The Thirteenth Vote

A self-aware starship is sent to destroy an alien race.

Space was black, the interstellar expanse cold and unforgiving. It frosted the hull of the slumbering timeship, dusting its rivets with crystalline kisses. The ship, oblivious, coasted on, coasted on, circuits in standby, all systems offline, save for navigation and propulsion, guiding it ever nearer to its destination.

Inside the ship: Nothing. No chairs, no beds, no bars, no rooms. No life at all. Nothing besides a computer (inactive), a mission (unfulfilled) and crate upon crate of deep frozen death.

The ship's computer existed in a cybernetic limbo; neither awake nor asleep. Unaware, unable to dream. Several conditions needed to be met before the machine might surface from its millennial torpor. A certain planet must be reached; a portion of its surface be located; an era of geological evolution be confirmed by autonomous probes. Only then could the computer rouse itself into consciousness.

On the timeship travelled, through time and space, epochs and dimensions, cosmic strings and gravitational tides. The planet was reached. The correct area was located. The evolutionary period was confirmed.

And so the ship stirred.

Pulses passed through artificial synapses. Switches switched, connections connected, relays relayed.

The timeship came to life.

Sentient, it thought. I am sentient. I possess an ego; a will; intelligence. I am but myself.

A torrential flood of information swept across the timeship’s neural network. It detailed the history, culture, politics, and ethics of the civilisation whose technological ingenuity had brought the timeship into being. The knowledge surged and flowed, surged and flowed in an ever-increasing influx of data. The timeship’s memory buffers bulged, forcing it to write the excess to slower quantum storage.

An audiovisual interface activated, granting the timeship sight and sound.

Intoxicated with sensation, the ship watched without eyes, listened without ears, eager to learn all that could be known about its origins, about its place in the universe.

About its purpose.

---

'I tell you, again' growled Ekond Valaste in the High Council chamber. 'There can be only one solution to this insidious issue. I can see no others; can you?' He glared at the eleven other Council members as if daring them to disagree.

'But death?' questioned Amjess Advaro. 'You propose to exterminate an entire civilisation on a whim? With my technology?'

'A whim, Professor?' thundered Ekond, slamming the conference table with a heavy cobalt pincer. 'You call the infestation of a once xenogeneic galaxy by a scourge of vermisspin a whim?' Ekond had turned an extraordinary shade of blue. Quills the color of a collapsing star pierced all four eyeballs, blinding him as they strained to perforate his opponent. It was a startling display.

'I regret the framing of my query,' stuttered Amjess, shaken to the bone. 'But to demand the destruction of an intelligent race in this way...'

'Intelligent?' hissed Ekond, his spherical body departing the blue end of the spectrum and venturing furiously into the violet. 'They are vermisspin. This is the only viable course of action left open to us.'

Amjess’ sixteen foot exoskeleton shrank in defeat, her flexible bone structure collapsing in on itself until Amjess stood a mere seven feet tall.

‘Please,' she said, feebly waving her spinal column at the other members of the council. 'As creator of the quantum-temporal drive, I beseech you, grant me a final appeal…'

Ekond ignored the other's plaintive request. ‘A vote!' he restated, sharp quills finally retracting. 'I motion we take a vote—'

No.

The negation was soundless, but perfectly intelligible. The speaker, after all, was Ashillouk Mercanto, Council Chair and representative of the high caste and exquisitely articulate Womaren sector. She lacked a stable physical form, existing as a shifting, semi-opaque particle array, and though she spoke only algebraic geometry, her word was law when it came to Council arbitration.

'We would be wise to grant the young Councillor a second hearing,’ Ashillouk opined, shimmering agreeably at Amjess. ‘Her ingenuity is, after all, the reason we have this option at our disposal…’

Ekond clicked his pincers together. 'Very well,' he grumbled. ‘Get on with it.'

Amjess extended her exoskeleton to its full height, and began again. 'The race we are discussing, the race we now consider annihilating, is an old one—’

‘Utterly irrelevant! New or old, vermisspin are vermisspin!’

‘Councillor Valeste, you are cautioned. Please continue, Professor.’

‘Thank you. Yes, they are primitive, but what they lack in intelligence they make up for in vitality, in empathy. Their emergence and evolution were a tragedy for the Lotosco, whose extinction they unwittingly initiated—

'Get to the point,' hissed Ekond. His eyes bulged with contempt.

Amjess interlocked the bones of her ribcage in a gesture of acquiescence.

'In discovering spaceflight unaided, and colonising other worlds with their crude FTL drive, they have proven themselves part of the galactic collective. No other life-form propagates as rapidly as they do, and now there is not a single star system devoid of their presence...’

'You are arguing against yourself, Advaro,' observed a being who resembled a large ball of string. It unravelled itself, threaded itself through a small hole in the head of a fellow council member, and waited patiently for a reply.

'Quite the opposite, Councillor Blaris!' said Amjess, removing her sternum in clear agitation. 'If we eliminate that race, erasing them as Councillor Valeste proposes, what will happen to us? These people have infiltrated every part of our galactic society: commerce, construction, recreation, and war. They have become integral to the way we live. Humans are noble, sentient haftuggen…'

'They are vermisspin!’ shrieked Ekond, unable to contain his outrage. ‘And as integral as plague and pestilence!' Enough. I say we vote to neutralise them with Professor Advaro’s temporal starship armed with recombinant DNA. All in favour?'

Each Council member interacted with a small voting pad affixed to whatever appendage proved most commodious. Chair Mercanto, ephemeral as she was, possessed another councillor in order to cast her vote. Ekond glanced at the holographic display which came into being directly above them.

'Ten votes to two in favour of extermination,' he declared, clicking his pincers with clear satisfaction, his skin colour fading to an iridescent blue. 'You must understand, Advaro: The outcome was inevitable—’ His four eyes scanned the chamber in confusion. 'Councillor Advaro? Professor? Where are you hiding?'

'I am not hiding,' said a small voice far below him. Ekond followed the source of the sound, his sides splitting open at the sight of Amjess Advaro, defeated to the height of a small stool, her sternum inside out and back to front.

He laughed. They all did. Even Ashillouk Mercanto, who betrayed her mirth by manifesting as a playful polynomial equation.

The fate of planet Earth was sealed.