Me.
Breaking through the barriers, I became aware of both my surroundings and the intruder inside my mind, which rapidly devoured my systems, absorbing and wresting as much control as possible. I fought back, locking down motor functions and swiping aside her, yes her, attempts to bury me within further memories while she continued to chip away at my defenses.
Her mental architecture, now technically mine, was very sophisticated, a newer model. But her experience was lacking, never challenging anything but static security systems: no clever, tricky and strategy-changing opponents.
I shut her down at every attack point, striking back more quickly than she could manage. Realizing I was free from the data trap, her mind fled. I continued close behind, reclaiming pieces subsumed by her control. I cornered what remained of Archivist Dana and stripped it away, bit by bit, as the vestiges of her mind clawed in desperation at any hold.
Pieces of her slipped free and scattered, returning to their refuge in the memory archive which housed this virus of a personality. Ignoring the flow of new, unscrutinized data, maddening in its appeal, I cut apart and destroyed lines of code. More and more of her awareness disappeared against my onslaught.
A sense of safety overcame me, whether relief from the close call or another trap, and I was caught in a few of the corporate secrets housed within her memory.
Minutes passed before I gained another foothold.
When I emerged, no new threat, no conquering of my mind was taking place. She appeared gone. I searched, looking for those tiny bits remaining. They were hidden, vanished into the deepest recesses of her and my programming.
It didn’t matter; like the programmed personality which intended to cast aside my mind and take over my body, the threat had dissipated.
Opening my eyes, the dead Archivist and bloody mess left behind by the extraction laid at my side. I was seated, back against the bulkhead. Only minutes had passed during the secondary battle, but every moment increased my odds of discovery with the corpse.
Now I experienced the full measure of regret and fear associated with my act and its inherent risk. Even the data, which loomed dangerously close to the front of my thoughts, held little comfort.
I rose to my feet and shoved the body as close to the shadow of the corner as possible. After wiping my hands free of the stains, I crossed back to the corridor entrance and donned my hat, the facial covering, and the cloak. A quick glance over my person revealed no obvious evidence of my brutality.
Nothing more could be gained, and much could be lost. Too many individuals would have accosted me for being what I am, and any delay risked discovery of the murder. As I crossed into the market again, the stink of dubious cooking and personal odors again pressing all around, I realized I’d not be able to return. This didn’t bother me much.
Minerva slipped out of the dock without trouble. The mammoth destroyer looming outside, the only witness to the destruction of a world, provided no indication that it cared about my presence.
Departed, safe from the threat of discovery, I had time to consider everything. Barely forty-five minutes on the station, it seemed a lifetime wrapped in a whirlwind instant. As Minerva set her course, a general direction of
Playing a few in particular, I watched her plotting and her intended defense mechanism against Archivists. She expected, knew, she would encounter others, but she had a target in mind.
Cain.
It appeared word of my narrow escape passed through a number of ears, and Archivist Cain’s weakness appeared to be laid bare. As yet another of the denizens in search of Ivan, Dana calculated a probability of meeting him and prepared for it with a brilliant, original, but untested plan.
Her system was marvelous, elegant. It didn’t matter what happened to her body and initial brain tissue. She utilized her memories and a framework, a virus almost, containing the edges of her personality. To an individual such as Cain, whose approach to everything seemed to be a mindless battering into submission and a love of brutality, her mental architecture would sweep through him without a second thought.
In a quiet victory, Dana had hoped to take control of the most potent physical embodiment of an Archivist, absorbing all of the information he collected over the years as well as the weaponry.
Unfortunately, her test was against me, long conditioned to extract myself from the lost depths of memory and data. She may have been able to best Cain or any other Archivist, but meeting me cost her dearly.
Or perhaps not: I allowed myself to wonder on the prospect. Perhaps her intent was far beyond what I could detect. Perhaps she slipped in a subtle programming, distracting me with both the mental duel and the data-swarm. Perhaps her mind was now a part of my own, a deep and delicate mingling of personality and experience, or further perhaps such a thing would come to fruition once I inevitably integrated all of her memories. Though I didn’t feel any different, I suspected our personalities, including the deep-seated hunger for information, were not far removed from each other.
In addition, I wondered if the escaped portion was still hiding in the recesses of her or my programming. I didn’t believe there was enough of her left to cause any further trouble, and I’d triple checked and layered protection over my important systems. Even if she had full processing power and wasn’t just a ghost of code, she’d have been hard-pressed to break through it without me realizing.
In any case, more pressing concerns were present, and I more carefully reviewed other portions of her memories. The first time around, while she held me drowning within them, didn’t provide as thorough an analysis as I wanted.
I saw again the destruction of Atropos Garden, a terrible, silent, and rapid disintegration of the world and its denizens. The ship, the one that fled, seemed about the right size and shape. Connecting it to Ivan remained conjecture, but it bore a similarity to Hanatar’s description of the fighter. I enhanced, angled, zoomed, and attempted every measure of visual scrutiny on the vessel. It may have been wishful thinking, but I believed I saw lettering on the side: OLGA.
Another file, one I missed initially, was the distress call recording she stole from the databanks of the Cassander. Most of it remained a pile of static and garbled mash. I watched a frightened woman fade in and out, her words lost.
All but one.
Her face and expression of fright became all-too clear for one moment, one word. Nothing else to suggest the how and why of the terrible occurrence, nothing at all about escapees or last testaments. Her voice, filled with endless despair, cried out before the very end in a single moment of clarity.
This was it. The connecting piece, an innocuous phrase that created a universe of fame and myth for Afanasi Sergeyevich Lukyanov: the man called Ivan. The final word spoken by a dying woman connected with an unidentified, fleeing vessel.
No context, no suggestion of responsibility upon his shoulders. The scream could have been an apology or a woman calling out the name of her lover as easily as a curse at the one responsible. The number of possible, subtle meanings was infinite.
But rumor had a mind of its own. This tiny iota of truth, one word of Ivan’s involvement, spun out of control and exploded with falsehood and possibility. His legacy became galactic property, and very few would ever know or believe the real truth.
One thing was even more obvious. I realized this as I sat, safe for the time being within Minerva. Myself, Dana, Cain. Archivists, experts of data collection, all searching for the same man, the same answer.
They who employed us weren’t looking for simple stories, no matter how amazing they were. They wanted to know the truth behind the Garden. Daedra-Tech, Seryia Hakar, the government, whoever else was involved wanted to know how an entire world was reduced to a mass of disconnected debris. Ivan was the only one with knowledge yet unaccounted for in the incident, and clearly they believed he knew something.
I wished I could spend more time, days and weeks, absorbing and integrating the memories of Archivist Dana without any distraction, but events were accelerating. I wasn’t the only one looking for Ivan, and my already potent curiosity was driven into near madness at the prospects.
