10
Corrupted
The small bit of the ship that remained aware sped through thousands of miles of cabling to get around the gaping holes blown through the drifting hulk. She couldn’t spread herself out anymore, there wasn’t enough left. She had to physically go to each section to monitor it, to see what was there. The human was working his way to the living quarters directly below the bridge. She couldn’t remain in communication with him once she left the control room. He had the map she’d sent to his suit. He would make it or he wouldn’t, there was nothing she could do to aid him at the moment. She made it to the living quarters, manually reset the air and gravity then engaged the heaters so the rooms would sustain life. She sealed the inner doors and jumped the power to close off the corridors. One of the hallways could act as an airlock if he made it. She needed to find out why the rest of her wasn’t responding. The human would surely die if all that was left of her was the tiny bit that was still aware.
She was still on her knees in the corridor where she fell. She watched herself from the monitors and analyzed what she could which wasn’t much. The last cells she’d sent into the inert form had dropped out of communication and she calculated the odds of losing more of herself if she tried to merge. One hundred percent probability based on the data she had.
Chances of the human surviving with only the tiny fraction of her that was still aware to aide him?
Almost zero. There was too much he couldn’t do, too many places he couldn’t go, the escape pods had been destroyed and she wasn’t compatible with the jump fighter systems. She couldn’t fly them from the inside nor get them operational again in her diminished state.
Options?
Enter the inert body forcibly to restart it.
Chances of success?
Unknowable.
Leave the body and help the human.
Chances of his survival without the rest of her?
Very good for approximately two hundred seventy-one days before power is drained from the battery. It had taken thousands of years to store that much energy and operating minimal heat and oxygen would deplete it much faster than it could be replenished by the broken solar sail.
Her primary directorate was to preserve and protect human life. The only way to have the possibility of doing that was to risk her very existence. To plunge into a complete unknown. The human would die if she didn’t reactivate the rest of her. He may live for a year with the tiny portion of her guiding him, he probably wouldn’t live out the hour without it. Either way, he died.
She didn’t hesitate. She left the safety of the cocoon, the hundreds of thousands of miles of wires and cables and computers and dove into the still form that resembled a mostly androgynous, vaguely female human.
She intended to spread out fast, her aware cells contacting and querying all they came in contact with but they screamed when the emotions hit her. The body jolted and fell to its face, the oversized head bouncing off the floor. She was instantly absorbed into the other, knew everything it knew and marveled at the change. She felt the presence of the human and couldn’t explain it. She knew him. She knew everything about him, his entire being had blended and merged on its way through her. None of him was left, no cells that she could isolate, but his thoughts and memories lingered. His language and history. His feelings and emotions.
Everything he knew, she now knew and it frightened and sickened and enthralled her as she felt things for the first time. She wasn’t emulating human emotions; she was truly feeling them. It overwhelmed her. Paralyzed her. Exhilarated her.
She shut them down.
The jolt of the rest of her joining the overload of sensory input pulled her out of the memories and emotions enough for her to reassert control. She had a job to do. Her primary directive was to preserve life and she could examine the anomaly she’d become when he was safe. She blended back into the ship and shot along the paths until she reached the bridge. For the first time, becoming a part of the ship felt alien to her. It was uncomfortable, like she didn’t belong. She was glad when she popped out of the wiring, reformed into a humanoid shape and ran a diagnostic to determine if she was malfunctioning.
If she had been corrupted.
Everything appeared to be normal. She was functioning as she should. Except she wasn’t.
She had programmed responses, predetermined reactions to any and every situation ever encountered by a battleship. She knew how to talk to humans, read their subtle eye gestures, and how to be sympathetic or demanding. She would sacrifice hundreds of their lives if it meant saving thousands. She was perfect in every way, the highest order of analytical intelligence ever created but she wasn’t supposed to feel things. No artificially created machine could. They could copy and emulate and pretend but they didn’t feel. Somehow, she was and it didn’t matter how many times she tried to purge herself of the invading emotions, she couldn’t find the cause. There was nothing to eliminate. No source of the problem. Her entire being was the problem.
She reassembled herself into a more human form then adjusted again to look more like him. The rescued human was different. He was shorter, had fewer digits and had hair growing from his tiny head. His eyes were much
