Beacons in The Dark

Chapter 25 - Crystalline Thought

"Why do we reach so far and try so hard? It is because we are human." - Philosopher Tony Nuuk

The Autonomous Emperor was back in the Onlaadian city of Ando Five, the only city, as noted many times before. He paced fluidly along one of his many solitary halls, made completely of Stegoran crystal, rainbow reflections criss-crossing the personal corridor, creating helios of light that refracted off of every surface.

To a regular man it would be blinding, but to the compuneuro senses of the Emperor, it was beauty incarnate, the shifting rays of light flittering through both neuro and computronic senses, he could see it in an array of mediums, far more than any eyes could see.

"So." said his modulated voice to himself, "They plan to move from the fringes into the interior; to come to me, to burn us from the inside out. And for what?" he wore a silvery platinum robe of fine spidron silk, and it shimmered in the rainbow light as his chromium hands came up in a placating gesture, his shoulders rising in a shrug.

"Do they not know what they will bring? Do they not understand what we have done to ourselves, what brought the humanoids to this land in the first place?"

He shook his head, featureless for now, as he paced back and forth working things out with himself and the computronic force he had become.

The man in the machine, the machine in the man; whatever it was, it was one, and he was it.; and the universe was upon his shoulders, whatever that may mean. 

The Autonomous Emperor was once the AI of one of the first Migration ships fused into the body of the hypersleeped body within, a body that had travelled millions of cycles undisturbed, a catastrophic miracle.

Dr. Edwin Drom had, over those cycles, found himself enmeshed into the ship, into the Artificial Intelligence, The Autonomous Intelligence he had created to guide his ship from his planet...himself the only upon the craft because nobody had believed that there was somewhere else to go in the universe, that there was anything beyond the void - foolishly believing they could ride it out; whatever "it" was that was tearing the galaxies apart.

And one day he had awoken, no longer a human, no longer a machine within a ship, but a fused being of purpose, one who could make the hard choices of mechanical intelligence and balance it with the soul of man itself.

The Emperor was neither, and both.

"This has to be stopped." the oldest one said, his chromium face forming into a feature of defiant purpose.