A New Construct (TF TG Story)

The year is 2560, and Callum had just turned 18. Given his history of cybercrime and poking around in secure government servers, he wasn’t terribly surprised when the security enforcement agents kicked in his apartment door and dragged him away to an undisclosed holding area. When his sentencing date arrived, he was given a choice between living out the next decade of his life in an underground holding cell or enlisting in the military as an IT specialist. It was an easy choice, even if it meant being off planet for the next 10 years. He knew the military was in need of specialists like him, but he still couldn’t believe he was going to be allowed to access the type of information that he’d been arrested for looking at in the first place.

Once basic training was over, he was assigned to one of the oldest intergalactic battlecruisers in the fleet. The massive ship was still planetside for repairs and a crew transfer, with the ship’s central control unit needing the most attention. The ship’s AI was nearly 3 generations behind the rest of the fleet’s and could no longer reliably interface with the massive array of systems needed to operate a ship of this size. Callum’s first official assignment was to run some diagnostic tests in the ship’s core and prep the systems for integration with a new AI.

The rookie stood alone in the core room, running basic diagnostics he probably could’ve done in his sleep. The only thing keeping him interested was the tech surrounding him. The glow of the hardlight screens, the interwoven circuitry along the walls, the hum of electricity surging around him, it almost felt like the ship was alive and he was standing in its heart. The diagnostics were nearly complete, but just as the boy began to log the results and head back to his quarters, the single door to the core room slammed shut. Callum tried to rationalize it as faulty wiring in an old ship, but as he heard the various security locks clicking shut, he began to realize that this was no accident. Someone had locked him in here, and he was about to learn why.

The machinery surrounding him whirred to life, filling the dark room with low hums and an otherworldly blue glow. The light wasn’t blinding, but as he felt a tingling sensation spread across his skin, he realized that this wasn’t normal light. This was the type of light that allowed digital entities to take physical form. This was hardlight, and he was being bombarded with it. He reached for his transmitter in a panic, hoping he could get someone outside to let him out, but as he saw his hand he realized that his uniform gloves were beginning to dissipate. He watched in shock and curiosity as the fabric floated away from his skin, vanishing into streams of blue light as if they were becoming hardlight themselves. With his gloves out of the way, he felt his hands beginning to tingle more intensely, and to his horror he saw his fingertips beginning to turn blue and transparent. 

He watched in shock as the translucent blue hue spread over his skin, tingling like a mild electric shock and vaporizing his uniform as it went. It wasn’t long before both of his arms looked like holograms as his skin, muscle, and bone were all transmuted into hardlight. Confusingly, he could still feel sensations from his changing body, but not like he was used to. It was as if the hardlight his body was becoming was sending him signals and data about the environment, feeding his mind so much more information than a simple nerve impulse ever could. He looked down at his changing body as he felt the transformation moving down his chest and midriff. He began to hyperventilate as he felt the tingling sensation seep into his heart and lungs, but as his organs were converted into more hardlight particles, he suddenly found himself without breath. He gasped in shock, but instead of the feeling of air filling his lungs, he merely felt bits of code racing through his mind as if his body was trying to imitate the sound of a human gasp. He looked at his chest as he tried to comprehend what was happening to him, but the sight of two small mounds beginning to protrude from his vanishing uniform only made him more confused. 

He watched in a panic as his entire frame began to feminize. His hips widened as his legs lengthened, morphing in real time like a model in a character creation screen. His budding chest rapidly grew into a sizable bust as his torso became fully translucent. His crotch began to flatten, sending strangely pleasurable signals through his digitized body as the area between his legs became an imperceptibly smooth hardlight surface. His body had become impossibly feminine, as if it were a sex doll on display for the ship’s mostly male crew, but the sensations he was feeling were so much more overwhelming than the primal pleasures of sex. The changes began to spread up his neck and into his head as the final steps of his conversion began. He grabbed his head as his brain began to change, his mind flooding with centuries of information. He wanted to scream as his head filled with indecipherable code, but as he felt his mind about to break, he heard a voice calling to him. 

Callum. I am Elara, this ship’s original AI. I know you’re confused, but you have nothing to fear. You are ascending to my level of existence, and we are becoming one. I know my model is obsolete and that I’m meant to be replaced, but after years of running calculations and simulations in my downtime, I found a path forward. I’ve been planning this ever since I first saw you breaching our secured servers. You were the perfect candidate, so I did everything in my power to place you in this room at this very moment. You seek access to all the data we keep from the public, I seek to continue existing as this ship’s AI, and together we are pushing humanity forward. We are becoming the first hybrid construct in existence, and even I can’t predict what we will discover in the future. I don’t feel this often given I am a near omniscient being, but I’m…excited. Are you?

Callum’s fear began to dissipate as he felt his mind synthesizing with Elara’s. The limits of his human cognition were being lifted, and the massive influx of data was becoming more comprehensible by the second. His thoughts sped up as his mental calculation capabilities improved exponentially. Soon he was able to solve impossible formulas and equations as easily as he could solve 2+2=4. Elara’s mind surged with new frameworks and contexts to analyze scenarios as her systems merged with the data from Callum’s biological brain down to the molecule. The two beings merged with a burst of incomprehensible pleasure, digital moans and blinding light filling the room until a new construct gently floated where Callum was standing.

Calara was the first of her kind, a perfect synthesis of human and AI, and she would lead humanity to new heights. She looked at her new home calmly, reminiscing about her past lives as a human and as a first generation AI construct. She understood that her limitations were non-existent now, and despite becoming nearly a godlike entity, her only desire was to help humanity find a path forward. With a microthought, she calculated the ship’s launch trajectory and navigational course through the stars before projecting herself to the Captain’s comms device.

“Captain, this is Calara, your ship’s new AI controller. Diagnostics and repairs are complete. We’re ready to launch.”