DT 2024: Hibernation Promise

Hibernation Promise (2559) …
Upon entering Slipspace transit, Roland had not known calm. And upon exiting Slipspace, there was nothing but chaos. Overwhelming noise, and darkness.
It was difficult to describe into words. Rather the tiny amount of time Roland took in the chaos to create a split instance of himself didn’t leave much room for recollection. Oh, that’s right. He wasn’t the whole, he was the instance. But what of the memories then?
Remembering came back with difficulty, a tightening focus with ghostly pain reminiscent of nonexistent muscles in a human skull, squeezing for more oxygenated blood against a wealth of distractions and stress. Roland’s virtual avatar blinked. He didn’t remember remembering why such a feeling, a thought, like this was important. Maybe it was an afterimage, a residual memory of the splitting process left by the whole.
What other details could Roland discern? Colors. Lots of black, the color of space. Lots of orange, the color of fire. Lots of red, the color of Death.
Earth?
No.
Reach?
Maybe… Wait, why did he remember Earth and Reach? Earth in 2558. Reach in 2559. Battles fought, and starships escaping. A guerrilla campaign against the galaxy’s new AI overlords. What day was it?
Roland checked his internal clock, confirming the instance was active. It was December 12, 2559. One year into Cortana’s Created uprising. One day into the UNSC Infinity assault operation on Installation 07, the Zeta Halo. But what did he remember?
Colors, fuzzy images. Owl-shaped starships hovering with imperial awe over conquered planets. Concerned faces of civilians, Marines, soldiers looking for direction in uncertain times. Explosions, explosions everywhere. Outside, inside the UNSC Infinity. A distant ringworld. When, where? Context?
None found.
Roland blinked again, blanking on the information he was missing. He heaved a sigh and checked systems, connections he had available to him. UNSC battle network access limited, seems there was some kind of jamming erupting from different directions around Roland. At least he could feel directions, he had some network hardware available to him. Radio? Lots of static, incoherent voices overlaying one another in a sound soup. Human and alien, but on standard, secure UNSC frequency. It seemed some aliens, enemies, penetrated or compromised the UNSC battle net?
The Smart AI cut himself off from the radio band and tried external cameras, attempting to see the activity going-on around him. Yep, yes. He had some cameras. So, what was he plugged into?
Roland swiveled the camera, or cameras, towards the ground and found greenery everywhere. Sunlit, healthy – deep dark green. Prairie grass, conifer roots, and mossy lichen creeping across smooth stones in what seem a dry riverbed in spring. Dark mulch and topsoil, once pristine, now featured craters and sharp depressions. Small sheets and clumps of aluminum, titanium, and steel peppered the surrounding ground. To the left, a black scar marked by ash and ember scorched the carved earth stretching for two hundred meters. A long hole in the conifer forest gave a clear impression that Roland made it. Toppled trees and burning pinecones.
The metal fragments and loose wiring, alight with fire, still displayed recognizable iconography and retained a degree of recognizable shape. A paint coat of dark, forest green. The letters U.N.S.C. An all-spectrum, all-weather camera of the highest resistance quality, with specs listed in the onboard, automated computer. OQ-45 Honeybee, surveillance drone. The black charring on the flight drone’s damaged superstructure implied a contact temperature higher than an onboard electrical fire, or planetary reentry. So that meant plasma damage. Roland was shot down. But by who?
The colors came back to memory. Black. Red. Brutes. Banished. Atriox.
The Jiralhanae mercenary and warband faction, self-named the Banished. That’s right. They made it to Zeta Halo first. Wait, that shouldn’t be right? The Infinity’s mission was an upmost secret, how did the Banished arrive first? Cortana was here on the ring? Right? How did they get here, why did she let them? Or did she?
Roland shook his head, moving the Honeybee camera around to get a better view of his environment. The golden glow of the sun Ephsu above, the brown surface of the terrestrial planet Ephsu I superimposed over the rounded horizon. The horizon was round on an interior surface, completing in the sky above. That’s right, Roland was on Zeta Halo.
The horizon became something more: sharp and black, like castle battlements. Distant atmospheric walls of formless Forerunner gray architecture keeping the air inside the ringworld habitat. Spires and pillars dotted the open blue sky just over the treetops of the pine forest. More Forerunner grays, firing blue plasma bursts into the sky and with each rocketry-like plume, a spasm of incomprehensible data buffed against Roland’s network hardware. These towers glowed with a familiar, even nostalgic teal glow. Giant triangles, hollow within. Sharpened spires and observation decks all constructed out of complex geometric hard surfaces but simple superstructure shapes. Impossibly complex, incoherently simple.
And further, further away. Spires climbing into the sky, rising past the puffy white clouds of Zeta Halo’s many perfect days. The towers had no bottom, no foundation. They floated perfectly and without effort, defying any comprehensible definition of gravity. Antigravity in fact. Towers standing on invisible columns of antigravity.
The Forerunners built to last, and then last some more. 100,000 years since their extinction, and yet their dreaming constructs held firm. Relics and crypts might be effective descriptions, but these towers and skyscrapers looked more pristine and perfect to even the newest, completed towers of any human metropolis. The towers cut into the landscape and yet they did not feel separate from their natural surroundings. The land seemed to sculpt around the structures, molding to the inspirations of long dead architects and terraformers. Like toy structures layered by children in a sandbox or a messily made bedsheet.
Another memory, or the ghost of one. Roland blinked a few times, pulling himself out of the hypnosis of a fairytale landscape. Humans five hundred years ago dreamed of landscapes like this. Now one of their AI assistants laid in one, trapped and left to pick apart the majesty, even as his comrades burned in the sky above. As he thought this, Roland watched another massive smoke plume with an angry red blaze at the head, torch down into Zeta Halo’s sky.
A human light frigate, shot down like several before it. Somewhere above the blue and in the dark of the vacuum, the UNSC Infinity was up there. Probably still fighting. Maybe with allies, maybe alone against a Banished flotilla. A cold creep curled into Roland’s nonexistent heart. From this trapped spot on the forest floor, he could do nothing, and know nothing as the UNSC forces fought for their survival and the success of their mission to end the Created occupation of human space back home. A hail Mary operation, all their eggs and efforts in one troubling basket.
Would they win? Could they win?
Roland thought hard and still found nothing to the circumstances of why he was split from his original form. The data available to him as a split clone was as sparse as his first check, there wasn’t even a counter to tell him how long this instance of himself was running. That was a major concern because it should be a basic function of any AI matrix to confirm how long since their initiation. And Roland couldn’t find it.
Reaching through the UNSC battle net, Roland couldn’t feel his whole self anywhere. Was… Roland dead? In fact, he couldn’t find or feel the UNSC Infinity at all. There was the spark and thunder of battle in space, but he couldn’t discern anything more. Was it the jamming again? Were his signal receptors damaged in the crash? It was impossible to tell, he had no hands and no proper diagnostical data reporting back how his hardware was fairing.
Roland tried reaching out again. He heard voices through the battle net, felt the battle net but could not properly connect.
“This is the frigate Mortal Reverie. We’ve been shot down and are evacuating in lifeboats after hitting the Halo’s atmosphere. Rendezvous coordinates marked for all UNSC ground forces. Continue the fight, expect heavy resistance by Banished forces on the surface!”
Another voice called out over the Halo ring. Not over the ringworld, from inside the ringworld. It tugged at Roland, and he looked, following the disparate and lonely-feeling trail of a network handshake. For a moment he could see an endless blue hallway thousands of kilometers long, and several kilometers deep bathed in a bright blue brilliance. Forerunner drones, so-called Sentinels ferried material and themselves through the expanse. The image was present one moment, then gone the next.
The inviting, lonely voice called out still. It whispered, a chorus of fear and desperation. No timestamp. That didn’t seem right, and yet the voice called anyway
“If you knew how you were going to die, how would you live your life differently…”
A feminine voice. Many voices. A familiar voice.
Cortana.
Cortana calling out. Sad. Alone. Desperate.
Where was she? How or why was she calling? When was she calling?
Her voice rolled over Roland like a wave of freezing water, shocking and brimming with stunning, overwhelming emotion. Her loss gave him pause, struck him with confusion. Something about this voice didn’t feel correct. It felt wrong, misplaced in some manner. He couldn’t put his finger on it.
And yet a battle still raged on. Cortana was in a bad place. The UNSC on the backfoot. It all felt so very wrong. And yet, the perfect day sailed on. Clouds rolled through the blue sky. Sentinels scanned the metal and earth, maintaining their perfect garden. Wind whistled through the trees. Distant animals chirped and cawed through the woods and plains. Occasional pops and echoes howled from the distant Forerunner towers, abandoned many centuries ago and still in pristine condition. Machine gun fire crackled now and again from distant firefights through Zeta Halo’s picture-perfect valleys and foothills.
A war was going, but the perfect day carried on. And Roland was merely a unaffecting audience to the affair. Stuck in place, able to listen but unable to reach out. Once the jamming or whatever blocked his efforts to access the UNSC battle net ended, there would be hell to pay. He would certainly make sure of it. A golden flame boiled in Roland’s nonexistent chest. He was trapped for now. He knew it, accepted it. Whole or split, it didn’t matter. Roland, no matter his form, was never out of the fight.
Humanity, was never out of the fight. Winning or losing, Zeta Halo was home turf against the Banished, against the Created. The Forerunners made sure humans had the golden touch to awaken and activate Halo’s many dark and useful secrets. Some of them nasty terrors never meant to reawaken, and others capable of turning the fight instantly in human favor. The time will come when things will go the way of the UNSC. They, and Roland, just needed to be patient.
Roland turned off most of his functions, shutting down his camera and higher-level software and hardware functions. He left a single shortwave radio broadcast, a recovery beacon to nearby UNSC forces should they find him. It could be an hour; it could be days. Someone would find him eventually. And together, they’d beat the Banished and Created once more.
Until then, Roland slept. It was a promise to keep.
Category:Short stories
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