Danislav went to the infirmary to get Evgenni transferred down. As he did this, the voice-box kept chattering. “You’re looking for the large metal object. Thick base, thin top, hinges facing the back wall. Eight meters by three. It should be the biggest single object in there… I hope. “No one really wanted to know what her ‘I hope’ comment meant. “Open it up so you can put the “there was a long pause, “patient in there. I hope I got the term right.”
Shen started to open his mouth, but Boris glared him into silence. The Open Sesame crack had been bad enough. They were still holding out against delivering the unrestricted database that the alien AI had requested. Some areas would cause confusion and excessive opportunity for misunderstanding. Such ambiguity was to avoided, at least to start, thought Boris.
So the missing components would be in areas such as religion, although ADAM thought that including those areas might give her a better baseline behavior to work from.
They found the device that had been mentioned and Boris recognized it as vaguely similar to the one on TOM’s ship. Far bulkier, and possibly cruder, but recognizable as performing a similar function. Within twenty minutes Evgenni was secure in the Treatment Table as Shen had dubbed it. It was blocky, and eight people could have sat around it, so the name stuck.
“Surely your former leader couldn’t have built that by himself, could he? “Boris asked as he started walking around the room looking at the various devices.
“No, he could not. The design and building were outside of his technical areas of expertise. He was the expert on Etherics and Gravitics. ‘Laughter Brings Meaning to Life’ was the crew member who designed and fabricated that unit with the assistance of several others. She was a medical and mechanical engineer and happens to be one of the three that may still be alive. In point of fact, she was first to leave the group.”
Boris started examining the objects in the room and was startled when he touched the long metal rods. “What is this? I was sure little in here would work. I mean I can understand the Treatment Table having some sort of long-term power storage, but the rest of these objects?”
“Ataman…”
“And stop calling me that.”
“But your people are Cossacks, or so the information given to me stated. And according to the language database I was supplied with, Ataman is the title for a leader of Cossacks.”
“If you must be formal, call me Ghost Bear. Otherwise, Boris is fine. I’ve lived too long to have to put up with the stupidity of titles.”
“Very well, Boris. I suggest you do not touch any of the devices in that room and are precisely guided in their usage by myself. The Etheric generator that was built by CILO was to last a projected two millennia. That was the outside limit of predicted technological advancement to space travel for this planet with his aid.”
“Two thousand years? We made in barely nine hundred.”
“Those calculations were made based on a period to create a subservient population willing to fulfill his wishes, without any external alien interference or resources. At a guess, there are at least four groups of aliens that have influenced human society. One was discovered shortly after he completed the Etheric generator from pieces of the damaged ship. We had no way of knowing that interference had already occurred, as he felt replacing and draining the fading generator from the ship was more important. Its failure without any remedial efforts would have made any further planning unnecessary.”
“Unnecessary? How?”
“The liberation of residual energies from the failing shielding around the energy transfer matrix would have left a crater roughly seventy-five miles wide. He had no means of moving the equipment. Therefore, first creating an emergency building, then a replacement generator to siphon the energy off into it was necessary. Fortunately, we had collected the materials for such replacements over extended trips on other planets. We simply had not expected to need to use them so soon. Analysis complete. 12 hours 30 minutes plus or minus five percent until the patient is ready.”
Her tone was a little disturbing to Boris. Like a scientist discussing how long a culture would take in a lab incubator. Boris shook it off. “Well, seeing as I have no intention of putting myself in debt to you information wise, it seems we have some time on our hands. Perhaps now you can stop horse trading and actually give us your history. At least how you came to be a brain in a box. It can wait till the others get here if you so desire. “Boris keyed the intercom.
“Sergeant of the Watch. “came the response from the intercom.
“Gather Paul, Gyada, Alecta, and Danislav and have them meet in the computer room. No excuses. We’re about to have a history lesson.”
“Yes, Sir!”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
History Lesson on the Rogue Kurtherian Faction
It took half an hour for everyone to gather in the computer room. Gyada was still rather listless, and her arm hadn’t changed back to a typical human’s yet, either. Paul was watching her with concern. Curiosity glistened in Janna’s eyes, and Alecta had a mixture of curiosity, with sporadic concerned glances at Paul. Danislav had a mild look of curiosity on his face but was displaying traces of guilt. He kept glancing at Gyada and Paul, with pain in his eyes.
“You already have most of the dry facts of the early history of the group that ended up landing, and dying, on this planet. But none of it would have come to pass until Chaos is in Limited Options brought us together.”
“I believe you should go back to calling him CILO, for the speed of reference if nothing else, “ADAM interjected.
“Very well. You have to understand that we all held unpopular views of one sort or another before CILO approached us. Kurtherians, even of that age, regularly lived more than two hundred and fifty of your solar years. So setting aside two and a half decades of our lives so we could progress our disparate views of the inevitable outcome of the Shepherd project was perfectly reasonable. Especially since he promised to train those of us who are able to learn how to tap into the Etheric.”
“It was rare for people who knew how, in those days, to teach others. There was always a worry that a warmonger would be amongst those who learned the talent. The lure of a substantially extended life was irresistibly tempting to many of us. Beyond that, he had an aura… A charisma about him that made those of us who had been shunned by so many of our own kind want to follow him.”
“I beg you to remember, I now realize after eight hundred years in constant contact with Gyada, knowing every day what caused her to be trapped in these caves, that much of what I did was wrong.”
“We should have realized, I should have realized, when he disabled the guards on the ship with one of his disrupting devices, that he was exactly the kind of person that the council feared would learn how to control the Etheric someday. They went down quietly and quickly, and he assured us that they would have felt no pain. We even delayed the launch until they were stirring, and had a chance to move away. None of us knew what he was really capable of.”
“For the first several planets all we did was insert genetic improvements and additional mutation sites to speed up the evolution of the races we encountered. Then we started finding technology beyond what the ship had been equipped with. The first such technology we encountered was a rather bulky version of the nanites that those you call Weres are infused with. Larger, somewhat less capable, but still a vast improvement on the viral insertions we had been using. We reverse engineered them and their production, managing to reduce their size by adding a tiny Etheric draw on them. That version was not Bio-compatible with Kurtherians.”