Gloria woke with a start. The darkness of Eve’s sleeping quarters was near absolute, and she had no idea how a normal person might turn the lights on. “Lights on, please!” she rasped. Her throat was dry, and as she rolled out of bed she caught sight of the adjacent bathroom. The soft, smooth covers, lavish furniture, spacious quarters, were all from the dream she’d been living for what felt like an eternity. “Oh God, it’s all real. That crazy bitch has been living in my body.”
She made it to the sink and found it already filling with warm water. Gloria splashed her face and looked in the mirror. She looked as horrified as she felt. Nothing seemed right, as though the world was somehow partially artificial, as though she wasn’t completely there.
A pressure built in the back of her mind and she watched in the mirror as her lips quivered, her eyes widened, and warm water was replaced with salty tears. Panic was turning to despair and she shouted; “What have they done to me? How do I stop her from coming back?”
The pressure built in throbbing waves, as though there was something in her head begging to be free. “What is it? What’s wrong with me?” It was an invasion, a foreign thing that had been walking around, living a life that wasn’t hers. The throbbing beat against the interior of her skull like a cacophony of percussionists, striking harder, faster.
The lights flickered, the water began to overflow in the basin, and a new wave of panic rose, driving her into a mad frenzy. “No, you’re not coming back. Not this time, bitch!” she raved, smashing her head into the reflective wall above the sink.
The first blow was more painful than she expected, but for an instant the pressure abated, the mad chorus disrupting Gloria’s being was nearly silent. Again she drove her head into the mirrored bulkhead. “I’ll kill you!” She could feel something behind her eyes, trying to force its way to the surface, watching. “You’re dead, you bitch!” Again she bashed her forehead against the wall, and the face in the mirror regarded her with a twisted grimace, blood, seeping from its forehead. With a desperate wail she drove her head against the unyielding bulkhead, pushing off the deck this time.
Eve rested on the wet bathroom floor, staring up at the ceiling. The sound of water dripping from the edge of the sink was like a tiny waterfall, something she’d never seen before. The framework augmentations built into her human body had repaired the physical damage that had been done. That didn’t put an end to Eve’s numb, confused state, however.
She was conscious for the whole thing but could do nothing to stop what was going on. Gloria Parker; that was the name of the woman who had original claim to the body she lived in. There was no evidence of her. Not in the digital backup systems inside the framework, not in the exterior Regent Galactic network, nowhere. They had made sure, there were no backups after what they called the Eve Brain, her mind, was placed inside the host. Gloria was gone.
There was no explaining what had just happened. It would have been possible if there was a hidden backup memory node inside the body she was using, but no such thing existed. After Jacob Valance, there was no framework or augmented human built with such a thing in place. That kind of system allowed a personality to entrench itself inside a host, and there was no reason to provide that option for any existing host.
She stood up slowly and forced the medical systems in the bathroom to perform a full series of scans. Eve read the raw data as it came in and saw no evidence of any hidden backups. Her mind sought solace in the sprawling digital world that stretched across the Regent Galactic Fleet, Pandem itself and beyond through hypertransmitters.
She ordered the tap to stop pouring; the floor drank the excess fluid and directed it to a recycling line, and washed the caked blood from her face and hair. All the while, she was watching people going about their business on the planet from observation satellites, crewmembers keeping watch in the halls, and software maintaining systems that did everything from manage the constant flow of operational data to keeping the fleet in orbit.
Balancing the perception of the physical world with that of the digital had come quickly to her, and she could sense that, without a limiter chip, it would be possible for other frameworks to do the same. Thoughts of those limiter chips, absent in many early frameworks, partially occupied her mind as she made her way to bed. The frameworks in service were stupid, basic, without creativity or personality. Basic programming kept them from tripping over each other, made them effective soldiers, guardians, basic technicians and servants, but they were little more than speaking animals. The combination of the memory programming and waking protocol along with a limiter chip made greater thought, improvisation and the construction of a personality possible. The new frameworks would be better than the old, and more importantly, they’d be better than any human. Unlike a human, their personalities formed around a purpose, and a modern, full featured framework like Baudric wouldn’t feel right unless he was working towards his purpose, following some order or greater directive. Much like Jacob Valance before the memories of Jonas Valent ruined the perfect balance Vindyne and Doctor Marcelles had created. If he had a limiter chip, it would have been different. He wouldn’t have been able to connect to the secret memory backup, and it would have remained dormant forever.
For the first time since she awakened in her new body she wished she had her own limiter chip. It would restrict her from interacting with anything she couldn’t touch, but whatever had happened to her moments before would be impossible. The thought that, even though all the evidence in the system verified that Gloria’s backup scans had been deleted, she could return was terrifying, the woman she saw in the mirror was unhinged. It was as though Gloria didn’t care whether there was anything left after she destroyed her uninvited passenger, as long as it was dead forever.
She shook her head and sat on the edge of her bed. Without direction her mind had wandered, and Eve found herself watching a late night arrival, Captain Lucious Wheeler.
Eve’s attention was fixed on the live footage of him disembarking from a Terratran corvette registered as The Ferryman. Its forty-two meter long hull creaked as super cooled mist rolled off the edges and her four gunnery turrets.
The ship was designed as though someone was emulating the musculature of a human forearm, with smooth lines running from front to back, flatter on the bottom and rounded on the top. The particle turrets and rectangular thruster pods laid flat along the length of the ship and many curved, unmarked hatches hinted at surprises just under the surface. The white and violet coloured ship had just finished a journey through a hyper compressed wormhole of its own creation, in an effort to obey an urgent summons sent by Lister Hampon. It was a recent purchase, most likely acquired right after the summons was issued. Eve couldn’t find any evidence of a purchase in the Regent Galactic database, meaning that Wheeler had not only funded the buy himself, but he made sure the seller had no ties to the corporation.
Wheeler was alone. She could detect no one else manning the ship. He stopped only long enough to ensure that his ship’s airlock closed and locked behind him. His dark brown hair had grown back at an accelerated rate, and hung in a short pony tail that brushed from one side of his dark long coat collar to the other as he looked around the empty mooring bay.
His boot steps echoed in the idle dry dock as he made his way up the crew hall and into the control room. Hampon waited on an anti gravity litter in fine robes, surrounded by his guards and aides. “Welcome back,” he said calmly, wiping a wisp of sun blonde hair out of his eyes.
“What the hell is going on Hampon? First you call me back and as soon as I arrive my comm updates with an order to stand down all pursuit!”
“The Saviour has other business to attend to now that the Triton has been apprehended and we no longer need Jacob Valance. Your services-“
“The Saviour is my ship! That was part of our deal! I trade Gloria in for a nice, new Regent Galactic Carrier, distract Valance and we part ways.” Wheeler snarled, ignoring the guardsmen with rifles held across their chests.
Eve didn’t know anything about the deal that had been struck for her host. If the data existed anywhere, it had been deleted before she had the opportunity to get a glimpse.
“The host isn’t everything we expected it to be. Thankfully, Eve has made the most of it, and hasn’t noticed the short comings built into that model.”
“Glitches and bad craftsmanship has nothing to do with me, or our deal.”
Hampon sighed wearily and shook his head. “You are forgetting something, Lucious. We made you immortal, gave you most of General Collins’ memories. You have a second life most people would give anything for. I’m even
