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6.87% Star's Ships / Chapter 20: Raining On His Parade

Kapitel 20: Raining On His Parade

"Does that mean you aren't planning to be always with me?" asked Jun Li, a small note of loneliness entering into his voice at that thought.

"Won't you have a body to be traveling to different worlds with me?" I asked confused. My understanding was that he might be the ship, but he was also a program that could be transferred to anything electronic. But maybe I was wrong. "Or is your primary conscious this ship?"

There was a pause as if he was trying to figure out the answer. "The ship has been my physical body for as long as I can remember. In fact, this ship was built to house me and not the other way around. So, I have no idea what it would be like to not be the ship. However, I need a lot of… space. There are a lot of different components to the ship that I control at the same time so it keeps me from getting bored or going crazy. For example, right now I am running 10,659 different programs aboard this ship from the gravitational system and air supply, to charting the course to Earth, calculating the distance between rocks and other objects in space and us, those sorts of things."

Essentially, he was the world's best multitasker. I snorted at that idea, but I didn't want to hurt his feelings or make him feel lonely so I tried to come up with a solution. I mean, I didn't want to spend all my life aboard a ship, even one as big as this one. On the other hand, choosing one planet to live on for the rest of my life was also unimaginable to me.

"If you had a body, would you download part of your conscious into that, or would you download everything?" I asked.

"What do you mean?" replied Jun Li curious.

"I mean, if you spread your consciousness across many devices, would that take the place of having to be part of the ship's systems?" I knew I wasn't explaining myself well so I tried another approach. "Say that something manages to blow the ship up. Would you die with it if you still had a part of you inside an android body?"

"I have never considered that before. I am the top of my line, and as of yet, no one would have the ability to do something like that."

"Not even another of your line? Like Stargazer? Or even the Saalistaja" I pushed. I didn't want him paranoid, but at the same time, we needed to look at all possibilities. Mind you, I wasn't sure how we got from talking about a vacation home to him being blown up, but here we were.

Once again there was silence as Jun Li took a few minutes to process my words. I wasn't too upset about it. I recorded the information I had gotten on the garrottes into my device and then stood up to continue looking around the weapons room. The bracelet garrottes had performed way beyond my expectations, destroying each pipe that I had installed. Therefore, they were now part of my permanent collection of passive weapons on my body at all times.

There was one cabinet that had remained closed and that had me curious. "Jun Li, what is in here?"

Not getting any response, I walked over to the keypad and looked at it. There was no way I would be able to randomly press buttons until it opened. Something told me that when Jun Li locked something, he really locked it.

Maybe I could ask him to change all the locks on these cases to a single code that I knew so that I could access them whenever I wanted to without having to bother him or make them fingerprint activated. Because clearly, he was bothered now.

Turning away from the mysterious closet of mysteries, I left the room with my tablet in tow.

I was not an impulsive person. I liked to think and plan things out. I liked order, schedules, and a firm set of rules to obey in order to not go crazy. The fact that I had a cabinet in that room that I couldn't open and didn't know what was inside was enough to cause me to be impulsive. I needed to know what was in there for no other reason than to know what was in there.

I compared it to seeing a giant red button in a glass case with a sign over the top saying: "Don't Push". You know you want to push that frigging button. That was the cabinet for me. I needed to know simply because I didn't know.

I started to chew on my nail as I made my way to the nightclub lounge. I like the steak and potato dish that they had so I wanted to re-order it. "I ran all the possible scenarios," came a loud voice through the earpiece, causing me to jump.

"What?" I said confused. What was he talking about?

"All the scenarios that might result in me being blown up," Jun Li said. I wrinkled my forehead. Of all the things you never thought you would hear: 'I thought about all the ways I could possibly die' was probably at the top of that list.

"Okay?" I replied, my brain focusing on what could be in the cabinet versus what could blow me up, but everyone had their own priorities.

"I am going to take your suggestion and multiply my programming so that if one ship is destroyed, I will have several ships under me that won't be." He sounded so confident in his plan that I didn't want to rain on his parade.

"How do you plan to get your hands on multiple ships?" I asked, completely raining on his parade.

Once again there was silence. "Hey, Jun Li," I said quickly hoping that he would pay even the slightest bit of attention to me.

"Yes?" came the immediate reply. I sighed in relief.

"What is in the locked cabinet?" I asked already turning around to enter the room again. The lock to the outer door disengaged as I walked up to it. Heading in without a pause, I stopped in front of the cabinet.

"That one?" asked Jun Li confused.

"Yes, that one," I stressed. "I need to know what is in that one."

"Okay, but you will need to step back like five feet," grumbled Jun Li. Confused, I did as he told me and the cabinet opened and a landside of rolls of fabric fell out of it and across the floor to stop at my feet.


next chapter

Kapitel 21: Silks Fit For Royalty

The rolls of cloth poured out of the cabinet like clothes in an overstuffed closet. No wonder Jun Li didn't open it at first, the scientist or whoever probably just stuffed everything in there. But does that mean that they don't know what it was used for or did they know, they just didn't care?

"What type of fabric is this?" I asked as I held up a bolt of beautiful royal blue material. There was every color of the rainbow and then some laying haphazardly on the floor.

"It is a fabric produced by worms only found on planet X86970," he replied carelessly.

X86970… why did that planet sound so familiar.

"You guys went to the zombie planet to get silk?" I asked stunned. I mean, it was beautiful material, but still… zombies.

"No," Jun Li said with a snort. "The Dryadalis go to the planet to harvest the threads produced by the worms before bringing it back to their own planet to produce it into fabric."

"And the zombies don't bother them?"

"No," continued Jun Li. "They have set up a base where they can fly in and out of without encountering the local inhabitants. However, there were many Dryadalis that were killed in order to secure the worms into the base."

"Why didn't they take the worms back home? Why bother going back to the planet at all?" I asked surprised. I mean, wouldn't that make the most sense?

"The worms are completely unable to survive being taken off planet, no matter how much a species manages to duplicate the worm's environment. This was determined to be the best way."

"Okay, so what is so special about this fabric that the Dryadalis are willing to go through all that work just for cloth?" Don't get me wrong, this cloth felt softer than the finest silks back on Earth, but I was not getting past the whole zombie thing.

"This particular fabric costs almost 10 million of your Country M dollars per square foot. As such, only the upper echelon in this universe is able to afford it. It is knife-proof, blaster-proof, bomb-proof, and laser-proof. In fact, a weapon had yet to be invented to be able to penetrate its fibers once the cloth is woven together. That was, until recently," said Jun Li as if he was talking about simple cotton back home. But now I understood why you would be willing to deal with zombies just to get your hands on it.

"All that, but it is shoved into a cabinet?" I asked stunned. This was a gold mine!

"Most are not able to afford it," Jun Li shrugged. "As such it is too obvious that this much material is stolen. But the Sisalik on the ship wanted to invent a weapon that could penetrate the material. For that, they needed a large supply of it."

"Did they ever succeed?" I wondered. I mean, if the fabric costs that much as is only used on high-profile targets, then any weapon produced to get through it would be worth a lot.

"There is one weapon completed, but it has yet to be mass-produced," replied Jun Li his voice distracted. Then again, the guy does have tens of thousands of things to do at any moment.

"Where are the plans?" I asked, another idea forming in my head.

"Saved in my database," he replied offhandedly.

"Has it been shared, downloaded, or in any other way distributed to anyone else in this universe?" I needed to be exact, because if his answer was no, then I had the best golden finger possible.

"No. They had just completed the first successful test the day that I was freed and all systems have been locked down since then. The scientists also didn't want any information leakage and didn't mention anything outside of this ship. They wanted to release all the data and proof of a successful trial all at the same time."

"And they didn't get around to it," I said with a smug smile on my face.

"And they didn't get around to it," confirmed Jun Li. "You seem happy, your heart rate has accelerated. May I ask why?"

"I am happy," I confirmed. "At present, we have enough fabric here to provide me with an entire closet full of clothes that are, essentially, bulletproof. You have also just told me that no one has the ability to get through the material except for us. That means that I have the ability to kill anyone or anything in this universe, whether they are wearing this fabric or not, and no one has the ability to kill me."

To say that I was happy was an understatement.

I just had the universe handed to me at my feet, literally and figuratively. If I was going to get into weapons trafficking, I would need extra security like this fabric to keep me alive. Unfortunately, it wasn't like I could just drop it off at the nearest seamstress and have the clothes made.

"I don't suppose you know any discreet people who could create some clothes for me using this fabric?" I asked already knowing the answer. This was too expensive, too important to just leave to anyone.

"We have one clothing generator, also from planet X86970, that is able to manipulate the fabric into clothing. It required a specific cutting tool and needles created from the claws of the zombies to be able to create clothing from the cloth. Only 426 individuals have the clothing generators needed to manipulate the fabric."

"And we are one of them?" This just keeps getting better and better. I fingered the lightweight material and thought about everything that I could do with it.

"We are," said Jun Li, this time with a smile in his voice. "I assume that you are happy with that?"

"More than you know," I admitted carefully picking up the rolls of cloth and putting them back in the cupboard. "Do you have instructions on how to use one of these clothing generators?"

"I do," he said before pausing. "And I have just uploaded the program into your tablet. You need to design your own clothes and input your measurements and the generator will be able to do the rest."

Well, now I knew what I was going to be doing the rest of our trip to Earth; build a wardrobe of bulletproof clothing, learn a new language or five, and start making some less-than-savory contacts.

Hey, everyone has to start somewhere. I just had an invincible AI willing to help me.


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