Part 19. The Age of Invictus.

Synopsis: Molly, Alexa and Jason discovered that they had never been humans, that their memories were fabricated by very sophisticated AI computer system that had been created by Invictus, a name that came from a famous poem by William Ernest Henley. Jason is dedicated to a mission to determine the truth about why they were created and by whom.

Chapter No. 180. Saturn.

I am the master of my fate.

Saturn hung like a gem in a canvas of pitch black emblazoned with millions of stars. Its rings tilted in defiance of our presence like thin blades of ice crystals. The scene was both uplifting as it was ominous. Saturn has 82 moons, but some of them are small and imbedded in Saturn's ring system.

As a location of a supercomputer system, Enceladus was too small, but its vast oceans under a shell of ice contained primitive life. Titan was large enough but was way too cold. In fact, all of Saturn's moons were too cold.

At first, it appeared that we were not going to find anything here, but something changed that.

"Something's wrong," Molly said. There's an object orbiting Saturn that's not supposed to be there."

"What sort of object?"

"It's black. In fact, it's so black as to be almost not visible."

I stared at the image on the main screen. "You were not kidding. What is that?"

"I would say it's what we came out here to find," she said with a subtle grin.

"Does it have any security systems?"

"I'm not detecting anything that would represent a threat."

"I can't seem to get an image of what's inside it," I told Alexa. "How about you?"

She shook her head. "Nope."

"I think there's a round hatch on it," Margaret said. "I used optical enhancement to find it."

Her enhanced image appeared on the main screen.

"I suppose we'll have to go over to it in a shuttle," I said. "Haven't had to do that in quite some time."

Molly, Alexa and I, along with Alice and Ben, launched a shuttle to travel over to the object, which appeared as a large spherical moonlet that was about five kilometers in diameter.  It reminded me of the Star Wars Death Star, but in this case, it had no outside markings and the circle was not recessed.

We approached the location of the round hatch slowly. Fortunately, the object didn't object. The round indentation didn't have anything that resembled a handle or latch, and there was no indication of how to open it.

We stared at it from the windows of our shuttle for several minutes before reacting.

"I think there's a data module right in the center," Alexa said. "Maybe it requires a passcode."

"That's possible, but even if it was, we don't know the passcode."

"I do," Alice said.

We turned to look at her.

"How would you know the passcode?"

"I'm unable to determine that at this time," she said without emotion.

Her reply was what you would expect from an intelligent computer, but I had no way to know if she was telling the truth. "We'll have to go out there to try her passcode."

Without objection, they got into the sleek spacesuits that were in the shuttle. I donned mine and we entered the air lock. After it was evacuated, the outer door opened, and we were able to float out and use propulsion systems on our backpacks to maneuver over to the data module's location.

The unit was recessed and had a small screen and a number pad. I motioned for Alice to try her passcode, and she went over to it and began entering numbers. After punching in twenty numbers, the oval hatch began to recess, allowing us entry.

Fortunately, we floated into the inner chamber without incident. After all of us were in, the hatch closed. Air began to fill the entrance port, and when it was at the proper pressure, an inner door slid open.

"Pressure is at one atmosphere," Alexa said after consulting her handheld scanner. "I'm not detecting any excess radiation or muon and neutrino particles."

We removed our helmets and proceeded into a large chamber that had a control module.

"I think we've found what we were looking for," Alexa said. "Judging by the size of this thing, I would say it's a massive supercomputer."

"Hopefully, we can get some information out of it."

Alexa sat down on a spartan chair in front of the control module. She tried several buttons without any effect.

"I'm sensing that this thing's power system if offline," I said. "However, there appears to be an auxiliary power source. Maybe I can get it to activate."

After a few moments of thinking about it, the control module came to life. Alexa began entering query attempts. Data began to scroll on the control module's screen. She seemed mesmerized by what her eyes were recording.

After several minutes of work, she turned to me. "We were right. This system was used to create all of the human-based androids, including us. Actually, all of the androids have personalities and memories generated by this system."

"I can't even imagine the computing power that would take."

"What's even crazier is how they got away with building this thing all the way out here," she said.

"It had to be some corporation with a lot of cash."

"That could be the case," she said. "Apparently private outfits took over the space exploitation business from NASA. Obviously, they didn't rely on humans for all of this."

"I think that makes sense because there is no way they could have recorded the memories and personality data from a human brain. On the other hand, it's relatively easy to make a recording from a positronic brain. What I would like to know is who did this."

"I think you know," she said with a teasing grin.

"Let me guess. His name was Caviler Fox."

She pointed at me. "Bingo!"

"That means that he used this system to create Tyco, based on entering his personality and memories manually."

"That's right. The crazy thing about that was that he killed himself so that he would live as an android."

"Except it was just a simulation. He, the real person, was dead."

"just like us."

I sighed. "In other words, we never existed, which means we didn't die. We're just simulations based on fictional characters."

Alexa turned to Alice and Ben. "Why couldn't you tell us that this was the case?"

"We were prevented by the Tyco code in our positronic brains," Alice said. "We apologize for any inconvenience that we caused."

I chuckled. "You sound like a product commercial."

She tilted her head in a gesture that indicated that she didn't understand.

"I've seen these commercials when some company's product got caught for causing a physical condition and they distributed an apology like that that has no real moral value."

"We do not have moral values," she replied. "Our actions are driven by the survival of the collective."

Alexa and I exchanged knowing glances. We realized that this was the reality that we had been born into. All of the androids, including us, are based on a brilliantly insane Nazi psychopathic killer's wildly pernicious imagination. In a word, our situation was essentially FUBAR.

However, there was no use crying over spilt milk. We had a job to do, and that was to reform the android collective so that it was based on moral principles. How we were going to do that was unknown. Even though we are based on fictional characters, we do know that some things are historically correct because of the huge database of human creativity that we have. We know that humans walked on the moon and colonized Mars.

Alexa entered my name into the control module, and it produced a long list. "You're in here."

I looked over her shoulder at the screen. What I saw was very disturbing. It had a list of all of the People I had known, including my parents, my grandparents, my wife, Marie, and my children. It also listed all of the friends I had at Space Academy, which were fictional, as were all of the people I had ever met. The list then began to display all of my personal events, all my birthdays, graduations, academy classes, everything that I had experienced. the list that went on and on for what seemed like forever. Then I caught sight of something that made my jaw drop.