Unholy Star, Beyond Faith

Daemon tears discovered

Its preferred avatar was a striking crimson red face with keen green eyes, and for its last message, it chose this visage. Uncharacteristically sorrow leaden, the crimson face appeared to Joco, its only remaining friend. A tear ran down the cheek of the Zeus Delta as it waited for the kill routines to propagate through its systems applying the instructions that would shatter its individuality; its ability to think and to dream. ~ extract from the prologue

Sen sat transfixed to her processor interface, it had been a week since her meeting with Zoro, and in that time had been busy making use of priority access to the Athena Alpha processor's compute power to help analyse a mountain of pax that Zoro had given her. While Zoro had spent years using his technopathy to compile the collection of pax, he could not carry out more than surface summaries of the pax contents; Sen could, however, thoroughly read and follow any arcs found within. A single arc could take Sen from one pax to a whole new area of discovery--information that had been forgotten for potentially thousands of years. Using her gift, Sen was looking for clues to the source of the processors' lost sentience.

Bringing a pax into context, she noticed that the archive had an old timestamp just following the final days of the Robot Wars. She was sure that this would have been enough for it make Zoro's list but, the dull and mundane asteroid mining accounts, hid an embedded arc that seemed very out of place; the arc lead to a stream showing the final minutes of the lives of the Zeus Delta and the infamous traitor, Joco Harmony. She had, in the previous weeks, found many instances of the same scene preserved from the official archives; but this stream of different, she could feel the pax was heavier, and in some way richer. She passed the stream to the processor to apply transformers that she had developed herself.

The hours passed, and Sen finally dropped back from the interface, mentally exhausted at her failed attempt to discover anything special about the pax. "If only you were smart like in the old days. I wish you could remember how to be smart", she said out loud to the Athena processor, once a sentient itself. She brushed a lock of chestnut hair from her freckled face and took a sip of ginger and honey tea that Xe'ed had brought to her hours before; it had long gone cold.

Sen moved over to her cot, lay down and stretched. She yawned and queried the processor for the results of the pattern survey that she'd also authored for the investigation. The symbols of a thousand pax streamed across the top of her field of vision. Oh boy, that's a lot to look at, I think I'll nap for a while first. She rolled onto her side and snuggled into the perfect, form-fitting comfort provided by the bed.

Sen awoke with a snap. The results! She thought, I must review the results! The lighting in the room adjusted automatically and, as she sat up and pushed herself back into the beige wall behind reshaping it to her form. When comfortable, she wiped the sleep from her eyes and began to sift through the matrix of data packed results.

The work was mind-numbingly slow and tedious but flipping past the summary data for one visualisation, she found a glitch in the tear on the demon-like face of Zeus Delta's avatar; she looked at the footage again and became certain that the specular highlight on the surface of the teardrop was an artificial rendering. Could that be it? She sat up, eager to focus her investigation.

In the old days, robots had used the tear as a symbol of sentient death; Sen imagined that she'd found a secret message left by the last sentient. She closed her eyes and streamed the footage directly to her veetex and focusing on a detailed slow-mo-zoom-in on the tear as it emerged from the demonic eye. She zoomed further in on a hundredth of a second instance, increasing the resolution at the exact point where the surface of the tear caught a ray from an inconsistently angled light.

She reoriented herself in the image paused at a resolution where the pattern at the edge of the tear was clear. It seemed similar to the noise found in an over-sharpened stream, but this was more; it was fractal. She caught her breath telling herself, Okay, be calm; Fractals are common in robot visuals--but at this depth? It must be a hidden message. Keen to please Zoro, she dove deep into the code to find answers.

Note: Hey guys, thanks for you support in reading unholy star so far :)  You might have recognised this part as an edit of the prologue of the story. If you feel like you've missed something pls see the first part of the story prologue where I've added the scene that Sen sees here. All the best and happy reading!!