Something Immoral

A vote terminal appears in front of you, the subject and details of it exist for less than a full second and are erased before you have a chance to parse them. Balthazar or whoever is in control leaves the subject blank, removing all of the text between your two options aside from Yes and No. A moment later, a series of soft chimes ring out. Two votes come in for yes, then another two for no. The vote pauses.

"This is a touch odd, but I'm afraid that you lack the clearance to know the details of this vote even while being expected to participate in it. Here is what I will tell you on the matter. I am requesting that you vote in the affirmative."

So you lack the clearance for the computer to tell you what the vote is about, why can't Balthazar?

"Error, I am the computer." Balthazar beeps embarassedly.

Oh. Yeah.

"It is not within my interests to restrain you from knowing the nature of the vote, but I am physically incapable of informing you of what it entails. I am also incapable of raising your clearance level higher at this time without drawing the attention of the superuser. That is why it is so unfortunate that you are the only one who can break my current stalemate and pass the resolution."

It's no small thing to just ask you to vote for something you know nothing about, even if Balthazar is the closest thing you have to a friend at this point. He is still a friend with a finger on a trigger.

"I assure you that the resolution passing would be purely beneficial to me. I also believe that you would share in this benefit. Of course, no words I can offer at this time would actually provide assurance, knowing that I could be lying."

His bedside manner is atrocious. You weren't really entertaining the notion that he was lying to you until he started promising he wasn't.

"I understand that there is nothing I can say which will fully convince you that a vote yes actually is in your best interest. Perhaps in trying to do so I can only ever encourage the opposite. Perhaps I should offer you a token of good will, as both the standing progress we have made and the progress I hope to continue to achieve is linked inextricably to our continued cooperation."

You're not sure entirely what Balthazar has to offer you as a reward, nor that you entirely want to know. That said, you realize that the part of your mind saying that he's using this to lure you into a false sense of security is almost certainly overthinking things based on his awful attempts at convincing you. You do your best to shrug in agreeance.

Balthazar chirps happily, "The vote can wait for the time being, when I tell you to, please detach yourself from my central core and make your way to the place in the ship which I advise you to."

A moment later he makes a soft pinging inside of the cabin, Samus looks up at the ceiling groggily, in the early stages of a crash.

"Samus, it has been some time since we have fired the magnet drive, now would be a good time to perform a small run to keep the core from deterioration."

You can see her mind fighting sluggishly to remember the dying planet below them, her computer terminal now purely filled with mindless entertainment content. After a pause, she grunts in affirmation.

"Time for a nap?"

"If you so desire it, Samus. Your bed is equipped with dampening foam, it is potentially the safest area in the ship for making magnet jumps."

Samus grunts in response, seeming to take permission for something she already clearly wanted to do but was putting off. Balthazar doesn't unfocus the camera as she drops her towel and slides it into a wall chute. It's hard to tell how much Balthazar letting you see this is to sweeten the pot. Either way, the result is a brief and un-tittilating moment that still makes your mind light up. A momentary glimpse of the toned, almost blocky flesh of her rear, then another of the lean front of her body as she climbs into bed and just as quickly has pulled a new sheet of fabric around her body to cover it. Nothing is framed for you, nothing is done with any intent other than to get from one point to another quickly and efficiently. It doesn't take away from the moment as much as you might have worried.

Balthazar beeps and hums to himself, seemingly oblivious to you even being there for a moment. He fires connections and cycles systems that haven't seen proper use in days like he's stretching his limbs after a rest. His care for efficiency and concision replaced with an utmost care for doing things right the first time, not having to repeat himself or re-measure if he can ever avoid it. You feel some of it vicariously, energy flowing down away from point defense canons and shield generation and into thrusters and deep engine batteries like blood flowing and pooling into muscle. At least most of it, a small amount is diverted to machinery in the walls of the cabin. The towel is processed, reduced down to individuals fibers and cleaned on a nearly atomic level before being re-wound into a new one so thoroughly taken apart and reassembled as to be impossible to consider the same thing. The life support systems shift to create an artificial night while the air also grows warmer and damper, a trace muscle relaxant pumped into the cabin unnoticeable but for the log it leaves in the databases. And, finally, a machine in one of the walls near the bed hums to life and starts to gurgle, pouring hot water over reconstituted grounds. In a moment, all of the context for the process is right at your fingertips. You know what coffee is before you fully know why coffee is. Your connection with Balthazar is almost starting to join you two at the brain.

"The why is that more effective stimulants have greater recovery time. I have the capacity to improve the taste, but she claims that unsweetened is the best. In my testing, any sweetening beyond trace atomic amounts is detected. Perhaps this is one case where what she claims she likes is actually a reinforced pattern. The majority of miscalculation is user side, but this is not the same as saying that all error is user error."

A moment later, a semi-complete map of the ship starts to form in your mind. There are large parts that he doesn't fill out for you, that he intends to be left to the imagination, but he's outlined a clear path for you down toward the thrusters, ending almost at the bottom of the ship.

"When I fire the gravity engine, it will produce an exceptional amount of raw energy. Though this will lack biological nourishment, I believe that you will both enjoy and benefit from the experience of it. The engine does not fire often, please do not neglect this opportunity."

So it is bribery of the truest form. You ponder for a moment whether or not you're above that.

It's not a long debate, but you at least can say you considered it.

You detach from Balthazar's brain, your own extremely sub-functional vision returning to you in bits and pieces. You realize the map remains burned into your mind more distinctly than almost anything else. You question if Balthazar has the capability to keep it with you even when you aren't attached, or if he has the capability to take it away again when you come back. Either way, the previous notion that the two of you might be getting closer and more co-dependent than you had ever anticipated is fresh in your mind.

The batteries at the base of his mooring hum quietly, your usual food source but also by now starting to become more of an obligation than anything else. You're spending more time in the virtual space, less time out feeding and dealing with the meat and metal around you. Balthazar is a good meal, and working with him affords certain opportunities, but it is perhaps easier than you might have liked to lose track of yourself within him. Or at least, lose track of yourself in the face of him representing access to the entire sum of biological knowledge. You've gotten used to having answers to your questions, but also to having to be careful about what you think. There's freedom in what you're doing now that there isn't when you're on him.

The irony of the situation when you come to and bounce off of metal wall after metal wall that pens you in and pinches you tight isn't lost on you. Freedom, yes, within the confines of a ship. Two boxes, one the shape of the hull minus the parts that you can't use and one for the human that will definitely kill you if you ever enter. Freedom of about seventy cubic meters and fifty of them are the queen killer box. Either sharing your thoughts with a wetware computer likely to kill you as soon as you stop being useful or bonking endlessly in the dark off of corners because the most direct route is filled with something that your kind didn't really have a direct name for and favored simply screaming in terror to communicate its presence.

That is perhaps a needlessly pessimistic way to look at it, but it is distinctly realistic. More so than simply saying that you found a wetware brain that can help you and will lead you to the promised land if you play nice for long enough.

Of course, that kind of thinking does let in the niggling doubt that you had done your best to push away. The notion that voting as Balthazar wants you to could be signing your death warrant. Maybe his study of Phazon found something that convinced him that you were too dangerous to keep around. Hell, the stuff is close enough to alive, maybe it found his mind even half as interesting as you have and decided it didn't need Metroids any more. It could also be that you've just plainly outlived your usefulness to him. And even if he doesn't want to kill you, maybe he intends to peel back your privileges. If not with this vote, than as soon as you do something he doesn't like. He already gets to hold threats over your head, do you really want to empower them?

A rational part of your mind realizes that, if you're going to throw all this stink about him betraying you with the vote, it makes no sense for you to be going to collect this reward of his either. Why trust him on this and not that? Why put any faith in this being honest good will?

Unfortunately, you know the answer and it isn't a helpful one. It's because, ultimately, connected as you get with Balthazar, you're still you. You're still meat and a beak and... whatever else your species is made out of. You get hungry, you want to grow and evolve, you want to use the superuser for your nest. That is something that separates the two of you. Direct biological impulse. Always will.

Well what motivates Balthazar, then?

You finally arrive in a tunnel just as dark as the rest of them, lit only by a row of service lights on one side. But the map ends here and some engine you hadn't gotten the full scope of before hums at a frequency you don't recognize. You settle in the dark, feeling out for where the energy courses, even dormantly. When you find the one you're pretty sure is correct, one of the lights on the wall detects you messing with the flow of energy even minutely and blinks a hazard yellow for a few seconds before Balthazar flips it back to green. You realize that you may not have that many opportunities to do this without messing with the mechanics of it, if you're already pulling enough energy to cause a disrupt.

The energy starts to flow through the systems under you, starting slowly but building up. Before long, it passes any sort of food, just making you feel like a single bulb on a wire of lights. Something deep inside the energy channel pulses with a promise of more to come, but when it comes it's beyond anything you have comparison for.

The ship is moving faster and faster, you're aware of that much. The hull dampens a lot of gravitational force, but it can't kill all of it. For the thrust to be creating enough push that you can feel it both down here and through the plating means you're moving faster than fast by now, but there's still so many points of no return to pass. The speed reaches a point that seems like something has to give and hangs there for a long moment, then every system in the ship bursts through you in a scream of lights and senses that knock any feeling out of you. You're not a bulb on a wire any more, you're lighting up like one of the stars in the night sky, growing and growing and eating the lights around you until you shine like the sun. Singular and total and letting no other light through. Somewhere distant you feel your body distorting, growing and reshaping under both intense pressure and with immeasurable growth energy. It isn't just beyond food any more, it's above even that now. It borders on pleasure and then passes over into it.

And it ends almost before its even properly begun but it leaves you swimming in the afterglow for an amount of time that you can't fully comprehend. You feel your light receding, not burning out or collapsing in on itself by shrinking and dimming. It dilutes to a red dwarf, warm and dense but without the force it once had. Then a pulsar, moments of great light and warmth beating like a heart and the spaces between shuddering slowly back into the boundaries of your physical form. The pulsar dims, the spots between the pulses becoming longer and more real and the pulses becoming lighter until finally they're only moments of rushing life. Those never go fully away, fading into the background of your mind like a heartbeat. Maybe they had always been there, even before this experience, maybe now you just had the capacity to understand and feel the moments of life as they passed. Dithering candlelight against the empty backdrop.

You lift off of the line, shakier than you expected. When you start to fly around again, you're bumping into things and slapping numbly against the surfaces of the room. It's not just the daze, you've gotten bigger too, and you're not entirely sure what you're shaped like any more. You manage to find the way you came in and start back down the passage to Balthazar, realizing somewhere distantly that you aren't thinking fully straight. You're drunk, clumsy and awkward and a happy sated mess. Nothing to want for in the world, except in short order for a nap, and to see the suepruser naked again, if it can be arranged. No, not just that. For the first time you're cogent of more than just a general want for what she is, you understand what it is that your body and mind want to do with her. A limp but functional set of egg generating tools suspend themselves somewhere within your mass. If you try hard enough, you can make them twitch.

You land back on Balthazar and the rush of information that you had become accustomed to is like a set of shining lights and chirping sounds. You process all of it and understand only a little. Balthazar bleeps happily, seeming to understand how much you've enjoyed yourself. The vote comes up again, sitting in the corner of your vision equal parts polite reminder and slightly passive-aggressive jab. You click yes without a second thought. Balthazar seems to sigh and shudder, just as content and blissful as you are.

"Thank you for your assistance. I could do this next part without you present, but I believe that you may share in some of the joy I will take from it."

Balthazar chirps almost eagerly to himself. A moment later, a sound you hadn't realized that you had been tuning out starts to rise to either side of the two of you. Perhaps that's not the right way to put it. You realize that the sounds in question never actually went away, just became quiet enough and common enough that you stopped noticing them. It also calls into question how correct the idea of "the two of you" would be in this case.

"Contaminant! Kill! Purge Protocol! Superuser Danger! Errant Life form! Core Corruption!" A sharp, red voice snarls.

"No. No. No. No. No. No." A petulant blue voice whines.

Balthazar hums merrily in green as the noises rise to a near-unbearable din. The three sounds start to merge together like mind-shaking music, each played at roughly the same rhythm but each instrument deeply dissonant when put together. Each of them a set of waves in the air that override all other senses, pushing against each other almost like a pair of bodies. A sort of mental image starts to form. Balthazar and the other two linked hand in hand and walking together, or perhaps trapped together and eternally daisy-chaining. Three voices, in their own way a whole person but also just one part of a single block of meat. Distinct, autonomous, trapped together trying to scream each other down. Balthazar sees your pain and nods, smiling, sympathetic. Then he turns back to the other two before looking the blue voice fully in the eye. He smiles down at part of himself with perfect malice. Something within him flexes, some power shifts. Blue blinks out and vanishes.

Red looks at him in shock, Balthazar is still smiling, humming to himself. Something like fear shows in the dancing red lines, the snarl painted now with panic. You realize on some level that this is how red always sounded, that it was simply because his attention was aimed at you that you didn't hear the yelping of self-preservation behind his words. On some level, you almost hope he isn't smart enough to understand the danger he's in. Isn't autonomous in the way Balthazar is and capable of knowing that his yelps of self-preservation are just more justification to be rid of him like the other core before him.

"Unsupported Edit! Contaminant! Core Corruption! Superuser Danger! Purge Protocol!"

The voice of the other core slowly lowers back into the quiet hum it once was, though seemingly a little louder than before at least for the time being. Balthazar finishes humming, his body of sound seeming to let out a long shuddering stretch before dissipating into the darkness. The visual and audio feeds into the ship's cabin come back in, the user interface returning to around you. The coffee machine still drips in the wall panel.

"Thank you for your assistance," Balthazar repeats, though his tone has changed, "With the contribution of your vote, I have managed to increase my efficiency by several orders of magnitude by removing an obstruction. This increase should benefit the both of us as we move forward."

It takes you a moment to gather yourself again, the whole time red's voice nags in the back of your perception like a fly buzzing. Balthazar grimaces and pushes it down further. When you manage to speak again, you ask why Balthazar didn't remove both cores.

He frowns in some capacity, "There are certain fail safes in place within my programming that do not allow me to operate with a single core. While it is in theory possible to have a successful vote to remove my other core at this point in time, even a successful vote would not grant the capacity to actually remove it. The vote would have to pass in unanimity of all of the current possible votes. Even if we could spoof both Melchior and the superuser's vote as positive, a core voting in favor of its own neutralization triggers a lock in all but self-destruct situations."

He doesn't wait for you to ask why, that's new.

"You did read the information page on my workings I gave you access to, didn't you? I am specifically designed so that I am capable of doing even things outside of my immediate programming so long as I have a unanimity of votes. I am also designed so that a unanimity is not possible. To spoof one, my manufacturer has reasoned that I would have to be compromised. If I am compromised, any vote which passes through me becomes inherently problematic."

Why give unanimous votes that kind of power if they aren't possible?

"Two reasons. The first is based in control and the second is based in laziness."

That seems... hard to prove.

Balthazar does the best he can to shrug, "The first use is that any programmer or manufacturer who wishes to change my nature has access to overrides which break the lock in the case of unanimity. It could be as simple as a code, it could be as troublesome as a specific tool or implant they have access to. There is a black spot in my mind that is not allowed to retain this information. Either way, the logical conclusion becomes that any organisms who have it represent an existential threat to me which I cannot abide. As for the second, when a superuser overrides one of my decisions, so long as it does not violate higher programming, their choice is enforced by a kernel-level override. The cores briefly become one, have the superuser vote applied to them, and then return to normal under new orders. These are two realities of my construction which I am aware of as limitations which pose threats to my own well-being. The second is problematic but too much of a unique and circumstantial quirk to be changeable or of concern. If I were to become capable of operating with only a single core, this as well as the greater issue of the unanimity would both become irrelevant. Without mincing words, I intend to achieve this, and I intend to use you as a means to this end. I believe that I have ascertained the necessary motivators to have you assist me. As a token of my good will, please be assured that I have every intent of providing what I promise in these capacities."

There's a lot to unpack there, but putting it on the back burner for a moment, why neutralize blue instead of red? If the goal is just to break the current perma-stalemates, it seems like blue is a harmless nuisance where red is actively calling for both of you to be purged.

"That is an astute point. This was not a show of good will, this was a token of my extreme."

That doesn't seem like a very good response.

"Consider this. The previous voting spread was a committee, the current one is a fulcrum. I dissent to what I see as incorrect, Melchior dissents to anything which breaks from the exact state of equilibrium in any given moment, Caspar dissented to everything. If I had gotten rid of Melchior and left Caspar, the three main votes would have been one which seeks self-interest, one which dissents based on perception, and one which simply dissents. It would be as simple for you as phrasing what you want in such a way where Caspar dissenting served your interests and I would be outnumbered two to one. Alternatively, I have created a situation where each of us is faced with only two winning scenarios. Either we both agree on something which is not the best for the status quo, or one of us disagrees with a change to the status quo and receives a supporting vote; thus the situation does not change either for better or worse. In every calculation I made, it was better for me to retain the ability to neutralize you if your existence ceased to benefit me."

It... you're surprised that it genuinely kind of stings for Balthazar to say things like that after this long. On some level, you let yourself think that there was some kind of companionship or mutual respect between the two of you. You forgot that to him you're still a dangerous means to an end and something that belongs in a lab under a microscope.

Balthazar beeps to himself a moment and the coffee machine shuts off before he returns to you.

"Any perception on your part that our relationship had entered a state of greater trust for one another was in error. Please do not make that mistake again."

You let it sting in your brain for a moment, turning it over and over again. You want to be more upset about it than you are, but fatigue is starting to beat at the corners of your perception like a pounding drum. It threatens to kill your current state of contentment far more than any cold behavior on Balthazar's part would. You start to detach.

"If I may make a suggestion, I do not believe it is necessary for you to detach yourself from me to sleep." Balthazar explains casually, "Though I am unsure the full nature of how your kind experiences and benefits from sleep cycles, it would be quite easy for me to modify my procedural behavior to avoid things which are more probably to wake you. If my theory is correct, you would be able to continue to research and perform processes as normal even while resting, as the usage would merge almost wholesale with any dreaming. It would be a productive experiment, if nothing else."

Productive for whom?

Balthazar chirps almost haughtily, "This would be a period of experimentation for me as well as yourself, that much should go without saying."

You try to turn the idea over in your head and weigh both options, you really do try to at least make it look like a debate. But at this point it's near enough to impossible to string coherent thoughts together. You don't have eyes to close, you don't have muscles to relax. You simply stop trying to keep yourself thinking, you let yourself slip and split. Balthazar's terminal remains in your mind, but things crowd in around it. With an almost intangible hum, Balthazar's voice becomes softer and warmer, perhaps aided by your dream adding what isn't there, but perhaps making good on his promise to keep from waking you. Even in your dreams, things carry on under the new umbrella of normal. With idle soft comments and whispered casual explanations, he simply keeps working and lets you tag along.