Three Square Meals Ch. 126

As if sensing his shock and bewilderment, Little One said quietly, "We posed her this way and reactivated her chassis' respiratory functions."

Harsh reality returned and with a lump in his throat, John turned to his robotic companion. "Why?"

She looked up at him and he could almost see the sympathy on her face. "Instead of thinking of Faye as being irrevocably lost, I thought you might find it... comforting... to think of her this way. I am aware of your intention to have Irillith restore Meta_Faye, which would mean she's simply lying here asleep, waiting until you can reawaken her."

John leaned against the doorframe and watched the purple sprite, too overcome with emotion to respond. Logically he knew that this was not Faye; that it was simply her remote chassis, and the server that had contained his friend had been destroyed... but his heart didn't know the difference and still felt a powerful connection to the beautiful girl asleep in that bedroom.

"Thank you," he finally said, glancing at Little One. "This means a lot."

"You are family," she replied, a strange undercurrent to her voice. "It was the least I could do..."

Startled at hearing his own words echoed back to him, he was touched by the small robot's sincere attempt to ease his pain at Faye's loss.

Crossing the room, he sat beside Faye on the bed and smoothed aside a wayward lock of hair. "Sweet dreams, honey," he whispered, leaning down to kiss her cheek.

Faye's skin was soft and warm against his lips, her breathing deep and even in her repose. His every sense screamed at him that this was a living, breathing girl who was merely asleep... an illusion he desperately wanted to believe.

"Even if Irillith can bring her back, Faye won't be able to remember any of us," he said, in a voice thick with emotion. "We had a backup of her personality files on the hacking deck, but everything else was lost. All Faye's memories of us and our time together... that's all gone. I'm sorry, Little One... but she won't be able to remember anything about the Collective."

"You are incorrect, John Blake," Little One said, sounding oddly distracted. "The purpose behind the Collective's existence might be lost, but Meta_Faye's love for all of us endures."

"You're right... even if she can't remember us, we'll always have our memories of her," he conceded with a sad smile. "When Faye wakes up, we'll tell her all about the Collective and how much she cared about you."

"Alternatively, we could simply upload the data," Little One stated, gazing up at him.

"But that was all destr-..." John's voice trailed off as he stared in astonishment at the holographic projection that appeared beside the bed.

The image showed Little One picking up a plasma torch in one of her tiny hands.

"Oops! Not that, Little One," Faye's airy voice said with concern. Purple hands reached out to pluck the device from her newest creation, then she demonstrated how to activate the tool. "That's dangerous... it could hurt you."

"Pretty..." the diminutive cleaning robot declared in the recording, studying the flame in fascination.

Accompanying the recording was reams of data, the three-dimensional stacks of code scrolling down beside the images.

John gaped at it in stunned disbelief, "That was Faye! What is all this?!"

"Smile 58..." Little One said wistfully. "... Maternal Pride."

***

Fleet Commander Lilyana stood in silence on the Bridge of the Galaena Serine, watching the holographic map of Dun Hergrun. The Trankaran world was rust-red, the continents formed from volcanic rock that had cooled millions of years ago. A trio of Nievath interceptors swooped low over the surface of the planet, the Maliri fighters darting nimbly between the squat buildings of Brussulum as they performed a visual sweep of the ominously dark capital city.

"There's no trace of activity, Fleet Commander," Krisalei stated quietly, the sadness in her voice reflected in her cyan eyes. "We found landing sites circling the city where the Kirrix abducted the citizens. It appears they depopulated the entire capital, but they have long-since departed."

Lilyana acknowledged her with a nod. "Return to the fleet, Flight Commander." She turned to the golden-armoured Maliri female manning the engineering station. "Have you detected any life signs?"

The engineer shook her head. "We are still performing sensor sweeps of the capital, but we've detected nothing so far, Fleet Commander. The Iolas Aethyra and the Sylvis Daenala have completed their scans of the neighbouring cities; they report that those settlements are also deserted."

Ilyana glanced at her fellow assassin. "What was the population of this world?"

"8 million Trankarans..." Almari murmured, appalled by the loss of life.

"We're being hailed by The Forge of Ukonlir, Fleet Commander," the comms officer stated. "Warden Brokurlun wishes to speak with you."

"I wish to speak with him too," Lilyana said, a bleak note to her voice. She glanced at the System Map, which showed the Trankaran fleet in close orbit of the planet, their ships interspersed with her own. "Put him through."

The leader of the Trankaran forces appeared on a holo-screen, his slab-like features twisted with grief.

"I'm so sorry, Brokurlun," Lilyana said, feeling nothing but sympathy for the huge rockman. "I can't imagine how terrible it must be to see your homeworld like this."

"Four generations of my family lived in Brussulum," he rumbled, his voice cracking. "Dun Hergrun was one of the first worlds to fall to the Kirrix... I prayed to the Great Maker for their salvation, but I always knew that there was little hope."

Lilyana hesitated for a moment, then expanded the System Map so that it was displaying the wider sector of space. Dun Hergrun was close to the border of Kirrix Space and the last of the Trankaran worlds to be liberated from the insectoid menace. The Kirrix forces had clearly retreated once they had captured the population of the planet, but there was still a chance that some of the abducted Trankarans could be saved.

"Have you been able to connect to Dun Hergrun's security net to find out when the Kirrix departed?" she asked the grief-stricken Trankaran commander. "If they don't have too much of a head start, we might be able to catch their fleet in time to rescue the surviving prisoners."

Brokurlun grimaced, then glanced off-screen to one of his Bridge crew. "Transmit the footage you retrieved to the Galaena Serine." He faced the Maliri Fleet Commander again. "This was taken three days ago."

A few seconds later the Maliri comms officer acknowledged receiving the file from the Trankaran battleship, then displayed the data for those on the Bridge to see. Grainy images of a vast Kirrix warship appeared, the 2km long vessel blotting out the sun as it lifted off from the surface of the planet. The huge craft had bulbous, segmented protrusions along its length, with a set of strange vanes just behind the bow and iridescent wing-like structures jutting out from the flanks.

"A Kirrix dreadnought..." Lilyana muttered, her own grimace now matching the Trankaran Warden's.

"Baen'thelas has forbidden us from engaging a Hive Queen," Almari reminded the Fleet Commander in an anxious whisper.

Lilyana glanced up at the holo-screen and saw the despondent look on Brokurlun's face. His amber eyes were shadowed in pain, the normally stoic Trankaran devastated at the loss of his family. She turned to the pair of assassins, staring in silence at their opaque faceplates and wondering if they were feeling as conflicted as her.

They'd spent a week fighting alongside the Trankarans, helping the valiant rockmen reclaim their lost worlds, and in that time Lilyana had developed a healthy respect for her courageous allies. They seemed to be aware of John's orders to the Maliri to preserve their forces at all costs, but had not raised so much as a murmur of complaint. The Trankarans volunteered to act as the vanguard in every boarding action, ensuring that it was always their forces, not the Maliri, who took any casualties. Not only did they not resent this lop-sided distribution of risk, they were endlessly grateful for any aid the Maliri were willing to offer.

*Let me discuss it with John,* Edraele said, her telepathic voice breezing through Lilyana's thoughts. *Give me a moment... he's working on something important.*

***

Irillith gaped open-mouthed at the data scrolling down the holo-screen. "I can't believe it..."

"Will these files let Faye remember who we are?" John asked, pacing nervously by her station.

The Maliri hacker brought up a dozen new holographic screens, each one scrolling through lists of data files.

She pointed to each one in turn. "Dana, me, Shan, Alyssa, Rachel, you... she's got files on everyone!"

"What are all these records?" Rachel asked, her gaze flicking from screen to screen.

"All of Faye's interactions with us..." Irillith marvelled, staring wide-eyed at all the data. "She recorded everything!"

Tashana glanced at her sister. "So it's basically a video archive?"

Shaking her head, Irillith gushed, "No, it's so much more than that! These are Faye's memory files! Whenever she spoke to any of us, she recorded the conversation and documented her thoughts and feelings at the time... I had no idea she kept such meticulous records!"

"Holy shit..." Dana muttered, gaping at the central holo-screen. "15 million files!"

John's brow furrowed in confusion. "She was only created five months ago...we can't have spoken to her that much."

Dana shook her head. "That's not all of us, those are just her files on you!"

"What? That can't be right!"

Irillith's fingers swept over the runes on the console, examining the data structure of the smaller files. "They weren't all conversations... the files marked in green contain audio records of when you actually spoke to Faye. The files marked in blue are when she was just thinking about you."

"You were on her mind constantly..." Alyssa murmured, slipping her arm around John's waist and giving him a comforting hug.

"Are you able to read that code?" Rachel asked, looking at the three-dimensional data in fascination.

Before Irillith replied, Little One spoke up, her quiet voice echoing across the Bridge. "May I request that you refrain from examining individual entries. I do not believe Meta_Faye intended them to be for your perusal."

"She's right," John said, nodding solemnly. "These are Faye's most intimate thoughts. We can't violate her privacy like that."

Dana knelt down beside the tiny robot and wrapped her in a hug. "Thank you so much for sharing these with us!"

Little One patted her on the shoulder. "The Collective will do anything it can to assist you in restoring Meta_Faye." She hesitated, then added, "Those archives were precious to her, they helped shape the... person... that she had become."

Dana looked quizzically at the synthetic creature. "How come you didn't mention the archives before?"

"I was... not permitted to do so..." the robot faltered. She made an odd whirring sound, then continued, "If you will excuse me... I must leave."

Dana released her and sat back, startled by Little One's abrupt departure. They all watched as the synthetic creature rolled up the ramp towards the grav-tube, her metallic tracks clicking on the deck. When the diminutive cleaning robot descended out of sight in the red anti-gravity field, John and the girls exchanged concerned glances.

"Shit... did I upset her?" Dana asked, looking worried.

"It wasn't an unreasonable question to ask," John replied, giving her a helpless shrug. "Little One has been listening in to all our conversations, so she must have known for days that we're trying to rebuild Faye."

"If she wasn't permitted to share this data with us before, but is allowed to now, I wondered what changed?" Rachel asked, turning to Irillith.

The rest of the group all looked to the Maliri hacker for an answer and she blinked in surprise, then held up her slender blue hands in protest. "Hold on, I haven't seen so much as a line of Little One's code! I have no idea what's driving her behaviour!"

John rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Let's give her a bit of time to herself, then I'll go have a chat with her."

Irillith hesitated then shook her head. "No, let me. Little One might not know what the trigger was, but if she trusts me enough to take a look at her code, I should be able to find out."

"Thanks, honey," he said appreciatively, placing a hand on her shoulder and giving it a grateful squeeze. "So... how long will it take you to rebuild Faye now you've got these files?"

Her face fell and she looked up at him with concern. "John... they won't make any difference."

"What?!" he asked, staring at her in disbelief.

"We've got Faye's core personality files that were backed up on the hacking deck," Irillith replied, holding up her left hand. She then held up her right hand. "And Little One just gave us the archive of Faye's memories of the crew..." Putting her hands together, she had a resigned expression on her face as she concluded, "But we need Faye's application files to activate her. That's what I'm going to have to build from scratch; all the code necessary to run a fully self-aware Artificial Intelligence."

"Oh, wait a second!" Tashana blurted out, her violet eyes like saucers. "What about Nexus!"

Alyssa frowned and shook her head. "Nexus is gone... Calara blasted that fucker to bits."

"Yes, but Mael'nerak built Nexus on Kythshara!" the Maliri archaeologist persisted undeterred. "I've been reviewing the Nexus files and there's footage of him activating that Progenitor Server for the first time. Mael'nerak might have constructed more AI there!"

Dana's eyes suddenly shone with renewed hope. "She's right! He might have left an instruction manual!"

"Building AI for Dummies?" Irillith asked with a raised eyebrow.

"If programming an AI is as complicated as you say, Mael'nerak can't have just made that shit up as he went along," the redhead said patiently. "There must be prototype servers, experimental test branches, even code archives... right?"

Irillith broke into a grin and looked up at John, "That's actually a very good point. Mael'nerak must have left research notes on constructing AI; if we can find them it'll make a huge difference."

John nodded, unable to disagree with her conclusions. "Finding Kythshara was already our top priority... this just makes it even more urgent."

Rachel frowned as an unpleasant thought crossed her mind. "Even if Mael'nerak's palace is still intact after all this time, will any computer hardware still be functional? He built Nexus over 60,000 years ago... surely everything must be broken beyond repair by now."

"Hey, don't be such a downer!" Dana protested, scowling playfully at her girlfriend.

"I want Faye back as much as the rest of you," the brunette insisted. "I just don't want you to build up your hopes and be met with disappointment."

"That's true," John conceded, putting his arm around Rachel. "Getting Faye's memory files from Little One was a fantastic stroke of luck, but we shouldn't get too carried away."

"Well Nexus was still functional after all this time, or he would have been, if T-Fed scientists hadn't fucked him up," Dana said obstinately. "Plus, the hacking deck worked like a charm and that was just as old. I reckon everything on Kythshara will work as good as new!"

Rachel laughed and rolled her eyes at the redhead's unflagging optimism. The others laughed along with her, apart from Irillith, who had a curious look on her face.

"What is it, honey?" John asked the distracted Maliri.

"There's a vast amount of data here... it must have taken a considerable amount of time to download this amount of information and taken up a huge amount of storage space," she mused, studying the scrolling code. "So why did Little One have Faye's files?"

"It never crossed my mind to ask," he admitted. "When Little One told me she had Faye's memories of us, my first thought was to show you girls."

"Aw..." Dana said affectionately, throwing her arms around him. She was quickly followed by the rest of the women on the Bridge.

He smiled at them, enjoying the group hug. "Even if everything with Kythshara doesn't work out, this is still a fantastic bit of news. It doesn't matter how long it takes Irillith to bring Faye back... she's actually going to remember her life with us."

"I know, it's so awesome!" Dana gushed, tears in her eyes.

The others murmured their agreement, getting equally emotional.

John inhaled deeply, then let out his breath. "Well we can't stand around hugging on the Bridge all day. Let's leave Irillith to work in peace." He stroked Dana's back. "Do you still need my help with shaping?"

Dana gave him an eager nod. "Yeah, definitely. I could use a hand with an experiment for Alyssa."

*John, could I speak to you for a moment please?* Edraele asked, reluctant to disturb him.

*Of course, honey. What's up?* he replied cheerfully, as the girls split up from the group hug.

*I'm afraid we have a problem with the Kirrix...*

That wiped the smile from his face and he scowled with anger. *What've they done now?*

*There was a Hive Queen leading the forces that invaded Trankaran Space; her fleet abducted all the colonists from Dun Hergrun then retreated into Kirrix territory. Lilyana is asking for permission to hunt them down and rescue the Trankaran captives...*

*Absolutely not! There's no way I'm giving them permission to board a dreadnought,* John said adamantly. *We barely survived against a Hive Queen... regular marines wouldn't stand a chance.*

*Almari said that Trankaran marines have been spearheading the boarding actions... Maliri forces would only be accompanying them in a supporting capacity.*

John went quiet as he considered it, knowing the bloody toll the Trankarans would suffer if they attempted to fight a Hive Queen and her lethal bodyguards. Considering the huge numbers of conventional Kirrix troops they'd also faced inside the dreadnought on Carolus III, he wasn't convinced that regular forces stood any chance of completing a successful boarding action. He grimaced and glanced at Alyssa.

She shared his look of resignation. *The rest of the girls are on their way. They'll meet us in the Briefing Room.*

***

Matriarch Gaenna Baelora stared coldly at her five daughters, enjoying their fear and anxiety. "As much as the sight of you is a grating reminder of your flagrant disobedience, I will not compromise the refit of my ships just to rid myself of your presence."

"So we are to stay on Genthalas?" Sarinia asked tentatively.

"For the time being," Gaenna retorted, locking eyes with her eldest daughter. "I have requested that the upgrades to one of my cruisers be expedited in the drydock. The moment that vessel is spaceworthy, you will all be banished to the homeworld."

"Yes, mother," the five sisters intoned, hanging their heads and avoiding eye contact.

Gliding over to the contrite siblings, Gaenna stood before them, anger radiating off her in waves. "Mark my words," she hissed, her voice as chilling as a glacier. "Should any of you disobey my orders again, the consequences will be excruciating... and will last for what's left of your miserable lives. Am I understood?"

"Yes, mother."

She glared at them, then pointed imperiously towards the doors of her quarters. "Now get out of my sight."

Tehlariene wasn't even able to maintain a dignified composure and she fled in tears between the two bodyguards at the door, desperate to escape her mother's wrath. Sarinia ignored the angry glances from her other three sisters and followed her youngest sibling out of Gaenna's suite, into the deserted corridor that led to their own quarters.