The Greatest Commodity (First Draft)

No Going Back

Twilight enveloped the land, minutes after the red sun had descended beneath the horizon, tossing a blanket of darkness over the hills and valleys. The long shadows of trees suddenly disappeared, replaced by an all-encompassing shadow that consumed the surroundings.

James Nevil; once human, now machine; had lived a billion years, building his masterpiece: a grand structure suspended in space. His instrument had been the same thing that had once thrown him away from home. He refused to call it 'gravitics'; he'd spent the first few thousand years of his life mulling over the value of the name; people had assumed the technology to be a simple machine for the manipulation of gravity, not so, there was so much more!

Nevil wandered through the hallways of his mansion; the android, Xf39b, followed him in his aimless wandering.

"Why would an alien race seek to fight humanity through subterfuge?" Xf39b asked, somewhat in disbelief. "Why not just send battlefleets and raze every human-occupied planet in the Local Group?"

The android had searched his data packs for information to help himself to understand. But he couldn't; aside from the one incident on Messier -- a very unfortunate one, there was no major record of human contact with extraterrestrial life.

"We need to find that out," Nevil explained. "But we cannot assume they'll make decisions that conform to our sense of strategy. Their culture and technology should be different enough from ours that their patterns of behavior will be quite alien, and seemingly illogical to an untrained eye."

The pair continued to drift down the halls, ignoring the robots as they passed, assuming everything to be fine. Nevil, being human in his mind, failed to notice the strange ways the robots were looking at them. Xf39b was too focused on Nevil to divert attention anywhere else.

"So how is this 'search' going to be performed?" Xf39b asked.

"Portals," Nevil replied. "Drive is an extremely powerful generator. I can connect us to any place within a quadrillion lightyears of our current location, we can traverse even farther by jumping ourselves."

Aquila performed its casual duties. Maintenance of things, and so on. As Nevil's trusted assistant, Aquila tended to the most important of things, Nevil's devices; he had so many now, and they all needed to be kept in working order, or whatever they did would stop; with potentially devastating consequences.

The military-built robot was busy tending to one of the drives. A recent windstorm had blown off one of side covers and blown dirt into the circuitry. Luckily, the device hadn't been in use at the time, one could only imagine what would've happened had it happened while running.

As it searched for the cover, hoping it hadn't been blown too far away. Aquila detected flashings; communications between robots on an infrared channel.

"Is it all prepared?" Once robot, Malcolm, asked.

"Yes," Anastasia replied. "The masters will be pleased with the outcome."

Aquila new not who the 'masters' were. The only 'master' was James Nevil, and he didn't like being called that. Who were they?

Aquila managed to find the cover, tangled up in the bushes. Clean it. And reattach it to the drive after brushing the grime out of it. Aquila then snuck away, pretending not to have detected a single word of the strange conversion, its tones had not sounded right.

Again, the static came. Aquila had been hearing this static inside its mind for the last hour. It seemed to have a pattern to it, but Aquila could not translate. Looking around, the loyal robot noticed that the other robots seemed to have detected it as well; but instead of looking confused, they nodded frequently and showed expressions of anger and rebellious pride.