EP8 What Victus Knew All Along

Hi, I'm Aon. This is my channel, where I talk about my sci-fi story, Jack the Space Dog, which is also reflected in my artwork series of the same name.

If this is your first time here, I'm glad you came and gave it a chance — though I'd suggest going back and watching a few earlier episodes first, because we're jumping right into the middle of it today.

Where We Left Off

When we left Aon in the last episode, he had just jumped from the pocket dimension where the Primignus — formerly known as the Atlians — had secreted their dimension away. He's jumped out and sent a message to Victus: hello.

Victus's response, without thinking, is simply: Aon?

To understand why he isn't more excited, it helps to know how the message reached him. Aon sent it out on their private, entangled communication node — not the way most messages travel, where every node sits on a planet and gives you a location for where it's coming from. Aon isn't on his original ship. He's on the Bedouin, and the Bedouin isn't registered on their private node at all. He's simply adapted its tech to piggyback on their private channel. So to Victus, this comes through like a ghosted voice in the back of his head — unnerving on its own, and worse given that Victus has already been struggling with the fear that he's losing his mind. He thinks he lost Aon, his best friend, when he helped him engage the drive that he assumed had killed him.

Aon isn't usually one for subtlety. His thinking: rather than spend time explaining where he's talking from or how — he doesn't fully understand the mechanics himself; that's really Victus's field — he'll just gate right in front of their base.

The base is a mined-out, depleted asteroid mining operation: a giant space rock, Swiss-cheesed through in a grid, that serves as the secret hub for all of Aon's former smuggling operations. It's why Aon reaches out to Victus first, even though there are others who are just as worried about him — Aon's husband (at this point, boyfriend), and Aon's sister. People who are close to him and just as anxious about his disappearance. But Victus controls their private node, which means Aon can reach him without anyone else knowing. And right now, he has a problem.

He has a way home. But he's arriving in a ship the size of a skyscraper. Jumping straight into orbit of his home planet would make it harder, not easier, to reconcile with his boyfriend and sister — a lot of explaining to do, a lot of alarm bells going off with planetary defense systems. On top of that, the Bedouin isn't just a big ship that can gate without a gate system — it also looks disturbingly like the dead technology the Primes left scattered across the settled galaxies. Too many problems, too many delays, if he just jumps straight to where he wants to go.

There's also the matter of the directive the Primes gave him: carry on their work. He's been handed near-magical technology and a mission, but no plan — their plans are nearly a million years out of date. Despite their vast communication network, the Primes cut themselves off from it entirely when they sealed themselves into a pocket dimension, hoping survival meant staying unfound. Which means the local AI that ran their city has been blind to the rest of reality for almost a million years.

So what Aon's inherited is like being handed an aerospace machine shop the size of a warehouse — except he's the only operator, and the manual reads like it's from Ikea. He knows what the finished product is supposed to look like. He has no idea how it was actually built. It's like getting the Ikea manual and the workshop to make all the parts, but not the kit itself. He has to make the kit, then assemble it, then solve the problems as they come. Not exactly his specialty. He needs help.

The Reunion

In the past, whenever Aon hit a problem he couldn't solve alone, Victus was who he turned to for unconventional answers — because Victus doesn't believe in "there's no answer." He believes there's always an answer. The hard part is just thinking your way to it.

Back to the moment: Aon appears out of nothing, right in front of Victus's favorite viewport on the asteroid — a spot Aon already knows from experience, because Victus likes to stand or sit there, plugged into the vast mycelium network he's built out in his secret underground lair in space. He chose the asteroid for the view — somewhere to sit and contemplate while he filters billions of planets' worth of information through himself, looking for anything useful, tinkering on inventions he wires into his fungal network.

Victus, mid-connection with his network, his feet in direct contact with it, tumbles backward off his workstation in shock — while simultaneously pulling up every defense he has, which isn't much. Their biggest defense was always just hoping never to be found. He's also spamming every communication channel trying to reach this ship, because he hasn't yet connected the voice that sounds like Aon to the strange alien vessel that's just appeared. He's fairly sure he's having a break from reality.

Aon decides it doesn't need to be this complicated. The Bedouin can gate massive distances, but it takes serious power, even for tech this advanced. Over shorter distances, though — across a battlefield, to the other side of a planet — Aon can gate on his own, no ship required. Just not planet to planet; for that, he needs the Bedouin. But right now, he figures the fastest way to clear all this up is for Victus to just see him.

Picture a vertical door sliding open — a window between where Aon is and right behind Victus (he meant to appear in front of him, but doesn't think it matters much) — and Aon grabs him into a big hug, which only makes Victus panic harder. Mushrooms are about 90% water, so Victus is perpetually slippery. He slides free, spins around, and points a broken piece of tech at Aon like a weapon, certain he's facing an intruder — which makes Aon laugh, because Victus doesn't keep weapons of any kind.

Victus just stands there, sputtering, unable to get a word out.

"Yeah, man," Aon says. "It's really good to see you too. Why don't you sit down."

Catching Up

Over the next couple of hours, Victus lays out everything that's happened since — most importantly, that the drive worked. Their mapping definitely needs work, but Aon already has a fix for that (he doesn't know how it works, but he knows it works). More importantly, Aon lays out the true scope of what the Sect — the hive intelligence — is actually doing: devouring entire worlds, entire galaxies, on a scale far beyond what the settled systems believe. What's publicly known is a fraction of the truth. This has been going on for a million years — much longer than anyone suspected. What people think is the visible edge of Sect territory is only the tip of the spear.

The reason no one's grasped the real scope: the Sect keeps pushing suns together to build bigger and bigger black holes. And a black hole without a nearby sun to feed it — without an accretion disk — is essentially undetectable unless you get close enough to measure its gravity directly. What everyone assumed was a small triangle of contested territory is, in truth, vastly larger.

Aon lays all of this out casually, projecting holograms above his hands as he talks — which is deeply distracting for Victus, who keeps wanting to ask questions about the tech itself. Aon keeps pulling him back on track.

"No, no, man — look, look. We had this problem. You were right about a lot of it."

Victus had always insisted the Sect was more than just another hive society — and he was right. Every other hive society the settled galaxies know of is essentially peaceful: some indifferent, keeping to themselves, sharing nothing but taking nothing either; at best, friendly, at worst, neutral. The Sect is the only outlier — aggressive, destructive, annihilating worlds without hesitation. That contradiction always bothered Victus. Statistics matter, especially evolutionarily: when almost every example of a phenomenon behaves one way and only a rare few don't, something specific must explain the outliers. And hive-mind species aren't even rare to begin with — across galaxies, across hundreds of thousands of suns, across tens of thousands of habitable planets, there are thousands of evolved civilizations to draw from. A large data set. The Sect is the only one that behaves this way. So Victus always suspected there was more to the story. Why them? How could something this destructive also be this advanced? Normally, something rises to check unchecked destruction. Nothing ever has. How did the Sect evolve in a vacuum, seemingly within a single galaxy, without a single predator to ever slow it down?

The answer: the Sect stumbled across a now-malevolent, formerly dormant AI — a leftover outpost of the Primes. The Primes caused this.

With that piece finally in place, Victus's old theories click into focus. He'd always believed there had to be a single source behind the Sect — no queens, no hierarchy were ever found; whatever hierarchy exists seems arbitrary, situational. His theory was that some supermassive intelligence sat behind it all, directing everything. Everyone told him that made no galactic sense — a civilization with technology that advanced typically has no reason to destroy on this scale. It's usually seen as costly, both culturally and developmentally; the more a civilization evolves, the more it tends to value creativity and capability over conquest. If your technology is that far ahead, you don't need to keep acquiring energy and territory the way the Sect does. It just seems to expand for the sake of expanding.

But slot the AI into the puzzle, and it all makes sense. The Sect is still operating on a biological directive from before it ever achieved sentience — from the moment, purely by accident, that it first interfaced with this AI, back before the Primes' outposts were sealed off. The Primes existed before any other sentient race did. They had nothing to fear and no reason to think anyone could ever access their technology, let alone misuse it. They were even cultivating other intelligent species deliberately, because they didn't want to be alone — because variety is the root of creativity, and being your own echo chamber after hundreds of thousands of years gets boring.

Victus pulls up an old plan — sparse, but laid out like a conspiracy theorist's string board. "So, we have to do this," he says. "I mean, I didn't want to say anything about it, because it makes me look a little crazy, but—" He's already worked out, in theory, an approach to the whole problem: how to get information on the Sect's central node, how to trace how it moves data — because he's always thought of it less like a hive mind and more like a malevolent computer virus. No one else ever took that idea seriously. Aon and Victus never had the resources to act on it before, so it stayed a pet project Victus tinkered with while sifting data alone.

But between what Aon can now show him of the technology, and what Victus already has mapped out as a theoretical plan of attack — combined with the Primes' own knowledge of where the Sect started and what Aon and Victus now know of where it's headed — the two halves finally come together. For the first time, they can see an option besides permanent retreat: something other than a continuous exodus, fleeing wherever the Sect decides it wants to go next.

What Comes Next

Hours pass. Aon and Victus geek out over the possibilities, circling back more than once to the fact that they were right about jump drives all along — everyone else was wrong. They should get back to that. But it'll have to wait, because there's the small matter Aon almost forgot to mention.

"No — no, the reason I came here. The real reason. I mean, that is the reason, but also — I'm going to have to borrow your ship."

Victus doesn't follow. Aon's arrived in a supermassive ship that can gate on its own, and now he wants to borrow Victus's? "Yeah," Aon says. "I need to borrow your ship. But also — we need to build another gate drive. And I need you to put it on your ship. And I need you to send out some messages for me."

The reasoning: Victus's ship is far less conspicuous, and building a new drive won't take nearly as long this time. The old drive ran on a neural network Victus assembled by interfacing mycelial wetware with hardware to control processing for the gate node itself. But Victus now has the arc ship Bedouin — a vessel built to house an entire micro-society. Manufacturing bays, sleeping quarters, full environmental sections for entire species. It was meant as a last resort, should their home systems ever prove unsavable. Whipping up a working jump drive isn't even the most impressive thing on Aon's list of things he can apparently now do.

Aon still has people he needs to see — and he can't show up in the Bedouin. It has to stay secret, for now. So the two of them set about retrofitting Victus's ship into something Aon can actually use to go see the people he loves.