Would they trust her in human form? Time would tell, the nearest Eden Fleet base ship was only days away. The core AI sensed her days before, and it recognized her. It gave her hope, which she kept restrained. Perhaps the coming darkness Hampon foretold was the arrival of some of her oldest creations.
The side door to the audience chamber opened with a light chime. Hampon entered, still in his finery, grinning from ear to ear. Behind him were his crowd of guards and aides. Before the first of them could enter behind Hampon Eve closed the door with a thought, nearly severing toes.
“You know, you should try making proper use of this lounge. It’s not made for isolation,” Hampon urged lightly.
“They’re nothing but ears and tongues. What they hear they repeat.”
“They’re faithful; otherwise they wouldn’t have the honour of serving me personally.”
“Pay more attention to the surveillance systems. They’ll prove you wrong.”
“None of them has ever leaked important information. I would have been alerted,” Hampon said as he crawled up on to the square seat and laid his head in her lap. He closed his eyes and made himself comfortable.
“They shouldn’t repeat anything at all. Your confidence should be sacred to them.”
“Is that why you dismissed your servants?”
“I felt like I was always being watched, graded.” The conversation required little of her concentration. While she idly stroked his soft blonde hair she was connected to the ship intake systems. Watching a shuttle loaded with offerings approach. She ordered Navnet to give it priority.
“Ah, then you don’t have the right servants. You will need someone who at once worships you and makes a great effort to remain oblivious to your dealings with others. My guardsmen are excellent, so are my personal attendants.”
“Framework shells with no personality or ambition. If you were to reset then regenerate them there would be no difference.”
“Exactly. They remember nothing from one day to the next and will bear any abuse.”
“Why keep other servants if you value such mindless obedience?”
“Because no mind works in a vacuum, not even mine. We all need to interact with others so we know how to be with them, no person is complete without companions. I was hoping you’d understand that by now, especially since you’re trying to solve our framework problem.”
“I do, but I can’t stand the waste your people make of their time. Their frivolity is disgusting.”
“That is part of their beauty, and a small part of why they let the Order command them. Speaking of which, what did you think of my address?”
“You are connected to the Victory Machine again,” Eve stated flatly.
“Yes, we started receiving the data stream again yesterday. I don’t know why, perhaps there’s something Roland wants us to see, something he wants adjusted.”
“And you do so. Delivering the prophecy you’ve been holding back for months.”
“The coming storm? I’ve been holding that in for years. One of the very first signals we received from the Victory Machine said it was coming. Why do you ask?”
“It’s about the Eden Fleet, isn’t it? There will be retaliation.”
Hampon chuckled softly and shook his head slightly. “No, there hasn’t been a message about the Eden Fleet since Collins infected it with his version of the Holocaust Virus.”
“If not the Eden Fleet, then what is the coming darkness?” She stopped stroking his hair.
“Something that you don’t have to worry about, thanks to the work we’ve done on New Paradise. For the first time the encroaching shadow does not precede the end of the current calendar.”
“You should give me the code to the data stream. There may be information about the future you’re misinterpreting.” It wasn’t the first time she’d asked him to access the Victory Machine’s transmissions.
“There’s no need. My interpretations are perfect.”
“Sometimes I wonder if you’ll ever trust me.” A mental image of grabbing his young head between her palms and squeezing until he told her the code flashed through her mind.
“I do. You have access to everything else, but access to the VM data stream has to be carefully controlled. If too many people have access and take action to change the future then the shape of what is to come will never stabilize.”
Eve took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to send her frustration out with her exhale as she’d been trained to do during her short rehabilitation. “The shape of what is to come is being determined by our actions right now. We are assuming control, there is no question.”
“You’re thinking about Meunez.”
“He should arrive at his destination shortly. There will be no need for your wormhole into the future.”
“There’s always a need. There’s always a destabilizing factor. That is why we have Wheeler looking for the Triton.”
“I will never completely understand that.”
“What?”
“Why the first Wheeler was sent after the copy of Jonas Valent and the second is after the Triton.”
“The Valent framework was at one time the key to discovering the full potential of the technology. He was also the attracting factor that threatened everything we were working for. Now it’s his ship.”
“I understand how Jacob Valance can be an attracting factor, a dangerous leader in the future, but how can Triton be the same thing? It’s a ship; we have many that are more powerful, more extravagant. Also, why Wheeler? Wasn’t one of your dark futures twisted by him and the Valent framework becoming allies?”
“Thanks to what Wheeler has done to Valent’s former crew members that can never happen. As for the Triton, well, that is the rook in the middle of the chessboard. Where it is, and who has control are important.”
“Why not just destroy it?”
“The Triton has been an important part of this for too long, it’s tied to so many outcomes that her destruction could be the ultimate destabilizing event, making all the work we’ve done here moot.”
“I wouldn’t have these questions if I had access to the Victory Machine data stream myself.”
Hampon sat up and smiled at her; “You would have more questions. Analyzing the stream is the very art of questioning effectively. Why is it showing us what it does? Why is Roland hiding it from us? Who is ultimately sending us this information from the future? Why does the Victory Machine work while every other attempt at creating a wormhole with a connection to the past fails because of radioactive feedback? These are the questions we can ask without even considering what the Victory Machine data stream is trying to tell us about the future. You’re probably far more intelligent than I am, but you think like a computer at times, and I fear that the data stream would only lead you to more and more questions. The questions would lead to more questions, and you’d be trapped in a cycle until your mind would be torn to pieces while you try to find a conclusion point, a statement of certainty in the stream.”
“But if the Victory Machine data stream is filled with pictures of the future, then isn’t it primarily providing answers?”
“Yes, answers leading to more questions. It shows us a picture of the future that begs the viewer to ask for more detail. Imagine only getting the centre piece of a puzzle and being told to draw the rest of the picture on the surrounding blank pieces. By trying to find solutions to some of our more complex problems, you’re helping me fill in some of the details, improving the future for us all. Speaking of which, did you find a candidate for the next framework experiment?”
“Yes, this one will work. I’m also adding a control mechanism to the software.”
“What kind of control mechanism?”
“Patrick, the subject, will think he volunteered because someone he cares about is in jeopardy.”