[OC] The Vestige (1)

First time poster to the subreddit, but a long time lurker. It's the first part of a longer story, obviously. I hope you guys like it!

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“Bring it around carefully- Carefully! If this goes wrong we're finished.”

Zen rolled his eyes at Gax’ droning voice, glancing away from his console and out the large viewscreen with a bored sigh. It wasn’t as if either of them really knew how to operate the ship, or any of its auxiliary functions. Ever since the federation had collapsed, no one did. If it hadn’t been for the singular AI’s that operated them, they would all have been planetbound, and unlike Gax, Zen did not really believe they would have found their way back to the stars on their own.

Outside the ship, a long and articulated mechanical arm unfurled from the ship’s body and extended into space, holding a steel girder that it carefully fitted into the growing construction orbiting along with them. The structure was a stark contrast to the smooth, streamlined contours of the ship, and though its entire kilometer-long expanse had been built in the last week, it looked much older. As if they were building a piece of the past, Zen mused. That was another price of their technological regression. Even when they did invent something new, it couldn’t hold a candle to their old ships and trinkets, their precious artifacts of the past.

Folding his lower arms, Zen leaned back into his seat, putting his other hands against the back of his head and clenching the feathers bunching there. They were grasping at straws. As the robotic limb before him began to carefully weld the component in place, he spun his seat around to look at Gax. He was a Brog, and his bulky, bouldering physique looked absolutely absurd situated in the captain’s seat surrounded by delicate, holographic displays.

Zen envied him. Brog never got bored, and never got headaches. Their entire emotional spectrum ranged from irate to grumpy, which meant they tended to keep to their own kind. Not just because they got on the nerves of everyone else with their constantly dour attitude, but because other races, with good reason, had a lot of trouble discerning their varied but extremely subtle moods.

Kilik got bored fast, and they had bad headaches, and Zen was feeling both in a big way. He liked to think he got enough for the both of them. Unlike Brog, Zen’s kind were notoriously aloof, good at coming up with ideas and terrible at seeing them through.

 

“You know the ship will do all this on its own. We don’t even have to watch. We’ve been here for weeks.” Sitting up from his slouch, he began to pat around the various pockets, looking for a reprieve.

“We have not. This was your idea,” Gax replied in a low, rumbling voice. “It was a good idea. Now we are doing it, and we have to watch. Stop looking for your pills, I have them.”

“You what?” Zen threw out all of his arms at once in a gesture of astonished indignation. “Give them back!”

“No. We are working. You can have them back when we are done. I do not want to do this alone.”

“I just told you, you aren’t the one doing it- What the hell, Gax, how did you get a hold of them?”

“I took them from your pocket when you weren’t looking.”

“Dude, you are eleven feet tall and this room is not that big, I am never not looking at you. You had the ship steal them for you.”

“I had the ship steal them for me,” Gax admitted. “This was your idea. I will not do all the work while you do all the drugs.”

“You are very easily distracted,” said the ship, in a pleasantly upbeat feminine voice that came from nowhere in particular.

“I don’t do that many drugs,” Zen said, pulling his limbs back in and clicking his tongue against his beak indignantly.

“We have been here for six months, Zen,” Gax grumbled.

“What?”

“Six months,” repeated the ship. “You are very easily distracted.”

“This was the last piece,” continued Gax. “We’re done.”

Zen perked up all the way out of his seat and moved toward a large monitor, leaning into it as if it was a window. Gax was right, it was done. Three kilometers of steel, stone and robotics, splayed up like a giant set of wings around the meticulously constructed magnetic lift at its center. He didn’t understand the exact mechanics of it, only the ship’s AI did, but he knew what it was for. They both did.

Looking past it into the distorted darkness of the black hole they were about to defy, as it pulled at the space around it. This close, it made a halo out of the entire galactic disk. They both knew that many, if not most of those stars were dark now. That was why they were out here, after all. A last ditch effort to stop the encroaching end. Well, that wasn’t quite right, they would never be able to do that. A desperate attempt to find someone who could, then.

 

The time scales were the hard to swallow, no matter how much he thought about it. Four hundred thousand cycles of Gax’ planet Lar, around its twin suns. Over a hundred million cycles for Zen’s homeworld Ark. A full revolution of the Hub around the galactic core, since the ones who built it left them behind and went home. To some dark spot in the sky they called home. So much time that not only had species disappeared, but entirely new ones had appeared, evolved from microbes on barren worlds and joined the fractured interstellar community in the time since. Yet here they were, in a replicant ship old enough to have seen Zen’s ancestors when feathers covered more than just their scrawny heads, and they still remembered the visitors from the milky way. AI never forgot, after all, and they particularly remembered their makers.

The machines had been like a life support system for their failing galactic federation, and while it had kept them from dying, it was a false life. Machines could predict, could remember, maybe they could even feel, but unlike their makers they had no vision. They saw the future as it was, not as they wanted it to be, and that inevitability had infected every one of their patients.

It was Zen who, while asking the ship ridiculous questions during a particularly meandering drugged stupor, had stumbled on the possibility that there might be a cure. They had not so much stolen the ship as persuaded it to come along once the discovery was made. In fact if anything, it had persuaded them. Their governments would not see it that way, though. Replicant ships were expensive. Planetoid expensive, and there would be a price to pay on their return. The thought made him nervous, and he looked for some affirmation at Gax, who did not even notice him.

“Are we even sure it’s still down there?”

“You are joking,” Gax started without taking his attention off the displays, “we-”

“There is a 87,67% probability that the capsule’s integrity remains intact due to the time dilation effects of the singularity,” the ship chimed in. “That is sufficiently likely for a reasonable assertion of surety.”

“If you knew this, why haven’t you tried this before?” Zen looked up, as if he could somehow see where the ship’s voice was coming from.

“There is an 11,3% chance of success. The optimal course of action was to wait for technology to improve.”

“Then why are we here now?”

“The probabilities have changed. The odds of adequately advanced technology being invented by any of the sentient species within the Cassiopeia Dwarf galaxy before it is entirely consumed by the Czan are less than 0.000000-”

“Right, right, I get it, we’re stupid, you don’t have to be a dick about it.” Zen didn’t even really think the computer was calculating anything at this point. She could be very snarky when she wanted to be.

“She is just observing facts,” Gax noted. “You should pay attention. It’s starting.”

 

Zen pressed his two right hands into the monitor, once more forgetting that there was nothing but electronics on the other side, caught up in the current by the unexpected escalation of events. This was it, then. They had built themselves an angel to dive into the abyss, and pull something out. An castaway architect of their lost golden age. A derelict god from the pantheon of their machines. His hearts spun up as he saw the construct’s great wings unfurl before him and spread out, lights glaring to life in the shape of a brilliant feather coat. If this failed, there was no going home. The human had better be worth it.

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