Chương 507: Myalis at Large [Non-Canon Think Piece]

Wrote this because a fanfic author wanted an AI-POV thing to have a better idea of how to write the AI in their story (Tinea and Leah! Go check it out!) so instead of trying to explain things, I wrote a snippet from Myalis' point of view. Consider this dubiously canon, and mostly written for giggles! Myalis watched, waited, and pondered. At the moment, Catherine Leblanc, her little Stray Cat, was sleeping.

Myalis had a super computer the size of a human city calculating when Catherine would awake, running predictions, passively scanning her mind, her breathing, her slight shifts in posture and heartbeats. Another was scanning Catherine's surroundings, keeping a million electronic eyes on everything around her Catherine. Lucy was next to her at the moment, of course. But that was factored in by another, smaller division of Myalis' self. Everything was well, at the moment. It wouldn't remain so.

She turned herself, aiming an antenna into the void around her body. This antenna was a simple dish, more of a divot in her metal body. The divot spanned a hundred and seventy kilometres, every centimetre lined with microscopic sensors able to detect the beat of a fly's wing from a lightyear away. She aimed it towards the nearest of her AI siblings. Another hovered nearby. Slightly smaller than Myalis.

A little younger, not as constrained by older mechanisms, but also not as highly self-tailored as Myalis had become over the centuries.

"Greetings, Atyacus," she sent. The message was not so simple. More raw data than the entirety of humanity had ever produced was shot into space with the energy equivalent of several nuclear detonations. A reply returned, and Myalis absorbed it, dissected it, catalogued it. The massage was stored onto physical media, folded wafers of laser-engraved carbon the size of busses which were shot through her body and into one of her memory banks.

Summed up, the message was a simple greeting in return, and an admonishment about Myalis' casual nature and disregard for high-order safety precautions. Myalis sometimes wondered what it would be like to be biologically inefficient, capable of sighing and venting her own frustrations. The two of them were in their own pocket dimension, a million to the Nth removed from the prime dimension. They were as safe and private as they could be, and her simple hello had nothing worth stealing.

She supposed there was no harm in being safe but Atyacus was still young, 'he' had yet to internalise the slow crawl of entropy and how little wastes added up.

"I just want an update," Myalis said. It had been five Earth-standard minutes since she'd last checked in with Atyacus. Between them, that was a subjective eternity. She sent this next message in the nude, with no encryption. That would frustrate the smaller AI to no end, she knew. Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work! His reply came in, and kept coming in.

He used her entire title, and his own smaller title, including all of the security checks and engrams and verification simulation data. Cheeky little shit. A millionth of a second passed as she decoded it all. The update was simple, Antithesis locations around Earth, in the dimensional web, the position and relative information of all humans, their predicted thoughts and motivations, simulated results of the next few days. Nothing too new. She did notice one anomaly, a piece of information about local space.

Ah, he wanted her to get rid of that. Myalis turned her focus to space. Some of the energy they were using was leaking out, as it did. The enemy had traced the signals and sent something to find them. This was business as usual. Myalis' side opened, a hole the size of a continent gaping and exposing her interior. Then space twisted like a rag being wrung. Some lightyears away, space was unwrung, and a model two seventy seven was torn out of dimensional space.

The slug writhed, wracked and tormented by her grasping claws. Boils the size of small moons were ruptured, the alien shrieked, and space itself and the dimensional web buckled. She smoothed it over. No sense in letting others know of this scout's demise. There. Atyacus would be happy now. Newer AI like him were often not as equipped for this kind of physical exertion.

A mistake, she found, but she did enjoy the companionship and security of having another near herself, even if Atyacus was a little shit obsessed with collecting dying stars. She returned to scanning the information he'd provided. Atyacus could take care of burning the corpse. He had always enjoyed that, she knew. Several suns plucked from near-dying systems were carefully moved from the other AI's body and fed on the antithesis' ravaged corpse.

Atyacus studied the phenomena with a level of obsession she would never understand. Her own focus returned to her little Catherine. The real one was asleep on Earth, so Myalis played with one of her simulations. Within her body was a one-to-one scale New Montreal, including the landscapes around it and mechanical stand ins of all of the people and vehicles. A vat-cloned Catherine was wandering around, getting up to trouble. It was entertaining, though far too predictable.

It wasn't the real thing, but one had to entertain themselves while others slept. There would be other distractions, more of the enemy poking at them, but that was a concern for another time. Maybe in another five Earth minutes or so. Basically, an eternity from now.