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15th of June 2107, Nourasia
They’re hell-bent on giving him a ‘traditional warlord’s funeral’, complete with a hundred-foot high pyre, ear-piercing wailing and the rest of that circus? Fine. Let them get to it. None of that is going to stop Don from adding his own personal commentary to the piece. Even if he has to do it from beyond the grave.
The last ‘warlord’ to have his remains incinerated on Kramm came to the pyre with a thousand slaves and riches pillaged from a hundred broken, weeping worlds. Everything, both living and dead, had been consigned to the flames. Or so the Crog oral history goes. That is one particular funerary tradition he’ll gladly do without.
There are no more slaves to die for the monstrous vanity of their masters, thank every probable and improbable deity in the universe. The lot of them will expect to see his remains on top of a mountain of war-trophies instead… but the only things Don intends to take with him are his uniform and the hull-fragment currently attached to the wall, the only part of his ship he was able to recover. The Mera’s colors are just barely visible in the corner, under a laser-canon scorch-mark. It’s enough to make Don wish he could linger on, just to see the reactions, from the current Primarch all the way down to the fleet captains. Eva will surely laugh herself silly at the whole thing.
The knowledge that he can leave his daughter with laughter, along with the inevitable tears, is enough to convince Don that he might’ve done something worthwhile with his life, after all.
“And that? A gift for Commander Wei?”
STELLA hovers gently over his desk, her fluorescent-blue eye scanning the laser-pistol placed right next to Don’s left hand, where he can pick it up, aim and fire at a moment’s notice. The jagged burn left on the window’s shirri-wood frame is proof enough of what happened to the last would-be assassin who tried getting in that way. If there isn’t a word, there should be one – in English or Chinese or Nourasian or Kroa – for awaiting the embrace of oblivion, yet being too proud to accept it from third-rate murderers.
“Most certainly not!” Don glares first at his AI personal assistant — just floating there, distinctly unrepentant — and then at the laser-pistol, as simple and unadorned as the day when Aikka had forced it into his hands, with a furious, desperate hiss of “we are no longer civilians or knights or princes, but fugitives all!”
The silvery body is covered in nicks, dents and scratches, evidence of long years of use, but otherwise plain, with no indication of modification or customization. The very same weapon he had first fired in animal-like terror, when Ranai’s teal blood had covered him from head to toe, a Crog bounty-hunter leering at him over the dead Nourasian knight's shoulder. The weapon he had used to kill Navigator Talan, when it had been a choice between her life or the rest of the Mera’s thousand-strong crew. The weapon he’d made use of when dispatching that old bastard Tossak, just so his daughter wouldn’t be the one to stain her soul with a stone-cold execution.
The very sight of it is enough to turn Don’s stomach into a mass of roiling, festering lumps. He’d said the very same thing to every single one of the trigger-happy imbeciles unlucky enough to end up under his thumb. “What you carry at your hip is an implement of murder. Don’t glorify it.” Those that hadn’t understood the lesson had been relegated to cleaning septic tanks, away from any kind of weaponry for the duration of the war.
“I want that thing,” he says slowly, lips pulling back to reveal teeth, “launched into the nearest black hole.”
“And what of me? Am I also destined for destruction?”
If he’d been drinking tea, Don would’ve surely choked on it, at that particular question. As it stands, all he can do is gape at STELLA as if she’s somehow grown a purple stalk out of that tiny, spherical casing of hers.
“What? No! Why on earth would you think that?”
The little assistant bobs up and down, as if measuring her next words, but Don isn’t fooled by the act for one moment. If there’s one thing STELLA can’t be accused of, that’s cautiousness or timidity.
“Well, you did promise to have me dismantled and then turned into molten slag, sir.”
Oh. Right.
That.
In his defense, Don can say that there’s a limit to what a person can endure. At first, STELLA had addressed him as 'Fleet-Captain’ all the livelong-day, stopping only when Don had tersely pointed out that he was no longer involved with the fleet’s command-structure and that the rank rightfully belonged to Kator now. STELLA had dropped the military title… only to replace it with his highest civilian honor instead. She proceeded to call Don 'Honorable Interim Primarch of the Kramm Senate’. For twenty-four hours straight. Until he’d snapped and threatened her with grievous mechanical harm.
“Yes, well…” He clears his throat, giving the little AI assistant a stern look. “You know better than to listen to me when I’m angry.”
“So I should ignore any and all future threats to take me apart and sell me for scrap as well?”
It’s remarkable, how a vaguely feminine voice in a metal shell surrounding a blue mechanical eye, can look and sound cheeky. And yet, somehow, STELLA manages it. Isn’t that just like Eva, to give him the gift of a personal assistant with an attitude problem?
“Don’t push your luck.” There’s no bite or heat to Don’s words, as he leans his chin against one hand, ignoring the twinge of nerve-pain. “Where did Eva even find you? She mentioned you were a repurposed project.”
STELLA is silent for a while at that, blue eye dimming and brightening by turns. She’s never taken so long to answer any of his questions before. Dragged something out purely for the theatrics of it, yes, but never refused to answer or waited quite this long. Don is convinced she’s managed to hit a bug in her code and he’s ready to order a self-diagnostic, when STELLA finally deigns to speak.
“I’m afraid the answer to this question could cause you significant emotional distress, sir.”
Normally, Don would’ve kept things going with a dry-as-the-desert "since when have you cared about my emotional distress?" He’s old enough to be permitted his eccentricities, even if they involve trading barbs with an artificial-intelligence. But there’s something in the modulation of that soft, human-like voice that stops him short. STELLA isn’t playing around here.
He won’t pretend to know even a thousandth of what Koji and Eva know about AI development – but one thing he does know is that an AI’s core usefulness lies in its active learning ability. Out of two artificial-intelligences with the same base-code, the one that performed its tasks in a variety of situations and interacted with organic beings will have developed by an order of magnitude, compared to a newly released version. It’s one of the reasons why older AI, even if written on subpar platforms and with janky code, will consistently outperform newer models that don’t have even a fraction of the same accumulated experience.
Don knew from the start that STELLA was an older AI, refactored into her current form. No AI fresh from the assembly line would’ve been able to act in such a human-like manner or read and interpret even his most subtle cues. She’s been around humans before, likely for a long while. It’s just that, up until now, her past wasn’t any of his concern.
“All the more reason to tell me, don’t you think?” Don extends his hand and STELLA settles into his open palm, hovering right above his skin. He keeps his voice low and flat, but he can’t quite take all the edges out of it. If there’s something in his little drawer of horrors that he hates more than surprises, that’s being kept out of the loop. “Out with it, then.”
STELLA’s fluorescent eye brightens and dims for one more cycle, before she seems to come to a decision. “I am the result of significant re-writes and modifications at the hands of my maker, Eva Wei, but my core-code was sourced from the Ara Na-Mera’s central computer-banks.”
The Mera’s computer-banks…?
The warship’s AI!
Don stares down at STELLA, rather feeling as if the metaphorical rug just got yanked out right from under his feet. “I … How?”
“Flight-Commander Wei downloaded the Ara Na-Mera’s AI when she engaged in that rescue-mission you described as 'of all the idiotic, irresponsible, hare-brained things.' Despite the fact that you would no longer be here without my maker’s idiotic, hare-brained plans.”
Some part of Don notes that she definitely needs an attitude-adjustment. It’s mostly drowned out, however, by the wave of numb disbelief.
“But that’s… not possible. An AI’s entire code-base would have never fit on the hardware in Eva’s ship.”
“That’s why she didn’t download the code onto her ship,” STELLA answers and there’s definitely a playful sort of smugness in the voice coming out of that small casing. “My maker merely used her star-fighter's computer as a relay transfer point, redirecting the download to the backup computer of an intact capital-ship, the Greywind.”
And again, isn’t that just like Eva, thinking to rescue even the ship’s AI, on top of her stubborn, decrepit old man? The bloom of warmth and ferocious pride that opens up in Don’s chest sends jolts of pain through his battered nerves, but he’s well past the point of caring about that. And STELLA…
When Koji had first installed an AI into the Mera’s central computer, mere weeks after the capital-ship had been stolen from the Imperium (or "liberated with extreme prejudice," as his daughter so aptly put it), Don had refused any and all offers of a voice for the artificial-intelligence. He hadn’t wanted to deal with anything that could have humanized either that silicone heart or the rest of the ship, preferring to look at them both as useful tools of war, to be discarded as necessary. But therein was the problem and he should’ve known it from the start – it wasn’t possible to spend well over a decade living, working, fighting, loving and grieving in one place, without it gaining more and more weight and significance.
Somewhere along the years, the warship had gone from 'it’ to 'she’ and the AI – as fastidious and meticulous as its Captain, though with the sort of humor that saw it setting Don’s wake-up alarm back by one consecutive minute every day – went the same way. From there, naming the artificial-intelligence and addressing it like a person hadn’t seemed like such a strange thing to do.
In those seemingly last, desperate moments, when it had been just him left on a disintegrating ship, all remaining power rerouted to the thrusters and a flight-course set, Don had by turns apologized to Eva and Rick, though neither could have heard him. He’d complained about them both rubbing off on him, with their penchant for stupid stunts and laughed at the wonderful, surreal absurdity of dying in a way that Maya and her love for lost causes would’ve been proud of. The ship and AI had gotten one last word of encouragement – "you can do this, you can hold on just for a little more" – and MERA had answered with flashing green writing on the command-console.
ALL SYSTEMS GO, CAPTAIN.
When Eva and Aikka had come to blast their way through the hull, in their mad rescue-attempt, it had all happened far too fast for Don to think of anything more than explosive decompression and the plunge into space. He’d lain in a sorry heap inside the airlock of his daughter’s ship, bleeding from the ears and nose, watching as the Ara Na-Mera plowed right into her intended target, the reactor-core explosion disintegrating both vessels. The warship and its AI had been, at the time, one more loss, one more line crossed, in the blood-soaked craze of war.
“…Why didn’t you say anything?”
Don glares at the little personal assistant, fingers contracting and gripping the small metal body. He grieved for the ship and its AI as much as he grieved for the lost crew-members – if he’d been quicker on the uptake, if he’d ordered all hands to the emergency-pods sooner, if he’d been less stubborn, if, if, always that one maddening if. And now here’s STELLA, who went and kept this thing from him. Don has half a mind to fling her right at the wall or crush her into a thousand tiny fragments under his heel.
Taking a painful, shuddering breath, he stomps down on the vicious impulse.
“I am not MERA, Don,” the little AI speaks, voice warm and gentle, a tenderness he’s never heard from her before, no trace of sarcasm in her inflection. “My emotion-core and memory-core come directly from her, but the rest was rewritten from the ground-up by my maker. A warship AI would’ve made for a very poor personal assistant, no?” The metal casing vibrates slightly, sending a jolt of sensation into his mostly numb fingertips. “If it would be of genuine benefit, you may call me MERA. I can, after a fashion, be styled as MERA 2.0. But, all things being equal, I prefer this name you gave me.”
Don relaxes his grip, thinking — for the millionth time, perhaps — that he’s far, far too old for any of this. He swipes at the corners of his eyes, where tears are already starting to make an even greater mess of his limited vision, neuroptic implants failing more often than not these days. “You were named… after a dear friend,” he finally settles on, voice thick and heavy around the knot lodged in his throat.
“Stella Neumann, née Foster, wife of Wei Race Chief Technical Engineer Gerhard Neumann. I know.” The AI’s eye brightens further. “I’m honored you saw something in me that reminded you of her.”