“Goddess fucking damnit Ellie.” I put on the light of my rifle and my helmet to get a bit more light than the emergency lighting provided.

“Commander, are you on board of the ship already?” Lieutenant Zu contacted me over my suit’s intercoms.

“Yes, I’m here, Zu.”

“Ellie has started her update.”

“I noticed.” I replied. “Are all the systems down?”

“The important ones are still functioning, it seems it’s mainly the lighting and some unimportant secondary systems that have lost power.”

“Well, I’ll be heading towards her physical mainframe right now. Just in case we need to do a manual reset or something.”

“Do you know how to do so, Commander, or do I need to send someone with you?”

“That’s one of the things I did learn by heart.” I replied and then signaled to Luna. “Luna, are you coming as well?”

“I will.” Luna joined me at my side.

“What about us, Commander?” Gunny asked.

“It’s fine, Luna and I will just go take a look.”

“Alright.” Gunny saluted, after which I started jogging with Luna towards Ellie’s mainframe room.

“What did you find down there that made Ellie perform an update so soon?” Zu asked while we jogged through the dark corridors.

“I’ll explain later, this might have to be a closed door meeting again.” I replied as I turned the corner. Ellie’s physical mainframe wasn’t too far away from where we were now. But it would take a while to gain entry if the doors were out of power too.

“Oh, that sounds interesting.”

“It does, but let’s just focus on our lovely AI right now.”

“Yes, Commander.” Zu replied.

We crossed another couple of hallways before we finally reached the door that lead into the room with Ellie’s mainframe. But as I expected, there was no power going in.

“Here, Luna, take this.” I handed my holostick over to her. “There should be a hidden space at the bottom left of the door frame where you can slide this in.

“Uh…” Luna nodded, slightly confused, as she got on her knees.

“It’s a panel you need to press in so that it reveals a slot.” In the meantime, I was busy with another hidden panel on the right side of the door frame. The one I was busy with revealed a lock composed of 10 disks with 45 symbols on each of them. In practice, it was just an alphanumerical lock with some extra symbols on it to increase the amount of possible combinations. It wouldn’t take very long to crack with a supercomputer, but you had to know where the lock was and what the second component was to unlock the door, my holostick.

“I found the panel.”

“Alright.” I replied. “Stick in my holostick with the power button pointing towards yourself and give it a twist once it’s shoved in. It should give you a click.

Luna did as I had told and she soon looked back at me.

“And now?”

“Just give me a sec.” I was still turning the last couple of disks. “Aaaand done.” I looked back at her. “Now you press the power button.”

Luna nodded and did as I had told her once more. Once she’d pressed the button, the heavily armored door towards Ellie’s mainframe slowly but surely started to slide open.

“Is it doing so on the battery power of your holostick?”

“It is.” I nodded as I scrambled the lock again. “It’s a very roundabout way of doing this, I know. But I’m not the one who designed this.”

“And you are the only one who can open this door?”

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

“Normally there’s five people, you should be amongst those, actually.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. My XO and then three other lieutenants.”

“I never got the memo.”

“Huh. Military administration must have been slacking then. Maybe because you got assigned to us so short before the mission.”

“Maybe…”

“I’ll look it up later… but first.” I looked into the very dark mainframe room. As opposed to the hallways and the other rooms on this ship, this room’s emergency lighting wasn’t burning at all. I shine my rifle into the room. As far as I could tell, the entire AI mainframe was powered off, or at least it wasn’t clearly running.

“Are we not going to give her more time to finish her update?” Luna asked as we slowly walked into the room.

“Just a bit longer. But I’ll go look for the reset anyway. If I recall correctly, it should be somewhere on the right side of the room.”

Luckily, this was less convoluted than opening the door, it was just a panel sitting in the far right corner of the room that said ‘emergency reset panel.’ I opened it and inside was a rather big lever with a turn button to the top right of it. Instructions were also stamped on the inside of the panel.

“Turn the button, flip the lever, turn the button again and then flip the lever once more… Sounds straightforward enough.” Luna read the instructions out loud.

“It does.” I looked around at the mainframe but it still didn’t kick to life. “I’ll give her five more minutes.”

Luna nodded and we both started to wait around. While my holostick was stuck in the wall for the moment, we had to rely on Luna’s to look at the time.

“I do hope she’s fine.” Luna commented after about a minute.

“I hope so, too.” I replied.

“If she is, are you going to reprimand her?”

“Of course I am. That’s my job. She might not have a physical body, but she’s still a crew member of this ship.” I said.

“She did ask beforehand.”

“She did, but she didn’t say anything about this happening. She could’ve at least warned us.”

“That’s true… but maybe she thought it was fine because you were heading towards the ship anyway. I think she has a lot of faith in you too.”

“Do you think so?” I asked.

“I do… otherwise she wouldn’t be so willing to go with the plans and secrecy of this entire mission… at least that’s what I think…”

“Hmmm…. Maybe.” In a way, that did make me feel a bit better.

We waited a bit longer, twice as long as I’d originally said I would, but now my sense of duty was definitely gaining the upper hand over my desire to wait for her. Luna had realized this and gave me a nod as I walked over to the reset switch.

“Let’s hope this fixes it.” I put my hand on the switch, but right as I did, the lights in the room shot on.

“Wait, Commander.” Ellie’s voice rang through the room. “System updates have been completed.”

I took my hand away from the switch again. “Ellie… why did you practically hibernate the ship?” I asked in a commanding tone.

“The update required a bit more power than I had anticipated, Commander.”

“A bit more power?”

“None of the ship’s critical systems were shut off, the safety of the crew was guaranteed through the entire duration of the update. I made sure of that.”

“That’s still not a good reason to leave us literally and figuratively in the dark.”

Ellie stayed silent for a couple of seconds before she replied. “In my opinion, the minor inconvenience outweighs the gains that were gained with the update, Commander. However…”

“However?” Luna asked.

“However, I admit that I may have been overzealous with pursuing my goals, and I should have laid it down in front of you first.”

I took a deep breath and sighed. “You did follow my orders to the letter… However, I do still think your actions were far beyond reasonable. What you did really belongs in the gray zone of insubordination… But, at least I’m happy you see that you should have acted differently.”

“I understand, Commander. I apologize once more for the trouble I have caused.”

“In all honesty, I should probably sanction you… the problem is… I can’t.” That’s the problem with AI that’s integrated in your entire ship. If I sanction her in some way, I will just sanction the ship as a whole.

“Commander, might I offer a proposition.”

“Go along, Ellie. It’s not like I can stop you.”

“Might I suggest that my sanction is that I have to work ten times harder than before?

“Uhh… I don’t know how to quantify workload for AI, but please do explain yourself.” I walked back over to Luna and crossed my arms while I looked at the mainframe. It’s the most physical representation of Ellie, after all.

“I mentioned earlier that the updates that I readied would boost performance by almost two-hundred percent.”

“You did.” Luna replied, she also looked very interested in what Ellie was about to say.

“It appears that I made a slight miscalculation. The total efficiency gain granted by the complete systems update totals to 1348,57%.”

“What, how? How is that possible?”

“The system integrated a lot easier with my own than I had anticipated.” Ellie explained. “The code expanded to other systems, which I previously had thought to be completely unaffected by the changes. Our power output has increased by 12.4%, while our overall power use went down by 31.498%. There’s many more but I’ll send those datasets to your holostick and the XO’s so you can look over them manually.”

“Wow.” Luna had already received the file and was looking rather impressed by the numbers.

-Okay… I suppose that’s one way to pay us back, I suppose…?-