It was time to investigate this matter’s heart.
No fame, no notoriety, not even the slightest whiff of his current reputation would exist for my quarry if not for this one event. No matter the truth behind any other rumors, no matter how many brilliant victories in battle, crime lords destroyed, or shocking heists, Ivan’s successful career and legendary status was created by his supposed destruction of the colony at Atropos Garden.
The Garden was a beautiful world on the rim with the highest concentration of diverse flora and fauna ever seen since the toxification of Old Earth. It became a haven of evolutionary study and exploration towards the greater meaning of existence. Thus, it housed a prominent research facility. Galactic Central Government-sponsored, it was protected and secretive, one of the last remaining pieces of actual clout politicians retained in a galaxy ruled primarily by corporate interest.
Until the colony was vaporized.
The situation was kept quiet with very few details granted to the public. Even still fourteen years later no one but specific GCG officials knew what happened. However, most conjecture suggested that the damage, whose range was from full-colony crater to entire planet cracked in half, was caused by something which no one had ever seen before. Some new manner of technology.
No one I had spoken to in my long search retained any notion as to why Ivan, for the last fourteen years, had been accused of this crime. Near anyone could say who caused the incident; it was common knowledge with no backing.
The only thing tying Ivan to the Garden, indeed one of the only pieces officially acknowledging his existence excusing my painstaking information-hunt, was a GSA-created bulletin stating Ivan was wanted for questioning on that matter. Without a full name or a picture, it gathered no success.
Even so, what spurred the creation of the notice and the subsequent mythos surrounding Ivan was not clear. A billion suggestions floated through the galaxy from all manner of conspiracy theorists. Indeed my esteemed and unbalanced friend, Dr. Trevors, was likely not the first to suggest Ivan as some manner of obliteration technology with or without the android portion.
I discovered the existence of Captain Josef Onnels after a not insignificant amount of digging. His destroyer-class vessel, the Cassander, ran a patrol route for many years in a particular sector of the rim not far removed from Atropos Garden. Records not often accessible to the public stated that the ship had received a distress signal and was first on scene. Depending upon who told it, they either witnessed the destruction and were helpless to stop it, or they arrived too late and saw only the aftermath.
My assumption was that either he himself or someone on his crew became the source which carried Ivan’s name to the stars. Onnels and the Cassander became a priority.
Though I happen to have a great many contacts and a high amount of influence, boarding a military vessel and questioning its captain was somewhat out of my range of abilities. Fortunately, I discovered a refueling station visited by the Cassander with some frequency.
Marxis type stations differ significantly from the Dei Lucrii. Less a hub of trade and variety and more a dingy stop-over point for large cargo vessels, they exist for fueling and base amenities out on the rim.
The usual authorities granted my docking request, and I was pleased to note my appropriate timing. The mammoth destroyer was berthed outside, almost half the size of the station itself and boasting significant firepower. Dozens of lines for fuel and supplies snaked out of the station and connected to the Cassander.
I wrapped myself in my usual cloak, donning a facial wrap and gloves in a mild attempt to disguise my mechanical nature. The risk for assault was moderate, but it wasn’t fear of damage which motivated my attempt at concealment. I had strong doubts that any drunken miner or cargo-pilot could match me in any physical or mental fashion. Though the prospect of knocking around a few illiterates was alluring indeed, I was not there for that purpose. Any such confrontations would inevitably waste time.
My feature-concealing garb drew a few suspicious glances as I passed through the check-in point and moved into the market area, but no one spoke to or accosted me. Milling around the crowd, I spotted a few crew members in uniform. No one was of significant enough rank to be worth speaking to.
I had hoped to see a member of the command staff, but I didn’t know if any of them would depart the ship for any reason. It was too much to hope Captain Onnels himself would be out and about, but I kept an image of him and the flight crew in a recent memory file in case I happened to spot one. Five minutes would be all I’d need.
I continued my walk through the market, cringing at the filthy sights and smells of dirty stalls containing worthless trinkets and food of questionable edibility. As time passed, I started to regret not contacting the Cassander directly to attempt to set-up a short meeting.
In cases of highly questionable cooperation, I try to catch my potential source off-guard rather than to give them the opportunity to deny me access or time to craft a suitably false story. Failing to find someone of importance, I considered speaking with one of the underling crew members when I saw someone else.
A flicker of light glinted off of a metallic limb not twenty feet away. A wary eye not made of organic flesh stared at me, scanning and scrutinizing. A sudden awareness of hunter and prey developed with no certainty toward who was which. An outward hiss of breath resulted as concrete realization struck, catching up with brutal instinct.
Someone jostled me, and another patron crossed between us. In the nanosecond of distraction, the figure disappeared.
All manner of thought related to my presence on the station and the inquiry I was attending vanished, driven away. Pulse quickening, I slid through the crowd, flitting every spectrum of scan available through my synthetic eye.
Stinking organic gas bags swarmed all around, stifling and choking me with their absurd idiocy. Electrical signals in neon lighting and cooking grills. Body heat surrounded by the cool metal bulkheads. Nothing but squishy, intellectually-devoid…
There: disappearing out at the end of the large chamber, the shape of a human hand without the heat of flesh. I smiled, hurrying through the milling people, obsession devouring all else.
Corridors flitted by, each time I saw naught but a flash of cloak as my quarry disappeared around another corner. Abandoning caution, I followed.
The Archivist whose name I did not know stood at the end of a short, empty hallway. The cold metal of the bulkheads surrounded us, and a sealed hatchway lay at her back.
Her. I blinked in surprise. The heat signature emanating from skull region betrayed the significant upgrades needed for an Archivist, but the shape of her body was most definitely feminine.
Her being female was a momentary surprise making no difference to the fact that we were about to fight to the death. Archivists are most often the product of industrial accidents. Whether there were fewer female workers or they were less prone to fatal mistakes, I didn’t know. Regardless, female Archivists are a rarity.
It made no difference to myself or to her; I could see the same calculating expression, each of us deciding the best way to win quickly and quietly. The idiotic allure of physical intimacy was not a question or an answer. Such base, organic needs pale in the face of fresh data, the kind only we can attain.
I almost laughed. One prosthetic limb and eye, mild skeletal and muscle augmentations. She was young, a polar opposite to Cain with so much human flesh thus far only mildly tinged with the ashen pigment. No concealable weapons, I marveled at her bravery and inexperience. It made me almost pity the slight increase in her heart rate: a tinge of fear as she realized her chances of beating me were slim.
Nothing registered on her face, which remained as cold and hungry as my own. A flicker of doubt passed over my mind; my calculation suggested her odds of beating me were about as good as my own against Cain. No, she had something else I hadn’t detected.
I was already committed. Rather than risk a more clever mental opponent jamming my consciousness somewhere else, much like I did with Cain, I locked down every wireless port under the most obstructive security I could manage. Without further hesitation, my hand shot forward.
Four needles erupted from my fingertips, pressure-fired and sinking into the other Archivist’s flesh before her eyes widened in realization. As the tranquilizer sped into her bloodstream, I knew the fight was already all but finished.
She met my charge with a standing kick, her movement fast and vicious. I pivoted, allowing the strike to glance off my metal shoulder. I used the opening to plant an open-hand chop at her neck. Twisting, she attempted to dodge, but my blow struck her cheek. She staggered, off-balance with little damage done as I pressed the attack.
We fought, blocking and parrying with small hits chipping away at each other. Her movements became sluggish as the tranquilizer battled the scrubbers in her blood and brain. More of my strikes connected, but she fought on.
She overextended in a hook that carried body weight behind it. Seeing the opening, I braced my weight against it, taking the hit to position one of my own. My head snapped to the side, my jaw wrenched close to the point of breaking as my own fist struck her into her solar plexus.
Gasping, she doubled over as the wind rushed out of her lungs. I seized her shoulders, saw the fear and recognition in her eyes, and slammed my metallic head plate into her normal skull.
She fell to the deck, unconscious.
Her death was rapid, painless, and what followed does not merit discussion. Unlike Cain, I take no particular pleasure in the act of murder or extraction of the implants. She was the third Archivist I’ve killed, the vestiges of their memories and data still haunting the inside of my skull.
There will always be regret, but it won’t stop me or any other Archivist from continuing this pattern over and over.
A feeling of sheer ecstasy mingled with the guilt of murder as I absorbed the data from her implants. Finding something of importance, my consciousness was swept away, lost in memory.
“Good afternoon, Captain Onnels,” I said in a voice that wasn’t mine, extending someone else’s hand to the man in uniform. Bars on his shoulders confirmed the title, and I recognized his face as being the subject of my recent search.
Aside from that, I remembered… almost nothing. I wasn’t me. Who was I?
The captain smiled at me/not me. “Call me Josef, my dear. I apologize that we cannot meet under more pleasant circumstances. I don’t care much for the ambiance of these Marxis stations.” He made a face. “Too uncivilized, filthy. I may be a man on the edge,” he chuckled, “of the galaxy, that is, but it does not mean I can’t try to enjoy the finer things in life.”
“Of course,” came the reply in what I realized was a feminine voice, “but I do not wish to keep you overlong, Captain—”
“Josef,” he reminded.
“Of course,” I… she repeated.
I had no control. I was an observer watching through someone else’s eyes. My greater sense of self was lost, missing in this dream of another life. I knew the captain was important. I knew this person whose eyes I saw through was not me, but what else?
The captain folded his arms. “Please tell me what I can do for you, Miss…?” He paused, waiting with expectation.
It appeared to be a private room, or at least repurposed to be empty for the meeting. The cold lack of adornment along with the captain’s statement and light discomfort suggested she was not permitted to travel to his ship. It made sense, as they had no reason to invite non-crew aboard.
Instinctive knowledge of a military vessel struck me as confusing, as I didn’t remember how I knew that.
“Dana,” she replied, answering his question. “I’m looking for information on the incident reported at Atropos Garden.” The Garden? Very familiar. Wasn’t I going to ask someone like him the very same thing?
Raising an eyebrow, Onnels asked. “Is that all? The incident was what, fourteen years ago now? A puzzling case, to be sure, but the investigation concluded long ago. Who did you say you worked for?”
I felt my, her, lips twist in a smile. “My client wishes to remain confidential, but as always there is a curiosity towards what method caused the devastation, including the ever-present rumor of new technology.” I could sense anticipation in her mind, and this was only part of her inquiry. “My sources say the entire planet, not only the research center and colony, was completely destroyed.”
I continued to witness the exchange, no more than an intruder in her mind. Somehow this thought of complete destruction of the Garden was a surprise.
“Ah, I see,” the captain chuckled again, “that again. You must understand that the nature of the incident remains classified under GCG law.”
She frowned. “Surely it doesn’t also include the simple impressions of a patrolling ship captain.”
“It does, as a matter of fact. In order to not be chained to a desk for the remainder of my career or exiled to the farthest reaches of deep space exploration, I had to sign a very threatening nondisclosure agreement.” Onnels shrugged. “It’s just as well: I take my duty and obligation very seriously, Miss Dana.”
“Just Dana,” she replied, irritation flaring in her tone. I felt the muscles in her body tensing, and I wondered if she planned on striking him. “Can you at least tell me the nature of the distress call?”
The captain sighed. “I suppose I’m only bound to secrecy on the issue of the planet’s fate…” he rubbed his chin. “We were on our routine patrol when a warning signal from the planet was issued. The message was almost completely distorted. The Cassander arrived only a few hours later, and by then the colony was gone.”
Her fist clenched. “That’s quite vague, Captain. Was there anything comprehensible about the message you received? Perhaps related to the prime suspect—”
Rolling his eyes, he replied, “Oh, that. Yes, I suppose that’s public knowledge enough. Yes, the message pointed to the possibility of the mythic fellow Ivan being involved. When the Cassander arrived, there was a vessel fleeing. It was a small fighter which we’ve always assumed as belonging to the perpetrator.”
“How could a ship that small cause such devastation?” She swept a gesture towards the deck, where outside hovered a vessel much larger. “All of the ordnance aboard your own ship, a destroyer, couldn’t manage to break apart a world in a month of planetary bombardment. Six months, a year even!”
A flicker of defensiveness passed over Onnels’ expression. “Do not assume too much about me or my ship. She’s one of the finest of her kind.” Her muscles tensed again, frustrated by the captain’s shift from friendly to not, and I felt an inward smirk. She was too goading, insulting matters of personal pride. I suspected he had not much left to say, but still she pushed the wrong button. It didn’t matter how correct she was about the Cassander’s bombardment capacity; she caused offense to the good captain, and he was likely to cease cooperating.
She seemed to realize it as well. “Thank you for your time, Captain Onnels,” she said, rising and resuming the formality. He didn’t correct her this time.
“Farewell, Archivist,” he said, motioning for her to leave.
The title shot panic into my mind. It was important; I knew it from the very core of my soul. It was what I-
Images scrambled around, and the tension surrounding my mind faded, as though nothing but a bad dream. I saw images of her client, Seryia Hakar. Familiar, rival to Daedra-Tech, a name which prompted feelings of loyalty.
I viewed small probes containing sensor masking and disruption fields, fired through the thick web of preventative measures surrounding the area by the quarantined Atropos Garden. Risky: if they had been caught and traced back to the company, penalties would have been harsh.
A few images confirmed the glittering disconnected mass which used to be a planet. It was surrounded by data-collection satellites and dozens of science vessels. The spy-probes were not equipped for survey and analysis, but the images they sent back displayed a lumpy, unidentified mass surrounded by the sea of shining particles. Curious.
I saw someone handing the information, the images, to me/her. He said, “Here are the pictures from the spy-drones, Archivist.”
The terrible urgency rose forth again. My head broke the surface of the stifling dream for a bare moment, and all that I was, all that I knew was laid bare before my flailing mind before-
More flashes, and my hands worked quickly at a console. No, her hands again. She tapped into one of the lines connecting to Onnels’ ship. Her mind slid through security barriers in the data network on the Cassander, also a risky endeavor. Her inquiries side-tracked a hundred different ways, but she seemed capable of bouncing back quickly, only seconds lost to tangential searches. Impressive, somehow.
Layers of encryption peeled away as she accessed the archived data from the incident. My first thought was that Onnels should not have kept this, considering the agreement which threatened his career, but it might not have been his decision. We watched, she and I, in fascination as the recording played in our mind.
The Cassander arrived in the system in time to see the flight of a single vessel, speeding away. The rest of the recording was that of the planet, it’s final moments a matter of absolute awe.
An expanding sphere of something, energy perhaps, vaporized all in its path. As the camera recorded, the grass, trees, mountains, seas, animal life, everything appeared to disintegrate into a sparkling, disjointed mass. With no sound present, the event was quiet and eerie.
She whose mind I resided in connected the two events; the probe and the destruction. One was of the world falling to pieces, and the other was the beginning of the coalescence, the return of the particles to a gravitational mass.
Disconnecting from the terminal, her information in hand, I saw, reflected upon some surface, her face. The face of a person I knew. The face of an Archivist.
My thoughts erupted out of the nightmare once again, feeling an intrusive burrowing into the core of my overtaxed processors, assuming control of my mind and functions. Sid, Sid was my name, and I was an Archivist. Images of my friend, the librarian Marqyni Avieli, protecting me from being lost in data, but this was-
Consciousness was shoved into the swarm of memory again, and I lost myself in months of her life experience. Data collection. Interpretation. Interstellar travel. The collapsed world of Atropos Garden, its reformation. Very important. Marxis stations featured in the most recent memories. Stopover points for cargo, most often from mining operations. Mining operations, miraculous survivals… who survived? Phineas Gage, Piper Welkin. Archivists… Archivists!
I was her again, in a drab corridor. Fighting, movement sluggish from sedatives, losing ground against… who? I saw a face: Sid.
Me.
Breaking through the barriers, I became aware of both my surroundings and the intruder inside my mind, which rapidly devoured my systems, absorbing and wresting as much control as possible. I fought back, locking down motor functions and swiping aside her, yes her, attempts to bury me within further memories while she continued to chip away at my defenses.
Her mental architecture, now technically mine, was very sophisticated, a newer model. But her experience was lacking, never challenging anything but static security systems: no clever, tricky and strategy-changing opponents.
I shut her down at every attack point, striking back more quickly than she could manage. Realizing I was free from the data trap, her mind fled. I continued close behind, reclaiming pieces subsumed by her control. I cornered what remained of Archivist Dana and stripped it away, bit by bit, as the vestiges of her mind clawed in desperation at any hold.
Pieces of her slipped free and scattered, returning to their refuge in the memory archive which housed this virus of a personality. Ignoring the flow of new, unscrutinized data, maddening in its appeal, I cut apart and destroyed lines of code. More and more of her awareness disappeared against my onslaught.
A sense of safety overcame me, whether relief from the close call or another trap, and I was caught in a few of the corporate secrets housed within her memory.
Minutes passed before I gained another foothold.
When I emerged, no new threat, no conquering of my mind was taking place. She appeared gone. I searched, looking for those tiny bits remaining. They were hidden, vanished into the deepest recesses of her and my programming.
It didn’t matter; like the programmed personality which intended to cast aside my mind and take over my body, the threat had dissipated.
Opening my eyes, the dead Archivist and bloody mess left behind by the extraction laid at my side. I was seated, back against the bulkhead. Only minutes had passed during the secondary battle, but every moment increased my odds of discovery with the corpse.
Now I experienced the full measure of regret and fear associated with my act and its inherent risk. Even the data, which loomed dangerously close to the front of my thoughts, held little comfort.
I rose to my feet and shoved the body as close to the shadow of the corner as possible. After wiping my hands free of the stains, I crossed back to the corridor entrance and donned my hat, the facial covering, and the cloak. A quick glance over my person revealed no obvious evidence of my brutality.
Nothing more could be gained, and much could be lost. Too many individuals would have accosted me for being what I am, and any delay risked discovery of the murder. As I crossed into the market again, the stink of dubious cooking and personal odors again pressing all around, I realized I’d not be able to return. This didn’t bother me much.
Minerva slipped out of the dock without trouble. The mammoth destroyer looming outside, the only witness to the destruction of a world, provided no indication that it cared about my presence.
Departed, safe from the threat of discovery, I had time to consider everything. Barely forty-five minutes on the station, it seemed a lifetime wrapped in a whirlwind instant. As Minerva set her course, a general direction of elsewhere, I carefully peeled back layers of her memory.
Playing a few in particular, I watched her plotting and her intended defense mechanism against Archivists. She expected, knew, she would encounter others, but she had a target in mind.
Cain.
It appeared word of my narrow escape passed through a number of ears, and Archivist Cain’s weakness appeared to be laid bare. As yet another of the denizens in search of Ivan, Dana calculated a probability of meeting him and prepared for it with a brilliant, original, but untested plan.
Her system was marvelous, elegant. It didn’t matter what happened to her body and initial brain tissue. She utilized her memories and a framework, a virus almost, containing the edges of her personality. To an individual such as Cain, whose approach to everything seemed to be a mindless battering into submission and a love of brutality, her mental architecture would sweep through him without a second thought.
In a quiet victory, Dana had hoped to take control of the most potent physical embodiment of an Archivist, absorbing all of the information he collected over the years as well as the weaponry.
Unfortunately, her test was against me, long conditioned to extract myself from the lost depths of memory and data. She may have been able to best Cain or any other Archivist, but meeting me cost her dearly.
Or perhaps not: I allowed myself to wonder on the prospect. Perhaps her intent was far beyond what I could detect. Perhaps she slipped in a subtle programming, distracting me with both the mental duel and the data-swarm. Perhaps her mind was now a part of my own, a deep and delicate mingling of personality and experience, or further perhaps such a thing would come to fruition once I inevitably integrated all of her memories. Though I didn’t feel any different, I suspected our personalities, including the deep-seated hunger for information, were not far removed from each other.
In addition, I wondered if the escaped portion was still hiding in the recesses of her or my programming. I didn’t believe there was enough of her left to cause any further trouble, and I’d triple checked and layered protection over my important systems. Even if she had full processing power and wasn’t just a ghost of code, she’d have been hard-pressed to break through it without me realizing.
In any case, more pressing concerns were present, and I more carefully reviewed other portions of her memories. The first time around, while she held me drowning within them, didn’t provide as thorough an analysis as I wanted.
I saw again the destruction of Atropos Garden, a terrible, silent, and rapid disintegration of the world and its denizens. The ship, the one that fled, seemed about the right size and shape. Connecting it to Ivan remained conjecture, but it bore a similarity to Hanatar’s description of the fighter. I enhanced, angled, zoomed, and attempted every measure of visual scrutiny on the vessel. It may have been wishful thinking, but I believed I saw lettering on the side: OLGA.
Another file, one I missed initially, was the distress call recording she stole from the databanks of the Cassander. Most of it remained a pile of static and garbled mash. I watched a frightened woman fade in and out, her words lost.
All but one.
Her face and expression of fright became all-too clear for one moment, one word. Nothing else to suggest the how and why of the terrible occurrence, nothing at all about escapees or last testaments. Her voice, filled with endless despair, cried out before the very end in a single moment of clarity.
"Ivan!"
This was it. The connecting piece, an innocuous phrase that created a universe of fame and myth for Afanasi Sergeyevich Lukyanov: the man called Ivan. The final word spoken by a dying woman connected with an unidentified, fleeing vessel.
No context, no suggestion of responsibility upon his shoulders. The scream could have been an apology or a woman calling out the name of her lover as easily as a curse at the one responsible. The number of possible, subtle meanings was infinite.
But rumor had a mind of its own. This tiny iota of truth, one word of Ivan’s involvement, spun out of control and exploded with falsehood and possibility. His legacy became galactic property, and very few would ever know or believe the real truth.
One thing was even more obvious. I realized this as I sat, safe for the time being within Minerva. Myself, Dana, Cain. Archivists, experts of data collection, all searching for the same man, the same answer.
They who employed us weren’t looking for simple stories, no matter how amazing they were. They wanted to know the truth behind the Garden. Daedra-Tech, Seryia Hakar, the government, whoever else was involved wanted to know how an entire world was reduced to a mass of disconnected debris. Ivan was the only one with knowledge yet unaccounted for in the incident, and clearly they believed he knew something.
I wished I could spend more time, days and weeks, absorbing and integrating the memories of Archivist Dana without any distraction, but events were accelerating. I wasn’t the only one looking for Ivan, and my already potent curiosity was driven into near madness at the prospects.
Assignment: Seeking information regarding the truth and whereabouts of Ivan.
Location: Marxis Station
Report: Intended meeting with captain [Josef Onnels] of planetary distress [Atropos Garden] call respondent vessel [Cassander]. Necessary information obtained from fellow Archivist [Dana — now deceased].
Probability: n/a
Summary: Encounter with Archivist Dana fulfilled all needs for information regarding the incident at Atropos Garden. Discovered source of Ivan mythos in one clear word of the distress signal. Potent, unknown technology involved in full planetary destruction.
*Addendum: Archivist Dana retained significant data unrelated to Ivan search but likely of prominent interest, including a subjugation protocol inside security intrusion devices. May be useful in future encounters if intricacies can be discovered.
**Second Addendum: Ivan issues now seem to be of great interest by multiple parties; will have to accelerate process and disinclude leads with low probable utility.