Vega and Kalilah reached the three – no, four – of you mere moments after Animus offered you everything that this mission had set out to discover. Half a year of searching, flitting across enemy territory in the most dangerous covert mission in human history. Only to find that the answer had never been in Shiplord hands.
Oh, the journey had taught you things, found you truly unexpected opportunities – perhaps even allies. But the true cause? That was here, and the promise of Animus embodied it. You'd been turning to Iris, intending to ask what your daughter had spent the time you'd been indisposed discussing. Only to be interrupted.
Kalilah, with her history as your former bodyguard, arrived quietly only through the swift action of Iris, or perhaps Animus, in opening the doors to the lab. One moment you were alone, the next the woman who rightly held the title of the most personally dangerous human being in existence was simply there. Her Aegis was fully extended, itself a rare example of true armour, segmented plates of silver metal over a tight blazer of ruby cloth. She blazed with the subtle interplay of a barely-veiled Focus, concentrated around the head of her spear.
And yet for all that, her expression was entirely calm. You could feel the worry beneath that mask, see it in how she held herself. It just wasn't controlling her. She was ready to destroy any potential threat to you, or to the mission, but those expressions of her Focus weren't why she'd come. She'd come to protect.
Confirmation came as she slumped slightly on seeing you all intact, the lambent unlight of her Focus dimming somewhat as she recognised a situation that didn't appear to call for it. Then she turned to Vega, the unsaid question easy to hear: were the three of you actually okay?
Pure, white light pulsed in the Harmonial's eyes as she examined you, then surged out from a bracelet fastened tight to her left wrist, enveloping you, Iris and Lea for a traceless instant. You felt the power of Vega's Focus brushing against your own, searching for any signs of damage or less obvious malice. Evidently she, too, found nothing. The light receded, and the tension in the Harmonial's pose, tension you'd somehow never realised was there, flowed out of her.
The flaring radiance behind her eyes faded, shuttering to a gentle spark as she turned to Kalilah and spoke. "They're fine. All three of them. Lea and Mandy are exhausted, but it's natural fatigue. What did you two do?"
A fair question, given how Miracles just weren't meant to do this. The last time you'd felt this drained from one had been more than two decades ago, in the aftermath of the Shiplord subnet's assassination attempt. Saying as much didn't help put things together, though.
"Then maybe..." Iris hesitated, working it through. "Maybe it's different because of what happened here, mom. You weren't just healing - you and Lea created something, realised a life. And Animus, they're not like any being you've helped before."
You blinked, confusion spiralling across the connections between you and the other Unisonbound. Not from you alone, either. Animus, however, seemed to seize on the statement.
"Your daughter is correct," they said, the matrix of gentle lines on display pulsing in time to the words. "When the Consolat created me, my intelligence and self was founded on a set of universal principles that your people are still only beginning to grasp.
"I was specifically designed to be capable of sentience without the aid of a supporting soul-structure," Animus continued. "From what Iris has told me, you have never encountered a form of life that lacks this until today, barring this system's Guardian intelligence. They, however, remain slumbering. In awakening myself, you had to restore and repair significant parts of my core matrix, my 'self', for lack of better terms."
You nodded slowly. "It was something I'd never done before."
"But why should that matter?" Kalilah asked, perhaps a touch harshly. "You've done things that you've never done before lots of times, Amanda."
Given that context, it was again a fair question. This time, though, you thought you had an answer.
"It's something that none of us, no human, has ever done," you ventured, glancing at the holo display in search of confirmation. None came, but neither did denial. "Mary said so, remember. Our research into this field withered with the discovery of the Second Secret. And despite appearances, Iris isn't the same."
"But Skylark-" Vega began to protest. She didn't get far, realisation kindling abruptly behind her eyes. "It was built by humanity. Everything on Mars was. Here…"
"Lea and I had to do something new."
"A difficulty that would certainly align with my data on the subject," Animus said, dropping that bombshell into conversation with precisely zero apparent care. "Still, perhaps not the most important matter for this instant."
The web of precise light dipped towards Kalilah and Vega. "I apologise for any concern my initialization may have caused," they said. "You may call me Animus."
"Kalilah," your once-bodyguard said, with surprising grace. The energy around her weapon had continued to dull, now faded entirely to nothing. "And it's not the first time that Amanda has done something utterly reckless without telling us first. I can't imagine it will be the last."
You, quite wisely in your opinion, kept your lips firmly sealed.
"She's not the only person to have done that," Vega pointed out, smiling. Concern, it seemed, had vanished quickly. She cocked her head at Animus' holo, and you saw a spark of purest white kindle in her eyes. Just for a moment, but that was likely enough.
"Oh my," the Harmonial murmured softly. The more deliberate light in her eyes cleared away, being replaced by simple awe. "I'm very glad to meet you, Animus. Though I'd offer my sympathies for all the questions you're soon to suffer."
"They've already handled several thousand of mine," Iris chirped, her lips curled into an entirely too smug grin. It softened as she continued, though. "Wanted to get a head start for Mom, once she's allowed to do research again."
"Which is itself quite the curiosity," Animus noted. "Your mother's current issues, rather. Not the upcoming attempt to drown me in queries. That, I expected the moment I chose to grant your species, or at least your current mission, an Inheritor designation."
"And what does that entail?" Vega asked. She was already making guesses, but that was just the way the woman was.
"Full access to what knowledge I possess, including details of my core architecture, general purpose, and capabilities." Vega blinked, lips opening into a perfect 'o' of shock. Kalilah jerked in place. Animus, meanwhile, just kept talking.
"Key among this knowledge at this time would be details on how to locate the control plane that I was created to interface with. I find myself at present unable to connect to it with my Telaxion, which is a disturbing state of affairs given the clear presence of a successful deployment of the system infrastructure my creators built me to administer.
"Indeed, there are several points that your sapling intelligence," here Animus dipped towards Iris, who simply chuckled at the term, "has described to me so far that make the swift application of system updates a necessity."
Vega looked at you, the shock on her face only slowly subsiding, and sighed heavily. "Mandy?"
"Yes?" you replied. You were still exhausted, but you could feel the beginnings of warmth within your soul as your Focus started to properly recover.
"Jane may have an aneurysm and Mary is going to affectionately despise you until we can fix whatever's going on with her soul," the Harmonial, member of your Heartcircle, and dear friend said. "But keep doing stupid shit like this. It's clearly working."
You stared at her for a long moment, trying to figure out if the Harmonial was joking. Then you sighed, and nodded. "I'll…take it under advisement. Though I'll need to talk with Sidra, too."
A very faint twitch of attention from your Unison was the only reply to that. You really hoped that they'd be okay.
"You can do that later," Kalilah told you, perhaps a touch severely. Not that you could really blame her for that. "For now, we get you home. Though that does raise a question. Animus, what are your plans?"
"Given the presence in orbit, I could not easily conceal the movement of my entire self. And indeed, I am not sure I wish to leave this place," the Consolat AI said, bobbing the lines of its holo towards Iris. "But your sapling daughter has told me that you have a solution."
"Yes, a solution," there was a tiny pause, a hitch in her flow of words, as Iris replied. If you hadn't known her so well, you'd have missed it. The term sapling was quite specific, so why was Animus using it?
"Animus only has limited access to the planetary network, thanks to whatever happened to the AI development node," your daughter explained. Her words were level again. "But there's enough of that infrastructure there for them to connect to the Consolat Archive. From there, they can link to the Magi's systems."
"How good would that link be?" Vega asked, glancing between the two AIs. "I'm sure I could do something to boost the bandwidth, if-"
"The connection profile you've built is rudimentary by the standards of our own infrastructure," Animus replied. If not for their tone, it could have been insulting. "But it is entirely functional for the purposes of a real-time link. And I, I must confess, would be fascinated to observe any attempts on your part to repair the copy you've extracted.
"From my own understanding, that should hardly be possible." The holo bobbed again, twisting in a way that somehow felt amused. "But that would also have been my understanding of any attempt to restore my core matrix."
"And this would be secure?" Kalilah, always the security minded. But then that had commonly been her role. "Not something the Shiplords in orbit could detect?"
Animus laughed. It was a surprisingly natural sound. "The Shiplords were dear friends to my creators, and the only race with whom we shared our worlds. If I'd been completed as planned, they'd have ultimately received everything we found here. But I wasn't, and they didn't."
Kalilah stared at the holo, utterly deadpan. "So?"
"It will be secure."
"Good enough for me, then," your once and likely current bodyguard said shortly. "Mandy, Lea? Let's get you home. Animus, do you need anymore time, or has everything you need been done whilst we were talking?"
"Iris has given me everything I need," the AI replied. "You will be able to contact me securely by the time you return to your outpost. And I promise not to do anything untoward with that access."
"Thank you."
"Lea, Mandy?" Vega asked, ducking in close. "You both good to fly?" Implicit in the question was a gentle offer of support. You glanced at Lea, to see her rubbing at her eyes. Not that you could judge, with one hand firmly supporting your chin to stop your head from falling forward.
You took a moment, just to assess yourself. Tired, exhausted even, yes. But you could feel the sputtering emptiness that had consumed your being fading away even now, the steady thrum of your soul returning to warm your body and strengthen everything connected to it.
"I think we'll be okay," you said, finally. Vega looked a question at Lea: were you right?
"What she said," Lea sighed. "Doubt I'll be up for much after we get there, but we can do it. Unfair how much faster you're recovering though, Mandy."
Perhaps there was a touch of sourness in that comment, but could you really judge? She was right, what you were feeling from her was much weaker than your own. And Vega's shuttered stare after looking between you again, that tiny spark shimmering in her eyes? That only proved it.
"Alright," the Harmonial said, clearly unhappy. "I'm not exactly thrilled by this, but we've not got much choice. With you this drained, I'll need to focus on shielding us from orbital scans. Though I suppose we'll be moving slower, so I won't have to smooth out excitation that could have set the atmosphere on fire."
She stared at Kalilah, who had the good grace to look at least a little chastened. Not apologetic, though. Hardly surprising to any of you, though. Indeed, what you could feel from Vega across the Heartcircle link seemed less annoyed and more in the manner of one going through the motions to feel better.
Further evidence of that was that she only held the stare for a few seconds, before turning to the floating representation of Animus. A life so newly born, and yet begun in a time beyond the grasp of human existence, let alone history.
"We'll talk soon," she said, the words a promise.
"I look forward to it."
Mary had, predictably, done exactly as Vega had predicted. There at your side from the moment you landed, her green eyes shadowed with concern as she scanned and fussed over the state of your soul. It was actually rather nice, in a way, and a state of affairs that would no doubt take several days to pass.
You'd been drained a second time by the flight, but enough of your strength had returned across it that you'd been able to demand and actually get into the emergency meeting called in response to recent developments. And to your actions. The initial concerns took several minutes to pass, to which you made many apologies, but no promises.
Vega's words, as irreverent as they'd been, stayed with you there. And eventually, the first wave of that storm passed. Leaving the room clear for what were, in the end, far more weighty matters.
"I understand all of your concerns," you said then. "I really do. I know how I endangered this mission, how my actions could have brought it to a disastrous end. But this is a risky business, and just being here was taking a chance. If we want to find a solution, to find the solution that the Uninvolved said might be here? We have to take those chances sometimes. Like we did with Kicha, with Entara. Even those Shiplord teenagers."
The room around you tried to compress their ire on you in reply, but it was a silent thing, and paltry against the truth. "I know what I did here was, in many ways, an ever larger risk. To wield the full power of Practice here, when we still don't properly understand how it could interface with the echoes left behind.
"It's my job to consider that," you continued, sweeping the room with tired, defiant eyes. "But it's also my job to take that risk, when I believe it's required. Here, I did. And what Lea and I did, it changes everything. Iris?"
Your daughter simply nodded, and spoke a single word. "Animus."
If Sidra had been more awake, you'd no doubt have felt the connection being made. As it was, you only saw the results. The conference doom at the top of the Magi seed dimmed, and then the same shifting angles of colour flowered in the air at the centre of the table.
"My greetings to you all, Inheritors," the Consolat AI said. "Are you prepared to begin the work?"
"To begin what work?" Jane not-quite-demanded. She wasn't angry, or even frustrated anymore. Though there'd been a brief moment of utter consternation at Vega, about how she'd told you to do things like this again, your FSN second in command was firmly in control of her emotions.
It was simply the question that needed asked. And she'd said it first.
"I promised your leader an answer to the question that brought you here," Animus replied calmly. Out of the corner of your eye, you saw Mary staring up at the visual representation in wonder. And with a rapt, impossible yearning for answers she couldn't ask for. At least not yet. "I have spent the time offered by your need to discuss recent events considering the best possible routes to that goal."
Jane's eyes narrowed. "And we should simply trust those routes?"
"I believe it would be best," Animus said. Their patterns moved, this time through one that made you think of a shrug. "Please understand that I have no intention to harm you. If I had, I could have contacted the Midnight Dreaming with relative ease. Or simply raised one of the many activation alarms for the Guardian AI my creators placed in this system.
"I understand that trusting my intentions may be difficult for you, but please. I want to help." The AI sounded almost pleading. "I want to be able to do what I was made for. And I'm not sure those you know as Shiplords could help me do that. I need people like my creators, and as separated as you are from the Consolat in time and space, you are like them.
"All I'm asking is that you listen."
You raised a weary hand, stopping Jane short of another question. "Iris? Do you believe Animus?"
"I do."
"Vega, is my daughter still herself?"
"She is."
"Then I believe them as well," you said, staring up at the screen. Jane looked far more harried than she ever had, but she saw the steel in your eyes staring back at her. And recognised that, at the end of the day, you were the expedition lead. She subsided.
You looked back to Animus' representation in the room. "What would you suggest? Please remember that we have at least one major commitment in this time period." You squeezed Mary's hand. "One that we can't shift."
"Of course," Animus bobbed a nod to you. "My suggestions here are more ones of general focus, broader actions that I believe could be of the highest immediate benefit to us all. I am sure you will have your own ideas, too, and I understand that you may not be able to turn all of your attention to my needs. I simply ask that they're considered."
"They will be," you promised. In Animus, there lay the possibility of a victory, one stripped of the horror of a truly galactic-scale conflict. You couldn't ignore that.
"Very well." The hologram brightened, and several files unfolded around it. "First, I am aware of the header codes of certain files that should be present in what you know as the Consolat Archive. I've yet to confirm their integrity, but they contain command codes and other administrative data that should significantly ease the difficulty of your mission here."
"I'm sorry," you said, into a suddenly deafening silence. "Command codes?"
"Of course," Animus replied. "And administrative data, to help you access the local datasphere more securely. Work might be required to restore the files if they were damaged by the emergency data dump, but at least some of them should still be there."
"And these would let us do…what, exactly?"
"You'd be limited by your status as Inheritor," the AI conceded. "But it should be more than sufficient to access core systems at my base location, the Resonant Spire, and the Guardian AI node that was placed on Satellite Four-Fifteen."
More silence.
"I am going to hate the next forty-eight hours so much," Mary growled at you. "You have no idea."
"The Resonant Spire?" Vega asked, leaving you for the moment to contend with your truly frustrated best friend. "Would that be the structure in the city nearby? The one at the centre of what the Consolat did?"
"Yes," Animus replied. "It was a critical piece of infrastructure in their work to create the Secrets, and I believe will be equally necessary to restoring my connection to the system. I would, however, advise caution before entering. There are details on the Spire in the Archive; I can provide header files. Any of your Potentials who intend to use it should read them in depth first."
"So noted," you said, having somehow placated Mary now. "Your base location, that would have details on your core infrastructure and Telaxion, correct?"
The Consolat AI dipped again. No doubt mimicking human cues, but that was okay. "That's correct. You'll need to understand at least the basics of it at some level to help restore my connection. I believe certain of the lessons my creators learned in building intelligences of my type could also be of interest to your daughter."
"You can say that again," Iris muttered. She was being better than Mary about hiding her eagerness, but she could also directly communicate with Animus. And far faster than any of the rest of you.
"I believe- ah," Animus paused. "This would be an example of sarcasm, yes?"
"Yes."
"I see. How curious." A pause, then the Consolat creation continued. "Before you ask, attempting to access the Guardian node would require more preparation than just acquiring the command codes. Even with me there to corroborate your story, its nature may make negotiation a challenge. A perfect solution would be a member of an allied race to stand beside you, but I'd consider the chances of that wildly unlikely."
"Difficult to manage, at least," you countered, thinking of Kicha. "We've made a few friends among the Shiplords. It would just be rather difficult to get either of them here."
"A task made even more difficult by the current state of affairs," Animus nodded again, considering. "I could access the functions of the local interstellar array without difficulty, but transmitting through it isn't something that I could hide from the Shiplord sentries. A last resort, perhaps. My files lead me to believe that a properly planned effort could succeed in convincing my senior that you are here to help."
"What else, then?"
"We've got some projects of our own outstanding," Mir, silent all this time, pointed out. "Maybe not as important as what Animus is offering, but that's not certain. And if we're going into the Spire, it might be better for us to have more than a single string to our bow when we try to connect to what happened there."
"A good point," Vega agreed. "And you had what you saw in the jump, Mandy. Once you're feeling better."
"And regardless of what you choose to pursue for now," Animus added, "I will be available to provide support and guidance on those subjects to which I have relevant data.
"Thank you, Animus," you said, cudgelling your tired brain into motion. Your focus would be a bit split as you recovered and saw to the Mending of Mary's soul, but after that? There was just so much to do. But you had to start somewhere.
What did you choose to focus on this turn? You may vote for as many options as you like. The top voted options will win, but I'm not going to put a number to it.
[X] Critical Mending - Mary's soul is still unrepaired, and as such she is unable to help your mission. You must resolve this as swiftly as you can. Only once that's done can you begin to understand what's causing it. [LOCKED]
[] Archive Headers - Follow the data offered by Animus, particularly within the Archive. Investigate those command code files, and the preparatory data on the Resonant Spire. If you have any time left after that, focus on the Animus technical data.
[] Guardian Code - Try to put together a workable plan to access the Guardian Node on Satellite Four-Fifteen. Command codes will be needed to get in, but you'll need a way to get it to listen before it flags you as intruders. Which, technically, you are.
[] Animus Data - Dedicate a solid section of your time to Animus' technical files. The nature of their existence, their Telaxion, and also how any of this might be able to help Iris evolve. Maybe you can get an answer on what they mean when they call your daughter a 'sapling'.
[] The Nature of Souls - You know what Tahkel said, when the Uninvolved told you that you'd changed. You've felt it too, just recently, in how you recovered so much faster than Lea. Go looking with your Heartcircle's help, and see what you find.
[] Visions and Order - There are two points of interest remaining among the research that was still ongoing when you woke Animus. Understanding the nature of the not!Practice suffusing this world, and finding out who, or what, is waiting at that starlit cathedral where Tahkel met you months before.
[] Practice Secrets - The nature of the Practice, or at least of the Secrets created by it, now lies within reach. Once Mary recovers, to this endeavour she will go. Help her, where you can.
