ChronoBot Chronicles (USS Hamilton) by Mark Wayne McGinnis & Jennifer M. Eaton

Author:Mark Wayne McGinnis & Jennifer M. Eaton [McGinnis, Mark Wayne & Eaton, Jennifer M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Avenstar Productions
Published: 2023-08-15T22:00:00+00:00

With the conversation exhausted, we retraced our steps back to our respective dorms, aware that mere minutes remained before lights out. Orin maintained close proximity to me this time, and my heightened awareness of his presence triggered warnings from my HSA, reminding me of my increased heart rate. I cursed under my breath. As I approached my dorm area, an urgent call interrupted my thoughts—the summons for my next infusion.

Chapter 23

Hardy

Hardy was dreaming.

In the sterile silence of his mind, this was an impossibility. A ChronoBot didn’t dream, didn’t sleep, didn’t surrender to the ethers of a subconscious. Yet he was in a realm of imagination, or memory, staring into a battlefield littered with the carcasses of monstrous beasts, grotesque in their multiplicity of legs and gaping maws.

He saw names, heard them echo in the hollow chambers of his mind. Hamilton. Adams. Oblivion. Jefferson. Lincoln. Familiar and foreign all at once, floating in the space of his memory like comets without orbits. Faces of men and women were smudged in the lens of his recollection. An alien species, different from the multi-legged beasts, loomed large in his vision. But also people … those with feelings of warmth and familiarity, faceless and nameless in the collage of his fragmented past.

The waves of images and sounds crashed, broke, and receded, leaving him in the quiet darkness of confusion. Hardy, for the first time, felt a surge of an information overload, a sensation akin to humans experiencing the mind-bending effects of hallucinogens. He reached out to LuMan, demanding clarity for the unexpected dream-like sequence.

LuMan, always the bearer of bad news, reported the situation.

LuMan: Your memories were fragmented and are defragmenting, but doing so too slowly, too sporadically. It implies possible imminent failure.

“Terrific,” Hardy said, feeling the sinking weight of that prospect. The dreams, memories, whatever, seemed too valuable to have simply disappear.

Listening to the ship’s synthetic hum and vibrations, his attention shifted to Loni. She was in HealthBay. Hardy slipped into the ship’s network, his program mingling with the digital ether. Denzel was there, preparing Loni for an infusion.

“I told you, girl. It’s prepping you for work here on Gossamer.”

She laughed. “Read my résumé. I’ve spent a lifetime on stations like this. This is unnecessary, which I’ve told everyone, like, over and over again.”

Curiosity piqued, Hardy dove into the data stream, pulling up information about the infusions. HealthBay was a treasure trove of medical data. He saw the patterns, recognized the treatments. A broken wrist, nose bleeds, and a petty officer with an alien venereal disease, but nothing more about the Rivon3 Metabolic Boosters, nothing about their composition. And there was the name SynthoGen, which revealed nothing more.

His mind began to swim with questions, possibilities, conjectures. Why would ChronoBots be needed on a mining outpost like Rivon3? Especially since they already had modestly adequate security bots. There had to be a connection between the infusions, SynthoGen, and Rivon3.

Hardy descended deeper into the labyrinth of data, hacking through the layers of security. Infusion records, patient logs, raw data, everything he could get his virtual hands on.

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