Chapter 47: Chapter 47 Abomination Nightmare Spirit
The Gooblens were already streaming out of the airlock, making it possible for him to actually walk along the hall, to the kitchens. Opening the door, he heard his father laughing along with Old Motha, and couldn't help but feel as if they knew what was going on.
"Where are we?" asked Old Motha, standing from her chair. There were several old male Gooblens around her, almost as if they were her guards.
"I moved a planet into orbit around the sun my people call home. I hope it will be suitable for your people to live on," said Dustin, wondering what they were talking about before he entered the room.
"You moved a planet?" said his father incredulously.
"Of course! Kitteral, didn't you know how capable your son is?"
Old Motha laughed at his father's look, and turned to Dustin.
"I am honored and delighted that you deem us Gooblens worthy of a whole planet. May we reproduce to fill it? Will we be allowed to leave it if we wish?"
Dustin opened his mouth to say, of course, but then stopped himself. "What do you mean?"
She laughed in delight. "Wonderful! We Gooblens are capable of reproducing very quickly. If you gave us free reign, we could probably fill this planet in a decade. Don't worry! I will keep them under tight control. We haven't had a planet to call home, since your Granny, as you call her, was born. Though we will need a lot to keep my Gooblens busy."
"I was intending to bring a whole bunch of derelict ships from a space graveyard for you to disassemble and rebuild…" said Dustin, confused by her odd behavior.
"Ah! That should work wonderfully! Thank you!" she said, prancing over to him and patting him happily on the cheek before sweeping past him through the open doorway, where she paused suddenly.
Dustin turned to look at her, as she stood frozen in the hallway.
"Is everything…" he started to ask her, when she turned quickly back his way, and grabbed his arm with a terrified look in her eyes.
"Is it still alive?"
"What?" he asked confused and startled, taking a half step back away from her.
"The abomination nightmare spirit?! I can feel its presence on your skin. It has touched your spirit! I need to cleanse you immediately!"
Before Dustin could do or say anything else, Gooblen hands grabbed him and had him laid out on the table.
"What does cleansing him, mean?" asked his father, watching as she approached Dustin, and making no move to come to his rescue.
The thought to struggle and fight swept through Dustin's mind, then he remembered how scary that spirit monster had seemed, and lay still.
"I need to remove all traces of its presence from his spirit so that it doesn't try to eat him and grow in power. If allowed, even a trace can grow to eventually take over the body. Now don't move!"
The Gooblens holding him, backed away from her as she tapped Dustin on the forehead and he found himself paralyzed.
"Whatever you see, don't move away from your body!" she whispered in his ear as she smacked him on the chest.
Dustin found himself floating in space, with his body above him. Why he couldn't see the table confused him, but he realized he also couldn't see the ship. There were faint smudges where the other Gooblens should have been, and where his father had stood. Craning his neck, he could barely see smudges where he thought Olivia and Granny might have been, and a mass of what must have been the Gooblens. Then he started to notice other things. Things he knew shouldn't be there.
Their eyes glowed and he knew they would gladly swallow him up, consume him like fine wine, and take his place in his body.
With a shudder, he opened his eyes and found himself returned.
"What the fuck!" he cried, jumping up off the table, patting himself down to make sure he was really himself.
"I was able to get the smudges off of you, you should be fine," said Old Motha breathlessly, wiping the sweat from her face.
"That took forever!" said his father, rubbing his face in exhaustion.
"How long did it take?" asked Dustin, his eyes darting around and noticing that Granny and Olivia were in the room.
"About four hours," said Olivia, stretching as she stood up.
"Tell me what happened," said Old Motha, sitting back into her chair with a deep groan of fatigue.
Dustin recalled what he could remember, certain by this time that he couldn't be stuck in a dream.
"It sounds like that spirit was trying to figure out a way to gain access to the AI's body," said Granny thoughtfully.
"It would have figured it out by now, if the AI had acquired a biological body. If you hadn't shown it how to eat the codes and programs, there's no telling how much longer it would have grown, trying to figure it out."
"How can a spirit eat code and programs?" asked Kitteral scratching his head.
"It's all a form of energy. No different from one consuming the fat of someone overweight," said Old Motha with a wave of her hand.
"Do we need to worry about this anymore?" asked Dustin. "Because I have a lot of Uz'En to find and bring home still."
Old Motha watched him for a while, deep in thought.
"I want Glyfzi to travel with you. If there is anything that tries to attack you, now that your presence is known in the spirit realm, she will recognize it and be able to save you."
Granny's head popped up in surprise. Dustin glanced at them, back and forth, not understanding what was going on.
"You banned me from spirit manipulation," Granny whispered, as if speaking it aloud would cause one of the Gooblens around them to attack her.
"You are older and wiser now. You have made it possible for the Gooblens to have a home. I have faith in my first daughter to do what is right."
"I made a mistake though," she said hesitantly, glancing in Olivia's direction.
"No one learns if they never make mistakes. You have a natural ability to work with spirits. I have no doubts you will be a future spirit warrior. It is not my place to refuse such raw talent. If I had been in your place, I would have lost Olivia to the spirits. Go with these children and keep them safe. They are important to the Gooblens now."
CREATORS' THOUGHTS 
Sdrawkcab
Sdrawkcab Important to them...how? I think Dustin may need to find out exactly how she deems them important.
Chapter 48: Chapter 48 Hivemind
"Now that you have a place for the Gooblens to be, what do you intend to do next?" asked Olivia, following him back to the bridge with Granny and Kitteral in tow.
Old Motha had left to join up with the other Gooblens, and to organize them in starting a town where Dustin had dropped them off. He had promised to fetch them some ship remains to start playing with, at some point in the next week.
"I need to fix the hivemind. Every Uz'En has nanobots inside of them, and those bots need the hivemind to connect them all. The AI was able to hack it far too easy, so I need to fix that before I program a new one."
Reaching the bridge, he paused and looked around. It was really cramped with so many people in it. There were only two seats, which meant the other two would have to stand or sit on the equipment.
"Computer, how long will it take to remake the bridge to incorporate two more seats?" he asked, sliding into his seat and looking over the schematics the computer flashed for him.
"With the new power source for the nanobots, they can do more per nanobot, much quicker than before," said the ship computer.
"Good. Then start that once we arrive at the hivemind. I should be able to get most of what I need done, by the time it's complete."
"Understood."
The ship left the atmosphere if the Gooblen home world and headed over to the hivemind, on the other side of the sun. Dustin was already typing away furiously when they arrived. He had pulled up the basic programs for the hivemind, and was busy reprogramming it to notice all outside programs as hostile. It would also update itself to prevent any other programs from being able to out think itself. Never again would it be hacked like it had.
All around him, nanobots under the ships control, were disassembling the ships bridge and rebuilding it to allow for two more seats with monitors. Standing up, he moved past all of the construction, and the three people who stood in the doorway watching in amazement, heading towards the airlock.
"What are you doing?" asked Olivia, grabbing his arm as he moved past her.
"I'm checking on some things in the hivemind. There may be a way to prevent the complete deletion of its budding awareness, so as to prevent it from having to learn everything from scratch all over again. Plus, I need to make absolutely sure that AI doesn't have any lingering programs hiding in it, before I go to upload the new programming."
She nodded, letting go of him. He shook his head, trying to get back onto the train of thought he had before getting interrupted.
Pausing at the airlock, he began his transformation before slapping the open button, then swam over to the hivemind and diving into it.
The biggest problem he saw was that it was still open to attack from all sides. There was no physical barrier from infiltration. Being made up almost entirely of nanobots, anything could cause damage to the internal workings very easily. And no matter how many failsafe's he programmed into it, the hivemind would always have to worry about signals from outside attacking it. As he struggled with a solution, his mind wandered to when Olivia had shown up outside his father's ship, right after his father had saved him. The coincidence was just too much. Hadn't the ship made a comment about minerals in the asteroid belt preventing signals from being sent?
Dustin wondered if there were some way to utilize that, without preventing the hivemind from communicating with the nanobots.
Floating among the stillness of the dead hivemind, thinking, Dustin became aware of activity hidden deep below all of the programs. Diving down to investigate, he wondered if it were the AI or some remains of the hivemind itself. It was a repair program, from the hivemind, trying to fix itself. He floated there, watching in amazement as this tiny program tweaked a little here and a little there, until moving on to the next thing. At the rate of its progress, the hivemind would take several years to repair itself. But it was still there!
Not wasting any more time, Dustin began to search each program, using the processing power of his own brain, coupled with the processing power of the hivemind itself, to ensure that all traces of the AI were gone. The few strands he found were no longer functioning, and were wiped easily.
Pulling out of the hivemind, he flew back to the ship. There wasn't a moment to waste. He had to get those minerals before the hivemind became too much more aware. No one bothered him as he flew to his seat, barely bothering to change back into his normal form and instructed the ship to jump back to the asteroid belts.
The bridge was just finishing up when they appeared next to the floating asteroids.
"What are we doing back here for?" asked Granny.
"Minerals," said Dustin, before sending the nanobots out to start harvesting the signal blocking minerals.
Kitteral grinned as he realized what was going on. "That hivemind of yours getting fixed?"
"Soon!" beamed Dustin, watching the cargo hold fill up carefully. The new energy the ship used to jump with could only handle so much, so as soon as the hold was filled as full as he dared to let it, he pulled back all of the nanobots and jumped back.
Despite the obvious lack of activity in the hivemind, Dustin dumped the minerals into space around it, before flying back to it. He wanted to oversee and speed up its repair, while making sure it didn't glitch anywhere. The AI had done some pretty severe damage to some of the programs, and he wasn't about to let a missed period here or there, cause a hiccup. The future of his people depended on him.
Several hours later, the hivemind was busy with nanobots zooming all over the place, repairing bits and pieces and utilizing the minerals he had dumped, to form a carapace around the central mind, protecting it from all outside signals that might hack it again.
"Thank you, Dustin," said the hivemind, knowing he was there, despite him not programming a way for it to register him. Already it was progressing further than the AI had.
Some of the programs that had made up the AI were being utilized to upgrade his hivemind, and Dustin didn't mind at all.
CREATORS' THOUGHTS
Sdrawkcab
Sdrawkcab
Nothing like feeling like a fifth wheel. I wonder what the others thought when they saw Dustin bringing the hivemind back single-handedly. I see pride, satisfaction, acknowledgment and a little bit of uselessness.
Weekly Power Status
200+ Power
Ranking 
0 Power
stone You may also Like
Paragraph comment