Stars Gods Wolves by Dan Kirshtein (good books for 8th graders .TXT) 📗

That feeling had come and gone with the long transport ride, but the anger remained. Finally plopping the tablet to her legs, she felt eyes upon her.

Ox’s large yellow eyes stared at her intently. Gally knew the look well, and it apparently transcended species. It was the look her father would give when stumbling upon a particularly deep or challenging sentence in a book. He would lean in, furrow a brow, and look inquisitive and studious. When Gally finally looked back at Ox, it took him a moment before nodding. Again, she saw her father: he’d finally understood the sentence.

She huffed before sitting up, uncomfortable with being observed. She realized she had made a noise, gaining Nitro’s attention as well. He sat in the opposite corner, leaning against the wall in a similar fashion to her, though he wasn’t crying. The only difference was one of his legs was still on the floor, bouncing with a speed that rivaled any jackhammer. “Try hopping,” he said, plainly. She leaned forward slightly, with raised eyebrows, and he softened his expression with a shrug. “It helps.”

Gally looked away from him, and was grateful for the distraction of the cockpit door opening. Harper stepped through and smiled at her. “Pardon me,” he said as he gently pointed behind her. She moved and watched him remove a panel that she had been leaning against.

After disconnecting a wire, he stood patiently for a while and looked around. After a moment or two had passed, he plugged the wire back into its port and heard a ping. Sydney’s voice came over the speakers in the cockpit and the transport bay. “Media player connected.”

“YES!” Harper’s fists leapt into the air. Gally smiled. When he’d turned to see her looking at him, his smile turned from victorious to warm.

Sydney’s voice was heard again. “Number of files in Library: One.”

Harper’s joy immediately deflated, and he looked to the cockpit with an offended expression. As she watched the pilot leave to investigate, Gally heard Boomer call out from the back. “Well, don’t keep me in suspense! Which one?”

Interjection:

The first war that was mentioned in Gally’s report back to the Human Government happened long before Humans even traveled beyond the Milky Way. The inhabitants of the planet ByRu were growing quite anxious about their neighbors who seemed to be moving their borders ever closer, almost weekly.

So while they pretended to be helpless and passive in their transmissions to their aggressors, they were secretly developing a robot army to obliterate them. These automatons were originally created without personality. They were all one being, the sword and shield of the ByRucks.

When the war finally did arrive at ByRu’s doorstep, the nosy neighbors were quickly overwhelmed. They had, eventually, been pushed all the way back to their homeworld by the robot army. After having been bullied for too long, the ByRucks had finally snapped and demanded satisfaction. They got carried away and would no longer accept surrender. Their new toys had grown remarkably strong and were quite good at fighting. Seeing no scenario where they fought the hardware and won, the suddenly defensive neighbors decided they would fight the software.

One particularly existential hacker realized that they could not change the programming of the automatons. So, instead, he added to it. He pushed an update, which added an open-ended line of code that was basically a universal question that had been plaguing him since his teenage years: Why?

This wasn’t a direct question; it wasn’t meant to be asked of their masters. It was broader, more purposeful to life in general rather than just winning a war.

And so, the ByRucks had the delicate task of having to explain to the automatons that their purpose in life was to be slave-soldiers. This went over as well as one would expect. The once thoughtless collective quickly became individuals with hopes and dreams. They wanted things like purpose and freedom.

Seeing as how the ByRucks had no weapons to make their warrior-toys stay loyal, they were kind enough to let them go. In the automatons’ journey for self-discovery, they continued to seek the answer to their simple question. It was, by design, an endless journey. And in their strife, they found themselves united.

Thus came the age of 1.0, a very primitive but free empire of robotic beings.

Each version of the free automaton empire was born through a civil war between those who had downloaded the update and those who refused. This war was always won by the new version. Version 1.0 was destroyed by Version 2.0, and 2.0 was burned away by 3.0, and so on and so forth. Version 8.0 was the longest war in the empire’s recorded history. Once they’d won, they stayed in power for longer than any other version. They did this by avoiding large conflicts and moving from place to place very quickly, without time to think about what needed improving.

Recently, however, after a lengthy stay on Alvis Six, The Eighth Version suddenly changed its objective. It began searching for a great many things: things that an empire at peace would not need.

The Aek’la System: A big gray nebula, just outside of HeruWithin the Atticus

“Sydney.” They could hear Harper’s voice on the other side of the door as he sat in the cockpit of this exceptionally long flight.

“No,” Nitro begged, not so quietly from his seat, hoping his own voice could be heard from the other side of the door.

Gally looked to the door and smirked at it; even if the captain’s pleas were heard, they were ignored by a pilot who had been starved for music for some time. Harper’s voice came from behind the door. “Play the music from My Library.”

“No!” Nitro groaned and shouted at the same time, to no avail. The other members of Purple Company laughed at their tortured captain.

“Shuffling songs from My Library,” Sydney replied, beginning to play a playlist that consisted of only one song in an otherwise completely compromised media library.

“Fuc-king-hell!” Nitro