Our first week together went by in a flash. Ess and I enjoyed the same hobby, sharing an insatiable curiosity for exploring space and the mysteries it held. She was always mimicking me, asking me what I was looking at and why I found it interesting. I tried to mimic her once and ended up learning something amazing about her. She always seemed to be looking at things differently, with her head tilted at angles seemingly at odds with the orientation of her body. When I tried it, finding nothing special about it, I decided to ask her why she was doing it.
It turns out, she can feel and see light in more ways than I expected. Not only could she see it, but she could see the direction that it was coming from and was highly sensitive to any fluctuations, almost like a person could hear sound and notice extra noises in 3D. She described it to me like someone would describe looking out over the ocean, as though she could see the waves and watch the patterns that would indicate rocks just below the surface.
I asked Tutor how she was doing it and she explained it like Ess was using her whole body as a lens, making her able to catch and filter the waves of light touching her.
To me, a being that only tended to use a limited spectrum of sight, talking with Ess who used almost all spectrums and who understood it more fundamentally, was crazy. It almost seemed like I was the blind one in the conversation, simply how she tried to describe what she could sense and see.
Meditati and Tutor also seemed to learn a lot from Ess about Leva during these conversations. I gathered from Tutor that the Tela had initially used the Leva as mine detection pets back when they were running away during the war. Meditati said that it answered the key bit of information that they were missing about the Leva's secret extra sense, as though they could see what even the most advanced technology missed. When I asked why they hadn't tried to see if they could get a Leva to talk like Ess did, she simply gave me a curious look and told me that they actually had tried under experimental conditions.
"The fact is, Kevin," she had told me, once she managed to get my attention to pull me away in VR. "No Leva has ever, in all of our history files, ever shown this level of intelligence. The only ones that come even remotely close are those that are super ancient and living in the heart of galaxies. Something about Sublimis makes her special."
I thought about it for several moments before something clicked. The Leva King had said that they were his offspring. What if they existed in a starved state on this side of the dimensional divide? Only those who managed to absorb massive amounts of energy, in this case, the energy from the next dimension that was only accessible by being close to the core of a star, ever matured enough to become as smart and as wise as he was. Ess's egg had fallen deeper inside the star that I had found her lost in.
"She was in direct line of sight to the core..." I muttered aloud.
"What?"
"Oh, nothing yet. I may need you later to test something though if you are interested." I said, knowing that she was addicted to knowledge and would jump on any new secret.
She rolled her eyes at me before vanishing, leaving a funny bit of text for me to read before I returned to exploring with Ess.
"He knows that I know that he knows that I know that he knows that I love to know."
Yup, she knew.
Ess and I stayed away from clearly inhabited systems, choosing to steer clear of the LOW and Tela space highway that ran through this galaxy, and instead chose to path our way towards strange systems and places that might have once held life.
At first, flying through space like a superhero was exhilarating, but that changed after a couple of hours. I ended up hollowing out and shrinking much of my body so that I could make a couch and the shell of a small spaceship around us. It felt better this way, as though my body belonged, rather than my legs always seeming to be pointing off towards nothing.
I still had a fear of Jaws it seemed.
While we traveled, lounging in style, we talked, and Ess asked me about my life before she was hatched. She understood that I was different from her, even acknowledging that I wasn't the same species. She didn't get hung up on that, thankfully, and Tutor said it had something to do with how Leva hatchlings bonded with their parents when they were born. If they accepted you as a parent figure, then there was nothing you could do to change that image. Tutor was beginning to formulate that the same thing went for those who failed, like Magus. As it turns out, he probably failed within the first few moments of his hatchlings being hatched and had never understood that the moment had passed for him.
I told her everything that I could about my life, trying to stem the tide of her infinite questions, and eventually had to resort to watching movies of my memories together.
It was the best experience, movie nights with my Leva hatchling.
After a couple of such events, Invictus and the rest of the AI joined us as well, manifesting and introducing themselves to Ess if they hadn't done so earlier. This led to more stories being told, as each of the AI got to tell their tale about how they met me and a little about their lives from before. This led to much of the empty travel time between star systems being filled with us all relaxing on couches and watching each other's memories. Ess enjoyed laying across my lap with all of her rapt attention on the virtual screen. By this time, with so many present, my size was reduced to just about the same size as Ess, her head laying across my lap and her length curled into a big pancake shape, crushing the cushions.
Ess's ability to watch movies with us was accomplished with upgrades that George had worked out, letting Ess's helm project and share our VR for her to see. It took her a little getting used to it and she kept saying that the light was all wrong and so plain. After hearing how she saw, I could totally understand her complaints. George said that he would keep tinkering with it for her and he would occasionally pop in with upgrades for her to give him feedback on.
This time together was a time for learning, not just for Ess, but for myself as well.
I learned that she was not human regardless of how the helm managed to make her seem so. Don't get me wrong, I knew this completely, it was just so much more prevalent the more I got to know her. For one thing, she was highly aggressive, almost to the point where it seemed as though her mission in life was to constantly see if she could overpower me.
Not kill me, mind you, only become the dominant entity.
This turned out to be an ingrained racial trait, common to all Leva and it required me to have to be more heavy-handed with her than I would ever have been with a creature I considered a child. The bright side of this trait was that it wasn't constant, she would try something and then, when I put her in her place, she would settle down. The problem was this trip was teaching her so many new things about me and was constantly giving her new ideas for her to try out.
One such example was the moment when she learned that I don't see like she does. She managed to learn that I mainly tended to see just a limited spectrum of light, seeing as that was what I was born with, and preferred to see colors in that spectrum. The moment she figured this out she vanished from my sight, specifically instructing her helm and armor to emit specific wavelengths of light, and the next thing that I knew she was trying to smash me into the far reaches of space with her mighty headbutts. It only took me a second to flush the area with tiny swarm dust, letting me easily see where she was at all times. I tied her into a pretzel shape that time, she didn't like it, grumbling to me that it gave her tail energy cramps that she had to work out.
It worked though and stopped her from doing that exact attack again until she could figure out something new.
The funny thing was, I quickly figured out when she was getting antsy.
She would sit there, doing something with her internal energy, and then "Pow!" all of a sudden try to headbutt my chest. It kind of reminded me of a kitten, playing with its parents and always trying to jump out and scare them. Because of this knowledge and the fact that I wanted her to be as powerful as she could be for the times when I would not be around, I didn't dissuade this behavior and even told her, or let Invicta tell her, how she could improve.
Every time she would headbutt me I would tell her just how much harder it was than the last time. She hadn't yet been able to hurt me, not even slightly, but surprisingly I was actually starting to feel the impacts.
It all had something to do with her internal energy.
We learned that, when she was hatched, the reason why she had attacked for twelve hours straight was because she thought I was trying to give her time to improve herself, as though my passive behavior was me finding her weak and unworthy until she improved enough. In those hours, she had learned how to cycle her energy, not just inside her mind but throughout her entire body, making her into a little Leva bodybuilder.
Besides being aggressive, she was also very defensive towards me as her parent. She, without thought, would try to attack anyone who became aggressive towards me, even while we were reliving my memories and watching movies together on a VR screen. One such memory, about a bully that accosted me while we were all out on the playground playing soccer as a child, quickly found Ess attacking the VR screen that we were all watching the memory on.
It was very interesting behavior to witness, her entering a frenzied state, even while she spoke and retained lucid conversations about her rising aggression. We also learned that she had a memory like an elephant and would always remember anyone who harmed her parent. In the end, the only thing that we could come up with to solve this issue and to get her to calm down was to create a simulation where she got to beat down the wrongdoer and they would kowtow and ask me for my forgiveness. This behavior seemed to reset Ess's aggression towards them. She still paid more attention to when they were part of my memories, but she wouldn't flex her spikes, blast her photon bulbs at max power, and try to flatten their image on the wall with her head.
Everything was going well, the first week had passed and we were heading towards the outer far edge of one of the spiral limbs, where an interesting nebulous cloud existed.
And then I got cut off.
Instantly, like a hot knife through butter, my connection through my swarm to the distant body that was currently racing Ess through asteroids was gone. Instead of an expanse of darkness lit dimly by a purple and green haze of glowing gasses, I was suddenly staring out through the right eye socket of the swarm body my drone body resided inside. It seemed that Nurse had decided to shift the little trapped drone body forward, covering it with an image of an eye just in case this might happen again.
Everything else was gone. I had no connection to Nurse, VR, or the outside world beyond my basic senses. Even inside my personal pocket space Nurse was missing. It was just me and an expanse of clouds with no swarm copies living below.
Just me.
Around me the body that held my little drone prison continued to function and go about whatever it had been doing before my connection out was cut off. From my first impressions, it appeared as though my copy had decided to go for a jog in the early morning even though the weather seemed slightly inclimate. It was a pretty view, a bit drizzly and wet, and not something that would normally see joggers putting on their sneakers to get out into. Regardless, it seemed like a good choice and something that I might have been doing to destress and to just absorb the sights of the world under Meditati's influence.
We must have been jogging on a bike trail that ran around some farms because the view was very rural and there weren't any people in sight.
"This body is currently out for a morning jog; the weather is a perfect balmy and cool temperature with a slight breeze coming in from the north." The body that I was in started to say, making me laugh inside my head a little as I noticed it change its tone from sounding exactly like me to something else. My swarm knew me and how hearing myself talking to myself without having any control would cause me to remember my lack of control. At least this way, sounding like someone else would remind me that my swarm, though outside of me, was working as a separate entity to fix me with all the power they could muster.
"No one else has yet to detect your absence, as per your instructions to keep it quiet in case it happened again, and Nurse is on her way." He said, as less than a couple of seconds later the air in front of us on the trail warped from Nurse sending swarm over. Her body formed so fast that, to an observer, she might have simply looked like she stepped from behind a tree or through a hole in the air.
"Kevin? Does this mean that another of the seven is dying or something else has happened?" She asked, making me wonder as well. "Your memories say that there are only two options short term for us to choose between. The first is to wait for whoever was supposed to pick up the slack to get to it or for you to go to sleep and to send your mind to them so that you can get them to fix this." She said, her opal-colored eyes looking at where my little body was contained with worry.
"It is still unfortunate that we can't affect the void seedling in any way, it is almost as though its shell is as impervious to cr as your materials are." She said as she stepped closer, filling up my view with her beautiful face. "If you choose the second option, just please be careful."
I waited an hour and when nothing changed, I put myself to sleep and sent my mind towards where I hoped I would find one of the seven.
Hopefully, we could get this fixed, it was too early for this to happen.
---
"General! Reports are coming in about another cosmic event taking place!" a cry came out from one of the scientists who had been tasked with researching any history or past research that might be able to guide their progress in weaponizing the now five-ish mindless alien bodies that they were studying. Anything would help since their research had stalled. They had split the first subject in half and had observed in rapt wonder as it had regrown completely, leaving them with two whole, yet mindless alien husks to study.
Since they now had more subjects, new departments were created and the go-ahead to create more copies for each department had been granted. The scientists noticed after the third division that the regrowth slowed considerably. The fifth and sixth regrowth's had taken days to fully regrow. After they cut the sixth in half it actually started to decay, as though it was cannibalizing itself to destruction. No further divisions of the creature had been conducted, lest they lose the only subjects that they had.
Yes, they had also discovered that cr propulsion energy could revitalize the cells of the aliens, but they had decided to put a freeze on that option after the subject they had tested it on, the same one that had started to cannibalize itself into oblivion, had seemingly exploded in growth, filling and damaging the lab and ship that it was inside with randomly growing cells.
It was uncontrollable and insanely rapid in its growth. Something that would be viable as a bomb and to be studied further at a later date. Currently, it wasn't the direction that the General was looking to go though. All of the nanobots within the cr that had been part of the ship had been irreparably damaged, thus making it only suitable for cases where you wanted to completely remove your own kind and to leave a lump of indestructible flesh behind. The Tela had plenty of bombs and didn't need an alien cell bomb... yet.
As for the research stalling... Magus couldn't pinpoint the reason why it bothered him. It almost seemed as though they had all realized something at the same time and had simply stopped pressing forward with groundbreaking discoveries.
It was troubling, an itch that felt like it was almost about to be scratched but then nothing came.
Sure, they were learning things, still at an astounding rate... but the weapons weren't being formulated with how to use their newly found discoveries.
"Oh?" General Magus said as he read the headline.
'A star going supernova? Nothing too surprising about that, it happened from time to time and during war was sometimes made to happen.' Magus thought to himself as he continued to read, his eyes coming across the preliminary long-distance scans of the epicenter after the star's energy had wrecked the cosmic neighborhood. No one, military or private Tela army, had ships in the area yet. The intelligence that he was looking at was the private scans of various prestigious exploration houses who employed tiny pods that were kept traveling at high speeds at all times so that they could sweep through systems when needed.
The General studied the hologram intently before commanding it to rotate slightly. The hours he had spent watching the braindead alien cadavers regrow themselves recently paid off and he immediately recognized the massive object on the hologram for what it was even though it was badly warped and desiccated from damage.
It was a gigantic alien limb.
A thrill rushed through General Magus the more he looked over the scan. He knew that he had to get there as quickly as possible.
"All scientists, secure your research and all samples of the new cr. There is an outside development that requires our attention." Magus the First announced through the secure network of his labs. He watched intently as each scientist obeyed the order to the letter and ported over to his ship, lining up as though he was going to give them a briefing.
Only when every clone researcher was present, their priceless research placed on hold and secured away did he freeze them all in place for transport, pausing their Personal Live Matrix's in their pods. Only idiots shared knowledge and plans freely with scientists.
A slight decompression in Magus's overlapping racial Tela armor occurred finally when he was the only one left online. This expedition had been a constant stress for him, having to deal with scientists who lacked military discipline and loyalty programming. As his digital Tela body relaxed, he summoned the controls that would allow him to reconnect to his private network back inside his citadel. He had cut off all ties to the outside world, only leaving a receiver in place for select scientists to pull research and news about topics that might benefit their continued progress.
The harsh warnings that popped up in his face caused him to curse aloud as he quickly responded to the threats that he was seeing.
Someone was making a play against him and there were ships inbound to investigate his secret operation.
With quick commands he purged and fused all of the scientist's Personal Live Matrix's cr, erasing them and turning them into permanent bricks until the end of time. The inbound ships displayed both military and science core labels, meaning that somehow one of his scientists must have leaked information about the secret operation and the disastrous weapons they would be able to create.
"I knew it!!! I knew something was wrong!" he shouted at himself as he blasted his ship away. One of the earlier subjects of research would pay for itself in these next few days. They had devised a way for his ship to be tethered to the new cr, making it possible to achieve speeds that normal cr could only dream of reaching, given time. It was still expensive to use, seeing as the cr that held the new cr to the rest of the vessel constantly needed to be replaced, but it was worth it in a dire situation like this.
As Magus escaped, he checked over his logs and the long list of warnings. It seemed impossible but with some of the scientists, the Jebzzbej clone being top among them, there was always the chance that they would figure a way around his security system. That had to have been what had occurred.
The most worrisome warning, standing out like a firing squad line, was the notification that every external clone had been taken offline. The only one that remained was the one that he had on ice in his possession.
They were trying to corner and kill him!
Someone very powerful was coming for him. They were sending the military, the science core, and removing every last escape route he had.
"So, they want to play dirty, do they?" Magus asked aloud as he considered the rogue alien cell bombs that they had developed. Normally Magus was above such dirty tactics but in war, everything was on the table.
His ship's path adjusted, swinging wide until it corrected and set its course directly for the distant supernova.
Magus had noticed something else in the scan, something that he was determined to be the first and only one to get his hands on.
Sure, the details were grainy, and the tolerances were garbage but that didn't stop him from zooming in and inspecting the spaces between the cracks.
The giant's desiccated limb was connected to a hand and the hand was curled tightly into a badly torn-up fist. A fist that would almost appear to be a boulder to the untrained eye.
Zooming in and delving into a tight crack revealed something to Magus.
The fist was holding onto something.