Embers After Flames, Chapter 12.9 (Patreon)

12.9

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“I have to say, I’m very happy with how well Raven is doing.” Ayre spoke to me. “So much progress has been made! We’re still working on speech therapy, but aside from that, Raven is as good any other Human.”

“I’m glad it’s working out so well.” I said.

While I had been busy building Megastructures, things had obviously kept happening everywhere else. Raven, for example, had spent that entire time recovering.

As it happened, Raven had proven to be quite receptive to the entire process, and was subsequently acclimating quicker than I had originally estimated.

Raven had regained full motor control and function, allowing a normal life without great effort or mechanised assistance. This proved quite helpful for ensuring that Raven stayed happy, as not having to rely on other beings for basic tasks like Raven had previously had to do in a lot of cases worked wonders for building up proper mental health. Good food, and a helping of treatments to temporarily boost metabolism, had brought Raven back into proper weight, while physical therapy kept them within the proper level of development.

For a Human who could have been mistaken for a corpse three months ago, it was quite the improvement.

Ayre had been with Raven every step of the way. She had done quite well in her role for watching over Raven, attentive and encouraging the entire time.

The only part of the entire process that had been taking a while was getting Raven to speak again. This was not due to some inadequacy on Raven’s part, though.

I still didn’t have the exact details of how, precisely, Raven’s augmentations had proceeded, but by this point I felt fairly confident in saying that yes, there had been malice involved.

Within Raven’s brain, Broca’s Area had been nearly entirely destroyed. Connections had been obliterated, synaptic webs cleansed. This was not damage that could simply be fixed, though I had done my level best to do so. In order for Raven to speak again, Raven would simply have to relearn how to speak entirely.

Raven had made progress since two months ago, going from near-complete muteness to being able to vocalise a number of sounds. Words as a whole were not quite there yet, but Raven was making continuous progress, and Ayre was fully capable of reading Raven’s intent regardless.

Ayre judged that Raven was fit to resume piloting operations only a month and a half into the whole thing. I had since provided Raven with full access to my catalog, and had left the pair of them to do as they pleased.

As I had suspected, the state of Raven’s Augmentations had nothing to do with Raven’s skill as a pilot. If anything, the excessive cruelty of the old Augmentations had been holding Raven back. Ayre spent a rather significant amount of time inside the Simulators with Raven, running through a variety of scenarios and reconstructions of previous battles. Ayre’s own skill grew in leaps and bounds, though Raven continued to soundly trounce her whenever they had a match against each other.

She wasn’t bothered by her loss, and merely took it as a chance to learn something new.

They were both doing quite well.

It pleased me that I could also say the same about many of the other people who’d come up to this city.

It had taken a while, but I had eventually managed to convince Walter to get his health checked out, too. No small effort, but well worth it in my opinion.

Walter had not been a bad state, exactly, but he had been in a rather unpleasant one. He’d worked a lot, taken very few breaks, and over time, that had added up. All I did for him amounted to housekeeping, making sure things were in proper repair... though I did also have to sort out a nerve issue which had left his right leg rather less responsive than it should have been.

Walter had thought it wasn’t that big of a deal, and had simply acquired a cane rather than get a full treatment. He’d claimed that it wasn’t worth the expense. I had refrained from lecturing him, but I had also made no secret of my disagreement.

It had come from his Augmentation process. He had been on G7, and a minor issue like that was hardly uncommon. He refused to have the Augments removed, so I offered him the choice of upgrading to either G10 or C6, and to my honest surprise, he’d taken the latter.

Perhaps it was all the time spent watching Ayre care for Raven. Perhaps not.

After him, many members of Carla’s crew had followed. A lot of them were exactly like Walter- Or, rather, Walter was exactly like them, since that was precisely where he’d picked up these kinds of personality traits. Convincing them took effort, but once I had them believing that it was just easier to go along with it all, it stopped being a real problem.

And then came Carla.

That had been a truly heroic effort. She was so unnecessarily stubborn and willful that it took me three fucking weeks to get her into an examination room.

I don’t know why she was so recalcitrant. She proved to be the very picture of health... somehow. She was nearly a hundred, one would expect some kind of issues, but apparently some people just had all the luck. She did have Augmentations, but they were entirely standard G7 Augmentations, wholly unremarkable except for the fact that they had come with literally none of the side effects that occasionally popped up in that generation. Luck? A particularly skilled doctor? The favour of a deity? Who knows.

I did tell her that her Augmentations were shit, though. She told me that she only wanted to hear it if I was willing to back it up. Carla had followed Walter’s choice, taking the C6 when I offered it.

She had quickly been forced to admit that I knew what I was talking about, the evidence easily seen with how she overcame her old scores with greater ease.

Of course, with her newly acquired ability to talk to me directly, she promptly badgered me into letting her play with some of my toys.

The missiles. She wanted the missiles, specifically. I let her have them. Carla had a lot of fun in the sims, that’s for sure.

Once Carla had accepted the medical checkup, there were no further objections from anybody else on the crew. This was a very important lesson, and I was going to have to keep it in mind going forwards.

Going into the second month, most of them had settled in. They were pretty much all engineers and/or scientists, and the rebuilt Institute City was absolutely full of technology both new and old for them to enjoy. Most of them were just truly starting to dig into the wealth of cool new shit that was present.

Give enough time, and these mad scientists would eventually start getting up to their old shenanigans. However, this would inevitably result in me getting cool new shit, so I fully intended to encourage that. Obviously, I’d have to keep an eye on the place to ensure that they didn’t too far... but, well, most of these people already had a pretty good idea of what ‘too far’ looked like.

Living through the Fires of Ibis will definitely do that to you.

... That, or living in the vicinity of Carla for fifty years.

Either way, the thing I found most surprising was just how... easy it felt. I had kept fairly constant interaction with people over the years, but that was mostly in the context of... Well, usually, a position of significant power and authority.

For the Firekeepers, I was one part military commander, one part equipment supplier, one part Operator, and one part spiritual guide. For a decent amount of the RLF, I had often fulfilled any of the first three. For Dolmayan, any of the latter three.

Flatwell and ALLMIND were the only two who I regularly interacted with as more-or-less direct equals, and even Flatwell had some complicating factors in that I was also the one providing significant material and intel support.

With the RRI remnant, there was significantly less of that than usual. They were living in a city that was completely under my control, yes, but to be honest, that didn’t really change much for them. The vast majority of Humans in this day and age would live in zones where AIs, or AI-equivalents in my particular case, would be the ones managing the actual, background matters of day-to-day life. I didn’t flaunt it, and therefore it just... wasn’t relevant to them.

They didn’t have the reverence that most of Rubicon treated me with. Respect, yes, because they had seen the results of my work firsthand, and they certainly appreciated that, but not reverence. It was refreshing.

I had to wonder how that would progress. More people would eventually come up to this city. It was too empty for me to not want to fill it.

Would attitudes shift? What about the future generations, those raised by the ones who currently lived?

... Well, no point worrying about it now.

I’ll see the future when it comes.

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While I was waiting for the ships I’d sent out to come back, I still remained busy. There were plenty of things that did not use platinum in the construction I had planned.

Around all three of the storage vessels, new facilities were laid. The Xylem’s vast industrial power handled the reconfiguration easily, and I turned it from building megastructure to building more industry.

The refineries came first, as always. Then the forges, then the fabricators, and then complex weave of chemical plants and material foundries. I left gaps around the Coral storage areas, intending to fill them in later with nucleosynthesis facilities, but everything those facilities were going to support could, ironically, come before them.

Well, some of it. I had no real intentions of stopping with the nucleosynthesis plants. I had not even started on the vertical expansion, either up or down.

Still, I was done with everything important by the time that ships started making their way back. I kept an eye on them as they did, awaiting the return eagerly since it meant I could finally kick things into gear. Their systems had reported a full load, though even without the reports my cameras could still pick up on the cubes of discarded, non-platinum mass that had been ejected after purification, set into the same orbit for easy retrieval later on.

It didn’t take them very long to get back. If there was one benefit to having no crew, it was that the thrusters didn’t need to restrain themselves to low levels of acceleration. With the limitation being material stress rather than biological stress, they could go much faster.

The deceleration burn made them visible to the naked eye in the night sky. Ironically, not over their actual destination, though, since the Ice Field was still covered with the concentrating remnants of the Firestorms that were not yet completely done filtering out.

Once they came close enough, I re-established a comms-link with them, and checked over the systems. Three 100% markers greeted me, to my pleasure, and I promptly sent them the commands to divert each one to their destinations before diving into the system records.

The asteroid they’d gone to had been the most useful one for my purposes, but hardly the only interesting one in its zone. The records detailed a lot of interest, and a bit of cross-referencing gave me a better picture than what the PCA’s records had provided.

The ships’ Skyrmion Engines took over from the actual thrusters as they re-entered the atmosphere, making the rest of the journey at a reasonable pace.

The hum they made was bone deep, though lower than the Xylem and effectively non-existent compared to the Vascular Plant.

There was something odd about it, though, which I noticed only after they came deep enough into the atmosphere and only had a dozen kilometers left to go to their destinations.

It should have been deeper. Not by much, only a few percentage points, but the sound didn’t match what I would have expected from its weight load.

Curious. Had I messed up the shielding?

I started a diagnostic of the system, targeting the drive blocks first. No errors, and all parameters were operating well within expectations...

Hmm.

I expanded the diagnostic, running a check on the entire system. Refineries, as expected. Command and control, as expected. Fuel reserves, as expected. Memory banks, as expected. CPU, as-

The CPU scan was completing faster than it should be.

I immediately launched a cyberattack into the system, and just as quickly had my access suspended.

I issued the red alert immediately. Every single military force on the planet received it, and the info packets arrived only a moment behind it.

Because I recognized the code that had locked me out.

Above the city, the ships split open, vast cargo containers opening. What emerged was not blocks of elemental platinum, refined and pure.

It was machines.

A lot of fucking machines.

My own forces were already responding, but I’d been caught off-guard this time.

I pulsed the comms request regardless. It was accepted, after a moment.

“I suppose I shouldn’t have expected you would give up that easily.” I said.

She just had to do this, didn’t she?

“After all, you’re a stubborn one, ALLMIND.”