The recording of Hana's story-telling session was watched, rewatched, analysed and pored over by at first the half dozen Chozo most interested in her presence, then by nearly everyone on the planet, and finally the recordings were sent to all their respective governments and organizations for further study. Heated discussions were had, voices were raised, and finally a vote was held to decide what should be done.
This all happened within three hours of the event, the Chozo having abandoned their legendary carefulness in favour of haste. The decision was made to wait and watch, after which everyone went back to their previous projects.
There were three exceptions. Shu-Qi, whose current project was the little gynoid. Kohinoor, who was organizing their response on a just-in-case basis. And Enza, who had come across the conference room after a late dinner, and who was sitting in on their meeting out of sheer curiosity.
————————————
Shu-Qi's face as he watched the recording, again, was decidedly grim.
The 'Subject', as most of his colleagues deigned to name the little gynoid, had displayed unbelievable learning ability. For four days he'd struggled to teach her the common Chozo language, and while she'd progressed well, it was nothing that couldn't be done by a sufficiently gifted and augmented Chozo child half her age. Not nearly fast enough for his comfort. As she had said, those books were meant for younger chicks.
All that had gone off into the wind with Hana's… story.
He had been too aghast at the time by the complete mockery Hana had made of one of his homeworld's most crucial literary works to immediately notice how she was making sudden leaps in her speech and reading skills. Reviewing the scene afterwards made it plainly obvious.
Shu-Qi leaned back in his chair, folding his arms as he observed the by-now infamous lesson. Hana began her story, language broken, vocabulary limited, sentence structure leaving much to be desired. Then she began reading ahead on her tablet. The surveillance software caught her with several panels open, scrolling through them all at once with impressive speed. Only a few minutes later Hana was speaking grammatically sound, complete sentences.
Kohinoor paced back and forth, showing a nervous energy that had been evident most of the day.
They'd long since gone over the obvious implications. Now they were trying to guess at her reasons.
"She found motivation. Created something she found engaging," he said, scratching under his beak. "Or was perhaps playing us for fools."
"She just seems so…" Enza muttered, watching Hana's face brighten in sheer joy as she got to the part where Nu-Fen and Sho-Sho started fighting.
"Innocent? Playful? Obviously by design," Kohinoor said, ceasing his pacing. "This is an intelligence which is blatantly beyond any one of us. It is endearing to be sure, but if you wished to insert a covert synthetic agent into a society, wouldn't disguising it as a child be especially effective?"
There was a pause.
Enza said, "But why human? They're not the most numerous of sapients, nor are they the most powerful or technologically advanced. In most of the universe she'd be out of place. Why let on that she's this clever, if she's trying to hide?"
"I could name any number of reasons why, as could you. They may have been the target, or the subject may be malfunctioning. If you wish for me to guess, however…" He fixed her with a stare. "Your reaction would be precisely as intended."
"She intended for us to have this discussion?" Shu-Qi shook his head. "No, Kohinoor. It brought her survival into question. If you had voted against—"
"Then she would have been dead, and we would continue to lose ground. I believe the gynoid represents our best chance at changing that, dangerous or not. However, she may understand that."
Shu-Qi scratched the side of his beak, not for a moment envying Kohinoor's responsibility. It didn't make much of a difference, from the perspective of future generations, whether they were overrun by slow Phazon encroachment or subverted by far swifter intelligent maneuvering — but while he could come to the same conclusions, he lacked the ancient warbird's personal experience of the former. No-one living had any experience of the latter.
The chill running down his side pointed out that this wasn't certain. He shook his head. 'However…'
He lowered his beak in acceptance. "You're right. Even so, we must operate on the assumption that we aren't worms being lured to her nest. She may be smarter than us all combined, and she's certainly manipulating us, but she cannot be omniscient. There are limits to how fast any being can practically learn, and I do not believe her familiar with our species. The crash-landing was, most likely, exactly that."
"If you're wrong…" Kohinoor pointed an accusatory claw.
"Measures are in place?"
Closing his hand and placing his arms behind, the old general resumed his rigged all-business pose.
"We've begun work on the neighbouring stars." Kohinoor nodded. "Readying them for supernova induction will take another few months, alpha containment will take years, but lesser measures of sterilization should be an option soon enough. I'm hoping it won't be necessary, of course."
Shu-Qi snorted. "I, too, would prefer not to explain why we burned the grid to five hops out. Though I don't suppose we'd be the ones to worry about that."
"Four hops."
He narrowed an eye. Kohinoor raised a brow.
"Five would put us in Federation space. Even four hops out there are seven systems sharing a galaxy with the Federation, one of which contains the homeworld of a major Federation species. While I would normally advocate for ignoring that, I'm afraid the diplomatic consequences would be… bothersome, enough so as to outweigh the risks. As it stands, we'd be destroying several of our own forge-worlds. It's my hope that the physical construction of the gynoid was an attempt at preventing it from replicating itself."
"It's a reasonable assumption…" Shu-Qi said, tapping the arm of his chair.
He could say that, but he couldn't say it with confidence. He wasn't sure he believed it. Paranoia was a danger of its own, but paranoia applied to artificial intelligence was merely… anywhere between 'pointless' and 'vital,' depending on how you read the history books.
"Enza, what do you think?" he asked, giving her a glance. "You've been very quiet for a while."
She looked between them, then down at the table. Her voice was neutral when she answered.
"I thought that vote was a formality."
———————————
Enza found that her knuckles were whitening, her claws partially extending and digging into her palms. It hurt — she wondered if she could feel a trickle of blood, but she doubted that she'd cut herself that badly. Her stomach churned.
Unclenching her hands, she looked back up at the two — she couldn't call them madmen, they were speaking far too reasonably for that. Also, they were in charge, and Kohinoor for one could have called for this deployment on his own.
She couldn't shout at them. She couldn't swear, the way she really wanted to right now, for threatening to destroy the most interesting thing she'd probably see in her life, no matter how long that life was. And for threatening to run out on the responsibility of doing so. Part of her told her that that wasn't fair, that they didn't have backups — but admitting that would have made them slightly less at fault, and so she ignored it.
"You can't seriously be considering this. Killing her, when she's a demonstration of science even beyond our own? Why? Because of paranoia? You do realize…" She took a moment to collect her thoughts, but only a moment. Something they'd understand. "You do realize that any society which could make one of her, could just as easily make more? Even if we did kill her, it wouldn't remove the threat. It'd just prevent us from studying it."
'...And it'd kill what is likely many billions of innocent people, if not trillions,' she thought, pointlessly and slightly too late.
Kohinoor nodded. "That is a fair argument, and one of the reasons I voted against. However. You were born in the Apex foundation's imperial territory, correct?"
"So what if I was?"
She tried not to glare. She hadn't taken him for a bigot, and she wanted to think that he wasn't.
Kohinoor softly sighed. "Enza… that is not what I meant. You are one of the smartest people here, and for my part, it matters little why that is the case. It's a question of history and experience. Will you let me speak?"
She shifted uneasily, but eventually nodded. She knew that look. Kohinoor finally took a chair for himself and settled in, taking a didactic tone.
"You should know the history of the Apex foundation, but what I'm referring to is their split with the original Chozo empire, three thousand years ago in imperial time. When the Ascendants left known space behind, they avoided all but the initial conflicts with Phazon. Their subsequent fragmentation is presumably why they didn't have the same problems, given their attitudes."
He shrugged at her befuddled expression. "I also make it a point to learn the backgrounds of everyone in my general staff. Regardless, it means you missed one of our… less well-advised attempts at fighting back. Have you heard why the first Chozo empire collapsed?"
"Social and technological stasis, combined with the stress of the war. The empire was growing too old—"
Kohinoor waved a claw dismissively. "Rubbish. As if a war in which there is one engagement on average every century could break a society, no matter how large some of those engagements might get. Practically no-one ever died. Social inertia… certainly, there may have been some of that, but that merely meant more offshoots, many of which are represented here. The Ascendants were atypical, yes, but only for initially failing. At no time did the Chozo population ever fall… except for a few years while we were making that mistake, which broke the old empire entirely. Would you care to guess what it was?"
She winced, but only internally. Enza wasn't the type to complain about truth. It was just… they were her dumb-as-fuck ancestors to complain about, not his, and Kohinoor bringing up that sort of ancient history smarted.
That was entirely besides the point, though. This was a lecture, and she was only three years out of her schooling. She knew not to get sidetracked.
So, his question. A mistake that the Ascendants, who focused on mental enhancement, might potentially have made… one which might have helped in the war… and which was somehow relevant here. There were only a couple of options. It being the old Chozo who'd done it narrowed things down further, and mentioning it in this particular situation…
"It isn't a very well-kept secret. The diplomats try to keep everyone else from repeating it, without ever explaining more than they have to; needless to say, that means everyone but some of our cousins know precisely what's what. In fact, groups like yours may be the only ones that believe what you just said."
"Artificial intelligence…" She narrowed her eyes, disturbed by the implications.
"The so-called 'Mother Brain' project, yes. It was intended to wipe out Phazon, a task at which it would have no doubt excelled. It certainly did a good enough job with everyone else." Kohinoor shrugged, and if he felt anything but cold detachment about that, she couldn't tell. "It's why that entire area of space remains off-limits. The thing itself is dead, we hope, but that doesn't hold for all of its creations."
"But that's…"
"And no-one has any idea why it stopped," Shu-Qi interjected. "Every wormhole link was cut simultaneously. Telescopes eventually revealed that some of the border systems had gone nova, but we don't know if that is universal — we don't actually know if it's dead, or why, and sending ships could be a fatal mistake; we'd be linking into its deep future. Maybe the program included a timed kill-switch that it somehow missed. We'll probably never know."
Not even Shu-Qi seemed bothered by the thought. 'Of course, they've likely known this all their lives—'
'That doesn't mean this one is dangerous. It doesn't mean talking with her, getting her perspective, that the benefits don't outweigh the risks.'
There was no point in saying that; they already believed it. So she didn't say anything at all, and they seemed content with her acquiescence.
"And Enza. Things may have worked out for the Ascendants in the end, but—"
She glared at Kohinoor, as if daring him to continue that sentence, and flared her wings slightly — a blatant reminder that hers worked. She already knew the historical costs, dammit, and the Apex weren't the Ascendants.
"—be careful."
Paranoid bastards. She wasn't an expert in AI theory, but there was a massive difference between a multi-system military AI and a single, alien girl-child who happened to be a gynoid. The more she looked at Hana, the harder it became to see her as anything but precisely what she appeared.
Nothing else of importance happened that night. They didn't make any decisions, and neither did Enza, who spent most of it trying to sort out her thoughts.
She largely failed in the attempt, taking to the corridors soon after.
————————————
Enza had always had a habit of walking while she thought, and that hadn't changed when she left home on Shu-Qi's invitation. If she hadn't been walking, she'd be fidgeting; and if not that, then running three simultaneous thought-experiments on her implants. Walking served to center her.
'Though really, this place is pointlessly huge. I could probably walk for days without seeing anyone.'
She suppressed a pang of loneliness at the thought, then found that she'd drawn her wings too tightly around herself, and gave the walls a glare. Too far away to be protective, too close not to feel enclosed. And she was an adult. Forty years old, not supposed to feel—homesick. Even if this was her first serious job, and her first time away from friends.
She missed her friends.
Maybe, if she ran fast enough, she could stop thinking.
'And I wonder if Hana feels the same way…'
And that—her tail-feathers flared—that wasn't something she could suggest. Her loneliness was abnormal, even diseased, for a Chozo. But as Kohinoor had so bluntly pointed out, she wasn't exactly a Chozo, she was of the Apex, and she liked being social, dammit. That wasn't some mistake. Yet if she told the others that they were misreading Hana…
Her clawed feet echoed down the corridors, their tapping speeding up as she tried to outrun her own thoughts.
Shu-Qi wouldn't understand "loneliness" if it hit him between the eyes. Kohinoor had no comprehension of social bonds that weren't regimented, military or contractual; she wasn't sure he'd had a single friend his entire, centuries-long life. Neither recognized the tells she tried so hard to hide, and neither recognised the clinginess that Hana exhibited more strongly every day for what it was. The child was desperate for friends, for interaction—for anything but what she was getting. She'd give Shu-Qi his due, he was treating her like a Chozo child rather than what he suspected she might be, but that just meant he was definitely wrong.
She slowed. Stopped.
No-one here understood what they were seeing, except for her. If she befriended the girl—and she could, it would hardly take anything beyond showing up. She could help her, for whatever was left of the young girl's life, and at the same time Hana could massively help her career. Wasn't that why she was here?
But it left a bitter feeling in her mouth, like she'd be betraying the girl. That was silly, she told herself. This would help both of them—Hana didn't need to know why she was there. And she knew why she was feeling this way, when none of the others would have; genes that had been carefully transcribed a millennia ago.
Of course, simply knowing why the feeling was there, didn't at all change its impact.
She chewed the side of her mouth, but in the end she returned to her room. She had some serious planning to do.
————————————
Hana slouched over her table in her room, staring numbly at the screen on the opposite wall.
A cartoon was playing, one which she might have enjoyed more a year or two ago, but now found herself bored to death by.
It was difficult to get most of the jokes, being from a species with a totally different culture than hers. She'd tried to amuse herself by guessing at what history could lead to those jokes, but it didn't really work. Nowhere near enough data. Back when she was a dumber, littler kid she might have laughed even if she didn't get it.
She wasn't so little nor dumb now. She insisted, even though she kind of wished that she was.
With a yawn Hana scratched her head, causing a tuft of hair to fall in front of her face. She looked past it, ignoring it for a while, until her eyes crossed together.
"… Fwoo."
Hana blew the hair, making it flip up. It fell right back down. She frowned, and blew harder. It was a fruitless effort, she knew, but…
"Fwoooooooooo."
She kept blowing, lifting her hair up and floating it in front of her face. She blew as long as she could, which was a pretty long time, managing to find some entertainment in this trivial task.
What was this feeling?
Boredom, yes. She wasn't unfamiliar with the concept. One of Mom's favorite activities was to sit down next to her, read a book, and wait for her to get bored enough that she'd think of a game. Then Mom would join in, or Cocona or Parsnip would, and the whole day would probably pass in an instant.
She was bored, but that wasn't right. This was something else. It felt worse. She wanted Shu-Qi to be here, so he could tell her what they would do, and they'd do it, but that wasn't quite right either. It didn't match up with the gnawing in her stomach.
She wanted him to be here, period.
…also, once he was, she wanted him to not be so boring. With a sour look on her face, Hana decided that was probably too much to ask.
Sour. Hmm. A sour fruit would be a great name for her grandpa bird. What was the most sour fruit she knew? Limes? His feathers were green. There were things way more sour than limes though. What about tamarinds? Those were super sour, and also looked like lumpy brown beans. Mr. Shu-Qi was definitely a big, old lump. The best part? There was no way Shu-Qi would know what she was calling him. Tamarinds only existed in really old stories.
"Tama-jii it is," Hana said, grinning mischievously.
Hana spent a moment giggling at this evil little thing she'd done, before she slumped over the table again and let out a tired huff. That had managed to entertain her for all of no time at all, and now she was back to staring at a cartoon she didn't understand. She'd missed a bunch of it, between blowing at her hair and trying to think up funny names for her grandpa. Now there was no hope she could follow the story.
She looked at the screen just in time to see the main character— a cartoonish red lizard she presumed was a mischievous thief— take out some kind of blue reed and set it on fire before waving it around with a smirk as he sauntered off from the scene of his crime.
Hana frowned, and decided this was dumb. She swiped her finger on the touch panel in the tabletop and slapped the off icon that popped up, finally fed up with cartoons. She looked around at the wide assortment of books and toys available, and realized she'd already read or gotten bored with all of them.
Everything her caretaker had given her to do on her own, she'd already done. They didn't give her access to much on the computers besides literature and fiction texts. It was either those, or educational materials. Though, now that she was thinking about it, no science books.
She wondered why that would be. True, she hadn't asked for any. Though, back home that was something she never had to think to ask for. So she hadn't thought to. Not until now, anyway.
"That's… I guess it isn't weird."
Once again Hana moped that she hadn't grown a single rotten centimeter in two years. She was really getting tired of being so tiny. They wouldn't treat her like such a little baby if she were taller. Well she wouldn't have it! She was growing up… kind of. She wanted to be treated like she was! As soon as he showed up, she was going to demand he treat her like a big girl and stop being so coddling.
*whoosh*
Hana looked left and saw Shu-Qi come in the door, carrying a stack of books. She got a glimpse of their spines, quickly reading their titles in hopes at least one was a science or engineering book, and felt her hopes dashed instantly. The heat of a sudden flash of anger filled her face and Hana jumped up from her seat, hackles raised. She pointed at him, took in a huge breath, and then…
He turned to the side to see where he was going and locked eyes with her. He gave her a blank look for a moment, saw her pointing finger, and raised a questioning brow.
She felt cold, all of a sudden. She felt like someone was gripping the inside of her chest, squeezing her heart. Her arm was shaking slightly, anticipating an oncoming rush of panic.
No, she couldn't just say nothing.
"Hana? What are you doing?"
… Maybe she could just be nice and ask normally, though.
"Can I have some science books?"
Shu-Qi froze in place, staring at her for a few seconds before one of the books at the top of his stack began to slide off and he scrambled to stop it. Hana, scared he was going to fall over, rushed to help him. This felt sadly familiar to her.
Daddy acted like he hadn't been hurt but his arm wasn't angled right and he must have thought she didn't see it but she did and—
No, no, she was better about that stuff now. She carefully helped Tama-jii steady himself and deftly caught the one book that managed to slip from his grasp. No broken bones, nothing set on fire, not even a bruise. Crisis averted.
"Ah… thank you," he said, momentarily looking a bit confused, or so Hana thought. The old codger finally gathered himself and set the books on the table before turning to Hana.
"I'm sorry, you asked for something?"
Hana tried not to frown, or groan. She knew he heard her before. Swallowing the lump in her throat she wished would just go away already, she tried again.
"I want to learn something different. Can I please try some science or engineering?"
"Um…" Shu-Qi looked very uncertain. Hana needed to make her case before he flatly denied her.
"I get it. I'm still really small and you think I'm too young to know that stuff, but my mom used to let me learn whatever I wanted! I can do it, really!" She gulped. "And I'm older than I look, too! I just… I grow slowly!"
It was better than saying "not at all", right? There was still hope, right? She couldn't possibly be worse off than mom, right?
She suppressed a frown at the thought. The children she'd met had mistaken Mom for being her sister more than enough times already, she didn't want the same thing or worse to happen to her.
"In that case…" Shu-Qi hummed. "Perhaps if you tell me more about yourself. You've made reference to your family before. How exactly did you come to be here? What was your life like, prior to the crash?"
Hana opened her mouth, then paused. She'd felt a little hopeful when he asked about her family, but—
She gave him a long, blank look. She remembered her birthday party, going to sleep the night after, and then… and then her head got real foggy, until a few days after she'd woken up in the jungle. She wasn't even sure whether or not she actually remembered the party.
"I crashed?"
What did he mean, crashed?
