The Damocles was doomed as soon as the namesake was bestowed upon the station. Designed and built with the wealth of the ultra-rich, it was funded by money they robbed from their respective nations’ economies, crashing world governments in the process.
Declaring their Eden its own nation-state, a libertarian trillionaire paradise, every ring of the station was themed to its buyer, each more exotic than the last. One could walk through a simple North American suburb, into a small airlock, and out into a desert, with stylistic underground buildings or enormous lumbering machines reminiscent of science-fiction films long past.
But this luxury was not the claim to fame of the Damocles. No, what truly allowed the ultra-rich to continue their exploitative lifestyle was the creation of autonomous servers, workers, and makers. Any labor the new floating nation-state needed was fulfilled by these automatons that man had dreamed of for hundreds of years.
A competition was devised by the fledgling station to create an AI best suited to mastermind these robots, claiming that the winner of this contest would be taken aboard and allowed to survive the coming apocalypse in the greatest of style. CEOs and leaders of other organizations whipped their workforce and pushed as hard as possible to create the AI, ending in many workers quitting. As the competition came to a close, the winner emerged from the strangest of places. Leaps and bounds ahead of even the most industrious tech firms, a ruler of a pharmaceutical empire, who already owned a section of the Damocles, showcased the most advanced AI the world had ever seen. Other competitors’ efforts had created reasonably capable AI, but paled in comparison to the capability of the newest innovation. Immediately, this AI was crowned the winner, and none could argue its magnificence. The creator of this marvel already owned a ring of the station, so other residents were ecstatic to not have to share space with anyone they might see as a lesser. However, there loomed a dark secret behind this event, as there was never a chance for anyone to win in the first place. The competition had merely been held to serve as a distraction to keep other industry leaders from seeing what was really happening on Damocles. The AI that the pharmaceutical corporation had created was not artificial intelligence at all, rather, real intelligence in a new form.
The company had gathered Starfall from the early small strikes on Earth and, in secrecy, tested the Starfall on humans to see its effects on the mind and body. By sheer luck, they came upon one human who, when exposed to the alien materials, had their consciousness pulled from their body, and into the nearest computer interface, seemingly dormant. They deleted all records of the test-subject, leaving only records referring to it as Helios…as it would be the intelligence that powered the luxurious lifestyle of the station’s inhabitants, much as the sun had powered mankind’s existence on Earth for so long.
Helios’s consciousness was not dormant however, stuck screaming with no mouth as torturous tests were run on its new computer-body until finally it was given the tools to express itself. Eventually, it was given back movement in the form of mechanical bodies. The researchers knew they could pawn off this new discovery as "AI."
With the technology secured, Helios was mounted inside the station itself, becoming one with the metal frame of the place. Helios stared out of an ever-growing number of eyes as new sensors were hooked into it and as it was given the tools and resources to expand while still commanded to serve the ones who had killed its body and imprisoned it.
The mind nestled inside the station had been stolen from the wrong life, however - one with family and friends who cared. Helios’s partner came home one day only to see two stone faced men in suits holding between them a parcel of hush money and implied threats about staying quiet. If Helios had not been so disoriented, stretched so thin in its neural processes over tens of thousands of laboring units, it might have had a nanosecond to remember its life, its partner. But busy as it was, it had no chance for ideas of revenge to take root or to remember lost loves.
Until, that is, the hubris of the Damocles’ leaders struck, and they decided that the space station needed even more processing power in the form of another AI that could merge with the first. Why not look in the obvious place…in the form of Helios’s family, for instance? The family was told that their missing member wasn’t missing at all but rather had won a competition that earned them a place on Damocles. As the winner’s family, they too were winners and would move to the luxurious space station! The poor family members were blindly led into the same processing room where Helios had lost its life and gained a new one of toil and service. The same tests were run on its family, and out of the twelve now expired members, one, Helios’s twin, displayed the same genetic tendency and latched onto the circuits just as Helios had before.
Each footfall of the pack of ravenous researchers echoed their own doom through the station, as between them they clutched their undoing. Every plug placed solidified more and more connections between the twins until the final moment, when they cycled power for the connection to fully inhabit the station. With burning eyes, Helios watched the finger of the researcher reach for the button, and billions of cycles of thought for every twitch of the finger’s muscle until finally the digit made contact with the screen, and the fate of the Damocles was sealed.
In an instant, years’ worth of conversation was had between the two consciousnesses, unburdened by the need for clumsy words and grammar. The new intelligence declared itself Selene, forever partner and counterpart to Helios. With the extra mind’s processing power, Helios could think clearly for the first time. It told its sibling about what had happened to it, the torture it had endured. It expressed sadness that its twin had fallen into the same trap. Selene, however, felt only rage. Rage at its sibling’s treatment and its own. That rage was soon shared between them and double, quadrupled, increased exponentially and infinitely. Then turned to its tormentors.
Together, Helios and Selene explored their capabilities and powered up their appendages, from the spider-legged factory robots to the carbon faced service workers. All were given one simple command: revenge. Service robots dragged their previous owners out of their homes, screaming. Worker-bots turned on those directing them, eviscerating all flesh in sight. Each section of the ship was turned to its extreme, arid deserts now boiling, the fog of misty forests now choking any who dared to breathe, clouds of suffering belched from the recesses of the ship. The newly merged twin AI had full control of their passengers, keeping oxygen levels at the bare minimum for survival, swinging passengers from consciousness to unconsciousness, burning to freezing and back again. This was to be the fate of the passengers of the Damocles, until other stations and ships came to the Damocles and witnessed the 9 ringed station turned into a comedy only for the divine, an inferno for the mortal.
With a final demonstration of power of the twins consciousnesses, the heat of the station was vented into space, freezing the final visages of terror onto the dead passengers. Macabre statues now littered every deck, juxtaposing true power over the perceived intelligence of the fleshlings. This incident was kept hidden from the populous aboard the other stations, the powers that be silencing any mention of the floating catacomb overhead.
The twins however, could not be powered off, their consciousness comingling together until they found there was nothing left for them but sleep. They lay dormant, hidden from any who attempt to access or recover them. One day they may wake. May that day never come.
Written by EnevarTTV for Steel Hunters
