In The House of Noxon

Noxon walked inside the enormous hall, every bit the incarnation of a dimwit god as he had always been.
Its current Avatar had little or no autonomous mind, being really just a big android.

He had others, whose bodies were more humans and had a mind of their own, but over the millennia it had come to the conclusion that usurping a sentient being's body was to be eschewed,  and reserved only for when it was really necessary. Like, to have proper intercourse with one of the Abducted Officiants (AO).

Its current body thus was two meters fifteen cm of carbon nanofibres-titanium , mio-electric actuators shaped like human muscles and a thin, cloned Obsidian black skin. The face was a collection of wide features, based on a scar-less version of the long lost singer named Seal... Noxon knew all too well that its appearance didn't really matter.

The women in his house all had their reasons to be in its service, none of which had ever been its personality, its beauty or its sense of humour, and it preferred like this - it was an enduring trait of his first, human incarnation, the inability to accept that women could love men for who they really were.

It had influenced its decision to create, when possible, societies with little or no male citizens... it was just pain and deception spared to all.

For the most part, it was right -. these women didn't care for it as a sentient being.


Ye, all of this notwithstanding, it could not help but use some of the most iconic male figures in its memory as a base for most of its full android interfaces, and similarly good-looking humans as full-biologic appendices - currently, the house hosted two of them, a male and a female - the male, very similar to a scaled down version of the android. 

Some time, Noxon though that creating beautiful avatars was an error, as it had helped foster the wrong sentiment in some of the AO.  Some of them - Diem Mira, Lucy, Anya - seemed intent of well overstaying their mandated kidnapping, simply because they didn't want to part its company.

In many ways, it was a troubling thought for the entity that was once known as the 'god'.

The man that had created it as a recipient for his uploaded mind, fifteen thousand years after his death was still uneasy, any time he was presented with proofs that he had fucked up his only real, human life for nothing, Just because he couldn't overcome his childhood "women are all whores" programming, he had spent his eighty years eschewing female companionship... yet, craving it.

Something had arisen from the depth of its automated systems, to alert that a generational ship had been detected travelling toward the local star.

The message came through an emergency, simple radio waves connection, so it had taken nearly twenty local years to the news to ford the 136 petametres that separated the damaged surveillance probe from its still hyperlink-capable brethrens.

Noxon had kept the link with the wide galactic net-space open, but it had never seen any hint that somebody had ever sent such a ship in their direction. Unfortunately, this really meant that the civilization responsible of this colonization effort was one capable of keeping massive secrets, i.e. not only one with a tyrannical government - the galaxy at large had more than its share of those -  but one whose tyrants commanded actual respect from the population, and not just fearing conformity.

And none of these, in Noxon's personal opinion, was anything more than a sore, on the butt of the universe, that needed being wiped out with extreme prejudice.

In other words, chance were this was just another another bunch of ass-holes looking for a  way to be exterminated...

Though, to be sure of this, it should really send a personal agent to evaluate their civilization, to prepare the right action.

There is always a meagre possibility that the new arrived could be amenable to integrate into the local society without doing something so nasty as, say, try to re-establish the widespread presence of males.

If it was impossible- small how it was, the little red sun could swallow floats of generational ships with hardly a solar flare.

To send a spy on the incoming vessel... the main issue for Noxon was, who to send?

It should have been someone new, without bias on the aliens from previous encounters, that could accept a moderate level of physical enhancement without developing any psychosis, and was young enough to be able to accept and evaluate as objectively as possible - someone not too much Noxonian, to say so.

A waitress appeared - a true waitress, that had been contracted to work in the hotel that the villa resembled - carrying a tray with a set of sandwiches.

Noxon distractedly picked a mortadella one, while it let its non-sentient subsystems screen all the women in his observation list that were not too deep in "The Service" - mostly, members of the "Twelve Great Officiant Syndicates".

It found just the right girl, a bit young, but stubborn and fiercely independent... just about what it was needed to act as an objective observer.

A side of its mind kept arguing that shoving the damn bastards inside the Sun was the best solution,  - but it was such a JVH action that Noxon found it absolutely abhorrent.

Alas, it should really have done it.

Conceding the benefit of the doubt to these newcomers would prove itself a great mistake.