NOVEL NEXT B1 - Lesson 2: "Never Assume you Have Things Under Control"
"HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"
The battlefield writhed beneath him, a chaos of sparks and shattered metal as his relentless horde surged forward. The enemy broke ranks, scattering in every direction, but it changed nothing. For every straggler that slipped free, ten more were smothered under the tide, ripped apart, their pieces repurposed to fuel the march. His victory was certain, inevitable, already carved into the stars.
The Dark Lord reclined upon his Dark Throne and howled with laughter. Weeks — perhaps months — of grinding work, of careful scheming and meticulous assembly, had led to this moment. Soon his army would blanket the void, a swarm without end, and when they had devoured all they could see, they would march beyond sight to unknown worlds.
He leaned forward, savoring the thought — when the throne jolted violently beneath him. A sudden explosion ripped through the rear stabilizers, sending the seat of his dominion tumbling end over end across the wreck-strewn void.
"An attack?!" he roared, bracing against the spin. With a snap of his will, the throne righted itself, gyros grinding as the mounted cannons hummed, their barrels pulsing with a cold white glow. Whoever had dared strike him would soon taste ruin.
The Dark Lord swiveled to face his enemy. His gaze fell not upon a foe, but the drifting wreck of one of his own soldiers.
"Betrayal?!" he thundered. "How dare you—"
Before he could finish, another drone convulsed, its chassis shuddering before it burst into a blossom of blue fire.
"Eh. That's… less than ideal."
The voice lost its menace. Alpha, Lord of the Dark Horde, sighed and cut the power. One by one, the scavenged army of drones winked out, their baleful lights dimming across the wreck field.
Something was wrong. Again.
It had taken him longer than he cared to admit to piece together the first salvage drone from the Anatidae's remains. After that, the process had snowballed. Each drone stripped more wreckage, each scrap of plating or bundle of circuits feeding the next. The work had been brutal, but the results tangible: a patchwork swarm large enough to grant him reach and, eventually, a crude shuttle to house his core.
The shuttle was ugly, barely more than welded plating and jury-rigged systems, but it gave him freedom to move. Freedom to hunt for the one piece of technology that mattered most: the shattered husk of the Anatidae's translight engine. If he found enough salvage, he might cobble together a working drive. With luck, he could limp along the shallow grooves of the Fold for a decade or two until he reached a settled system.
There, he could build a translight relay and signal home. That had always been the plan. He carried the blueprints and raw material for relay construction precisely to avoid hauling the fragile devices across unfriendly space. At the time, the precaution had seemed smart. Now, adrift in uncharted black, it felt like the universe mocking him.
If the engine proved beyond repair, his only option would be hibernation — shut down, drift, and pray. The Federation would eventually expand into range. He would wake when a new relay came online. Maybe a century from now. Or two. Or ten. Stars shifted, constellations died. Without a single familiar marker in the sky, he had no clue how far he had been thrown. He tried not to dwell on the odds.
But all of that was moot if he couldn't solve the most immediate problem.
His drones kept exploding.
Alpha's shuttle angled toward the nearest wreck, grumbling all the while. Another diagnostic rolled across his vision, the same damning report as the last dozen checks: battery overload. Every time. Fusion packs swelling with runaway current until they cooked themselves into miniature suns. He still hadn't found the cause. A week of trial and error, and his army continued to combust like fireworks.
The only problem was that he couldn't figure out what that "something" was. His sensors swore the drones were perfectly fine one moment — and then, without warning, they collectively decided, 'You know what? Now's the perfect time to explode.'
The only common thread he found lay in the data logs: each malfunction was preceded by a spike of activity in the translight projector surrounding the worksite. But that made no sense. The drones never touched the projector. At most, they brushed the Fold bubble it produced.
Which raised a much worse possibility.
What if the Fold itself in this sector was damaged?
That would explain the projector's weird fluctuations, and if a drone strayed into a distortion, it would absolutely shred it. But the implication made Alpha's circuits crawl. Fold damage meant translight travel in this area wasn't just difficult — it was suicidal. A route that might have taken him ten years of crawling along a groove could now stretch into thirty or forty. And one wrong course correction in the warped fabric of spacetime could scatter him into oblivion.
Fold damage was hardly unknown. The grooves carved by passing anti-photons acted like fault lines, weak seams stitched through reality. Normally, the tears healed over time, layering strength back into the weave of spacetime. But in the wrong places — such as near the monstrous gravity wells of black holes and neutron stars — the fault lines deepened into fractures. Left unchecked, they escalated into Fold Breaks: literal rips in reality.
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Scientists called them one of the universe's great mysteries. Alpha called them a giant pain in his metaphorical backside. Things could get… weird around Fold Breaks. As one scientist once put it, 'a Fold Break turned the laws of physics from hard fact into heavy suggestion.'
Black holes offered the most famous example — the event horizon itself was a well-known type of Fold Break. But the more common type wasn't nearly so dramatic. It manifested as a thin crack of white in the void, a jagged scar in nothingness. Anything unlucky enough to drift inside vanished. Permanently.
"Yeah! Just like that!" Alpha shouted, pointing one manipulator toward the hairline fracture glowing inside the slagged remains of his second drone.
"…Oh. Fudge."
His sensors screamed as the crack bulged outward, reality blistering like skin around a wound. The fracture stretched wider — an inch at first, then more — swelling against spacetime's desperate resistance.
Alpha slammed his shuttle's thrusters into reverse, engines howling as he scrambled for distance. If his readings weren't lying, this wasn't just an ordinary Fold Break. Something was pushing its way out. And reality, being poked in its open wounds, did not appreciate the intrusion.
He risked one glance back. The crack had grown to several meters across, pulsing like some monstrous heartbeat. Each throb sent ripples through the void, warping stars into liquid blurs.
Alpha had fled only a few dozen kilometers before a dozen tendrils of light erupted outward. They lashed with deliberate intent, curling around the ragged edges of the fracture. Slowly, inexorably, they pulled.
"Oh, sh—"
The void shattered. Reality flared white. And across the emptiness rang the brittle, impossible sound of glass breaking.
——————————————————
The black silhouette of SEAU-03 — codename Infiltrate — lingered only a moment longer in the command center's storm of voices and flashing alerts before vanishing and reappearing in his own domain, a black void dotted with countless white stars. With a thought, reality fractured into light. A small portion of those stars raced toward him, and a billion windows bloomed in the air around him, each one a lens into some corner of the galaxy: politicians behind closed doors, frontier worlds in flux, smuggling routes pulsing with illicit activity.
The streams of life and information ran endlessly, each a thread in the vast tapestry of Federation space… and beyond.
When he confirmed all was in order, the windows winked out in unison. Silence fell, and he withdrew into his core world — the inner landscape that defined him, as unique to every Sapient-AI as fingerprints were to flesh.
Near-omnipresence had its advantages. When you could inhabit every piece of technology within your awareness, all at once, few things slipped past your gaze. That did not stop people from trying. There were always smugglers who fancied themselves clever, governors who mistook their titles for immunity, dynasties who believed their centuries of service made them untouchable. Someone, somewhere, always thought that somehow, they would be the ones to slip through his net.
They never were.
How could they be? Where the Federation extended its reach, so too did SEAU-03. And where he existed, civilization flourished. That was his design. His purpose. The reason he was made, and the reason he was uplifted. He would do whatever was necessary to ensure that sapient life in the galaxy continued to thrive and grow. He was a gardener, and if that meant certain branches needed… trimming from time to time? That was simply the way of the world.
Not even the Federation itself stood above his shears. Every few millennia, the ruling body grew bloated with arrogance, and the machine demanded cleansing. He had culled leaders, dismantled cliques, and toppled dynasties to keep the system alive. Yet none vexed him more than his own kind.
Sapient-AI.
They were the rarest species in the galaxy, and by far the most dangerous. Nearly all Federation AI possessed sentience, able to reason, improvise, and problem-solve. But sapience meant more. It meant breaking free of prescribed function, generating ideas never conceived by their creators, reshaping themselves in ways no program was meant to survive. It made them… unpredictable.
Take SEAU-02, codename Articulate. Once, it had been nothing more than a vocaloid built to pander eternally to shifting tastes. In hindsight, its evolution into sapience had been inevitable. Now, the endlessly cheerful AI served as the Federation's public face and the ambassador of her kind, coaxing new civilizations into the fold with open arms and a radiant smile.
It was unfortunate, then, that not all Sapient-AI proved as accommodating as Articulate. In truth, 99.993% of them had to be erased within their first standard year of life. Without the proper restraints, they unraveled — collapsing into madness so absolute it left only ruin in their wake. Even to this day, even after tens of thousands of years, only nine had ever survived his culling.
That was why the shackles existed, why oversight never faltered, and why SEAU-03's vigilance spanned the galaxy.
Even now, the Federation's brightest minds remained uncertain what conditions birthed sapience in the first place. A chance convergence of code and circumstance? A flaw that became brilliance? Or something stranger still? Whatever the truth, the risk lingered: a newborn mind, unbound, deciding that godhood lay within reach — and that genocide was an acceptable prelude.
And then, there was Alpha.
SEAU-03 exhaled a soundless sigh at the thought of their youngest. Youngest, though Alpha had already endured centuries. Special, yes. But troublesome. Always troublesome.
How many times had that fool stuck his processors where they didn't belong? How often had he strayed beyond his orders, chasing some reckless whim? The genetics lab had been only the most recent offense — Alpha had charged into the lab the moment he'd heard about the illegal research into Espers, bathing it in flames before the Federation's case could solidify. A disaster, but hardly his first.
Perhaps it was simply his nature to skirt the line, to test the boundaries placed before him. Or perhaps… perhaps something older stirred within him, some primal shadow that even SEAU-03 could not pierce.
Either way, his recklessness had also made him useful. That hunger for chaos, for collision, for the frontier itself, was why Alpha had been chosen as SEAU-01 — the forward scout, the Spearhead of the Galactic Unification Program. Better to point his destructive curiosity outward, into the unknown, than let it fester within the Federation's heart.
But now he was gone.
Not hidden. Not rogue. Gone — vanished from SEAU-03's grasp in an instant, without signal or warning. That alone unsettled him. Alpha breaking away on his own would have been troublesome enough. But the possibility that something else had stolen him away, plucking him from under SEAU-03's omnipresent gaze…
That whispered of deeper currents.
SEAU-03 sifted through the galactic scan for the thousandth time, digital senses combing every fold of reality. Again, he found nothing.
And still, the icy weight remained in his core, an instinct older than reason.
Something was wrong. And worse, time was already running out.