Post by Nireva Hale on Feb 22, 2017 22:24:34 GMT -5
My moods, my beliefs, my desires.
Me alone, nothing to regret.
______________________________David Bowie - No Plan
"Katharos. Internal shroud."
The syllables swam through nothing as the lone figure sat cross-legged in the centre of the room. Behind her, a quiet trilling alarm signalled the receipt of her vocal command; lasting for a second or two before falling silent. So very long ago, the woman could remember her mother - or perhaps even the woman who came before her - being in possession of a room such as this. Back then, it had been made of stone; a vaguely domed structure in which they could reflect and reminisce. While the observatory in the structure she now called home - and had done so for many years - didn't have a decorative fountain with which to draw her gaze, she had a more than fitting substitute to set the room apart from anything else.
Photon refraction technology had existed for millennia. One of many advances to be devised long before time rendered it sufficiently feasible for widespread use, it was the evolution of using harshly angled surfaces to limit the efficacy of now-obsolete radar systems. By lining materials with a complex latticework which prevented the interaction between it and light-emitting particles, it rendered them completely invisible. Over the years, it had been perfected to the point where, albeit with regulation by the authorities of the time, it was easily affordable and was used on everything from military hardware to cosmetic cybernetics.
Just as she had done with the entire outer hull of her home, Kari had lined the interior walls of the observatory with the same complex material and, with a simple command, the artificial intelligence had diverted enough power to fuel the refracting panels which both surrounded her and lay beneath her thighs. Within moments, the solid walls of the observatory began to melt away as they faded from view. When she was able to make the walls invisible on a whim, the room had no need for actual windows and, not long after her voice had descended back into total silence, the room was gone.
Leaving her sat atop a plateau of nothing, surrounded by the depthless void of space.
For at least forty thousand years, her family had integrated itself into the advancement of humankind; from its humble beginnings as deity-fearing hunter-gatherers who lived out their existence in caves to the present day, where the people who shared her physiology had scattered themselves far and wide, navigating and exploring the stars as they had once done with the sea. She had been alive for almost a quarter of that time, watching as her fellow man desperately sought the fuel for their rampant progress. From fossil fuels and combustible gases to rare-earth elements, they had - over time - stripped the land bare of everything.
She wasn't at all surprised when the planet itself had started to collapse. She was probably one of the very few people who had immediately accepted it. Millennia of excavation and drilling combined with the waste left behind by their endeavours had thrown the otherwise balanced and harmless ecosystem into utter chaos. People had rioted, nations had gone to war and, by the time those who remained formed a united effort to stage a mass exodus, the earthquakes and other meterological disturbances were ravaging the populace on an almost daily basis. But, as humanity made its arrangements to either depart or die in the attempt, her family's matriarch had visited with plans of other arrangements for her.
At her behest, she was to remain behind. When she had first met her grandmother back in the twenty-first century, her manoeuvring throughout the years had allowed her to easily settle into an existence as a high-profile businesswoman and, for the time, was extrordinarily wealthy. The billions of dollars which comprised her company's net worth had been more than sufficient to allow free and easy transportation around the globe by way of a fleet of private passenger aircraft. Now, the notion was distressingly quaint. What had once been known as Intellitouch was now the Rahal Incorporated Interplanetary Corporate Alliance.
RIICA, as it was more commonly known, was a cybertechnology and trading empire which had holdings on nearly every world and outpost which was known to have a human population. What had once been a monetary stockpile of billions was now a near-mindboggling list of assets, materials, money and ships and, were the dollars of the twenty-first century still considered legal tender, the Earth of that era would have required its combined wealth - physical and otherwise - to be multiplied a hundredfold to even get close to purchasing half of what RIICA owned. Her grandmother was likely the wealthiest thing in the galaxy that wasn't in orbit around a star and, because of that, the arrangements that were put in place to allow her to obey were child's play.
Rendered completely invisible through technological means, the Ananta Orbital Complex - so called because the word Ananta apparently meant "limitless" or "eternal" in an ancient language - was a marvel of mid-twelfth millennium technology. Measuring the size of a city skyscraper; a few hundred feet from bow to stern, the Ananta was equipped with the latest forms of polarised hull, energy shielding, weaponry, propulsion and enough other miscellaneous amenities to make armies jealous. The entire craft had also been fitted with enough autonomous subroutines to meet the requirements for self-repair and maintenance; all of which was governed by Katharos.
Katharos was an artificial intelligence and, for the most part, Kari's sole companion. His presence was what allowed the otherwise excessively large craft to be inhabited by a single person. Anything that Kari couldn't - or didn't - have the time or expertise to do, Katharos would automatically do for her. "The Sol Remnant." It was almost ten minutes before she spoke again. After living for so long, her voice had become almost generic in nature; any traces of a definitive accent long since lost beneath the thousands of other vocal habits she'd assimilated over the years. Some might have - perhaps insultingly more than anything else - remarked at how she sounded more like an artificial intelligence than AIs did. But that, she surmised, was likely down to having only eighty years or so left before she would be celebrating her tenth "millennium day".
Ten thousand years of... life would do that to anyone. "Give me a status report." Earth; the planet on which she and her family had been born had long since been stripped of its name. It wasn't even something which galactic society considered a planet anymore. Today, it was simply called the Sol Remnant; or just Remnant. The title was quite the unintentional pun when those in authority had needed something to write on the spatial maps but, after a few decades, it was just a name; a figure of speech which had entered into the galactic lexicon. Now just a landmark, the barren hunks of landmass and formerly molten iron hung lifelessly in space, its position showing the point in its orbit when the "galactic accident" had finally lost the life which random chance had granted it like a broken watch.
To prevent it from drifting away into space and damaging an innocent spacecraft as it passed by, the entire thing had been adorned with a gravity cell; an array of rapidly spinning spheres which, through its interaction with a near-limiteles power source, created just enough of an artificial pull to anchor the fragments of Earth to the physical point at which they'd died. "Gravity cell integrity currently holding at 97.39%." The data was mostly meaningless to her. Kari didn't really have to remember anything about the various tolerances to which the gravity cell was able to operate without sustaining damage. If something was amiss, Katharos would have spelled it out for her.
"Total mass being suspended by the tethers emitted by the gravity cell has decreased by 4.34%. Approximately 55% of the planet's historically-recorded estimated mass now remains." Between spatial drift and illegal scavenging which took place before the authorities had returned to install the gravity cell, almost half of what had once been Earth now lay lost forever. "After extrapolating sensor data and behaviour patterns of the pilots, eight of the nine most recent foriegn interactions with the Remnant were benign. Time spent stationary suggests their reasons for remaining were for navigation."
"Explain the ninth."
With Earth gone and various small trade corporations already strip-mining the rest of the solar system for whatever naturally occurring elements they could lay their hands on, the former cradle of humanity had descended over the millennia into a rarely travelled backwater. Humanity itself had migrated elsewhere and had taken all of their worthwhile belongings with them. For the most part, nobody even knew she existed, much less knew where in the galaxy she was. For Katharos to dub a traveller's presence to be anything other than benign was one of very few highlights to her existence. "Craft was detected ten hours and fourteen minutes prior to your inquiry."
"What kind of craft?"
"Small-scale. Scans indicated FTL capabilities and military-grade propulsion, shielding and weaponry." A scouting vessel. Hired muscle for one of the mining corporations. A privateer roaming the system for fortune and fame. The specifics of the ship's component parts were often vague. But, being human, her own words were similarly so. "Were you able to identify the craft's affiliation?"
"No."
That was enough to straighten out Kari's posture and open her eyes. Katharos was a state-of-the-art AI. With just about every known database collated by humanity in its cybernetic grasp, there was almost nothing it didn't at least have some insight on. For it to respond with a flat negative with no subsequent explanation was... suspicious. If Katharos wasn't able to determine the owner of the craft then perhaps, Kari thought to herself, she should aim her sights lower. Something rudimentary and basic. Something even she could have done, had she been awake at the time. "Were there any lifesigns aboard?"
"One."
At least things were being narrowed down. With the Ananta being an obvious - if perpetually invisible - exception, there weren't very many vessels in the galaxy that were designed for a single occupant. Even the emergency escape pods which adorned the decks of larger craft were designed to spirit people away in groups. Military fighter craft were about the only vessels which were still crewed by individuals and they couldn't stray very far from whatever was carrying them. With everything else which had passed by now long gone, this anomaly in an otherwise uneventful period of time was confusing and a little irksome. "Where did the vessel go? Did it leave?"
"Unknown vessel's current location: currently being refuelled in the aft docking bay."
"What?!" For a moment, incredulous emotion punctuated Kari's loud syllable. With a quiet blast of air from her nostrils, she rose to her feet, the tight material of her bodysuit flexing in time with her muscles. Despite Katharos being an incorporeal entity; little more than a disembodied voice which answered whenever she called, Kari found herself whirling around towards the observatory's only door. "That can't be right. We're still cloaked! How did it get in here? I'm the only one who can issue docking permission!"
Other interfaces would have simply spat out a response to the first statement and asked for a repetition of the rest. Katharos, on the other hand, had been programmed to intelligently deal with the mannerisms of humans, even if it was in actuality only one human with whom it ever interacted. "Affirmative. External photonic refractors are continuing to operate at maximum efficiency. No issues are currently detected." Of course they were working. As far as Kari was concerned, the Ananta may as well have never malfunctioned at all. If anything did go wrong, Katharos would have been on it in an instant and, rather than burden her with the details, would have simply informed her about the procedure after the fact. It might have been an AI, but even Katharos knew it was better to ask forgiveness than permission.
But still, the voice continued. "The vessel gained entry after I lowered the docking bay shields." Kari's eyes widened slightly as another pause fell upon the room. This was her ship. She was the only person who dictated who came and went. But, as the AI's voice chimed in again, her surprise and mild outrage continued to build. "And you are incorrect, Kari. Docking clearance was submitted. The records match the vessel's arrival."
"But not by me!!" It didn't even occur to her that she was effectively yelling to herself. Nor would she have minded if it did. With the exception of the Ananta's AI, she was her own best companion. "Only my clearance and my order can lower those shields! Not even you can do it!"
"I am aware of your clearance level and the permissions you possess, Kari."
"The clearance level used in the docking request superceded your own."
"That's fucking impossible!" Had the door to the observatory not slid open automatically as she approached, she would have kicked it down. Having been here for so long, the Ananta was more than just her home. Being so far from what the humanity of the twelfth millennium would have called civilisation, it was the only thing keeping her alive; not that she really needed any further assistance in that regard. To learn that someone had known her precise location and simply wandered in as though they owned the place? She felt... violated. "It can't! I'm the only one here with clearance! Where did the vessel's occupant go?!"
"Movement logs indicate that the vessel's occupant proceeded directly to the guest quarters on Deck Four." Kari's knowledge of the Ananta's decks bordered on the encyclopaedic. Within seconds, she had mentally plotted two courses. One traced the most expedient path for her mysterious visitor to take to reach where they'd gone while the other was driving her along the path to intercept them. "Occupant has not vacated the room since. This was nine hours and forty minutes prior to your inquiry."
"So you saw them."
"Visual tracking was made impossible through disruption to camera receivers. The pattern allowed me to track their route."
With Katharos unable to undo whatever means the visitor was using to hack into the surveillance system, whoever had walked into her home was effectively invisible. The AI knew where they were, but had no way of determining who they were. "Typical," Kari grumbled, storming her way along the corridors. "Let me know if they leave the room." With the observatory being on the same level as the bridge, the path to meeting her interloper was interspersed with a short ride on an elevator. Dotted throughout the ship for the sake of convenience, the technology had remained largely unchanged for millennia.
What had changed was the technologies used to achieve the desired result and the speed at which they were able to travel without causing discomfort. Nowadays, having solved the problems related to internal intertia, the speeds at which elevators could travel was only limited by what propelled them. Not five seconds after boarding the elevator and issuing the command to be ferried to Deck Four, Kari's eyes were opened to the different, yet similar surroundings of another part of her home.
Deck Four, with only one other level of the ship situated beneath it, wasn't home to very much. As well as the docking bays and a sizeable fraction of the guest quarters; which had mostly been added to the Ananta's layout to make use of the extra space, over half of the deck was taken up by what Kari liked to call the Storehouse. The Storehouse was the primary cargo hold, kept at a near-zero degree temperature in order to preserve anything perishable. If she wasn't able - or couldn't be bothered - to go there personally, a fleet of drones was on hand to fetch whatever it was she required.
For a moment, the temptation to summon a group of the drones to accompany her flitted across Kari's mind. They were armoured, industrial-grade machines which would otherwise have been assigned to dangerous heavy-lifting jobs in factories or similarly perilous maintenance tasks; more than capable of both taking or dishing out a serious beating if given adequate commands. With their behaviour, like many other mechanical components on the Ananta, regulated by Katharos, they would have obeyed her every wish. It would have been a fun way to evict this unannounced guest. An alternative was to stuff them into an airlock and hit the decompression button. But... too much work.
"Visitor is still in Guest Dwelling Alpha," Katharos' voice chimed in as Kari rounded yet another corner. Their entrances all adorning the walls of the same corridor, the minimalistic dwellings had been a confusing addition back when Kari had first toured the Ananta's layout. Why would she need guest rooms if the only person to enter or leave the complex was her? Sometimes, out of boredom, she'd slept in them instead of her own quarters; craving the slight change of scenery. There were only so many ways she could alleviate the monotony and, over the years, she'd used up just about all of them.
What Katharos had failed to tell her, however, was that the door to the guest quarters had been sealed. The Ananta possessed a complement of security countermeasures that rivalled - or even surpassed - those of most military installations. Doors and bulkheads could be sealed on a whim; either individually or whole decks at a time. But, to Kari, this was no concern at all. There was a master override code. Randomly generated daily, Katharos ensured that committing it to memory was one of the first rituals she underwent whenever she awoke. Nine numbers which, after such a long time of training her short-term memory, she was able to effortlessly recall without issue.
The attempt at privacy was swiftly undone and, within moments, the automated systems detected her presence and commanded the doors to yield.
"Katharos. Suspend Lux Aeterna protocol."
"There are easier ways to contact me than this."
"Protocol suspended. All systems operating normally, Khalidah Rahal." Kari's expression didn't soften in the slightest as the doors revealed the still-unchanging visage of her grandmother. Every so often, immortals such as themselves would revisit old identities. Able to simply wait until their earlier incarnations faded from memory, it was a handy fallback measure if they ever found themselves unable to come up with a brand new name. Khalidah had done precisely that after realising that her collective wealth had once again grown rather conspicuous.
Intellitouch had eventually been dismantled and sold off to various bidders sometime in the middle of the twenty-second century. Ridding herself of billions wasn't something which bothered her, after all. She'd given away and amassed her fortune more times than many mortals paid taxes. Getting everything she'd lost back and more was child's play. "I didn't want you to think you had been left by the wayside, Lucia." As the distance between them increased, it became harder to prevent relations from becoming strained at times. The fact that Kari - who had been given the name Lucia Cammeresi at birth - had been almost perpetually alone ever since the Ananta had cleared the drydock had made things awkward.
"It's Kari now," she declared flatly, eventually moving far enough beyond the guest quarters' threshold to cause the doors to close behind her. "And I cannot imagine just why either of us would think I've been left by the wayside." Her eyes darted to and fro in their sockets as she surveyed the layout of the room. Nearly ten thousand years old she might have been, but the only member of the Rahal family quicker to anger than her these days was her mother. The small table at the centre of the room had been decorated with, among other things, a solid bronze ornament; a formless abstract mass that presumably someone had liked when they put it there.
It was there one moment. And gone the next.
As the years had passed, the superhuman abilities which among other things allowed her to live forever had advanced. She had developed similar capabilities to her mother and, over time, she had honed them in her own unique way. With the muscles in her legs tensing up, almost to the point she could feel them crackling, Kari charged across the room. As she passed, her trailing hand scooped up the ornament and, once its slender top end sat snugly in her palm, she harshly brought it to bear against the side of her grandmother's cheek, spilling blood and cracking bone in a single swing. "You put me on this... gilded cage of a space station and tasked me with babysitting a swarm of lifeless rocks! For nearly two hundred years!"
"I had my reasons..." Khalidah had been expecting it. The fact that she'd taken a blow that would have killed a normal person? Not even worth the effort reacting to. Aside from physics causing her head to rock to one side - and physical force knocking out a couple of teeth and dislocating her jaw - she'd barely flinched. To normal humanity, the powers exhibited by Kari and her mother were amazing. To Kari and her mother, the powers exhibited by Khalidah were borderline unfathomable. Before civilisation had taken root, it wasn't that difficult for Khalidah and her sister to pass themselves off as goddesses. On a few occasions, they had.
By the time her head straightened up and she'd given her chin a brief tug just two seconds later, Khalidah's wounds were already gone. A dull crack resounded from her mouth as her jaw was yanked back into place. "You know that I prefer to play the... longer game." Her tongue prodded against the flesh of her cheek as it felt around. It always felt odd when her ability reverted her jawline to its natural state, regrowing teeth to fill in the gap her granddaughter had unceremoniously made. "And I wasn't about to let the planet's core remain unattended."
Kari's eye twitched. "This was all for a giant ball of iron?" It was a common occurrence to have Khalidah's plans fly over the heads of her descendants, but to hear that it was at least possible that her spending two lifetimes on a space station was purely to keep an eye on the Earth's formerly molten core? "Yes, but-..." Two syllables was all it took for the younger immortal to rush the elder a second time. This time, Khalidah wasn't intent on simply standing still and taking the punishment. There were times when her children - or, in this case, grandchildren - needed taking to task.
While Kari, like her mother, was now capable of briefly moving at speeds in excess of mere mortals, Khalidah was able to make their efforts appear to be on the level of a cheap parlour trick. Her granddaughter might have been a couple of feet away but, as she pushed herself further and further, her perception of the world around her grew slower and slower. To Khalidah, her movements felt... effortless. Leisurely, even. But, to Kari, she would have seen little more than a blur. A step towards the table was enough to dodge Kari's wild swing. A series of tugs at her granddaughter's forearm was enough to snatch the ornament away and, with the weapon in hand, she drove its flat base hard against the back of its former wielder's skull.
The exchange was over in a split-second. The next thing Kari's mind processed was the sickening noise of solid bronze colliding with her head; an impact which sent her crashing to the floor. Had she not inherited her family's resilience, she would have been dead before her body settled. As it stood, however, she was left disoriented, stunned... but otherwise aware. "I'm sorry," Khalidah sighed, tossing the ornament away. Katharos could send a drone or two to clean up the mess later. She knew that the quietly groaning figure on the floor could still hear her. Kari's wound would have been healed and closed up in a minute or so, while the concussion would wear off in another five. Ten, if she was unlucky. "But you weren't willing to let me explain."
"A.. b-.. ball.. of iron? Whyyy...?"
As if this was a normal Rahal family conversation - which, in some respects, it was - Khalidah sat herself down on the nearby couch, her gaze not averting itself from Kari's prone body. Her duty for all these years had been to watch out for her children and descendants. Forty thousand years of history hadn't changed that. "Have you heard of ferroelemental synthesis before? It's... a relatively new discovery."
"Fur-o... what?"
It would take a little while for Kari to be able to keep up with anything beyond layman's terms. "Hm. I'll put it more simply. Katharos can fill you in on the technical details later. Do you remember the ancient stories about alchemy? How scholars wanted to turn lead into gold?" Back then, such practices were the realm of magical folly. The transmutation of base metals into materials for the pursuit of riches was... laughable, even by those standards. However, after nine thousand years, technology had managed to once again catch up to the fanciful notions of humanity. "Well, scientists just managed to pull it off. Though with iron, not lead. And... into things a lot more valuable than gold."
"B-.. but the iron's... gone."
"Precisely." Naturally-occurring iron was incredibly hard to come by and had been so for thousands of years. However, with technology having long since moved beyond the need for iron in favour of far stronger synthetic materials, the galactic community hadn't really felt the effects of such a shortage. The research had progressed at a crawl, due in no small part to the sheer lack of iron samples the scientists had left. "However, being one of only a dozen or so who remembers the makeup of our former home planet, I had quite the ace up my sleeve. Given how long it took for the iron to cool down - even in a spatial vacuum - I needed a way to stop it from getting stolen while science caught up."
"So... you volunteered me on my behalf." Kari groaned wearily as she rolled over. The skin beneath her blood-matted black hair had knitted back together, the cracks in her skull vanishing in a similar fashion. "You could've told me what you were planning. Explained it to me. I.. I might not've been so pissed off."
"After how you reacted when I told you about my plans for the outer habitat worlds of Andromeda?" For a moment, they shared a knowing smile. The Andromeda galaxy of the twelfth millennium was now a densely populated haven; the various inhabited worlds each a paragon of industry and civilisation. But, five thousand or so years ago, various trading conglomerates had been violently vying for the rights to everything from land ownership to mining permits. Anyone Khalidah hadn't been able to buy out, she had simply eradicated. Back then, she, her daughter and Kari had led a fleet of soldiers, mercenaries and traders. It had taken a lot of convincing for Kari to fall in line but, once she'd seen the proverbial light, she'd made quite the good warmongering general.
The craters they'd left behind on those two dozen "garden worlds" a couple of million light years away, as far as they knew, were still there. "I bet you're... kinda relieved you only had to hit me once, huh?"
"You have no idea."
"So... what?" Leaving the small pool of her own blood behind, Kari sat herself up and, with some laboured grappling with the furniture, managed to bundle herself into the armchair facing Khalidah. "You're gonna... tow the Earth's core back to your home base and synthesise it into... what, exactly?"
"Enough latticed nanosteel to supply the highest bidding navy for the next century?" A small shrug accompanied the smile Kari's grandmother gave in response. "I'm really not sure at this point. This, though, will be quite the investment no matter what I decide to do with it. Our futures are vastly more important than anything else. The better I can secure them, the easier our eternity shall be."
"I suppose that's my cue?" With the vessel in which Khalidah had made the journey still sitting in the docking bay and far too small to really tow anything other than its own bulk around the galaxy, it was the Ananta's job to put the next phase of Khalidah's grand plan into action. "Katharos. Run through the procedures to prepare the Ananta for FTL. While you're doing that, send the drone fleet out to get Earth's core into the cargo bays. All of it. Cut it up into pieces, if need be. We're not leaving any of it behind."
"Flight checks in progress. Drone fleet scrambled. Due to the core's mass and size - and the requirement that the core conform to the dimensions of the Ananta's cargo bays - the retrieval process will take approximately thirty-two hours. Processing power means that non-essential tasks must be undertaken without assistance."
"I suppose that means you're cleaning up the mess in here," Khalidah remarked with a grin, kicking her feet up onto the couch. "How long has it been since you played housemaid, Kari?"
The sound of a pair of heels landing on a table punctuated the response, the figure in the armchair doing her best to recline as much as her grandmother. "Long enough to know that maids take time off when they have a fucking concussion."
