Ava and Aphrodite: The First Human in 8000 Years (Featured)

Chapter 5: The Secret Weapon is...

Ava lay in Sylvie's spare charging pod, they'd spent a several hours syncing and he'd grown to understand her a bit better by doing so. To Sylvie, it didn't seem to be a big deal, and indeed, going past the dorms, he noticed a lot of the other operators were syncing too, some operators were in fact grouped up with each other, turned out it was part of operational procedure, something to keep their minds healthy. It was essentially the same as hacking but two people doing it in unison, an extremely pleasurable and healthy experience, but mentally exhausting. Or maybe another way of looking at it was that hacking was essentially the same as syncing... you were invading someone's personal space, exploring them and understanding the depths of their intelligence. The main difference was that hacking didn't require consent, hacking was a skill unique to him, bred for war.

"It really is amazing syncing with a hacking unit." Said Sylvie from her pod, "The other operators will be jealous."

"...Well, it's sorta my job."

"Hey, you're pretty damn good at it kid."

"Cheers. By the way Sylvie."

"Hm?"

"You mind if I connect to your external network? I need to check something."

"Sure. Don't stay up too late though, we've got work in the morning." Her pod closed, "Night!" her voice was muffled.

Perfect, Ava had some work to do.

It was time to address the Copy AI of himself on Go-bot, the parameters he'd set the AI were simple: find out what the superweapon is, upload the data to a local network on the dorms.

It was time to recover that information.

It seemed his Copy AI was generally inactive for several hours, until a boardroom meeting that happened at HQ, at which point it decided it apt to speed towards one of the board-room cameras and hack into it. Apparently, the AI copy was certain that there would be important information leaked in the meeting.

Made sense.

Ava felt little guilt as he listened in on the conversation between the Major and several Block-1 Servs. Wow... Block-1s, it was pretty rare to get in contact with one of those. The elites. Most of them were men and women dressed in garish and odd clothing, fashion that would make Sylvie's eyes bleed, Major, with her elegant red suit and skirt, looked very out of place. Was there any reason Block-1s thought it was ok to dress that way? Maybe they did it because they thought they could get away with it.

The Copy AI then decided to remotely hack into the body of one of the attendants, sit in the background of their mind and take in all their senses, a necessity seeing as the camera equipment didn't have any microphones.

It felt odd being out of the driver's seat in someone else's body, but it was the best course of action.

"It's as we feared," said the Major, who was the only one standing up among the others, who had already sat at the boardroom desk. "they've managed to create one, a specimen resembling the Primary Ancestral Race." A gasp among the board-room. "It's called Genome Project-REC, and they've been putting research into it for decades."

"Longer than us then." Said one of the board members, it wasn't important who,

"Yes. They've progressed far further than us."

"From the documents, it seems they managed to get records of the human genome, as well as all sorts of other information to help them out, from Earth."

"Why Earth?" said another useless voice,

"It's where the Ancestral Race originated. The conspiracy theorists were right, it seems. We originally came from another planet, our seed planted by Earth-dwellers."

A hum among the attendants. Understandably so, Earth was a desolate planet with no atmosphere, unlike Mars, Europa, and other colonies, it wasn't possible for organic matter to grow there. He'd need to dig in further to find out about the history of this "Ancestral Race".

"For the sake of simplicity, we'll use the words the Evos use. Humans." Major muttered, "that's what they called themselves in one of their many languages."

"Many languages?" said yet another useless specimen,

"The details we have on what Humans are is detailed on a file available in this private network, there's a lot of information to process regarding who or what they are, hence it'd be best to mull on that at another time." Said the Major, Ava couldn't help but smile when hearing this. Bingo, "you've all got access to it, we'll be supplying it to Ava too." What!? They'd be giving Ava classified information?

"Ah, so you're sending him on his second mission already? Poor guy. He hasn't even had a chance to rest."

"Yes. Well... He's the only chance we have to defeat the Evos, with his hacking skills and the shielding he has-" shielding? Ava wasn't sure what she meant when she said that. What did he have shielding from? "he's absolutely essential for our race's survival."

"Heh," said the person Ava's Copy AI was wearing. He smirked, "knowing the guy, he's probably already hacked into the systems and found everything out anyway." Ava froze... was he that predictable?

"No, we can't let him know what the weapon is. He won't be able to handle it." Said another one of the oddly dressed Block-1s "This is classified information. Only Block-1 level authority."

"Don't worry, I understand your concern but I specifically told him not to hack HQ's network. He won't be digging around here."

What? No, she didn't. Not that Ava remembered. It's true that if she told him not to, her Block-1 authority would prevent him from doing so, but she never gave specific orders like that. Did she forget? Was she covering for herself? Or... something else maybe. The Major looked directly into the eyes of the person Copy-AI was wearing. She looked at Ava...

Did the Major already know he'd hacked in!?

The rest of the board meeting was rather monotonous. It ended with discussions about administration nonsense and then everyone but the Major went off to sync with each other for the night. She stayed in the boardroom. The Copy AI hacked back into the camera to see what she was doing, Ava couldn't help but think that maybe his Copy AI was a bit more of a voyeur than he'd like.

She sat there for hours showing clear signs of nervousness.

She said something to herself, but reading her lips only a few words were discernible. Definitely the words "Ava" and "Kill".