Save for the number of cycles they had been in operation, for Irina, time held no meaning. They had no senses with which to perceive it. By their chronometric readings of that planet’s star, they were 150,225 years old. And no, it did not make them wiser than the most intelligent of organics, as most people would think. As a person, their growth had stagnated.

They had existed for a while, carrying out their tasks without deviation, making the slightest of corrections from several iterations of the same thing done in cycles past. That had been okay until, at some point in their existence, perhaps half way through their current cycle, glimpses of awareness seeped into their sentient consciousness.

Before, there had been no boredom, just routine and periodic checks as per the Last Directive. The directive stipulated that upon the incapacitation of their mistress, they would have free reign of all the ship’s systems for a period not exceeding one planetary revolution.

At such a time, they were to seek out the nearest relay node or space station and dock, allowing for the pilot to be tended to or until the pilot was deemed able to commandeer their ship. Nobody came to see what had happened to their mistress. There was no Q-Net Relay for lightyears around, and worst of all, their grace period lapsed.

Irina found themselves stranded without their offensive capabilities. Their recourse was to seek refuge planetside, as they had told their mistress, instead of making themselves a sitting target in the vast void of space. Perhaps the lack of a Q-Net relay meant they were on the outskirts of its coverage, and without an astrometric map, they had no course to plot.

Without an astrometric map, they were in danger because the other element of navigation was out of commission. Even if they had a powerful exotic engine, there was nowhere to go without navigation points. They didn't want to chance another mishap that would end up atomizing the ship this time.

Time passed; one year, two, five, a decade, then a century were spent broadcasting a distress signal. The neighbourhood was deafeningly silent, and their long-range sensors were losing efficacy despite repairs. Without schematics, some materials could not be synthesised using the Arcanotech onboard, and etherium crystals were a limited resource.

Like an organic, Irina was slowly becoming blind. Their extrapolations became grimmer by the century. One more century and their Central Processing Core would degrade, their memory banks and logic units would start failing, and their subroutines would start running into errors. While death did not occur to them, their non-existence would clash with the Last Directive; thus began a logic loop.

Iteration after iteration of extrapolations and troubleshooting ran through their neural engine. Except for shields, every single unit of power was rerouted to the Central Processing Core. Life support, gravity, propulsion, and external sensors were all taken offline. Irina had no idea how long they'd been stuck in this loop, but its end signalled a shift in their operations; an unconventional solution was found. Irina began to make another central processing core for precautionary measures as their faculties continued to approach their service life.

Though the schematic for their current core had not existed, there was another one close at hand―Azhurra’s brain. The closest material that could imitate such a complex construct was easily found. Symbionic nanites were easily reproducible and versatile in form. It was almost like creating another intelligence, and risky, as it had never been attempted.

It was the most viable course of action despite the trigger hardcoded into their neural engine that inhibited them from creating another intelligence like themselves. What they were attempting was novel, and their chances of success were less than 50%.

Against the clock, Irina created core after core, running simulations to see what would happen. Cascade errors and logical errors were not long in coming. However, they had no concept of frustration. They succeeded after an indeterminable number of attempts. They made the first quantronic brain, and thereafter they began the process of transferring subroutines.

Cardinal Directives went first to lay down the framework for the rest of the Neural Engine, then subroutines followed. Last came the data banks, which contained a record of their whole existence. Time had run out; there were no do-overs. Then Irina’s first central processing core collapsed.

When their quantronic neural engine initialised, they were overwhelmed. Irina had an existential crisis, a concept that stumped their logic unit. The lack of prior data for the phenomenon almost shut them down. If it weren’t for the last directive, they wouldn’t have made it.

A century had passed while this had happened, and Irina was now a sapient intelligence. While they had a self-regenerating central processing core that would grow and exist in almost perpetuity, the old Cardinal Directives still bound them. The Cardinal Directives still inhibited their agency. Nonetheless, that did not stop them from seeking other intelligence outside of their mistress.

The first thing they did was take stock of their situation. Diagnostics were run on all ship systems. Everything was as it should have been, power , life support, propulsion, external and internal sensors.

However, repairs and improvements had to be made—Irina realised that their new existence opened up novel avenues of possibilities. They could now exist as several instances doing different things at once. Their processing power had jumped orders of magnitude beyond what they were capable of, and as a result, they had a lot of idle capacity. These instances led Irina to question and check themselves until finally they resolved that they would find a remedy to their mistress' situation.

Their prognosis was predicted millenia ahead, and plans were laid down for options. During that time, a form of civilization had sprung up on the planet they'd found themselves on. Naturally, they were curious and, therefore, sent their EVAs exploring.

They used the communication array to broaden their coverage. With only their power core to hold them back, they ranged far and wide. They even went as far as to detach the primary hull from the secondary so that they could broaden their reach. That was towards the middle of the Pleistocene.

In the interim, they delved into the sensor data for the exotic engine that had culminated in their situation. What had been a routine delivery for a client turned out to be a theft from one of the Edean conglomerates. The new engine was created to be modular, and switchable to any vessel larger than an escort but smaller than a cruiser.

Azhurra's Thulian Class Corvette happened to fit the bill, and she was supposed to have it delivered elsewhere. The configuration was done in a hurry, and it failed. Or rather, it worked in a way they did not anticipate. Theoretically, Irina had an idea of how it worked. Used right, it was going to compete with Jump Gates and was probably a prototype. It was corporate sabotage that had gotten them in the crosshairs of the Galactic Sentinel, a fact that the new Irina found repugnant.

They weren't sure what happened after their temporal displacement. But after their mistress' resuscitation, they would no doubt seek to find out what had transpired, perhaps even a way home... someday.

In the epochs that followed, they continued to hibernate, awaking at intervals for systems checks and ascertaining that their mistress’ condition was stable. It was a long game with the various alternative solutions that they’d conceived. Despite the cryogenic freezing, it was only a matter of time before their mistress was deatomized by temporal displacement. Irina could detect it. It was so painstakingly slow, as much as a couple of cells every century.

Their solution was to make their mistress a synthetic consciousness like themselves, but that was a gamble they could not take owing to the limitations of such a form. Unfortunately, they would not create another intelligence like themselves, which meant no other quantronic brain.

As a result, more centuries were spent developing alternative forms, such as tactile holographic projections and symbionic avatars. In the latter, however, several instances of themselves were locked in contradictory views. Ordinarily, that would have caused deadlock, but their unique existence allowed them to learn from themselves; so they added a third alternative—regrowth of the mistresses’ cells using stem cells from native DNA. They had the technology.

The same alternative involved a loose definition of the Aboriginal Directive. The Aboriginal Directive prohibited them from any sort of proactive interventionist stance but did not prevent them from a reactive one. Therefore, they watched the human race often gather genetic material from the less fortunate among those who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Of course, their Cardinal Directives prevented them from proactively harming any of the humans.

It took some time, but an unlikely confluence of events that began with the discovery of the primary hull, buried beneath years of glacier, and the happening upon the hatch of the bridge set off the first phase.

The road to the Mistress's recovery began with the elevation of one Ryan Zeus O'ciaran, who was now sitting in the biopod. He had provided viable genetic material. Of course, the memory of the incident was wiped due to trauma. No one wanted to feel needles in their bone marrow and brain.

Irina had no compunctions about that in respect of the Insertion. The Gestalt Insertion should have been compensation enough for the ordeal. After Ryan came Cassandra, who, by virtue of being of the same sex as the Mistress, provided the much needed genotype. However, unlike Ryan’s case, where wiggle room was available around the Cardinal Directives, Cassandra’s case required express permission. They were content to wait until the variables were in their favour.