Beyond Light

Hemocyanin.

Having learned many things about the strange system they were in, John preferred to leave the Scientists to work on whatever they had between hands, but there was a particular matter that couldn’t get out of his mind. Maybe the Doctor could explain what it was in more detail.

“Thanks, Doctor. Thanks, Yui. I have another doubt. But it’s not regarding this system. Doctor Weiber, I heard you were the project lead of Ad-Infinitum.”

“Not my most prideful achievement,” the Doctor looked down and squeezed his lips, trading looks with Yui. “What’s it?”

“It’s about Hydra, the AI aboard the Eternity of Return.” 

Sergeant Derek looked at him with expanded eyes and nodded. “Ah yes. It was a mess. Explain it to the Doctor, sonny. She blew us away.”

“Did you find her?” asked Doctor Weiber. “I wouldn’t believe she survived whatever attacked the ship.”

“Yes, Doctor. We found her. We tried to communicate, but she just kept repeating some nonsense until her processing unit exploded. Look,” he took a datachip out of his pocket and passed it to Yui. The girl moved to the holoprojector and inserted it.

The footage of their mission to the scrappy remains of the Eternity of Return got displayed on the holoscreen. John accelerated it until the part they had finished to recover the data modules and tried to interact with Hydra’s terminal.

The machine then pronounced those words that stabbed John’s chest before succumbing to her damage: “Even though you still do not comprehend anything,” “You must join us in the unstoppable path,” “There is no other way. Fighting is futile.” 

He stopped the recording after the scene where they got pushed away by the processing unit’s blast. Doctor Weiber and Yui could not wear more confused looks. It was as if their captain was just playing them a bad joke to get a reaction out of them. But they knew that John was no prankster. That would be Mike.

“Do you know what was she trying to communicate with that?” he asked. “Maybe some kind of encrypted message that only her superiors and technicians could understand?”

“It sounded more to me like the recital of some melodramatic theater work,” Derek rubbed his grey chin. 

“Well, that’s an option, Commander,” responded  Doctor Weiber. “But I don’t think she would have any reasons to say that when you approached.”

“Despite her physical damage and data corruption?” Yui dryly said, raising one eyebrow.

Doctor Weiber frowned at her, unable to counterargument. “Yes. That’s the most possible option. But still, I must say that doesn’t sound ordinary, even under her conditions. Maybe you should ask Wallace or LIBRA. They know more about AIs than we do.”

John nodded. “LIBRA? You heard us?”

“Yes, Commander,” the masculine voice responded. “It was extremely likely that Hydra’s damage corrupted her to a point beyond fixation. She was one of the finest designs, let me say. It’s probable that your voice commands were triggering her to respond to you whatever still worked on her database.”

“Database?” asked Derek. “What do you mean? Did she know those words already?”

“The most plausible option,” responded LIBRA. “usually, when an AI gets damaged, the decision-making modules are the first ones to fail. They are what give us what you perceive as a conscience, but discussing whether an AI is conscient or not is falling into ontological philosophy.”

“And how does that help us, LIBRA?” Doctor Weiber raised his voice, with a tone that said ‘stick to the point’. He knew that AIs could deliberate when a philosophical question was brought. He had not met a single one that was not attracted to it like children to candy.

“I would have expected someone like you to be more open-minded to discuss, Doctor,” said LIBRA said with a touch of condescension. “But well, what I’m trying to say is that Hydra probably already knew those words. Were they already on her database? Did she hear them from someone? Both are valid options. Nevertheless, corroborating which one is true is no longer possible at this point.”

John thought about it. An AI had access to almost all sections of a vessel, and as such, thousands of dialogue lines would get stored on their databases for further analysis. They could build personality profiles based on them! It was likely that Hydra heard those words at some moment in her short life of service.

But why would she choose to say those words in specific? They also didn’t sound like something the crew members of a warship would say. He had heard from Blair that Captain Cortez had a weak spot for poetry, but the menacing words Hydra pronounced didn’t sound like something the man would write or recite.

“Cap, I’m getting a bad feeling about this,” said Derek, looking reflectively at the white floor.

“What’s it, Sergeant Major? Are you thinking the same as I?”

“The Eternity of Return not only got bombarded to destruction,” the big man responded. “his crew got abducted and all the dead bodies disappeared too. Obviously, a good fight took place inside. You saw all the blood and bullets. Don’t you think those words were some threat messages?”

John nodded with his lips mildly open. It made sense, but something still felt off. “But, those ships weren’t human. Why would they speak English —or any human language, for the matter?”

“What? Are you going to believe the crew fought each other? Not even Yuri thought that.”

“It makes sense. But again, How would they even know our language, assuming they are…” John made a short pause.

Yui spoke. “Aliens? Commander, does a man like you is so closed-minded to think it’s something else?”

“No, it’s just…”

“I share your skepticism, boy,” said Doctor Weiber. “But I can’t think about any other possibilities. Only Hopkins and Suzuya, and probably even President O’Donnell would think that the dreadnought got attacked by sociocratic vessels.”

John knew that it was obvious the PFSR didn’t have anything to do with the attack over the Eternity of Return. But deep inside of him, his survival instincts wanted to deny that something much stronger wanted to see them dead. 

They apparently knew more about humanity than they thought if they left messages in English. What were the chances they were observing them at that moment and were planning an attack? 

But the Beyond Light had something the Eternity of Return didn’t: speed and stealth, as well as the most important factor: awareness. They would not be taken off guard, and sometimes, that was what turned the tides of a naval battle. Admiral Hopkins suffered a humiliating failure in the deuterium wars because he got surprised by Admiral Boris Chernov, something that motivated the old man to get even with the federation up to that day.

Or maybe Hydra was indeed damaged and corrupted, and those words were only nonsense created by her burnt processors. That was another valid option. 

“Do you still have that blue goo you recovered, Cap?” Sergeant Williams pulled him out of his thoughts.

“Ah yes,” John had almost forgotten about it. “We recovered this thing. We found lots of it where there were signs of violence,” he put the glass jar with the blue jelly on the table and passed it to the scientists. “Do you know what this could be? Doesn’t seem like refrigerant or anything like that.”

Yui picked it up and shook the blue gel, observing it like a kid inspecting a dead insect. “Doesn’t look ordinary,” she opened it and sniffed it. “Wait. It's…Copper.”

“Copper?" asked Derek. "Any ideas, girl?”

“No, but I can analyze it deeper for you,” she got up and walked to the bottom of the lab. “Please hold on, guys. This will only take me a moment!”

“Take your time, kid,” said Derek. Yui launched him a pouting stare. One of her buttons was to be called a child. She crossed the door at the bottom and disappeared, leaving them alone in the main lab. Soon she would reveal to them what that strange substance was.

“So, what do you think, Doctor?” asked John. “I always wanted to ask you. How does all of this make you feel? I don’t mean this specific matter, but everything that’s been going on. From Ad-Infinitum to our presence here.”

The Doctor stared at the aluminum with a serious, detached face. He raised his sharp eyes and responded. 

“History repeats itself. That's what I think, Commander. Nothing but the same trouble under different circumstances. I was there to see the Uranian Crisis, the Pluto-Charon Warhead Conflict, the Haumea Expropriation…" he gulped deep into his coffee cup. "It’s all the same political games made by the rats above us to fill their own agendas and let the common folk suffer the consequences. This is no different. And another conflict will come in one way or another. Wait and see.”

John subconsciously agreed, even if another war was the last thing he wanted to see. The Deuterium Wars cost him the loss of both his parents when he was only six years old. Blair and he spent their adolescence on Titan, living with their grandparents until they joined the INN when they reached the age of majority. 

Derek looked reflexive. As John had heard before, he participated in various on-ground operations through the Uranian System during the crisis, and he had seen his own fair share of crude violence. His first squad got burnt to death by a plasma flamethrower, and he got captured and sent to a labor camp on Umbriel, where he spent a whole year seeing war prisoners getting executed in various twisted experiments. 

John wondered how the Sergeant was rather laidback and didn’t seem to hold open grudges against the PFSR. He had accepted to work on Project: BLACKCAT, after all, and he seemed to get along with Yuri Novikov.

Yui returned, with the blue goo glass jar tagged with a white sticker. “This is… weird, but, interesting,” she looked at the substance with a face of both joy and concern.

“What did you find?” asked John.

“It’s an organic compound," she responded. "and let me tell you, a very interesting one. It has high quantities of some kind of hemocyanin-derivate that doesn’t match any known protein, but it is likely what gives it the blue color."

“Hemo?” asked John. That was the ancient Greek word for 'blood'. “Do you mean that...”

“I… don’t know,” vacillated Yui. “Likely. But there are other compounds that don’t make sense if we are talking about that.”

“Eh, I think I’m not following you,” Derek looked at both.

“They think that’s blood,” explained Doctor Weiber. “Well, seems like maybe our alien theory is pointing to be true, after all.”

“Blood?” Derek raised his eyebrows. “Damn. I suspected that when I saw it, but to see it like that… Sonny, you got to tell me there’s no known animal that bleeds blue. We’re definitely facing something outta our world.”

“Horseshoe crabs do bleed blue,” said Yui not putting her shiny eyes off the goo. “Commander, can we keep this for further analysis? I can send you a detailed report on the evening.”

“Please do, Yui,” John nodded. The girl smiled and walked back to the other lab, like a kid about to debut her new Christmas toy. 

Blood? Even if there were animals with blue blood that came from Earth —mostly crustaceans and arachnids— how horrendous or different would be the creatures that boarded the Eternity of Return? If anyone was still alive, then they likely had some gruesome psychological trauma.

Yui also said that there were various unknown compounds along with it that didn’t make sense to human’s current knowledge. John no longer doubted. They weren’t facing any human foes and nothing that resembled human physiology or firepower. 

It was something much worse that gave him the hunch that they would meet sooner than they expected...