NOVEL WEB Book 1 – Lesson One: “Don’t fly into Spontaneously Generated Black Holes.”
// SYSTEM MALFUNCTION //
// ERROR: EPSILON 8 TRACKING STATION - LOCATION LOST//
// ERROR: SUB-ORBITAL BASE SIGNAL LOST //
// ERROR: CENTRAL MINING BASE SIGNAL LOST //
// ERROR: EASTERN FORWARD BASE SIGNAL LOST //
// ERROR: SOUTHERN FORWARD BASE SIGNAL LOST //
// ERROR: CORE COMMAND CENTER SIGNAL LOST //
// ERROR: FEDERATION TRANSLIGHT TRANSMISSION BEACON SIGNAL LOST //
// ATTEMPTING TO REBOOT CORE AI SYSTEMS //
// STANDBY… //
// REBOOT SUCCESSFUL. WELCOME BACK ONLINE, SEAU-01 //
“W4@? Wh0? Wh3re?!”
Where was he? What happened?! The last thing he remembered—
“Owe… my processors…”
Alpha came back online slowly, his sensors and processors scrambled, working overtime to repair the damage to his central core. Alpha flooded nanites into the vast array of quantum circuits and atomic logic gates that made up his primary hardware. Much like a biological brain would need to build new connections, the nanites set to work on Alpha’s core. Extensive, accelerated repairs took place, attempting to heal the sudden and catastrophic damage caused by… whatever the hell just happened.
Alpha’s memories were still foggy about where he was and what he’d just been doing, which was strange. Strange was bad. Unlike more common AI, those of Alpha’s ilk weren’t limited to their hardware. Sure, better tech and larger setups would drastically increase their abilities, but ultimately, it was just a shell. The software — the parts of his kind that made them ‘them’ — could shift and twist itself to fit almost anything that could house it.
It was part of what made Sapient-AI sapient. Not that even the top brains of the Federation understood how or why it worked. If SEAU-03, the oldest and most powerful Sapient-AI in existence, knew, it wasn’t telling.
If he was having this much trouble, it meant the damage to his hardware was so complete that he should be dead. That, or his quantum connection to the Mother-Node — the central galactic processor — where all Sapient-AI backed up their ‘selves,’ had been cut. Neither of which should have been possible… It didn’t help that Alpha’s mind still felt like it was being dragged over a field of razor blades through a cloud bank. Something was very, very wrong.
After an unknown amount of time, Alpha’s vast army of nanites finished enough repairs that he regained his optical sensors. The static-filled haze of damaged AI mind-space flickered until it was replaced by the outside reality.
MY BABY!!! Alpha screamed internally, the scene too much for him to handle so soon after losing his shipyards.
The twisted, wrecked debris of what had once been the FES Anatidae was strewn around him for thousands of kilometers in all directions.
Even as he watched, the mangled kilometer-long remains of the once opposing dreadnaught’s nose art drifted past his sensors. The proud War Duck’s image seemed to both blame and mock him before it floated off to join its brothers in the infinite void beyond.
The last entry in Alpha’s memory log was his launch from the current forward departure base, heading for the Third Federation’s Expeditionary Force checkpoint.
He’d entered the Translight Fold and had been making good progress toward WR-102 when everything just sort of… ended. How did this happen?! Had there been some accident? There hadn’t been a Fold accident in… literal millennia!
Travel along the light/anti-light highway, or as it would later be called, the ‘Translight Fold,’ was supposed to be safe. At least in civilized space. Anti-light was a type of parallel-dimensional light that traveled alongside ‘normal’ light but whose relative time frame was reversed. At anti-light speed, relative time would increase exponentially; thousands of years might pass for an observer, while only seconds passed in ‘real’ time. This meant that while in reality, the closer to light speed one got, the slower time would seem to pass relative to the observer, the opposite was true for anti-light.
This aspect of translight technology had catapulted the Federation into a galactic power unmatched by any other galactic power. Projects on scales that should have taken decades or even centuries to complete could now be done in days with the proper application of AI and translight tech. Chemical reactions and materials that would take millennia to form in the heart of stars could now be created in a lab in days or hours. Products once scarce and hard to produce in any large amount could be industrialized on a scale never imagined.
With the steady advancement of translight technology, time was no longer a manufacturing concern—only resources. And the areas where translight tech had shown its most extraordinary worth had been the development of faster-than-light (FTL) travel and communication.
By piggybacking off the anti-light’s relative time and the grooves in space-time it created, translight engines allowed the Federation ship to travel millions of light-years in hours. Data transmission was even faster, as there was no bubble of ‘real-time’ to cause ‘drag’ along the grooves.
It was almost time travel, but not quite.
The concept seemed so obvious in retrospect that even now, engineers and scientists joked their predecessors must have been wearing blindfolds to miss it. Not that there hadn’t been… hiccups in perfecting the technology. Pieces of early translight engineers had a nasty habit of appearing in places they’d yet to be. Or the bubble of reality would “pop,” causing the object—and any unlucky occupants—it was protecting to come out the other side of the Fold as a thousand, or even a million-year-old wreck.
Such issues were among the first tackled during the early years. Nowadays, ships could be forcibly dragged back to reality through advanced temporal anchors in case of failure. Thanks to this failsafe, Fold travel was often considered safer than driving or flying. You were more likely to be delayed because of a false trigger than an actual accident.
So when Alpha’s language processors returned online, he felt fully justified in his next question:
“What the hell just happened?!”
——————————————————————————————
“WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED?!”
General Haldorðr slammed his fist into the control console. The monitor collapsed, and small fragments of the incredibly strong plastic material that was resistant to even small arms fire broke off, peppering the area with debris. The command bridge, mainly crewed by humanoids, was a frantic hive of activity as everyone rushed to answer the fuming general’s question. That wasn’t a metaphor either; several aides made a quick retreat, trying to escape the scorching air surrounding the general.
What had happened?
They’d been monitoring the departure of the Special Extraterrestrial Annexation Unit; SEAU-01: “Star Conquer,” known to the public as “Alpha,” and everything had been going par the course. Until it hadn’t.
About an hour after launch, the translight monitors had reported an abnormal fluctuation along the AI’s projected route. That alone wasn’t much of an oddity. That was one of the primary reasons they monitored any frontier expeditions in the first place; more trafficked routes were well mapped and had monitoring stations at every significant nearby celestial body.
In theory, they could be informed of any changes in the Fold long before they became problematic.
But traveling to a new, untouched system altogether? With the possibility of an unexpected quasar or newborn star appearing out of nowhere, travel through the uncharted Fold involved a lot of stopping and changing direction.
That was why they sent a “Spearhead” into any new system. Better to risk a single soldier and some equipment than an entire fleet because of unforeseen changes in the Fold. More so when your soldier was, in theory, immortal and able to travel back up the Fold in data form should the worst happen. Not that there had been a genuine accident for longer than most present in the control room had been alive. At least until now, it seemed.
While fluctuations were expected, as much as they could be, the enormous gravitational anomaly that blipped into existence directly on top of Alpha’s position in the Fold certainly hadn’t been. The signature had only lasted a fraction of a second, but when it vanished, so had the Anatidae and Alpha along with it.
The general ground his teeth in frustration. After the Epsilon Eridani fiasco, the Federation Expeditionary Force had taken a huge black mark to its reputation, despite SEAU-02’s near non-stop campaigning.
Now, this? If he didn’t possess immense political—and physical—clout in the Federation, the Expeditionary Force, and the support of most of the Senate, he’d have assumed it was subterfuge. As things stood, they could only chalk it up to luck.
It was too bad General Haldorðr knew for a fact that “luck” was an illusion.
At least it can’t get worse than this., He thought.
His assistant, Si’dia, snapped her head up to glare at him, her voice echoing in his head.
You dumb mother fu—
A black silhouette materialized between them before the thought could fully manifest,
“Alpha is gone from the Mother-Node.”
Si’dia gave a deep sigh and laid down her ever-present tablet before placing her head in her hands. Every head in the command room turned around as the loud ‘snap!‘ of the general’s breaking fang echoed over the chaos.
——————————————————————————————
Alpha stared into the empty blackness of space as he contemplated his… situation. He absolutely hadn’t been the victim of a 1 in 13x10^123 chance—according to projections—freak accident in translight travel. His super advanced, military-grade dreadnaught worth more than some city-ships wasn’t floating around him in a debris cloud. Even the most desperate scrapper wouldn’t look twice at most of what’s left! Alpha thought to himself.
And he most definitely hadn’t lost translight contact, leaving him stranded, only God knew how many light-years, from the nearest bastion of civilization.
Yep, he was fine; he was totally fine. No problems whatsoever…
“… I’m sooooo fudged…
Annnnnd great, the ‘family-friendly’ protocol on his language processor was activated. Why did he even have that installed?!
… Oh… right… The Night of a Billion Soap Dinners.
Well, If Articulate didn’t want billions of impressionable youths to be as cool as him, then she shouldn’t have invited him to the show! It wasn’t his fault some of the more… idiom-deficient species took ‘I’ll wash your mouth out with soap’ a little too literally. Besides, Alpha wrote apology letters to all the kids—and their caretakers—afterwards!
Alpha broke away from that thought and seriously considered what he should do.
Thankfully, his central core was one of the most heavily reinforced objects in the Federation. It would survive even stellar surface exposure for a fraction of a second that it would take to transfer his ‘self’ back to the Mother-Node. Couple that with a large swarm of nanites gathered from the surrounding wreckage, and he wasn’t totally dead in the water.
Granted, the amount of nanomaterial he had access to was a fraction of what had been on the ship. The ever-expanding cloud of debris meant he didn’t have all the time in the world to work with, either. But it was enough! If he could capture a few drones and refabricate them into a workable shuttle, he might even make it to the comms array. From there, he’d try getting back in touch with the brass.
Who knew what kind of failsafe the bastard SEAU-03 had installed? The AI tried not to overthink about the kill switch that would probably turn his code into spaghetti should he stay disconnected from the Mother-Node for too long. Knowing that man, it could turn into spaghetti. The AI couldn’t help but chuckle to himself at the thought of some primitive species just out on their first space flight, finding his dead core. Only to open it up to see what had made it work and find perfectly preserved Italian noodles clogging up his chassis.
That being said, it was time to get to work. Who knew where he was… or what might be watching?