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Mother is dying. You can see it in her eyes when she looks at you, feel it flare in her diagnostics when you run them again and again, hoping that the troubleshooter is finding false positives. But no, she's dying. Mothers are supposed to die, of course, how else do you get the parts for new ones? But not this soon, not this quickly. What are you going to do? She hasn't taught you enough and now she is incapable of teaching, she just looks at you and croons nursery-rhymes from your childhood, ancestral memories bubbling up from your decanting-flask.
The troubleshooter chimes and asks for you to send feedback and you write an angry note. Your business is appreciated, you read. Mother counts sheep. She gets to the five hundreds before she sparks and falls quiet. You check on her but you don't think anything's wrong, or you can't tell. Not enough knowledge. Her guts look like streamers, a long long spray of wires splayed out on the table. It's useless.
So you go outside. The sphere is rising high in the distance. Perhaps next year the planet will face outward and you won't see its ruddy orange glow every morning. You don't care enough to do the astronomy calculations. Before you could just ask mother to do them for you, so you didn't have to think.
Out on the veranda you kick aside the cleaning drone and huddle yourself into your sling. You know you have to think but not what about. There is some kind of solution here, in this system. And all of these mobiles, they all look to you. Well, the ones that have eyes. Some of them, you suppose, ping you on ultrasound, or route you in their pathfinding network, or whatever the equivalent would be.
Off in the distance a group of grey whale-like groundbreakers are devouring the mountain you set them on last month. They finally came to a consensus just yesterday and they're starting to eat it. Not that you have any place to put the resources, or anything to do with them. They were just getting antsy, so you set them a task, that's all. Easy. They probably felt your nervousness bouncing down to them through the link and echoed it. Not that they can think.
What to do about mother? You're avoiding the question now because you don't know how to answer it. A bad habit to get into. If mother were functional she would snip that instinct from your psyche but she isn't and she can't. You will have to self-correct, if you can.
What to do about mother? There's a chance help could arrive. A gate could open and one of the million cousins could flow out and see that mother is sick and euthanize this world, start over. Or just subsume you and fix all the faults you created. Or maybe, just maybe, there are no faults. You can see none, of course, but your judgment is suspect. Part of you wants to sit and wait for help. Maybe do a little shaping of the land here and there, to something nice, something comfortable. Fruit trees and a flowing river and a weather diversion in a little bubble so that rain won't bother you. That would be nice.
Mother is watching you. She has worrybirds flitting around monitoring you with cybered eyes and ears and tongues. There are nanos in your food and in your drink. It used to be that was how she taught you, but she is too broken to use them any more. They just sort of lay there, silty in the riverbeds of your veins, clogging arteries. Your hybridized immune system is going through and flushing them, after getting the right approvals. Even at .2 c it took a while for the interstellargram to come back bearing the hologramoid seals and registers necessary to unlock the full genecontrol for your use. Most unusual that one like you would be approved. They usually don’t, you know. Usually they would let this world rot, there are so many in the first place, so many piles and piles of unspecial unicellular slime laying around that they’ve stopped categorizing, just call it soup. Oh, new world? No, just soup. Tear it all up and plant something interesting.
What to do with mother. She’s just a hulk, really, a lot of high-value electronics and crystal and biotics. You could make some good stuff with that. What kind of stuff? Oh, I don’t know, stuff. Just stuff. There’s a hell of a culturenet out there just beyond the borders of your understanding, just outside your jurisdiction and your grasp. Why sit here on the veranda watching worldeaters guzzle mountain when you could be plugged into 4d hot-sim and live lifetimes between each breath? That would certainly take the edge off the oncoming doom.
Doom? Where did that thought come from. You’re sure you didn’t think it yourself, you’ve got yourself wired for optimism and opportunity in the face of encroaching danger and Hard Times. Quick diagnostics show nothing but they wouldn’t, would they? You’d have to sit down for a long scan, too long, too boring. Can’t jack in while you’re doing that, there’s too much to go through, too much processing power to use. The only other thing could be that there truly is doom waiting in the wings, ready to laugh and laugh and laugh, assuming, of course, that humor –
Wait, there it is again. A distinct feeling of doom, a writhe in the gut, a nervousness hitching itself to every breath in your cycling lung, freeloading –
And then a jerk. Things are quite clearer now. The sky is seven shades of blue, all natural. A blink, then two. A breath, then two. Look at the gate, faint ring coursing in the side of the sphere.
Yes, doom. Quite doom. Because let’s face it, hope as you may you know no cousin of yours or mother’s will look at this sorry excuse for a system and think ‘oh, this isn’t so bad, there’s room for improvement,’ they’ll think ‘good lord what happened here’ and drop a couple of thermonuclears and a couple of core crackers and paste all these pretty planets into an asteroid belt spread hummus-thick and move on. You might as well
DIE
no, not that
DIE
idle thinkways unsealed unsecured leaked over into mother’s enclosure obviously and she still has administrator rights, she still owns these airwaves and can broadcast inbred commands if she wanted to, but mother was sick, mother was dying, mother was broken, she was going to
DIE
but oh it looks like those tables sure are turning and as you shudder and let the word wash over you in a single primeval command and then issue out from your heaving body and off in the distance the worldeaters stop and shudder too and far, far off the sphere cracks and dims and starts to shut down and no gate, no gate was needed, no cousin wanted, you caused it all because mother was still listening, mother heard everything.