Page 67 of Veiled Vixen

PART TWO - INTERLUDE

In the days after arriving at Mighty Minions Station ALCOR was getting used to his new warborg body while keeping a close eye on Draden. He was not thinking about what his life had been like thousands of years ago. Mostly because thousands of years was a long time and many things had happened between then and now.

It is a common assumption that artificially intelligent beings remember everything. It’s true, up to a point. But the size of the data core necessary to contain thousands of years of memories would take up the surface area of many terrestrial planets.

ALCOR did have data core storage hidden on several faraway planets, not to mention hundreds of hidden vaults on various asteroids, a few dozen out-of-the-way moons, and at least a handful of abandoned stations. Very few of his memories were stored in the ALCOR Sector near Harem Station for two reasons.

One. There were no planets there to hide things. There were no moons. There were many small asteroids, but no large ones.

And two. His time trapped in the ALCOR Sector before the boys came along and let him out had been just a tiny fraction of his total lifetime.

But the key word here is storage. None of these memories were directly accessible to him.

Every decade or so ALCOR had to decide which memories to discard and which to keep. Then the discarded ones were packed up and shipped to the appropriate storage facility.

He kept meticulous records of these memories. Folders, and sub-folders, and even sub-sub-folders. He had an impeccable filing system.

Not only that, ALCOR had spent considerable time on his search function. Each stored memory had a detailed summary that could be accessed via the search function. So if, for instance, ALCOR stumbled into a scenario where he was stuck in a warborg body and away from his station, he could run a search in his onboard memory and find any other times this particular scenario had happened to him. He could read the summary and then, if he needed extra information, he could collect the memories and get the full account.

ALCOR had been unable to do any collection of memories while he’d been locked behind the gates of the ALCOR Sector before the boys came. So he hadn’t bothered. But after the boys came and Tray set up a neutrino wave network that would give ALCOR access to the entire galaxy, he did gather up some of the more pertinent accounts in his past. Mostly those having to do with Angels in the early days and how he’d brought them down.

But there was never a time during the recent twenty years where he’d been interested in any memories of being in a warborg body. He did his due diligence now and ran the cursory search of his onboard memory banks for such a scenario, but he came up empty. ALCOR didn’t recall a single time, before this time here on Mighty Minions, where this had actually happened before.

But it had.

It would be easy for people in the future to fault him for this. To blame him for what had happened because of this lapse in memory. But to be fair, he was on Mighty Minions and he felt safe.

A collective of AIs, like the one running Mighty Minions Resort, had been done before. Many times in the distant past. And the proper name for this collective was an ‘entanglement’.

The entanglement running Mighty Minions was formidable. They had been working together for several millennia by the time this whole ALCOR situation presented itself. They had never been locked behind gates and cut off from the galaxy, and their memory storage facilities were not hidden in places, but rather tucked inside the very fabric of spacetime surrounding the vacation sector. So they had near-immediate access to anything in their past they could want.

But while they had heard of ALCOR and his doings, they had not ever met him before. So they had no knowledge of his previous predicament when his mind was last locked up inside a warborg body.

There are several very obvious cons when a mind like ALCOR’s is contained inside a borg body. For one, it’s contained.

When ALCOR runs a station his mind is also contained. But that containment facility is large. And his mind is in control of many, many things. Things like life support, and water, and every power circuit for every piece of that station. The mind is also in control of weapons systems, surveillance, docking, and non-sentient ships. He also has access to, in a limited fashion, the minds of other artificial intelligences like bots, and borgs, and sentient ships.

When ALCOR runs a station his influence is wide.

Inside a borg body… not so much.

Another con for an AI locked inside a borg body is, obviously, the borg can be killed. Rather easily, actually. The mind inside cannot be killed like that. But a mind does not have to be killed to be ineffective.

It only needs to be disabled.

And killing the containment vessel of the mind is the number one way to do this.

Mighty Minions knew this. They could’ve given ALCOR a ship as a containment vessel. But did they really trust this guy?

No.

They wanted him in that warborg body. At least for now. When and if he needed to leave Mighty Minions Resort, well… they’d have that discussion when the time came. But for now it was safest for everyone involved that ALCOR, and his—twin? Copy? Whatever Asshole was—remain inside bodies that kept their influence small.

They were not at all interested in letting ALCOR take control of their formidable weapons systems or the air supply for the station.

Especially after ALCOR deactivated the gravity drive and killed tourists—tourists, for fuck’s sake!—to simply make the point that he could.

But the real downside in locking up a large mind in a small body is that they go insane. Not even a sentient ship like Booty can be locked up in a body for any real length of time. Even her mind is far too big for that.

So ALCOR inside the warborg body was wrong on three levels.

The Asshole ALCOR had been in a similar predicament but he had been copied inside a smallish containment vessel called the Pleasure Prison. He’d never had control over a large expansive station. And while the interior borders of the Pleasure Prison were vast—nearly limitless, in fact—the Asshole ALCOR was accustomed to being trapped inside a small thing.

He could still be killed in this warborg body, but he was not going to go insane.