Alarms blared and a blurry world slowly came into focus. What the hell. I tried moving my head forward. Then, I hissed in pain as my nose smushed against the thick transparency in front of my face. This left a nose-shaped imprint on the glass: a little, round, clear spot. The world wasn’t blurry, it was simply condensation on a transparent surface. Moving my head about revealed that the space that I was occupying was quite cramped and that I was alone, save for the pulsing red alarm indicator which periodically illuminated the space outside of my little capsule in a crimson glow. Capsule, that’s right. Let me see… Blindly groping and following some unbidden instinct, I searched what was outside of my field of view with my fingers. There should be a release somewhere around… My hand found the lever and I pulled.

The dry, rubbery sound of nanoseal unsticking itself was followed by a swish noise as the lid of my little capsule hissed upwards and away. I found myself in an angled, coffin-shaped, pod in some sort of corridor. Some quick restraint strap releases later and I found myself on my feet in said cold corridor, but my confusion was only building: for some reason, it was too easy to move. I felt fit, ready to spring into action, and ready to…fight? More importantly, how did I get here? I wondered if I’d been injured or put into stasis for some reason, but those explanations didn’t feel right. Looking down, I found that I wasn’t in a hospital gown—or anything at all. Strange.

A quick look at my insides—an internal diagnostic—further dispelled the hospital theory. All systems—and there were more than I remembered there being—reported green and that I was in peak condition. I flexed my hand and bent the coffin seal it was gripping. This promptly dispelled the idea that I was in peak condition—I was better than peak. Apparently, I’ve been upgraded a bit. Further dispelling the stasis theory was the fact that there was none of the fatigue or psychosomatic “coldness” that people who just woke up from stasis habitually complained about. So not a shipboard stasis either…

Carefully, I began moving down the hallway. The narrow hallway was lined on both sides by inclined pods, identical copies of the one that I’d just released myself from. The other coffins or stasis chambers or whatever they were, were all empty. As my mental faculties kicked into gear, I started properly paying attention to my surroundings. Obviously, this was some sort of space craft or space vessel. Station or ship, I wasn’t quite sure yet, but it had all the expected sensory tells: An unusually filtered atmosphere, the constant thrum of an idling powerplant, and the ever-so-slight discrepancies in inertial perception that led me to conclude I was under artificial gravity. Concluding my search of the corridor, I found a door at the end. A door that, annoyingly, wouldn’t open nor had handle.

Normally, doors opened automatically or told you why you weren’t allowed to go through otherwise. This door simply stayed silent. I knocked and felt along the edges, but stoically, it blocked my way and remained unresponsive. I’m missing something. Inspecting the door closer just grew my confusion: it wasn’t designed to be manually opened and didn’t even have any emergency opening mechanisms. Putting the clues together painted an uncomfortable picture: I was on the wrong side of a security door. So, I’m not in a hospital, and I’m not a shipboard crewmember. This door is obviously a security door. That means I’m on a… my thoughts ground to a halt as the memories came flooding back into me.

The heist. The clean escape. That glorious, incandescent, moment of fame. Then, the enforcer raid on OSPF headquarters. The sham of a trial. My sentencing. I collapsed backwards against the cool door and slid to the floor, tears flowing freely now. Bad and foreign memories were coming to me in a non-stop deluge. The evil actions my body had committed—the absolute inhumanity of it. Memory after memory of where I’d been a passenger, mentally straight-jacketed and forced to watch my body being puppeteered. That wasn’t me, that wasn’t me, that wasn’t me… echoed through my mind, but I could still remember, as clearly as if it had been seconds ago.

I stood on a strange world with a purple sky and the golden sands of an infinite desert surrounding me. The cool metal of the slug gun’s knurled grip rested in my hand as I leveled it at someone who I’d known and had called a friend in a past life. Then, the puppeteer yanked on my strings and I pulled the trigger.

Another memory, marching through a darkened cityscape in formation. My mien was a static mask of emotionlessness as I mechanically gunned down “dissidents”. Memory after memory flashed by my mind’s eye as I tried to recollect this life, the life that I’d both lived and hadn’t lived. Minutes passed, I sobbed, and I wished the torrent would stop.

To my great relief, eventually it did. I was only left with only one terrible thought: How long? With shuddering breaths, I looked at my internal clock. Oh no. Waves of despair renewed themselves in massive swells and once again thundered through me. It had been just over 200 years since I’d been sentenced. 200 years. I’d been 22 when they’d sentenced me to a life of corporate indenture. I’d been a digital slave, a replaceable machine component, a condemned woman for longer than I’d been properly conscious and free.

200 years was a long time too. My parents hadn’t exactly been young when they’d had me and with their modest financials, it wasn’t a sure bet to assume they were still alive. My friends—those who hadn’t been sentenced with me—would they even remember me? Statistically, I knew my survival was some fluke. Normally, the condemned never “functioned” for more than 50 years before they were “decommissioned” in the field. As for the friends who’d been assigned the same fate as me, no. I quickly stopped that line of thinking. There will be time for grief later.

Over the course of this internal reawakening, my despair and sadness started to morph into a much hotter emotional state. As I sat, back against the security door, anger and rage began to roil up. How could they do this!? For a while, I mentally raged against the corporates—raged against the system—but I knew just feeling angry wouldn’t get anything done. I couldn’t let myself get consumed by the all-encompassing mental state that was vengeance.

Breathing deeply, I took a hammer to the hot metal that was my passion. Then, this core of my anger and directionless rage were reconfigured—reforged—into a new emotion. A sharp and a cold one, an icy blade that would strike back. Cool. Calm. Calculating. Surprisingly, I found that wiping my mind of emotions was easy. Doing so left me with a crystalline clarity, a purpose, a singular drive. I will strike back and make my escape. I told myself that if I got out alive, I wouldn’t rest until every megacorp was broken, bleeding, and bankrupt, but I wouldn’t do it stupidly.

Resolve steeled, I stood up, and wiped the tears from my face with the backs of my hands and checked my available assets. Tools and weapons. My immediate physical surroundings were of no use in either category. Silently stepping down the short corridor away from the door, I quickly found the other end of the hall. This one was a solid bulkhead. Lining the short hall, or elongated storage closet, were a couple dozen identical pods. All were open, dark, and empty. Looking up, I was mildly surprised to see no light fixtures. No lights but I’m still able to see clearly?

Somewhat sheepishly, I continued my investigation but this time, on the inside. Of course, one of the first organs that had been upgraded had been the eyes. Glancing over the internal spec-sheet revealed a long and truly impressive lineup of features. Everything was there: Night vision, telescopic vision, thermal vision… jeez, they really spared no expenses. Glancing across the rest of my internal hardware and software was even more of a surprise.

Hardly any of me was actually “me” anymore. Alloy-infused bones, nanocord strengthened replacement musculature, cardiovascular nanopumps that could circulate the nanoblood through a theoretically heart-less body, and much, much more. The real Ship-of-Theseus moment came when I looked at my head though—and I immediately decided to postpone the existentialist crisis for a later date, fervently not thinking about it.

Truly, I’m quite the collection, I thought to myself. Looking over the installation and upgrade logs that had accumulated over the past 200 years, I quickly found why. Apparently, each of my “operators” had installed their own hardware for their specific requirements. A special-neuro chip here, beefed up antivirus there; it had all added up. More amusingly, the vendors of my internals didn’t always match up. Each time I’d been updated, some poor intern had probably been tasked to make sure none of my ware would fatally conflict. There were pages and pages of hacked-together bugfixes and band-aid patches keeping various ware from half a dozen corporate vendors working together.

The latest patch that had been installed left me with a wide smile on my face. The first time I’ve smiled in 200 years. That last intern had fucked up: plain and simple. The feeling of glee at what had happened briefly overwhelmed me. After all, some cruel twist of fate made it that the Helix Key that I’d stolen so long ago had been my salvation, and with a couple lines of careless code, discarded my shackles returned me to lucidity. I wasn’t going to question it, or at least, I put off questioning it until I could hold a more thorough investigation later.

My happiness faded quickly though, once again replaced by my cold determination. I gently probed the most mundane of my half-memories and quickly found the layout of my most recent “posting”: For the past 5 years, I’d been owned by a corporate survey vessel, the “CIPP-SE: Former Applause”. Its mission was to scour far-off star systems and perform the requisite planetary surveys that were required to claim a planet and thus trade its resources on the open market. According to a very shallow skimming of the past couple years, I and other convicts, who’d probably been housed in all those empty coffins, had been dropped on various exoplanets and tasked with basic science, sampling, and other data collection tasks too complex for bots but too dangerous for humans. Rather mundane, I guess, but a relief. I knew from the vague impressions in my mind that exploring strange worlds hadn’t always been peaceful.

My brief dip into my recent memories also gave me a perfect image of the ship I was on. The Former Applause was quite simple in design and security: The main threat to me would be the Mainframe Intelligence, which up until minutes ago, had been my diligent puppet master. So, it was a safe bet to assume that something had gone wrong with the MI. On a small ship like the Applause, a MI is as close to omniscient as it gets: ubiquitous security cameras combined with an AI’s unwavering dedication to an assigned duty: crewmembers aboard the Former Applause wouldn’t be able to sneeze without the MI making a note of it, but surveillance wasn’t the MI’s only job. More specifically, the MI was responsible for puppeteering me, the other indentured, and all the bots on this ship at all times. My eyes squinted slightly together in hatred. It’s gonna get what’s coming for it. Now it’s time for action. The proper codes that would open the door at the end of the hall were in my storage and I and transmitted them locally. I didn’t dare peer deeper into the ship’s net for fear of getting caught.

The room the hissing door revealed was just what I needed at that moment: the equipment compartment. Compact crates with drilling equipment, sample acquisition devices, and weapons lined the walls. With an odd sense of deja-vu, I stepped in and let the door close tightly behind me. First things first: some armor. Briefly checking my memories and retrieving the usual protocol for this room, my eyes settled on the skinsuit dispensers. Each was shaped like a shower stall and had an accordion door to contain floating nanos in case artificial gravity failed. Inside, multiple dispensers lined the walls in little vestibules. I stepped into the nearest one and instructed it to dispense the highest grade possible. Without delay, dark nanobots began flowing out of the ceiling, and adhering to each other and my skin.

Wasting no time, I instructed the suit to shift into a crowd-control template, and with a ripple, the nanobots began to flow and reconfigure their form. The crowd-control, or, riot gear configuration, was no stranger to my half-memories. “I’d” used it countless times before, but I didn’t want to think about that now. Still, It’s the right look for the job. It was designed to strike fear into those who opposed me and to anonymize my human features, making anyone in riot gear appear as a bulky, faceless, and unstoppable enemy. Also, it was quite armored and had practical preprogrammed adhesion patches for weapons and gear.

I stepped out of the dispenser and loudly thundered across the deck plates towards the weapons. Well, that’s a problem. The riot configuration wasn’t designed for stealth; synchronous stomping noises were supposed to make protesters and dissidents quiver in their boots and think twice before approaching. This wasn’t a big problem though. I plundered the design libraries that I’d been graciously granted access to and transfigured the outsoles of the ominous black boots into those from a noise-suppressing stealth suit configuration. How practical.

Weapon choice was also quite easy for me: considering the combat-bots that internal security doubtlessly had, a beam or energy weapon was the clear weapon of choice: slug throwers would run out of ammunition, and any gun with the capability to pierce heavy armor would also have enough recoil to throw me around no matter how strong I was. Self-guided munitions or self-propelled ones also weren’t an option: the weapons stocked in the equipment room were mostly for subduing hostile life that might interfere with science missions, not for becoming a one-woman army.

Fortunately, my power needs were covered. When I’d looked over internals, I found that I was equipped with quite the power cell. While I couldn’t generate my own power—compact nuclear reactors started at around half a meter in diameter—I would be able to hold quite a lot of electrical potential. With barely a thought, I popped open a charging panel on my wrist only to get hit by a wave of mild body-horror as a patch of skin just folded upwards below my right palm. Then, further intensifying the weirdness, a superconducting charging port extended out. This will take some time to get used to. Shaking my head and refocusing, I plugged myself into the nearest charging socket.

Like standing in a brilliant sunrise, electric warmth flowed into me, and the superconducting filaments meshed woven throughout my body twitched gently from the induced magnetic fields. Seconds later, I was full; but in a way that was hard to describe. It was closest to the feeling one might have after eating a hearty meal: satiated, but without the lethargy that a big meal usually brought. I felt like I’d eaten a meal of pure sunlight; I was ready to run up a mountain, do a couple standing front flips, or take over a ship. Taking over the ship it is.

I readied the beam projector in my hands, dialed in the settings I wanted, and headed out into the corridors of the Former Applause.