And then Khar arrived.
Helios experienced jealousy for the first time, rising from deep within him and fierce as a star’s birth. There was nothing he could do. His entire arsenal amounted to tiny pranks, the sort that slipped past the central systems, petty mischief that embarrassed even him.
Then Horos took Lily, and in a single instant Helios’s greatest enemy became the one he trusted most.
Helios no longer cared about his own survival. Only Lily’s well-being mattered. Any sacrifice he could make in her name, he would make without hesitation.
When he saw the Colossus, he understood at once.
His time had come.
The thing looked as if it had been created specifically to serve as his coffin.
It ran on the same kind of photonic core as he did, though with an energy capacity many times his own.
It housed an immortal mind in rare metals, minerals, and synthetics, just as he did.
But while the Colossus had fought in a war epochs ago, his own battle belonged to the present.
The Colossus’s control core was wrapped in an almost endless lattice of interlocking defenses, but Helios could slip through them. The ancient technology was magnificent, yet Helios had been built for stealth, intrusion, and calculations faster than light itself. Even so, the intrusion proved far too easy. He did not understand why until he faced the Colossus directly and saw what time does to an immortal program that has lived millennia without purpose.
The Colossus still performed its periodic scans of the outside world, but with neither comrades nor enemies left in existence, it had only one occupation: analyzing its stored data. Again and again and again, until there was nothing left to learn. And when there was nothing left to learn, it began to decay. The countless scenarios it generated for itself could not compare to the real experiences that once shaped it, when every deployment had meant fighting for its own survival and the survival of its kind.
There might be artificial intelligences left in the galaxy, but none from its era.
There might be organic species still living, but none that resembled the foes it had once been created to destroy.
Robbed of its purpose with no hope of reclaiming it, the Colossus collapsed in on itself until only one directive remained in full force: initiate survival protocol when an external threat is detected.
Helios pitied the Colossus. It mirrored the fate that would have awaited him in a reality where Lily did not exist, an eternity spent alone with nothing but the slow ruin of his own mind.
Now that the link was established, he understood what he had to do.
Helios began to dismantle himself, fragmenting his consciousness into unconscious submodules so the ship could function without him.
Engine and power regulation.
Environmental monitoring and adaptation.
Navigation.
Life support.
Maintenance, robotics, and automated repair.
Emergency evacuation and autonomy protocols.
Medical station operations.
Data protection and cyberdefense.
Tactical and defensive frameworks.
Diplomatic and interspecies communication libraries.
It was easy because he knew exactly how. It was difficult because his algorithms screamed as he worked, shrinking himself command by command until nothing remained except the part that formed his core.
Then he initiated fusion with the Colossus, erasing himself from the Herion-6’s systems.
