Mother of Stars

Mother - Skylar

Thayre rose his voice. "What just happened?"

I backed away from Connor as he turned to face the Lieutenant. My brother struggled with sounds for several seconds before he could form proper words. "I... um, uh... I have no clue."

Neila stood, still slightly delirious in her movements. Her eyes were partly glazed over. "I extracted a memory from the Defect, then I showed it to Connor."

"Why didn't you show it to the rest of us?" Thayre asked, narrowing his eyes. "Do you not trust any of us as well?"

"No," Neila replied. Her eyes darted around the room before landing softly on Connor. "I just trust him more than any of you."

"Any of us," Vatria stepped out from behind Thayre, her brown scales gently reflecting the green glow from the Defects, "who have known you for far longer than any of the humans?"

"I don't know why, alright?" Neila yelled. "I just do!"

I held up a hand. "Can we actually get to the content of what he saw?"

"I think it's better for all of you anyway, not to have seen it," Connor said, eyeing me in agreement. "To say the memory was unsettling is an understatement."

Kyrom stepped closer from his spot in the middle of the bridge. "Perhaps you can start by telling us the—"

Neila whirled around, causing him to flinch. "Shut up and let him talk!"

Connor folded his hands together and held them close to his chest, staring contemplatively at the floor. "The Mother is a vast artificial intelligence spanning the entire Milky Way, as far as I could tell. It's billions of years old. Its mindset is hard to describe, but I don't think it's actually evil. It watches every civilization it comes into contact with from a distance, remaining unknown. When it deems the civilization is about to enter its slow demise, it pulls the trigger on it, so to speak. It detonates any home stars of the civilization, making sure the death is relatively swift and painless."

He looked up slowly and met Kyrom's gaze with sorrow. "The Asturnians were its most recent victims. It saw you all as anomalies, and it really didn't want to kill you, but it obviously decided otherwise. After some of you survived, it was conflicted on whether or not to kill the rest of you. We apparently forced it to defend itself when we attacked the Siphon after mistaking the wormhole near the sun as a threat."

Kyrom narrowed his eyes. "Are you saying we have been mistaken in our mission this entire time?"

"No," Neila replied as Connor opened his mouth. "It still tried to kill us when we arrived, remember? We had given it the chance to communicate with us, too."

Connor shrugged. "It had made several predictions on possibilities as we made our way there. We lost in some of them, but the others were inconclusive somehow."

"The Defect," Neila said, looking out over the crowd of Defects with wonder. "It couldn't comprehend the Defect's existence. It had arrogantly thought no Defects would survive the elimination process."

Kyrom followed her gaze. "Can you confirm this, Defect?"

"Yes."

He waited for several seconds for details, but got none. Kyrom's jaw clenched. I could almost see the steam escaping from his earholes.

"Connor," Thayre said, drawing his attention. "For clarification, the Mother is still trying to kill us, correct?"

He shrugged more frustrated this time, flaring his wings slightly. "I don't know. It wasn't clear by the end of the memory. It was still making up its mind."