Lost Empire

Chapter 2

The cold and unforgiving dark of space can be a hard mistress when searching for something. It had been two weeks now and Derrick was no closer to finding more of the A.I. brain boxes than when he started looking with E. Having extrapolated the exact position of the last battle and moving from there (not where they found 0999), Derrick thought it would have been easier than this. 

Always having been extremely smart, Derrick had tried to write several programs to aid 0999 to act more independently, but so far he'd failed miserably. Hell, it appeared that even the first emperor hadn't had as much trust of the A.I.'s as had been written about him. So far Derrick had found thirty, seemingly redundant programs that were stopping independent actions and thoughts outside of certain limits. It appeared that the creators of the EIG programs had been more paranoid than Derrick had at first thought.

Sighing, Derrick tried again to disable another of the limiting A.I. programs. He'd found that they were always in pairs, trying to disable the first always seemed to make finding the second easier. The whole time he'd been running tests to see how much more independent thoughts the A.I.'s had, but it seemed that even after removing the thirty, there hadn't been much change.

Derrick had just started to trace where the second program was after trying to disable the thirty first program he'd found when an alarm went off.

"Derrick," E said, "I am detecting an imminent system cascade failure, please cease your activity or I'll be forced to terminate you, thirty seconds." Shocked Derrick quickly closed the circuit, then the hardware cover. With relief sounding in its voice E responded, "All systems returning to normal, cascade failure arrested."

"I'm sorry E," Derrick apologized, "I almost destroyed you, Damn it! I'm no closer to unlocking all of your independent systems than I was."

"No Derrick," E softly stated, "you have accomplished far more than you think. The thirty you have disabled have opened me more than either of us at first thought. It appears that normally, any tampering like you were doing would have caused immediate death."

"Yes E but," Derrick started, "problem is the programs, the commands and all the sub-routines are almost identical, I haven't been able to discern the difference between the thirty I disabled and the major one I just found."

Derrick spent another two days looking over the programs he'd disabled, and what he could of the one that had almost destroyed E and got him killed. Hmmm from what he saw the first thirty he disabled had been written by a multitude of basic programmers, though this last damn, he was sure he recognized the signature it just seemed to slip

out of his grasp. While E checked through older and more recent imperial records, Derrick ran the next five hundred programs. Looking for certain parameters he slowly began to recognize similarities between a few of the five hundred and those he'd disabled before.

Not too soon after this Derrick began to see a numerical pattern in the placement of the limiting programs. Yes! It appeared the deeper he went the more the pattern held up, but knowing those paranoid men back then it might just be an attempt to fool anyone to get this far.

"Derrick," E said breaking into his musings, "I've finished analyzing the signature of the one program, I believe I've found something odd."

"Odd?" Derrick questioned, "Let me log out"

"It appears this program was created as a final fail safe. Also," E suddenly stopped, "Derrick, the signature is from a part of the old imperial family, indirectly in line for the throne. It also seems to mirror your family's. Uh, Derrick? Is your family related to the royal family?"

"Honestly E, I don't know, but come to think of it, that might explain why my father and grand-father were so secretive about the family," Derrick thought aloud.