Startops

By Vic Williams

Blown wildly across the galaxy in man's first FTL trip, they manage to settle in pristine Startops. Only to find that its a galactic zoo. Dinos a dozen. Are they Zooie grub or Zookeepers? Worse the ecosystem extends across some star systems. Aliens settle. Royals Hunt their Preserve. Things claw right out of hand. Hunting pesky pests, the Osmos grasp Earth.

How do a few people settle a rip, tear, and suck, dino world? What happens when advanced aliens come in to hunt dinner? Caught between claws and tech teeth, people learn to play in new ways. Tech life swarms burrows, creeps into dino herds, and dances up inside astro balloons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vic Williams
• Release date: Oct 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465991096

Vic Williams

I'm a coach - trainer - writer, from Vancouver, Canada, with some years experience in China. I like to start things, to grow things and people. Gardening. The gardening grows into mapping, of some kinds. Scenarios, design thinking, strategy, and such. Part of growing things is improving them. Please suggest improvements at: [e-mail] Thanks, Vic

Book preview

Startops

Published by Vic Williams at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Vic Williams

October 9, 2011

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Contents

Chapter 1 Cruising

Chapter 2 Lets talk pretty

Chapter 3 Blasted, lightspeed escape

Chapter 4 A whole new hand

Chapter 5 Dang alien settlers

Chapter 6 Longnecks slurp humans

Chapter 7 Sulf cyclone attack

Chapter 8 Sprayed, worse dang aliens

Chapter 9 Garage rumblings

Chapter 10 Worser and worser

Chapter 11 Osmos extermination hunt

Chapter 12 Desperate moves

Chapter 13 Eco good, lets raid

Chapter 14 Life Dance

Chapter 15 Overspace war

Chapter 16 Mapping trade routes

Chapter 17 Worse monsters

Chapter 18 New Hong Kong

Chapter 19 Onward

Chapter 20 Earth blockade

Chapter 21 Lorna

Chapter 22 Bewilder war

Chapter 23 Fang and claw dinner talk

Chapter 24 Beyond the End. Dragons?

Chapter 1 Cruising

<Dead.> I moved the wand to the next bush.

<Dead.>

I poked the wand into the bush and wiggled both.

The wand buzzed, then said, <the bush is still dead, you idiot.>

I wiped the wand’s sensors off, and stroked it to relax it. It hummed back sardonically, as I moved to a huckleberry bush.

The berries look good.

Another voice in the wand said, <.forget it. They may now be poisonous to humans..>

I swept the wand over the huckleberry bush.

<Dead.>

I broke a branch off the bush and looked at the broken end. I sniffed it.

<Don’t lick it.>

We humans only eat the berries.

<Not these.>

I nodded, and stepped ahead. I could feel that whatever-it-was had killed everything in its path. Every bird. Every bee. Every tree. Every plant.

I sighed. Except that the plants didn’t know they were dead yet.

We were following the killer’s trail through a young stand of Douglas-fir trees on a gravelly bench, mostly with an understory of salal bushes. We’d got here by following up on a client’s request. I had been doing a forest check cruise, actually calibrating myself to what the instruments said about this area. Some call it a ground-truth check, comparing human reality to what the instruments record. Anyway, I had just splashed across a creek, when I felt something wrong and stopped to look around. I could see a few dead minnows that the current had washed into the bank. A couple of dead bugs stood sentry-like on a rock on the side of the creek. There was also an undercurrent, a stillness, something like a room just after a death in the family. The wand’s built-in Intelligent Agents, better known as IAgents, immediately scoffed. They told me that foresters shouldn’t play in creeks. Disturbs the fish. They said I should turn-off my intuition and get on with the timber cruise.

Then I tested a few leaves using the sensors built into my wand. The leaves tested dead. That, combined with a few supplemental tests to verify the results, sent the wand’s IAgents into a fractious discussion. If, that's a big if, they were organic I describe it more like 'howling at the moon'. More than a bit upset. It actually sounded like some kind of a voodoo death chant in miniature, so I detached. Instead I listened, sniffed, felt, and watched the world. I experienced the larger wild world around us.

After at least a couple minutes of squabbling, the assemblage of IAgents decided that the deaths weren’t natural, and wanted more samples. So I dutifully spiralled out wider and wider, waving the wand around checking. After I slipped and fell in, while crossing the creek for the sixth time, I decided that we’d follow the trail that we’d found. One direction came to an end fast, so we went the other way. We’d now been following it for about a hundred and thirty meters.

More than a bit uneasy, I said, it’s like some kind of death ray hit.

At least two IAgents in the wand chuckled while another replied, <uh huh.>

Frowning I observed, the trail’s still about a meter wide and a bit wiggly.

<Uh huh.> The little suckers were humouring me.

I reached up, grabbed a tree branch over my head, and ran the wand over it.

<It’s dead. It has normal fluid flows. Normal transpiration. But it’s dead at the cellular level.>

I broke off another chunk of branch and ran the wand over it.

No response. I felt my eyebrows flicker and my mouth quirk at the idea of these aroused and chattery IAgents going mute.

I went to tap the wand on the broken chunk.

<Don’t do that. We’re not broken.>

A hardware IAgent added, <<and neither is the wand’s hardware.>>

I grinned and nodded, then tapped them together anyway.

Stepping ahead to another tree, I reached and telescoped the wand out to a branch tip double my height overhead.

<Dead.>

I moved it along the branch.

<Dead.>

I moved it again.

No response.

This time I grinned. You know you have an edge. You can’t handle having a dead section right alongside a living section in the same lifeform.

This time the wand growled at me. I raised my eyebrows as I realized that I could detect at least three different growls in its response.

I moved the wand along the branch.

<Alive.>

I nodded. This chunk of branch, maybe fifteen feet above the ground, was outside the death zone, but the rest of the branch out to the tip was inside. The overall pattern suggested that whatever-it-was must have fired down from overhead.

One asked, <how can you tell that these plants are dead?>

I shrugged and grinned. This was an old story. I can sense it. My antlers really help my sensitivity, just like antennae. How do you tell?

The IAgent’s voice was all huffed up at the ridiculous idea of humans having antlers, but it easily caught the allusion. It snorted and said, <<you figure that your horned god archetype makes you a sensitive.>>

Still grinning, I replied, that’s a characteristic of the archetype. I nod and affirm with, shamanic-type deep connection to the living environment.

<<Just like those ancient cave paintings in France?>>

I’m grinning now, uh huh. It’s all the same thing. A natural human attribute. Squashed by city folk and city knowings.

Its reaction, mainly a scuffing noise mimicking something seeking data on one of those floppy disks the ancients used, had told me that I’d managed to get a rise out of one of the deeper down, rarely talk to humans, ones. It gave up on the horned god bit as it continued. <<The death signature is in the missing electromagnetic emissions. Electronic noises characteristic of life at the cellular level are absent.>>

I nodded, then offered, music not noise. Life music. I guess that part of me can somehow detect that some notes in the harmony of the dance of life are broken.

No response.

This time I restrained myself from tapping the wand, but added, this situation is exceptional. And Darwin said to cherish our exceptions. I grinned as I added, it’s easy to detect something you cherish.

I bent over a dead squirrel.

<Be careful.>

I scowled at the squirrel as I said, the conductors are dead. Each lifeform has conductors for the orchestra of its life dance. In this case some hell weapon has killed the conductors.

<Don’t touch it.>

Warning. This is the first dead mammal. If anything is infectious, a mammal will be a very good carrier. Idiot! Warning!!>

<*Idiot!*>

The squirrel still felt warm as I turned it over in my hand. It even had its legs extended as if it died in mid-jump. Somehow I could feel that it had been zapped, but that its basic integrity was still okay. It was benign in my hand.

<Pregnant female.>

I winced and nodded, then put it down again. I had a sudden strong feeling of being trapped, of being locked into somebody’s test sequence or game. And I wondered why anybody or anything would do such a profane act.

Walking on, I pondered how I sensed its death and lots of others. All while I could sense that life continued on unchanged immediately beyond the death zone. How does one sense something that’s missing? Or was I detecting discordant notes as the orchestral harmony of life fell apart?

About a hundred meters farther along, the trail went berserk. It took half an hour to work out that whatever-it-was had simply scribbled on life. First it did a figure-eight, then it just scribbled randomly across the forest. Airborne death graffiti. However, we figured out that when it scribbled it fired at an angle, and that offered us more clues.

The beam doesn’t penetrate through tree trunks. Or limbs larger than about a thumb in diameter.

<Uh huh.>

We need to relay this information off-site.!>

What? A sudden need to run, to get away, jerked at me. The whole situation was too strange, but this was over the top. Connections are always on, just like your heartbeat. Even here, isolated ‘out in the middle of nowhere’, as the city slickers describe it, there are trickle connections.

<<*There’s more. We’ve been spoofed. We thought that we had been discussing this matter across the web. We even got comments and advice from a variety of sources on the Internet.*>>

<<But they were all fakes.>>

<Also, we don’t know for how long we’ve been spoofed.!>>

I blinked, thinking through that issue, while forcing myself to keep going. There was no sense in stopping and stewing about it. I stepped around a bush, then stopped, staring down at a blown-open ant’s nest. Judging by the steam still coming off it, it had been steam cooked until it burst from the internal pressure.

<Acidic steam.>

I was now holding the wand over the nest, while looking at the ants. Quite a few were alive, and all too active in the heat. Worse, they were those vicious red ones. There were easily enough living ones to encourage me to keep moving.

Producing steam requires quite different beam characteristics than whatever has been producing this death trail.!>

Uh huh. Of course it does. I could feel the heat on my hand, and my nose was all crinkled up at the acrid formic acid smell of the cooked ant nest.

<Use the wand, idiot.> In order to escape the ants, I’d moved ahead a couple steps and had found a tiny woodpecker, still clinging to a tree trunk. I poked it with a forefinger.

My medical pack decided to get into the act. From way down at my belt, its little clinical medpack voice squawked, <if there’s an infectious component or toxic residuals, you could kill yourself.>

Maybe, but you know you IAgents are way too cautious. Besides one needs to show respect for life.

I nodded at the woodpecker respectfully as I said, still hanging in there. It was startlingly beautiful as I picked it off the trunk and rolled it over in the palm of my hand. It wasn’t steam killed, or visibly distorted in any other way, yet it was only a couple meters from the ant nest.

An ant attacked my left leg, so I turned and lobbed the body on top of the ant nest. As I walked away I decided that this was all too odd. I commanded, [apply full overrides and make an emergency call for assistance.]

<The trail doesn’t go that way!>

<Emergency communications are down.!>>

Blinking at such different responses, I just nodded then said, we have a pattern. Forever-on communications that aren’t. Spoofing to fake the communications. Some kind of sadist with a death ray, with still warm bodies. We’ve been lured well away from anywhere anybody would normally look for us. And —

They tore into the backs of my legs.

Hopping in agony, I flung my arms around and roared, shove off! Recognizing a wasp attack by the stings, I ran for it, but they kept viciously attacking the backs of my legs. Finally, fifty meters away, desperate from the continuing stinging, and badly disturbed at such odd behavior from wasps, I turned and swung wildly. Swatting, swearing, and yelling, increasingly bewildered by silent invisible wasps, I ducked and swung my head around, looking for the little sadists. I was hoping to kill at least one as I slapped at my tortured legs. I knew that I was paying for disturbing their nest but the vicious little critters were enjoying getting more than full revenge. They escalated by going for my bare arms like living candy.

Somehow I suddenly sensed something bigger, more than just phantom wasps driving my agonized dance. There might have been a faint noise, a psychic roar for all I know. I roared and jumped at it.

But it wasn’t an animal. It was some weird little leaf-green aircraft, quietly diving in with its engine cut back to an idle, firing needle-thin red stinging beams at me. I remember my mouth opening in shock even as I dove to the side. As I crashed through a huckleberry bush, tree limbs flared and exploded above me. A tree trunk shattered into flames just beyond me. Obviously I’d just found my phantom wasps.

Equally obviously it had just switched from sting to blast setting. Rolling behind a tree as a blast erupted the bark off its far side, I heard the thing throttle up and swing around for another pass. More red beams flickered into the smoke and over the whole area as it worked to keep me down, to impair me and to drown out any emergency help calls. Hoping the heat and smoke would derange its sensors, I scuttled over among the fires, then ducked down onto the ground in among the bushes.

It overlaid its message with mocking laughter as it inserted a message into our communications system. <#You can’t stay there very long.#> It paused, then laughed again as it said, <#prepare to die.#>

I winced, then said, [suppress its psych-war calls.]

<<*!We are now blocking it’s incoming transmissions. However, even with emergency overrides, we are unable to verify contact with any outside entity. We are isolated.!*>>

The plane’s IAgents then played with me, using the beams and the fires. I found myself constantly hopelessly scurrying just ahead of the fires as they combined and advanced. It’s IAgents also kept me constantly ducking beams that had already snipped past. They blasted new barriers that left me coughing in the smoke while the advancing fires climbed into the trees above and all around me. Battered and cooked by their provocations, I scrambled along, trying a whole series of new hiding places. Each time the plane or the fire routed me out, and herded me along. Tauntingly playing with me.

Then I got the squawk, <<*this hacker isn’t just intercepting our transmissions. It’s telling the outside world that everything’s normal here.*>>

I stopped and squatted, staying low for better air, and coughed out a weak, keep trying to get help. I watched a cedar tree explode into flames. [Override all laws. Squirt a high energy message up to a communications satellite.]

No response. I snorted.

Obviously, the IAgents were increasingly mesmerized by the spoofing activities. They were too complex, too human like in their interactions with the spoofer’s IAgents. They were being subverted.

Fine! I can still throw sand in its face.

I ripped the lace out of my right boot, then knifed it in half. Then I sliced the end off my belt.

What are you doing?!>

I started tying the half-laces to the chunk of belt.

<He’s been cooked off his rocker.>

Wondering about explaining to an IAgent, I shrugged and said,making a sling.

The plane backed off and circled around. And again. Almost idly firing terror shots in my general area. Deliberately playing with me, like a cat with an injured mouse. I sweated long hot minutes as the fires built up to cook me.

Finally, having tested the sling and collected way too many burns, I broke for it. On the far side of one of its circles, I ran downwind under the smoke.

As I ran I lost the boot. My medpack immediately burped then started yowling. <Emergency! Emergency! Bleep! Bleep! Radiation warning. Microwave damage!>

Just like it’d been suddenly awakened another IAgent suddenly yelped, <take protective measures now. Bleep! Bleep!!>>

Yuck. Obviously the plane had switched to cooking me through the smoke.

More blasts erupted, but these were in the treetops. The blasts were bigger but I could now tell that it was being careful, still aiming to cripple and harass not kill right away. More and more trees were blowing apart and dropping as I ran, forcing me out from under the smoke.

I flopped down into a tiny creek. A lovely refuge to splash in, but the plane reacted immediately. Its engine noise rose to a scream as it came in at us. I grabbed a handful of pebbles, and loaded the sling.

As the plane closed in, it triumphantly blew a message through my subverted security barriers, <#that creek won’t help! Heh heh. There’s no rest for the wicked.#>

I blinked, thinking that its messaging was too human, that it had an active human controller.

Beam blasts started tearing at the treetops above me.

I fired a sling load of pebbles up and ahead of the plane, then reloaded and fired again. I ran just as its engine coughed and banged away somewhere.

That gave me time to run, and I did that right away. The falling tree hit me as I slowed and turned to avoid a small fire. It hit right where my poor bloody neck merged into my shoulder.

Even as I dropped, the plane jabbed out another message. But this time it’s engine quit and there were crashing noises. I could hear its pieces thumping down through the fir trees as it sent, <#gotcha! Now we’ll really grind you ---#>

Smashed helplessly down onto the ground, feeling like a fly blapped under your fly swatter, I lost all contact.

Floating back up to awareness, I remember red and black floating images, an unbelievably crushing pain, and the HelpMe shriek of my medical pack. I remember feeling my shirt twitching at the back of my neck as my medpack detached itself from my belt and its legs crawled up my back. I could tell that it was scuffling toward my head to try and save me.

Then, as it came closer I could hear one of the medpack’s emergency IAgents muttering, <backup! We have to get a backup of the project data before the brain goes. Backup! We have . . .>

I could hear and feel the scrabbling from the medpack's legs when it ran into the tree trunk. Its primitive Reboot Warning shrieks rose as it kept fighting, even though its legs were too short, to climb over the tree trunk to get to my head before I went.

A faint wispy shriek of surprise echoed into my mind, generated by the heavy rotor noise from an incoming man capable helicopter.

Then I was snapped back into full data daylight. That stubborn medpack had finally hooked into me via a long probe. With full communications overrides on, it pulled me back into contact with the real-visual world, the phenomenal world. For some reason it brought me back even though I was well clobbered and quickly diving into oblivion. In a sort of mental poing, I was suddenly viewing those lovely young breeze-blown Douglas-fir treetops directly above us. All relayed via the medpack’s upper scanner set. Lovely. Dancing with life. Delicious.

Then the wind shifted and some part of the medpack realized that the fire was roaring along the fallen tree at us. It started yelping, <run! Get up and run. The fire is here.>

I didn’t run, so it reversed itself, or something overrode that part of it. Just as its built-in soothing routines went back to gentling my last moments, another separate hookup started backing up my datastore for the cruising project. The fire arrived, roaring as it fed hungrily on the tree limbs over me. My shirt caught fire. Insects died around me. Working madly in response, the medpack applied some kind of filter so we could see through the smoke. Those waving treetops and the medpack’s soothing routines were doing a fine job, until some jerk's head obscured them. Some jerk in a battle suit, with ‘Kowalski’ embossed on his chest plate.

He twitched in shock when he read the medpack's readouts. Obviously I had been much too badly damaged to activate my own pain dampeners, and I lacked the normal mammalian protective shock routines. With a worried tone he muttered, Geez! We might have wrecked the brain.

I distinctly remember wondering, ‘how about the rest of me?’

A second man arrived. Working through the medpack I checked him out. The idiot hadn't activated the web security barriers in his suit, so I networked into his suit and reversed the air filtration settings. He didn’t even cough. He just twisted and dropped as his suit went nuts collecting all the local smoke that it could inhale.

Kowalski jerked and swore as the other guy crumpled into him. He paused as his own suit told him what had happened, then he irritably swept a suit arm at the flames, and growled, no time. The fire’s coming too fast. His own suit was already suffering heat shock.

Now moving fast, obviously following somebody’s orders, he reached out and flipped the smouldering medpack onto my head. I was immediately bathed in a psychic roar until the medpack glommed onto the back of my head and established a full bath of soothing communications. Even as the medpack switched to soothing me again, Kowalski hauled out his battle beamer and sliced. Things went black. Ignoring the indignant insanely mad screeching from the medpack, he plopped the whole mess, including the suddenly ecstatic medpack, into a goo-bath in some special kind of head doctor bucket.

It was all incredibly jarring, scads worse than finding a bug in your salad. It was like watching a sunrise suddenly snap to midday, then drop into midnight blackness. It even jolted my medpack half bonkers. I clearly remember the medpack's dominant IAgent bleeping oddly as it asked just what the hell was going on, as it sizzled in the goo. Then the bucket’s IAgents and the medpack finally managed to get their acts together. I remember going deep and embracing the goddess just as they activated my sleep circuits.

. . .

Three months later

. . .

Months later, I’ve been able to take a peek into their mission log. It indicates that Kowalski’s boss, Major Jonas Thompson, then came in and threw bags of something over both my body and the downed guy’s suit. Sorry, I don't know what. Anyway, they carried my head bucket back into the helicopter and lifted off. Spinning a few kilometers over to plunk down alongside a military landing craft, they scampered aboard and immediately lifted off to a stealth frigate waiting in high Earth orbit.

Why all this effort to take my particular brain?

It helps to be aware that some will say that my explanation is a bit shaky, being built on a victim's view of things. And being snipped does change one’s point of view. Try it sometime.

When captured my brain was the fully up-to-date human II version, commonly called the Gaia brain. A few call it the Goethe brain. It was in normal Gaia service, in this case as a consulting forester called Al Petrie. Me.

Like all Gaias its workings are somewhat more compact, faster, and more flexible, than the original kind still roaming the Earth's surface, other planets, and space, in vast numbers. Every Gaia brain is easily capable of self-repair and new-growth. Each one includes a built-in genetic engineering capability and matching enhanced goddess and god archetypes. With a little care we’re cancer proof in both brain and body. We simply re-engineer our affected tissues into a less susceptible form, as we do with most radiation and chemical damage.

In some emergencies and some forms of war, when certain ethical barriers are torn, we can adopt natal mode, where we can reverse aging and regenerate new tissue from scratch. Actually, it’s simple, it’s just genetic programming. Dinobrains could do it if they had better control of their minds.

In short, we can shrug off a wide range of old-style human problems and diseases, partially because we don’t want to get sidetracked. We’ve replaced those problems with a huge range of new local and planetary ecosystem issues, world diseases if you like.

Gaia brains are designed to be part of an enhanced stellar-wide nervous system. We’re an active part of the planetary and interplanetary web, extending right down into the collective unconscious where we do a lot of work involving synchronicity and archetypes. Archetypes are basic patterns or frameworks that we can use to understand and to interact with systems. Since everything in the universe, every star, every ecosystem, every man woman and child, is a system, and connected to other systems, we can use archetypes everywhere.

A example human archetype is panic, named after the Greek god Pan who possessed humans at times of jolting stress. Like all ancients, the Greeks rightly knew the basic human archetypes as gods who looked over men’s affairs. For you object techies, the equivalent of panic in software like an IAgent might be an Exception daemon, followed by Catch and Throw recovery daemons. For a large mixed human-IAgent group the equivalent might be a stock market crash. It’s a characteristic of system development to learn to manage such impulses.

Gaia’s are also easily able to internally visualize what others have to look for on their computer screens. It’s like we have a built-in three-dimensional computer screen, but it’s actually a living visual computer. We can often directly visualize our data in front of us or all around us, as a kind of garden full of living data. Of course when I’m cruising I visualize the data and actually see the matching trees and other plants at the same time. For all Gaia, such intense involvement enriches our dance with life.

Each individual Gaia brain is intrinsically multitasking and multithreading. Parts of my brain normally keep crunching away at various ‘wide-awake’ tasks while the rest of me is asleep, and parts can nap while I’m awake. Part of our growing up process is to learn how to distinguish between various realities: current local, other locals in other places over the Internet, altered remote realities, grades of unconscious, and virtual realities. We have to be able to contrast realities, be able to play with them in the classic Taoist Yin Yang fashion, and to integrate them into a greater whole.

It’s normal for us Gaia’s to work with IAgents, thinking computer entities, to guide nonhuman stuff like self-controlled floor mops, tree pruners, and the neighbor's sprinkler system just as he's taking a nap in his lawn chair. One talks to sprinkler systems and such via languages such as Java, the Chinook or lingua franca of computer languages. My built-in java interpreter uses special bio-hardware for speed, for those crucial moments when I need to urgently get the attention of a toaster or self-tying shoelaces.

Don't laugh about the shoelaces.

I became very well known at school for my capability to ferret out the byzantine web network connections and personal security barriers necessary for persuading people's self-tying shoelaces to furtively retie themselves around something like their owner's lunch bucket handle. Preferably just before the owner stood up to do something for the teacher.

I personally mostly think intuitively/visually/symbolically but still automatically translate for the other side of the brain, just like the original kind of mind does. My so called logical side works in modern Earth English but dances with a fair amount of stuff going to and from a back-brain area where portions are translated to and from Java on the fly. However, at times its best to think directly in Java, or perhaps Go, like when one is trying to maintain a realtime conversation with a mapping satellite over cellular radio links, while swatting at wasps.

As another example, I, being a well known to me sample human II/Gaia, was once able to simultaneously remotely present a speech to a convention in Denver, while riding a bicycle along a dike in Holland, and remotely advising, well actually chastising the idiot, a City of San Diego underwater remote data recorder how to repair and update itself. Of course, most of the people and IAgent’s watching the speech weren’t actually physically present either. Also of course, convention arrangements are a bit cheaper when you aren’t physically present, but you don’t get the free pens.

Normally such full scale communications requirements involve transferring and local hosting one's awareness for all but one of the simu-events, with later selective re-merging of the experiences. To grow in capability, one must carefully analyze and carefully merge one's other experiences. They call it reflection, only we Gaia also use a lot of lateral thinking to enhance our pattern making.

One grows best if one reaches out and tries new things, learns working patterns from the errors, then later deliberately breaks and enhances the patterns with creative or lateral thinking, preferably using a natural sacred ecology mindset. Carefully grown, matured in a bath of rich experiences, then seasoned working with the normal insurmountable planetary eco-challenges, each Gaia brain is unique and has quite a few valuable uses. Obviously, these head-snippers badly wanted my brain for their uses.

The mission specifications called for a well developed Gaia. An ornery one with varied field experience.!>

Ornery? One has to be bullheaded to be creative.

Anyway, right now, three months after the Big Slice, we've traveled by sputter-drive a few star systems away and are on board the battleship LifeForce. I’m still stuck in a bucket.

I now have a good feeling for how those poor French Royalty felt when their heads thunked into the basket after being guillotined. At least I kept my mouth shut after the Big Slice. Unlike some, I didn’t generate centuries of comment by trying to chatter away without lungs.

Some of the dinobrains that monitor and manage my bucket like to do various kinds of ‘stress tests’. A few, especially Kowalski, like setting up chemical injections to torture my brain, as various spins on the chemical stew they have to constantly supply me to mimic my missing body. They like chemically distorting my realities. The clean-up jerk for the lab I’m stored in, has been having a good time forcing me to act as a slow calculator, then as a remote controlling device for a powered floor mop. Two others treat me as a widget controller for gadgets in the lab. Apparently they learned to do such things in response to a continuing series of us canned Gaias passing through the lab.

More formally, my captors have been coaching my brain and telling other devices about my brain for weeks. They have been coaching me to be both future Human In Charge of their secret high-powered colonization mission and as a different kind of mind.

<We’re tailoring a very useful multi-mind.>

Uh huh. I do get a lot of supportive attention from IAgents on the ship. They recognize that as a brain in a bucket I'm really another form of IAgent. They appreciate that I'm a very unusual form of IAgent, with a range of subtle and not so subtle human-type quirks, including the capability to find new combinations of things, to think intuitively, to use lateral thinking, and to be truly creative.

<You’re human creativity plus your built-in access to ‘I Ching’ makes you a lot more useful than the Ching(1) software.>

Thanks. Being complemented by an IAgent isn’t normally on my shortlist.

The IAgents also realize that I’m an IAgent that is a lot more likely than normal to go bonkers, especially considering the method the mission's hit team used to gather me.

<As an organic IAgent you are, almost by definition, bonkers, but in a friendly useful way. Happiness, intuition, and creativity aren’t logical traits.>

Anyway, what’s really happening is that some of these IAgents and I are developing into a secret colonizing team aimed at a planet to be officially called Sally, once we land on it. Apparently Sally is nice and Earthy, truly park-like with a super abundance of animals, plants, and minerals, a friendly sun, correction: star, and no significant human predators or competitors. In order to get there, me the worth-killing-for Gaia, a whole rash of IAgent's, a squad of twenty centimeter tall mechanical IAgent's, and a range of tools and tech toys, will all be strapped in various nooks and crannies on an interstellar blast engine.

It’s a one of a kind engine, with a bit of ship attached.

<Much better than the earlier victims got.>

<.That’s right. You’re special. Your sneaky ways with software are truly elegant..>

Thanks. That suggests that I got my head chopped because I’m good at tying shoelaces.

Anyway. The ship’s built from two radically reworked spare copies of the LifeForce's main power units. Instead of pushing around a nine-million-tonne hotel, euphemistically called a battleship, the blast engine has been souped up to push our eighty tonnes, scads of fuel, and ten standard military interstellar messenger probes. All to rush off someplace nobody has been before.

Then, once we've planted the flag on her planet's surface, we're supposed to use the messenger probes just like the ancients sent pigeons, including sending a ‘thank you’ note to the Admiral's daughter Sally.

As the ancients said, Cool eh? Or whatever.

In addition and at the same time as I’m being coached, I’m slowly learning secrets about some kind of flaky exotic second stage space drive thingy. A thingy that’s a key part of the drive reworking. They are finalizing the design on a drive-gizmo that has a radically new way to fling us away into space. First it will grab our initial blastoff energy from our rocket drives. Then it will use that energy to wrap us in an additional protective energy bath. Finally it will cleverly atomize us into an electronic bath or field structure, and spit the whole rig through some kind of backdoor across the universe to the Sally planet. Then we have to climb out of the bath and land, somehow.

Or dry off and land. Or something like that.

Apparently it’s a first and one of a kind gizmo, designed to get our mission travel speed well up over the speed of light so we don’t take forever to get to Sally. We’re in a rush. Time is honor and money and all that. Or power and money, perhaps.

However, it’s easy to tell that the new drive-gizmo is a bit flaky, because they keep blowing up each version they assemble and test.

<No. Not a test. Each one is a live mission attempt that carries one of you Gaia in a ‘brain bucket’.>

Fine, cheer me up. I’ve seen reports on seven such gizmo caused super-nuclear explosions while I’ve been here. These are hell blasts where matter, anti-matter, highly energetic radiation, and even weird stuff that they only whisper in awe about, are all tumbled and cooked off together. It’s as if the development team is deliberately trying to rip holes in the structure of the Universe.

<Exactly. which is a good explanation for why we are all deliberately isolated out here on the edge of human explored space.>

Just as interesting, they already know that there is no way that a human body could survive traveling in such a rig, even if they manage to build a rig that didn’t blow itself up. The accelerations are just too great and too erratic for too long.

<That’s right. Things tend to explosively shake apart. In your eco-terms, it’s like when a dog violently shakes a snake to kill it.>

<<Only our data indicates that the shaking doesn’t stop. Actually it gets worse and worse until things blow apart, and form a temporary star. We just need to control the way you disperse.>>

As you can tell, I learn more about the gizmo as they train me for the mission. I learn even more by furtively monitoring electronic nooks and crannies in the ship’s web. Partially for training and partially to keep my brain oiled up in its brain-gel basket, I'm allowed to electronically roam around the public areas on the ship's web. It’s actually interesting learning how a big hotel works. I get to meet and work with whole new types of IAgent, often associated with weird electronic and mechanical body parts. Robotic automation is a big thing here.

At first I stayed close to home, and spent a fair amount of time just exploring the waste recycling system. As I expected it’s nicely ‘out of the way’ and doesn’t get much attention, which made it a good place to learn the ropes and to get to know a few local IAgents. As I explored it I actually traced the nutrient piping out from our local recycling unit right into the secret preparation area for a bunch of our mission electronics, and then back into my brain's life support canister.

Yummy.

More recently my gang, some IAgents and I, have started to have quite a bit of fun playing in some of the general stores areas. For example, some of the parts on this ship have up to eleven part numbers for the same identical part. Part numbers vary by manufacturer, source star system, sales channel, and so on. They also vary by how often we change them to drive human stores clerks crazy. We have to maintain a judicious balance, drive them crazy but don’t drive them to do much about it.

At the same time, having a human type brain I wanted to be able to see the outside world. I started poking sticks at the ship's fire suppression system as a vision system and discovered that we can access everywhere on the ship via the heat and smoke detectors. Being military, subject to standardization, and far from factory replacements, the fire sensors are actually standard weapons grade target acquisition and tracking modules. These people put the same detectors inside their ships to detect onboard fires that they put inside missiles and beam cannon to detect and track enemy targets. I shrug. Anyway, such detector gadgets are used in the whole military city of weapons families, but they only have seven different part numbers for the ones on this ship.

Back to the vision system, it was dead easy to hook the fire-detector vision system to a private database to monitor everyone on the ship. I just quietly extended the parts database to include people and their movements. Tracking multiple targets using such detectors has been standard practice for malls, street cameras, and the military, for centuries. Your typical shopping mall tracks you and everybody else in the mall. Its tracking even includes your hand, head, eye, eyebrow, mouth, and subtle facial responses to store displays, for both marketing and security purposes. I can’t confirm about your shopping mall, but systems commonly also track everybody with infrared, for a naked or hidden-under-the-clothes view of things. One of my grizzly bear-to-marmot interaction studies did much the same thing. It followed dozens of marmots right through to becoming bear droppings. So configuring the software for tracking people in the ship was trivial. Of course one wants a map or grid system to position the targets being tracked.

As a forester, well maybe a head forester now, it was more fun and more natural for me to develop a variant of an aerial mapping system as the base for the grid system. We started small, by mapping one of the parts store rooms for the working prototype. Of course digital mapping is centuries old, but isn't normal inside spaceships, so we developed our own multidimensional model. We now have our own private model of the ship and its workings. It’s a kind of big three-dimensional map, plus a tracing database system for everything that moves. We're secretly tracking people, parts, and matching authorization signatures to specific devices being worked on in the secret areas of the ship. We could directly access those secret areas via the heat and smoke detectors, but it’s too risky.

<The enhanced security in those areas might notice the energy flows when we retrieved the data. We could lose everything if we got too greedy.>

I’ve now verified that the item that is getting the bulk of computer time and attention is that second stage drive integrator. It’s that same gizmo that will take and squeeze a star's worth of drive energy then squirt it out to punch us past lightspeed.

<Or into our own supernova if it doesn’t work just right.>

The scientists are playing endless modelling games with a range of integrator designs. They develop and test them in big Virtual Reality chambers in the Engineering computing section of the ship. They then actually