The Anniversary Gift

The Archival section of the library was guarded by two heavily armored droids with 35mm shoulder-mounted cannons and interlocking reflective plates that deflected energy-based attacks. Rust had barely tinged the edges of their ancient chassis. Sapphire was amazed that there were still two functioning units, but she knew they were vulnerable

Despite their armor, they were poorly insulated, and their counter-intrusion software was almost non-existent. Slipping quietly into line-of-sight, she sent a series of commands via direct-beam transmission and brought them to a shuddering halt. Sprinting from behind cover, she jammed an electrode between the plates of the fallen units, frying their circuitry from the inside-out. They flailed frantically as the current surged through them, then fell silent.

“This way to the reference section?” she chirped to the smoking relics.

The computers weren’t functional. Scanning the nearest one with her Monitor, she broke down its design, determined the communication platforms required to interface with it, then unleashed a small wave of nanobots with a command to clean and repair it. When its internal memory was operable, she executed a search function.

A wave of excitement washed over her. They had it! She pulled up the recipe, and her heart fell. She knew that the list would be hard to acquire, but chickens hadn’t existed for more than a century. Then, whatever cocoa was… she executed another search. It was from a plant on Alpha-1. Was there any way to make chocolate cake without cocoa and eggs? The Archive said that she could substitute blood for eggs, but cocoa seemed like a pretty central ingredient. Well, that plan wasn’t going to work.

Sapphire walked over to the nearest wall and placed her palm on the grimy surface. Resonators in her gloves shattered the concrete’s molecular structure, melting it into a puddle of dust at her feet. The nanobots she’d left in the computer would continue cleaning, until the entire library was repaired, so this seemed fair. She stepped onto one of the library’s many-tiered balconies overlooking the endless cemetery city. With enough time, it might even revive the infrastructure of the entire metropolis, but it would remain dead without people to inhabit it. Bleeping on her anti-grav device, she unfolded her suit’s wings and fell into the nearest slipstream.

Soaring above the wreckage of an ancient civilization, she called to her ship, pondering her options. An impossible task lay before her. She was celebrating a ten year anniversary with her partner, and she was trying to find them a gift.

You would think with infinite resources, molecular engineering and genetic nano-robotics, it would be easy to create something they would love, but they were an ageless being older than some planets. They had seen the stars that lit their night sky forming from the cosmic gases and dust of another broken galaxy. The Monitors worn on their wrists contained enough power to forge a city in an afternoon. So, how do you surprise an immortal being of unlimited power with a thoughtful gift?

You bring them memories: innocent pieces of themselves from the foggy, distant past. Whenever the anniversary of their birth came around, they mentioned “chocolate cake.” She knew that whatever it was must be important to them. So, she hatched a plan. Through careful planning and a holo-game, she’d gotten them to spell out the words, then cross-referenced them with the local archives. Now, she knew what it looked like, but there was no mention of how to produce it. Even their molecular archive lacked a proper blueprint. Suddenly, she understood why they always mentioned it. It was impossible to acquire, and that made it the perfect gift.

After making some obvious excuses, they had both flown off to find a surprise. Sapphire had dropped out of stealth at the nearest planet and begun searching for any hint of the fabled cake. She had eventually landed a hit on one of the planets whose interlinks had remained functioning into the final days of the Intergalactic Republic. It had said that there was an electronic reference text located in the library she had just explored, but their computers weren’t functioning. Now, she was back at square one.

Well, not quite square one. She carefully reviewed the ingredients from the recipe. Based on the technology level described in the instructions and the availability of the supplies, she could predict that the most likely place for “cake” to have existed was somewhere in the phase one expansion. Sapphire was thousands of years old, but some whispered that her partner had seen the rise of galactic civilization in its entirety. It was irrelevant discussing age after a hundred years or so, but this seemed to suggest that the rumors were true. She locked in the coordinates of the nearest city-bearing world in the sector, sank into a regeneration pod and loaded a synth file into her neural network. A pleasant cacophony of sensations massaged away the passage of time, as her body was slowly conditioned on an electrochemical level.

By the time she woke up, she knew how to ice-climb. She had been meaning to pick it up, but she hadn’t found the time. Long voyages were a perfect opportunity to pop into a regenerative cycle to learn something new. She scanned the planet. Yes, the exact level of technology required for her long-shot to pay off.

This planet was an early adopter of pocket dimensions. By combining a pocket dimension with the event horizons of two compressed trans-dimensional objects, you could store an object at a lagrange point where time didn’t pass relative to the current timestream. She hoped someone had used this horrendous abuse of infinite energy particles and unlimited resources to store some dessert.

Pulling up the ship’s navigational database on her HUD, she scanned the planet for energy fluctuations. A thousand tiny spheres of light flickered to life on the display. Jackpot. Each one represented a tiny fold in space-time. Now, she just had to search through them.

She cross-referenced the architecture of the city with the site of the fluctuations, eliminating all the dots related to government facilities, private corporations and public structures. Good start. She erased all the points of light outside of the remaining buildings. A tiny string of lights dotted the residential districts of the ancient world. She jumped from her ship onto the nearest building. There were no energy signatures, and the biological signatures were all molecular.

“Monitor, what happened to this world?”

Her neural network accessed the local infrastructure and found a working terminal. It downloaded a series of documents, scanned and organized them into a relevant explanation.

“Their medical infrastructure was overrun by a virus, leading to a breakdown of economic and political organization. The collapse led many to abandon the world, and the few who remained were unable to revive the settlement. It remained in quarantine for several hundred years, until technology overcame the infection through a benign nanophage.”

“Do I have access to the blueprints?”

“Yes, your Monitor can manufacture them on-site.”

“Please proceed and upload them into my veins.”

“Processing request…”

Sapphire scanned the environment one last time before opening the front door of the dwelling and stepping into a distant past. This must have been one of the first colonies with access to electromagnetic terraforming technology. You could almost feel the desperate need to display the amount of available space. Early settlements were always conscious of their limited capacities and conservatively designed into compact arrangements. This building had an entire room just for the entranceway. She released a wave of particles into the building ahead of her to reinforce the structure before she began exploring its rotting hulk.

After several minutes of waiting, the nanites had rebuilt a fresh swarm. She loaded seven capsules into her wrist launcher, set them to target the nearest pocket dimensions, then fired them into the darkness with orders to reinforce the structures. She hated waiting, but she was willing to put in a little patience to save time later. She stepped into a hallway, admiring the handiwork of both the ancient ones and her industrious nanites.

The horrendous screeching of rending metal split the air. A massive metal arm crashed through the wall beside her, smashing into the spot where she had just been standing. Only her suit had saved her by reacting with a combination of thrusters and microgravity. Her nanobots had restored an ancient guard robot

“Crap. Monitor, what order did I give those nanites?”

“Restore the household and reinforce it.”

Sapphire stared at the freshly forged weapons gleaming on the robot’s flailing arms, “I didn’t mean… reinforce… Nevermind.”

She scanned the reconstructed model. It was unfamiliar to her. All the electronics in this area were from before she was born, but it wouldn’t be hard to deal with it. Sprinting down the hallway, her suit thrusters kicked in, sending her sliding on her back to narrowly avoid being bisected by the machine’s whirring cannons. She interfaced with the nanobots that had reconstructed its titanium skeleton and ordered them to break down the machine on a molecular level. It wouldn’t be long, but she continued evasive action, until silence had filled the shelter, once again.

“Monitor, I’m uploading some adjustments to those orders. Please, distribute them to the other nanites.”

“Processing…”

Sapphire proceeded to dig through the ruins of empire. Only the hardiest pieces of paraphernalia remained intact. Metal frames and carbonized remains sat in ghoulish facsimiles of life before the disease had ravaged the planet. They were few and far between, but the pocket dimensions were almost as haunting. Small pieces of a forgotten past sat suspended in an endless void. They were almost meaningless detached from their context, but in these broken homes, they were still priceless. Small collections of books, a fuzzy blanket, pictures of long-forgotten people and stashes of candy spilled onto the floor as she continued her search.

“Maybe they’ll like this brand…” she wondered as she stuffed the candy bars into her personal pocket dimension.

Finally, in the fifth house, she found a strange collection of objects waiting in the transcendent portal. A white, transparent veil hung beside a collection of shining pendants and a… she checked the pictures… yeah, that was cake! Shouting with glee, she pulled the ancient treat into her world. Someone had really wanted to preserve this thing. It looked just like the pictures, but the sticky substance on the outside was white.

“Monitor, can you scan this object and add it to the database?”

The device on her wrist whirred, spilling light across the plate in her hands. The scanner determined both its molecular composition and created a blueprint for synthesizing it. She archived it in a secret spot on her server. Letting out a small sigh, she smiled at her prize and clicked the ship’s return beacon.

“Someone wanted to keep this safe,” she said and slid it back into the void.

Her ship was waiting outside; its hatch slid aside as she approached. She jumped into the air, letting her suit’s thrusters carry her through its open door. Inside, she set the coordinates for home and tasked the molecular transponder with synthesizing her gift. That robot had almost killed her... Well, her shields might have absorbed it, but she could have broken a few bones if she’d been thrown into the wall by the impact. Laughing at the ridiculous day, she slid into her regenerative pod. Picking out a neural history lesson on the phase one expansion, she let time slip from her grasp.

Waking up at home, she leapt out of the pod, grabbed the present from the synthesizer and sprinted into the house. They had been busy while she was gone. Decorations stretched across the ceiling and to the floor. She placed the cake on the table and jumped into their arms. They glanced at the treat on the plate and pulled her into a tight embrace.

“You remembered…” they grinned between kisses.

“Of course.”