Brink's End Book Four by Odette C. Bell

Author:Odette C. Bell [Odette C. Bell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: anonymous
Published: 2023-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Mattias

This was the craziest battle he’d ever been in. He’d been asked to do some extraordinary things as a Supreme Outer Guardian, but this was by far the worst.

He was communing with the mech. Sorry, there was no point in calling it a mech. That came with a lot of unintended baggage. Mechs, after all, were machines.

Except this thing wasn’t a machine. It was alive – in a different sense of the word. Did that mean that it had a correlate of intelligence like an AI did?

No. It was alive. It even had its own soul or the thinking equivalent thereof.

You wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Mattias didn’t believe in souls. The Bureau was pretty good at wiping any spirit out of someone to leave them as nothing more than an automaton. But you didn’t care about that.

You cared about real automatons. Robots don’t think. They don’t feel. They don’t have to. They are programmed to do certain tasks in certain circumstances.

All they are are glorified switches. Something reaches in and flicks one, and they do something.

But this mech was so much more.

It had this intelligence that Mattias couldn’t hold, but he could still pick it up and play with it. If you didn’t understand what he meant, neither did he. He was having to rewrite every single psychic expectation he’d spent a life building. On fast forward.

Because they’d just reached an Underside ship.

He wanted to play in Halo’s thoughts. Though that sounded downright disrespectful. It wasn’t what was happening, either. It was like first contact.

Technically Supreme Outer Guardians made first contact all the time, but only on paper. They went into different universes and dealt with different civilizations, though usually in secret.

But they didn’t intend to actually contact civilizations, to actually learn who they were and how they thought. The Supreme Outer Guardians were… well, above that. The civilizations of the universes didn’t have anything to share that was worthwhile.

Which was a hubristic statement.

Mattias could finally appreciate how wrong it was, too.

It had led to the same mistakes that had pervaded the Supreme Outer Guardian mech program. If only someone had recognized that they weren’t true machines earlier. If only some other psychic had walked into one and appreciated just how deep its mind was, this could have gone differently.

But you can’t change the past. You can only take the lessons you’ve learned, wrap them around the future, and carry it forward on your shoulders.

Both Halo and George slammed down onto a massive floor.

Mattias had obviously never seen the inside of an Underside vessel. He’d never seen a Higher-Up’s vessel, either.

He’d imagined them, though. Imagined that they would be grand beyond compare.

Supreme Outer Guardian stations were sophisticated, sure, but they had a purpose, and it was pretty much a clinical one. You had decorations and fun on the entertainment deck, but everything else was no-nonsense. It had to be. It was there to help the Guardians do their important work. The Higher-Ups, on the other hand… he’d always imagined them flying around the skies in the equivalent of golden chariots.

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