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Departure From Humanity


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Departure from Humanity
by Pakkrat

His ship was almost safely back inside Progen space with them. While Dr. Pakkratius had gathered them whether by incurious or ignorant discard, dark purchases under the table, or by doing the dirty work himself, the collection was a worthy one. He stood in the bridge of the *Culler*, looking at the various systems, devices, and weaponry that awaited use. From various exotic locations across the frontiers of the galaxy they had come from Terrans and a few Jenquai. Some arrived out of a promise for monetary credits. A few came of the Doctor's involvement with incidents. Lastly, some were smuggled from the findings of other Factions' hard-earned efforts.

The first of the changes came from the sanity-testing, maze-plowing, tedious back and forth of the Collegia Forgemasters-backed Agrippa Technologies. Imperator Agrippa at Arx Emporos in Altair III, had signed off on the final examinations that Pakkratius had taken and passed. A graduate of the R&D corporation's shields and devices program, Pakkratius now possessed the highest and most secret lab prototypes. The Sabine Sentinel had to smile at each of the long names given to the prototypes. Names like "Security Optimal Override Alpha", "Aspectus Limo Quinque", "Skirmish Omega", and "Tactical Advantage Omega" resounded their Latin language roots to the ears. Each system and device was a nightmare of gathered technologies, put together by the Architechti clones based out of Nostrand Vor City. But each final product was light years ahead of Terran systems.

Next were the alien, biological, and at first seemingly cybernetic weapons of the strange, piscene space 'fish' calling themselves the "Ten-Gu". The two Ten-Gu Bile Cannons were a necromantic amalgam of flesh, ossified skeletal structures, teeth and ribs of the slain creatures, and the almost magical bile humors of the strange species. The weapons were not on the table but rather already mounted on the *Culler* in the first and second wing hard points. They pulsed with living eagerness to shoot deadly bile-infused teeth at any targets acquired.

Not nearly as alien, but just as inhuman were the systems and devices inherited from errant, AI-built, master controller drones out of the blackness of Smugglers' Run. Amid the space-warping singularities and black holes, the rioting and rebelling drones had been given many systems to respond to pirate attacks. The Drone Shield Amplifier, various reactor cores, and system foci (one, the Deadly Grasp sat on the table), were just a few of the AI-designed or upgraded technologies that were not man-made. It would be a Turing nightmare to try to reverse engineer the designs of the machines in revolt.

Dr. Pakkratius remembered a former system that was no longer in his repertoire of arcanoi. Man-made, but surely no longer remotely human, was the Vindis Damage Focus, a shield developed out of the outlandish Vindis. The Vindis were a failed attempt to meld Progen clones with machine out in the mad reaches of the Nifleheim Cloud. At that failure, the Republic had pulled back out of the Cloud and denied ever setting up shop there. But the abandoned Vindis had continued to grow and modify themselves to hideous mutations and cybernetic upgrades using the derelict station's equipment and the Cloud's vast resources. It was a skeleton in the Progen Republic's closet.

Was it some renewable, Promethean fire that kept the odd engine system constantly aglow? The Unabating Fire it was called, sat bolted to the output jets and vector vanes of the *Culler*. The engine was a constant hum and vibration in the deck plates of the Sentinel vessel. It was, for an engine, an aberration that seemed to infect the nearby shield system, the Skirmish Omega with conduits and cables. It was an unholy union, the Doctor mused.

It tried to whisper its malevolence to him as he slept in his bunk inside the ship. It was the Cube of the Leech, found in some Unknown Galaxy that the Tada-O Gate Incident had accidentally allowed into the Milky Way Galaxy. It's eerie, green vibratory emanations could only be described as "black magic" for lack of a better term. The Doctor had been forced to lock the dangerous cube in a cargo container to keep the evil thing from being seen or heard.

The belted ammunition for the Fury of the Ten-Gu projectile launcher glinted. The Ten-Gu shards begged with their crystalline beauty to be shot by the multi-barrelled gun that had been used by the monstrous space fish as they entered human space to feed upon ships they had interdicted. Yes, thought the Doctor, their fury was indeed terrible to behold.

Then at last, Dr. Pakkratius had come to them. Classified contraband under the label "aa" for Ancient Artifact, the crystals lay out in an ascending array before him. Smaller shards on the left lay next to progressively larger lattices to the right. The Doctor had studied long hours over the first of the crystal specimens he had been given. Some swarthy Terran Trader had dropped it in the lap of the Sentinel. The British-Earth Terran, for some reason call-signed "Dutch" just discarded the huge Ninth-Power artifact out of disgust that the crystal did not cooperate well with his own ship's systems. The crystals had to be nano-scanned to discover their strange names. They had alien names all. Only one line seemed to have a single Earth Japanese name of "Daimyo" hidden in their lattices. The smaller ones of the left were hand-sized, growing in size gently as they went from Fifth-Power to Ninth-Power. Pakkratius had no specimens of smaller size and nothing higher than Nine had been unearthed as of yet. The crystals were of varying crystal structure, partitioned off by their alien names. Some were monoclinic, others triclinic, cubic and onward up to hexagonal and even orthorhombic. Their interfaces were gold-plated electrodes attached to their polar ends or plane convergence points. These electrodes had superconducting conduits that for reasons unfathomable were compatible with space ships of varying classes. The Doctor's collection seemed most compatible with the Sabine Sentinel with perhaps a deviation to other explorer-class vessels. But the miniaturization of the technologies was the riveting detail!

The mechanisms, crystal in form, were embedded and tightly packed in the lattices of the crystals. Furthermore, the programming code architecture was written into the quanta level of the devices. The Ancients had certainly mastered miniaturization to the infinitesimally small scale. Codes for the functions of the Ancient Artifacts were sub-atomic and went further into quantum activities. To this day, no human had ever deigned to delve so deeply as to reverse-translate, let alone reverse-engineer the Ancients' works.

Eventually, all these inhuman additions to the *Culler* took their toll on the ship, and on the ship's pilot. The *Culler's* white, glossy hull, wings, and sail plates took on a more sinister appearance with the massive weaponry of alien design. The devices made the interior of the ship appear as if a pilot had stepped into a landscape not meant for a humans or human logic. Cables, conduits, system connections of all types were strewn about the bridge and adjoining compartments as if the deck was layered in a sea of serpents.

If his younger, aging clone brother, Pakkrateus, was to see this departure from humanity, he might be further estranged from the Doctor. It would have to remain a secret for the Sabine's eyes alone. How many others would do the math and realize the span of what they had stocked the *Culler*? Each might remember their contribution, but to see them gathered might turn the stomach and shatter their sanity. While the Sentinel ship might look a clean, sterile white on the outside, the darkness was just underneath. What might other citizens of the Republic, yea the entire galaxy think of the "mad wizard-scientist" with such forbidden and arcane knowledge? Would there be the cliche of pitchforks and torches at his office door of NET-7 SOL if this nightmarish amalgam were scanned and discovered?

Other than the Progen Sentinel, Dr. Pakkratius, there was one thing that anchored the bridge to humanity. Aside the data-tablet library in the aft of the compartment was a single book on the console. It was opened and its paper pages were kept by a frail red velvet bookmark. A passage was marked with underlining.

It read:
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."

Nietzsche was warning the Sabine Sentinel. The Earth and Beyond was an infinity to explore and the Doctor had better beware. Edited by Pakkrat
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