Project Starfighter (44 page)

“Athena?” Chris called. His
voice echoed around his surrounding, but no one answered. He entered
the cockpit of the Firefly, bringing the main system online, and
slipping on the helmet.

“Hello?” he said.

Hello, Chris.

Normally, Athena was the first to
speak, greeting him as soon as the neural link was established. This
time, he was the one who had to make the initial contact. Not
entirely unexpected. He was, after all, here to offer the olive
branch.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

Not bad.

That was code for ‘Not good,
either’. The Firefly had responded after a pause. There was also
the hint of emotion in Athena’s voice, like she was upset. “Come
out into the hold,” Chris urged. “I want to talk to you.”

Okay.

Chris slipped the helmet back off,
lowering and stepping out of the cockpit, and seeing the form of
Athena’s Greek goddess persona materialising before him. There was
sadness in her eyes and her body language. Chris indicated to one of
the crates for the two to sit on.

“I wanted to apologise for what I
said earlier,” he started. “I shouldn’t have shouted at you. It
was the shock, I guess, nothing more. The spacing was completely
unexpected, but I completely understand why you did it. You didn’t
have any choice, and you were doing whatever you could to help. In
all honesty, I probably would have done the same thing, myself. I’m
sorry.”

“That’s okay,” Athena said.
She continued to stare at the floor, not raising her eyes to him,
gently swinging her feet back and forth.

Watching her, Chris began to get the
impression that something else was wrong. Had he missed something
earlier? He then remembered the time just before he, Sid, and Phoebe
had taken the executive transport over to Zetaman. Athena had been
acting hurt even then, something playing on her mind. He had not
bothered to ask what it was, his thoughts too focused on the task
that lay ahead. He now berated himself for being so insensitive, not
even taking a few minutes to ask. That, coupled with the shouting
that had followed, must have compounded the offence.

“There’s something else, isn’t
there?” he prompted.

“I’m a mistake,” Athena said.

“What?” Chris asked.

“I’m a mistake. I was never
meant to be. Overlook said that I was created to serve as a chariot
for a woman who wanted to roam the galaxy, fighting pirates and
mercenaries and whatnot. I was an experiment for a human-AI
interface. I was never supposed to develop thoughts or a will of my
own. I was never supposed to develop feelings.”

Chris saw tears starting to slide
down the avatar’s cheeks. He watched one as it trickled, saw it
ball into a drop, and drip off her face. He expected it to vanish as
soon as it fell and left the avatar’s projection field. Instead, it
lasted all the way to the floor, splashing as it hit the surface,
disappearing immediately after.

“What am I?” Athena asked.

“You’re ... ” Chris was about
to say ‘a machine’. He knew that that wasn’t what she wanted to
hear right now. “You’re Athena; you’re you.”

“Tell me, Chris – what will you
do with me once our mission is complete?” Athena asked, sniffing
gently. “Will you switch me off?”

“Well ... no,” Chris said. “Why
would I?”

“Because you don’t believe I’m
really alive. You continue to think of me as just an AI, a dumb
machine. You see me as a creation of WEAPCO, something you’re
supposed to hate.”

Chris flinched. It was true, though.
Sid, Phoebe, and perhaps even Ursula were ready to accept that the
Firefly, the sentient machine they called Athena, was alive, but he
wasn’t. He had always refused to accept it, despite all they had
shared and discussed. To him, Athena was just the result of memory
systems, logic gates, and computer code, only believing she was
alive, but never actually being so.

“N ... no,” Chris stammered. “I
don’t hate you. Not at all.”

“We’ve shared thoughts, Chris,”
Athena said. “As I’ve always said, I don’t delve into your
mind, but there are ideas that you project, that are there on the
surface, that you disguise poorly. It’s there in your words and
your body language, too,” she added.

Chris bit back the words he was
about to speak. He was about to argue the nature of being, of what it
meant to be alive. He saw the brick wall immediately, realising that,
while they were not sentient like humans, he considered cats, dogs,
and many other animals to be alive.

“This is very important to you,
isn’t it?” Chris said.

Athena nodded. “I need to know who
and what I am, Chris. I am helping you to fight back against the
Corporation because they did not respect my right to life. They
wanted to bring me in and
unplug me
. They wanted to kill me.”

Chris watched the tears continue to
stream down Athena’s face. He reached out and gently took her hand.
It felt warm and somewhat tingly as always, but soft and delicate at
the same time, like a real person’s would be.

“I don’t want to die, Chris.”

“And I’m not going to kill you,”
Chris said. “It’s not something that’s in my nature, not the
sort of thing that I would do, not unless I really had no other
choice. I’ve never even taken another life in battle. Hell, I don’t
even want to kill WEAPCO.”

“You don’t?” Athena asked, a
little shocked.

“No,” Chris said. “That won’t
achieve anything. It will just enforce a belief that violence and
destruction is the way to solve our problems. I have no problems with
taking down their AIs, but killing people is a different matter. My
goal was always to remove their dominance and create a fairer society
for all. More so now that I know WEAPCO’s nothing more than about
twelve major players and a bunch of underlings, and not even a
corporation.”

He squeezed Athena’s hand, trying
to coax a smile out of her. “But back to you. Something I’ve
found out in life is that we aren’t defined by our names, where we
were born, or where we come from, but by the things we do. Those in
charge of WEAPCO have proven themselves to be malevolent,
power-hungry, and greedy. You have defined yourself as being
generous, kind, and willing to do what is right, to help those in
need. You came to see me after that battle with Mal and Kethlan,
which shows that you care about others. That’s who you are,
Athena.”

“But you still don’t believe I’m
alive?” Athena asked, her tone imploring.

“I’ll admit I’ve struggled
with it. But I’m coming around to the idea.” He reached out a
hand, gently wiping away one of her falling tears.

That resulted in a smile at last,
Athena chuckling a little. The tears were still flowing, though.
Chris decided to change the subject.

“We lost a lot of fighters at
Murdar, then?” he said, glancing around the empty hold.

“Yes, sorry.”

“Don’t apologise. I told you to
sacrifice them if you needed to. They’re just hunks of metal. The
most important thing is that we got Ursula. We’re one step closer
to victory now, playing with a full house. A shame that we lost
Overlook, though. He could have proven yet another ace in our hand.”

“Actually, we didn’t,” Athena
said, drying the last of her tears. “I ripped his consciousness out
of the transport just before we jumped out of the system, and
confined him to Chugger’s memory banks. We can bring him back up
any time we want.”

Chris’ jaw dropped. “Seriously?”

“Seriously,” Athena said,
swinging her feet back and forth a little more playfully. “He’s
basically in a digital prison, with nothing to do and very little to
see. It’s like limbo to him in there.”

Chris chuckled. “Athena, you’re
a genius!”

Athena chuckled along with him.
“See? Not just a pretty face.”

She did have a pretty face, Chris
thought. Had she been human, he might have kissed her right there and
then. It wouldn’t have been the same with the avatar, though. The
tear he had wiped away had somehow had body, but no substance.

“I’m going to check in on Ursula
and then talk to Sid about what our next move should be,” Chris
said, hopping off the crate. “Come with me. You should be involved
in everything we discuss from here on out. You’re part of the team
and a participating member of this operation, after all.”

“Give me a moment to link myself
to Chugger’s system. Done,” she said. She would be able to walk
with him, now.

He felt her reach for his hand as
they started out together. He let her take it, curling his fingers
gently around her own, and held her hand as they made their way up to
the bridge.

~

“How
soon until we arrive at Eyananth?” Chris asked Sid, as he arrived
on the bridge, Athena releasing his hand just before they entered.

“Not long now,” Sid said from
the captain’s chair. “Less than thirty minutes, at the current
speed.”

“Have you heard any more from
Phoebe or Ursula? Is Ursula okay?”

“They’re both in the rec room,
getting some food. I thought I would give them a bit of space for
now. The AI took a look at Ursula, and has treated her for the
exposure. Mostly, she only needed pain killers and some time to
recover. I’m not sure what she was given for the drugging she
received in the tube, but she’s a lot more conscious than before.
It might have simply been some sort of sedative. Everything else will
have to fix itself naturally.”

“Sounds serious,” Athena said.

“She’s a little malnourished,
and that’s not something that’s going to go away overnight. Give
her a few weeks, and she’ll be back to a normal state of health
again.” He said it almost apologetically, though it was neither his
fault nor something he had any control over.

“That’s not time we can spare,”
Chris said, largely to himself. “We’ve started something here and
we should expect WEAPCO to start sending everything they have after
us.”

Sid nodded in agreement. “Ideally,
we should be making a move against them now.”

“Ideally. It’s not that
straightforward, though. We’re now essentially one quarter of a
galaxy-wide conflict. Another is WEAPCO, the third is Tyler, and the
last one is Mal and his damn cult.”

“You think Mal is still alive?”
Sid asked.

“If both Tyler and Overlook are to
be believed, the guy’s going to pop up again at some point in the
future, and I can’t help feeling it’ll happen a lot sooner than
in the past. The encounter at the shipyard was the start of the
long-promised pilgrimage, or whatever it is Mal’s supposed to be
leading them on. The guy’s not going to stay out of the picture for
long.”

Chris walked over to a seat and
slumped into it, falling silent as he tried to think. Four sides.
Three of them sought the elimination of WEAPCO, while WEAPCO would be
defending its corner all by itself. Not that, in all honesty, WEAPCO
needed any help.

“We could just disappear for a
while, and let them fight it out between themselves?” Sid
suggested.

“And hope that WEAPCO emerges the
victor so that we could take them down by use of psionics? Too risky.
What if Mal wins?”

“You think that the Immortal
League has a chance?” Athena asked.

“I don’t think that we should
assume that they will lose by default, just because they’re some
weird freaky cult. We can’t assume that Mal doesn’t also have
trained psionics available to him. And now that we know that WEAPCO
is essentially twelve gods, ruling over the galaxy alongside thirty
or so demigods, and several thousand underlings, we have to consider
the possibility of infiltrators. It all gets very complicated, I
know. Ideally, I would like to find a way to take both of them down
at once, or WEAPCO soon after Mal.”

“A pity we lost Overlook,” Sid
said. “He might have known something that could help us to dissolve
the cult.”

“Actually, we didn’t,” Chris
said, motioning to Athena. “He’s currently a prisoner here. He’s
confined to a digital prison or something?”

“I’ve separated his
consciousness into a sandbox with absolutely no resource access,”
Athena explained to Sid. “The address space is linked to persistent
storage, so we don’t have to worry about losing him if power goes
down.”

“Clever,” Sid said.

Chris’ attention shifted to the
bridge entrance as he saw movement there. Phoebe and Ursula walked
side by side, dressed similarly to one another. Phoebe was smiling
happily, Ursula not quite as upbeat. Perhaps she was just tired, or
perhaps her mood was the result of being a guest at WEAPCO’s
facility for so long. What they might have done to that girl, Chris
did not want to think. Phoebe indicated a seat for her sister to
take.

“How are you feeling, Ursula?”
Chris asked.

“Okay,” Ursula said, though she
didn’t sound all that sure. “Actually, more like I’m recovering
from the flu. Right now, I’m just trying to keep some food down.”

“Your head is fuzzy,” Athena
said to Ursula, wandering over to her. “I can feel your sister’s
thoughts, but yours are hazy and difficult to understand.”

Ursula snatched at the hand that
Athena extended out to her head, gripping the avatar’s wrist
tightly. Athena cried out, sinking to her knees.

“Hey! Don’t touch me!” Ursula
snapped. She gave Athena’s wrist a small twist when Athena said
nothing, causing the avatar to cry out again.

“You’re hurting me,” Athena
protested.

“Who are you?” Ursula growled.

“Woah, Ursula, calm down,”
Phoebe said, moving quickly to her sister’s side. “That’s
Athena, remember? She’s one of us.”

“Feels more like a WEAPCO
employee
to me,” Ursula said, continuing to glare at Athena.

“Ursula, really,” Phoebe begged,
“she’s working with us. She just saved our lives. We wouldn’t
have gotten out of that facility without her.”