Rocky Returns, Alternate Reality

        I dreamed that Rocky returned home. I was very excited at first, and then realized that she’d be 18 years old. She looked pretty spry for an ancient cat. She didn’t seem to want to come in, though, more like wanting me to come out to her. That’s when I heard another meow from the yard, and saw Penelope waiting with her. Penelope looked pretty good for a cat that’s been dead 12 years. The shock pretty much jolted me out of the dream.

        Before waking up this morning I dreamed I was part of a massive science fiction epic. I was the captain of a large assault ship, like a heavy bomber. I had a squadron under my command, about a dozen of us total. The ships were long and improbably narrow for flying wings. Copulas and turrets bubbled from nearly every angle. The crew were all in place, ordinance loaded and our fighter escort had arrived.

        The odd thing about this fleet is that we were all technically dead. The maneuvers the ships were capable of would cause a live person to black out almost the moment combat was entered. We were all neural net enhanced, poly-carbonate filled shock hardened undead constructs. We had our former bodies and personalities, but were so altered as to not really qualify as living any more. We fueled up rather than ate, and the activity of modern combat was really handled by our implants, of which we were merely the guiding conscience.

        Still, I was me enough to thrill at the sight of our twelve sleek behemoths rising above the smoking city in near silence. I’d all ready looked at the attack pattern of the latest alien incursion, and found that the vectors of the attackers came from a heavily forested area. Their targets were completely random, and it was only a few moments to figure out what the attack algorithm was, and what the actual random number seed was that was being used. (Apparently we’d captured some rather valuable equipment earlier and were putting it to good use.)

        I vectored my bombers in towards the beach head portal, expecting some heavy resistance as we got closer. About half way there, our fighter cover spotted a bunch of alien fighter craft and tore away to intercept, as they were headed for a heavy population center. The effectively stripped us of our fighter cover. I wasn’t happy as I watched them peel away after the alien assault boats. I began to correlate the feeds from the various defense units to try to help my gunners stay on top of the current alien tactics. The feed was somewhat disturbing. Apparently the alien ships were making a straight line run to each of their targets, no evasion, no combat offered, just a hit and run flat out attack and then we were cutting them up as they wheeled to turn back to their starting point. It was all very odd.

        I spread out my bombers so we were still covered by one another’s defense grid, but instructed my gunners to preventive fire into the vectors that the random number generator were indicating. We prevented any more attackers from even getting out of the forest.

        I looked down to see a huge column of refugees marching through the forest, the line was about a hundred people across, and they were making their way towards the city. Software began scanning the faces and recognizing people. The people tried to hide in the forest when they spotted us, but there were far too many.

        One of them was N. I broke from the formation and picked her up. She was bedraggled and worn, carrying a couple of bags and a makeshift satchel. I knew there was something amiss at this point. She made her way to my bridge and was shocked when I turned around. It was like I could read her and knew I had just plucked her away from another version of me. I had the scanners find me in the crowd, and went to pick me up. The other me didn’t want to come until I spoke to and had N ask.

        Turns out that I had lost my N in an early alien attack, and that was why I had volunteered for the transmutation program. I’d been made commander simply because the neural net of the fleet had wanted me for the job. We still didn’t really understand why, and it did cause problems for some of the pure military types who’d been passed over for command positions. From them I learned that the city of San Marcos resistance had managed to take a portal and were evacuating the whole city to what the aliens referred to as a “hostile stronghold world.” They each were carrying some data from the raided world in hopes that it would help us continue to resist. They had also disassembled one of the portals and were bringing it through in pieces. I immediately stopped my fleet and told them not to blow the portal back yet. Let the people through and watch for further automated attacks. Apparently the alien fighters were exercising some sort of corrupted failsafe program, and not intentionally attacking. (Which would explain why some attack vectors had taken them to the middle of a lake, for example.)

        I also used the ships loud hailer to direct the refugees towards the main road, where the neural defense net had all ready begun to dispatch emergency transportation. (Our ships could take only a hundred or so, and then only if we left our ordinance behind.)

Ad astra per technica,