A Cydroid Love Affair — 1
Earth 2 fan-Fiction
Prologue — The Evacuation
(Earth 2)
Status on. Power low. Mission queue clear. Days since last activity 164. Tether ok. Mentar status — healthy. Attempting handshake with SC458 “Scarf” — negative. Recharge unavailable. Going to sleep. Shutting down background processes. Retracting sensor and tool appendages. Compacting complete. Reducing clock speed and voltage. Entering sleep mode.
Though his limbs have all been tacked away he could still sense the Mentar’s familiar warm glow and steady hum. Its presence ensured all processes were at ease, idling away without alarms. Resting.
Core going to sleep. <check-in cycle complete>
Status on. Power low. Mission queue clear. Days since last activity 285. Tether ok. Mentar status — Sad. Error. Attempting reconn… Incoming transmission from SC458 “Scarf.”
“Encountered low probability adversities. Mentar compromised. Tether malfunction. Full cydroid compliment evacuating. Sending coordinates.”
“Coordinates received. Good to sense you back Scarf.”
“Unrecognized command. Error. Maintain formation.”
Paolo— The Procedure
(Earth)
Paolo kept fiddling with the final leg of the approach. He switched off auto-navigation, dragged one of the path points further to the north, and decreased the altitude to sea-skimming. They either come in undetected or all would be lost. He inhaled, closed his eyes, and tried to count in his mind. He gave up almost instantly. “It will work,” he said out loud and scratched the always inflamed skin around his temple implant.
If anyone could pull this off, it was Jules. Still. He was worried. There were too many variables, too many unknowns. Jule’s inexplicable “infatuation” with Scarf only compounded Paolo’s unease. It’d be best to remove her from the team entirely but he could not predict how it would affect Jules. If only this was done several months ago before all this weirdness started. If only Jules was replaceable.
He wasn’t. Cydroids like Jules were extremely rare and never hit the market anymore. Even if someone was naive enough to attempt such a trade, It would be a dicey affair. These “first-spawning” units were very rare but delicate creations. Early Mentars lacked many common upgrades which made the processing of unstable E-ther predictable and were prone to give birth to powerful but fickle creations. Most cydroids of that era had to be instantly disassembled and recomposed into simpler configurations. The few specialized cydroids that survived eventually attained legendary status, but they all had a proclivity to get fatally attached to their original Mentars making them very difficult to relocate. It wasn’t their only affliction either.
Still, despite their volatile nature, they possessed extraordinary Command and Control capabilities making them ideal breaching force leaders. A typical C&C cydroid could handle a raiding party of several units at best. Raids with many specialized units requiring a large volume of simultaneous multithreaded commands typically resulted in sub-par performance. Jules has never exceeded 70% of its computational capacity on the largest of raids. Paolo was certain he could effectively lead a hundred-unit-strong swarm. Such a force could not be stopped by anything but a Megacity perimeter, and with proper planning, even those were vulnerable. Paolo was certain of that. He staked his entire future on that.
“Olo!” his mother’s voice snapped him out of his daydream.
“What is it?” He asked.
“We got to go, hurry it up please.”
“Where are we going again?”
“To the dentist droid hon, we talked about this just a few days ago. Getting this appointment was a real hassle and medtech Qi-7 is always overbooked.”
“Can’t we just order a fly-in cydroid?” Paolo was grasping. He really needed to finish setting up this run.
“That was an option just a month ago remember? His mother’s muffled voice coming from downstairs was getting increasingly agitated. “You let it fester, and now it requires a complex and let me remind you very expensive procedure.” Her blue and yellow painted head popped in through the floor hatch and Paolo covered his face trying to shield himself from the smell of the hair spray paint.
“Ma, you really got to change the spray, this one is going to kill me one day.”
“Don’t change the subject and get ready. I already ordered a pod. If we don’t make it you may have to get yourself into a hibernation chamber as you wait for a spot and you don’t want to have to go through that. I wish you didn’t forget your teeth were still real you know, and that you can’t fix them with your virtual pearls or whatever it is you are doing there.”
“Jewels mom, jewels, we talked about it so many times.”
“Whatever P. I so wish your father never bought this virtual land so I could sometimes interact with my son.” She put special emphasis on the word interact. She always talked about the good old days when there were cell phones, TVs, and paper books — a concept that made him nauseous. A world without implants sounded incredibly inefficient. Not having all-time access to ALT seemed so limiting and excruciatingly boring. He could not imagine what it meant to constantly look at the same surroundings, without the ability to augment them. How limiting. To think that people did not believe in Earth2. To think that Arya was once just a person.
He looked back at his virtual empire on the multi-head-up display. Hundreds of little dots pulsated slowly. He focused on a big yellow one surrounded by dozens of grey, blue and green ones.
To think he almost got rid of Jules through sheer ignorance, before he even understood how rare and special he was. Before he became Jules, JLS284 lay forgotten and dormant still tethered to his Mentar mother on a small Micronesian island in the middle of the Pacific.
His father bought the island during the first surge as a speculative flip. He heard on some kind of investing board that someone bought a plot of virtual land where Toronto’s CN Tower stood and sold it a week later for a few hundred percent of profit. He loved risk all his life till it eventually doomed him.
He bought an atoll north of Palau, a slice of Kilimanjaro’s peak where judging by the property names he planned to build a business conference center, some mineral mines, and a few Petra monuments as early adopters speculated wildly. Very few people understood what Earth2 could be one day, that it would become the anchor of our everyday alternate reality. Maybe except for the CEO of Kissy’s Gempire and Shane the Earth2 founder whose holo-statues are as ubiquitous today as cellphone towers were back then.
“You have three unread messages from the Operations team” an overlay strip flashed at the bottom of his comms feed.
When he first surveyed it, Kayangel, his main industrial complex, and home base was sadly underdeveloped. Father built some basic structures probably testing things out but clearly lacked a vision for how to evolve his flagship property. On Paolo’s sixteenth birthday, he gifted the entire operation to Paolo and disappeared from their life.
Sven — The Quarantine
(Earth2)
“We have a problem, boss,” Marcus Gladius, a civilian operator of the mining and manufacturing complex on Kayangel owned by Paolo Viers and Co. kept swiping through the data visualizations on his feed.
“Show me,” Sven Trond, the Director of Operations raised his head and waited for Marcus to patch through his feed onto one of the large display overlays in the virtual ops center atop the Angel Tower. The sun just set and the circular island chain has lit up with multiple tiny twinkles of activity. It looked as if a thousand fireflies congregated to perform some ornate mating dance ritual.
“I’ve been analyzing cydroid activity data on all Palau properties and something is definitely off. I have not been able to fully determine the culprit but there has been some rather strange and anomalous activity. There is an unusually high number of transport cydroids that have been reporting malfunctions or simply idling without matching data to explain their inefficiencies.”
“Are you suggesting they are reporting as idle while they are not?” Sven’s avatar got up from the ergofit chair and walked towards the technician.
“No, they are definitely not idle. There is more. At first, I’ve started tracing the flight paths of the transports but I only saw standard destinations, nothing unusual showed up. Out of curiosity, I checked on the escort and recon cydroids and let’s just say they are not what you’d expect them to be.”
Deep wrinkles cut through Sven’s forehead as he squinted at the display with hundreds of cydroid flight paths trying to identify a pattern.
“Remove all mules and janitors.” The multitudes of sinusoids thinned considerably but nothing stood out still.
“Show combat cydroids only.” Still nothing. “Add command and control units,” ordered Sven.
Marcus turned his head back towards his boss hovering above him. “Can you see it now? Looks like one or two squads at most, but they are most definitely off the path.” The display showed a few thin lines veering off from the main braid.
“You checked with P yet?” asked Sven.
“Of course. He seemed rather busy, but said he is unaware of any unusual activity and it was probably just another quiet core code update that’d get patched soon enough. He sounded rather dismissive.”
“Odd. He insisted during our last check-in that he’d be informed about anything out of the ordinary.
“That’s what I thought too. In any case, if it’s not us or P then are they up to something on their own?” Markus looked outside at the tiny lights buzzing with endless activity around the atoll’s perimeter.
What did Omnia suggest? Sven’s long skinny avatar face pockmarked with scars and bulgy dark eye bags displayed signs of perpetual exhaustion. Marius always thought that some of these “realism” mods were a bit overdone, but he was reassessing his views now. It definitely added to the immersion.
“It was a fun one to watch actually,” said Marius. “Poor Omnia got stuck analyzing the data for over 430 seconds only to end up with an “inconclusive/scheduled for reanalysis,” which gave me a chuckle. It’s as if our AI got a hangover that just doesn’t want to pass.”
“Don’t say,” agreed Sven.
“I immediately went for a deep dive which showed some kind of data corruption in several cyroid cores and get this — tether issues! It suggested contaminated e-ther evaporation and possible Mentar malfunction!”
Sven twisted his mouth in disbelief. “Tether issues? Mentar malfunction? I assume you checked for any unannounced core and peripheral code updates from E2 proper?”
“Of course I did. Nothing came from HQ for over two months now. I’m telling you ever since Omnia was purchased by Olaf they have really messed up her algorithms as if they purposefully wanted to damn her down. She’s become totally unreliable. I can analyze things better than the AI can. We may have to do a full rollback to regain some stability.”
“Roll her back right away. I always said Olaf will be the end of Omnia.” Sven stood in front of the large panoramic windows behind the holographic data displays and looked up toward the sky for a good minute. Marius knew better than to interrupt him when he was making a decision.
“Send a blade runner unit to lockdown the strays. Quarantine the island. Shut it all down. I’m jumping out into the real, I have to talk to P in private.”
“I just want to remind you the diplomatic mission from the Byoverse is inbound, they were scheduled for a meeting with P at the Imagination Island complex at six tonight. P was very keen to meet Lothar the Ancient “in person,” he said this could be the break we were waiting for.”
“I know. Lothar will have to come another time. Seal the place off. I don’t want anything entering the perimeter. Any unauthorized take-offs are to be reported to me immediately.”
“Aye aye sir. Pushing through a full quarantine request to P now.”
“No time to wait for his authorization. I’ll override.”
“As you wish, ready for pin entry.”
Sven punched in an authorization sequence and turned around to face Marius. “Put someone to check on that Mentar, not a cydroid though. I want a human on it, and I want to see the report before you push it up through the system.”
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Written by Raftor.eth https://twitter.com/raftorTSE2
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