| Generated by Google Flow text-to-video AI software, powered by Omni Flash 1.1 |
While Sugar was talking into the microphone, trying to appeal to the masses,
she was quickly generating a network portal for them to access. Though their
systems were not entirely interoperable, everything was technically built on
the same architecture. Computers were invented on Earth, so every
civilization that spawned from it should be compatible with that technology,
even if it required some tricky integrations. With Desulforudis, it was
relatively easy, almost as simple as sending a web link for them to click.
Sugar wanted their input. She wanted them all to respond to her queries, and
tell her how they felt about Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida, the Milky Way Galaxy,
and just sort of everything, including their own government. Their answers
were surprising. They weren’t just isolationists. That didn’t even begin to
cover it. They were hateful, mean-spirited, and if Sugar and Liselot could
be so bold, potentially downright evil. The AI which aggregated their
responses reported a great deal of comments that it interpreted to be
racist, though their vocabulary was just a little different than standard
English.
It was heartbreaking and hard to read. An entire civilization of
misanthropes. How did they ever manage to survive together? If they bonded
with each other over hating everyone else, she couldn’t see a common thread.
There had to be something deeper...something preventing them from imploding.
The two of them stood there for a moment, trying to think of a solution to
this. How could they get through to the Desulforudisians?
Liselot’s face suddenly looked puzzled. “Wait. Why would we need to do
that?”
“Why would we need to...try to understand these people?” Sugar assumed. “Oh,
um...you’re right. We can just write these people off. They live in the
sticks of a distant galaxy, and an examination of their technology shows
that they are not capable of reaching anyone we care about, not even
Dardius. Though, we do need to find out if they have any enemies. Maybe
someone else is trying to attack them, and Bida just got caught in the
cosmic crossfire. The detectives call it victimology.”
“All right,” Liselot said with a shrug. “Punch it in.”
Sugar said it out loud as she was typing, even though she could have plainly
used voice-to-text. “At the risk of the answer being literally everyone in
the universe, who might have reason to attack you with charged Kugelblitz
black holes?”
They waited for everyone to input their respective answers. The whole world
had stopped for them, like an extremely cynical and depressing remake of
The Day the Earth Stood Still, which was saying a lot.
Liselot rolled her eyes and took it upon herself to command the aggregator,
“filter the answers that say some variation of everyone. They’re
either trolls, or stupid.”
Then there it was. After removing every result that just basically blamed
every non-Desulforudisian, only one remained.
They don’t care about the Desulforudisians, or the Thālith al Naʽāmāt
Bidans. They’re trying to kill me. If your planet is being attacked, it’s
because there must be another dupe of me hiding out there too. I’m
surprised he made it that far, but I suppose it proves our enemy has
intergalactic range.
Sugar and Liselot exchanged a glance. Sugar then zeroed in on that one
reply, cancelling the global address. She used voice-to-text this time.
“Where are you?”
What are you going to do with me? the mysterious target asked.
“I’m going to get you off this world, for one. My ship can handle a black
hole or two. We need to get you away from these, uhh...innocent
people, and then we’re going to find your Bidan dupe to pick him up too.”
The next response took a long time to come through. “Oh, no thanks.”
“Ah,” Liselot said. “He’s hiding out here on purpose. He probably knew the
KBHs were coming, and chose certain planets specifically because they were
more likely to have the means of combatting the attacks.”
“Yeah, that’s my guess too,” Sugar agreed. “I don’t know if he thinks we
can’t track him, or what...” She started fiddling with the console to trace
the pings. She sighed.
“Problem?” Liselot asked.
“Maybe it’s that he knows we can’t track him.” Sugar growled.
“If he’s the type of guy to get an enemy to send countless singularities
after every version of him, no matter who gets in the way, we shouldn’t be
surprised.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” Sugar violently rubbed her eyes. “Okay. We’re goin’
nuclear.” She opened the global address again. “This is happening because of
one person. We don’t know who they are, or where they are, but they do not
belong on your planet. They’re a foreigner. It sounds like you don’t like
those. If you have any information, tell us, and we’ll be on our way. If we
never find them, we never leave, so there’s your incentive.” She slammed the
microphone toggle off, annoyed at having to resort to this.
Liselot peered at the screen. “Lots of different coordinates. They can’t all
be our guy. They’re turning on their neighbors, trying to get us to do their
dirty work.”
“Yeah, we found the keystone holding this all together. This could end the
world,” Sugar mused, “eventually. Thistle, synthesize all tracing data we
were able to gather from the target. Cross-reference it with the
tattle-tales. Isolate the most likely coordinates. Re-ping our mystery man
if you have to.”
“Processing...” Thistle reported. “Coordinates locked; dead zone.”
“Why would it be him if it’s a dead zone?” Liselot asked, noticing Sugar’s
smile.
“He doesn’t wanna be caught, so he blocked all signals, and out of every
patch of land on this God forsaken world, it’s the only area like that. If
you want to hide, you don’t go somewhere remote, you get lost in a sea of
people who look just like you. Stay here.”
Sugar teleported herself to the dead zone. Under her feet was a broken
device. It was still slightly warm from having recently been in use. She
looked around. She wasn’t the only person here. It looked like some kind of
homeless encampment. So they did have some hate left over for
internal use.
She switched her watch to megaphone mode. “I’m looking for someone who
doesn’t belong here. Anyone who tells me which one it is gets a minishuttle,
fully stocked with a bed, hygiene amenities, and a food synthesizer.”
Everyone pointed to the same guy. When he realized he had been caught, he
disappeared.
“Do you all have teleportation abilities?” Sugar asked the unhoused.
They shook their heads.
“Your prize will be here in a moment.” Sugar adjusted her watch to
breach-scanning mode as she was walking over towards the spot where the
target was standing. Her watch locked onto the next coordinates, so she
jumped away. She had to jump a few times, but she kept following his trail
until she caught up with him.
“Just leave me alone!” the man screamed, not bothering to escape again.
“You answered my question! You obviously want this to end!” Sugar shouted.
“You can’t make me go,” he argued. “It would be a death sentence.”
“I’m the only one who can save you,” Sugar reasoned. “These people are
holding back the KBHs for now, but how long do you figure it will be before
one of them gets sick of it, and turns on the others? What happens when a
KBH threatens a competing nation, or whatever it is? This is not a
sustainable sanctuary for you. Come with me willingly.”
“They...they can always find me,” he explained. “If I leave, these people
will be safe, but I’ll be more exposed. Are you sure your ship can survive
that?”
“I’m quite certain,” Sugar confirmed. “It doesn’t have to exist in
realspace.”
He tried to wrap his brain around it. “Fine.”
She took his hand and teleported them back to the ship. “Thistle. Did you
already prepare that minishuttle I promised?”
“I’m preparing a full-sized shuttle,” Thistle answered, “based on the scope of aid.”
“Thank you,” Sugar said as she was dragging the stranger into the cell.
“Once it’s ready to go, stripped of its flight capabilities, go ahead and
dispatch it to ‘em.”
“They’re going to kill each other over it if there’s not enough for
everyone, or if others come to take it,” Liselot warned.
Sugar watched the shuttle disappear from the hangar. She just kept staring
at its now-empty dock. “That’s not our problem anymore. We’ve done enough
for these jerks. Thistle, take us back into orbit, and activate a
trans-ejection burn in any random direction. Get us away from this fly speck
on the ass of the universe as fast as possible.”
A duplicate, by all philosophical measures, was their own unique self. Sure,
the two versions could share a lot of the same memories, but their neurology
was different, and every second that passed following their split increased
the divide between them. Even so, on the quantum level, there was enough
similar data to match them. It was like the modern version of a paternity
test, which was perfected in the 21st century. They weren’t 100% the same,
but close enough within a margin of error, and that was all it took to find
the target’s other dupes.
Now that Sugar’s ship had experienced passing through a wormhole safely, it
was better at it. It learned how to compensate for the gravitational
perturbations during transit, allowing for a much smoother trip. None of
these wormholes ever took them to the point of origin, as far as they were
aware, and no pattern emerged. Each time they pushed a KBH back, and tried
to follow it, they ended up in a random star system, quite often doubling
back to worlds they had already been to, thanks to a likely tracking delay.
Most of the planets were in the Miridir galaxy. None of them was welcoming.
Some were almost as hostile towards visitors as Desulforudis. It sounded
like they specifically left because they didn’t like how soft Dardius had
become. It wasn’t Sugar’s place to judge or help. She just fired up her
quantum locator, scooped up the alternate hiding out there, and bounced.
None of them gave her his name, but they all looked like the same guy, so it
wasn’t hard to be sure that she had found the right one.
Finally, they had some evidence that they had rounded all of them up. They
were back in the Tau Ceti system. She beamed up another human target, and
waited for another attack to give them another window out of here. It never
really came. Sure, more KBHs appeared, but every time she pushed one back
and entered the wormhole, it spit her out somewhere around Tau Ceti again.
“This must be it,” Liselot decided. “We have them all, and now the KBHs are
coming because this is where they all are.”
“Well, I don’t want to overload the defense grid, so we should leave. I must
say, I’m rather glad it at least brought us back to the Milky Way, so we
wouldn’t be so far from home. I don’t know what it’s going to take to find
that damn source, though. It could be in Miridir, for all we know.”
“Well, where are we gonna go?” Liselot questioned.
Sugar stared into space for a moment. “Three hundred years ago, a seer asked
me to personally colonize Waizidi, and set up a facility there. No
one is allowed to go there but me, which I was able to accomplish using an
ungodly amount of energy credits, and a colonial law loophole that allowed
me to install defensive measures back then which are illegal today.
Honestly, I forgot it was a thing. They didn’t tell me what to do with it.
They just had me set the trap, and I moved on with my life in other places.”
“That’s only about one and a half light years away,” Liselot pointed out.
Sugar nodded. “It will take us less than a day to get there using the
reframe engine.” She took a deep breath and started tapping on the console.
“Thistle. Plot a course. I’m also uploading a hazard map into navigation
which will show you the path to avoid my booby traps.” Sugar looked back at
Liselot. “If my traps have held, it should be empty. They can send as many
KBHs as they want; it will hurt no one. But I need to know something.”
“You need to know who those men in hock are,” Liselot figured.
Sugar went back down the corridors where the cells were packed with human
targets of unknown origins. “The first man to tell me his name gets to go
free. I will make contact with friends of mine who can get you tens of
billions of light years away in an instant, but I need to know who I’m
saving. Because the way I see it, if you’re all dead, the KBHs stop coming,
no matter where your bodies happen to be.”
“Denver Strong!” they all cried at the same time.
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