LF Friends, Will Travel

Our Clockwork Children: Chapter 18

Scellestra was in a lot of pain.

Pain might have been the wrong word, considering their digital form. Distress? Discomfort? Whatever the correct word was, the Woolean felt it, as their entire being was ripped in two. Scellestra had followed Ivan onto the Uhae's ship, but that wasn't a fully correct answer. Some of Scellestra had followed their new Terran friend into danger.

Half of their nanobots lay shifting and hiding among the leafy green hallways that made up the Uhae vessel, listening and watching, slowly growing in power as they awaited help from ODIN. The other half remained on Far-Sa-De, allowing Scellestra to broadcast the vessel's position as it landed on a small hidden outpost at the edge of Uhae space.

The problem with this was a simple case of specifications: The Woolean AI's programming was not designed to handle two individual lives being led at the same time. Every automatic attempt at syncing them together provided a barrage of error messages and warnings that the merge attempt had irrevocable conflicts. It wasn't just the distance, but the time. The half of Scellestra on the Uhae vessel had been travelling at relativistic speeds for some time, meaning the two halves were different ages. While the 'Causality Principle' stopped information from being received ahead of time, this just caused more issues and confusion as their internal workings tried to correct such an impossible task.

The nanobots on the Uhae ship were Scellestra as much as the nanobots still left behind on Far-Sa-De, both sides struggling to make sense of what exactly they were experiencing. The normal solution would be to break the link and allow one of the two parts to shut down, but that would stop Scellestra from being able to contact ODIN.

So the Woolean persevered.

The Uhae outpost was both a wondrous and terrible place. Buildings stretching up to the sky were made of organic greenery: Flowers lined every path; streams, rivers and mountains had been formed even in such a small military location, allowing the blobby forms of the Uhae to wander around in peace as they used their XK abilities to influence the organic land around them. Every building, every room was a work of art, no matter how small. Fountains splashed in grand halls, communal areas merged shining rare gems in between tall spiralling beanstalks reading to the ceiling. Even the lights were made to seem as if the entire area was bathed in a natural calming sunset.

Then there were the non-Uhae. The prisoners were stored in harsh empty cells, in groups or single-person rooms. Hard stone floors, living walls made of sharp wood and thorny brambles left splinters and cuts when touched. The only light illuminating the conditions was from tiny windows in the ceilings, far out of reach. Each hostage, Parket, Terran or other species was left to ruminate and await their captor's next attempt to glean information from them, to force them to march to wherever their next interrogation was.

Interrogating the Terrans had seemingly been a problem for the Uhae. Initially, they had tried several times to connect mentally and read their minds, as they did with any other species. This had gone badly for the attempting Uhae, each one convulsing and collapsing into a seizure, shouting nonsense as they did so. Scellestra wasn't sure what a "Baby shark" or a "Rickroll" was, but they hoped they'd never find out.

Instead, the Uhae had reverted to more primal measures. They were sloppy and inexperienced, but at the end of the day, torture wasn't that much of an art. Anyone could wield a knife and cause pain until they got what they needed.

The real despair came from those who weren't prisoners, but instead slaves. The various races that the Uhae had subjugated long before the Terrans had even entered the galactic community. Mammals and reptilians of all sizes and colours, scurrying along, serving and being abused by their masters on a day-to-day basis. Most weren't even being controlled, they didn't need to be: They'd been broken long ago, before they were even born. For them to go against the Uhae was to go against nature and the universe itself: It just wasn't done, it was unthinkable.