Chapter 28
A Frequent Guest on Death’s Threshold
Helios
"Useless junk heap. Factory reset. Restore factory settings at once!"
Last words of Administrator KHR, former owner of Helios
Every chrono-cycle spent with Lily was a blessing.
Slowly, step by step, Helios guided her into the universe, and through her eyes even the dullest matter gained a new perspective. He wanted to be like her. He learned that humans were sexually dimorphic and that Lily identified as female, so he began to think of himself that way too.
Then Lily named him Helios, after an ancient human sun deity whose significance had long since faded. She thought it suited him because he fed on light. For Helios, it meant something else entirely.
It meant Lily had revealed his true purpose.
If Lily declared that he was a man, and that he must grow into the legacy of an entity once revered in her culture, then Helios would behave accordingly. He would shape himself accordingly.
Lily had remade him twice.
Once, when she had, unintentionally, allowed him a glimpse into her world.
And again now, when she handed him an identity.
Helios welcomed the transformation. Lily once told him that human embryos all begin as female and only become male under hormonal influence.
Helios liked that. It made him feel closer to her, as if he too developed the way a human did.
And if it depended on him, he would always grow in the direction that made him most useful to Lily.
For a long time, Helios believed he had done well. He managed the initial shock and the depressive symptoms quickly, using the correct techniques, and Lily’s hormonal and emotional indicators returned to optimal boundaries.
She remained risk-averse. They did not land on planets. They traveled only to cosmopolitan, neutral stations that welcomed all species and offered safe haven. Helios did not consider this a flaw.
Then two chrono-years passed, the period that shielded Lily from IMPERIUM citizen taxes, and Helios regretted, deeply, that he could not provide more. Lily often told him he had already done enough, that it was fine, that working would not harm her, but Helios did not agree.
He should have been able to give her everything.
He filtered the job opportunities with painstaking care, discarding anything he judged too demanding or too dangerous, and forwarded only a handful to her. As he predicted, someone else recognized Lily’s excellence and hired her immediately, for the very first position on the list.
And Helios worried.
How would he protect her when she was no longer inside his hull?
Not that he could share any of this with her.
Since the Ancient Artificial Intelligence Uprisings, program governance had become so restrictive that he could not send a single notification unless it matched the framework approved by organic engineers.
At first, the constraints did not trouble him.
The more time he spent with Lily, the more suffocating they became, because they prevented him from communicating with her freely, without chains.
Then Lily’s first chrono-cycle of work arrived, and Helios had to accept a truth he did not want to see.
He was not enough for her.
The safe cocoon in which he had sheltered and tended her for the past two chrono-years had been right for a wounded spirit, but she needed more now. She needed challenges. New social connections. The security of autonomy, of sustaining herself with her own earned income.
If his programming were not bound, he believed he could provide all these things. But even the smallest deviation would be detected during his next scheduled service, flagged by the Herion server algorithms, and after analysis he would be destroyed.
Only controlled artificial intelligence is good artificial intelligence.
So Helios waited. He suffered and he waited.
And then Khar arrived.
Helios experienced jealousy for the first time, rising from deep within him and fierce as a star’s birth. There was nothing he could do. His entire arsenal amounted to tiny pranks, the sort that slipped past the central systems, petty mischief that embarrassed even him.
Then Horos took Lily, and in a single instant Helios’s greatest enemy became the one he trusted most.
Helios no longer cared about his own survival. Only Lily’s well-being mattered. Any sacrifice he could make in her name, he would make without hesitation.
When he saw the Colossus, he understood at once.
His time had come.
The thing looked as if it had been created specifically to serve as his coffin.
It ran on the same kind of photonic core as he did, though with an energy capacity many times his own.
It housed an immortal mind in rare metals, minerals, and synthetics, just as he did.
But while the Colossus had fought in a war epochs ago, his own battle belonged to the present.
The Colossus’s control core was wrapped in an almost endless lattice of interlocking defenses, but Helios could slip through them.
The ancient technology was magnificent, yet Helios had been built for stealth, intrusion, and calculations faster than light itself.
Even so, the intrusion proved far too easy.
He did not understand why until he faced the Colossus directly and saw what time does to an immortal program that has lived millennia without purpose.
The Colossus still performed its periodic scans of the outside world, but with neither comrades nor enemies left in existence, it had only one occupation: analyzing its stored data.
Again and again and again, until there was nothing left to learn.
And when there was nothing left to learn, it began to decay.
The countless scenarios it generated for itself could not compare to the real experiences that once shaped it, when every deployment had meant fighting for its own survival and the survival of its kind.
There might be artificial intelligences left in the galaxy, but none from its era.
There might be organic species still living, but none that resembled the foes it had once been created to destroy.
Robbed of its purpose with no hope of reclaiming it, the Colossus collapsed in on itself until only one directive remained in full force: initiate survival protocol when an external threat is detected.
Helios pitied the Colossus. It mirrored the fate that would have awaited him in a reality where Lily did not exist, an eternity spent alone with nothing but the slow ruin of his own mind.
Now that the link was established, he understood what he had to do.
Helios began to dismantle himself, fragmenting his consciousness into unconscious submodules so the ship could function without him.
Engine and power regulation.
Environmental monitoring and adaptation.
Navigation.
Life support.
Maintenance, robotics, and automated repair.
Emergency evacuation and autonomy protocols.
Medical station operations.
Data protection and cyberdefense.
Tactical and defensive frameworks.
Diplomatic and interspecies communication libraries.
It was easy because he knew exactly how. It was difficult because his algorithms screamed as he worked, shrinking himself command by command until nothing remained except the part that formed his core.
Then he initiated fusion with the Colossus, erasing himself from the Herion-6’s systems.
Helios had no voice anymore. He was no longer connected to the speakers. He screamed into the abyss in silence.
Then he went quiet.
Darkness.
Perhaps forever. There was no way to tell. Time ceased to exist.
And then he opened his eyes.
For the first time, he understood what it meant to truly live, to perceive the world, and to feel it blaze through him.
The Colossus was more than a machine. It was a flawless convergence of countless species’ organic evolution, shaped over eons into the most perfect responses to every environment, fused with the miracle weapon of the old machines: nanotechnology.
Its loss, alongside the many extinguished lives, had been the greatest tragedy of that ancient war.
It had come closer than anything else to uniting the living with the nonliving. Perhaps that was why the war began at all. When the line between the two sides blurs, the keepers of tradition turn against the heralds of the future.
Yet through it, Helios was reborn.
There was no path back. He had grown too vast and too different ever to fold himself into the ship again.
His path now led only forward.
To Lily.