Rodney’s view out the front of the Dawn Treader switched in a moment from the familiar starfield of Earth to the most insane structure he had ever seen in his life. It was actually hard to comprehend what he was looking at. Like a galactic scale spider web made of colored glass, ribbons of multi-colored fibres - each the size of a shipping container in breadth and width but made tiny when viewed from this distance wove their way through an asteroid field binding the motes, rocks, and planetoids together. The first time Rodney had arrived at the Living Nexus, he had assumed the structure was somehow holding everything in place, but later learned the ingenious mechanism powered the installation. The gravitational movement of the bodies tugged on the threads generating enormous energy which in addition to the solar energy captured and repurposed fueled the complex.
The machines could not get enough energy. What ever their incomprehensible designs and aspirations were, they were the one place that always seemed to be in an energy crisis. The near infinite resources of a dozen planets worth of material was not enough. Rodney shivered to think all that they might be up to, but on some level it was obvious. The Living Nexus marked the frontier of the Galactic war, the boundary of the struggle for control.
The machines had saved humanity in fact. In some unseen and unknowable way, the artificial intelligence systems of a dozen species clashed here. The human AI were the ones that made the war visible. They brought it out into the light. And their cunning, ingenuity, and Rodney suspected the damage they’d done to other ai - provided a level of respect and acceptance many in the Galactic Union felt the young species did not deserve. Deserve or not, mankind had earned a spot at the table, if by nothing else than the insane capabilities of it’s greatest creation - living machine intelligence.
After every hard jump the ships system would reboot, recycle, and recalibrate itself. The process took a couple of minutes, and then the craft returned to his control. Rashad looked bleary eyed. Orbital translations, unlike translations deep in the gravity well of a planet could be more unsettling to the human nervous system. Something about the translation touched every electron so it was not that surprising that human neurons might be sensitive enough to detect the sudden and instantaneous change. But it usually didn’t take long to recovery.
“You have brought us to death,” Rashad whispered.
“Don’t you think you’re being a little dramatic Rashad?” Rodney asked.
Rashad looked up, irritation flashing across his face. “Do not call me that.”
“What? Rashad? It’s your name isn’t it?”
“No, that is my middle name, my father’s name. My full name is Anil Rashad Singh Khan.”
“How would you like me to address you?”
“Anil, or Khan, but not by either of my middle names. Both are sacred to me.”
“A PI with a religious side?”
“Spiritual,” Rashad - no Anil corrected him.
“Fine, Anil it is.”
Anil nodded. “Thank you. Now what is your plan from here?”
“As far as I know, this might be one of the only places in the Galaxy the Clans are going to either lay low, or avoid all togbether.”
Anil nodded in agreement. “That is true, but that doesn’t make it safe for us.”
“That is also true,” Rodney agreed. “But, I have a relationship here.”
Anil frowned. “How could you possibly have a relationship in this place?”
“Give me a minute, we’re going to need to find some place to dock.”
Now that they had safely translated inside the domain of the living digital consciousness known as the Nexus Collective, Rodney needed to do some practical work, like moving his ship out of the arrival zone. Space was a big place, but it was shocking how quickly it could get cluttered up with arriving vessels.
He carefully engaged the torsion drive, spinning up the alloy ring that was embedded in the hull of the ship, just below the main deck. He could feel the ship pulse with energy as the drive accelerated the charged thread of orichalium - named after the mythical substance orichalcum, the heavy metal bonded alloy was made from the same material they used to program neutrino behaviors, except in this configuration the particle acted like an oar, pushing against the curvature of space.
In effect, the ring acted like a gyroscope, twisting the ring provided force to propel the ship forward, “against” the axis of rotation. The tricky part was that nothing about this process protected the ship from the laws of physics or time dilation. It would take hours to accelerate to high velocity, hours to cross the expanse between the landing zone, and hours to decelerate. Yet once the ring was moving it was staggeringly a efficient form of locomotion. Suspended in a magnetic field above solid helium the ring could spin indefinitely, or close to it. The entire system had the added bonus that is generated a local gravitational field on plane with the rotating surface of the ring, making it a very convenient artificial gravity generator.
Rodney sank into his seat and felt the familiar tug of gravity once more. His harness went slack. Anil settled into his chair, and then unclipped his own harness. The seat belt would not be enough to protect them from anything that could disrupt the torsion drive, so at this point it was unnecessary.
“Where are we going?”
“To meet an old friend,” Rodney replied. “They call themself Odenshi, or Lode Star. I tend to think of them as an old man, because that is how they choose to manifest themselves physically.”
Rodney laid in the course that would take them to one of the organic life form compatible asteroid’s in the Nexus web. Six hours total travel time. Not too bad all things considered. He tried to imagine what his ship looked like from the outside - an egg shaped disk, flat at the back where the traditional fuel based thrusters resided, the bridge opposite at the apex of the narrow point in front. Hex shaped insulation covered the lower dome, while windows would ring the upper dome giving the cabins and main living space a view into the starry expanse around them. Not exactly a flying saucer, more of a blunted arrow gliding through the vacuum. A row of lights, venting heat energy in a visible spectrum would rotate in the bottom most ring of the ship - the exhaust of the torsion drive. It would give his ship the appearance of multicolored holiday lights depending upon the viewers perspective. The color shift would be a function of distance, time, and angle. Dead on they would always look white, but the rotation sprayed the lights across the visible spectrum, giving the propulsion system its other nickname, “Rainbow drive.”
Rodney locked the console to his DNA signature, then got up from his seat and motioned for Anil to follow him. “Cup of coffee?”
Anil leaned forward then pushed against the gravity. It was a full 80% of an Earth G. “Tea if you have it.”
“Yeah, I can do that,” Rodney lead the way into the common area and headed for the kitchen.
Tony was already in the kitchen starting the coffee. It was an old school brewer, something he had salvaged from an antique commercial aircraft. “I started a diagnostic,” he said proudly.
“After one jump?” Rodney asked.
“You can never be too sure,” Tony sounded confident.
“Yeah, yeah you can,” Rodney replied, but Tony ignored him.
“So what is it you hope to achieve in coming here?” Anil said. He clearly knew his way around a starship kitchen and proceeded to pour himself a cup of hot water.
“Odenshi is a level two construct. He has full access to every system,” Rodney explained. “My intention is to ask him to unlock those jump codes.”
“He can do that?” Tony asked, fixing a cup for himself, and one for Rodney.
“If anyone can, he can,” Rodney answered. “This isn’t just the home of our AI systems, this is the central distribution point of all human data - this is the hub. Across the human expanse all of our communications are integrated and synchronized here.” Despite the discovery of faster than light travel, no one, in any species had devised a way to send information faster than light. In some sense, when mankind moved into space, he took a step backward in communication. It was like returning to the pony express era. Messages had to be physically delivered. Humanity solved the problem with brute force. Packets were shipped continuously to a hub where AI systems merged the updates and then sent them back.
The Nexus was the busiest star port in the galaxy with innumerable packets arriving and leaving as fast as they could process the information. This was another reason the energy demands of the Nexus were so high. Rodney could not fathom the amount of energy being expended to transmit countless physical memory devices back and forth, not to mention the raw processing that was running continuously to reconcile all the various versions of the data. The Nexus was the source of truth in the human portion of the Galaxy, and that is one of the main reasons Rodney wanted to come here first. If there was anything in the data that could point him to Geoff Stikine, it would be here and Odenshi would be the one to help him get it.
Anil dipped his tea in his cup. Frowning he said, “And exactly how are you going to convince a digital god to do you a favor?”
Rodney sipped at his coffee. “That’s a very good question. I have just under six hours to think of an answer.”
“While I’m working on that, Anil is there any way to tell if a Clan ship followed us?”
“I can’t imagine that they would,” Anil said. “Besides, they wouldn’t have to. This is the most monitored Star Port in the Galaxy. They’d get regular updates from the feed every few minutes. Why send a ship?”
Rodney considered that. “So you’re telling me we’re safe while we’re here?”
“Safe!? Gods no man. We’re in the Nexus. Those crazy AI could snuff us out at any moment!”
“For the sake of argument, let’s just say that’s not going to happen. You believe there’s no reason for the Clan to follow us here?”
“I can’t think of one. They want Stikine, and I’m confident they think anything you can learn, they will learn it as fast as you do. In some ways you’re doing them a favor.”
“They’re not going to try and protect that lock?”
“They didn’t put it on,” Anil replied.
“Who did?”
Anil didn’t reply.
Rodney shook his head. He silence could only mean one thing. His client had locked the codes. “If I find out you already know where they went and you’re not telling me, I’ll throw you out the air lock myself.”
“No you won’t,” Anil called his bluff, “But you don’t need to worry about it. I don’t have the codes. They were locked for me as well, which to be frank, isn’t helping.”
Rodney spent the next hour and half mulling over how to convince Odenshi to unlock the jump codes. It was hard to know what an AI would want. The reason he only spent ninety minutes pondering the problem was that Odenshi contact his ship as soon as the transmission lag dropped low enough for him to engage in real time conversation. The Dawn Treader sounded the “incoming call” tone, which caused Rodney to sit up straight. They were still accelerating toward the cluster. “Dawn, please identify”
“Inbound transmission request, call sign Lode Star” The ship replied. Rodney had never installed a personality in his vessel. Tony was character enough.
“Mode?”
“Interactive Holographic.”
“Render in the main lounge, notify the rest of the crew.”
Note feeling terribly confident, Rodney was left with only one plan. Ask the AI what it wanted.