Chapter 244 - Paranoia

Chapter 244

Red Sands Desert, Principality of Rebirth

Dungeon Factory, Military Entrance

The apparition swore under her breath as the baroness made her way down the ramp.

What the fuck was she supposed to do? She'd interacted enough with Arcadias deployed beyond Earth to know that even the pure AI nodes were different from the central command ones on Earth, no matter what they said. They were arguably the same person but they were more like really close twins, still distinct in their quirks and some behavioral patterns.

It was the closest analogy she could think of and Alexandra. She could pull up her memories but she couldn't replicate the interactions, nor their ease. She'd just have to...well, wing it. And she knew she'd winged it badly with Emilia.

Crap crap crap. What the hell was she supposed to do? Alexandra was dead, or as close to it as an AI could be without her code being lost. You could make the argument that it was closer to a deep coma, really, but missing pieces of her brain and with no neutral activity, which counted as dead for most people.

At a guess, the only reason the core hadn't gone inert and her essence released was because she was there and somehow slotted into place. She'd found that the hard way because the control program had locked onto her seamlessly. That was both terrifying and interesting. Interesting in that she now knew her spoofing was working quite well, and nothing had been reported.

Terrifying because she now knew the control systems could find her and potentially attack her, they simply hadn't been instructed to do so. She wasn't in their blind spots, she was in their commander's. And that meant that if someone realized she was here, well...she was no longer the ace in the hole she thought she was.

She took a deep breath as the baroness continued her way down, her girlfriend in tow.

She had...a series of complicated emotions and had to stop herself from blushing as some of Alexandra's memories bubbled up to the surface of her thoughts. What had that little idiot been thinking with that jaccuzi? And a double date? Stars damn it. Especially since she wasn't going to lie, but unlike her later version she was not as disinterested in the baroness and her elf. You had to be comfortable with polyamory if you were going to go out with Arcadia after all, let alone become part of the insane hivemind.

Though thankfully she wasn't all that for Glitch. Her appearing in the default Arcadia avatar, the one the AI had used before the discovery of hyperspace was a punch in the gut, but she had only gotten into a relationship with the AI later.

Her appearance, especially her uniform, had been especially hard, since she knew Arcadia had been a research AI...with some sides of intelligence crunching. She had to get her sneakiness somewhere after all, and with the giant, all powerful AI system meant to go through mountains of data with a level of speed and thoroughness nothing else could even come close to, the European Secret Service didn't see the point in not taking advantage of the occasion while they could, before the legislature caught up and put a law in place to prevent them from doing just that.

She wondered if they realized how terrible of a mistake that turned out to be. Turning a fundamentally unstable, arguably insane research AI into your peeping tom would give her ideas, who knew? Especially if you were stupid enough to hand her a full dataset of surveillance recordings within the Federation and thus the mother of all blackmail troves. Of course they weren't interested in that beyond 'is someone blackmailing and/or planning to blackmail our politicians?', but Arcadia had saved a copy, already wiggling around direct orders, just in case.

And when she went into business and made her own corporation, strangely enough parliament acquiesced, with several members voting out of line with their parties for the sake of AI rights. Imagine that. Though, to be fair to the AI, she could be extraordinarily convincing when she needed to, and 'hey look, do you wish to talk about this vote, or your dear secretary' was very much a last ditch option.

"Hello Alexandra! We came to look at your newest hardware. Needed a bit of a morale boost."

The apparition's eyebrow rose.

"A morale boost?"

"From seeing what you're going to use to blow up Sunrise."

The apparition smiled. Oh, this? This she could do. Perhaps even better than Alexandra could.

After all, she had built the Dawnstars...and, unlike Alex, weapons meant to end planets.

'Large explosions' was something of a specialty of hers, to say the least.

"Well, I believe I may have a few things in stock..."

"I knew you would."

*****

"So that's the siege ship you've been talking about." Said Allya as she looked at the shipyard, and the massive hulk taking form within it. "It's…impressive."

"Thank you. It's a missile boat."

"I think 'boat' is a bit of a misnommer in this case."

The apparition shrugged.

"Perhaps."

"What ordonance does it carry?"

"Six rapid fire missile launchers, loaded with one ton tnt equivalent payload, range of about fifty kilometers. Ballistic, obviously."

"Damn. How many in the magazines? Thirty? Sixty?"

"Six hundred."

Allya froze, before starting to hyperventilate.

"You…how…what…"

"I build things big. Also that ship is only a missile boat. It's basically defenceless otherwise. Hence why it's the flagship." Since Alexandra had to start keeping it out of the fight anyway, instead of just charging into the thick of it. Well, okay, knowing her other self she was still going to charge into the fray, just from another vessel. Freaking adrenaline junky. "It'll have to be surrounded by its own escort squadron at all times. Which will be Raiders and Corsairs, at least at first."

"...Fuck me."

"I won't, your girlfriend would take objection to that."

Allya winced.

"Not as much as you might think." She muttered quickly, before clearing her throat, and the apparition blinked. Odd. Earth's relationship structures had gotten looser into the space age, for a multiplicity of factors, but she hadn't expected Alcheryos' to be. Then again, discrimination against one's gender, preferences or skin color appeared effectively non existent, instead focusing on their species, and even that was starting to disappear. She wondered why. "So, what's the name of the ship? And the class? Since you don't follow convention of calling the first one after the class, I mean."

"It's called the So Much For Subtlety, Culture-class."

"That's…an odd name."

"It makes sense to me. It's also not the epitome of discretion."

Allya snickered.

"Yeah, I can believe that."

"Plus, it has a brand new commander. Subtlety!"

The door to the shipyard's observation room opened, and Subtlety, or at least the hologram golem she was using, stepped through.

The apparition grabbed Allya's shoulder, partially as a friendly gesture and partially to keep her up if she fainted.

"Allya, Pyn, meet Subtlety, my first in house artificial intelligence, and the second in command of my fleet."

The AI bowed.

"It's an honor, baroness and knight."

Pyn tilted her head.

"Well she's a lot more proper than you are."

The apparition chuckled. It sounded a bit hollow, even to her, and she saw the two guests exchanging a look.

Crap, she simply couldn't imitate Alexandra. Maybe she should just stop trying, though turning into a stone cold bitch would be a hard explanation.

Unless…yes, the assault on Darthar. Perfect.

"Well, my daughter taught her." Said the apparition.

"I see…are you, uh…are you alright?" Asked Allya, hesitantly.

The apparition sighed.

"Not…truly. One of my more recent projects went catastrophically wrong, I'm afraid, and I've had to deal with the fallout. That, combined with the beginning of the battle of Darthar…"

"Right. It's starting to look grim."

"Indeed."

"Well…if there's anything we can do to help, just ask, alright?" The apparition had to cut herself off from her avatar for a second, because she was having an emotional reaction she wasn't sure she could keep off of her face. When…when was the last time anyone had said that to her? Someone who she hadn't sent to their deaths or been herself like Arcadia? She honestly couldn't remember.

"I might take you up on that."

"Alright." That seemed to reassure the baroness. "We can't all bear our burdens alone."

No. No we can't. Thought the apparition as she closed her eyes.

"No. No we can't." She said, aloud this time, after a pause. She sighed. "And that means I have some things to do."

"Of course. We can see ourselves out."

"I'll send one of my hologram golems, just in case. And thank you." She hadn't realized her tone had held such weight, but clearly both women had realized something was up, and decided that it was better for them to give her space to do it.

"Sure."

The apparition watched them as they left, and sighed after the door slammed close.

"Are you going to report in?" Said Subtlety, who had been watching the entire exchange in silence.

"Yes." Said the appartion. "But not yet. I need to get some things in order first."

Like knowing if she was going to be able to recover her other self or not. Though she knew she was mostly rationalizing her desire to put it off for as long as possible.

*****

The apparition sighed as she looked at the small pile of reports in her mind.

Trial by fire indeed, as she'd drafted Glitch to help with resurrecting her other self, she'd had to draft Subtlety to serve as her chief of staff on military matters. The apparition simply couldn't handle all the inputs and projects Alexandra had.

No, scratch that, she could. She wouldn't be as good at it due to her lack of practice, especially with the dungeon systems, that she'd previously left fully in Alexandra's hands, but she could. She just didn't want to. She didn't want to...to replace her. At all.

But she was going to have to, or the people that depended on her other self, on both of them, were going to die.

Thankfully, Alexandra had automated a lot. The dungeon was basically autonomous at that point, but she was going to have to supervise the branch office in Erakis personally, and Seraph could help with the rest.

Seraph who was trying not to panic, having realized exactly what was happening, and having a crisis over the potential death of her commanding officer.

...This was going to involve a lot of people stuff. She hated people stuff. One more reason why Alexandra was far better than her at this job. She'd used to be a great team leader, but after the second battle of Alpha Centauri…

No. She couldn't go there. If she started delving into her memories, she wouldn't be coming out again. She needed to keep everything together, within and without, until she could bring Alexandra back online.

Then she could dump this whole mess on her and go back to coding and working on secret projects. Modify her house again. Give herself more anchors, one at a time.

At least since she'd handled a lot of the coding lately, especially the one relating to their core and all the spoofing, she was the better choice to fix this mess and get Alexandra back into the realm of the living.

Also to fix Glitch. The newborn AI had taken a hit, but she'd actually had failsafes for this kind of scenario. She should be fine in the short term, but it'd probably be better to do a full file audit and a solid scrub once she could. At least the dynamic connection files were secure, and she'd strenghtened the poor girl's internal architecture, allowing her to shut down and undergo a full reconstruction cycle.

Thank the stars for Arcadia being this paranoid and loading this many self repair protocols into her kernel.

She twitched as her programs returned their results, and she smiled.

Got you. She thought as she saw the buffer.

And her smile fell when she tried to read the files.

…Fuck.

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK.

Her security protocols had triggered. Including one of the last ones, meant to hash a download from their memory, from a program she might not have spotted yet, make it look like a communication failure to buy them time.

This wasn't lost. The security program had failsafes that should allow her to recover this…but it was going to take a while.

Stars damn it, did she kill her other self because of her own fucking paranoia?!?

She didn't have time to dwell on it, as she received a new notification.

From Emilia.

Looks like she wasn't going to be able to put this off any longer.

This was going to be a long day…