What did the Solar King do all day?

It was a question Chester had never really thought much about. Now, it weighed heavily on him. There were only so many times he could ask the Solar King to check his schedule, then tell Chester what that schedule was, just for Chester to then instruct the Solar King to do what was next on the schedule. Just telling the Solar King to follow his schedule was not enough. It was too vague, left too many steps unspoken, and resulted in the Solar King standing motionless more often than Chester was comfortable with.

“At least his Golden Eminence already has a habit of going silent for minutes on end,” Chester sighed when he overheard some of the Solar King’s advisors commenting on it.

“Any idea what he’s doing?” one advisor asked the other.

“Long distance, high priority communications, I assume,” was the response.

If that was the case, then he hadn’t received any such communications since Chester had taken control of the Solar King. Not even a full day yet, so not hardly much of a sample size. It was still several hours of effort though, and Chester was beginning to fade. He was a morning person so staying up late was not his usual preference but, as he was learning, the Solar King didn’t sleep. Literally. Something about his golden armor allowed him to just keep on going without stop. Not so with Chester. It was the slight banter from the advisors that called him back into consciousness.

“Tell them you need time to consider their proposal,” Chester instructed the Solar King. “Call them back in thee hours and tell them to do whatever you would normally have told them.”

The Solar King obeyed, the advisors bowed and left, and Chester slipped back into sleep.

The following morning, Chester was the last one to arrive to the lab. He knew he looked rough, and between his lack of sleep and still needing to divide his attention between the lab and whatever the Solar King was needing to do, he did not have high hopes for being able to contribute much to the project.

As he made his way to his station, nodding to everyone as he passed them, he gradually began to notice how quiet everyone was as they watched him enter.

“I’m sorry I’m late, everyone,” Chester said, “didn’t sleep well last night and I’m afraid…

He trailed off as he finally met some of their gazes. There was sock, betrayal, even hints of disgust.

Had they figured out what happened?

“Is something wrong?” he asked as his stomach clenched.

He could have the Solar King announce their executions before they could tell anyone what he, Chester, had done, but…no, he couldn’t do that. He wasn’t a murderer and these were good people, for the most part.

“We noticed a discrepancy in the amount of neural gel in the vat,” Smythe Hark said in a controlled voice. “Just the right amount for a sample. So we checked the logs, and sure enough, you ran the process while the Solar King was here yesterday.”

“I, uh, well, he wanted…”

“You ran the old process,” Smythe was barely keeping himself from shouting as he shook with anger. “You didn’t show him what I’d actually discovered, what we’ve worked to create. You tried to take credit for that work!”

Chester sighed a breath of relief. Oh, was that all? They thought he was concealing their efforts, making their work seem substandard. Not an innocent accusation, but certainly not on the level of regicide.

“His Golden Eminence wanted to see the difference between the old and new processes,” Chester smiled as he waved his hand as if to clear the air in front of himself. “He isn’t usually keen on being shown untested results so I produced a sample for him. This was after the first on had attacked him. It seems the anger issue was still present so it was deduced to be an issue in the neural gel itself. We’ll need to begin synthesizing alternative formulas to make sure the limbic system doesn’t override our commands again.”

He waited. Either they believed him, and everything was fine, or they didn’t and things were about to get complicated. Of course, if they called up the record of apes delivered as samples then they’d see that no such sample had been created, but this was the best Chester could do on such little sleep.

Expressions softened and tensed shoulders sagged.

“Oh,” a number of them said quietly and a number of embarrassed grins began to spread around the room.

“No one worry about it,” Chester said. “If I’d shown him our original process, no doubt one of us would be dead right now. Mr Hark’s new process was sufficiently impressive to the Solar King that no one needed to be executed. Now then, let’s all get to work so that we can continue that trend beyond next week.”

That satisfied them and everyone spent the day teasing apart the neural gel compound, trying to identify the proteins that would most efficiently bind to the limbic system. Chester even managed to find a few promising compounds between nodding off a couple of times and muttering his way through the Solar King’s schedule. The day both crawled along and flew by and when the time came to leave the lab, Chester let out a huge sigh of relief. He took his time, gathering up his things and letting everyone else leave ahead of him.

Once he was alone, he unpacked his bag and sat back down at his desk and waited. A few minutes later, the Solar King arrived. He took the seat opposite Chester and then, well, did nothing.

“There’s not enough returning data,” Chester said.

The Solar King remained silent.

“I need to see and hear more if we’re going to make this work.”

Too often, Chester missed key details. Everything from the Solar King felt like a memory rather than a true data feed.

“But this process wasn’t designed with a two way data feed in mind since the goal was to produce an obedient, mostly autonomous subject.”

He kept talking to himself as he thought to keep himself on track. He was so tired and just wanted to sleep but he needed to get this figured out. The longer he kept going as he was, the more opportunities to be exposed would arise.

“While I think on that,” Chester said as he began hooking up the neural gel injectors to the Solar King, “let’s see if we can add just a bit of this new formula to improve your autonomy. Seemed to work on the three samples I tested this on today so –

It was at that moment that Chester turned and as Smythe Hark standing in the doorway, mouth agape and pale.

“Ah, mister Hark,” Chester said in as calm a voice as he could.

What he would say next was anyone’s guess, himself included. And all the while, the Solar King sat there, a blank expression on his face while various notices pinged in Chester’s mind for meetings and negotiations the Solar King was needing to go and attend to.