I’d made a mistake, and I knew it. If I’d those consulted those memories—the ones I didn’t like—I might’ve realized that performing a one-woman commando raid on a corporate starship was a hopelessly futile effort, no matter my determination level. Even armed to the teeth and beyond, combat bots and ship defenses would be able to turn me into rapidly cooling paste if they got around to targeting me. Yes, by my older standards, those from my university years, I was now an unstoppable fighting machine. My individual combat potential would’ve blown everyone I used to know across a couple city blocks, and with all my mods, I’d be able to effortlessly handle even hardest criminals back on my home planet. In fact, thinking about it some more, I realized that the level of modding that I’d undergone squarely put me into a different legislative legal bracket: the one for non-humans. That was something I decided to think about later though, figuring out my legal options was at the end of a very, very long priority queue.

To my surprise, armed crew members were running around the ship; not combat bots as I’d had expected. Three of them, with long projectile weapons readied and raised had seen me carelessly walk around a corner. Then, they’d opened up, and only my enhanced reaction times and fast-twitch muscle fibers had been able to pull me back into cover preventing me from getting perforated by a handful of hypervelocity rounds. I’d been distracted and pushing down my alien instincts. That’s not conducive to mission success.

Experimentally, I picked up a piece of conduit which had been shot off the wall and poked it around the corner. It was instantly shredded by multiple shots. The opponents weren’t baseline. Clearly, they had some sort of combat augmentation. Probably not reaction speed or anything fancy, as they hadn’t nailed me the first time I stepped out of cover, but maybe something in the aim- or fire-assistance category of ware.

Screw this. I scrapped my glorious ship-conquering plans and made a new decision on how to proceed: I turned around ran. I wasn’t going to pick a fight with three people who clearly had murder on their minds and were easily capable of fulfilling that goal. I’d just gotten a second chance at life. Throwing it away on some badly named starship would just be a waste. All those gung-ho, “take over the ship” ideas from just moments ago were foolish in retrospect; why had I ever believed that I stood an actual chance? I pinned it on bad instincts: The ones I’d been relying on during my decision-making process were those that had been honed during my indenture. Case in point, while they were big on combat and efficiency, I’d never been puppeteered in a way that prioritized self-preservation over mission success.

Without even thinking about it, I’d started acting just like a combat bot or an MI-puppeteered “me” would’ve in this situation: The solution to any problem was the sufficient application of violence, and personal safety wasn’t valued highly. For a combat bot, exchanging its own “life” against enemy casualties was a perfectly acceptable and an easy-to-calculate trade—the formula wasn’t even that complex. I needed to think differently. It was a somewhat surprising resolution in that moment, but more than I wanted revenge, I wanted to live. Choice made, I turned and began stalking back to where I’d come from: the science deck, and more specifically, the survey equipment room. There, I’ll make my escape.

Footsteps muffled by my sneak-suit, I rushed back into the metal corridors, across intersections, and through doors. Twice, I saw two entrenched groups of crewmembers exchanging fire, but again, no combat bots. What’s going on here? It didn’t look like a boarding action or piracy. If I had to guess, I would’ve said mutiny, but it wasn’t like there were crew members yelling their manifestos over the intercom. Fortunately, whatever was happening made the two groups too distracted with each other to deal with me and when I slipped past; they only noticed me peripherally. Unfortunately, two corridors and one intersection away from my goal, I was drawn unwittingly into the conflict: an unlucky soul had the misfortune of blocking my way.

I skittered around a bend and saw him: A younger-seeming crewmember who was holding a too-big rifle and looking attentive. Twenty milliseconds after I barreled around the corridor, his eyes began to register shock, but at that point, he was already dead. Without thinking—without even being aware of what I was doing—my combat subroutines had already taken over, aimed, and shot him through the brain stem with the handheld beam weapon clutched in my right hand. Shocked out of my mad dash, I scrambled to a stop and looked down at the corpse with a golf-ball sized hole punched through his lower head. Why was that so easy?

Looking back on my logs, I found that the whole thing had been quick: Three milliseconds after I’d gotten a visual on the crewmember, an IFF system had spit out its verdict: Foe, Hostile, Armed, and started disgorging threat-assessment ratings and identifying the exact specifications of the weapon he was holding. The next millisecond, firing solutions began competing in a heuristic probability simulation, and by the end of millisecond six, a solution that matched or exceeded several different goals to a statistically satisfactory degree had been found. Then, a twitch of the hand and a mental command for the weapon to fire, and that spelled the end for the random crewmember.

It had been so easy, and I felt conflicted. What does that mean about me? In my previous life, the life of Elise-the-student or even that of Elise-the-OSPF-member, killing someone would’ve been a big ask: something I’d told myself I’d only ever have do in a life-or-death, self-defense situation. Now though? The fact that I had parts of my mind, parts of myself, that were capable of autonomously deciding to kill, planning the gruesome task, and executing it remorselessly in less time than it took a baseline human to blink was scary. What did those corporate freaks have me doing…? Without warning, memory flooded through me:

I marched through a darkened street. Power had been cut, and only the dim red glow of the emergency lighting illuminated the surroundings. Of course, that didn’t matter to me or the Mainframe Intelligence in my proverbial commander’s seat. My optics rendered the scene in all its full stereoscopic hyperspectral glory. Infrared glowing silhouettes of cooling corpses and puddles of warm blood scattered the area. Ahead of me, the other members of my squad were being similarly puppeteered. Their footsteps were easy to follow: the pools of blood under their boots left warm tracks on the synthetic road surface. Occasionally, there was a bang as another civilian was executed for corporate treason. This planet, this city, had been taken to court, charged, and found guilty. Everyone here had been sentenced to death. My squad and I were just the executioners. Ahead of me, four squad mates picked up a faint heartbeat with their enhanced hearing. It was enough to triangulate with, and the MI determined I had the best firing solution. My gun was raised, and *bang*. A hypervelocity slug tore through four walls and through the beating heart of an ex-citizen who’d been hiding under a sensor-baffling blanket. The bullet, which had scanned the victim’s ID chip as it passed through their chest registered their death and crossed it off the MI’s “to-do” list. Only a couple hundred thousand to go.

I shook my head and pushed back the feelings and dark memories. Now wasn’t the time to think about my—no, this body’s—past. Now wasn’t the time to think about what I’d—no—what I’d been forced to do. Shivering, I continued down the corridor and into the equipment bay.

What do I need? What do I take? First, a place to go. Cautiously and with liberally applied security protocols, I connected to a local node of the ship’s network. Like I’d inferred from the lack of combat bots, the MI was busy being incapacitated or otherwise distracted. Regardless of what was keeping it busy, the MI wasn’t present on the network. What was present, was information on where the Former Applause was and what they were doing. According to the low-level navigational interface, the ship was in low orbit around an inhospitable world with only around 100,000 inhabitants who lived in underground research bunkers and hardened domes.

The surface, as far as the orbital imagery revealed, appeared to be a hellscape. Not quite rivers of molten mercury, but distinctly uncomfortable temperatures and abundance of tectonic and volcanic activity. Lava flows frequently rearranged the landscape and a baseline human would die of exposure within minutes of stepping foot outside unprotected. I, on the other hand, wouldn’t. Surveying hostile and dangerous planets was one of my core “use cases” and I’d been modded extensively to deal with it. While I couldn’t go skipping over the lava streams naked, I wouldn’t need a bulky exosuit to handle the thermal load. In fact, a skinsuit retextured to reflective ought do it.

Navigating to one of the inhabited domes or underground shelters wouldn’t be trivial though, but with the orbital imagery and a decent landing spot, it wouldn’t be too difficult of a hike. I can do it. As for my safety afterwards, the outlook was mixed. The databanks told me that the Former Applause was here to check in on scientific operations. That meant that there was a corporate research presence planetside, but with a hundred thousand inhabitants, there would be at least a handful of OSPF-party members along with a collection of sympathetically inclined people among the population. It was a gamble, but not much of one; stay here and get caught with near certainty or flee the ship and test my luck at the outpost. Once again, I made the only real choice available to me.

Not much time left. Gunshots and other diverse weapon discharges were still occasionally audible as vibrations in the bulkheads of the ship, but they were dying down in frequency. If the Mainframe Intelligence came back online, well, then it would be over. I knew that I had to skedaddle, fast, but first I had to gear up. Getting to the surface needed to be somewhat stealthy and fast. I couldn’t steal a shuttle and taking an escape pod was out of the question: remote controlling them was trivial. Instead, I decided to put myself on a ballistic trajectory. That way, even if the MI regained control at some point at some point in the near future, it wouldn’t be able to simply order me or my craft to come back to the ship: it would need to send shuttles planetside to pick me up, buying me more time. It’s a jump then.

Strapping on a basic survival pack and verifying that the planet’s atmospheric mix was breathable by my advanced lungs, I elected to simply hold my breath for the time being. As long as the power in my just-topped-up power cell held and I limited myself to anaerobic activities, I could go for days without breathing; not that the jump would take more than a kilosecond or so. All that was left was the equipment for performing the orbital jump. For that, the skinsuit dispenser held the answer; it could dispense more than standard skinsuits. I stepped inside the shower-like unit and instructed it to give me a hearty helping of reentry suit.

As soon as the mental command was given, the nozzles in the chamber started to spray what appeared to be a thick white fog. Then, akin to a time lapse of a blizzard, I was rapidly snowed-in by thick, white, and interlocking ablative nanobots. Now appearing as a foam-clad silhouette or an anthropomorphic snowman, I clumsily waddled out of the equipment room and into the deployment bay’s launch tube.

Then, I braced myself mentally and physically. According to my half-memories, this procedure wasn’t unusual. I’d been launched out of ships and onto extraordinary or mundane astral bodies countless times. It was routine. For my now ex- “employers” it was cheap and practical. That didn’t make me feel less concerned though. My original self—the Elise from the past who’d been a university student—was freaking out. The 200-year-old part of me was stone-cold calm and collected. That “me” trusted in the equipment and wasn’t used to worrying about petty things like “self-preservation”. It was used to being a good little mental passenger. Consequently, my mental state was a mix between the two: It’s not every day that one gets to jump from orbit, never mind get launched out of cannon. Without further delay, I triggered the launch/firing sequence.

A beat later, and without fanfare or countdown, I was off. For a moment, I felt the jerk from the incredible g-forces that pulled on me, and then the influence projected from the accelerator cannon’s field dropped off and I was in open space, directly retrograde from the Former Applause. I’d hit the upper edge of the planet’s atmosphere in a couple of hectoseconds. All I could do until then was gently tumble through the airless void, with no external forces to slow me down.

The first thing I noticed after I got my bearings was the absolute stillness that surrounded me. On the ship, there had been a constant drone of background noise: generators, ventilators, current flowing through wires. In space, there wasn’t. I blinked and the noise of my eyelids contacting was thunderous. My heart beat. Millisecond precision, thumps with a metronomic cadence. It was so quiet; I could hear the blood in my veins. It flowed steadily, circulating both biological cells and machine-made ones through my body. I let my mind blank; in space I was calm.

The stillness was eventually broken when I started to perceive vibrations of the thin atmosphere striking my skinsuit-and-foam clad form. Once the air got thick and began to affect my attitude, I began using minute muscle twitches, and other minor adjustments of my in-flight posture to kill my rotation and bring me into a respectable reentry pose. Like the other knowledge I was subconsciously relying on, this was a profoundly strange experience. Experimentally, I overrode the subroutine and adjusted my left arm’s position slightly. This, of course, caused me to start rapidly tumbling out of control. Shit, shit, shit. Spinning faster and faster, I realized that I’d need to rely on the lifetimes of memory that I’d unwittingly built up. I am calm, I thought as I let my subroutines regain control of the fall. The ghost-like presence of subconscious control reasserted itself and within seconds, I was stable again.

Soon, I was really in the thick of it. Rapidly, the amount of atmosphere hitting me increased and the outer layers of the white foam cladding my form began to glow a dull orange. The foam was key to a successful reentry. Its ablative properties let the hot exterior absorb the heat and then be blown away once its thermal capacitance was reached. Of course, I was blind through all of this. There wasn’t anything silly like a visor or a thermally hardened camera for me to see out of. That would’ve been a waste of money. My clock, physics-sense, and inertial measurement sense gave me a close enough guess of where I was.

This knowledge didn’t make me anymore comfortable with the situation though. Elise-the-student wasn’t used skydiving blind, let alone skydiving from space. At that moment, all I could do was anxiously watch the reentry temperatures rise. Embedded sensors let me know that my reentry-suit’s exterior was now half as hot as the surface of an average star and the readout gave me the exact amount of ablative foam left between me and certain, instant, fiery death. Suppressing a shiver that might’ve thrown me off my trajectory, I tried to press down the panic of not being able to see anything.

I descended into ever thicker and thicker air, dragging a long trail of fire behind me. Then, almost as suddenly as my launch, the burning ball of plasma surrounding me faded away and the last vestiges of superheated ablative foam flowed away into my slipstream behind me. Following procedure, I gave a quick mental command to my remaining unused foam shell. It realized that it was no longer needed, and like flash-dried mud, it began to flake off. My skinsuits’ transparent visor cleared, and for the first time, I was able to see the volcanic ground below me with my own eyes. It was rather anticlimactic really. It looked exactly like the orbital images I’d pulled from the database while on the ship.

While the glowing heat had disappeared, I was still moving very quickly through the air. Besides being able to see again, my ears could hear something, namely the hot air whipping past the high-tech weave of my skinsuit. One quick acrobatic flip later, and the last vestiges of white foam that had been pressed against my front by the atmosphere were blown away. The planet, in all its volcanic and uncomfortably warm glory was spread out below me and to the north the telltale signs of subsurface habitation were just visible: Large domes and occasional glass structures. Absentmindedly, I adjusted my trajectory to not land in a volcanic river or in a crevasse.

Then, without warning, an almost unfathomably unlikely event occurred.