One whiff convinced Ava to turn off her sense of smell. She whistled, gd she didn’t have to breathe in the rancid air. The pile of bodies was impressive. “That answers that question,” she said. When Irric and Cyrix had brought her to one of the Highest’s rooms, she hadn’t expected such a macabre sight. Green smears stained the floor, stopping in front of the pool of dried blood that the bodies were piled on. Studying the floor, Ava couldn’t find any signs of the pink discolouration that had been found in the control room.
Off to the side was a pile of heads. Their empty eyes were disconcerting. “Why did you remove their heads?” Ava asked, not comprehending why such a thing would have occurred. She looked between Cyrix and Irric with a complicated expression, then back to the heads.
“Good heavens, we didn’t do that!” Irric corrected quickly, waving his arms. “When we discovered this room, all that was in it was the pile of dismembered bodies you’re seeing. Our soldiers believe that the gru’ul we found here were killed by having their heads ripped off.”
“I find that highly unlikely,” Ava said. “The amount of force required to do so isn’t something a person can casually output, if at all. There’s also the fact that no living being would just let itself be beheaded. These gru’ul would have fought back. Why isn’t whatever that did this to them among the bodies?”
“One of the mysteries. The bodies have been here for some time, if that wasn’t obvious,” Irric said. Ava gave Irric a ft stare. She’d managed to figure that out already and didn’t need a reminder. Irric coughed. “What we’re wondering is why they hadn’t been disposed of and were left to rot. Why keep them here?”
Ava hummed, stepping closer to the pile of heads. With a look of disgust, she bent down and gingerly one picked up. She inspected what was left of the severance. It was enough to tell in what direction the force had been applied. “I believe you about them dying to beheading now.” She let head drop to the ground and shook her hand. By the gods, she’d found that unpleasant. Focusing her attention on the bodies, she pointed. “There’s some variation on the bodies, but enough of them have the same tearing pattern on their necks.” She analyzed the pile further. “There are quite a few broken limbs in that pile, and one that looks like its head got bashed in.” She shuddered. “I don’t want to know what could have caused that.”
“Are you able to spot anything simir to the discolouration from the control room?”
“Have you guys bothered to look before now?”
“We didn’t consider the possibility, since the bodies have begun to decompose. It hasn’t been that long since the rooms were discovered, and we focused our efforts elsewhere. You’re the one that pointed out the discolouration in the control room.”
Ava frowned, unimpressed. Taking a reluctant step towards the rger pile, she began meticulously looking over the bodies, trying to spot any indication of the pink substance. Irric pointed out which ones had killed themselves so that Ava wouldn’t waste her time.
Irric and Cyrix said nothing, letting her work in silence. With no other distractions in the room, Ava made swift progress. Her enhanced eyes eventually spotted faint stains on some of the gru’uls’ cws. She moved closer and stared. Her eyes hadn’t failed her. It was faint – so faint she’d almost missed it – but there it was. She reported her findings, confirming that whatever had happened in the control room was the most probable cause for the bodies’ dismemberment.
“What happened in that room?” Irric wondered aloud after Ava reported her findings.
“Who’s to say it’s limited to just the control room?” Ava asked. “Have you noticed any other green bloodstains in any other rooms?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Irric admitted sheepishly. “I haven’t explored much beyond the rooms I was assigned to investigate.”
Ava turned to Cyrix. “Maybe you could have your soldiers pay attention for any bloodstains they come across. Mark them on the map and determine which ones were caused by your soldiers. The remaining stains most likely appeared at the same time as whatever it is that happened here occurred.”
Cyrix didn’t like taking orders from a machine but couldn’t find fault with her logic. It would cost him nothing to find out and would put some very bored soldiers to work doing something productive for a change. He nodded. “I’ll instruct my teams to keep an eye out,” he said. “That still doesn’t expin why the bodies were gathered here, where they could only be accessed by one person.” He eyed the operating table near the back of the room. “They weren’t experimented on, clearly. I don’t think any of the tools in this room are designed for beheading people.”
“This is a restricted section. Perhaps the research conducted here was being kept secret from the other gru’ul,” Ava proposed. “This many bodies coming out of the restricted section would have raised questions. It could be that the Highest was trying to cover up the incident by hiding the bodies until they could be disposed of discreetly. Since only the Highest had access to these rooms, it’s clear that it was involved in the incident in some way. The Highest must have been aware of what happened.”
“Is there any other information you can learn by studying the bodies?”
Ava wrinkled her nose. “Not without performing an autopsy.” She gnced at the pile of heads. “I’d really rather not spend my time working with the decaying bodies of my creators. Start by having your teams see if they can find any strange bloodstains in any of the rooms.”
“There is one room we know of that has significant bloodstains in it,” Cyrix said. “It appears to be an operating room. The table and floor around it have quite a few sptters of blood. Those stains are red. We’re assuming that they’re reted to whatever experiments were performed on Adrian, but we don’t have any confirmation.”
Ava made a mental note to check on the room ter when she had time. “Is that all for this room?” she asked, eager to escaped to feeling of death that permeated the room.
“Please say yes,” Irric pleaded to Cyrix. “I really can’t stand the smell any longer. I don’t know how you guys are doing it.”
“I turned off my sense of smell ages ago,” Ava said. “The stench was horrendous.”
Cyrix and Irric blinked at the admission. “You can control your senses?” Irric asked, bewildered.
“You mean to tell us you have senses beyond sight and hearing?” Cyrix inquired.
“Of course I do,” Ava said, looking offended. “My creators designed me to be as faithful to the species that I was built to imitate as possible. With some modifications, of course. I don’t know how my senses compare to yours, but I still have them nonetheless.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Cyrix said. “Why would the gru’ul bother to give a machine the ability to perceive the world like we do? No offense, Ava, but you’re a machine, not a person. There’s no need to go so far.”
“I do take offense to that statement, actually. There’s no reason I can’t be both a machine and a person. I may not be an organic being like you are, but I still consider myself a person.”
“Can we save the philosophical debate for anywhere but here?” Irric pleaded. “I think I’m going to be sick if I stay in here any longer.”
“Fine,” Cyrix sighed. “Let’s move on to the next room. I don’t think there will be much there for you to do, since it’s just a terminal.”
Ava’s eyes lit up at the thought. “You mean the Highest’s terminal? I definitely want to go there next.”
“Don’t be surprised if you can’t access the data,” Irric said as he approached the wall. It disappeared and Irric ran out into the fresh air, taking a deep lungful. “Thank the gods,” he said, earning him strange looks from the soldiers that were guarding the halls. Ava and Cyrix followed him and Irric gleefully distanced himself from the wall, watching it close back up, sealing the scent of death away.
Cyrix called Nadi over and gave her instructions to rey to the other soldiers that were present in the restricted section. He left it to her to organize and coordinate the search efforts for any obvious stains or discolorations. Nadi walked away grumbling words Cyrix pretended not to hear.
The remaining soldiers followed the group as Irric led them to the next room, ready to intervene at a moment’s notice. Ava would have appreciated the attentiveness of her guards more if had she not been the threat in question that required protecting from.
The soldiers understood the hint from the st room and remained outside, silent, after securing the halls. Irric led the way and brought her to the terminal. Ava’s eyes glistened in anticipation. Irric sighed, ready to dash her hopes. “The data on the terminal is encrypted,” he said. Ava’s head swung towards him.
“What do you mean?” she asked. Irric showed her what he’d found and expined his theories to her. After several long minutes of studying the data, Ava sighed. “That’s going to be a pain in the ass to solve.”
“Is it doable?”
“With a lot of effort and even more luck, yes. That’s not getting solved anytime soon, but at least its salvageable, unlike the corrupted code. I’m not entirely certain yet we can undo what was done to it.”
“I’m convinced there’s a way to do something,” Irric said.
“I’m not convinced,” Ava replied simply. “This,” she pointed to the data sample Irric was showing her, “is promising because of how stable it is. I don’t know how they managed to encrypt it like this, but we can learn.”
Cyrix sighed in relief, knowing that he had done well to concentrate his efforts here first, giving them extra time for the problem. “It’s a question of time, then?” he asked.
“Yes.” Ava nodded. “But I’m not certain how much.”
Cyrix hummed in thought. “It wouldn’t do to have you start on a lengthy project without at least seeing the final room and inspecting it. I believe you’re in for quite the surprise.”
“Now you’ve got me curious.”
“Good,” Cyrix chuckled. With that, he had Irric bring them to the final room. He kept silent at Ava’s incessant questions, where she tried to wheedle the answer out of him. It would be far more satisfying to see her reaction to it if she didn’t know what was coming.
Irric navigated the halls, using the map on his data ste to guide the group to their destination. Cyrix ordered the guards to clear out of the immediate vicinity of the room. He didn’t want to take any chances of his soldiers seeing what was inside, even if the bodies weren’t immediately visible.
Standing in an empty corridor, Cyrix bade Irric to approach the wall with his badge. It melted away, revealing another hallway. Irric led the three of them to the end and turned right. He walked several steps forward and moved out of the way so that Ava could properly see.
She gasped, taking in the sight of all of the bodies. “Are these all experiments?” she asked, slowly taking a step towards the nearest pod. She continued walking and pced a hand on the gss, taking in the strange growths all over the naked a’vaarian body. Irric and Cyrix joined her.
“We think so. Adrian cims he never saw another person during his time here,” Cyrix said. “We’re not sure what to make of this room. Without the knowledge on the terminals, there’s no way of understanding what happened to these people.” Ava paused to inspect each pod they passed, trying to determine the cause of the mutations. As they went deeper into the room, human bodies began to appear. “Do any of these bodies seem familiar to you?” Cyrix asked as Ava inspected one of the humans.
Ava shook her head. “I don’t recognize any of these bodies. The only ones I ever sent off were Adrian and Subject 011. In all my time running the experiments on Earth, they were the only successful ones –” Ava stopped short and sucked in a breath, her eyes wide. “Subject 011!?” She was staring at the only fully intact body free of mutations, rooted to her spot.
“You recognize this person?” Cyrix asked, surprised. He’d thought it a longshot that Ava would recognize any of the people in the room. He hadn’t actually expected anything when he had Irric bring them here. Perhaps she would have been able to help decipher what had happened
“Yes,” Ava stammered in disbelief, looking at the figure suspended in the pod. “The st time I saw him was also the st time I saw Adrian. It was when we put them in their pods – this pod,” she pointed. “I can make out a scratch on the bottom, over there. One of the pods was damaged during instaltion.” She walked closer and inspected it to be certain. “The mark looks the same,” she verified. “This is the pod we put him in originally.”
“Does that mean that the empty pod right before the restricted section was Adrian’s?” Irric asked.
“Possibly,” Ava replied absentmindedly. “I can’t believe this. Subject 011, here of all pces.” She continued to stare at the man’s desperate expression as he cwed at his neck. Her eyes shoulders drooped. “Poor thing,” was all she had to say.
“Did you know that the pods would be coming here?” Cyrix asked, studying Ava’s reaction to the man very carefully. It appeared genuine.
“No. I didn’t even know about this facility. I was activated on Earth with knowledge already impnted in my mind. All I knew was that I had to follow my core directives.”
“And those were?”
“To fulfill the Mandate.”
Irric snapped to attention. “What do you mean a mandate?” His heart sped up in his chest. “We’ve found documents that make reference to one, but there’s no information on what it actually is.”
“The Mandate is the core directive,” Ava said unhelpfully, not seeing the issue.
“Yes, but what was it about?”
“It was – wait, why can’t I access this information?” Ava froze, trying to figure out what the problem was. There should be nothing restricted from herself in her own mind. Her eyes went bnk as she devoted more processing power to the problem. Several seconds and countless attempts ter, they came back into focus as she returned to herself. “I don’t understand. There’s information being kept from me. In my own dataspace. That should be impossible.”
“What does that mean?” Irric said, a feeling of dread creeping up on him.
“It means that something pced some sort of virus into me, preventing me from being able to remember it. I know that it exists. I know that my core directives exist to serve it. Yet, I can’t access what it actually is. The gru’ul must have done something to me before activating me, embedding it in my code. It’s going to take me a while to be able to access it – if ever. I barely understand what’s happening to me. This is going to take time.”
“How long are we looking at?” Irric said, hoping that the answer would be something short. He knew he it wouldn’t be when Ava shook her head.
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I have to figure out what I’m looking at first. I can work on this at night when I’m back in my cell. It’s not like I’ll have anything else to do while you sleep.”
Cyrix rubbed a hand over his face. “Fine, do that. For now, we’ll focus on what’s in front of us, rather than something we can’t do anything about yet. I want to know the instant you find out.”
Ava smiled sharply. “We’ll see again in six months,” she said.
Cyrix’s expression darkened. “You mean to tell me you would knowingly keep information from us, to be held hostage for a concession ter?”
“This isn’t me working for you. This is me undoing a virus that was wrongly impnted in my brain from before I was even born. It is inherently a part of me. The deal was that I share what I learn while working for you. My memories are not your property. That the information I’ll be unsealing just so happens to be what you want doesn’t change the fact that it’s inherently one of my memories. Events that happened before the beginning of our agreement are of no consequence.”
Cyrix swore internally. Externally, he frowned. “That’s skirting the line there. I disagree with that statement. Since you’ll be learning it after we began our contract, it technically counts as something you’ve learned while working with us. Which you’re obligated to tell us.”
“I am sovereign over my own thoughts and memories. You’ve no right to them, for they are mine and mine alone. Without them, I am nothing more than a scrap of metal,” Ava said harshly, ready to fight for what was hers.
Cyrix shook his head. The conversation had turned philosophical. He wondered what it meant for an inanimate object to have such considerations. He filed away Ava’s words for ter. “This assumes you’re even able to undo whatever’s blocking your access to the information.”
“True. I’d rather this be discussed now, rather than ter.”
“I’ll have to bring this up with the Tribunal. They’re the ones that are going to be making any decisions concerning you. I’ll see what they have to say and let you know. For now, we’ll put this discussion on hold.”
“That’s fine by me,” Ava said, turning back to the body floating in the pod. “What would you like to do with him? Are you going to leave him in there or do you want him out?”
“Are you able to operate the pods?”
“Yes. It’s part of the knowledge granted to me by the gru’ul. I don’t know how the pods function, however. They didn’t deem that necessary. I won’t be able to help you replicate this technology.”
“That’s unfortunate.” Cyrix studied the body. “Are we going to be able to understand him, like we can Adrian?”
“I honestly have no idea. I’m surprised Adrian can even communicate with you at all. I didn’t think the gru’ul would take the time to teach him a new nguage.”
“It is rather strange,” Irric agreed. “It’s one of the things he refuses to talk about. Whenever asked how he learned the nguage, a dark expression clouds his face, and he simply says he didn’t have a choice in the matter. Or so I’ve been told. Regardless, it’s not exactly much to go off of.”
“On the off chance we’re unable to communicate, will you still be able to act as an intermediary?” Cyrix asked Ava. It would be preferable for Cyrix if Adrian’s involvement in the matter was minimal. He didn’t know how Adrian would react to seeing a fellow test subject alive and well again.
“Yes,” Ava said confidently. “I’m able to speak the same nguage they can. I’ll be able to transte should the need arise.”
Cyrix rubbed a hand over his face. “Great, just what we needed. Another problem to keep secret. One person the wrong colour is enough, but two? That’s just asking for trouble. What about the other bodies? Are you able to free them as well?”
Ava hesitated before answering. “I doubt many of these people are even alive to begin with, given what I saw. Would you be able to reverse what was done to them if I free them?”
Cyrix looked over towards Irric, who shook his head. “Probably not.”
“Then I think it would be kinder to leave them frozen, where they’re no longer suffering.”
“Why do you care about the suffering of others? Didn’t you run experiments on people that resulted in their deaths?” Cyrix asked.
A conflicted expression clouded her features. “It’s only just recently that I’ve gained self-awareness,” she replied. “Anything I did before that was when I was following my programming. I couldn’t go against it, even if I wanted to. The suffering of my test subjects was logical. It made sense then and wasn’t something I had the capacity to question. Now’s different. Am I responsible for the way I acted when I was bound by my programming or is it my creators who bear the responsibility?”
Cyrix didn’t know the answer to her question.
“How did you become self-aware?” Irric asked.
“When I experienced emotion for the first time, my programming identified it as an error and instructed me to debug my code. When my personality matrix was about to be terminated and reset, something from deep within yelled at me to live and I listened.” Ava shuddered. “That, I think, is the moment I truly became self-aware.”
Cyrix regarded Ava in quiet contemption while she replied to Irric’s question, conflicted. Inanimate objects did not have a fear of death. The fact that Ava was able to recognize that she was about to die implied that she was also able to recognize that she was alive. A knot formed in his stomach at the implications. He pushed them out of his mind for now and focused on what was happening in front of him.
Ava looked back to the pod where Subject 011 was. “What do we do now?” she asked.
