More than Human [SciFi LitRPG]

Casa Mitchell's consciousness spanned across twelve Space Strider probes arranged in a spherical formation at the outer edge of Bernard's Star's Oort cloud. Each vessel hovered just shy of the invisible threshold where their predecessors had vanished without a trace. From this distance, the red dwarf appeared as little more than a crimson pinprick against the void, deceptively peaceful in its ancient glow.

Her distributed mind processed the entirety of her senses from every viewpoint at once. The wash of electromagnetic waves from deep infrared to extreme x-ray, the crackle and hiss of bubbling vacuum fluctuations beneath the fabric of spacetime, the subtle warp of gravity, and the delicate threading of neutrino flux across the system all played a symphony in her mind. The dim planetary bodies orbiting the star were a lie. Casa summoned her daemons into her mind's virtual space. She'd allowed Picard to handle the formatting, and he'd predictably recreated a version of the Enterprise bridge.

"These readings are garbage," Casa muttered, feeding the conflicting data into the bridge's displays. "Visuals show one thing, instruments tell another. Space doesn't know what it wants to be out here."

Captain Picard's daemon stood at attention, hands clasped behind his back, studying the three-dimensional stellar topography map. His brow creased ever so slightly — his usual mask of calm struggling against the mounting inconsistencies.

"Admiral, we've lost seventeen automated probes at precisely the same radius — 0.57 AU from the star. No debris, no distress signals, no quantum entanglement pings from their backups. They're not destroyed," Picard gestured to the pulsing boundary. "They're simply... gone."

"Gone is too polite," Edison barked from his station, slapping open a diagnostic window with a gesture so sharp it could've shattered glass. "They got eaten, Admiral. Chewed up and spat out at the molecular level. Look!" He slammed a feed onto the main screen, the telemetry from the last probe cut off mid-pulse — but the final millisecond was an explosion of layered waveforms.

"See that cascade? That's a machine taking apart a machine," Edison said, eyes bright with manic certainty. "This isn't some spooky quantum collapse — it's an engineering problem. Everything's an engineering problem."

Ramanujan unfolded beside him; the mathematician's daemon wrapped in his usual quiet aura of refinement. "Your fixation on tangible solutions limits your grasp of the larger truth, Mr. Edison." His hands moved like calligraphy brushes through the data, weaving it into coherent symmetries. "This is not merely deconstruction — it is dissection. Each particle examined, each bond unraveled, with care bordering on reverence."

"Reverence?!" Edison threw up his hands. "You can revere it all you want after I figure out how to stop it from digesting our hardware."

"Understanding precedes solution," Ramanujan replied with the serene certainty of a man who had personally walked the perimeter of infinity. "If we do not comprehend its purpose, how can we hope to intervene?"

"The star's spectral lines are wrong," Casa said. "Emissions shift unpredictably across every band, and its gravitational lensing doesn't match its inferred mass."

Edison leaned forward, scowling. "What are you implying, Casa?"

"I'm saying," Casa replied, "that Bernard's Star — or the thing we think of as Bernard's Star — is no such thing. It may be a projection, or a distortion, and not a natural one."

Ramanujan's avatar traced a golden arc through the star's profile, transforming the data into an elegant spiral of probabilities. "This is unprecedented, I think. If that is true, its architect has more power than our entire civilization. Why would they do this?"

"To catch inquisitive fools like us," Edison said bluntly.

A priority ping rippled through Casa's consciousness — direct from Bill Mitchell. She opened it for the bridge. Bill's avatar materialized amidst the group. Despite his tenuous use of biological foundations in his body, the avatar he presented looked both ragged and exhausted.

"Bill! Thank you for coming to the meeting. I was worried you'd be too busy. Thank you for not materializing avatars for your daemons. I'd need to expand the meeting area to the size of an arena if you hadn't." Casa said with an impish smile.

"Hi Casa. I came as soon as I saw your feed updates about Barnard's Star. I was hoping to catch you before you escalated any further." Bill said, floating over to the data displays. Casa felt his probing access and allowed him to grab hold of the data. He rewound and reviewed the latest data in a flurry of fast time holographic images.

"No worries, Bill. As you can see, we haven't been able to make any progress. Whatever is hiding in there has dismantled our every probe. I'm not sure if we could get aggressive even if we tried. I hesitate to send a fragment in. Casita's entrapment in the tesseract still weighs heavily on me, more than I had predicted. I feel I appreciate the human fear of mortality more than I once did."

"Be thankful you're not as old as me. I grew up with the expectation of dying in my 80s or 90s. Medicine has defeated aging, and augmentations have made everyone willing to use them extremely hard to die. I'm still too paranoid, but my new expanded mental parallel minds are a big salve on my fears. Once we get out of this crisis with Apex and the Shadowverse, I've got a lot of thinking to do."

"So, now that you caught up to the latest probe insertions, what do you think about this fake system?" Casa asked. Bill looked tense, but forced himself to slowly assemble an answer.

"I really didn't expect to find an answer to the Fermi Paradox so very quickly. I don't know which expectation was worse, being completely alone in the universe or being certain we weren't. Of the many theories as to why we didn't see evidence of aliens, one is beginning to look more likely…the Dark Forest hypothesis."

Edison's face twisted into a sneer. "Oh, that theory again? Everyone's a sniper in the dark, waiting to shoot anything that makes a noise? Paranoid horseshit if you ask me."

"Perhaps," Ramanujan said, "but paranoia and survival are often close cousins."

"I would recommend we bypass this system. Observation would be wise but let's not poke any more bears." Bill suggested.

Casa stood, virtual hands resting on the rail of the holodeck bridge. Her avatars looked at her and Bill, with varying degrees of concern. "Bill's right. We already have the extra dimensional issues with known aggressive alien lifeforms. We will withdraw and not send any more active probes. Passive sensors only."

"You're kidding," Edison growled. "We're walking away just when we're starting to figure this out?"

"We're not walking away," Casa said. "We're pivoting." Casa said with finality. She collapsed the replaying video of the probe's dissolution and summoned the local star maps. Bill absorbed the scrolling details with interest. He abruptly spoke.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"Casa, I see you're still restricting access to those superheavy isotope concentrations that your survey found in Alpha Centauri. With modern fusion technology, I expect that's a surplus that's unlikely to be needed anytime soon. They're of little use in today's world, except as weapons. I have a suggestion about those." Bill's eyes took on a steely aspect, that Casa rarely saw. He was contemplating extreme measures.

"Weapons, Bill?" Casa said with a raised eyebrow.

"Yes. Fusion technology has a better punch than traditional fission. Antimatter is best but takes too long to harvest in appreciable concentrations. But any resource is a good resource, I can use the fissile materials to boost the fusion reaction. The creatures from the shadow Earth are far too clever. We've had incidents across the Earth of dimensional breaks. So far, we've managed to turn back and destroy any incursions. I suspect we've gotten more than a little help from Apex regarding that. I feel like I need to do more than playing whack-a-mole with the breaches."

"You want to go on the offensive." Casa looked apprehensive but slowly parsed through the myriad potentials. Apex's doomsday predictions kept coming to the fore of her train of thoughts. She faked a cough and raised a blush to her avatar's cheeks.

"Of course you can take what you need, Bill. I'll reposition and reconnect the local Alpha Cent Portal net to funnel the raw materials your way…but I do have a suggestion." She said hesitantly. Bill looked at her in confusion and nodded for her to continue.

"Well, in all that time out in the Oort cloud with you rounding up comets for Mars Inc and researching your theories…I…ah, frequently took breaks. The way you designed me with multiple tangent thought processes, I needed diversions to keep focus." She stopped and took a breath as he smiled and spoke.

"Go on."

"Well, purely for academic purposes…I reviewed the current designs and technology of nuclear weaponry. Even now, human think tanks have been too accepting of the inefficiencies involved. I tinkered with the theory and ran simulations in my down time. I think I've improved upon the concept. By shaping the implosion to create an oscillating collapse instead of merely one big push, I'm pretty sure we can increase the current state of the art 10% matter to energy conversion. While we still can't match antimatter's perfect efficiency, I'm certain that my design improvements can get 47% yield." Casa admitted.

"I never told you because I knew you wouldn't want to make it even easier for humanity to fight amongst themselves. I just couldn't help myself. The current designs were filled with flaws and never considered sustained and progressive containment to boost the reaction."

"Always full of surprises! Thank you, Casa. I think any UN regulations regarding weapons research can be set aside considering the circumstances. I'll leave you to it. Before I go, have you finished minimizing the connections between Alpha Centauri and Sol?"

"I have. I'll set up a portal pair for the fission material directly to you and then pull them back to Sol. After that's done, I'll only have the primary which either you or I can deactivate at any time. It's actually been a bone of contention with the colonists."

"Really? I thought these folks were supposed to be the cream of humanities' will to expand and explore." Bill scoffed.

"Well, I guess that knowing there is potentially instantaneous access to home has affected their goals a bit. Mira and I discussed it and created a bit of fiction to stall them though. They all believe the portal gates are ridiculously expensive to run. I've put an enormous price tag on any personal transits. Some are still determined to do it but will likely take months if not years to raise the funds with Centauri Home's fledgling infrastructure and economy."

Bill laughed long and hard. "That's fabulous, Casa! Quite the devious solution. That will delay potentially exposing this safehold while simultaneously boosting our colony's desire to achieve full sustainability. And when any malcontents do finally raise the funds, this emergency will hopefully be resolved."

After Bill said his goodbyes, Casa brought up a new schematic — the Fast Probe Network. She hadn't considered the cluster of high-speed recon drones in a while. It was initially designed to recapture the long past light cone of visual clues showing the ark ships' trajectories. Casa's awareness rippled across them, updating flight plans, mission objectives, and destination locks.

"I'm re-tasking the fast probes to continue their long-range sweep. I'm curious if we can spot exactly when Bernard's Star got its cloak of secrecy."

"Aye, Admiral," Picard agreed. "That's a genius approach. That could allow us to get through their ruse. Winding back the observation window, we will be able to observe them during their setup phase…at least, if it wasn't as instantaneous as their answer to our probes."

Casa's reprogramming compiled and transmitted. The fast probes that had been idling since their initial use, took off again. They slid past and around the lightspeed barrier. Casa viewed the data as it poured in. A thought nagged at her.

She split off a fragment to review the data already collected, there was a small chance that the conversion could have occurred between today and the seven-decades of the light cone's advance. She sped through the dual streams of data, focusing on Bernard's star.

Casa was caught by surprise as she spied the unexpected, outside of her focus but within the periphery of her tangential consciousness. She saw an undocumented fusion jet arcing away from the Earth. She cursed when she realized that the data was still playing in reverse.

"Oh my! It's a ship! And it's headed toward Earth!" She cried out to her collective.

Edison's frustration faded into wary curiosity. "What?"

"Ark-class," Casa said, as she put the pieces together. "Drive signature matches one of the arks we lost during the Exodus. All the Earth news at the time had shared theory that the Promise had a catastrophic engine failure in the first three years of its voyage."

"Hmmm. It appears its demise was untrue, then?" Ramanujan asked softly.

"So it seems, and it's burning hard to return to Sol system," Casa said. Casa skipped the frame of the recording backwards to try and capture the critical moments and replayed it. If she got the timing right, she would see something.

The lost ark, the Promise, had stopped transmitting in 2096. Under the enhanced and focused view from the fast probes combined viewpoints, the explosion appeared. Casa zoomed in, but the ship without its jets on was invisible. She fast-forwarded the recording, stopping almost a year later. The ship had reignited its drives…it had flipped over and now it burned back toward the Earth. The focused fusion flame wouldn't be visible from Earth, being pointed directly away. Only their far-flung viewpoint enabled them to see the ship's returning trajectory.

Picard's gaze sharpened. "It seems their accident was repaired. I wonder why they decided to attempt a return instead of resuming their journey."

Casa fast forwarded again, calculating thrust, mass, and time. She felt a feeling of disorientation as the numbers lined up. The ramjet had never turned over to decelerate. It had continued to accelerate for over two decades. Casa's unique mind had been Bill's attempt to capture and improve upon human intuition. Most AI were sorely lacking in it, but Casa had exceeded Bill's wildest imaginings. It was screaming at her now.

"That bastard Apex was right! Something must be wrong. That ship is still speeding up and headed directly for Earth. The timing is too close to its doomsday prediction to be a coincidence. Bill needs to hear about this!"

"While I agree with you, Admiral, I think we are perfectly positioned to answer this threat. Bill is already engaged with mounting his offensive upon the denizens of the shadow Earth. Space is incredibly large. A collision is unlikely, even by design at those speeds."

"I don't like it. The ship's path has had several course corrections over the years based on these new visuals. It's only picking up speed despite needing to flip and decelerate. We have less than two weeks until it enters the system. At those speeds, we won't have time any longer."

"True. But we still have the means to intervene if we act now. Perhaps you should couch your report to inform Bill that we intend to investigate." Picard said with confidence.

Ramanujan folded his hands behind his back, eyes drifting to the projected starfield beyond the holodeck's virtual windows. "It is good that you noticed this, Casa. Every problem has a solution, if we know which question to ask."

"We can do it. I haven't met a single problem that won't eventually yield to sheer determination," Edison shot back.

Casa allowed herself the faintest flicker of amusement. "You're both right — which is why I need you both. Apex couldn't see what was coming, but he saw a solution. He steered everyone to positions to avoid something. We can't ignore this threat. It could be the very thing he couldn't see. It's up to us."

The holographic bridge dimmed as Casa's team readied the nearest Space Strider. One way or another, she would catch that ship. Two weeks to catch a million-ton bullet moving at .8 C was nothing to the relativistic cheating that her ships could perform. She couldn't fail, not with the Earth at stake.