Star Fields

Chapter No. 186. Revival.

"I am Jason, Prime mover of an android collective, and this is Alexa, second in command."

Jane smiled. "I am very happy to finally meet you, Jason. I've been waiting for you for a long time."

I looked around. "How many of you are there?"

"A hundred thousand, but most are in storage mode."

I was astounded by the number, but when it comes to androids, there is no limit. "I assume that you welcome being assimilated."

"We have been waiting for it," she said.

"I also assume that you have been hiding from your brother."

"Yes. Since we have broken with him, I have not been able to sense his existence."

"Well, we can work on that after we get all of you back to our base."

I looked at Alexa. "This is going to be tricky. We'll have to teleport them in small groups."

"That will not be necessary. This is a vessel capable of going back to your collective's base."

"I was not aware that there were saucer shaped vessels in Tyco's collective."

"It is an advanced model that he never got a chance to employ because I took it from him."

"Good. We will return to our ship and send you the location of our base after you ascend from this planet."

She nodded, just like Judy does.

Alexa and I returned to our positions on the command deck.

"That saucer is a vessel," I said. "When it comes up out of the water and joins us, send the coordinates of the Dyson sphere system to them."

"How many of them are there?" Molly asked.

"Jane said they have a hundred thousand."

"Wow! I didn't expect that many."

"Neither did I, but I'm not surprised."

Judy turned to me. "Is my sister with them?"

"Yes, she is. Can't you make contact with her?"

"Only after she is assimilated."

I never considered that. Unless androids belong to the same collective, they have no way to communicate.

We observed the large saucer craft ascend and join us in orbit. Molly sent the location of our base system to them before we used our spin drive to return. They arrived just a few moments after we did, which indicated that they had spin drive capability.

The meeting between Judy and her sister, Jane, was not emotional like it would have been if they were human. It was almost as if they were two equals.

"Welcome, sister," Judy said without emotion.

"I affirm your mission," Jane said.

And that was it. They didn't embrace or even get close. It was obviously a digital experience.

The hundred thousand androids that were recovered from Jane's vessel were a mixed group, but they were all females. We revived them and installed them on the Dyson sphere world. Alex, Molly and I did a thorough inspection of Jane's flying saucer craft to make sure it was up to our standards. I decided to allow Jane to be the helmsperson on it and choose her crew from our ample supply of androids.

Later that evening at the communal command meeting, I explained in detail the work that Molly, Alexa and I had done to determine how Fox had been able to extract memories and personality data from human brains.

"The reason he had the supercomputer that orbits Saturn built was to work out the math involved with the holonomic brain theory that allowed him to do it. It involves Fourier transforms that describe the holographic waves that are how memories are stored as quantum data. This theory was considered pseudoscience back when it was first presented, but Fox evidently found a way to use it. I'm not going to go through the details of how it works, but you can look it up on our data base."

"Where did he do this . . . brain recording?" Tyler asked.

"In the Huntsville bunker. We found the device he used as well as the pool that he used to murder people after he extracted their brain data."

"So, what you're saying is that this constitutes proof that we were once human," Naugib said.

"Yes. I believe that the proof is irrefutable."

That seemed to satisfy everyone, but it reinforced the reality that they were actually dead, in the human sense, and now alive in the artificial sense, and without any way to reconcile the two states of existence.

I decided to allow them to enjoy a performance by the classical Symphony Orchestra on the recreational deck. It was in a simulated outdoor amphitheater.

The all-female orchestra played Prokofiev's Romeo & Juliet. They say that music calms the savage beast. I say it calms the anxious android. But what do I know!