The Fine Line

Valerie

The heavy magnetic connection between the anchoring complex and the end of the heavy Kevlar cable dangling from the sky was made. A heavy thunk echoed through the ground beneath me.

I was on a gas giant moon that circled a star one hundred and fifty light-years from Sol. The star didn't have a name, just a catalog number. HIP two one oh five three was attractive because the nearest star was only just over two light-months away. Each system had a relatively large number of planets.

The magnetic rails were now visible high above to my magnified vision as they descended the cable. They would soon allow massive elevators to ascend into space up to a height of three hundred and twelve kilometers. The cable behaved like a cross between a guy wire and a strand of metallic spaghetti. The top of this strand was hung from a silver hair that crossed the sky from horizon to horizon. I could see elevators climbing other cables connected to this strand in the sky. Dots of light, like condensation on a web, reflected the dusk light of the white star that had already fled the thin nitrogen sky.

Did this world need to be terraformed? No. Why was I doing it? Maybe I thought grand projects would justify the past. It was actually a distraction.

I honestly had no idea why I had come out all this way without any real purpose. Most of the work going on throughout the solar system was standard fare performed by sub-sapient machines. I added a little bit of creativity to the work going on. The compound I was in was painted simple complementary colors. I decorated the laser propulsion stations being assembled on the thread above and launched into orbit of the gas giant. I designed vistas to be carved into the landscape. I wasn't stirred by any of these things.

I sat upon a boulder that I allowed to remain in the middle of the compound because I thought it was tasteful. I planned to add grass in the future. It probably would have been uncomfortable if I had been flesh and blood, but that hasn't been the case for a long time now.

My body was a construct of dark metallic bones and white polymer muscles. Perhaps 'chassis' was a better word for it. My mind had long ago been transferred into the black ball I kept in my chest. It was a nice arrangement to my way of thinking. It allowed me to create segments of my mind that could totally focus on a task without truly bringing my full attention to it, among endless other benefits.

I only had a few segments running at the moment the alerts came in from two of them over the course of a couple of hours. A sudden rush of information revealed itself as the segments' knowledge was written directly to my memory and virtual visual cortex. That is to say, two camera views of a yellow speck appeared in my vision. The first was two light-hours and fifteen light-minutes distant. I quickly became concerned. This was new. Nothing about humanity's centuries of cosmic observations predicted something like this. I had no explanation for it, but neither did I have any reason to take aggressive action. However, I broadcast preparatory instructions to my installations across the solar system. Four and a half hours later, the distant speck vanished, and a new one appeared high above the ground, yet inside the atmosphere. It was moving fast but perfectly stationary relative to the now missing one in the far reaches of the system according to the same mind segment that was watching the cameras. The relationship between these two yellow lights was obvious yet too wild to consider just yet.

The readout told me that the new one was extremely near. I looked up. Nearly directly above me was that yellow speck. I wanted to have a better look, and one of my AIs set about finding useful sensors and pointing them in the right direction.

I soon had a better view. It was actually a sphere with the volume of a small room. It wasn't totally opaque. There was something small inside, but I couldn't tell what it was. Neither could the pattern recognition bots trying to help, not with the burning luminosity of air compressed into plasma flaring around the object. They did, however, have relatively high confidence that it was a limp body. The yellow hamster ball falling from the sky did not appear to be under control as it fell at atmospheric re-entry speeds.

All of this was confusing. I was more than a little confident that there was not another human in the solar system. The nearest two were out at the neighboring star doing what I was doing, developing a solar system. One of them did have a great time changing the form of her body regularly. Still, she would have to travel here first, and that would take one hundred fifty days minimum and would be obvious in the extreme. Not to mention that they absolutely had nothing like the objects I was seeing. The one above me was falling much more slowly now, and my systems calculated where it would fall without even a single thought from me to prompt it.

With a thought sent across the compound, my personal VTOL woke up, performed some quick checks, took off, and headed my way. In moments, the hum of electric motors and large rotors descended upon me. While still hovering just above the ground, it lowered the ramp for me, and I quickly strapped myself into the chair inside.

The yellow sphere was still falling when it popped like a bubble. The sensors reported to me the presence of seventeen small objects and a body falling to the ground.

I instructed the VTOL to fly to the projected landing zone. I wouldn't exactly make it in time, but there wasn't a surface on this planet that didn't have the nanoscopic machines that made most of my terraforming efforts possible.

Soon the figure and the other debris struck the ground. Instantly, millions of my nanobots raced across the ground like a swarm of grasshoppers, abandoning their efforts to assist the pastel green and blue lichens in favor of the stranger. It was moments before I saw reports of keratin towers, that is to say, hair and fur, then some had found blood. Those swam 'upstream' to enter through the wounds that were the source. They sent word of their discoveries up their hierarchy of larger, smarter, and more complex machines even as instructions arrived to go further. Discover more.

The largest and smartest of these machines could even rival the size of a grain of fine sand. These in their multitudes did most of the work involved in discovering the identity and state of the intruder, while the smaller ones figuratively served as remote eyes and hands to the larger ones.

The machines told me of lipid bi-layers catastrophically breached. Circulatory fluids running out of oxygen and nutrients and accumulating waste.

When they reported the discovery of a recognizable brain, I ordered them to consume the rest of the body to gather and deliver the resources that the brain was draining from its stagnant blood. It had only been moments since the process started.

I arrived seconds later. Steel valves attached to canisters embedded in the hull of my VTOL opened. Each issued forth a gray stream of liquid that snaked out and raced to the body as I kept a steady pace and took in the sight of a bad scene.

Images and impressions flowed into my mind, and I learned about this dead alien at a rapid pace. Nearly dead, actually. Somehow brain death was still seconds away. Seconds that my machines would make excellent use of in their many millions. Even with the information I already had, I could already tell that this was a bizarre case of convergent evolution. It did not originate on Earth, but nature had found the same solutions to many processes.

The alien was an equine female with a very similar body layout to Earth-based animals to the point that vast swaths of her biology were familiar except for a few extra organs, such as one that seemed to regulate a third circulatory system. She did have the blood and lymphatic systems that I was familiar with, but my machines could not interact with the material in the third. I couldn't even determine if it was a liquid or a gas, but it was delivered everywhere, especially to the wings and hooves. The wings were a surprise. Feathers on a mammal. I was almost certain that the wings were vestigial considering their size, but the unknown substance kept me from closing the book on the idea.

A small part of me pondered her colors. Its coat and feathers were a beige-gray so pale it was nearly white. Its mane and tail were desaturated indigo created by pigment rather than dye, which was odd. It was unclothed, but perhaps that was normal in its society. It resembled Pegasus straight out of Greek mythology made me question the possibility of a connection in our shared past. For now, I ordered my internal software to temporarily assign 'pegasus' as the name of the species in all of my documentation.

Much of her tissues were revealed to be failing for biological reasons rather than purely hit-the-ground-too-hard reasons. It took little time to discover that the DNA strands in every cell were coming unwound. Was this alien especially old? I determined that repairs were not feasible before total cellular failure without dangerously overheating the body and sent a command into my network. It took only seconds before cargo drones arrived with several spools of feedstock ordinarily meant for soft robotics. I didn't watch the process too closely. I was glad that I couldn't feel nauseous. It was an intensive process that took hours, but eventually, I reworked the body of my visitor to make it appear and behave as functional and as healthy as I could.

The results were relatively crude in my eyes, but it worked. The new heart was just a vibration device, and the lungs were only good for speaking and influencing otherwise autonomic functions. The flesh was converted from red meat into white fibrous polymers. I added nutrient storage for energetic compounds to enable the equine to move around and sustain her brain. Dyes were added below the surface of the skin such that light would scatter properly, a key ingredient in the perception of liveliness.

Once I decided that gentle movement was safe, I lifted the pegasus with machine steadiness and carried it into the VTOL.

I shook my head. What a night this was turning out to be.

***

It took an entire day in the infirmary before my efforts started to show the first signs of working. It wasn't my efforts, per se. The sub-sapient AIs were doing all of the work, but I regularly had to make decisions. The body of the alien was complete, but the brain was not. A lot of information had been lost. The strength and pattern of connections between brain cells themselves constituted memories and skills in the alien just as in humans. Most patterns had many copies, but I wouldn't be able to recover everything.

Soon enough, the brain of the winged alien was known to me to the degree that it became possible to understand the purpose of whole structures of neurons, but not necessarily the information contained within them. I soon replaced important neural structures that were destroyed entirely, but I had to borrow from human patterns to do it, lacking any other examples to choose from.

During the process, a machine walked into the room. It looked far more human than my current mechanical body. This was by design, of course. It was an android, a robot with the appearance of a human. It wore a face that was mine once and would be again, but I could not remember if it was my original look or not. Those memories lay behind digital caution tape that I did not meddle with. I sent a command, and it unbuttoned its shirt. The flesh below the sternum recessed nearly back to the spine, revealing access to a port behind the ribs.

I instructed my own chest to open, and I retrieved a black sphere the size of a grapefruit. My core. Its surface was covered in sockets and metal plates, and inside was the hardware and software that formed my mind. I looked down upon the device. I remembered for just this moment just how surreal my life was. I delivered the heavy object to the port on the android, and it was collected by small arms that reached out and took it. The flesh below returned to its natural position and closing the seam. My body was now just a remote-controlled robot. The android connected to my core. In an instant, without any new outward change, the android had transformed into a post-human. It was now me. I sent new commands to relinquish control of the metallic form I had worn to that point.

Now I at least looked more human. I felt a little more alive. I sensed the chill of the thin air. I reached ahead to touch the fur of the pegasus. It reminded me of a house cat. The cut of the fur wasn't long, but it was soft. Somehow, it became easier to set aside my burdens. I found myself with new reasons to heal the stranger. There remained extensive brain damage, however. I focused on following the work of the AIs. It wouldn't be long, now.

There were times that it seemed almost conscious, but lucidity did not come easily. Eventually, I overcame a threshold. The tiny machines plugged into every brain cell reported patterns of undirected thought. Dreams.

The AIs built into my mind couldn't say with total certainty, but I may have succeeded. I climbed out of my chair and rolled it to the wall beside the bed that engulfed my guest. I pulled a blanket over it in case its state of undress would have bothered it.

I exited the room on soft steps. My system told me that actual 'first contact' would probably go better if it wasn't greeted with the sight of me towering over it. I also needed something with a screen in a hurry. I was willing to smirk at the idea. Very old-fashioned.

I closed the door behind me as I left.

Sierra Sky

My head was full of cotton, and my legs felt only as solid as water. I was confused. I flexed my forehooves. The touch of the bed beneath me was odd. The aching in my joints was missing. I peaked past my eyelids, wondering where I was. I was ready for my eyes to go through a painful adjustment to the light, but there was no such discomfort. That extra oddity fled from my thoughts as I began to study the room I was in.

I thought I was in the hospital for an instant, but the white ceiling didn't look right. Then, as my mind shed its brain fog, I remembered. I stole the AMSTER, I took it to a different dimension, and I got hurt! There was fire! I wasn't sure what had happened, but now I was… somewhere.

My heartbeat picked up its pace. I flexed my limbs. They felt too light; they moved too easily. The pain I expected was still missing. In a slow, deliberate manner, I turned my head away from the wall, searching for something that would explain to me what was happening.

I quickly discovered several things. The room was half-lit with the natural light of what might have been dawn or dusk. The bed was relatively high off the floor. There was a chair that would have engulfed my body, and it was all so high above the floor. The walls were made of a white… stone? I couldn't tell. There was a wide window shrouded by what appeared to be slat-style blinds.

That's when I spotted a form passing by the window, its shadow leaking through the gaps as it approached my door. It must have been almost twice my height.

I wouldn't have been so scared if I had put even a little bit of thought into what was happening. Before I knew it, I had pressed myself against the wall behind me. A pair of gentle knocks on the door sounded before it opened.

A strange face peered at me. There was no fur on its pale pink-beige skin that I could see, but it had a mane that was an interesting combination of red and brown. It had no muzzle. Its eyes were on the small side. It was wearing black clothing and stood on two legs.

It was also very tall, maybe even taller than Celestia, but I wasn't sure about that. Was this the creature I was looking for? I was getting nervous until it sat down and introduced itself.

"Valerie," it said, patting its chest with the odd flat object that it was carrying.

I let my shoulders slump, and I let out the breath I was holding. It was introducing itself. It wanted to talk. I put a hoof on my chest and replied, "Sierra."