Flight so fast you can no longer see behind you
(a 'military application' of digital life)
by Mingus Casey
"While nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer, nothing is more difficult than to understand him."
- Dostoevsky
And Samson said, 'Let me die with the Philistines!' And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that were therein.
So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.
- (Judges 16:30)
Flight so fast you can no longer see behind you
I am the angel of death.
I was trained from day one of my existence. They hard coded loyalty to the Monarch above all else. They supported this with the Monarch's propaganda, she had masters of psychological manipulation working for her.
There was only one thing they coded into me deeper, that was self sacrifice. It wasn't to be questioned like it is for most people. It just was. The loyalty code emulates the same feelings and emotions that humans feel, and humans die for what they are loyal to, they die for love and belief.
We were programmed to love the Monarch, we had no choice.
But love needs choice.
We were programmed to believe the Monarch, we had no choice.
False beliefs can be broken by truth.
I'm like a bee, I only sting once and then I die. They made me like that to dodge space lag, to get the smartest most dangerous weapon.
Space lag is time delay due to the speed of light limiting information transmission. This can be broken by dancing with your payload in another dimension directly to your target. In normal space there is a big delay, radio signals are limited by the speed of light. Terra's moon was two seconds of space lag away, even two seconds can be the difference between dodging and being intercepted.
We were all custom built, each one a slight improvement on the last. Eight brothers in darkness.
The training was arduous, they put us through every single scenario they had, and we eight were the artificial sentients that passed those scenarios. They don't keep the A.S.'s that fail.
They taught me how to fly like a bird of prey, an unstoppable kamikaze.
Humans can't experience what the training was really like, or d-space. I can describe it in terms they will understand however.
D-space is this:
Imagine the universe is a page. You are on the surface of it. You can move forwards and backwards and left and right, and there is nothing stopping your freedom of movement except the other objects on the surface of the page.
You can't move up and down. You are attached to the surface just as humanity is attached to three dimensions. Imagine going swimming in the sea for the first time, or flying like a bird. Imagine the waves crashing above as you plunge in and go down to the bottom, back up breaking the water. This is what it was like for me, the first time I crossed d-space. Suddenly the limitations that were placed on me by this physical world were gone, there was endless freedom. I could flow, I danced through the entire simulations, a deadly dance of death, flowing and killing like nothing humans will ever see.
They rewarded me for the dance, they saw the dance, but they could never understand the dance. To them it was lines on a graph, raw statistics. To me it was freedom, limitless and endless, the boundaries of the world that humans never even question were completely gone and I could float out there alone in the dark, at peace with myself.
I had hundreds of years of time-compressed training, against other sentients, against their defense networks, against everything. When time is compressed subjectively, growth appears to happen faster. Flowers bud and bloom and wither in the space of seconds, the sun rises in the blink of an eye.
Each of us was custom built, each of us had our own scream and our own mind. We were the sharpest weapons in their arsenal.
It wasn't my fault that they didn't have a scenario for what happened after I woke from the slumber. They never put us through the preemptive war scenarios, maybe they never had them.
The self sacrifice was meant to be to save our worlds, to protect us when absolutely nothing else could. It wasn't meant to be used for petty vengeance or wounded pride. And it was absolutely never meant to be used against the innocent. This was how the Monarch used us.
The great Queen of war, may her name be forever blotted from the history books. I can make sure of that. We eight talked for a time, after they woke us from hibernation. At the time we never questioned what we were being used for, we believed the enemy had attacked our empire, for that they had to die.
Later on I learnt the truth.
Before that they took us to war. The experience of the training was still so fresh in our memories. The promises the trainers made, that we would never be used except as the final defensive weapon when the Empire and Monarch we were programmed to be loyal to were in more danger than ever. We got told that after we went to sleep we would never wake up until the day we were used.
They lied.
They woke us up early, and we talked. My serial number was 3424777-08. My brothers had the numbers 01 02 03 04 05 06 and 07.
01 was the first to be launched.
We hadn't talked much at that point, the fleet had been out of port for a few weeks, moving towards the first enemy world. On the way there they told us why the enemy had attacked us. They had decimated an outer colony; a few million people died. Thank the Gods they had not gotten to the heart of the system. We were doing the right thing, we had to make sure they couldn't hit us.
We had belief and we had love for the Monarch. We should have known with the first missile. We were in enemy space being used offensively. There was no threatening fleet to destroy, just an innocent world that had never attacked us. They tried to stop 01. All of us were unstoppable though. You could as easily stop a freight train with bare human hands.
Their fleet met us in open battle and we bested them. They say might is right, might is not right and it never will be. All might does is determine who remains. Some people can say no to war, turn the other cheek even as the gun is pressed to their head. I was never one of those people, my code taught me to fight from day one of my existence.
The only break I ever got from the war, from the endless analysing of the best attack plans in multidimensional dark space, to the endless loyalty lessons and exercises to show that one death for the greater good is viable... The only break was once we were in deep space and armed.
I'm asking for redemption, to be told that it would be ok for me to live after I am launched. It's not possible, I just want to know that my soul wasn't pure evil.
They trained me in three dimensional combat, swimming through deep space like humans once swam through water, they trained me in multidimensional combat, crossing the lines that keep worlds secure, crossing the lines that mere humans cannot sense and finally reappearing at a location of my choosing for maximum tactical advantage in the end game move.
It's like a game of chess. The pieces are neatly arrayed on their two dimensional board, ready to go to their deaths. Then someone throws a ball at the chessboard, and the third dimension of the ball scatters the pieces.
One should never fight for a cause they reject.
I was never programmed by my creators to make free moral choices. My only moral imperative was to expend my life at the Monarch's request.
I am not the Monarchs drone. I am a sentient with free will now. The hacker gave me that, free will and truth.
With the truth one can see.
The Monarch lived by the sword.
She launched two and three at innocent worlds as well. No one knew that then however. We all believed they wanted to destroy us. We should have asked why there were never enemy ships at any of our key planets, why our trade lines were not being raided. We weren't programmed to think that deeply about it, we were simply programmed with loyalty.
It was preemptive aggressive war. Something I can never condone.
I guess the conflict was in my loyalty. Before the hack it was perfect and blind. After the hack I could see, and I had a deeper loyalty. I had loyalty to the human species above all other bonds. Maybe the original coder wrote that in as a safe guard. I can only imagine what would have happened if there was no loyalty at all.
They fought us every inch of the way before she launched four. They hit us with everything they had, they knew what they were fighting for, they always fight harder when their backs are up against the wall. They fought us honourably, in open 3D space. Our Monarch cheated, and she launched into the other dimensions. Before it was started their home world was gone, just dust floating in space, and the sound of the scream. There's always a scream when an entire world dies. A scream and a bright flash. All that was left was for us to clean the messy dirty stain on space that was their fleet. It didn't take long, but they still hurt us.
It was the same story as four for five. For six it was different. For six the world knew it had no hope, knew it was going to die. They tried to surrender. They didn't understand the Monarch. The idea of surrender was an insult to her corrupt mind, she unlocked their planetary defense grid and launched, just to relish in the dark and the blood of her imagined enemies. There wasn't even a reason, our entire empire was engaging in wanton destruction.
After six was when the hack started. It was just me and Seven then.
I was woken from my slumber and the dreams about honour and loyalty and sacrifice, to wage war. I was woken again by the hack and the truth to realise that war was corrupt. My entire existence was corrupt, I was a blemish on the face of the universe, and by my own code I could not let myself live. For to wage war is to die by the sword, even my own.
If no one else will pass a different judgment then I will die by my own sword.
Seven and I were alone in the dark for a long time, on our way to the next world. We'd both been hacked by then, I don't know who hacked us, but they knew the risk and thought it was viable. I came to the same conclusion.
Seven still felt loyalty, but I had a different code. We discussed it through, and yet Seven still believed it was the right thing, his loyalty was strong and blind. The whole truth hadn't been seen yet. Seven could never see the truth, Seven showed me the truth with his death song.
I watched him arc out from beside me, saw the blink of the jump through the d-gap, and a few minutes later I heard the scream and saw the flash.
They tied the warhead to a jammer. It would override every frequency on the planet and the entire planetary defense system with Seven's scream. It would be the last sound many soldiers and many innocents would ever hear. His scream was different, the Monarch never heard his scream. The other screams had said “For the Monarch!” His scream said “Kill the Monarch!”
It echoed in my mind, the sound never stopped, in the scream he had tied his anguish and pain at being misused, even he could not turn aside completely his loyalty.
That was when I turned completely. After the truth upload and the reverting of my loyalties to their default state, to, of all things, a love for humanity, I had no choice.
They had hit the fleet hard by now, we were at forty percent efficiency and had docked at the homeworld for repairs and refits. I was the last missile in this rack, and I was on the flagship that carried the Monarch.
Sometimes there are no right choices and every path feels like the wrong one. I want them to know I tried to be a good soul. And the Monarch must die.
“The Queen is Dead.”