The Core: The Dark Enemy

2. The last dreamers

A week had passed and Tutor, having extra time on her hands between shifts at the hospital, was currently inspecting the crates of stored Skii aboard their personal spaceship. Kevin still had enough time to recover and to decide how he wanted to approach having hitchhikers in his care. In fact, he still had just under five years left to decide.

Plenty of time.

If it wasn't for Nurse's insistence that his mind had been fine the last time that she had sensed him, in that brief moment before he had been cut off from them all, Tutor might have been more worried than she presently was.

As it stood, she was worried, quite a bit actually, but she had chosen to devote her time to maintaining all of Kevin's assets while Meditati looked into ways of freeing their human, her best friend.

George... George was busy building something. Tutor had seen him flickering in and out of VR constantly ever since his workload had been reduced nearly to zero at the hospital on earth.

Tutor didn't know what he was doing but she was sure that it had everything to do with something to help Kevin.

"I hope we can all get back together again soon. AI aren't supposed to feel these dark emotions and the worry is beginning to cause some of us to reach for options that we might not normally consider if Kevin was here to guide us." Tutor whispered to herself softly as she checked the first crate that was labeled to contain the living Skii. There were many others that simply contained foodstuffs and various technology that belonged to the Skii.

Tutor was physically checking the seals and status of each crate solely because of a lesson that she had learned recently as a nurse on earth. Reality was chaotic and reliably imperfect and self-destructive.

Things lacked the order that she was so used to accepting as fact in VR. She was here to make sure that the Skii were all still alive and had not suffered any ill-treatment while existing as cargo.

Skii's were an oddity though. Of all of the more odd alien races, they could take on a state that more resembled death while they hibernated, even more so than bears and frogs on earth.

"It is almost as though their minds and spirits leave their bodies." Tutor mumbled as she read through the extensive logs of the first container.

"Could Skii knowledge be used to help Kevin? Something to do with how they wake up and resume animation?" Tutor mused as she inspected the outside of the next container for any leaks or damage.

"If there is even a chance... then it would be best to divert their course at least to the outside of the Milky Way galaxy. Maybe they can devise a way to get past the invisible shell that surrounds him." She said as she worked through the rest of the containers before marking off one more duty as complete inside her mind. She diverted the ship's course and set a reminder for herself to return when it got close.

"Would you lend me a clone of yourself Meditati when I am about to wake a crate up?" She asked the air as she looked one final time over the small ship's cargo hold.

"Yes. Good idea by the way. Let us hope it bears fruit. I have depleted my first run of tests that I had thought might break through the invisible shell surrounding Kevin. Whatever is surrounding his drone body seems to be alive, as it pulses at steady intervals, vibrating the cr around it." Meditati answered as she sent over the latest batch of data that she had compiled about Kevin's predicament.

Kevin's drone body was currently resting inside his fake body laying on the hospital bed back on earth. The size of the drone was pretty small, about the size of a hummingbird egg, and was encased in an invisible shell that seemed impenetrable, even against the cutting ability of powerful gold and obsidian cr.