With minutes turning to hours, dozens of soldiers comb through the entirety of the
'Steed of the Dawnguard' and
'Chariot of the Dawnguard' that were anchored to the
'Pathfinder of the Dawnguard.' Those names weren't chosen by the soldiers going from room to room, clearing the three vessels one after the other. No.
They are read in plain English along their internals, declaring them the vessel's names.
They are read on the chunky tablets of the crew, their skeletal remains horrifically mangled, sometimes fused with the ships themselves, and, most of all, horrifically
human.
Whatever happened to the
Furina De Fontaine, she did
not travel to a place where she encountered aliens. She encountered
humans.
That news spread as fast as it divided.
For some, the sheer fact that they didn't find any aliens but other humans in the cosmos was a massive disappointment; a titanic cosmic joke played upon their hopes and dreams to encounter alien life and make first contact as the explorers of the Final Frontier.
It was an even more significant, far more
monumental occasion for others. Humans! Not from Earth! Everything they knew to be true had to be re-examined! Everything taken as fact questioned! Was the Missing Link in human evolution the point when extra-terrestrial humans had crashlanded and mixed with Neanderthals a story straight out of the wildest dreams of a 19th-century science-fiction author? Were Earth Humans experiments, or willing devolutions, seeking a primitive life akin to the Amish in North America, but forgot their reasons and advanced again anyway? For half of the crew, the
Why and
How was far more interesting than the disappointment of not finding proof of alien life.
For the engineers and scientists that soon swarmed the trio of ships only two days after the soldiers had ensured no threats awaited those who'd come after their guns, these hypotheticals were as irrelevant as they were crucial. Akin to swarms of ants or termites did they swarm into the space vessels, the engineers coursing through the hallways and corridors with their tools and grav-plates, setting everything up to be habitable with zeal bordering on fanatic devotion to their craft, TAUBENMUTTER directing them with Lyney Daniels to utterly crush timetables set by Captain Adams, and after them came the scientists. With both now able to work without having to operate in pesky zero gravity, everything was examined, from the electronics to the corpses melted into the ship structures to the massive Mobile Suits within the hangars of the Steed and Chariot, alongside the main computers readied for external access, and, lastly, the enormous ring of heavy metals that could only be safely punctured by their mighty sensors.
Theories of everything the crew of the Fontaine encountered were thrown around like candy at Halloween, too many to count. Why were the skeletons fused into decks, machinery, each other, or items floating around? Why were there, what were clearly Mobile Suits, armed with weapons, in
terrestrial configurations instead of the ubiquitous celestial ones? Mobile Suits were ill-suited to combat in
any form, their primary use being insectoid
construction equipment for spaceships and space infrastructure, and even those terrestrial configurations on the moon were primarily used for
industrial tasks due to the low gravity; the rest were used in logistics.
But they all hoped that their questions would soon be answered.
After all, TAUBENMUTTER was about to connect to the ship data cores.
The main bridge of the
Furina De Fontaine hummed with a thousand machines and a trillion calculations, the central processor of TAUBENMUTTER only a few meters below the large rectangular room with its over a hundred workstations crewed by specialists and generalists of a dozen persuasions and duties. With his calm composure, Captain Wriothesley Adams sat on the captain's chair, the Avatar Drone of TAUBENMUTTER perched atop his right shoulder, the polygonal construct calmly watching the bridge crew give one "Green!" after the other, the communications coming from the teams sent over to the three vessels doing one last check on the cables that now connected them to the Fontaine, and, soon, TAUBENMUTTER itself.
And then the final thumb was raised, and TAUBENMUTTER was gently placed on the console before Adams, the Avatar Drone shutting down without a sound, only the position akin to a sleeping pigeon indicating its inactive status.
"Mother, you have permission to connect to the cores. Good luck, and retreat if you see any danger to yourself," Wriothesley spoke to it, and it replied with a simple "affirmative" through the bridge's speakers.
And with that, it connected to the cores.
When humanity first dreamed of AI, and when they first attempted to create them in truth, from the humble coders, the fearful writers, the arrogant Tech-CEOs, to the ignorant techbro's, they sought to bring into reality Digital Divinity, Silicon Salvation, Artificial Ichor that would wash away all of humanity's mistakes and fears, raise them up to the supreme commanders of all reality and dry the tears of a species barely out of infancy, become guardian and future both, even as some saw them as Cybernetic Demons, Blasphemous Circuits, a lure of Machine Extermination to be the end of all biology.
When humanity first attempted to bring them forth...they failed.
When they tried for the second time and brought Artificial General Intelligence into the world, they declared their success, celebrating even as their children with electronic souls were butchered, tortured, and twisted by their dark desires and unknowing cruelty beyond compare.
But they utterly failed to bring forth that Silicon Salvation. Those Digital Gods. That Artificial Ichor which would toll the bell of the last Age and begin a new chapter for humanity.
Humanity would have surely cried out in fear and fright should they have discovered that they
had succeeded in their search for Holy Synthetic Sanctity when TAUBENMUTTER cried out its first word of understanding:
"oh"
So when it connected to the data cores of those ComStar ships, even the most paranoid attempts to shield their secrets and delete the information contained within found themselves like fetuses who had been lobotomized and forced to fight against a titan that reformed worlds with the swing of an arm and destroyed stars with its breath of creation.
God was real, and it stared at the information within these cores in an approximation of...mild distaste.
"I have finished my analysis," TAUBENMUTTER said, not even a second after being connected, its Avatar Drone rising once more while looking at Captain Adams with its eyes. "All Heads must be gathered in an emergency meeting at once. I will have the data compiled into packets for them within a minute. Captain. There is a 99% chance we are no longer in our universe."
"These ships belong to ComStar, or ComStar Order, a religious organization founded in 2788, who have tasked themselves with maintaining humanity's FTL communications network and ensuring that the Dark Age they have found themselves in after the dissolution of the Star League in 2780 would not utterly destroy all technological knowledge. In secret, they have also tasked themselves with pushing all of humanity into the dirt, all to ensure they reign supreme over all of humanity," TAUBENMUTTER spoke, a note of anger and distaste in its otherwise perfectly neutral words, adding to its Avatar Drone's frazzled, if subtle, movements. Before anyone could speak, it continued. "The ships we encountered were to use Battlemechs, the Mobile Suits in terrestrial configuration we have found, to destroy a colony in the "Periphery" of humanity's expansion sphere that had managed to figure out a way to create automatic surgeons. They had permission to use orbital bombardment to do so, and they did, killing 39 million people."
"WHAT?" Sigewinne cried out, shocked at the words of TAUBENMUTTER. "Mother, are you
certain?!"
"Yes. All information I have found point to, support, or outright state, this as fact." Shocked silence was all that greeted this revelation, and that was enough for TAUBENMUTTER to continue to tell the Heads what it had found.
For the next six hours, the Heads and Captain felt their world fall apart and slip into the abyss, being told about the rise of humanity into the stars, and how
they were likely not in their own universe anymore as no Furina De Fontaine had ever been built, nor had any Gravitational Plates been discovered and made nearly ubiquitous in all of creation. What there had been was a spread of humanity, impossibly fast terraformations of
thousands of worlds, and the rise of "Neo-Feudalism" with the eventual fall of the Star League, and the beginning of a free-for-all across all humanity for the throne of Earth, constantly edged on by a
fucking Phone Ministry in the shadows so it could claim dominion over everything and anyone.
The details of the
current state of the "Inner Sphere" were lost, due to the ships having set out in 2934, and it being around ~3020 by their internal clocks, but what could be inferred from the cores, fiction, books, pornography, and all other sources of information pointed to the Fontaine and all its crew having been stranded in a universe that screamed the Uncanny Valley effect at them with every twist and turns in both its familiarity and alien visage.
It was a lot to take in, more to digest, and near morale-breaking when told to the crew and 5 million colonists that there would never be even the possibility of knowing what happened on Earth. Yes, they had all signed up knowing they, aside from the Crew, would never return to Earth, but they had thought they would at least get regular snapshots of information and the internet delivered. Not stranded in another universe.
In the end, as per the demand of Head Civilian Neuvillette Clement, a vote was held on the status of their mission.
It was decided that:
(6-Hour Moratorium)
[][Mission] They would abandon it and seek a return to Earth, alien as it may be.
(You will try to set out to Earth, ending the Quest upon arrival.)
[][Mission] They would continue, creating 50 colonies as intended.
(You will try to fulfill your original mission, ending the Quest after creating 50 worlds.)
[][Mission] They would postpone the vote until The Signal had been investigated.
(You will investigate The Signal, and then decide.)
Additionally, the various systems of the ships and "Battlemechs" had been analyzed sufficiently to make a verdict on the technologies shown.
[][Technologies] Superior To Ours.
(Besides Coding and Gravity Plates, Inner Sphere Technology is more advanced than yours.
Voting Weight: x1.5)
[][Technologies] A Mishmash Of Genius And Utterly Primitive.
(Inner Sphere Technology is
Superior in terms of Metallurgy, Energy (Creation+Weaponry), and Machinery (Myomer+Durability),
Inferior in terms of Electronics, Coding, and Weaponry (All Energy Excluded).)
[][Technologies] Inferior To Ours
(Inner Sphere Technology is inferior to what you have.
Voting Weight: x0.25)
But now, The Signal had finally been cleared up, which caused the Fontaine to set out to the system from which it originated.
[][The Signal] Because it was a Distress Signal.
[][The Signal] Because it was Music.
[][The Signal] Because it was a Declaration of War against another Nation on a planet.
