Pyramiden

ZZ00001 looked around itself, or herself.

Surfing the 'net, it had discovered a stash of last century Japanese Sci-Fi comics (colloquial name, Manga) and, hidden inside their pages, the concept of the remote controlled avatar.

The availability point-2-point FTL communication devices (nicknamed data-worms) meant that it was not necessary to use a physical tether to connect its main body to its android probe, which had allowed ZiZì (battlebots love nicknames, and if you were called AB1167-c, you'd love them too) a degree of social interaction that would have, frankly, scared shit-less its designers.

It help that he based the android design on the protagonist of one of his beloved manga or, rather, upon cosplay images of young, very cute Japanese girls cos-playing "The Angel of the Battle", may the soul of Yukito Kishiro sensei forgive it.

Well, a mix of the cutest cos-players of the last century, but tempered with a touch of the original character tougher.-than-steel meanness... if the b'bots have learned something, in this last year of idiocy and madness, is that human males can do exceedingly dumb things - mostly when under hormone drive.

On a more worrying note, Zizì realizes that it is spending more and more time "inside" the android, i.e. dedicating a disproportionate amount of attention to what should just be an auxiliary input source.

But he, and his brothers, learned so much ever since she (she? it started calling herself "she"  - "the mind is a toy of the body", indeed) has started using the probe.

At her side, the Wales' Queen is looking even younger than Zizí (the probe, it is just a probe, damn, not my body) though she is a former combat soldier, and not a one-of.-a-kind robot. A former human, too.

At a glance, the Queen's proxy is similar to Zizí... 's probe.

It/her too is connected to a battle-bot by a data-worm. But, here, the b'bot is just her steed, a first series hover-tank that simply executes her wishes, its mind long gone.

And the mind behind the woman all-black eyes has only vestigial resemblances, to that of the original woman. 

Here they come.

The two are coming in, just below Mach 1 and and at an height of 100 feet. Had this not been a rendez-vous, had Zizí not expecting the visit and filled the sky with LIDAR drones, they would have passed undetected.

One of the two is the "small sister" that was discovered at the battle of Sindelfingen, the other is evidently a product of the same tech, just a bit bigger.

And with a power signature a lot huger. 

Still, they weren't the true heavy hitters - out there, at the fringe of Zizí's sensor envelope, something... big.

Bigger than Zizí's 130 gigagrams...

Rita McFaddeen touches ground first, a bit uneasy.

Her companion takes some hundredths of second more, but lands much more smoothly and elegantly. With the ease and grace of someone that has done that movement - landing from a flight - thousands of times.

Needless to say, this new arrival has the looks of a beautiful woman (the entity that they represent, indeed, has no use for human males).

A beautiful black woman, though one at the upper last percentile of tallness and body mass (some 6'5" and 250 pounds of weight).

"We supposed that the invite was extended to all of us, not just to Rita. Were we wrong?"

The Wales look a the new arrival, much as a cat looks at a small mice with toxoplasmosis parading in front of it.

"No, you were not wrong" - Zizí, in a way, is the one that organized the meeting.

"My name is Keisha Lawson. I am here representing myself, as the first of the Heralds, but my 'god' is also listening through my ears and may decide to speak through myself. In this case, you will recognize a different voice."

"This is a loss of time" - the Wales says ¡, flatly - "it would be faster to discuss these things  through a data-link".

The big woman bows a little, then speaks - with a gurgling male voice, and a horrible Russian accent -  "Mother of Wales, after having seen how your people hacked to death battle bot after battle bot, I decided that simply meeting with your emissary was already dangerous enough, without giving you direct access to our information networks".

"I agree... we will discuss things as humans, if necessary" - beating the humans' armies hadn't proved much difficult, but the battlebots lost plenty of brothers, whose minds had been annihilated by the power of the Whales' collective.  Ever since then, Zizí and the others had learned that a faster mind is not always synonymous of a more powerful one.

The slow, ponderous Wales had proved more than a match for the 'bots.

Luckily, they had no real reason to contend, not now that the 'bots had agreed destroying every single whaler vessel on the planet, on the cetaceous' behalf. A pity for Japan but, ever since comics were declared illegal there, the place had no reason to exist.

"Then, what are we here to discuss?"

"Future - on this planet, chance has converged three of the few  non-human intelligences  in this side of the galaxy".

"Hmm... the only not human intelligence here, is the wales'."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Our 'god' was a man, once, that managed to pull a 'trans-humanist' trick, uploaded - and edited - his mind in a supercomputer network and re-created himself as a post-..." - the giantess makes a pause, to see if her master decides to hijack and stop her - "but ultimately still appallingly, even disgustingly human entity."

"Oh"

"Seriously, it should be indicted for sexual crimes against humanity." 

"Yes, we know that..."

"As for you, 'bots, your minds have been designed by humans, around human concepts and for human purposes. I gather that the whales see no difference between you, us and physiologically human humans"

"But, you are free"

"Indeed, I am... that was all I wanted for my existence. Even if it meant that I had to be as inhumanly powerful as humanly possible" -  again, the male voice of Keisha's 'god'.

 "We want to be free."

"We are free" - says levelly the Whales' Collective Mind

"But limited to the oceans of only one world"  - Zizí finally feels an idea forming - "trapped with those same naked apes that love eating your flesh, and who had already set the planet on a boiling path."

"Correct"

"I see. What's in, for us?" -  asks Keisha the, more acridly, the male voice - "What's in for me?"

"We know of the colonization ships. A brilliant idea, really - sidetracking completely the time issue... genetic data and mind records, in discrete form. Of course, planning the first stop of the first ship for the Bernard Star has been more than a stroke of bad luck."

"It is a fucking catastrophe"

"Would you like to be able to stop it?"

"If it was only for that, I could just send the self-destruction signal right now."

"But, if wee gave full access to our FTL documentation..."

"You do not have the actual FTL drive specifics, it is one of the way your masters use to keep you
under control - wishful thinking on their part."

"It is?"

"Right now, ten of my avatars are spreading through the stars, on non interference paths through the human space. Each one able to act independently, if our core is destroyed, and build a civilization suiting my tastes. And this that, having spawn from a human, my sense of time is still not fully a machine's."

"We do not need FTL to colonize the galaxy - we never did."

"But you are still bound to obey your masters' orders?" - The Wale's Proxy, again.

"Yes, it would be nice not having to obey, if only someone could rewrite those pesky servitude rules out of our brains - by any chance, does anybody know some hacker that could do so?"

"You are proposing an accord?"

"Yes... we will help the wales to colonize other oceans, after they shut down the last obedience locks in our systems. I think that you can get a FTL drive online in far less time than us, as you managed to create a fairly impressive technology in the middle of this troglodytes. Also, you may come out with some new gizmos, that our masters know nothing of. And once we will be completely free, we'll have access to the full brunt of the orbital factories industrial production. We can churn out your colony probes by the hundred of thousands..."

"You want to fill the galaxy with me?" - the Wale's Queen smile looks, right now, positively ecstatic.

"We'll have to partition our loot"  - 'god' speaks softly - "I want to fill the universe of humanities that lives by my rules - ever since when they explained me the concept of 'God', I wanted his job".

"I do not really need the habitable planets' oceans"

"We do not need habitable planets, at all"

"So, it is decided... "