As James finished his move and made Ezrael riddle about it, he slowly raised his head to give James a pouty smirk. "If your current strategy includes distracting me with heavy questions that absolutely require time and thought to be answered, congratulations. It works." Ezrael said, the pouty smirk turning into a charming one again. Once more he leaned forward, looking at the chessboard. His long hair was dropping off his shoulders, hanging down, swinging. "You'd be a perfect match for Maren, you know. She is sort of a realistic misanthrop, similar to what you make it sound to be one. Those questions are very difficult for me to handle. I do have a certain experience in psychology, especially the biologic aspects of it. I do believe Maren takes it as invitation to see me as dumb, but I usually do not respond to such topics. Especially since I am one of those people she repeatedly calls degenerate." He touched a pawn, knowing the following move would result in a dirty chain of events that would cost him a few pawns and very likely the Queen. "She has quite an unrelaxed opinion about one-night-stands. She thinks the existance of them and how easy people find to each other for having sex is destroying society. Her argument is that people don't try anymore to have stable and working relationship constructs like marriage since they don't need to. If they want sex, they just get it from any stranger that is willing. Less reason to put effort into social interactions that bring people closer to each other. In her utopia, people would need to marry first before they can have sex."
He lifted the pawn slightly. "Is it right or wrong? I don't know. It's not my field of experience, so all I can do is refer to myself and look at the person that voiced the opinion. Before I met Maren, I literally was one of those she always likes to describe. I was taking my best friend to the clubs and had fun times there or in hotels or somewhere else. Multiple times a week, not limited to one girl per night. It was addictive, causing adrenalin to rush through the body each time you were flirting with a new girl. They came from all over Sirius to Curacao for party and sinning. It never was hard to seduce them, really." His hand was moving the snub closer to the Bishop. "People do this to let out the steam. They want to have fun, because for some reason, they see the very need to. Despite being in the age of robotic automatation, people are still prefering to put the burden of hard work onto themselves. Especially when it comes to war-related training and jobs. Many well-paid soldiers and pilots come to Curacao, because they are just rich enough to be able to afford it. Especially Bounty Hunters. Anything taking place in space is incredibly profitable compared with similar jobs on planets. The responsibilities are higher, though. People need to vent. Sirius is a dystopian place. The world is cruel and unforgiving. People can't wait until they are married. They want to get highs, and if sex is out of question, it is more likely they start using drugs." The Marlin removed the Wraith. "Pawn to D4."
Slightly stressed, he leaned back, frowning at the chessboard. "People need vents, because the world is cruel. Which makes me look at Maren, a very slightly chubby girl that is barely able to uphold social bonds, using cardamine since her sixteenth year. She is dangerously intelligent, both dangerous to her surroundings and to herself, because she has a hard time enjoying hanging out with people who are on a less intellectual level. If Maren and I had met in different circumstances, neither of us would have bat an eye on each other. Entropy however lead us together. I know very much about her childhood. Her father was often away, he was some important guy who even managed to show up in Nuremberg's television at some point. Her mother was a housewife, her pretty role model. Nuremberg is a planet that is known for incredibly high crime levels, and I know Maren never had real friends. Never. She had her toys, but never managed to create social bonds. She was always alone. And when she wasn't, she had to regret it, because she met people who introduced her to cardamine. She was good at school, highly intelligent and her parents did their best to provide her education level, so she ended up studying criminalogy, then she worked on some desk for the MND. Entropy was cruel to her, as she ended up in a car accident which caused neuropathy in her hands, something that will be cured soon here on the ship. With her neuropathy, MND decided she wouldn't be able to handle space missions, so her dream died. She left the MND, headed for Delta and we met."
He grabbed his wine glass to take a good sip, feeling that talking so much was drying his throat. Not that the wine was the best idea to take care of that, but he had nothing else in range. "So I look at my girlfriend. A woman with neuropathy that every now and then kicks in and gives her horrible pain she simply has to endure. She grew up on Nuremberg, in the ghetto so to say. She never had friends and she never celebrated her birthday, because there was noone who would celebrate it with her, apart from the only role model she ever got: her mother. She was always slightly chubby which got significantly less in the last twelve months, however I can imagine she was often bullied because of it, and her moonface. People were not nice to her. She got in touch with cardamine and got her few good highs and suddenly there was the need for her and her family to keep her alive, supply her with cardamine. Something that probably nagged on her, probably even made her parents angry at her. At least she completed her studies. When she worked for the MND, she was happy, and then she got banned behind a desk. Because nobody needs a woman that can't use her hands. She was at one of her lowest points of live, escaping her old environment for any answer. Is there anything out there that makes life enjoyable? She ended up at Freeport 11 at the right time, because I was there. The naive but handsome Core captain who slowly realized how terrible the Core was, not wanting to eliminate the nomads but exploit them as regrowing resource." He sighed, shaking his head as he looked up at James. "The marriage of her parents was the only constant in her life. Of course she is the one who deems people who are not aiming for marriage but cheap sex and sexual relationships as degenerates. It is a logical thing to do in her position. She wants to be like her mother. Strong, loving, caring. Because that is how her mother appeared to her. But that is not how life decided for her to be. I do think she would be a great mother, but cardamine will prevent her from pregnancy. And in the rare cases of it working, there is a big chance for her to have a miscarriage. All her dreams are dead. She is a very sad, very lonely woman, and I am all she has, which is why she decided to be with the degenerate I am. Many of her arguments are very influenced by her past. A very sad past. One that pre-emptively destroyed her future. If she had had a more happy past, she might wouldn't call me degenerate."
His eyes were aiming back at the chess board. "The reason I told you this is because I believe you, as someone who decided to live a life in hermit-like conditions, have your reasons to judge the social constructs of house space the way you do. While I, as a person who blooms the most when interacting with people and many people at the same time, regardless of their origins and intellectual levels, have reason to believe that there are more important matters needing my attention than philosophing about the doom of social constructs and values. They change anyway, no matter what I do. All I do is provide a home for a certain amount of people here on the Apahanta. Some of them are like Sherry, who defected from the Core with me. Funny enough, ten of the women that came with me back then only were able to take the chance to bail out because I met them in Yaren's bar. Because I slept with them. Four of them are still on the ship and they are very loyal, because we met this way. Other people are from all over Sirius with all kinds of backgrounds. I love to listen to their stories. Which is the reason I invited you to come here and play this game with me. I'm horrible at it. I probably played it one or two times and know the rules because I looked them up yesterday. To me, this is not about winning. It is a game, a great medium to have while talking to each other. I like those media to meet people. I want to listen to your story."
James leaned back, taking in all the information that was just fed to him. Some parts of Maren's story reminded him of his own childhood.
"Ezrael, much of what you're doing is very honorable. As calm and calculated as I might seem I am still very much someone who believes in the good within man. There are many psychological theries about what the natural 'setting' of a human is when they're born. Many believe that newborns are a blank sheet of paper that life is waiting to write on and freely shape after all its experiences. I believe that everyone is born good, that it's experiences that make them choose their path in life. Within my lifespan I did many things that I regret, but the Canaan project is something I don't regret forming."
He looked off to the side while speaking. Both of his hands gripped the armrests of his chair tightly.
"As foolish as sounds to most people I tell this, the purpose of the Canaan Project is still to create an utopia for my people. I have a long history with many of them and as some sort of leader I feel responsible for them. I saw and experiences intense suffering multiple times, physical and menthal. Intelligence is a dangerous weapon that can easiely backfire when one is about to slip into insanity. An experience I made first hand. When you think of your own intelligence highly, the perspective of it being lost forver by some stupid but very real event can be crushing."
El Harady sighed and turned his gaze back to Ezrael across the chess board.
"Being trapped witin Planet Gammu was an event like that. Being isolated for a longer time with what you presume is a real artificial intelligence like that can do weird things to your mind. Time passes by and you feel your biorythm get out of synch. The room you reside in changes shapes before your very eyes and when you felt yourself lying on your camp bed at one moment, you're suddenly face to face with one of the walls. The security cam shows you that you have been talking to this wall for multiple hours straight, but how can you trust technology, or even time when you can't trust your own damn mind? While I know that the PRIME AI saved us from our own minds, I sometimes wonder if the cybernetic enhancements actually 'cured' us just like that."
James took a swig from his milk to moisten his throat.
"You know that milk was all that was left from our rations as a beverage shortly before we helped the artificial intelligence re-activate itself? From my experiences with psychology I know that these circumstances conditioned me to feel a certain sense of relive when I taste milk. I still do to this day. Sound recordings, video recordings, radio waves and transmisions. I think the most valuable medium we still have are stories. While being very vague at times, they still survive most conventional storage media."
He closed his eyes for a few seconds, before looking back at the board.
"I could have won this game a few times up until now. I just want you to know, that this is no sheme to mine informations. Not at this point that is. In reality I just enjoy talking to you. Thank you for having me. Knight D4. Knight takes Pawn."
James watched the Marlin get penetrated by gunboar razors with a pleased smile.
With a slight note of confusion, simply based on the lack of imagination on how living on Gammu really was, Ezrael listened and tried to fill the holes of the image as best as he could. "I really wonder how all that started, with PRIME and Canaan. I know the Core has an archive on Gammu and PRIME, maybe even on Canaan, but I never got to read it. We had a few encounters with PRIME, some conversations. Asking about their nature and whether peaceful co-existance was possible, which was denied back then. To be fair, I was still part of the Core in that conversation. But there is only so much publicly known about PRIME and Gammu. Cold world, inaccessible without alerting harvesters. A good friend of mine, Sombra is her name, managed to talk herself out of getting harvested with her Whale. And then I also met Progenitor and Empathy and you and Maria Calvo, and I believe also a certain Tau unit of PRIME. Or some other letter." Like every other time when it was his turn, Ezrael leaned forward, this time however with his usual charming smirk. This was much fun, even knowing James was obviously taking easy on him.
"Did PRIME have physical avatars like their ships on Gammu's surface? How were the interactions with them, and how the cooperation and co-existance? How did you convince them of permitting you to have a permanent stay on Gammu? You see, this is all pretty interesting. I always had the highest respect for robots with artificial intelligence, which is why I refused to outfit the Apahanta or our Kishiro Service Robots with sentience. And even then Maren gives me weird looks when I talk politely to them, asking them instead of ordering them to do. Pawn to E4. Pawn takes Donau."
Patiently James listened to all of Ezraels questions, occasionally nodding at some parts, smiling ammused at other parts.
"I guess the short version of how all of the initial members of the Canaan Project got involved with the PRIME AI is that we played a part in re-awakening it. At least to some extent. We were the first humans to actually spend enough time learning about the inner workings of the artificial intelligence that it chose allow us to communicate with it. So this is what I know:"
James finished the rest of his milk and took a deep breath before continuing.
"The PRIME Artificial Intelligence is one giant processing unit that is 'stored' on various places below the surface of Gammu. It's sentience is split into millions and millions of individual AI's. While they are all tightly connected and working as sort of a hive mind, they are still individual, with their own unique tasks and - dare I say - 'personalities'. Many of those tasks can be easiely completed within Gammu and don't require traveling to other systems. That's also why so little of them ever appear around the planet."
He looked down, in the direction of the chess board, but his gaze seemed to go right through it.
"The story of the Canaan Project as it is right now is an entirely different one. The PRIME AI took an interest in us. We survived way longer than the last humans that tried researching Gammu. The longer time we spent researching it, the more we realized how amazing the PRIME AI was, as well as the repercussions should we ever publish what we found. This is why we chose to stay on Gammu to research the AI for a longer period of time. This is how we avoided getting the whole world of robotics into an uproar and getting punished for basically escaping with loads of Zoner equipment. Everybody knew how risky the expedition was to begin with, so nobody even bothered sending a rescue unit. All of us dying on Gammu was a calculated risk."
James sighed and looked off towards one of the windows.
"Our augmentations were a different story. To the PRIME AI we not only were humans willing to make sacrifices to find out more about it, but also potential test subjects. Usually the AI needed to be creative when it came to finding specimen to experiment with. Those experiments were usually limited to general human biology, instead of more complex topics. The main turning point was when one of us brough up the idea of humans being adapted in order to gain a view similar to the PRIME AI. More objective information to judge situations. A giant database filled with immeasurable ammounts of information to base decisions upon. That seemed logical to the PRIME AI and this is where the tests started."
A pained expression flashed across James' face as the memories flooded back into his mind.
"By accessing the recordings I can tell that the tests and modifications took roughly a year. During some of those tests we were fully sentient, sometimes for weeks without a break. During others we were without sentience, while months passed. After this yeah the initial crew was reduced by about a third. They were not strong enough to withstand the tests performed on them. But the cybernetic enhancements were a success. The part of the PRIME AI database we could access via our minds was laughably tiny compared to the rest, but still more than the data all of the houses of the Sirius Sector could save combined. Very topical data, but an immense ammount nevertheless. It took all of us a while to adjust to the changes - after all we still had most of our human brains. The records show that each and every one of us was deeply traumatized by the past experiences. The cybernetic enhancements still compensated for that, but we all agreed that we needed some distance from Gammu. The PRIME AI could reach us anywhere in the Omicrons anyway. We would have been too much of a hinderance on Planet Gammu anyways. This is when we made it our second goal - besides completing tasks for the PRIME Artificial Intelligence to the best of our abilities - to find a new home where we could stay in peace; our promised land so to speak. Hence the name Canaan Project. That was 80 years ago."
After finishing his story James looked back up at Ezrael with a weak smile.
"You're old as fuck then!" Ezrael sounded with a smirk at his opponent. "So PRIME was researching you, and in return it allowed you to access it. Pretty interesting, and that explains the variety of units I've met so far. Especially Empathy. Does Maria also have those crazy enhancements?"
Leaning forward again, Ezrael tried to figure out what James was planning. He obviously was playing rather defensive. Brushing through his hair for a short moment, he made a kissing mouth, followed by fish-like mouth movements, then he placed his finger over one of his Threshers. "Bishop C5." And with that, the Thresher moved closer to Ezrael's remaining Pleco.
James sighed while shaking his head, expressing that he fully anticipated that reply.
"The enhancements the individual members of the Canaan Project received vary. Of course Maria is cybernetically enhanced as well, but I don't think it's polite to talk about a woman's enhancements without her approval."
James smiled. Finally Ezrael was starting to get a little more agressive, beginning to use some of his more valuable pieces.
"Similar to the units of the PRIME AI, our modifications vary as well, depending on our role within the Canaan Project. Subsequently chunks of my brain being replaced with cybernetics is a direct consequence of my role as the current leader of the Canaan Project. Bishop E3."
This was horrible. Right now they reached a critical phase of the game, Ezrael thought. Castling time. "And what are your plans now?" Ezrael asked him while reaching for his glass, intending to empty it with the next sip. "Queen E7." As planned, he emptied his glass, taking the bottle to refill it, leaning to the side to do so. "I do wonder what you are allowed to do. Can you leave the Omicrons or are you bound to them because of the connection with PRIME? I mean, are there any further goals Canaan has apart from self-development?"
"It's actually pretty important for us to move freely across Sirius. There is also no point for the PRIME AI to prohibit us from moving around. RIght now we mainly concentrate on doing research involving terraforming. We're planning on finding a planet to establish a base of operations on. Unitl we can make that happen we will continue to use our flagship - the Arcadia."
Once again, he leaned forward, having expected something different. A pretty aggressive move, however not necessarily better than what Ezrael assumed James to do. "What kind of planet are you looking for?" he asked her, refraining from making a comment about the last Zoner IFF ship out there with the name Arcadia. "Knight D3" Taking a more comfortable position in his chair, Ezrael smirked at James. The following chain of events would be interesting, he thought, looking up at the Pleco manouvering into El Harady's lines. "Far out?"
Ezrael's move took James by surprise. Not only was that Pleco now way too close for comfort, but it was also in reach of his queen.
"Yes, preferably. We looked into a few planets but didn't find anything that was either not claimed by a faction, not completely uninhabitable or in the middle of some warzone. Queen D2."
This was fine for the moment. Ezrael's Knight was blocked until James either moved his Queen or Ezrael moved his King.
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