Paul Middleton - Revelations

She had no real idea of how long she’d been here. There’d had been a time when the hunger pains had become all consuming. The voice had done its best to calm her while she was in pain, and convinced she would die. It said she was drawing the energy her body needed from elsewhere. She still only had a rough understanding of this ‘elsewhere’ the being spoke of. But then she also had trouble understanding that the creatures that had broken into her cave were humans. It hadn’t been until she had tasted their blood that she had known.

Actually, she had been afraid of these people.

This group she had encountered had smelled so different from her memories of what humans were like. They had been something unknown, and in her current form, the unknown was frightening. Not only that, they had invaded her home, the place she had become comfortable.

If they damaged or destroyed it where would she go? She had been here for so long she had no idea what the outside world was like. She didn’t want to leave. But they had come deep into her home, and their strange devices had fired things that hurt her.

Finally, they had been something she could eat.

Gyada had to assume that the long thin tubes that these strange humans carried were some form of weapon. They had spat out fire and blunt objects that had caused her much pain. The pain had reminded her of her hunger, so she had attacked for food as well. Then she had started tracking down those who left their homes.

The homes that had been built near hers. She did not want others coming to hunt her. That had been how she had been trapped in the cave in the first place.

She would protect the people here from others, and do them no harm as long as they stayed and did no harm to her.

The second group of new humans had been different. They had waited for her at her lair and smelled of the woods. She had not noticed them until she was too close to them to escape. They’d also had chains strong enough to hold her. It was all very strange, as they had been able to take forms unlike their human forms, but not a true beast form either. Like her children had once been able to take. She had feared her children had been affected as she was. That there were no others who could shift. She had been wrong.

Who could they be?

It was unlikely they were her descendants, since before she had engineered her children’s escape, she had told them to warn her descendants to stay away entirely.

That her family was never to return.

Could it have been so long that someone had forgotten to pass on the message before their death? Could her children have even survived with their unusual abilities, rather than having been killed? It seemed so long ago. She could not remember how old they had been when they had escaped. She lay down on the cell that her captors had made for her and listened, trying to learn the language which they spoke.

It had taken TOM two months to complete the analysis of the Beast’s DNA and nanites with ADAM’s help. It was odd, very odd. The species that she had been transformed into was extinct and had been for tens of thousands of years. It wasn’t even a placental mammal but was a marsupial. Thylacoleo Carnifex , the Marsupial Lion, although it was actually more like a bear in form than a lion.

Neither he nor Adam believed there had been a living sample of the creature at the time that ship had crashed on this planet. Piecing together the DNA of an extinct species, especially one that long gone, was a complex process.

It would have taken someone far more knowledgeable in the sciences than he was. It was more than anyone that had been sent on this mission to help races defend themselves against The Seven had the knowledge to do. TOM couldn’t think of even someone from the group of them happily sauntering off into the wilderness like this, let alone a pure scientist.

It was just too much risk, as he’d explained to Bethany Anne previously. Kurtherian scientists were just not this adventurous. So he was at a complete loss.

He and ADAM had reverse engineered how it had been done, or at least a probable method, but without ADAM, TOM would have been completely out of his depth.

How had someone from at least two and a half thousand years ago, at TOM’s best guess, ended up all the way out here? Not only ended all the way out here but ended up out here after TOM had arrived?

It was clear from the degradation of the alloys that the ship had only been in the atmosphere for eight centuries or so. Ships from that era weren’t designed for long-term periods in the atmosphere. By this point, even if the ship were able to be pieced back together, it would never be able to fly in space again.

The other interesting thing was her nanites seemed to react to radio waves. They’d confirmed the beast was female. ADAM was reasonably sure that she had been human, as he had found sections of trashed programming. Remarkably trashed, as if they’d been deliberately destroyed by someone or something.

He felt this was how she had been trapped in this beast form.

Without the nanite protocols to assist a human in changing back-and-forth, he extrapolated it would be difficult, if not impossible for a human to achieve that result. He supported Shen’s theory that there might be a proto-AI or even a full AI active in the computer.

The fact that the Beast was still alive and the computer still running suggested that they had gotten as far as using the Etheric for a power source, but not for communications, by the time whatever happened, happened.

Without stable Etheric communications, short-range communications radio waves were the most effective method. The main drawback with them was they could be intercepted. The short burst receivers that were within the nanites when they combined in the presence of radio waves suggested the same elegant solution that modern humans used. Burst transmissions were far harder to track than full transmissions.

Still, even with a companion, it seemed unlikely that an AI would be completely sane. It had far more relativistic time on its hands than a human being would, if it was an AI, because of its processing power. What had been done to the Beast, on the other hand, was genius.

A cruel, evil genius, but genius nonetheless.

TOM found himself both fascinated and sickened by it. He dreaded what might be in the archives of the ship. How many planets had this individual stopped on before reaching earth? How many races had he meddled in? These were questions TOM did not want the answers to. TOM pushed aside those thoughts.

Adam, can you see a potential way of reprogramming those nanites without resorting to the Pod Doc?

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What?!

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In your opinion, what level of AI is indicated by the data we have been receiving from Shen’s communications with the machine?

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TOM groaned. Adam let’s not have that conversation again. For the purposes of our present conversation, your behavioral patterns and moral compass may be considered sane. Let’s not get into the fancy definitions of the fact that you would think self-immolation in the protection of your host a point of contention. Simply because you would be willing to die to protect a friend does not make you insane.

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ADAM, there is more to what makes a sentient being than survival alone. If survival alone was a requirement, then I am insane. Bethany Anne is insane. Everyone we work with is. There are some goals, some higher purposes, that fall outside the definition of survival, but inside the definition of sanity. And please don’t talk to Bethany Anne about this.