Leary

Sugar Cube Entry for 02/18/19, Leary, 1,298 Words,

Leary  (13+) She’s 19,000 years old. #2183620 by Paul

Story Prompts:
— Write a story about a man (older is better) whose wife died after a protracted illness. He spent a year at her side trying to live for her and failed. They collected many valuable things, porcelains, jewelry, coins, etc and now, 5 years later, he must get rid of it all. What does he do?

— An an 18 year old lesbian has decided they want to be transgender and is trying to get scheduled for surgery to remove her very large breasts. What problems did she have? Physical ones like getting the surgery approved and internal ones she went through deciding to do it.

** I choose the Red badge. I like red and my girlfriend says I look good in it. 2 reasons, one quite compelling.

Story:

Leary

We were sent to analyze a new culture a passing merchant had discovered picking up very old style audio and visual electronic signals. Leary and her staff have been analyzing them for months as we orbited in, feeding the languages and cultures into my mind through the data link embedded in my brain. With the link we share an unlimited quantum memory so it’s just a matter of me assimilating the data.

But not everything went as planned.

Our approach had been normal. Leary burried us in a twenty kilometer sized chunk of ice she found in the cloud of leftover debris from the systems creation that encapsulates it, then nudged us so we looked like a new comet coming in from their solar north. Our cometary tail had been eleven million kilometers long.

We were supposed to pass just behind their moon and drop down unobserved, letting the comet go on into deep space on a non-return orbit and had just separated from it when we made acquaintance with a 10 kilo bundle of nickel and iron with a rock or two and a bit of ice to glue it together. Moving at 208 kilometers a second relative speed it’s mass was a bit more than ours, just over 100 million kilos compared to our 10 and the resulting explosion had broken the comet into a few million pieces.

"Wake up, Sean, we’re down and hidden."

“Leary? ... Ohhhh, my head. What the hell happened?” The explosion of light when my eyes opened made shutting them feel like slamming a door. Turning my head slightly felt like another bomb going off and I held very still. Whatever the device causing time to stop does to our cells when it energizes makes coming out of a stasis field a very brutal couple of minutes.

“I saved your sorry ass again.” Women. She thinks she’s in charge. “It was a rock a little bigger than your puny head.”

“Puny? Wait a minute, there’s nothing puny about me.”

“Yes, there is.” As my survey partner and co-leader of our team she’s just over a 10,000 metric tons.

“Thanks, I think.”

“Pay attention Sean, that piece of junk destroyed our nearly indestructible ship, proving the nearly part. The stasis field was only on for three local minutes.”

She is the ship and her reflexes are measured in nano-seconds. She had the stasis field on in five-hundred of them, a half a micro second. The field has a check feature that snaps it off for pico-seconds, a thousand times faster than she could, every minute to see if it’s safe to turn itself off. It's a system that's worked for a hundred thousand years and has saved uncounted lives.

We build well, but we've been a star culture for over half a million years and there are trillions of ships flying around known space so chance happens. Even to Scel Hulls like hers.

“I always pay attention to you. I’m in lov...”

“Don’t start that again, we have other needs right now.”

Humans are essentially immortal, but between 5 and 10 thousand of our standard years most get tired and chose to die to reset their minds. We save ourselves as semi-conscious code, still active but on an extended time scale, speeding up every few hundred years to see if we’re ready to come back.

Most come back as a ship or its support staff and spend millennia exploring. The ships computer can hold multiple full personalities as separate beings. There are 3 in ours now, but the others are support staff.

Leary chose die at 6,000 years and stayed dead for another 2,000 then came back and has been at it for 11,000 more years as a ship. This was her fifteenth Hull. The others were old style, before we met the Scels and adopted theirs. They’re a race we met 200,000 years ago and are masters at understanding metals and what can be created with them. The hull she’d just lost had lasted over 8,000 years.

I’d met her when my previous team partner decided he wanted to deactivate again. We’d only been together for a couple hundred years of our years, but he’d been active for 9,000. I was partnered with Leary and somewhere around 400 years later fell in love with her.

Leary is very tough, she is the pod that’s the pilots cabin and saved my butt. David and Beth, the other 2 personalities, will remain asleep until our new hull arrives, the pod lacks the power needed to keep them active, but our full memory is still on.

“Damn! I lost my collection of primitive art.”

“It was ugly.”

“You have no culture, Leary.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Pfiffle!”

“What?”

“A euphemism for BullShit.”

“Careful.”

Leary had been gathering data from the edge of their earliest signals, an effective two-hundred or so of their years out. I was fluent in thirty of their languages and doing all my thinking in what seemed to be the three most common, English, Russian and Chinese.

Each time we do a new culture it's confusing, knowing at one level the language is new with concepts and definitions scrambled because my mind hasn't quite connected all the meanings. It only takes a couple hours, but the accident threw the timing off. I lay and let it happen while trying to recover from what had happened.

“Give me an hour to assimilate.”

“No problem, Sean. If the locals didn’t see that rock hit they’ll think the comet broke up coming to close to their moons gravity field. From that spray of debris they’ll get some spectacular meteor showers for the next few Year's.”

Leary, got us down and hidden so we could finish the survey. She got a warning off too so a replacement hull should be along in a week of their time and we should be done by then. She found a quiet high mountain area surrounded by giant growths called Red Woods, some over forty meters tall, in one of the more militarily powerful countries; America or United States

I relaxed and lay back into the cushions Leary had formed under me, settling into understanding the culture of these people. Cultures actually, “They have a multitude of cultures and languages.”

“Yes, Sean, they do. Fascinating, the differences in thought. They have more religions and philosophies on their one planet than we do in our home galaxy.”

“And wars! It’s incredible the way they treat each other.”

“Yes, an insane culture by our standards that may have to be destroyed if they discover faster than light travel because of the the effect it could have on the weaker members of our system.”

Translation of languages is very humorous at times. “They refer to themselves as humanity, but they do not treat each other with what we would define as a ‘Humane’ practice.”

“We should be finished when the new hull arrives.”

“Good. Okay, back to our earlier discussion; will you marry me?”

“Sean, we are as married as two beings can be after six-hundred years together. Why do we have to go through this again?”

“I like the idea.”

“I’m older and wiser than you and I say it’s not necessary.”

“I really like older women, but I’ll argue the wiser part.”

“You’ll argue about anything. Being 19,000 years old has given me a better perspective than your 5,000.”

“Not better, different.”

“Would you like to swim home?”

“Want me to pull your plug?”

“Okay Sean, we’ll talk on the way back, but I don’t promise anything.”

“You never do. So, what have you discovered about their global warming problem?”

“At the rate they’re going we probably won’t have to worry about them discovering FTL travel.”