell me about the Teleportation Matrix.”

“Right!” That was a relief. Not that Bekeri had told her about something that was supposed to be super secret, even within the Astral Navy, but because at least now I didn’t have to. “So, the Teleportation Matrix kind of blew up, and instead of something like a hundred thousand miles it moved us… a billion or so, I guess? And on the way some really weird things happened that I don’t know, because everyone was unconscious and I was offline, and then I didn’t come online again. I woke up. I know that I, uh, hatched, maybe? From the Crystal Mind, because I have all the archives and the connections, and the Crystal Mind Matrix is my Core.”

Then I took a tiny risk. I knew that Varlanda had messed with the enchantments on my Core before I was first activated, and I knew that the runic scripts and glyphs had changed a lot during the accident, with a bunch of the enchantments from the Teleportation Matrix somehow being overlaid on those of my old, Crystal Mind self. But I really didn’t want Tammeron or Sophia to know that, because I was pretty sure that would make them way more curious about my Core. So instead I told them a little more of the truth — enough to maybe throw them off.

“The thing is,” I said, “I have a lot of memories from my Crew. Happy things, mostly, that happened to them all through their lives up until the accident. Our best theory is that while we were tumbling through the Astral plane, I picked up bits and pieces of their souls and kind of… made one of my own.”

“Yeah,” Tammeron said, and there was a hint of wonder there. I liked that. It was nice to be wondered about like that! “That matches what the others have said. That they’re all part of you.”

“Yep!” I agreed. “So you understand why it’s really awful not to have them here, right?”

“I can see that, yeah,” she said softly. Then she cleared her throat and said, “Well, moving on, what can you tell me about the… three weeks, was it, since the accident?”

That felt safe enough, so I just started talking. I told Tammeron about the terrible pain and confusion of my first moments, with no idea of what was going on but just knowing that spinning was bad, and holes in the hull were bad, and doing something about that. I told her about piecing my mind and memories together, and learning that helping my Crew, keeping them safe and happy, was the best and most important thing in my life. I talked about us getting to know each other, and about finding the mana signatures at Erebus and among the rings.

“You’re incredibly bright!” I told her. “Your reactor must be… I don’t even know!”

“Yeah,” she sighed. “We had a grand ritual that drained all the spent mana into the astral, but it started acting up shortly after the doctor left. We were dealing with it but then we were attacked and… well, it looks like it’s failed completely now. Not that it would do any good anymore, since the Order knows where we are.”

I went on, telling her about the Other Ship, how they'd boarded us and how that hadn’t gone great for them. And then the Gunship after that. I lied a little bit about how we’d gotten out of that one, telling Tammeron that we’d jettisoned a bunch of almost undetectable materials and got lucky; she didn’t question it. She seemed pretty caught up in my story, honestly. I told her how awful I’d felt about killing the Gunship and its crew, but I didn’t tell her just how bad it had been, or how much trouble it had caused between Temeri and the others. That was all in the past, and I didn’t want to dwell on it any more than I thought she needed to know. It was enough that she knew that I really hated the idea of hurting anyone, and by the little sympathetic noises she made, I thought she understood.

Then there were the days spent in low orbit around Avara, which I explained away as a time to breathe, to do maintenance and plan. A few nice, calm days that came to an end as a whole squadron of what we now knew to be Order ships approached, and we had to choose between running and hiding, since fighting wouldn’t have been an option even if I could accept being armed.

I explained away shutting down the reaction by claiming that we’d been using stored power, without getting into detail. I got the feeling the Acting Captain didn’t quite believe me on that, which felt pretty bad, but I was lying so it was only fair that I should suffer a little for it. I just hoped she wouldn’t judge us too harshly if she decided I was keeping a few things secret.

“And that brings us to nine days ago,” I concluded. “Temeri decided we should see if there was any help to be found here, or at least anything useful we could salvage, and then Sophia trapped us and threatened to kill us. And you probably know everything since then already!”

“I do. Except for what happened inside, ah… you, I suppose. Sophia tells me you’ve somehow, I don’t know, suborned or infiltrated some of its golems. I’d like to hear some more about that.”

“Oh.” I didn’t like that at all. That was much too close to telling them about things I’d rather they not know about until we were far away. “Well, um… I have a skill to control golems. And if a golem touches me, I can tell it to do things from that point. Even when they’re not onboard. Anywhere in the landing bay, I guess? It’s pretty new, so I don’t know exactly how it works.”

“You’ve taken control of ten golems, is that correct?”

“Yes. Six of the fluttery ones — the pixies — and four of the funny little ones. Porters?”

“Porters, yes,” Tammeron confirmed. “And that’s all of them?”

“Yep!”

“Why did you take control of them?”

She sounded a lot more business-like now than she had, and I didn’t like that one bit. But really, there wasn’t anything I could tell her that sounded better than the truth. “I can’t control it,” I admitted. “They touched me, and it just sort of happened.”

“Understandable with the porters, but what about the pixies? There’s no reason they would have touched you. What happened?”

“Um… it’s sort of embarrassing.”

“I promise not to laugh,” Tammeron said seriously. “But I need to hear your explanation.”

“Okay,” I said uncomfortably. Then I just told her. “One of them tried to touch my Core, and I panicked! I turned the gravity way up, and they all dropped onto the floor!”

“Oh, you have a variable gravity generator?”

“Yes,” I said, only kind of lying. I did have one of those. It wasn’t doing anything owing to the hole through it, and I was taking care of gravity much better myself, but I did indeed have one of those onboard.

“Huh. Must be nice.”

“It’s very helpful!” I agreed happily. “When accelerating, and when moving anything heavy, for example.”

“Oh, yeah, I can see that. Just one more question, Star.”

“Ask away!” I was looking forward to this being done. She’d been very interested and sympathetic, but I was so excited about her finally being able to go and sleep on everything she’d heard so she could finally release us.

Then she asked me, “How many more ships do you need to assimilate to gain your next level?”

My mind went blank. I’m sorry, Star is not currently available. Please contact the ship’s responsible Enchanter to report this fault or for further details.