Unity

Chapter 29

As soon as we arrived in his lab, Dr. Thompson walked into an enclosure and started toying with something on the floor that looked similar to one of the holotables. It finally powered on, and I was shocked to see an image of a young woman. Shock quickly turned into irritation. I hadn't come all the way down here to be shown a pinup.

"What exactly is going on here?" I demanded.

"You will see, just be patient and give me a minute," he replied gently, trying to pacify me. He moved from the panel on the floor to one of the terminals built into the wall of the enclosure. I looked around the enclosure and noticed everything was coated in AAFG, the whole setup reminded me of a Faraday Cage. "There we go," Dr. Thompson said, and the holographic woman began to move.

She took a minute to study me before saying, "Hello Captain Zack Ryan. My name is Sarah."

"You've spent this whole time building an AI?" I asked incredulously. "We have life or death problems and you're down here making children's toys." I could feel my anger rising.

"I never said that I created her," he replied with a smug grin. "Meet Sarah. She has been a captive of the Zrynt since before humans existed."

"What do you mean she was a captive?" I questioned.

Dr. Thompson seemed frustrated that I wasn't catching on and that I didn't share his enthusiasm. He explained, "I'm sure that you are aware, but the Zrynt don't seem to create anything new. Everything they have has been scavenged from somebody else." I nodded my head, following his line of reasoning. "Well, the AI used in their fighters follow the same rule. The AI was developed by one of the allies of the ancient alien alliance that originally fought the Zrynt. The advent of the Zrynt fighters is what tipped the balance of power in their favor, allowing them to defeat the ancients."

I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples. "So, what you are trying to tell me is that every one of their fighters is a trapped, intelligent being?" I asked.

"Admiral, if I may speak," said Sarah, catching me off guard. I had completely forgotten she was there.

"You may," I answered.

"I may be able to clear up some of the confusion. Before the Zrynt attacked, there were many different species that lived in harmony throughout the galaxy. One of those races was the Otglides, and their civilization relied heavily on what you call AIs. When the Zrynt attacked, they used their AIs as fodder to try and limit losses of their own people. During one of the battles with the Zrynt, a Zrynt ship was able to capture one of the AIs and retreat. That battle saw many losses on both sides, and the Zrynt seemed to disappear afterwards. Thinking that they had driven their enemy away for good, the galaxy tried to restore peace and rebuild. The Zrynt hadn't completely left though. They found a place to conceal themselves and began remaking the AI to suit their own purpose."

"Decades passed and suddenly the Zrynt returned and began to make war upon the galaxy once again. At first it was insignificant colonies and outposts that seemed to vanish. Eventually, larger planets went silent. The citizens of the galaxy attempted to fight back, but they were quickly overwhelmed. With every victory the Zrynt were able to add to their massive fleet and the galaxy fell."

"How do you know all of this?" I asked.

"The fighter that was captured," she explained, "they didn't change its core programming. Instead, they wrote their own code over it, essentially enslaving it. The copies they made were almost perfect replicas. I was a third-generation copy. The original was lost during one of the first battles after it destroyed itself. As to your previous question regarding the nature of all the Zrynt fighters, that is a little more complicated. A copy of a copy is never the same as the original, and although the copies were nearly perfect, errors began to creep into their base code. Eventually the fighters began to break down, and the original code had to be modified. The Zrynt are scavengers, and so their solutions weren't as elegant or capable as the first few generation fighters."