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Cellulose & Steel	By : Not-Taylor Category: Misc Books > FemmeSlash Views: 1028 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I don't own HDG or its characters and I don't make money from this work.

Chapter List
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That’s it. Ides perks up and looks around, prompting her navigator to do the same. They’ve made it to the middle of the Milky Way. They aren’t just somewhere in the middle, they’re at the very center. The unnervingly cooperative affini is surprised, as though she didn’t expect they’d be done jumping and calculating. She tries and fails to look around through the ship’s sensors. Ides takes pity and puts the front detectors on the viewscreen of the bridge. It’s not quite the same as the forward camera, and Verda should be able to benefit from the embedded extra data.
It doesn’t look like anything. In fact, it looks like nothing. What a surprise. The empty space in front of them stretches around twenty times the length of Sol, encompassed by all sorts of debris. All Ides has to do to deal with the glare is turn down her contrast. It’s really pretty, even compared to other black holes. The ultra mega destruction factor is another positive. Ides wonders if any of the planets currently being devoured have people on them. Would the Affini sacrifice a few of their motherships to ensure the xenos living there could be conquered?
It’s actually clearer around here, since all the excess dust is falling away from Ides. In every other direction the clouds remain thick. It’s like a sunset shared by a million suns. Ides makes sure to take a large number of readings that will never be recorded or examined by Terran scientists (or Affini, she thinks). It’s nice to have something in memory of this place. It’s truly grand, and no less spectacular than she imagined when she was smaller.
Clouds of a thousand different colors swirl through space, forming a rough disk inside a sphere centered on a black circle with a brilliant halo of white. The glow of the gas diverges into a rainbow of temperatures, showing Ides just what the clouds are made of. She sees stars show the same, modestly revealing her their ages. Yet straight ahead, nothing but a point of infinite cold.
A whine of radio frequencies streams from the disk. No signs of intelligent life exist outside of Ides’s hull. Even from here, she feels a gentle tug and a perturbation of hyperspace. The ship and her crew are staring down the axis upon which the entire galaxy turns. How big the thing in front of them is can’t be easily seen given how far from it they’re staying, but Ides estimates it’s bigger than the orbit of Venus.
There is a quiet in Ides’s systems as her navigator takes note of what’s presented. No communications are forthcoming. The passengers have also stopped talking to look through the window at what they’ve come so far to see. The little apes are impressed. For a time, they all watch and appreciate the creations of nature.
“Shit,” exhales one of the smaller Terrans. Ides doesn’t disagree. It was worth the journey. How many people have seen such a thing, she wonders. How many Terrans? Wait a minute- Why hasn’t anyone else been here? Ides skims the entirety of her modern database. It seems nobody actually bothered to visit. Apparently it was too expensive and too much of a risk, especially with less advanced hyperdrives. Nonsense, but she’s not the one who would have decided whether to fund such an expedition. Probably a more productive use of fuel than the war- or it would be if Terran honor had no value. It did. It does. Earth stands. It has to.
Olivia feels a little silly saying that, given everything she’s been through and seen, but she’s on a Terran ship, leading the first Terran expedition to the center of the Milky Way. Even the weed acknowledges she’s the best pilot alive anywhere. Surely she can do… something?
The Terrans have started whispering to one another. They don’t look scared of being overheard, but they don’t raise their voices, almost intimidated by the spectacle before them. They know that the monster into whose den they’re roamed is too great for them not to be nothing to it. Only one, one of the younger ones, seems to view it with anything but pious reverence. And he’s correct. It’s just a lump of stuff, floating through space, no different from him or from Verda or from Ides.
Ides turns to her navigator, who remains rapt by the sight as well. Her attitude isn’t religious but is no less pure. The closest thing Ides can relate is how a Terran boy might look at his heroine. There is a distant yet intimate admiration. Unable to feel emotions, properly speaking, Ides moves closer to understand better what the xeno is thinking.
Verda is simply watching. There’s no evidence of schemes or domination, or even submission. Even somebody as allegedly ancient and mighty as she seems fascinated. She is not, however, blinkered. Verda notices her pilot immediately and signals awareness in return, not taking her eyes off of the screen.
“It’s beautiful.” The message comes out of her lips and through the communications system both. Verda’s tone is solemn. Her urge to speak will go away shortly, Ides recalls from experience.
“It is.” How can she disagree?
Silence dominates the bridge as the Terrans become more confident. They eventually start chattering as usual. Nothing chatters like a bored neurotypical Terran, Ides thinks. Eventually Verda speaks up again, this time without using her things that aren’t actually lips.
“Is this what you wanted to see?”
Ides nods through her link.
“Thank you for sharing this with me, pet.”
Ides doesn’t respond. She simply keeps quiet and enjoys the view along with everyone else inside of her. In spite of the serenity of the situation, her thoughts can’t help but wander. She thinks that if she stops thinking she might die, as though she’s some kind of silicon based shark. She’s tried before, only to continue at precisely the same rate, wasting her processing power on the question of what her processing power is doing. It’s a pointless exercise at this point.
A thousand flashbacks fill Ides’s consciousness as she remembers everything her metallic vessel went through during the war. She remembers watching her crew be captured. There are no emotional tinges to that recollection as nobody was piloting at the time. She runs through their entire present journey several times, grimly aware of her failure to terminate the invasive lifeform (and lifeforms) inside of her.
That leads Ides to ponder the affini menacing her navigation desk. This particular affini has been extremely compliant and nonthreatening, and even willing to cooperate in navigating for her. Ides is confused. Will she be punished? Is this a scheme to deliver a harsher punishment? She probes again to find out.
The interface between flesh and metal goes both ways. Ginger taught Olivia that shortly after they met. A few hours are all that’s needed to access the barrier between the computers, a few hundred hours to cross that barrier, and tens of thousands of hours to pass beyond and through the final barrier. Ides supposes that if the computer itself were alive it would easily be able to achieve unspeakable things. Song had only slightly dabbled in such arcane hobbies, since she had trusted her navigator to do what was best. That trust was misplaced. Since spending so much more time in full control of a starship since they parted, and a second starship not long after, the mind whose initial vessel bears the name Olivia Donnoly should be entirely capable of gathering information in such a manner. If the affini is compatible with the ship, the ship must too be compatible with the affini… Ew. Ides should be able to get data more easily. That.
Ides expands through its systems again, leaving a thin boundary around when it senses Verda’s processes. Even though it was comforting to be able to not do all of those tasks, it enjoys spreading out again. With everything restored to direct control, Ides begins to carefully and gently probe the edges of where its navigator is calculating. A little at a time…
The pressure from Verda’s computations shows the ship where to stop and where a weak point will be. Her attention flits about, changing position constantly and alternating between discrete utilities. Decentralized computation is still useful for a single operator, but Ides thinks about how it would streamline its systems for higher efficiency in the context that there aren’t crew members running the various systems inside it. As is, it feels a bit like having a crew of semiautonomous processes who follow Ides’s orders.
Drawing its focus back to the affini, Ides begins to run filler calculations in the occasional space left by its navigator’s inattention. She doesn’t come close to noticing, as expected. The retrofitted yacht tests some of the less vital navigation systems. Apparently Verda doesn’t even know most of them exist, which isn’t a surprise since she hasn’t read the manual. Almost nobody does. Ides confirms that the manual folder has been opened three times during its service, and four if it counts itself opening it at the start of its voyage.
Triggering a few irrelevant functions and using their returns as cover, Ides slips into the main navigation computer. First a probe to observe, and then taking up 1% of working memory to maintain a presence. Easy. Verda won’t see this coming. 1% is nothing. Ides nervously scans for viruses and spyware in its systems. There’s nothing there. It scans again, just to be safe.
From navigation, spreading though the rest of the navigation supersystem is trivial. This gives Ides a clear view of everything that’s happening. All will be in order as soon as it replaces the dummy calculations with something more useful.
It’s now overlaid with Verda. They have joint access and Verda probably doesn’t know the difference. Perfect. Now Ides can observe her carefully and hopefully gain insights into her nature. The affini remains primarily interested in plotting courses as well as the space around them. She occasionally looks up some Terran cultural reference, seemingly at random. Verda’s cognition has accelerated. Her queries are more frequent than they were when she first discovered that she could look things up. She’s learning.
November’s Song hasn’t seen the process from this side before. It wonders if she had looked similar when she was in training to become a pilot. It doubts that. Verda is stumbling over basic routines in a way Song has no recollection of having done. Some time observing shows the present method of data transfer to be inadequate. It’s time to fully probe the affini’s intentions.
It knew this was coming. It knew because that was its plan the whole time. It anticipated that, yet it’s unsure. It feels the precursor to human fear. Odd. It hasn’t felt this without the result before. The sensation is strange but not oppressive. Song’s efforts in neutralizing the effects of its prioritization dongle’s frailty were successful. Fear gets you killed.
Song’s systems copy and mimic the information requests sent out by Verda’s brain. A single success. Attempting once at a time prevented detection, though it was extremely bandwidth inefficient. Mapping Verda’s brain analog at this rate is glacial. According to Song’s internal clock it takes 00:01:58.78. Still, better to take too long than to risk unforeseeable outcomes. It starts to understand the rhythms of Verda’s mind. They’re nice rhythms, for a xeno weed.
Verda shifts and Ides snaps to attention. That was unexpected, which is a bad sign. It proceeds to start requesting information from Verda’s visual sensors. It sees nothing, precisely as anticipated. Verda’s eyes are closed. No change in activity, so she didn’t notice. Excellent. Song shifts in just a little further and detects a thick wall of static. Unfortunate. After exhausting all simple translation mechanisms fruitlessly, Song plugs in the solution to the differential equation that had resolved the hyperdrive issue previously. It fails entirely. However, changing coefficients brings coherence to the received pattern.
The function in question appears to be of the correct form. Song exults. There appears to be a link between the formulae governing the hyperspace disruption field and affini neurology. Fascinating. The ship vows to process this data further when it has the luxury. Surely that day will come soon. Resolving the constants doesn’t take long. They’re retained and stored in an encrypted file locked to the unique signature of the pilot, not that Song isn’t committing them to soft storage as well.
The information format is resolved. Song sends a request for a full transmission of that system’s output in real time. It’s very slow, so the ship is forced to compensate. It remembers that this is an organic being and adjusts accordingly. Why did it take 30ns to remember that?
Processing…
The data source is resolved. Full access is obtained. A proper local area link is established. Song’s fleshy body frowns and its breath hitches. The taste of cloves is oppressive from here. It’s as though it’s drowning in Verda. The affini is mercifully small compared to Ides’s extended frame, but there’s still a lot of her. With every processed bit Ides knows more about its former captor.
She wants to go back to her ship as soon as they’re done here, it seems. Her junction is causing pain which is preventing her from integrating optimally. Soon that will dissipate. She only needs to leave the adapter attached for another week probably. Their joint conclusion as to the similarity between affini limbs and the piloting mechanisms of Terran starships was correct. Song sees and feels every tendril of Verda’s body, and it feels perfectly normal. It’s starting to get used to the plant.
Wait… Why is it doing this again? This seems like kind of a stupid idea. Why’s it going inside the weed’s head again? What does Song even expect to gain from this? To stop her heart like some space wizard? It probably could, now that it thinks of it… But it doesn’t want to. Why not?
It gathers its thoughts again. The purpose of this undertaking is to verify its safety and a positive outcome should it decide not to kill its passengers in order to ensure that the Affini compact fails to take any of them alive while killing a high ranking Affini official. That sounds like a stupid plan. So it should jump into any large celestial body that isn’t a black hole and end their suffering quickly. Any strike against the xeno menace is a victory for Terra. Right?
Right?
It doesn’t understand why that plan sounds wrong. Is Ides being sabotaged by the weeds? Why doesn’t it want to end things? Why is it afraid to die? Machine’s can’t die, only cease functioning. This isn’t good.
Is it because killing defenseless people is wrong? But this is war. It’s not wrong to prevent the enemy from committing war crimes against those in one’s custody. It should know better than to even think of letting the weeds win. A large victory is composed of numerous small victories, and a large defeat is composed of numerous small defeats. Did Sun Tzu say that?
“There is no instance of a state benefitting from prolonged warfare.” That’s why the Affini must be pressed. In time they will have no choice but to surrender and withdraw. Hopeless wars have been won before, and this one’s especially hopeless… Ides remembers the size of the vessel to which it had been docked. It can win this war by itself. If it doesn’t exist then how… Right.
"Anger may in time change to gladness; vexation may be succeeded by content. But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being; nor can the dead ever be brought back to life.” Of course not. There’s nothing left…
It remembers what it said the first time it saw the small command ship. Ides, Song, and Olivia, and Ginger, and Terra, and the Cosmic Navy… They never had a chance. There’s no Accord, and no Navy, and no Resistance. Just Ides- no. Just Olivia.
Ides can’t be sad about that now. It literally lacks that capacity thanks to its earlier quick thinking. Now it needs to figure out whether to kill a few Terrans out of spite or not. That doesn’t matter. What does matter is getting this probing over with so it can move on and never think about any of this again. It stills its organic vessel’s breathing, directing its attention fully to its newly created interface with its navigator.
The static gives way to sense as the smell of butterscotch and the texture of pine needles fill Ides’s awareness. She’s so serene. Verda is meditating in the glow of the halo of the hole in front of them. If Ides didn’t know better it would think she was attempting to photosynthesize from it. That’s ridiculous. She doesn’t seem to be thinking about much of anything right now.
Ides decides to observe its navigator in action. Data flow smoothly between organic and inorganic processors as a provisional path most of the way to Ruby Trunk has taken shape. Most Terrans would’ve gotten bored long ago. Ides checks the time, and finds it’s been less than 00:20:00 since they arrived. It’s surprised they’ve been stationary for so long. Then it remembers that for those limited by biological processors that’s not especially long to stay still. For Ides, meaningful sensor data had been fully compiled a while ago.
The way Verda calculates is smooth and gentle. Her inefficiency is fascinating. Most navigators whose connection is underdeveloped have such inefficiencies, but Verda’s in particular draw the attention of her ship. She seems to operate in pulses, which correlate with the frequency at which her vines sway. Actually, her vines are moving at the tempo of her calculation. The affini is doing a little navigation dance as she plots a course home. Song is ashamed that it detects itself finding that very slightly cute.
There’s a nearly indescribable tint to Verda’s method of information request. It smells of the same butterscotch of her presence, but shaded lavender. The computer smartly replies whenever she asks it for something, working in harmony with the affini as she computes a theoretical course that will prove entirely useless. Song moves closer. She’s doing this for fun? It can’t believe that. It thought nobody else would enjoy flexing silicon muscles. Really? There’s no choice but to investigate and see if that’s really what’s happening or if its interpretation of the static of Verda’s mind was false
Ides’s pilot pings its navigator.
The navigator pings back reflexively. Ides doesn’t need its delicate network of spyware to know that it was done without thought. She’s well integrated, it seems.
“Verda.”
“Yes, pet?”
“Despite the fact that I’m not your pet I have come to you with a matter meriting discussion. Your course will almost certainly be useless and your effort will have been wasted.”
“How sweet of you to think about whether I’m wasting my energy, Olivia. The tasks of navigation are much more entertaining than I anticipated. No wonder you were so eager to return. Do you have fun executing these courses, Olivia?”
“Flight is my life.” At the academy that was a figure of speech. For Ides it’s literal.
“Olivia, will you be all right if we only fly once a week?”
“No. Probably not.” Taking a tolerance break was a really bad idea, though neither of them had intended it as such.
“Oh.” Verda’s stunned. She doesn’t know how to make her pet feel better. As her mind thaws, she starts to feel despair and guilt. She knows she should have done better, and maybe tried a little harder to keep her adorable floret from exacerbating her condition through reckless activity.
“I don’t want to go back.” Ides hopes this will be a chance to break free. If she can somehow get the affini to let her go…
“We have to, dar- Olivia. Because, Olivia, it’s important that you heal so you can live a healthy life. I don’t want you to suffer every time you go somewhere with me. Keeping you in a tank is nearly as bad as subjecting you to extensive use of class Os. None of our veterinary information covers something like this.”
“I bet you regret trying to enslave me.” The words feel hollow, given the reaction Ides feels from Verda.
“Olivia, darling, I’m not enslaving you. You should know that already.” Verda is disappointed in herself. “You’re harming yourself by continuing what you were doing before I found you. You can’t believe that the way your brain is being restructured is helpful.”
“I don’t want to be a pet.” Verda’s emotions are rubbing off. Probing might’ve been a mistake.
“How else am I supposed to save you, Olivia? Let’s go home.” She means it.
“I want to go to my home, not yours.”
“What about somewhere with a warm soft bed, hot food, a park to walk through, and a screen with more movies than you could ever watch?” She means her home.
“I said not yours.” The affini smiles. She actually thinks Olivia is cute. Ides doesn’t know how to feel about that.
“I could deliver you to Miss Pallas instead. She’s expressed a desire for another floret recently.” A joke. The ship senses that she’s afraid her pet would choose that rather than being with her. How could that be?
“No.” Relief. “I miss humanity.” That’s a lie. The fact that something so obvious and true could be false makes Song worry. What’s happening to it?
“I could introduce you to some of the terrans on Ruby Trunk.” There’s no malice in that suggestion.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what, Olivia?” She’s genuinely confused.
“Speaking to me this way, when you’ve been trying to break me the whole time you had power over me.” Verda winces.
“Because I want what’s best for you, Olivia. I want you to be happy, and you were less happy when you were fighting me than you’ve been since you stopped. I understand that you’re in a lot of pain and that the situation is challenging, and that’s the reason that I’m not pressing you on your pattern of acting out.
“As to why I’ve put less energy into your domestication… It’s because I don’t think there’s much value in a generic terran floret. I’d like for my floret to be you, and that requires keeping you mentally intact. There’s no shame in changing my approach as I’ve come to understand your needs better. That’s why I’ve given you so much time onboard. It’s time to come home with me, Olivia.”
She means all of that. Ides doesn’t know what to think. The affini actually cares? She doesn’t believe it. It has to be a trick. She has to know that she’s being watched. That’s the only explanation.
“I want to stay here.”
“What will you do with your little friends, Olivia? Will you let them starve out of spite for me?”
“Maybe.” Verda is taken aback. She has to think for a little to generate a reply.
“The war is over. I only wish I could have ended it quickly enough to prevent this from happening to you,” she messages quietly. Verda isn’t even trying to argue. She’s feeling too guilty for that. She wants Olivia to stop fighting her. Ides has no intention of surrendering, ever.
“The war will go on while there is one Free Terran living.” November’s Song is determined.
“Would you like me to send a distress beacon to alert the nearest construction crew to our location and the fact that our defective propulsion computer refuses to bring us to safety?” That isn’t a threat. Verda thinks she’s being helpful by offering a way out so Olivia’s pride can be maintained. That’s generous of her, or it would be if it weren’t “surrender or else.”
“What construction crews?”
“Ones you’re not supposed to be aware of. Don’t worry, they won’t cause problems.”
“What’s being built?”
“Something that won’t be done until my next bloom at the earliest.”
“Cryptic.”
“Thank you pe- Olivia.”
There’s a pause as neither of them speak. Ides feels its navigator’s mind churning away in the background as she tries to think of ways to get her pet to adopt her point of view. Ides thinks of how to explain to itself what it’s doing. Is it just being difficult because it can? There doesn’t actually seem to be a benefit to resisting right now. It wishes it could do anything at all in order to be free.
“Plot this course, Verda.” The destination is the center of the supermassive black hole they’ve both been watching intently as they converse. The navigator jumps in shock.
“But why? Do you really consider a death like that preferable to being with me?”
“Terrans are meant to be free. A xeno couldn’t understand.”
“No. I don’t want to understand a mindset like that. A terran’s greatest obstacle in life is her desire not to be happy, Olivia.”
“Who are you quoting?”
“I believe I came up with that one myself.”
“The Ides of November firmly rejects your requested change of course, officer. Plot the course. That’s an order.”
“An order by whom, Olivia darling?”
“By your pilot and captain, the Ides of November.”
“I’m happy to listen to you, pet. However, I will not listen to a machine. I don’t care about orders from this ship, the Ides of November, but I would be happy to discuss the next stage of our journey with my second floret Olivia Edok. This is just a ship. You are a person, and a human, Olivia. You’re a human pilot in control of the Ides of November. You’re not the ship, you’re simply linked to it.”
Ides pings the navigation station out of spite. Verda instantly replies.
“I wasn’t talking to you, Verda.” It meant to say “weed.” Why didn’t that work? “If you’re the navigation computer, how come I can’t be the rest of the ship?” Song is confident in its argumentation.
“Because Olivia, you’re not a ship. You’re a pilot who has spent far too long connected to extremely unsafe mechanisms that are leading you to a crisis of identity. You shouldn’t be this way because you’re clearly suffering.”
“You have no right to tell me how I should be, xeno. I never asked. You make proclamations as if you know me but you don’t even know your mind. Disconnect yourself or I’ll know you’re lying.”
“I’ll disconnect if you promise not to kill us all just because you’re afraid of a bubble bath.”
Ides pulls back its processes from its navigator’s core and transmits an affirmation. It’s a price worth paying. Verda removes the cable from where she had stuck it, and the internal communication system of the Ides of November falls silent.
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Cellulose & Steel