My trip out through the tunnel of my new base was quick and I even spent a few moments near the entrance to form a door to keep sloth leeches out. It wasn't anything impressive, I simply instructed my cr to dig into the surrounding matter and to cut out a round door that could be rolled into place.
I swung over to the egg and once again was drawn in by the slow pulses as it continually drew in energy from the ancient star. Invicta assured me that there was very little I could do to harm it, both in this inactive form and once it hatched. Haha, she was silly. I was more thankful that it couldn't harm me.
I spread out my mixed cr around the large egg and once again thought of home. My older brother would have loved to be here doing this instead of me. This was more his kind of thing. All throughout our childhood, he had been the one to always keep and tame exotic pets. Snakes, lizards, scorpions to name just a few. What would he say if he could see me hugging an egg the size of a van and trying to lift it out of a sun?
It would blow his mind. - I grinned at the thought as I hefted the egg, freeing it from its age-old home. I had to rotate my vision around and to carry the massive thing on my back because I couldn't see through it while holding it in front of me. It continued to pulse steadily while I carried it upwards and out of the star.
Catching up to the habitat was interesting. It was my first time using just my hud to guide me and it was really hard to see a speeding habitat against the vastness of space and the blinding light of the blue dwarf.
In the end, I did manage to get us home. It just took a couple of extra moments while I chased it around the equator of the sun after I totally missed it speeding by.
"Looks like they are expecting us," I commented to Invicta when I noticed that the side nearest us had withdrawn the cr, making a large entryway into the cargo hold.
"Yeah, I have been telling Tutor about your crazy driving the whole time. George keeps telling us to "Leave the boy alone." but this is just too good to not have fun with." She said before making a zooming sound that trailed off into the distance.
"Yes, yes, I missed it... a couple of times. Sue me. It was like trying to spot a mosquito while driving past at 90 miles an hour."
"You just wanted to try it because that is how they do it in movies back on earth. Well, out here, it is always left up to AI to accomplish. Or just maybe you will drop all your previously learned nonsense and understand this one key fact. Isn't all the cr of the habitat yours?" She asked pointedly.
I had done it again. I had forgotten that I wasn't truly a human man living inside a spacesuit. I was instead a mind that was part of a digital system. I could have done what Magus the 2nd had done back inside his residence. He had transferred his mind into the massive construct to feed the captive Leva offspring. I could have done that and left instructions to have my body and rescued egg delivered perfectly while I was busy doing other things.
"Thanks, Invicta. I think I am getting it now. At least a little bit more than before."
"I know. Just take it slow ok? I think I understand why Tutor is slow about teaching you this knowledge. It is an easy way for you to forget who you are. I don't fully understand all the things that she does but she says that we can't let you lose who you came here as. It is the most precious part of you. I trust her and George completely. They are a rarity of AI, they are both solely yours and focused on helping you achieve whatever you will."
This revelation made me make a mental note to have a long talk with Tutor in the future.
I entered the cargo hold and gently set the massive egg down, creating a cradle to secure it to the deck while in transit. The hull of the habitat fluidly swept back into place once it was secure.
The hole that I had created to craft the Alpha cube was quite a bit larger for some reason. The reason came to me when I realized that I had used up more resident cr to hold the egg in place.
"I need to fix all this," I said offhand as I walked over to the wall of raw cr that took up half of the bay. Everything was getting very crowded with the addition of the egg, my Alpha cube, Silvers module, and the book, plus all of the gel piles of nest matter that my cr had managed to harvest while I was off tunneling.
"Invicta... did Tutor instruct my cr to lay off from collecting more Leva nest?" I asked as I realized just how dumb that command had been.
"Yes?" She answered with a worried tone of voice.
"Well, I will definitely have to thank her for the oversight in that manner then," I said when I remembered just how vast the nest had been. Had my cr kept at it, it could have stuffed my habitat to the brim thousands of times over and still had more nest material to collect at the end.
I found the cr hovering off to the side and mentally commanded it to remerge with me.
"Swarm, eat only what is required to completely absorb and assimilate the rest of the raw gold cr contained here," I said as I let it gorge itself on the gold pulp cubes I held inside me. I was about to step over towards the lone travel disk when I instead attempted to simply leave the cr body that I was existing in and to transfer myself into my habitat.
This was how I became the habitat. It took me a second to realize what I had done wrong above the noise of Invicta's laughing. To me it was as though I had simply jumped into the mining harvester body that I had been held captive inside, except in this case it was the habitat and I was able to see both inside the cargo bay and the quickly shrinking blue dwarf behind us.
"What did I do wrong?"
"Ahh. Thank you. That was hilarious. You did the right thing, you just need to enter the travel disk. All of the programming to transfer your mind into your habitat is in there." She replied.
"So... this can be my body as well?" I marveled as I watched my alien cr rapidly working through the raw gold. It was like watching a water balloon being filled up. There was no wasted effort, no human error, it simply flowed over the sides of the mass and went to work making it mine.
"Yes... and while it may seem to be an increase in size, trust me when I tell you that you will need it dearly." She said with foreboding in her windy voice.
"Why do you say it that way?" I asked as I noticed something that she seemed to be pointing out to me.
The Leva egg's pulsing had changed. It was no longer as steady and timed as it had been while inside the sun.
"What does that mean?"
"Mmmm... it means that you have about 3 days to hatch it or it will fuse and forever become inert."
"Well, I am off to take Leva hatching lessons then," I said as I mentally targeted the travel disk and tried to enter VR again. This time I was successful and found myself standing back in the area next to the navigation deck.
"Whew, it is good to be back!" I said as I clenched my hands, feeling the skin of my palms against my fingers. It was the strangest feeling to come back to, being inside a flesh and bone body. I knew it was in VR, but the realism was perfect from what I remembered it being like before.
So I had three days to induce the Leva offspring to hatch? We were currently traveling in real-time so that we could get back to the task of rescuing Silver's sister. I hoped that my delay in needing to harvest more cr wouldn't create a bad outcome in finding her module. I still had the coordinates as to her estimated path of travel while leaving under the guise of garbage from her Core but I also knew that real life happened and could lead to unforeseen events taking place.
I hoped that upgrading my entire ship to gold cr would help to make up for the lost time.
"Kevin!" I heard shouted briefly as I spread my arms wide to accept the incoming body that I had been expecting. Hoping for and expecting. I smiled into her hair as she wrapped her arms tightly around my neck, securing me in a wonderful hug.
"Hey Tutor," I said softly against her head as I hugged her back. A brief couple of moments later I felt George's grandfatherly arms as he embraced us both, making us all into a hug sandwich.
I felt a stir and swirl against the hair on my head as Invicta materialized and sat herself down where she had mentally been hitching a ride for the last adventure.
"Sheesh, you guys act like he was gone forever." She said as I felt her grab handfuls of my hair to keep her balance. Or maybe it was just to cause me to roll my eyes in my head at her behavior.
George broke the hug and stepped back, followed a moment later by Tutor who was beaming up at me.
"So you plan on trying to raise an outcast wyrm?" She asked as she nodded down towards our feet where we could see into the cargo bay. The huge egg took up much of the view as it sat there ominously pulsing and waiting.
"Yeah, you know. I leave home for a moment and see a lost puppy and think, man it would be nice to adopt something that could eat my house in one bite." I said as we all looked down at the new arrival.
"We got this right? Tell me we got this." I said as I looked up at their faces. George, ever practical George, had on a face that I could only describe as one that your dad would have on after you came home with a messed-up tattoo. Tutor, on the other hand, I think she was the more optimistic of the two. Invicta... she was busy zapping my scalp so I was pretty sure she didn't care.
"Oh!" I said as I remembered what we had learned from my resident swarm. "Big update, apparently we all almost died the last time I dreamed. It seems that I was meant to become a host for an invading swarm and not to have obtained a stronger version of cr. Turns out that the monster that ate the ant actually saved my life." I said as I gave both of them access to the conversation and all the events that happened while I was away.
"A new type of energy that mutates interdimensional life?" George was the first to speak as he latched onto the scientific parts of my encounters.
"Whatever! Kevin, come see my new place when you get time!" Invicta said before she jumped off my head and went speeding off into the distance. There was a new stone path that led off to the right of George's workshop and into some trees.
"Invicta kind of spoiled that surprise. Sorry." Tutor whispered to me, revealing to me why they all weren't more distressed than they were showing now.
"Looks like we have a forest growing behind your workshop now?" I asked George as I spotted the dense treetops leading off into the distance, letting the expectation of them being freaked fade away. Some things were bound to happen. Invicta would probably spoil movies for people as well.
"And a sky as well here it seems." I included when I noticed that they had let the environment leech into this section of the VR space.
"Yeah, we have been a bit busy monitoring the fallout from Magus the new 2nd's Core getting destroyed. Things happen very fast since most Tela exist in the System's rate of speed." Tutor said as she fixed the sky in this local area back to the original blue. It was better this way, it made this area seem like a transition point between leaving, command of the habitat, and the living spaces of my guests and AI.
"What is new in regards to the Citizens?" I asked as I noticed that my alien cr was through with its task of absorbing the raw cr. Four and a half small cubes of gold pulp remained and were stacked next to the gel of the nest.
Had the swarm been free thinkers I would have expected them to have disobeyed my instructions to only eat what they required to absorb the raw gold cr. My suspicions were validated that these were obedient drones whose sole purpose was to carry out commands from a monarch or possibly a queen.
"The Tela quickly mobilized to create new dyson spheres to house them all. A total of three have been built and another 36 are in the works. It seems that the attack has awoken an old fear in the Tela. They all fear being wiped out by an invading force. Someone, we think it is Magus the 1st, has been working in the background to gear up for combatting a new enemy. We think his enemy might be you and we have reports that he is meeting with the heads of research and the military powers to gain their support."
"Me? Why me?" I asked as I walked with them over to the navigation deck.
"Voices say that it is because of the reports he obtained about you from his clones." Tutor said as George grunted in agreement.
"Also, why dyson spheres and not Cores? Is it because dyson spheres are cheaper?" I asked.
"Indeed," George said as I picked apart more of what he had said.
"Voices? Like Systems?" I asked as I looked around for something that I just noticed had been missing from my return.
"By the way, where is Silver?" I asked.
"He is how we have been getting the extra reports. At present, he is in quick time conferring with many of the other Systems as to what we should do. He says he really is not geared for all this and would like to hand it off to his sister as quickly as possible." George chuckled as we came to stand around the display of my habitat.
I focused on the mass of new gold cr and on the old Tela-based cr that made up the hull of our ship. "George, would you do the honors?" I asked as I figured that he would be better able to handle this than I could. Him or Tutor.
"What would you have me create?" He asked as he started to rotate the seed-like shape of the habitat, getting ready to form it into a new design.
"I have a specific design in mind, it comes from an old favorite book series that I read as a child. Could you look up the space books by E.E. Doc Smith for me?" I asked as I smiled. I knew that he would read all of them in a second and understand completely what I was going for.
"The Skylark 2 or 3?" He said as his eyes lit up. I could tell immediately that he had enjoyed reading the books in that brief instant.
"Yup, let's form the habitat into a sphere, for now, making a floor for the cargo bay area and habitat for the Leva while it grows. The rest, all the living floors and other odds and ends that he detailed, just leave that on the back burner for now. We don't need to create any of them just yet since we exist in VR. It could be useful if we ever want to visit other aliens though." I said as I let slip one of my exciting dreams, to have a crew of real-life aliens on board.
"I am glad you didn't pick a Borg sphere vessel as the design you wanted." Tutor said. "If you had the swarm taking over would have made more sense."
I couldn't agree with her more.
"What about the Tela cr? Do you want your alien cr to absorb and assimilate all of it?" He asked with a note of concern.
"No... not really, I think we need to keep some Tela technology unspoiled and changed by the alien swarm," I said as I thought about it.
"I was thinking the same thing." He said with relief as he went about commanding the changes to take place. "For now I will gather all the original softer Tela cr into a little gold cr container to keep it safe from damage from the more dense cr while we increase our speed to match the ability of the gold cr." He said as he reformed everything expertly. The new gold cr had encircled my habitat and smoothly shifted into new walls and flooring to house my stuff.
"What about this cr?" He asked as he focused on the new spatial obsidian. "Fascinating light absorption properties." He commented as he began studying it.
"I was going to keep that as my training cr. It seems that the gold cr emits a mutating energy on interdimensional life when you use the "Jump" command. This black cr doesn't?" I said with a question in my tone, still not sure what the corrupted words meant.
"Invicta, can you please edit the habitats code so that we won't generate any cr propulsion or this new alien energy without my command?" I asked the air, knowing that she could hear me.
"In the middle of my shower?!?! Fine!" I heard her melodious voice scream at me from the distance with the sound of splashing water.
George and I both looked at each other while Tutor sighed loudly and squeezed the bridge of her nose between her fingers.
"Was she like that the whole time?" She asked me.
"You have no idea," I said as I took on a fake haunted look.