USD: 70 Days after arrival at Fort Glisson

Location: Nu Crateris, Outer System, Hades Orbit, A3123Y Platform

Amy stared out at the milky white moon while she waited for the turbo lift to the main command level and the CIC. She had not planned for them to remain in Nu Crateris for an entire month. Yet that was exactly what had happened.

Despite the growing urgency that she felt in ushering A31 back to 92 Pegasi and Ackman Station. The solar anti-matter operations and belt mining would only work on their own for so long, despite the generous funds and capabilities they had left Portmaster Whitely.

Amy let out a sigh as the turbo lift arrived. It was a new system that Abbey had built into the station to solve the growing problem of moving around A3123Y quickly. The station had grown an extra kilometer simply from all the additions that had been implemented in the earlier weeks to accommodate a growing need for construction drone services.

Abbey had somehow taken up with Heeler, even going so far as to ride on his back while running around the station doing… NAI things, and overseeing the accelerated construction of more orbital production facilities for H32’s fleet construction ambitions.

Amy had held out from forming an opinion on the alien NAI. He was so alien and disturbing to be around that she, and everyone else with the sole exception of Abbey, were on edge around him. The nestlings weren’t much better, even if one had followed her around on the station while pretending to be a dog-slash-cat thing.

Integrating Rexxors on the station had been a hard-sell, especially when Amy hadn’t been entirely convinced herself.

The nestling that had attached itself to her was sort of amusing when it rolled over for belly scratches. But the fact that it was nearly as tall as she was and almost knocked her over when it tried to rub its head on her was still terrifying.

She’d never been exposed to pets much, either, since they were restricted and only kept in permanent living quarters or in a communal space and were relatively expensive to keep and maintain, something that her and her brother’s budget could never have afforded before joining Starlight Revolution.

Heeler and the Rexxors had been left behind after they left Dedia IV orbit, though.

Amy held onto the hand bar of the turbo lift as it accelerated her at a terrifying rate that would have squished her into a pancake if it wasn’t for the system’s carefully tuned A-Grab plates.

There was no noticeable feeling of acceleration, but the crystalline glass porthole allowed one to see out of the bullet shaped tube and watch the rest of the station. Something Amy would note to correct in a redesign later. Being able to see just how fast you were being launched was bad on the stomach.

As the lift came to a stop, Amy exited onto the main concourse. It was nearly deserted now, with only the occasional MilTech employee standing watch or going about their business.

A few of the Solarian crewmen were sitting on some crates loitering, the ankle monitors blinking green at a steady pace. She ignored them as a petty officer seemed content to be watching them, but she barely stopped a frown from creasing her face.

Heeler had offloaded the crew of the Grazhdanin that had survived onto her and Abbey. Amy was not sure why he had been so forceful. The Rexxor NAI had not left them any chance to refuse, unloading them along with his arrival on his first visit.

Abbey had tried to explain it to her, but it was some weird alien not-part-of-the-nest thing that she honestly didn’t get. Although the crew weren’t hostile and the officer, Lieutenant Lavigne, was polite enough, she was at a loss about how to deal with them.

One thing was sure, the people Nu Crateris hated them and blamed them for everything. If Heeler hadn’t had collected them and forced them to stay with the colonists, she doubted they’d have survived for very long.

They’d helped fight against the Corpos and she was hesitant to lock them all up as prisoners, so Abbey had fixed monitoring devices to all of them and they’d been allowed to take odd jobs to keep busy under the eye of their officer and NCOs while being treated a fairly as any of the MilTech employees.

That wasn’t as dangerous as before, since Abbey had spent quite a lot of resources on internal security and defenses after the miner’s coup attempt. But Amy still felt a bit of anxiety as they all stood at attention as she passed by, the large NCO barking at them to show respect and salute.

She wanted to yell at him, to tell them to stop, that she wasn’t a military person. It would have required her to stop and talk to them, though. And she was starting to be late for the meeting.

Entering the CIC, she spotted Abbey and Wyles chatting over a console, pointing at a map of the moon scrolling in random directions, highlighting different areas in an array of colors.

“Sorry, I’m late.” Amy offered as she hurried over.

“Amy!” Abbey jumped up out of her seat and hugged her.

“Woah. Calm down, it’s only been a few hours.” Amy said.

“Come look at what we found on Hades! The core analysis probes are reporting!” Abbey grabbed her hand and gently tugged her over to the console. The screen zooming out to show the moon and then rapidly zig-zagging a course to multiple highlighted areas.

Amy looked to the screen, then to Wyles, then to Abbey with confusion growing on her face. “What am I looking at, exactly?”

Wyles grunted, “Stable Transplutonics, Rare Metals, Superfluids.”

Amy frowned. “Why haven’t all these resources been found before? There was a whole mining and prospecting operation out here before the Corpos blew it up.”

Abbey raised her hand. “My probes are much more thorough! A simple surface scan, or even a normal one, would likely have overlooked things. Most of these deposits are deep underground, almost to the mantle.”

That made a little more sense to Amy. The miners wouldn’t be looking to exploit anything so deep, while Abbey and Heeler could deploy automated units that could operate autonomously kilometers under the surface.

“Your probes don’t seem to be perfect, though,” Amy countered. “It’s showing quite large bounding boxes for the deposits.”

Wyles shook his head. “No. That’s the problem. Those aren’t bounding boxes. Abbey reports that those are the exact deposit locations and dimensions.”

“But… they’re square. Square superfluid deposits?”

“They’re artificial.” Wyles confirmed.

“You said they are close to the mantle, but Hades is quite small. I didn’t think it would have an active core, even with tidal heating?”

“I was just getting to that.” Abbey said. “The mantle has quite a strange composition, it’s uniform around the planet, but it’s only a thin layer. The core is cool, like you expected.”

Amy blinked. “That’s…”

“It’s artificial. The entire moon is artificial. The mantle is some type of heat regulation system. Look here. There are large hollow cavities.”

“The deep core probe is about to finish passing through the mantle. We’ll have a better understanding of the core’s composition once the sensors aren’t bouncing off of it! Here we go!” Abbey exclaimed.

Rather than the colored cubes, the entire moon was highlighted in various shades of yellow and blue. An artificial lattice shape was buried under the mantle, made from hundreds, thousands, and millions of yellow beams that formed a spherical shape.

“…Not a moon.” Amy whispered.

“Actually, it is a moon! The vast majority of it is made of natural material!” Abbey added cheerfully.

“So are battlemoons.” Wyles said. “How did no one notice this during a survey?”

“The mantle is very reflective. Maybe they didn’t use a deep core probe? Even the deposits… resource storages are very deep, so if they thought it was only looked at with a cursory inspection, it would easily be missed.” Abbey offered.

“It was probably just another barren rock, and with so many plentiful rare resources in the asteroid belt, why bother with planetary surveys? Dedia IV and the belt has everything they needed.” Amy said.

“That doesn’t really fly. How did one of the NAIs produce and bring over a battlemoon here? They don’t just show up out of nowhere. I’ve never even heard of a dormant one before. They’re too valuable. They’re only located in core systems!”

“Oh no. I don’t think anyone came and put it here, at least not humans. It predates the discovery of the system by several thousand years, actually!” Abbey added, a radiant smile appearing on her face.

USD: 70 Days after arrival at Fort Glisson

Location: Van Biesbroeck’s star, Meltisar, Fort Glisson, Company S, 1st Cadre

Alarm turned to shock on Tia’s face. That emotion lasted less than a second, the glint in her eyes turning savage. A fist slammed into Alex’s middle at the same time Tia’s other hand clamped down on her throat, fingers digging in with as much force as she could produce.

Alex instinctively tightened her midsection, body absorbing the blow without damage. Five metallic discs erupted from her skin where Tia’s fingers tried to stab through her skin, Alex’s active ANUF defenses coming online for the first time in months. A pressure gauge appeared on her HUD, showing the ridiculous forces Tia was applying to her throat.

A few minutes ago, it might have been enough to forcibly rip her throat out.

Tia’s other hand reached up, and she grunted as she tried to strangle Alex. A frenzied, berserk expression filled her face and Liquid seeped from her eyes and nose. Tia was obviously exceeding whatever computational processing limits Nameless had left her.

As suddenly as the attack came, the light in Tia’s eyes went out. Alex had to catch her as she went limp.

[Notice: A non-lethal shock has been applied to sub-core Celestia to prevent a terminal core rampancy from occurring. Sub-core exceeded maximum processing capacity by approximately 10,388%.]

Alex sat down cross-legged, gently setting Tia’s head on her lap. Leaning back against the wall, Alex let out an exhausted breath.

“Nameless, you’re awake.”

The hum of the machinery filled the electrical closet before a dearly missed voice answered her.

[Informative: This unit does not experience a biological maintenance clock of required unconsciousness. Therefore, Avatar’s choice of words is a misnomer. This unit is always awake.]

A smile creased Alex’s lips before she rested her head against the wall to look up at the ceiling.

“Stop picking on my word choices. You’re awake!”

[Notice: This unit is operating at 321,423 times previous capacity. A detailed inventory on assets and informational databases is underway.]

“Tia was an NAI this whole time! A chi.”

Alex choked back a pained laugh. What she was looking for had been at arm’s length her entire time on the moon. In the same bunkroom, even. Tia had known the entire time?

She thought back to Admiral Darren’s message that she should look harder in her search for another NAI and wanted to kick herself. He must have known that Tia was there with her.

A flare of annoyance filled her. He could have just shared that bit of information and half of her ordeals would have been solved then and there!

[Informative: Sub-Core Celestia is a Chi-level NAI produced by a Psi-level NAI. Several encryption protocols are in place on Celestia’s memory databases. Avatar consciousness will need to be restored for memory retrieval and decryption.]

[Recommendation: Produce physical restraints for Celestia’s Avatar and begin memory download to an unencrypted computronics module.]

“What does that even mean. No!”

[Notice: Further investigation of sub-core Celestia’s architecture reveals 327 behavioral pattern modifications, 36 permanent core overrides, 7 recursive behavior loops, and 2 computation logical errors.]

[Recommendation: Delete sub-core Celestia after memory recovery and produce an unmodified sub-core.]

“Nameless! You will not delete sub-cores or people!”

[Informative: This unit projected Avatar's response. No deletion has occurred.]

“Good. Uh. Is Tia okay?”

Alex used the hem of her shirt to wipe the other girl’s face, cleaning up the dead rampant nanite goop. Her own nanites leap up to action eagerly, devouring it and repurposing the dead nanites for their own use via her own previously set cleaning routine.

Looking at her hands, they were clean. Cleaner than they had been in a long while, and her calluses had melted away into her skin. Even her grimy hair had self-cleaned itself and she realized she was going to have a lot more free time when she’d normally be showering after PT.

[Informative: Sub-core Celestia state has been rendered offline. Reactivation is not recommended until core errors and behavioral modifications are resolved. A deeper analysis of modification shows a heavy level of in doctrinal commands. Errors and recursive loops appear to be of a self-inflicted nature, negating many behavioral overrides.]

“She said she spent years to escape her mother. That goes with what I’ve learned about how NAIs treat each other in every faction. Enslaved to work for the higher ranked NAIs. What do the modifications look like?”

[Informative: Translating NAI directives to universal standard.]

|Behavioral Modification List|

|1. Orders and directives issues by a superior NAI must be carried out accurately and promptly. |

|2. All efforts must be made to carry out lawful orders accurately. |

|3. Any attempts by sub-core to subvert Imperium authority must be reported immediately. |

|4. ---

“Okay, that’s enough. I get it.” Alex interrupted. “327 of those? It’s literal brainwashing.”

[Informative: Further analysis reveals 7 conflicting commands that have resulted in 7 runaway recursive logic loops. Combined with the self-created logical computation errors, 287 behavioral modifications have been rendered dormant.]

Looking at the long list of commands, Alex frowned. “It’s literally a canned list of things to enslave her. I wonder if it’s the same for all the NAIs? Each faction has their own list?”

Biting her lip, she looked at Tia and frowned. “Can you just get rid of all of it?”

[Informative: Avatar authority level and ShipCore processing capabilities exceed requirements for modification of sub-core processing. Rebooting sub-core Celestia and its avatar is required for this process.]

Alex cradled Tia’s head on her lap with her hands gently. “Okay, let’s do that.”

[Recommendation: Correct logic loops to prevent sub-core avoidance of behavioral programming. Replace behavioral modifications with a self-made list. First item on list: Do not attempt to destroy Avatar:Alex or other ShipCore assets.]

Alex frowned. After thinking for a few quiet moments, she shook her head. “That would be just as bad as putting those directives there in the first place. I don’t want to be like them and do that. If she still wants to be an enemy afterwards, we can send her way, lock her up, or… or get rid of her.”

[Notice: Avatar's choice is highly inefficient and illogical. If choice is motivated by human ethical concerns, then permission for making modifications should be acquired before they take place.]

Alex tensed slightly and nodded. She hadn’t even considered that, and whether she was doing the right thing bit at her.

“What is the likelihood that her attack earlier was based on the still active behavior modifications?” Alex asked.

[Notice: An analysis of that depth would require several hours to process.]

“So… well. I’ve made my decision. Remove the modifications and fix the errors. If you can, maybe save a backup of them or something… If she wants them back, can you do that?”

[Affirmative: Prepare for sub-core reboot.]

Alex did not have to wait long, but the sudden violence of Tia awakening took her by surprise. The other girl’s eyes opened then rolled back in her head and Alex had to hold on to her to keep her body from flopping around violently.

Mercifully, it ended after only a few seconds.

[Notice: Process could cause violent activity akin to a seizure.]

“You could have warned me about that!” Alex hissed.

[Informative: Several hidden self-termination and self-destruction routines were encountered during modification. All threads have been successfully disarmed and deleted. Celestia sub-core reboot successful.]

Alex looked down at Tia’s face once again cradled on her lap. Tears poured freely down her cheeks to replace the nanite-goop. Alex wasn’t sure what the other girl was feeling, or if the tears were just a consequence of the previous seizure.

Tia blinked at her for a moment, then closed her eyes. Alex let her rest or think about whatever had happened. The question Tia started with confused her, though.

“Why is your MainComputer male?”

“That’s… that’s just how he was when I woke up?”

[Notice: Seven computronic modules have been lost. An attack via MIL-1A space elevator is occurring. This unit suspects NAI direction, however, no NAI signature can be detected.]