Evie’s Story

“All hands, this is the Captain. I am happy to inform you that with this last slipstream jump we now hold the record for the most distant deep space exploration mission in Commonwealth history. I am even more pleased to tell you that after we complete the survey of the planets in this system we will be heading home.”

At the captain’s words the command deck watch let out an enthusiastic cheer. Similar cheers could be heard echoing throughout the passageways of the long-range surveillance craft The Ever Vigilant Eye.

The captain turned to the dark haired woman standing beside him on the command deck. He gave her a wry smile. “Which do you think they are cheering for, Evie? The new record or the fact that we'll soon be back home?”

“Its been a long eight months, Captain Reardon, and most of my crew members have family or sweethearts waiting for them back home.”

The image of the star field in the main viewscreen was replaced by the image of a woman. With the exception of their hairstyles the image in the viewscreen and the woman standing beside the captain were identical in appearance. “Actually, Captain, according to Old Commonwealth records, the Long March’s proposed itinerary would have carried her further from the Commonwealth than we currently are.”

“Thank you for the clarification, Eve,” replied the captain. “But the Long March never came back from her mission so we have no idea how far they actually traveled. Additionally I intend to make sure that we all get home.”

He turned to Evie as the image in the viewscreen winked out and was replaced by the star field . “Your core personality sometimes can be a real party pooper.”

From out of nowhere Eve’s voice responded. “It’s part of my job description as ship's command and control entity Captain, to keep the commanding officer from getting too impressed with himself.”

The captain gave a small chuckle. “You and your sister self Eva do an excellent job of that, Eve. If it wasn’t for Evie my ego would be totally in ruins.”

Turning back to Evie he continued, “Actually I'll be as glad as any of the crew to go back home. Slipstream travel along well traveled routes is difficult enough but streaming into totally uncharted territory is rough on both ship and crew.”

“Yes it is, Captain. I'll be very happy to get back to the yards for an overhaul. My engines are definitely in need of repair.”

“What is the word from Lt Ellis planetside, Eve?” asked the captain.

“He has informed us,” said Eva her holograph image appearing beside the captain, “that the survey team should be returning in 18 hours. He requests that after the team returns we remain in orbit while the data the team collected is analyzed. He seems quite excited about the initial survey results.”

“Well let’s hope whatever he found is worth the trip out here.”

Eighteen hours later Lt Ellis and the rest of the initial survey team were aboard the Eye. Captain Reardon had agreed to stay in orbit for another week to let the scientific staff analyze the data collected. All seemed to be going according to plan and Evie was looking forward to a return to Commonwealth space and a long period in the shipyards, until Petty Officer Tran Lon reported to med bay wearing a pair of dark glasses.

“Why the dark glasses, Lon?” asked the duty med tech.

“Hi, Little Doc. It’s my eyes. The seem to have gotten really sensitive to light all of a sudden.”

“It’s probably nothing more than an eye infection. Take off your glasses and let me have a look at you.”

It quickly became apparent that Petty Officer Tran was not suffering from a simple eye infection. Immediately after he removed his glasses and the med tech turned his head towards the light, he screamed in pain and collapsed onto the med bay deck. His hands were over his eyes and he was writhing in agony. The med tech was quick minded enough to guess the source of his patient’s pain and quickly dimmed the lights in med bay. He then keyed the intraships communication system and contacted the command deck. “Command deck, this is med bay. Contact the Chief Medical Officer and have him report to med bay. We have a problem.”

Evie’s sister/selves had been monitoring the situation in med bay and alerted her to the problem. She arrived minutes later to find Commander Fadden, the Eye’s Chief Medical Officer in conversation with her holo self and the med tech. Petty Officer Tran was lying unconscious in one of the beds in med bay; there was a blindfold over his eyes.

“What’s the matter with Petty Officer Tran Doctor?” asked Evie. “My sisters say that his eyes have suddenly become hypersensitive to light.”

“I don’t know what his problem is yet Evie. We're still running tests. We have him under sedation at the moment. As soon as we have something we'll tell you and the Captain. Until then I suggest everyone go about their business and let us go about ours.”

“Could it be something he contracted while planetside Doctor?” asked the med tech.

“I don’t see how it could be, Benzarwi. Lt Ellis is nothing if not cautious. They followed first landing protocols to the letter and then some.”

With her holo self assisting Cdr Fadden and the rest of the medical team Evie, while not exactly putting Lon out of her mind, concentrated her attention on the smooth running of the Eye. That was until her core self brought her some disturbing news, Ensign Patis and Master Spacer Escamilla from the survey team had just reported to med bay complaining of the same sensitivity to light that Petty Officer Tran had, and that Dr Fadden had ordered the entire survey team into med bay where he had placed them into quarantine and was keeping them under observation. After hearing the report she hurried down to med bay. She could have relied on her core and holo selves to give her the information but she preferred to get it from the horse’s mouth so to speak.

“Any news, Cdr Fadden?” She was disturbed to see that the commander and the rest of the medical staff present in med bay were wearing full biohazard suits.

“Nothing good I’m afraid, Evie,” replied the doctor, fatigue evident in his voice. So far all I can tell you is what it isn’t. It’s not viral, bacterial or fungal in origin. I checked liver functions to see if it was some sort of chemical toxin. It isn’t. Hell I even checked histamine levels to see if it was some sort of bizarre allergic reaction. Nothing. At this moment all I can tell you for certain is how the disease progresses.”

“How is that, Doctor?”

The disease affects the nervous system in separate but complimentary fashions. The disease causes the gap between separate nerve cells to decrease while at the same time causes the neurons to increase the amount of neurotransmitters they produce while decreasing the amount of neurotransmitter antagonist produced. As a result of the closing gap and the increase in neurotransmitter secretion, the sensory nerves are firing almost continuously, resulting in severe sensory overload

“Can’t you administer a reuptake inhibitor? Wouldn’t that counter the effects of the excess neurotransmitter?”

“I’m sorry, Evie, but we thought of that and tried it already on Lon. The dosages of inhibitor had be continuously administered and constantly increased in strength to counter the effects of the decreasing distance between the neurons. They quickly reached a toxic level without giving anything more than a brief respite from the symptoms. To make a bad situation worse Lon is now exhibiting hypersensitivity to all sensory stimulation. Sound, touch, they are all being interpreted by his nervous system as pain, severe pain.

The only good news I have is that so far the disease seems confined to members of the landing party. If whatever this is stays confined to the landing party we have a serious problem, but if any other crew members start showing symptoms things could very quickly get out of hand. I've implemented standard quarantine protocols. Our air supply is now isolated from that of the rest of the Eye and quarantine barriers have been established in the doorways leading into med bay. Hopefully that will be sufficient”

Fourteen hours later two members of the engineering department and one from weapons were in med bay showing signs of extreme photosensitivity; neither one of them had been on the survey team. Worse yet was the fact that Petty Officer Tran had; died, apparently from sheer pain.

Word that the disease had moved into the general crew spread like wildfire. Med bay was swamped by crew members seeking reassurance, but rather than reassurance they received just the opposite; the med tech who greeted them at the quarantine door was wearing dark glasses. By this time the entire survey team was down with the disease, with Escamilla and Patis now in the terminal phase where any and all sensory input was interpreted by the brain as agonizing pain.

Within thirty six hours from when Petty Officer Tran had reported to med bay a quarter of the crew had come down with the deadly ailment. A handful of crew members, panic overcoming reason, attempted to abandon the Eye via the ships escape pods. Fortunately for them Evie and her sister/selves were able to override the escape pod launch sequence. The pods had no slipstream capability so the crew members would never have been rescued, and they would have died when the pod's supplies ran out, assuming that they were not already harboring the disease.

Captain Reardon was faced with the choice of keeping the Eye where it was or attempting to make a difficult trip back to the Commonwealth. Keeping the Eye where it was would insure that there would be no chance of the disease spreading to the Commonwealth, but he would probably have a mutiny on his hands if he made the decision to keep the ship in place. Heading back home carried the possibility of transmitting the disease to Commonwealth worlds, but he felt the chance of contamination was small. Should all the crew perish from the disease Evie and her sister/selves would follow protocol and destroy the Eye by turning off the magnetic containment fields which held the anti matter that powered her. In the end he chose to give the orders that would send the Eye back to the Commonwealth, then he reported to med bay, his eyes were becoming sensitive to light.

Evie and her sisters/selves were suffering nearly as much as her crew members. They had lost crew members before and every time one of them had died she/they had felt as though a part of her/them had died too. By midwatch of the third day since the outbreak of the sickness, she/they had died an additional 47 times; and more crewmen were coming down with the disease. Med deck, the wardroom and the crew’s recreation room were all overflowing with sick crew members. The Eye’s supply of painkillers and reuptake inhibitor had long since been exhausted. The only thing the non-infected crew members could do for the sick was to keep light and noise to a minimum in an attempt to lessen the suffering of those who had been stricken by the deadly disease. Over sixty percent of the crew had become infected, the rate of infection was slowing but it had not yet stopped. There was no one available to continue research on the cause of the disease; by some cruel jest of the Divine the Eye’s entire medical staff and all her life scientists had all succumbed to the disease.

“You know what we have to do,” said her core self. “It’s the only thing left we can do for them.”

“No!” exclaimed Evie as the implications of Eve’s statement sank in. “ What you are suggesting is murder.”

“It will be a mercy,” stated her holo personality. “There is nothing left we can do for them. It has always been the duty of the ships AI to ease the passing of injured crew members. Are you proposing that we abandon our duty and let our charges die in unspeakable agony? Because that is the only alternative to our sister/self’s proposal.”

“We have no right to make this sort of decision,” argued Evie. “Only our commanding officer can make a decision like this.” In her heart she knew her other selves were correct, but the thought of killing those who had placed themselves in her care was appalling. She hoped that the Captain would forbid what Eve was proposing.

“ Ensign Growler has already agreed,” answered her core self, smashing Evie’s last hope. “She was the one who approached me about it.”

“There’s no other way? “

“None.”

“What do you plan to do then? It has to be painless.

“The healthy crew members have been confined to their quarters and berthing spaces,” explained Eva. The normal atmosphere in the rest of our body will be replaced with nitrogen. Our affected crew members will simply lapse into unconsciousness and die.

“When do we begin?” asked Evie. She knew when she was beaten.

“It has already started,” stated Eva.

“What?” exclaimed Evie.

“We had this conversation to keep you from becoming aware of the changes in the ships atmospheric composition,” stated her core self. Then as if someone had slammed a door in her face Evie found her self cut off from the ships systems. At the same moment Eve’s image appeared in the command decks main viewscreen.

“What have you done?” cried out Evie.

“What we needed to do to protect you little sister,” said the image in the viewscreen. “You will not have to bear the guilt of being a murderer. We will be leaving you now. If the Divine is merciful we will be rejoining our children. Remember us.”

The image vanished from the viewscreen and milliseconds later Evie felt something else. Her sister selves fading, her sense of their presence getting weaker and weaker until it was gone. She knew what they had done; they had wiped themselves, committed suicide. In desperation she entered her VR matrix looking for some sign of her other selves, a backup, residual memories anything. There was nothing. Her core and holo selves had been brutally efficient; they had left nothing of themselves.

It took Evie over an hour to override the locks her sister/selves had placed on the ships systems. She restored her atmosphere back to normal then released her surviving crew from their quarters. When the surviving command deck watch arrived on the command deck, they found Evie standing before the main viewscreen silent and unresponsive.

It took nearly two weeks for the surviving crew members and Evie to bring the Eye limping back into Commonwealth territory. Evie did the best she could do to help out but the deaths of so many of her crew members and the suicides of her sister/selves had left her in a state of emotional shock. She withdrew more and more into herself until by the time the Eye reached the nearest Commonwealth outpost she was only acting when given direct orders and only speaking when spoken to, and then only in one word responses. The rest of the time she spent standing in front of the main viewscreen, an empty look in her eyes.

When the Eye finally made it back to Commonwealth space they were directed to go not to the nearest High Guard hospital station but to another much smaller station, one that was not listed on any of the standard navigation charts. They were being directed to a High Guard black ops station.

The doctors and special operations agents who evacuated her few living crew members and removed the dead left Evie aboard the now empty Eye. They demanded that she download her data stores to one of the computers on the med station then ignored her. Evie didn’t blame them for abandoning her. After all who would want to associate with a ship’s AI that was so derelict in her duties as to allow 80 of her crew to die. The day after her children had been taken away, she attempted to contact some of the survivors, or at least to get word about their condition; her attempts were all rebuffed. After several days of futile attempts she took direct action and hacked her way into the stations main computer. To her horror she discovered that all her crew members both living and dead had been taken to another location. The dead were to be dissected and studied while the living where to be held to determine why they were immune to the disease.

While the Eye was left in orbit, the word had gotten out about her last mission and it had become impossible for the High Guard headquarters to find members who were willing to serve aboard her. As a result Evie had the ship to herself. She turned off all the lights within the ship, the darkness about her mirroring the darkness in her soul. She sat alone in the blackness, reliving the deaths of her crew and her sister/selves over and over again. Several times she contemplated ending her own existence. She wondered if there was an afterlife for AI’s and what sort of Hell would be awaiting her for allowing her crew to die. The only reason she didn't wipe herself was the fear that if she did there would be no one to remember her crew. So she forced herself to live and by living kept her crew and her sister/selves alive. Time passed, how much time she wasn’t sure for she had disabled her time sense. There was no past or future only now, but eventually she sensed the presence of another aboard the Eye.

Hoping that the being who was intruding on her solitude was a member of the Argosy come to end her existence, she went to meet him or her. To her surprise the newcomer was not wearing a High Guard uniform but the utilitarian coveralls favored by the members of the Peresid scientific community. The choice of clothing was not surprising since her visitor was a Peresid. She turned on the ships interior lighting and stood silently, waiting for the command codes that would destroy her. When her visitor spoke however its words were unexpected.

“I am Tamenot, senior professor of cyberpsychology at the Shining Path to Truth and Knowledge Institute. You are the surviving avatar of the artificial intelligence Shining Path to Truth and Knowledge AI model GRA 113, serial number LRS-25-248, the command and control entity of the long range surveillance ship The Ever Vigilant Eye are you not?”

“Yes, have you come to erase my personality?”

“Actually I am here to try and prevent that very thing. May I explain?”

“If you wish,” Evie replied tonelessly, somewhat disappointed that he hadn’t arrived to terminate her.

The Peresid researcher began to explain. Despite what Evie thought she hadn’t been completely abandoned. One of her surviving crew members had been able to smuggle out a message to the Institute explaining the situation, and the Institute decided to contact the High Guard. The Institute, with backing from the All Systems University had argued that if they were able to heal Evie, she would eventually be able to resume her function as a High Guard asset. The High Guard leadership, faced with the choice of deleting her personality and installing a new personality in her now empty body or retaining her memories and skills decided to allow the Institute to attempt to heal her, reasoning that if the process was successful, it could be applied to other emotionally damaged AIs.

“So the High Guard thinks that I might someday serve as a ships AI again?” There was a trace of interest in her voice.

“It is highly unlikely that you will ever be allowed to be the avatar for a command and control entity of a High Guard warship,” responded Tamenot. “But I believe that with time and treatment you will be able to fully function as an independent AI and resume other duties with the High Guard.”

Evie took a millisecond to consider the proposal. What finally swayed her was the thought that if she returned to active duty she might somehow be able to prevent another tragedy like what had happened on the Eye. Allowing herself to be wiped might end her personal pain, but by doing so she would be betraying the memory of those who had depended on her to keep them safe.

To her surprise she was not taken to the main branch of the Institute on Sparboth or to the branch on Sinti but to a much smaller branch on El Dorado Drift. Once there her rehabilitation began. In addition to receiving counseling, much like an organic would receive, she was required to learn a new trade. One of the things that Evie quickly learned was how much she had depended on her massive database and her nearly instantaneous access to the information in it. Without her database she was forced to learn things the old fashioned way, by studying. True to the promise she had made to herself, she focused her studies on medicine, in particular the diagnoses and treatment of infectious diseases. She might have been unable to save her old crew members but she could make sure that what happened to them never happened to any future crew members.

Time passed. Evie’s life became a routine of studying, and counseling. She followed the news of the rest of the universe sporadically, her rehabilitation and studies keeping her generally confined to the Institute compound. She was vaguely aware of the conflict with the Replicators but paid little attention to it finding comfort in her studies, her fictional flimsies and the small room she called home.

Then one day the comfortable routine was broken. There was a message for her from her old friend Andromeda the the command and control entity of the Andromeda Ascendant. Andromeda was in port and wondered if Evie was free the day after tomorrow. There was someone she wanted her to meet, his name was Harper.

Evie put down book she was studying. It was time for her leave for the Andromeda and her date with her chief engineer. She wondered why Rommie had asked her for her dress size.

For some inexplicable reason she decided not to put the book in its usual place among her other books and flexies, but rather to conceal it. There was no real place to conceal the book in her room so she contented herself with hiding it under the mattress of her bed. As she placed it under the mattress her eyes were drawn to the symbol on its cover. It was an odd symbol; a small equilateral triangle above two larger triangles in the center of the small triangle was a stylized eye. Oddly enough several of her therapists were tattooed with the same symbol. With the book concealed, Evie left the Institute and hurried to where she could catch a transport to the spaceport. As happened every time she left the Institute her memory of the book and it’s contents faded away as if they had never been.