Theseus

It had taken a little bit to help Ray clean up the mess of gross bodily fluids that I’d left all over her furniture, and thankfully by then, I had calmed down enough to at least appear composed on the outside.

When I walked slowly back into my heart, my eyes still red with tears, the pair of doctors looked up from Doc's terminal. I blinked and saw that they had been examining Doc's observations about me.

"Sorry." I said hoarsely, approaching my small pile of clothes in the corner and finally beginning to dress myself. I supposed that I should get used to wearing something again, after all, I wasn’t sure how long we’d be here at this point.

“I figured you needed some time alone after the whole... thing.” Doc was avoiding eye contact with me. I didn’t, I just needed to talk with someone I could relate to more than that asshat, Joel. But I wasn’t about to voluntarily reopen that fresh wound now “I’ve just been showing Dr. Fuller your profile.”

“The official one?” I scoffed. “Nothing to see there.”

“That and my own observations.” Doc paused and looked up at me “… Are you going to be okay to continue with this?” he asked carefully.

I took a deep breath, trying not to snap at him. Of course I wasn’t going to be okay. I’d just learned that I was less of a person and more of a thing. But I tried to keep Ray’s words in mind too. I just had to remember that I was more than that. “I’m going to be… yeah, okay. This is just a lot, you know? I know… most of you guys aren’t going to treat me any different or anything, but everything feels unreal right now. Like a dream. Or a nightmare.”

Doc nodded solemnly, then perked up. “Ah, right. Speaking of nightmares.” He pulled up a file for Dr. Fuller and began to address her again “I almost forgot, Meryll’s been having consistent nightmares since she joined our crew. The other day, she had the idea to record her brainwaves as she slept.”

Dr. Fuller leaned over to look and creased her brow in rapt interest as Doc scrolled through the readout “That’s… well, I suppose I shouldn’t have expected normal, but it’s certainly not something I’ve seen before.” She mumbled “It’s probably just nonsense being thrown around like when anyone dreams, but It’s like there are at least two different streams of mental functions crossing over one another.”

“It’s like I have a starship in my head or something.” I muttered as I finished buttoning up my only ridiculous shirt “It’s a stream of data I’m receiving constantly. I see it every time I close my eyes. The ship, all its sensors, its controls. And any other electronic devices nearby. I can control it all from the core module and create wireless networks pretty easily.” I threw my arms out in frustration “I can control it from anywhere, really, it’s just easier in there.”

“Psychic networking, yes. I’m familiar with it. It’s what Cassandra used to kill Arthausen.” Fuller nodded solemnly. “And you just… knew how to do all of this inherently?” Fuller asked with a tone of curious surprise.

“Well, yeah, it’s not so different from how I used to-“ I paused and thought about that for a moment. I was never an IT consultant. I hadn’t had formal computer training in any capacity, or likely any experience with it beforehand at all if I had just been an experiment about sparking human consciousness. That had all been a simulation, and why would that have actually left me with the knowledge I had to do what I do? “No, that doesn’t make sense…” I muttered to myself.

“It doesn’t. We never trained the clones we used in the experiment, either before or after they woke up, to run any kind of machine core network. Ship cores need a simulated training regimen before they can learn to operate something like a starship and be released to market. Plugging a blank clone into a ship may as well be the same as grafting it to a corpse.” Fuller explained “You must have had training sometime between the end of the experiment and becoming amnesic.”

“… So who trained me?” I asked curiously, and there was a long uncomfortable moment of silence that told me that nobody knew.

Doc cleared his throat “I have a theory. What if the Arthausen project didn’t really end at all?”

Fuller crossed her arms and looked irritated, almost offended. “There was an awful lot of disposing of documentation and… personnel… for a secret project to continue anyway.”

“Just hear me out. Say it’s a staged project. The first stage is to create the units. After that, the team involved with their creation becomes redundant. Maybe even a detriment if they know too much.” Doc explained. “So they dispose of that team and move the responsibility of the units onto the next at another level of secrecy.”

“There were only seven successful units, though.” Fuller was starting to sound a little bit annoyed at the theory. “That’s hardly a viable sample size to continue the research. And they were all extremely unstable. Dangerous. They were hardly something that could be released to the public.”

I didn’t like the implications of Doc’s theory, but I was starting to see the logic he was getting at “What if the goal was never mass production?” I asked, making both doctors look at me with their own realizations dawning “What if we weren’t meant to be a product? What if we were a proprietary weapon?”

“A black op weapon.” Fuller nodded slowly, dread in her expression “They weren’t trying to create the future of machine core science. You seven could have been the goal all along.” She reached back and grabbed a chair, falling back to sit down and hold her head in what surely had to be dizzy realization “Or at the very least, what they settled for after Dr. Arthausen died.

“That makes sense.” Doc nodded “I haven’t read the sim reports myself, but the captain’s been training Meryll for battle just in case, and she mentioned that Meryll’s performance in them is staggeringly good.”

“You’re running combat sims?” Fuller asked, renewed curiosity once more washing over her face as she leaned forward toward me again. “Can I see the logs?”

“Sure.” I shrugged and closed my eyes, beginning a transfer of my most recent set of log files to Doc’s terminal. It didn’t take long before she clicked into the folder and looked a little disappointed “Something wrong?”

“Well, usually, a ship core will run millions of these sims and create an aggregate report, this is only a few hundred individual ones. Is that all of them?” She asked.

“Operating at computational speeds is dangerous. I’ve only had to do it once and I think it might have almost killed me. I have to do the sims in real-time.” I explained. “Just open some of them. You’ll have to settle for the individual results, but I think they speak for themselves.”

She nodded, looking uncertain, but as she opened a file, her expression changed to surprise. She continued browsing through several more files, skimming across them “Well, the computer running it certainly doesn’t like you, but it’s hard to argue with the actual results. This is after only a few hundred simulations?” she asked.

“Actually, that’s just the most recent batch, I didn’t used to be that good at them.” I admitted. “These are just the ones from the last week.”

“Don’t laugh, but she also has me playing video games about starship battles.” I smiled a little bit, a bit of levity returning to me at the absurdity of what I’d just said “I feel like I might be learning more about tactics from the game, honestly. It’s designed to challenge human players, whereas the sims are made for machines. But the sims are a better gauge of my actual progress.”

“It’s more than impressive, it’s practically… miraculous. No standard ship core can come anywhere close to this, even on a seeded simulation. Your performance is far above what I’d expect from a market core; even leagues over a custom-made clone.” Fuller still sounded astonished as she kept browsing through.

“I’m getting close to a 99% survival rate, I think I’m pretty much ready to go to war if I have to.” I was proud of myself for a moment, but when I reflected on what I’d just said, I shrunk a bit and had to add “Which is good, cause I just might have to before long.”

“That’s… absurd. In what metric?” she asked “Evenly matched one-on-one?”

I looked at her, a little surprised that she was looking for a specific scenario “… Every metric. I’m trying to be ready for anything, so I run uneven hardware, handicapped scenarios, large-scale battles…”

Fuller was speechless for a long moment where she just kept reading through my reports of what were, despite what the score value said, successful mission after successful mission in awe. Finally, she picked her jaw up off the floor and looked up at me “Meryll… are you aware of what a standard ship core’s acceptable range of performance of these simulations in an even battle usually amounts to?” she asked.

“I dunno, like… 95% survival?” I hadn’t really thought about it before, but those were the kinds of levels I was reaching when I had just gotten used to the controls, so maybe that was the norm?

Fuller shook her head enthusiastically “You don’t understand. These are simulations of ship core behavior, meant to be pitted against a ship core, which are operating on similar training themselves. At the very highest, between evenly matched starships, I’ve seen a ship core survive 65% of these battles, and that involved a lot of luck.”

It was my turn to look surprised. I figured I was doing okay, but that was unbelievable. I closed my eyes to do a little bit of math on what I’d just heard and realized that in a direct battle in space, it meant that I was operating at a number of magnitudes greater performance than the norm. A startled “Oh.” Was all I could say as I returned to reality and looked back over to Doc who shared an expression of bewildered wonder with me.

Fuller couldn’t help but let out an astonished chortle as she declared “Meryll, you’re a god among machines.”

Doc, however, didn’t look as happy with the news. He had a look of quiet contemplation on his face before he announced “Which not only means that the secret elite starship squad theory holds water… but that Foundation potentially has six more gods.”