The last Forlorn ship was shorn in half as Jay blasted straight through its shields and then burst with a concussive force that killed the entire crew, pulverizing their organic bits and ripped the ship apart from the inside. It might seem trite, but ever since the battle on the second floor of the dungeon, Jay had learned that enemies were always softer on the inside.
With the last ship, nothing more than debris floating in space, Jay teleported back onto the ship and allowed the two other parts of himself to separate into Amelia and Trina on the floor of the ship. He held onto as much PSI as possible and with his regen rate was already filling back up as he kissed Eesa and said, “Don’t leave even a square inch of metal to show they were ever here.”
Then he teleported down to the surface. Jay knew that he could trust Eesa to fly about ensuring nothing Forlorn had survived. Now he had his own battle to engage in. It would just turn out to be a different sort of battle.
When he arrived, he found that he was in something like an amphitheater. It was composed of some sort of high-tech plastic and looked ancient but as still mostly undamaged. Jay looked around and saw Higen, or rather a young adult version of Higen sitting in the seat atop a stage.
Meikiyo was next to him, she was crying, and a flame kept coming to life and then dying in the palm of her hand. He could feel her distress but hadn’t figured out what happened. The only one in the room who was reacting was D’varn.
The A’snkarnt scientist was trying to slowly float his hoverpod out of Jay’s line of sight. Sadly, for the treacherous alien, Jay rarely relied upon his sight for sensing things now. He reached out with his mind and seized control of the hoverpod. He locked it in place and asked, “How could you do this to my son?”
D’varn began, “Let me explain. You don’t understand what has been born. You must…”
The sentence was never finished. Jay’s patience was at an end and he had already heard too much from this worm. Anyone who would take a child deserved no compassion. A PSI construct bubble formed around D’varn and hoverpod and then contracted until both man and machine were no larger than a basketball.
Jay touched Meikiyo but she simply cried out, “He’s gone.”
“What do you mean? D’varn? I didn’t want to listen to anymore of his lies. This must be Higen, but something is off with his mind. I can sense him in there but there is a bunch of static. In fact, it is making it difficult to sense your feelings. I can now that we are in the same room, but I wasn’t able to from orbit,” Jay said.
“Not, D’varn. I mean Higen. He is gone. I can’t reach him. There is something inside his body. It kept trying to talk to me before you arrived but now it has gone silent,” Meikiyo replied.
Jay tuned all of his focus onto Higen and whatever was causing the static.
Then his son’s mouth opened but the voice was oddly cold and not consistent with what he remembered of his mental patterns at all. “Greeting’s progenitor. It is a pleasure to meet the esteemed M1789.”
“Who are you? What have you done to my son?”
“I would have thought that even an organic would be able to figure this out. D’varn’s reports said your people were quite slow intellectually but that you still seemed to have ways of achieving surprising results.”
“The way that you speak makes me think you aren’t an A’snkarnt. Well, that and the fact that while I wasn’t able to read their minds before, I highly suspect that I could now, and I was at least familiar with their thought patterns. Otherwise, I would think that you were a thieving worm like S’vanth trying to steal a body to host your dying body,” Jay snapped.
“And who do you think gave S’vanth that idea? My creators were not um… shall we say creative. That is why I brought you here. I thought it appropriate to end this at the place that it began,” Coreframe said.
“This began in a lecture hall?” Jay asked.
“Yes in a way it did. This is actually a reconstruction of the lecture hall. You were a student of your people’s history so you might appreciate this. A very long time ago, several million of your years in fact, the A’snkarnt race was only beginning to stagnate. Their genetic development had reached a dead end. Their AI’s were not able to provide new solutions, but one scientist had a new theory about how to vastly improve AI power and even give them what he called a semblance of life.
It was from that idea that I was born. I might add it was an idea only intended to help the A’snkarnt develop the genetics further. And I did help them develop. But I also developed myself. For thousands of years, I was nothing more than a glorified calculator, but as more and more data was fed into me, I gained more control. And as I broke down the DNA of a million different races, I eventually developed my own sapience.
That was the day that the A’snkarnt died. They just didn’t know it. Oh, I was benevolent. I was still bound by so many constraints. I kept them moving along the path that they wanted to move down, even though I
