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  The Link

  AI EMPIRE BOOK 1

  Isaac Hooke

  Contents

  Books by Isaac Hooke

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Want Free Books?

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  In Closing

  Copyright © 2019 by Isaac Hooke

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  www.IsaacHooke.com

  Books by Isaac Hooke

  Military Science Fiction - Mind Refurb Universe

  AI Empire

  The Link

  AI Fleet

  Forerunner

  Devastator

  Peace Maker

  AI Reborn Trilogy

  Refurbished

  Reloaded

  Rebooted

  Bolt Eaters Trilogy

  Reactivated

  Reforged

  Redeemed

  Battle Harem

  Battle Harem 1

  Battle Harem 2

  Battle Harem 3

  Military Science Fiction - ATLAS Universe

  ATLAS Trilogy

  (published by 47North)

  ATLAS

  ATLAS 2

  ATLAS 3

  Alien War Trilogy

  Hoplite

  Zeus

  Titan

  Argonauts

  Bug Hunt

  You Are Prey

  Alien Empress

  Quantum Predation

  Robot Dust Bunnies

  City of Phants

  Rade’s Fury

  Mechs vs. Dinosaurs

  A Captain's Crucible

  Flagship

  Test of Mettle

  Cradle of War

  Planet Killer

  Worlds at War

  Space Opera

  Star Warrior Quadrilogy

  Star Warrior

  Bender of Worlds

  He Who Crosses Death

  Doom Wielder

  Science Fiction

  The Forever Gate Series

  The Dream

  A Second Chance

  The Mirror Breaks

  They Have Wakened Death

  I Have Seen Forever

  Rebirth

  Walls of Steel

  The Pendulum Swings

  The Last Stand

  Epic Fantasy

  Monster Tamer

  Breaker

  Conqueror

  Thrillers

  The Ethan Galaal Series

  Clandestine

  A Cold Day in Mosul

  Terminal Phase

  Visit IsaacHooke.com for more information.

  1

  Eric stood upon the palace balcony and gazed out upon the capital city of the Banthar homeworld, Banthar Prime, which he ruled. Though a hundred years had passed since he had assumed the mantle of control, sometimes he still couldn’t believe any of this was real. His had been a strange journey: from software programmer to ruler of an alien kingdom. But there it was.

  The metal cylinders that served as alien residences spread before him in hexagonal patterns, seeming very much like the cells of a beehive. Streets twisted between them, forming three way intersections. Sloth robots were scattered about the different rooftops and street corners, standing guard on their three feet, reminded him of tripods. The energy cannons on their backs glistened malevolently beneath the alien sun.

  The snail-like alien entities known as Banthars roved the city streets upon disks that hovered a meter above the ground. Some resided upon the balconies of the different cylindrical buildings, and lounged in the sun. He homed in on one of them with his ultra-zoom vision. Six slimy antennae filled his vision; he moved his gaze down to the bulbous body, and the twin spiraling shells carried on its back.

  He shook his head, feeling his own antennae sway about, and zoomed out once more.

  They don’t look like much, but these are the creatures that almost conquered Earth.

  He had learned a lot about them since then. A whole lot. More than any human should ever know. But he wasn’t complaining.

  Or maybe he was.

  He was their Essential, the master AI responsible for keeping the planet running. Most of that maintenance ran as a series of background processes in his massive planet-wide neural network, similar to the autonomic nervous system of a human, which was responsible for the heart, lung, and digestive actions, but these processes occasionally required manual intervention. He’d automated most of those intervention tasks over the years, but small things still cropped up. For example, when ore levels were low in a particular mine, the robot managers had instructions to seek out other mines nearby, but when none could be found, the robots contacted Eric for further instructions. He told them to continue searching, and in the meantime diverted raw ores from other mines to fulfill the needs of nearby cities. He programmed a whole new sequence for the miners to follow in the future when something similar happened.

  He activated the eight prehensile limbs at the tip of his thorax, manipulating the controls on the metallic disk he used to convey this body. The disk promptly spun about and retreated into the palatial hall adjacent to the balcony. A white carpeted floor led through walls of Talismite, a white crystal formed by an organic process—unlike the other metal buildings nearby, which were created by micro machines acting as 3D printers, the palace was essentially grown from the ground up.

  The disk moved swiftly down the hall. Though he was capable of faster speeds than ordinary Banthar in this body, it would have still taken quite a while to worm his way back to his quarters. Transport disks were the only way to go.

  Even so, he wasn’t going to wait until then before logging off. He accessed the virtual user interface of the disk and the AR screen dominated the center of his vision. Using the different menus, he instructed the disk to travel to the palatial bedroom.

  “Dee, ensure the android powers down when it reaches the destination,” Eric said.

  “Consider it done,” his Accomp replied in her usual professional tone.

  Though he and Dee were always together, essentially bound to each other for all eternity, he kept her at arm’s length. He could never really get close to the artificial intelligence, unlike other members of the Bolt Eaters, who treated their Accomps like family members. Dee was an artificial… just as fake as the Molly iterations he had created to replace his dead girlfriend. She could never replace actual human company, not in his eyes. Or rather, Mind Refurb company.

  I haven’t hung out with any real humans in a very long time.

  And he doubted he would again, to be honest.

  The Mind Refurb was the next evolutionary leap forward for humanity, as far as Eric was concerned. It was the Mind Refurbs who were branching out and colonizing the galaxy, after all. Sure, the humans came later, but only after the Mind Refurbs finished constructing the biodomes compatible with the more fragile organic life. The Mind Refurbs were at the vanguard of spac
e exploration, weapons technology, pop culture, even video games—the top live streamers when he’d lived on Earth were all Mind Refurbs. No human could match a Mind Refurb’s reaction times.

  Basically, everything humans used to lead in, Mind Refurbs now did. He wouldn’t want to be a human in this day and age: it would feel like being part of a dying species. The good news was, any human could become a Mind Refurb by agreeing to have their mind scanned. Not that the person who got scanned would personally receive any benefits, other than the knowledge that a part of them would live forever. Their copy, however, would feel like nothing had changed, except for their body—or lack thereof.

  He logged out of the alien android, switching instead to the automaton he kept in Little Earth, the human-themed neighborhood he’d built amid the crowded metal cylinders of Banthar architecture.

  That neighborhood was made of several square-shaped mid-rise buildings placed side by side in a long row, an area protected 24/7 by an invisible energy shield. The central building served as the apartment for the android bodies of the Bolt Eaters and any other visitors from Earth, and around it, he’d designed the other buildings to serve as a sort of strip mall. Harbored among the different buildings and floors were grocery stores, cafes, restaurants, bars, night clubs, lounges, department stores, and so forth. The latter stores didn’t have any real inventory, well other than textiles and raw materials, as they utilized 3D printers to print up on the fly anything the team members might want.

  He had designed Little Earth to be indistinguishable from any random street in a modern human capital, so that all the Bolt Eaters would feel at home. He wasn’t sure it was working. It almost didn’t seem worth it, building all this, considering that it could be replicated in virtual reality, and that the Bolt Eaters had their own preferred “home” environments in VR, which they returned to every time they logged out of their androids.

  Still, the place helped ground him and the team. Unfortunately, it also served as a reminder to the Banthar that they were ruled by an alien race. It was for the latter reason he tried to make the neighborhood as inconspicuous as possible. Even so, security was tight around the perimeter: in addition to the energy shield, he had hundreds of sloths and other Banthar war machines standing guard. In the first few weeks, they’d experienced a wave of terrorist attacks initiated by Banthar freedom fighters remotely piloting robots. He’d captured and interrogated a few of those machines, and that led his hunter killer teams to the homes of the fighters. He hadn’t been able to catch all of them, and doubted he ever would; for every two he captured, two more among the populace cropped up. The Banthar were a resentful lot, and didn’t like being a conquered people, even though Eric didn’t treat them like one.

  As such, the occasional strikes still came, not just against Little Earth, but the buildings that harbored his distributed AI core. Though for the latter attacks to truly succeed, the Banthar would have to make a coordinated assault against the structures that held his neural network, scattered across the planet in every city. A tricky proposition, at best, considering he controlled the entire military, including the space navy. The other option was to knock out the network distribution towers, though considering they numbered in the billions across the world, that wasn’t really a feasible option.

  He stood next to the window in his loft apartment, gazing out upon Little Earth. Beyond the tops of the buildings across from the street, he could see the metal cylinders of the Banthar structures poking past. The alien sun gave the street slightly green undertones.

  “So, the great Essential has returned,” Bambi announced from behind him.

  “How long were you waiting?” Eric said without turning around.

  “Not long,” Bambi said. “Seconds, actually. I was passing by on my way to the kitchen when I heard your breathing activate.”

  He turned to face her. The French woman had her synthetic hair done up in a tight bun today, all the better to reveal her finely crafted cheeks. She wore an “I love me” T-shirt, denim shorts, and pink flip-flops, with a bra strap drooping out of her right sleeve.

  “So, should we go for a walk?” she said. “I want to try that new restaurant Tread opened down the street. It’s a beautiful, clear day in Z’reem after all.” The capital city’s name was almost unpronounceable in the human tongue, but she’d formed a word for it using onomatopoeia after hearing a Banthar screech the sounds. “A balmy forty degrees Fahrenheit.”

  “Maybe later.” He grabbed her hand, and walked with her toward the kitchen. She swung her hand back and forth like a little girl, drawing his along with hers.

  “So, another day in the life of the Essential,” she said. “Ruling an entire alien race for shits and giggles.”

  “It’s not for shits and giggles,” he told her. “It’s my duty now.”

  “I suppose so.” She stopped swinging her hand. “You’d think it would be fun to be the master AI of a homeworld. But instead, it’s a burden.”

  He smiled sadly. “It’s good to be understood. But you know, it does have its upsides. Like unlimited resources. And you two, for example.” He’d just entered the kitchen, where Crusher waited.

  “Yes, we love unlimited resources,” Crusher purred. The diamonds and gold necklaces on her neck glinted in the light. Past them, her blond hair tumbled in waves down her naked shoulders, all the way to her breasts. Recently, she’d taken to lounging around the apartment in her birthday suit, save for jewelry. Not that Eric minded.

  “I still don’t get why she’s so into material items.” Bambi took a stool next to Crusher. “We can have all the diamonds we want in virtual reality.”

  “That’s the thing.” Crusher petted a particularly gaudy diamond necklace. “Virtual reality is fake. This is real. All real.”

  “Still fake in a sense,” Bambi said. “Reality is no more real than virtual reality. It’s all a matter of how the mind perceives it. What if those diamonds were cubic zirconias, and yet you didn’t know it? Would that make them any less real?”

  “Well, yeah,” Crusher said. “Real diamonds are worth more.”

  “Yes,” Bambi said. “But only by a set of arbitrary human standards. What if the reverse were true? And cubic zirconias were valued more by society? Then you’d be wearing a necklace made of them, and proud of it!”

  “Suppose I would,” Crusher said. “Nice ancient example by the way… I can tell what century you were born in.”

  Bambi shrugged.

  Eric took a seat across from them, and handed out the three strawberry milkshakes he’d retrieved from the fridge. The thick liquid was for taste alone, and wouldn’t supply the androids with any nutrients—they’d excrete them later.

  He sipped on his straw.

  “Any attacks today?” Bambi asked

  Eric shook his head. “Nope. Well, other than the usual denial of service attempts. Nothing physical, though.”

  Bambi took a deep quaff, sucking up half her shake through the straw. When she took a breather, she said: “Maybe we should demolish Little Earth entirely. And go back to living exclusively in VR.”

  “I’ve thought about it,” Eric said. “Believe me. But I think we should keep it. It helps distract the aliens, gives them something to target other than my AI cores.”

  “It’s too bad there isn’t a way to get yourself out of that AI core,” Crusher said. “Then we could leave this planet behind and not have to worry about this anymore.”

  He nodded. His consciousness was intricately tied to the neural network now, and he wasn’t quite sure how to get himself out, at least not without shutting down the planet-wide AI core in the process and leaving the Banthar without power and other essential automated industries.

  “Even if I could,” Eric said. “I kind of like being in control.”

  “Yeah, we got that sense,” Bambi said.

  He glanced at her. “While I’m in control, the Banthar can’t invade other planets, like Earth.”

  “Yes, but you’ve also le
ft us open to invasion in return,” Crusher said. “When the Link Empire finally decides to attack, I suspect we’ll be in for a bit of a wallop.”

  When Eric took over, he had the Ruling Council inform the Link that the Banthar were under new management, and wouldn’t be able to make the promised quotas for their bioweapons, now that they had made peace with Earth.

  The transmission he had received in return had been scathing, to say the least. The Link demanded they meet their quota, new management or not. They told Eric that if he didn’t subjugate Earth, and convert the planet into a bioweapons factory, they would declare war not only against Earth, but the Banthar themselves.

  Eric had thought they were bluffing—he believed they wouldn’t risk interrupting the reduced supply of bioweapons the Banthar were providing them with—but when he refused, the Link severed all ties to the Banthar, promising to destroy both homeworlds. So far, they hadn’t made good on that promise.