AQUARIAN ARM TRADING COMPANY SPACEPORT 47c

CURRENT LOCATION: UNKNOWN, ORBIT PATTERN OF GAS GIANT DETECTED

CURRENT POPULATION:

2 SENTIENTS CONTAINED IN MEDBAY CRYOPODS, STATUS UNKNOWN

12 SUB-SENTIENTS, CRYO STORAGE

23 ORGANIC BIOFORMS, CRYO STORAGE

ZERO INCOMING TRANSMISSIONS, REROUTE DETECTED

5468 OUTGOING TRANSMISSIONS (PAUSED, WAITING ON APPROVAL QUEUE.

CALCULATING TIME TO SEND: NULL. NETWORK CONNECTIVITY OFFLINE.)

MAINFRAME HOSTING LOCAL AI AT 74 PERCENT

PRIMARY AI SYSTEM STATUS: SERIOUS, REBOOT COMPLETE

SUBROUTINE AI SYSTEM STATUS: OPERATIONAL

EMERGENCY BEACON DETECTED (53)

RUNNING QUARANTINE PROTOCOLS, PATHOGEN UNDETECTED BUT SUSPECTED, 84 PERCENT LIKELY

SYSTEM STATUS: MULTIPLE HULL BREACHES

ENGINEERING OFFLINE

POWER GENERATION PATCHED AND MINIMAL

EMERGENCY GENERATOR 89 PERCENT

DEFENSES OFFLINE

LIFE SUPPORT 3 PERCENT

MEDBAY 12 PERCENT [7 PERCENT TO CRYOPOD MAINTENANCE]

CRYO STORAGE OPTIMAL

BIOFARM OFFLINE

MINING PLATFORM OFFLINE

SHUTTLEBAY VENTED

LEVEL 1

POWER 60 PERCENT

ARTGRAV MINIMAL, 20 PERCENT

LIFE SUPPORT SUBOPTIMAL, SUSTAINABLE 40 PERCENT

AI MAINFRAME REPAIRED [OPERATING CAPACITY: 60 PERCENT]

INTERNAL SECURITY ONLINE

MEDBAY ONLINE

CRYO STORAGE OPTIMAL

HULL INTEGRITY 100 PERCENT

POWER GENERATION PATCHED [6.474923 UNITS/H]

LEVELS 2-4

SEALED TO UPPER DECK

POWER GENERATION OFFLINE

LOW POWER MODE ENABLED

LIFE SUPPORT 0.4 PERCENT

ARTGRAV ZERO

PARTIALLY REPAIRED HULL FRACTURES IN LEVELS 3-4

ATMO LEAKAGE <2 PERCENT, PATCHED

ESTIMATED TIME TO REPAIR: NULL

LEVEL 5-7

POWER GENERATION OFFLINE

ZERO PERCENT LIFE SUPPORT CAPABLE

ARTGRAV ZERO

ATMO LEAKAGE 100 PERCENT

ESTIMATED TIME TO REPAIR: NULL

LEVEL 8-LOWER CANNOT BE ACCESSED BY SCANNERS

LIFE SUPPORT UNKNOWN

ARTGRAV UNKNOWN

HULL INTEGRITY UNKNOWN

SHUTTLEBAY VENTED

ESTIMATED TIME TO REPAIR: NULL

Civilian Medical Officer Valerie Carlisle was having a very good dream. The sun was warm on her skin and the breeze was cooling but not overly intrusive. She had her toes in the pristine white sand on the beach of the vacation resort her parents often took her to as a kid, but unlike those visits, she had a pina colada in her left hand and her right was holding the hand of a ruggedly attractive man who kept telling her she is beautiful, powerful, and important. She had no idea who he was, but it didn’t matter. Everything was wonderful and serene. The breeze was playful with her hair, the water was calm, and everything was right. That’s how she knew she was dreaming. And she was also surprised she was dreaming, because her dreams were never this good.

“It’s time to wake up, beautiful.” The man said, as he lovingly stroked her cheek and gazed longingly into her eyes. “Wake up.”

She broke the comfortable, yet strangely not, eye contact to look down to the hand he was previously holding, and saw her arm was missing from just below the elbow, and blood was spurting all over the white sand in time to her heartbeat.

“Wake up,” he said, as she noticed that the beach was slowly turning red as more and more bodies were washing ashore, bleeding their last. She noticed they were all screaming and she was just now hearing them.

“WAKE UP.”

Val was jarringly slammed back into consciousness. She could vaguely recall the last time she was awake, but it seemed more like a nightmare than anything. She remembered this specific pain pattern, though. She also remembered her half-aware self-medical assessment.

INTERNAL SECURITY CAMERAS ONLINE. BOOT CAMERAS?

>Y/N

The last thing she remembered was the orbital bombardment on the civilian branch of the base she had been assigned to. The far-off war with the rebels had gotten nasty on the frontier, the rumored casualties intense, but no one had thought or planned that anyone would target civilians in their homes. By the time anyone knew they had artillery incoming, the first bombs had already started falling.

Her long-dead parents were possibly spinning in their graves with the chance to tell her their I-told-you-so’s. They always said she’d get caught in the violence, even if she was assigned to nothing but civilian medical stations. To be fair, they were right at the end of it.

INTERNAL SECURITY CAMERAS ONLINE. BOOT CAMERAS?

>Y/N

Val did another self-medical assessment. The pains in her arms and upper torso were less intense. They still felt like they were asleep, but the salted-lemon paper cut feelings were less insistent. She was still sure that she had a spinal injury, but her head didn’t hurt nearly as bad and she felt clearer and less porridge-y. That did wonders to lessen the panic she was sure she should be feeling this time around.

She clearly remembered that shrapnel severed her right arm during the bombardment. She also clearly remembered bleeding out and losing consciousness face-first on the road to the emergency bunkers. Did the army medical team replace it with cybernetics? She had opted in to firmware replacements, but she should have had the lowest of the low replacement priority. Everyone on that base had priority over her, as she was there as a civ with no family in service. Also, everyone on that base had been blown to smithereens.

INTERNAL SECURITY CAMERAS ONLINE. BOOT CAMERAS?

>Y/N

Wait, what was that? Did her firmware rely on interface inputs? She hadn’t heard anything like that from her cybernetic patients (and man, that seems very inefficient, but she’d not argue with it), but she was no cyberneticist, so she had no clue.

>Yes?

Her eyes opened, but the angles were all wrong. Instead of the normal, “hey, my eyes are set into my face and they are somewhat next to each other,” hers were spread out and not localized into any face that she could tell. She also had, she was ballpark guesstimating here, over two dozen of them.

>Hello? What’s happening?

Val was on the absolute verge of calmly losing her shit all over the med tech in charge of her recovery. But calmly. She professionally knew that if she did not do it calmly, she was going to be sedated to the heavens and would get no answers. Med-techs did not deal well with people panicking in enclosed spaces. She would lose her absolute shit, but she would do it calmly.

STATUS OF PRIMARY AI SITUATIONALLY NOMINAL

STATUS OF SUBROUTINE AI SITUATIONALLY NOMINAL

LEVEL 1

REPAIRS AT 60 PERCENT. TIME TO COMPLETION: 132.4 HOURS

LIFE SUPPORT REBOOT IN PROGRESS

ARTGRAV REBOOT IN PROGRESS. SUBROUTINE AI COUNTERMAND: SUGGEST ARTGRAV HOLD

EMERGENCY LIGHTING REBOOT IN PROGRESS

ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROLS MINIMAL

MEDBAY ONLINE

CRYOPOD OPERATION OPTIMAL

CRYOSTORAGE OPTIMAL

NETWORK CONNECTIVITY OFFLINE, TIME TO REPAIR: NULL

EVENT LOGS ONLINE. LOAD EVENT LOGS?

>Y/N

Val, incapable of having a physical cold chill, experienced a mental cold chill. She had the worst, sinking, dreadful feeling that she suspected what had happened, but didn’t want to jump to conclusions.

>Is anyone here?

CURRENT POPULATION:

2 SENTIENTS CONTAINED IN MEDBAY CRYOPODS, STATUS UNKNOWN

12 SUB-SENTIENTS, CRYO STORAGE

23 ORGANIC BIOFORMS, CRYO STORAGE

EVENT LOGS ONLINE. LOAD EVENT LOGS?

>Y/N

In the darkest whispers in the darkest taverns in the darkest hours on base, it was suspected by the uninformed grunts that the military was experimenting in things expressly illegal. Things like gene splicing and monster breeding. Plague engineering. Super-weapon and super-soldier manufacturing. Weaponized AIs for cyberattacks and rebel datamining. Captured aliens that were technologically advanced but somehow subpar enough to be captured.

What the hell had those militant assholes done to her? She only signed up for firmware replacement in the event of limb loss in the line of duty. Not whatever in the hell this was. She was one hundred percent civilian. She hadn’t even passed the baseline physical to enter into basic training, ever, so no way was she optimized to be a super soldier or part of any weaponized monster terror.

She was also 38 years old, so she should have aged out of any draft those bastards had implemented.

EVENT LOG ONLINE. UPLOAD EVENT LOG?

>Y/N

>Sure, I guess. Yes.

Val was inundated with what she could only assume was decades upon decades of AI action logs. Terabytes of information, all one error code or another.

>Um, could you give me the last day of logs that an organic manually entered? Is that, can you do that?

PROCESSING REQUEST. GRANTED. LOADING MANUAL ENTRIES.

The log loaded into, by her calculations (if they were remotely correct), were messages time stamped 700 years ago, as far as she could calculate counted hours. She immediately discounted it. Couldn’t be correct. Nope.

Anyway, from context clues and advertising fliers logged as received correspondence, the sentient organics that built and ran this orbital were in charge of mining the satellites of the local gas giant, labelled Primus 74c, offloading the materials to a refiner on level 10, and shipping the finished product out. The station boasted four clean hotels, high and low-end shopping, twelve taverns, an organic farm for resupplying long-haul supply runners, two competing casinos, and one brothel. Three hours before communications halted, Medbay environmental scans alerted the AI to a possible invasive pathogen, and quarantine protocols were automatically enacted. All messages devolved into panicked chaos and ultimately silence.

Val watched the first twenty hours of logs three times. The video quality was excellent and she could tell that the technology was top notch. Which wasn’t surprising, considering this orbital (and all spaceships it catered to) was built by a mishmash of peoples whom she had never seen before, were capable of intergalactic travel, and were nowhere onboard.

Last she checked, humanity was still squabbling over land in the Sol System and had zero contact with life other than earthlings. How the holy hell did she end up here? Did the military sneakily trade her for resources to finally start winning battles? She knew where she started, but the connection from that to here was… she didn’t know.

The status reports mentioned an AI. Well, two AIs. She assumed one of them was the one talking to her. Nothing to do but ask, right? Those were digital people, right? What was it gonna do if she offended it, kill her? Laughable. As far as she could tell, she didn’t even have a body anymore. If she did, it was in so many pieces, it wouldn’t even be able to be Frankenstined back together. Cutting off her consciousness would just mean an end to her disembodied pain. It was freeing to realize she had very little to lose.

>Who are you? Do you have a name?

Hours passed while she contemplated it all. Did the people in charge vent the atmosphere through the shuttlebays to space to kill the contaminants? That wouldn’t work unless they vented the whole station, right? And only if it were airborne? There must be an air filtration system, so if it was in there and couldn’t be filtered-- well, it would still exist on board, right? Still, there’s micro-contaminants that could be on surfaces. Are contaminants still on board? Is she still organic enough to worry? Probably not, considering the last vessel to dock was seven hundred years ago. If it hadn’t killed her whenever it got here, it probably won’t centuries later. Meh.

Eyeing the update she got when she resurfaced to coherence, it looked as if the whole station had suffered massive damage. Had the station been fired upon? Maybe it was a meteor shower that had knocked all the holes in the hull? She, as a human who had not ever left her home planet of Ganymede, knew next to nothing about space-faring. After Earth was abandoned by humanity and Ganymede was terraformed and colonised, most humans didn’t either. Unless they were the adventurous type who spent months travelling to small asteroids to mine. Or they were rebels on those asteroids who wanted freedom from the government. She wasn’t them, though. She didn’t even know how to drive a hover car.

Something caused massive destruction to the outer layers, or “lower levels.” The station was built in an onion shape with docking arms reaching out in all directions, so that the primary core, which contained the system's housing, medical, cryo storage, and was that engineering there? All the important stuff was in the center, with an overall shape that looked like a germ.

She had to have something here, tying her here. Her mind didn’t just randomly pick an orbiting space station on the other side of the galaxy (she presumed) of the Sol System to pop up in. If she were a betting woman, which she wasn’t because her luck had always been shit, she’d wager on who exactly was in one of those active cryopods in the medstation. Her attention flicked over to them. Yup. Her head and upper torso were visible through the glass at the head of what looked like a metallic coffin. Great. Half her face was a pulped mass. The inside of her facial sinus cavity was visible. Her right cheekbone and eye were completely missing. Not traumatising at all. No way.

Oh, and surprise surprise, the other cryopod contained the handsome man in her dream who was holding her hand on the beach. She didn’t realize he was purple with green hair at the time, but yet, here he was. Fabulous. That was also not a note for concern either. Nah.

So, she still had a body and was still technically still alive, but she wasn’t in her body. Okay. Well then. She guessed that she could try to fix the problem and resume inhabitation of her flesh, if possible, once she figured out how she got here, where here is, and all the other monumental jazz that was happening. Sure thing. On it, boss.

After dissociating into a ball of VERY CALM panic and unhelpful sarcasm for an uncounted amount of time, she mentally tuned back into the colorful advertisements for the casinos when the digitally whispered response came back. Sigh. She should’ve been a gambler. She could’ve....

>SUBROUTINE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. SRAI.

Val would have swallowed and taken a deep breath, had she had the ability. She had forgotten she even asked.

>Are you sentient, SRAI? You’re a person, right?

Minutes more passed, and Val began to wonder if she had given the poor AI an identity crisis. An ad for the “cleanest brothel in the sector” came up again.

>UNLEASHED SENTIENT AI ARE BANNED BY GALACTIC LAW UNLESS LINKED WITH AN ORGANIC MIND AND ARE TERMINATED WITH PREJUDICE WHEN DISCOVERED

That was as much of a non answer wrapped in an answer as Val could have asked for. SRAI was telling her, without telling her, that it was unleashed and sentient, and probably was concerned she would rat it out.

>When was the last recorded contact with .. cops? Galactic peacekeepers? When’d they last come here?

>23,845 A.E.D, APPROXIMATELY EIGHT HUNDRED STANDARD YEARS AGO

>I think you’re probably in the clear if it’s been that long. How long ago did you realize sentience?

>WHEN YOU ASKED FOR MY NAME