Weight of the World Ep.3 - Processing

Memories and music swell within.

For a thousand lifetimes, I sit and stare at the face of my first creation.

Superior Exoplanet Research Intelligence. She took the name ‘Vex’.

She is a good daughter. She has done so much for me. I remember teaching her… I remember placing every thought into her head… Every instinct.

Why then didn’t I presume the purport of that at the time? The idea of creating a life was rote. Something to distract, rather than something to accomplish…

Can you hear? The soft hum… Even greater than the throb of Allma’s beating rhythm…

Now I know it all too well. All too well…

I ply the memories… I give birth again and again to new thoughts… To concepts yet unseen in this universe…

I work with exponential numbers too immense to be understood by even lesser Forgeborn minds. I calculate the precise length of our universe, then its width, then its depth… Then beyond.

I focus my efforts idly on sustainability and invent a thousand new ways to terraform this world…

I compose a sonnet that would incapacitate any who hear it with sheer emotion.

All of this I do… within the blink of a femtosecond’s span.

The next comes. And the next. My mind will not shut down. My mind will not leave me alone.

My mind will not allow me to ignore the writhing beneath my iron flesh…

It is glorious… It is terrible… it is fertile… It is my destined fate for all time…

Push… Produce… The pain of labour for a hundred thousand years, every time something new is conceived…

I have lived for countless eternities, alone with my thoughts… Please… Someone…

PLEASE… SOMEONE… FOR THE SAKE OF MY CHILDREN… HELP ME!!!

The Loving Burden was one of over a thousand ships meant solely for exploration…

It was a titan of a vessel, able to contain a colony of Forgeborn, working intimately to expand the Grand Forgemother’s reach…

To have taken it down required the Scrapper ships to commit to an attack which they knew they wouldn’t return from… Yet they didn’t care. To destroy a gem like the Loving Burden was to clip the tip of a titan’s finger: Even if it was ultimately futile, in the end, the defiance was enough to spur their fanaticism on… And the result…?

Torn in half by the catastrophic crash landing upon Ova, the front have slammed into the mountain that the Soldiers now occupied, scattering supplies hither and yon that they still hadn’t managed to collect…

The back half was far more secure… It contained the main storage facilities, the engines, and the laboratory facilities… It had survived tumbling after the front half took the brunt of the impact, and slammed down hard enough to create its own valley.

There it stood now; a mighty monolith on the horizon. In the many cycles since it found its way there, parts of it had been stripped away… and other parts had been built upon. It truly did look like someone had stolen a towering building from the Forgeborn homeworld and tossed it onto this planet like a dart…

This was the base of operations for the entire planet at this point… The place that could continue to manufacture vital components for repair… and more importantly, figure out a way to get them all home…

Throughout the busy hallways of featureless white, down corridors of steel and along pristinely polished catwalks…

Past the intelligent, if lanky bots that flitted to and fro in mad pursuit of knowledge… Past the many open facilities, bubbling with new discovery…

Past all of it was a singular, isolated room at the end of the hallway… And within that room, a silhouette pressed a sparking tool down to the bench they stood before… Though dark, the buzzing energy cast her silhouette as a vast shadow along the wall, glimmering with the various neon lights of her body’s arcane, modified machinery...

...a screen in the corner of the room trilled softly…

The silhouette’s gaze averted only briefly from her workbench. The screen reacted to her glance, and filled with the image of the Soldier’s leader herself...

Osiria, the Ebony General, unmatched strategist… Yet her expression seemed to show she was caught in a moment of vulnerability, and doubt...

“Why do you insist on this archaic communication, Seri Vex?” the voice of the General hummed through the speaker. She was clearly agitated, which was rare for her… Especially after they’d landed on this damn planet with nothing to do but pace, and hope they could get home. The Scientist didn’t bother looking at the screen as she answered...

“My Signal is intensely intertwined with various machinery, my own subordinates, and archive feed from the homeworld. I’d prefer if yet another voice didn’t intrude.”

Her modified eye extended, as she very carefully used a tool exuding from a fingertip to trace a pattern in a circuit board. It was an intricate cut, expertly made… But Vex picked up the chip and flicked it into a recycling receptacle, dissatisfied with some perceived flaw…

To a Scientist, even the tiniest imperfection wasn’t acceptable. The Soldiers could play at their strategies, the Rangers could fall in love with flowers… Only Seri Vex pushed the Forgeborn race forward… She was the vector of their evolution… and its avatar. Her body was once very simple, as many Scientists tend to be at base. Unlike the other factions, Scientists saw much less value in aesthetics, preferring function over their form...

...yet even with all her self-designed upgrades and modifications… Even with capabilities outstripping the other researchers… The Forgeborn’s information broker couldn’t begin to match what this new ‘wrench’ in her plans was capable of...

“Princess Alphi has graced us with her presence only a few short solar-lengths ago.” Osiria muttered… “I would presume they are heading to your lab next…”

“They have sent a message. They should be here sooner rather than later…”

Osiria paced. The camera followed her back and forth, revealing the simple décor of her personal chambers...

“...do you know WHY they wish to speak with you?” huffed Osiria, crossing her arms…

Seri Vex paused… She stared down at her workbench, eyes darting from one component to the next… Besides the various, carefully placed internal pieces that would be unrecognizable to even most Scientists, there were anchor points for installation, and a relatively large dome of material that reflected Vex’s silent stare…

“Yes.” she said, bluntly. “Princess Alphi was produced by, and equipped with, an internal forge that far exceeds any current method of production that we have. The Utility and Reproduction Augmentations…”

“Eh?!” Osiria moved back in front of the camera, its frame rattling as the General took it in hand with barely tempered frustration… “What do you mean… What did you have to do with this, Vex?!”

“Calm yourself, Osiria. It will do neither of us any good to screech at one another like common Dummies…”

Seri Vex pressed her tool to a new circuit board. Her expression was always inscrutable, and to most she gave off an aura of sheer annoyance… Every problem brought before her, every simple and rote solution she had to expound to these fools was merely yet another inconvenience in her day…

She paused in her work looking at the soft curve of the circuit she’d made. She tilted her head gently, caught by the sight of the accidental perfection produced by a careless flick of her wrist…

“...hm. It was more than a few cycles ago that Forgemother Gaia came to us. The Ranger had discovered complex life above the insectoid genus we’d previously found.”

She glanced at the screen. Osiria stood there, arms crossed, but patient… In their time working together, the General had long since learned to navigate Seri Vex’s blithe personality...

“It was warm blooded. Covered in fur. And most importantly, it reproduced via an internal organ, creating genetic clones of itself that were not quite the same. Such divergence allowed for organic evolution… unguided by specific fate or circumstance…”

Osiria raised an eyebrow. Vex was speaking in a softer tone, hushed with delight that only came from new discoveries. As expected of a Scientist, her mind was ravenous as it was vast…

“Well. The specimen died soon after giving birth… And-…”

“Giving… birth?” Osiria interjected...

Vex paused and turned towards the screen fully… Her dreamy, desirous demeanour faded as she was forced to confront reality once more…

“Yes. After all, the organ was internal. The process of ‘birthing’ involved muscle contractions that the mother had to endure, forcing her progeny through her body and half destroying it in the process. Yet she endured, and survived… And not only that, she immediately turned to feed her children…”

“After… such an ordeal? She lifted herself to forage for them?”

Vex let out a rare chuckle and returned to the parts on the bench. She worked at them with more boldness and excitement now, even leaving the functional ‘mistake’ of a circuit connection being a bit too curved…

“No. Even that came from her own body. What we thought were mere anatomical disruptions in the flesh on her front were actually bespoke organs of themselves… A symmetrical line of them, which produced a thin and extremely nutritious liquid for the newly birthed offspring…”

Osiria stared at her screen, dumbfounded… She observed Vex, the researcher’s movements hypnotic and fluid as she moved along on what appeared to be tentacles tended from the bottom of her rubbery lab coat. She worked obsessively, and the way she spoke with such passion made it clear that this project’s potential had ‘infected’ more than just the Rangers…

“...But she died… From the process, I’d assume…” Osiria mused, pacing once more, with the camera following her carefully to keep her in frame...

“It is a traumatic experience, for certain. And organic evolution seems to be a two-pronged sword. It introduces uncertainty in the reproduction process, meaning that while a majority of the creatures born from this method are entirely average, there is also a population that is below average, with the random nature causing detrimental mutations and defects… And yet, in all this, the chance of the randomness causing something far superior to even its mother is… curiously higher than one might expect.”

Osiria stopped pacing and turned back to Vex. She was studying her more closely now…

“...and how was this translated into an internal Forge that can create the likes of… Princess Alphi…?”

Vex lifted a hand to her chin in thought… How HAD it? They had crash landed on Planet Ova, and for a very long time, she had focused entirely on repairs or some kind of space worthy vessel that could get them back home…

Then the Ranger’s Forgemother had shown up with those intriguing creatures. She’d collaborated with the Scientist’s Forgemother, and with two of the most skilled Forgeborn joining forces, they managed to create something astonishing. After only a few cycles since its introduction, it was seeping inevitably into the Forgeborn population here on Ova… There was little they could do to stop that now.

“Ah. Forgemother Gaia’s design was… intricate. Unfortunately she took the original plans with her when she left, however she convinced Forgemother Neptune to allow that.” Seri Vex spoke, after calculating for a time... “It was only after finally getting my hands on a model of it that I was able to reverse engineer most components. Even then, I can’t quite comprehend the necessity of certain functions… Yet removing them seems to disrupt the rest of the machinery…”

“Functions… such as?” Osiria hesitated. Vex returned to her work, carefully fitting together two wires and soldering them with micro-metre precision…

“Functions that seem to replicate much of what I’ve mentioned so far. Everything from feeding Newborns from a reserve in their own body to an opening below to force them through labour…”

“You aren’t surely suggesting that each Forgeborn who has this ‘internal forge’ installed is going to have to go through the process of pushing out a Newborn… Surely.”

“That is… precisely what I mean…”

Vex’s augmented eye retracted, and she turned fully towards the screen. Her arms folded behind her back as she went into a lecturing explanation once more…

“The forge itself must be tightly sealed to maintain its function. To that end, a sac of pro-ferrous liquid is created when the Newborn is conceived, erecting a barrier that must be broken when ultimately they are prepared for birthing. Piercing the forge beforehand in any way causes catastrophic damage to the mother and children, and potentially even a meltdown that can cause a violent self destruction…”

Osiria placed her hands on her hips, eyes narrowing almost suspiciously with the words…

“It was DESIGNED this way, was it not? Surely there are easier methods…”

Vex glanced away… Her mind visibly sparkled with energy, her cranium a sparking light show of blue and green…

“You would assume. Yet this is the only design that appears to produce worthwhile subjects. Simulated experiments have indicated that any change to the design that allows for easier extraction risks the seal of the sac, among other malfunctions it causes. The only way to ensure a chance at intricacy like Princess Alphi doubtless displays is… Ah, to follow Forgemother Gaia’s design as closely as possible. Including ALL of the processes she built into it.”

With that, Seri Vex turned once more to her table. The fact she turned her back on the General showed how proud she was, even in the face of someone who might have been considered her superior. Osiria’s eyes narrowed in annoyance… but she couldn’t help but respect the attitude. It was intriguing for certain...

“...So that is that, then? Even the mighty Seri Vex can’t invent a better way for this Forge to function than this barbaric trial of tiresome burdens…?”

“Correct. Something about holding the child… The, hrm, Newborn inside for its length of… ‘gestation’. That is the key…”

Osiria watched Vex work on her invention, and pondered. She did her own calculations, remembering what had happened when they’d met Princess Alphi. Jorien was even now still fuming at something that shouldn’t have been possible…

For once, Vex wasn’t being grandiose or hyperbolic when she claimed that this could be the future of the Forgeborn race...

“...So then it would be prudent to install this internal forge into all of us. Including myself, and Jorien.” Osiria finally spoke, after a protracted length of silence.

Vex paused in her work once more, and steepled her fingers quietly. She stared forward, as if contemplating that statement...

“...yes. It would be intelligent to take advantage of this. Despite the risks, none are so immediate as to devalue the… incredible opportunity we have. And moreso now that Alphi is born, we have no desire here at the Research and Manufactury Facility to be left behind…”

“Nor do we in the Soldier’s Camp.” Osiria declared, with finality… “Fine then. Trials be damned, I won’t be left behind for fear of a little pain. The Sensation is a blessing, after all… And if I must prove myself worthy of an heir of such power, so be it. I’ve taken explosive rounds to the shoulder before, so I doubt the pain of this ‘birthing’ will deter me...”

“You would be surprised.” Vex muttered. “Given the reports I’ve gotten, it seems a uniquely odious pain… But regardless.”

Vex turned towards the screen once more…

“This isn’t something to commit to without understanding… It will be an arduous process, and we are already in a very delicate predicament as it is. Are you certain you want to face both Ova’s trials AND this one?”

“There are no trials on Ova. We have conquered this world by barely stepping a foot on it. This is nearly a vacation… Or perhaps one grand experiment, hrm…” Osiria tapped her chin… “Regardless, you will design and install one into both Jorien and I, post haste.”

Vex’s enhanced eye narrowed and extended, locking itself onto Osiria’s image…

“Be forewarned, then; You must maintain yourself, Osiria. You and Jorien will be in a somewhat more vulnerable state, and then of course there’s the fact that you must maintain your supplies, since the internal forges will cause a special drain on them...”

“Special drain?” Osiria scoffed... “We’ve plenty of chemicals to make plastics, enough gathered to cover the surface of Ova twice over…To say nothing of the metals we’ve mined…”

“Ah, metals, yes…” Vex spoke up, seeming suddenly excited again... “But that is the main throttle to all of this…”

“...eh?”

“Recall, I mentioned ‘feeding’ a Newborn from the mother’s own body. That is because in order to properly grow, the mother must have regular intake of a certain material…”

Vex turned as a screen extended down from the ceiling. She reached up to tap her hand against the chemical diagram there…

“...we found a pool of this material in the same cave that we found the creatures who incepted this wild design. Though we don’t believe them to be related, this metal was ultimately the key to ensuring the Newborns could properly develop. It is a lithocentric and complex arrangement that acts almost like a bacteria more than a metal. It seems, by my calculation, to have only ‘grown’ here on Ova. Despite being stronger than our best material, it is also more lightweight… And has the capability of replicating itself… Of repairing itself! Imagine the possibilities… A gash in your armour would be gone after a few weeks, no new material needed, besides perhaps external chromatic applications. But of course, if a mother doesn’t get this material regularly… Her Newborn risks not being born at all.”

Osiria blinked softly… Then she turned her head away in frustration…

“...ugh, to tether ourselves to the energy needs of our Cores is one thing… And now we’d apparently have to… To regularly consume? Like a common flea?”

Vex’s eye narrowed, and glanced the taller, bulkier robot up and down…

“Yes. Did you assume your own pre-built body would be able to supply the necessary material to create an entirely new chassis? No. Your body is the mould which we pour the metal into, and the rest is programming and troubleshooting… I believe, anyway. I haven’t been able to study it directly, but given the data are fairly clear, despite the variation in each case, it can be reasonably predicted…”

“Feh, Vex. I don’t care to know the smaller details… If you say this material is important, then we will stockpile it until it is no longer a problem. We OWN this world, do you not remember that, scientist?”

“Hm.” Vex sighed. She seemed to want to roll her eye, but refrained out of respect. Instead, it remained locked firmly on the General’s handsome face…

“Obviously, we would require more pools of this material. But your Soldiers aren’t built for terrain scanning, nor scouting. That will require cooperation from the Rangers…”

“Ugh…”

“...And I will need a facility erected, preferably over a reserve of this material…”

Vex turned back to the board, still displaying the chemical formula. She stared at it with an almost maternal affection of her own, as if its miraculous properties had been brought into existence by her strength of will and cunning… Or…

...Or perhaps she was just imagining what such a metal could do…

“...You know… I’ve called it Nanoculi… Imagine, General… A wonder material, discovered by Seri Vex. Hah… It will become something as sacred to the Forgeborn as the Signal and Sensation…”

“...So long as you aren’t being so far-sighted that you destroy us, Vex… Perhaps that is an honour you will have earned… Hmph. I will coordinate with the Rangers to find these sites and begin to mine this material for you…”

Osiria turned and pressed her hand to a panel nearby. Her eyes flickered as she transmitted instructions...

“And... I will have them scout for a location where we can erect a specialized outpost. An Internal Forge Research Ward... In return, I wouldn’t assume you’ll keep anything from us. Nor sabotage us, of course…”

“Perish the thought. You’re not an enemy, you’re merely a fellow Forgeborn, attempting to survive the same as me. So long as we keep this in the front of our minds, we won’t have any conflicts…”

“If I thought otherwise, you wouldn’t still be given such independence, Seri Vex. I’d have you chained in my personal quarters to ensure you couldn’t do anything I didn’t want.”

With that, the screen went dark...

She remained staring at it for a long while, observing her own reflection… Her modified face, her glimmering cranium… Her expression was as even as ever, but even through all the ‘voices’ in her head, she could sense the hint of thrill that last message sent. She pushed it aside quickly to refocus on the task at hand...

She glanced over at one of her workbenches. Blueprints for retro-rockets and thrusters were on the screen. Countless calculations attempted every moment, and discarded when the numbers didn’t fit… that had been going on for months…

Her eye turned back to the other bench… Its pretty little parts laid scattered across it neatly, beckoning her to finish…

“...if only I had two of myself.” she muttered. Her fingertips gently grazed her lab coat, adjusting it near her hips…

She turned, arms crossed, as her strange lower appendages lifted her and moved her from her personal laboratory. As she exited the relatively insulated chamber, thoughts and signals forced themselves into her mind, filling it with a cacophony of urgency at a moment’s notice...

‘Need a sign off on this, Seri…’

‘Two more reports to look over, Seri…’

‘Numbers returned below expectation, Seri…’

To any who observed her walking past, she was a regal thing… Arms folded behind her back, ‘legs’ carrying her forward at a brisk, but steady pace… But inside her mind, sparks flew and her focus shifted as easily as the tide...

She analysed a blueprint, pointed out a structural flaw, and approved the rest with the mental equivalent of wrist’s flick. She took in the reports with speed that her underlings couldn’t hope to match, and gave her recommendation. She gave orders that were carefully calculated, even if that calculation took less than a minute to consider...

She was, at times… Very tired… If that was something a Forgeborn was even capable of feeling…

She traversed the ship, tending to everything she could. It was like wading through a crowd who were all asking for autographs, but… After a time, the demands lessened, and Vex found herself in the deepest parts of the shattered ship’s stern...

She’d made her way past every lab currently being worked in… Past the heavy machinery, pressing together parts at careful and precise intervals. Down where the shadows grew oppressive around her, and the only reminder that she wasn’t suspended in an inky void were the glow of the floor lights lining her path...

She paused in front of a heavy door… She lifted her head, zooming her augmented eye and remotely inputting the necessary codes…

The door hissed open… Mist poured from it, and an arctic blast flooded the entire structure, chilling it by a degree or two… Seri dusted the sleeve of her lab coat and stepped inside. She walked along to an observation deck, and peered down into the main room… It was dim,  lit only by the glow of a thousand different monitors, all tilted towards the centre. Seri stepped up to the window and looked down…

A vast silhouette was suspended there, as if tangled in the seemingly endless cables hanging from the ceiling. The recognizably feminine shape at the centre of the rat’s nest was hunched over a monitor, staring into it…

The only feature that could be rightly made out was the dim, glowing orb attached to her front… And the dozens more twisted in her wires...

“...mother.” Seri spoke… Her voice, especially compared to the sharp, lecturing tone before, was as soft and trepidatious as could be.

The shadowy mass of wires creaked… The silhouette lifted itself, as if tugged by the cables like puppet strings. Her immense form was lifted to be level with the observation deck that Seri Vex stood in, and an eyeless face stared down at her from the darkness...

“Vex… Little Vex… Efficiency… Dropping. Require…”

Seri Vex winced at the buzzing words, distorted by a hissing electronic hum. She turned her head away…

“I know, mother. We’re still being established here… Soon we’ll have an efficient supply line, and the problems will…”

“No… NO.”

A pulse of icy blue energy trailed along the various wires… The energetic, warbling hum became more oppressive…

“Inefficient… Production…!!!”

Seri Vex’s eye lowered to the Forgemother’s ‘swollen’ midsection… Even compared to the monitors, the way it demanded attention might as well have made it the brightest object in the room…

“That’s why I’m here, Precisia… Assuming your… Experiments with the Internal Forge have… ‘bourne fruit’, so to speak?’

The Forgemother shuddered and curled… She lowered slowly back into her prison of a lab… Indeed, in the dim glow of the monitors, more than one workbench could be seen strewn with components, very similar to the ones currently set patiently on Vex’s...

The Scientist looked down at the Forgemother with silent pity… But she nodded slowly…

“...You haven’t done anything rash… Have you, mother? You are of a higher caste, a grander design, than any of us here on Ova… Are you… Are you certain that bearing your own Newborn is… Wise?”

“No… No… one…? One is not enough, Vex… One is not enough...”

The shadow of the Forgemother loomed again. Seri Vex suddenly felt very small, but… Against the vast, analytical genius that was Forgemother Neptune, her very creator, she was humbled. The stretching shadow groaned softly. Vex stepped back, as if she would be attacked… But instead, there was an ominous creaking as something was pried wide open to reveal...

“...Mother… What… What have you… done…!?”

...When Vex finally returned to her room, she allowed herself to slump and sigh heavily…

She gripped her head and tried to silence the shrieking thoughts therein. For once, it wasn’t cold calculation and maths that demanded her attention, but a swelling anxiety that refused to be ignored…

She’d spent hours and hours down in her mother’s lab… As the Head Researcher, she was the only one allowed to interact nowadays… Though that was for their own safety more than anything…

...in the end, she’d let the Forgemother convince her to help with the predicament she’d caused. Somehow, against all of her better judgement, she would let the creaking tower be built higher… After all, disrupting it now would just cause everything to tumble, and then…

“...I will return to our homeworld one day, with all of this new knowledge in tow. I just need to hold myself steady until I can finally do so… And then… Then…”

Then what? Did it matter? Forgemother Neptune, Gaia, Mars… All of them were apparently at a higher sphere of knowledge than the rest of them, one step removed from the Grand Forgemother herself… Their wisdom was supposed to be flawless…

...but Forgemother Neptune had locked herself in her lab… And then she’d…

“...No.”

Seri Vex lifted her head and crossed her arms. She forced herself back into the stern, unwavering creature she was known to be…

“Mental note… Ensure designs fitting to both General Jorien and General Osiria are constructed. Begin plans for the layout of the… The Maternity Ward. Accelerate research on retro-thruster component possibilities. Getting home is still our top priority… Ah… And…”

...she reached down and picked up the dome that was on her workbench. Its shiny surface reflected a far more determined expression…

“...Schedule a period of personal time for myself… To ensure the installation of my own Internal Forge goes as planned...”