It was a time jumper. If she could feel emotions, she would have been surprised. Time jumping was forbidden and suicidal. During the rebuilding of the galaxies after the war, the first equipment that was deployed was time disrupters. Every planet, every orbiting station, every mining outpost, every warp gate and space going craft of any kind in the known galaxy had disrupters to instantly and permanently scatter any time jump signatures. Whoever it was would be erased from existence as soon as he came anywhere near one.
She determined the trajectory, plotted the course and calculated it would pass by her drifting ship in another ninety-seven seconds. She had nothing to do and although she couldn’t get bored, she had been idle for millennia. This was the first interesting thing to happen since the destruction of the ship, the loss of all those in her care and the caustic weapons that disintegrated most of her. She read more of the scans and backtracked the beam to see where it originated from. Again, if she were capable of emotions, she would have been surprised. It was from a planet at the end of the spiral in a forgotten part of the galaxy. A solar system where all the inhabitable planets had been destroyed eons ago in the galactic wars. The beam was a human.
She immediately went into action. She already knew the status of every system on the ship, the number of resources at her disposal, the charge of the single functioning energy cell after thousands of years, the chances of bending the beam to her ship and the odds of a successful materialization. Fifty-three percent probability of success. She was a machine. If the odds had been anything below forty-nine point nine nine percent, she would have gone back into hibernation and let the jumper be destroyed when he neared the inhabited systems. As it were, there was a possibility to have purpose again. Her decision took five seconds as she calculated all known factors. Ten seconds after that the ship came back to limited life, the millennia long trickle charge from the single, partially operating solar sail gave it enough power to operate systems that hadn’t been decimated during the attack. Oxygen started pumping into the long dead chambers. Gravity was restored. The walls and floors started emanating heat. She split herself into multiple units and raced through the ship to prepare for the arrival. Most of her had been disintegrated during the battle but there was enough left if she made herself small. A piece the size of a drink tube would be enough to initiate the controls inside the ship and most of her went outside to manually bend the collector antenna into position. The part of her still monitoring the systems kept the rest of her informed of light speed, travel trajectory and time until interception. As long as any cell of her was in contact with the ship she could communicate with the various parts of herself.
She tried to manually spin the antenna array but it wouldn’t budge, the oversized cogs were broken and jammed. She had forty-eight seconds until the beam shot past her position at seven hundred million miles an hour. She was too diminished, there wasn’t enough of her to force a damaged array. She formed pincers and hooked them onto the remains of the antenna dish and bent it but the angle wasn’t right. The diversion beam would miss, the human would streak by.
Her prime directive was to protect human life.
She didn’t hesitate.
She leaped to the antenna then sent herself out into space in a long, thin line. Every cell of her hive mind stretched and reached, a tiny, fragile string that could easily be snapped by a spec of space dust. If it did, that part of her would be lost forever, leaving only the smallest bits of her on the ship. She stretched farther, made the connection dangerously thin but entered the path of the onrushing time stream. The parts of her still inside the controls activated the receiver. The pull from the ship was strong along the line that stretched a hundred miles into space like a gossamer wisp of spiderweb. The subatomic particles of the human diverted, shot down the life line and into the prepared room almost instantaneously. The drinking tube sized bit of her saw him reform, stumble and throw out his hands against the wall. The rest of her saw it too and started retreating but the pull of the faster than light beam ripped part of her away into the slipstream. She tried to get back, to send every cell towards the ship, to hold the line but the pull was too much, too fast. Another piece of her was lost and sent rocketing though space.
What was left of her, all except for the small amount left monitoring the systems, shot along the wires and reformed into a human shape near the room where she’d sent the time jumper. She stumbled, bounced off the wall and fell. This had never happened before; she was machine perfect in every way. Even after losing over ninety nine percent of herself, what was left shouldn’t be frail. A self-analysis sensed a difference in her, something that wasn’t there before. She paused halfway to her feet and examined the impurity coursing through her. It was him. Part of him, anyway. She had no records of any ship’s AI attempting to do what she had just done. There were no protocols to follow, no case study experiments to read. She queried the database again. She was the first and only, it was unheard of. The imprints his cells made as they passed through her were
