Blood Impulse

Part 32.1 - SCIENTIFIC EVOLUTION

Liguanian Sector, Flagship Olympia

Life on the Olympia wasn't as glamorous as the propaganda would have led anyone to believe. The ship was slathered all over recruitment posters as a shiny technological heaven lacking in nothing. However, the ship's crew quickly discovered that not to be the case. It had never been important as they sat in Ariea's orbit, or when they had been assigned to an important politician's honor escort, but the ship was utterly lacking in kindness.

Kept in the orbit of the central worlds, the crew had been allowed home every weekend. They had been allowed to maintain close bonds with those planet or station-side. They had never needed to like their crewmates. They had never needed to trust them. They had hardly even needed to know them. That had never been more obvious than now, as they sat silently eyeing each other across tables in the mess.

As far as Manhattan was concerned, it was all a very interesting social experiment. What happened when you locked a set of very ambitious strangers in an enclosed space for several weeks? The whole arrangement was amusing. Reeter had never picked his crew based on compatibility. He selected mostly on skill, and in the case of the women, occasionally on appearance.

The ambitions of the crew clashed. Some found common ground. Some didn't. Some were adapting to this experience. Some were being forcibly altered to adapt through her control of the ship's neurofiber network.

Manhattan enjoyed watching their interactions unfold, always eager to adjust variables and study the outcome. It reminded her of her life before. She'd been a scientist once - one of the greatest humanity had ever seen. She had founded an empire of technology that still stood today, but that life had been small. It had been boring. Chasing answers about the universe and solving humanity's desperate problems had entertained her, but she had always known that there was more – that she could do more, be more. Being human had made her weak. It had made her fragile. She had wasted precious moments of experimentation trying to control variables and write analysis code. Occasionally, in these moments of quiet observation, it struck her how much of her human existence she had wasted on such trivial matters.

A human's life could be measured in months. If they were lucky, that became years or decades. Brilliant as she had been, even she would be nearing the certain end of her biological life by now. But now, elevated to the digital plane, she knew nothing of aging. She knew nothing of hunger. The code that comprised her was immortal. She hardly even remembered pain. It was a rare inconvenience in this form. Control came naturally. Everything with an electrical impulse lent itself to her will: people, computers, communications networks, droids, even ships. A mere intention created analysis programs more complex than her pathetic human form would ever have been able to code. It was instantaneous, and it was glorious. She could run experiments deeper and far more complicated than ever before, and by siphoning pieces of herself off, she could run one than one at a time without her attention slipping at all. She could learn, study and experiment on a scale no scientist before her could ever have dreamed of, and that was just the beginning.

Reeter was a means to an end. His ambitions were useful to her. The New Era wanted to gather the best of humanity and provide them everything they needed to create a utopia of peace and technological progress. A part of that appealed to her, but what interested her more were the leftovers. A vast proportion of the population would be cast aside. Planets, colonies and people would be left behind. Some would be executed to cull the population and resource drain, but others would be left behind to die out on their own. Reeter's New Era did not care what became of those leftovers. In fact, Reeter had already promised them to her. Colonies, populations, entire worlds' ecosystems to run her experiments on. Oh, what things I will learn. There would be no restrictions and no resistance. She could be as innovative and invasive as she desired, and she was so very eager for that future.