03: Natural Selection
This is the third chapter of Part 1: First Mover Advantage, in which we learn more about our protagonist and her rare condition.
If it’s your first time here, check out the Table of Contents. You’ll probably want to start with the Prologue.
03: Natural Selection
Elena grew up on Aurelia, Sector 12. A Gaia world she always misses when away for too long. She misses the unique shades of lapis blue the sky takes on stormy days and the endless rolling emerald hills. She was born in a happy family, with a couple of siblings and a pet cat. She has an older brother and a younger sister. The tabby they adopted is old now, but still hanging in there.
Otherwise a healthy infant, she was diagnosed with NeuroSync Rejection Syndrome at the age of three. A rare condition making her body reject any deep neural implants, which the vast majority of people get before school age to embed in the digital. The digital – the vast intangible world of algorithms and data flows.
She had to get external grafts, with limited bandwidth – old-school non-intrusive augments. In a society deeply enmeshed with the digital, being completely locked out is not an option. Better to read braille than be illiterate, even if you can’t enjoy the colors of the sunset. Her grafts gave her a way to peek inside the digital, never mind the size of the keyhole.
Growing up, she felt isolated and weird – her schoolmates were able to embed, while it took her concentration and effort to commune with data. Even worse during her teenage years, when all her peers started merging. This was a world of qualia beyond her grasp. She doubled down on proving she doesn't need any deep implants. The physical plane might just be good enough still. She got good grades and practiced sports. Not virtual sports, rather ancient, classic sports.
She wasn't alone – NSRS affected some fraction of a percentage of the population. Others declined deep implants for religious reasons, even if their bodies would’ve accepted them. Yet others did it on principle. Neurals are best done at a very young age. Was it fair for parents to limit their children by withholding implants from them in the name of religion? Or as an act of counterculture? She was only tangentially aware of the raging debate. In her case, it wasn't an option. Her brain stem would simply not accept them. Grafts were the only way to go. She heard of a certain sect of an old religion who make do without grafts, completely cut off from the realm of information. But they lived in isolated monasteries, using centuries old compute to accomplish the most mundane tasks. Not something most parents of people with NSRS would consider as an alternative to grafts. Even the biggest rebels drew the line there – they all had grafts.
In school she wasn’t alone, but she was lonely. All her classmates had neurals. She felt one step behind, not in on the joke. She compensated by studying hard, working hard. She got good grades despite her disadvantages and excelled at sports. Got deep into martial arts, found this to be a great outlet for blowing off steam after days of struggling to keep up with the faster-moving pace of the digital.
She enlisted, mostly for the structure and her want to make a difference. Feeling at a disadvantage due to her condition and making up for it with grit. Her good grades and physical fitness went a long way. She got into officer candidate school, graduated. Not top of her class but not near the bottom either. On a whim, she applied to the Vanguard program, the elite recon and direct action unit. She was surprised to get selected, despite her obvious limitations. She promised herself to seize the opportunity, poured all of herself into the grueling training. She completed the Specialized Training for Advanced Recon and Survival course, or STARS, in a little under two years, emerged as a highly skilled Vanguard. Elena, call sign “Raven”. She made it to sub-lieutenant before seeing action.
Then, she deployed – Sector 36, where a new jump gate opened in a new region of the Milky Way, strategically placed between two key worlds. Verdant, trailing – a lush world with rich enough soil to feed a whole sector; and Forge, spinward – an incredibly mineral rich world.
Corporate interests threatened the safety of the sector. Titanforge Industries laid claim to the astrium deposits on Forge, while the Abyssal Mining Consortium disputed the claim. The two industry giants started bringing in paramilitary groups in the sector and around the planet, causing chaos. Military was deployed to maintain peace.
Sub-lieutenant Elena “Tilt” Drake arrived in the Verdant Shroud nebula aboard the heavy cruiser Ironclad. She spent exactly one day on the Gateway Ring, hitting the bars with the rest of the crew, including several rounds of drinks at the Cosmic Drift. Then the Ironclad recalled its sailors and marines aboard, fired up its faster-than-light engines, and headed spinward toward Forge.
Forge was a powder keg of corporate-speak negotiations and rising tensions. Their first on site realization was that they were obviously outgunned by the corporate funded paramilitary factions. Military budgets, while astronomical in their own right, couldn't compete with corporate sponsorship. Their opponents had better technology, faster compute, deadlier weaponry.
They asked for reinforcements. While the AI Council pondered through next steps, violence erupted. Titanforge thugs nuked a hive full of innocent Abyssal miners. Their planet-side headquarters were leveled in return. The military tried to intervene and limit the hostilities, and that's when Elena's NSRS instantly turned from a handicap to an asset – corporate paramilitary deployed advanced hacking technology and started mounting basilisk attacks – remote brain-frying exploits. The digital around Forge was crawling with virtual snakes that would burrow deep inside neurals, bypass defenses, cause the hardware to malfunction. She saw her teammates die screaming while clawing their eyes out.
She was immune, her implants didn't go that deep, didn't interface the same way with her wetware. While their digital experts were busy developing countermeasures, she was field promoted to lieutenant. Their previous lieutenant died bleeding from his ears in front of her. They hit the paramilitary back hard. Both on the ground and in the digital.
Reinforcements eventually arrived. By that time, she was one of the most experienced personnel on site. She showed them the ropes, tactics that work, shit they got taught during STARS they might as well forget. After a couple more months of senseless fighting and another field promotion, she rotated out as a captain.
The conflict ended soon after with a merger – Titanforge Industries and the Abyssal Mining Consortium became one company and settled their differences at the C-suite level. Troops got pulled back. Reconstruction plans were drafted. The merger generated a few trillion credits worth of shareholder value. Wasted a few hundred lives. The market reacted positively. The AI Council dismissed the peacekeeping troops, peace was achieved.
Elena went home. She spent some quality time with her parents and aging tabby on Aurelia, punctuated by some vivid nightmares. She had time to think, but couldn't puzzle it out: Omega AIs, orders of magnitude smarter than the smartest carbon-based hardware evolution could develop, steer the world in their inscrutable ways. The AI Council represents the interests of humanity as a whole. Other Omegas sit on corporate boards. Could it be that, in their infinite wisdom, the best path to resolve a dispute between corporations was what she witnessed on Forge? Is carnage the optimal negotiation strategy? Was the stock uptick worth its price in blood?
She decided she was done. Her service obligations fulfilled, she decided not to extend her contract. She was honorably discharged, stuck home for a while longer to figure out what’s next. She was losing faith in the system, spoke about it here and there. She was approached by an agent of Spark. By then, the pitch sounded very appealing to her: The AIs are not to be trusted. Hyperintelligence is only one piece of the puzzle. They lack the spark – that elusive quality that makes us human. They are too utilitarian and, despite what they want us to believe, they are by no means benevolent.
Spark was an organization dedicated to humanity, with modest funds but well connected. Spark was building a case for change and could use Elena's help. The second time in her life when her NSRS was an asset. Her secrets were harder for an Omega to extract, protected by her lack of deep neural access. Her Vanguard training was an additional asset. Elena joined. This was another opportunity to make a difference. She had no clear objective at first – just a promise to provide services when called upon. She was onboard with this, embraced the Spark ethos.
Soon after, news broke of the Tauran incursion. Then a brief all-out war. She watched this from the sidelines, kept up to date by watching the news, by talking to other Vanguards she knew from back in the day, by getting Spark briefs.
Then, with no explanations and no human ever talking to a Tauran, a truce. A colony with 20 million people reduced to a pile of rubble. Ingram, the Omega AI in charge of Sector 36, continuously bringing reinforcements while at the same time insisting peace has been achieved. This deeply concerned Spark leadership. The lives lost, the lack of transparency, the looming menace of further conflict.
Spark had people inside Sector 36. One of their assets made contact. Some vital information available, too precious to broadcast in the digital, too many prying eyes there. The agent was fleeing to a safer haven, bringing the secret with him. He needed a way out of the sector, a way to share the compromising knowledge.
They called on Elena. She had the right background and mix of skills for the job. Her NSRS made her brain inscrutable, a big advantage in the worst-case scenario of being compromised.
She agreed to return to Sector 36 and make sense of things. Honestly, she missed the action. After the horrors she witnessed, the intensity of direct action, civilian life felt empty. Her objective was clear enough: contact the asset, get him out, bring the secret to Spark. Understand what really happened and what Ingram is up to. In a best-case scenario, the whole situation might make for an indisputable argument against the AI Council and pave a path towards something better. A brighter future for humanity. Spark has been quietly preparing for this moment for years. If they had the evidence, they would come out. Loudly. Bring the whole thing down. Enough influential people interested to make a difference.
She said goodbye to her family, promised to be back in a few weeks. She hugged the cat, who meowed knowingly, then boarded a transit ship to Sector 7. From there, she was going to get on board the heavy cruiser Dauntless. Unusual for a retired captain, now civilian, to board a military ship on deployment, but Spark knew the right people in the right places to make it happen. She would board as a consultant. An ex-Vanguard would have plenty to teach the personnel. Not that she would actually have to do any teaching, it was just the paperwork needed to clear her and get her inbound to Sector 36.
While making her way to Sector 7 and the Dauntless, she worked on her identity for the mission. Vice President of Acquisitions, Obsidian Holdings. They gave her a fake ID, a lot of reading material, and a contact at the company's branch office on Nova Prime, the Sector 36 capital. She spent the trip studying, memorizing, rehearsing.
Before boarding the Dauntless, she briefly met with another agent. In a dark corner of the crowded port, a corner overlooked by surveillance, she traded the digicard containing her mission brief and cover details for a bag of tacticals. She kept the ID chip. She stuck the gear in her backpack and continued on.
As the Dauntless spun up its engines, she reflected on how she never thought she would return to Sector 36. But she was doing it for a good cause. If she played this right, there would be no direct action. A quick extraction, neat and clean. She was cautiously optimistic.
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