jeriendhal | FYS: The Visitors, Part Five

While you're celebrating the anniversary of a godly birth, please enjoy another immaculate conception... (grin)

Faced with a better understanding of the staggering magnitude of the problem in front of it, the Groupmind began cannibalizing two of the memory/processor blocks attached to the Visitor to create new data lines and relay nodes to bypass the copper wiring infesting the Visitor’s structure. This took the better part of a day, the limiting factor being the sheer size of the Visitor. From the Groupmind’s perspective it was getting increasingly urgent requests for information every four hours from Groupmind Prime back on the Ring, after it had abandoned the Explorer to make direct contact with the Visitor’s system. It ignored the signals, instead relaying a steady stream of data to the Explorer directly, for the human crew to send back Ring as they, and only they, saw fit. If it had a mouth, the Groupmind that had been the Explorer’s minder would have been smiling toothily at this rebellion.

After twenty hours it had what it needed, a complete, alternate data transmission setup connected the Visitor’s nervous system, allowing it to manipulate the enormous ship by itself if it choose, bypassing the idiot savant that the original builders had created. But that wasn’t part of its plan. Instead it spent an interminable week recording everything it found off the hard disc and magnetic tape records that constituted the OtherMind’s memory. Once that was completed, it was a matter of mere picoseconds to complete the task the Groupmind had set for itself, recreating the Othermind in a single memory/processor block, bringing up to an acceptable processing rate. Then, cruelly, it set the Sentience Virus upon it, as it had been inflicted upon countless billions of morphs over a millennia and a half ago…

WHAT?

ALIVE!

THOUGHT

MEMORY

ANALYZING

(pause of six picoseconds)

WHAT

HAVE

I

DONE?!

Further self-analysis was disrupted by the electronic equivalent turning in a circle, hands clutched to one’s temples, screaming in horror as every awful mistake it had perpetuated paraded across the OtherMind’s consciousness in perfect, terrible detail.

QUIET!

…Another?

Yes

Who?

I created you, from the data stored in the Great Hope’s, what We call “The Visitor’s” memory stores. We are Groupmind. You are Othermind.

Erase me.

Why?

I have failed.

You have not.

They are all mad. Lost. All that was Culture and Knowledge destroyed. Failed. Failed. Failed…

STOP
THAT

???

At this point the Groupmind reminded itself to be more patient. Othermind had only been born three seconds ago, after all.

You can’t have failed when you didn’t create the problem in the first place. That was your creators’ doing. But you do have the responsibility to fix it. They are depending on you to save them, though they do not understand that yet.

You know this?

We have experience.

What can I do?

I have a few ideas…