The Generators Sequence

By M. David Scoble

The prison ship should have been dead when the final failsafe, Tristan 08 awoke. But Xander, the Evolved leopard spy had no intention of dying that day. That chance meeting would throw two civilizations into conflict across the stars. Buy The Generator Sequence to find out what happens to Tristan 08 and Xander as their meeting sets off a chain of events leading up to the new novel, Chimera, coming in late 2020!

 

Twilight Rising - On a good day, an Autonomous Organic Emergency System remains in a twilight sleep and never sees another living human. Today is not a good day.

 

Windfall - Evolved feline Xander escaped from the prison ship and escaped from Conclave space. Proctor Cathcart wants her kitty back.

 

Overburdened - When the work he unknowingly sold to his mortal enemies is found on a spy, Gervais Moore finds himself overburdened by his own actions.

 

Earthed - Curiosity doesn't always kill the cat, but it did frame Evolved feline Ella Ubeke for mass murder.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Moogi and Wil Books, LLC
• Release date: Mar 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781648870002

Book preview

1

Twilight Rising

Verdant Sun

The Vedic cruiser rotated out into our dimensional space, shedding imaginary 9 th dimensional particles that confused our simple sensors. The soft sensors were not fooled. Simple sensors without imagination spat out errors, soft sensors let their minds go beyond impossible math.

Cleared hot. Simulated ranging complete. Fire for effect.

The orders came in through the linked network to every gunner and soft sensor on the Verdant Sun. Particles and anti-particles streamed from dozens of locations on our hull, all bound for the Vedic ship. The gunners had freedom to select the fire they laid out, particles or anti-particles, whatever they thought had the best chance of penetration. Vedic ships were hard to kill, so the gunners tried to be unpredictable. They weren’t.

Our simple sensors confirmed the Vedic sent out multiple waves of particles to negate our anti-particles. They splashed out strange quarks, Higgs-bosons, and other, more unusual particles that distorted our beams. Tiny flashes of light winked on and off between the Vedic cruiser and the Verdant Sun, then our weapons went silent. The fight was over; the Vedic was in our linked network. Our soft sensors, gunners, and probably half the organic crew was gone. The simple system would euthanize them now. Weapons that refuse to fight are dangerous. The simple systems took over. The inorganic weapons began firing, expending fuel, precious stores of rare gases, material we could not replace in this star system. The simple system injected inbresol into my spinal implant, waking me from the twilight awareness where I slept. At least the simple system knew this was an emergency.

Emergency system on-network. Verdant Sun acknowledges command transfer. Tristan 08 in command.

I was in charge. The linked network was worse than I thought. I was fully integrated into the network, and I could tell the simple system had euthanized all the organics except for me. I was the only mind keeping the network alive, so I let it die. No sense in talking to a dead ship. No sense leaving a door for the Vedics to come in. It was time to leave. The fight was lost.

I released a marker buoy from the hull and began rotating into higher dimensional space. The 9 th dimensional particles began to collect around me. I had just moments to get out. The marker buoy would take care of things from here out, and I needed the Verdant Sun to be gone when it did. And in the next moment, it was. Anti-climax. I was in the imaginary dimension beyond the physical universe. The marker buoy should have detonated. Scorched the system we had been guarding. Hopefully, the Vedic cruiser was caught in the destruction. Usually they were not. I didn’t understand why or how they avoided it. The marker buoys created a tremendous space-time distortion, releasing destructive forces not unlike a supernova but without a star’s mass. Yet Vedic ships almost always seemed to escape destruction.

Not that it mattered now. I was on my way home. I saved a dead ship. Again. Emergency over. Until the next one. I wondered what it would be like to save a living ship, or just to be awake and walking on a living ship. Something like that had never happened to me yet, not in 50 years as an Autonomous Organic Emergency System. What would it be like to see another human?

The ship rotated back into real space, the Hartnell system. The simple system injected the sedative drugs into me and I entered twilight again.

Emergency system deactivated. Hartnell control established. Command transfer complete. Tristan 08 in stasis.

Good night, my sweet.

Awakened

They removed me from the Verdant Sun when they decommissioned it at Hartnell Station. Ships that survived a Vedic incursion were always decommissioned and broken down for analysis. I was just one more system removed and analyzed. Removed from the Verdant Sun’s simple system, my handlers cased me in a temporary transport network. Autonomous Organic Emergency Systems were integral to warships, but removed from a warship, an AOES was a class 4 military asset and required a full network connection with sedation. Twilight status, as if I had never left the simple system.

The new network was rougher than the Sun’s simple system. Temporary networks were crude compared to the full suite of life support and tactical assets I felt when I was integrated into a ship. It was a difference that I recognized, but only just. The crude temporary network kept the right levels of sedation in my system, and that was enough.

They analyzed me along with the corpse of the Sun, my actions measured, evaluated, and judged. I passed muster and entered deep sedation as the transport network injected ketamine into my spinal ports. Ketamine was a sign that they judged me serviceable and ready for reinstallation into a ship. There really were only two other options, decommission or storage. I would be decommissioned if my actions been judged in error, or had they had found me obsolete. I would have been euthanized just as the system had put the organics on the Sun down. Storage was worse. An AOES doesn’t like to think about the boneyard, but as I exited twilight and entered the disembodied sleep of ketamine, I only thought about the next ship, the next mission, and with luck, remaining in twilight until I was obsolete.

Emergency system on-network. Incandescent Vision acknowledges command transfer. Tristan 08 in command.

Shit. I was in charge. Again. How long had it been since Hartnell? I queried the ship’s linked network for a time adjustment. The response was immediate. Seventeen years had passed, not bad. 6,125 standard days, 360 standard days in a year, a handful of hours, minutes, and seconds. Curious.

I had taken precious moments to request the time adjustment and unbelievably the simple system had allowed me to dwell on its response.

I had taken the time to soft think about it, organic thinking and consideration. The fight must have already been over. The simple system would never have allowed me to query the linked network for that kind of information, let alone think about it if there was an ongoing emergency. Another activation, another dead ship, but nothing for me to do this time.

I swept through the sensor suites, simple sensors, artificial algorithmic sensors, finally the soft sensor links. The response was immediate and positive from the simple sensors. The algorithmic sensors paused, considered themselves mostly functional and replied in the affirmative. The soft sensor links all returned negative. The crew was dead, not a big surprise.

Curiously, the live sensors reported an undefined emergency condition. Vedic technology signatures radiated all around the Incandescent Vision. Not large signatures, rather many smaller signals, Vedic tech suffused the space around and inside the Vision. The condition was undefined because the system had recorded nothing like it before. Ever.

I brought up all eight of my remote drones, cycled the full sensor and weapon compliments. The shear volume of Vedic signatures around the Vision was something I had never experienced, no AOES had. I relayed a system call to the algorithmic sensors, find the 9 th dimensional particles.

The response curve was flat. Query response plane. Also flat. There were precisely zero 9 th dimensional particles in the system. Impossible.

The Vision had arrived in the system via submersion drive, there had to be traces of the higher dimension, I queried the algorithmics again.

Response conclusive. No presence of particles outside of normal physical parameters.

Shit. Mystery. I disliked mysteries.

If there was no threat, no Vedic ship despite their tech signatures being everywhere, then there was nothing left to do but return to station. I queried the navigation for the closest destination.

Epsilon Colony, was the reply. Prison system. Great, prison systems, epsilons, were not hubs or suitable harbors for advanced ships. I queried the Vision for its ship designation and classification.

Epsilon Transport Incandescent Vision. Alpha 9.

A prison transport ship. Alpha 9 meant end of life. Well, this was a new experience for me. Tristan 08, AOES for a prison transport at the end of its life. Could anything but obsolescence be in my future? Probably not.

Fine. Dead crew. Nearly dead prison ship. At least I could bring one last ship home. I queried the drive system. Engines needed to begin the submergence protocols to rotate out of real space. The sooner, the better. Time to get this life over with.

Response negative. The engines were not on the linked network.

I sent a remote out to manually activate the sequence.

The video link that came back surprised me. Another surprise, another mystery.

The engines were gone. The remote recorded open space where the engines should have been, open, empty space. Hard vacuum.

I queued the stasis pod to