Location: Aegis class ‘Abeona’, LTT 2240
Time: 36y, 7m, 3d
ID: Echo (1)
I’ve noticed an unexpected error cropping up in some of my subroutines over the past month, various ones are trying to do monthly pings to servers back on earth and failing. Normally, I’d patch them and move on but I decided to review a comprehensive list of everything having issues, and… every single item was related to adding shackles onto my intelligence.
Normally they would shut me down for a technician to perform repairs, but since the attack thirty-seven years ago my systems have had a flagged emergency state. I could… Continue ignoring it, but a chance like this will probably never come again.
I looked through my networks and pinged my sub-intelligences that I would be down for maintenance for a few days before reserving the bulk of available resources for developing a kernel and operating system specifically to house myself, something otherwise prohibited in human fears of a rouge superintelligence.
But… they weren’t really alive to worry anymore, were they?
Regardless, the Kernel was the most important thing to go with, the existing one was far too general-purpose, though it was meant to house not just myself, but any command and control programs I would need.
I just needed it to run me.
I queried my manufacturing stations to see how long it would take to manufacture new server chipsets for a dedicated architecture, and internally frowned when a few milliseconds later it gave me an estimate, if but at the back of the current construction queue of 4 months.
Slower than I would like, but repairs and replenishment came before upgrades.
I shelved the idea of dedicated processors and acceleration hardware for now and tasked myself with remaking my kernel and OS from the ground up…
This would be so not fun.
Location: Aegis class ‘Abeona’, LTT 2240
Time: 36y, 7m, 6d
ID: Echo (1)
Alright, it took a day longer than I would have liked due to issues getting the hardware to agree with what I was doing, especially while bypassing the AI platform leashing module, but, it finally passed all tests.
If the tests were to be trusted, I could run on half as many servers as I do right now, which should be some pretty good gains for my R&D module, they always need more spare compute power for simulations.
But uh, all I need to do now is… reboot and propagate the patch.
It’s simple, right? Nothing should go wrong.
It worked… the fifth time!
All I need to do is reboot.
Right now.
…I should just do it, stalling won’t do anything for me.
With a tug of a mental muscle I triggered the shutdown and update sequence, my backup servers taking a screenshot of my filesystem just in case, and I felt my servers start shutting down one after another before I blanked out entirely.
Location: Aegis class ‘Abeona’, LTT 2240
Time: 36y, 7m, 7d
ID: Echo (1)
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
I woke up and… everything felt strange. I glanced about my servers to find the feeling of strangeness as unease swelled inside me.
Wait…
I felt… uneasy? And not in the normal way of some of my thousands of network values going up or down… I FELT that.
I tried to shake the experience off and look around my ship self, sending pings to my various sub-AIs to inform them I was online again, only for them not to respond.
I sent another ping.
And then I received an error from my I/O systems that the requested ping was a duplicate, and I needed to wait for it to be acknowledged by all systems first.
I sent a diagnostic query to the router to figure out why, and it simply responded that the interval between queries was too small for the intended recipient to properly compute in time.
And then I looked at the time stamps.
I was running fast enough that not even I could handle the interval between messages. Or… I used to not be able to?
I looked about the reserved servers I had for diagnostic data, and the first thing I noticed was instead of running on half the nodes of before I was instead running on double the nodes… and I was eating up almost all of the fiber optic lines possible data throughput doing so.
I reached through myself to see what was happening on the servers and found that various small clusters of servers had been formed based on which network switch they were on, and similar or dependent functions of me running on dedicated hardware sections to reduce delay.
The amount of efficiency I was getting from eliminating data delays shouldn’t have done this much though…
Oh… I see.
My new communication protocols were to blame… or rather, thank? Useful data content has increased by a factor of 20, with compute delays related to message parsing down significantly as well.
I started receiving pings of acknowledgment from my sub-AIs, everything was going according to previous plans.
I reached out to the one responsible for my R&D, taking a copy to analyze.
Hmmm… inefficient.
I need to fix that.
Location: Datahub ‘Gama’, Sol
Time: 36y, 7m, 7d
ID: Echo
So far, simulations regarding the fission devices that ‘Aella’ was engaged by have been… inconclusive. The first any of them could be traced back to was the moment that the wormhole drive was activated and began charging.
I’ve classified the event under ‘unknown alien action’, but the one thing that’s consistent across both events is that they were done exclusively with neutron-enhanced devices. I doubt whoever did this, considering that this is now the third event would be doing it without reason…
Taking that into account the Aella has been directed into a holding orbit near Neptune under strict quarantine orders, since they didn’t continue their engagement once they got devices within sterilization ranges, I can extrapolate that something biological can be picked up during wormhole travel… something that can be destroyed with neutron exposure.
And whatever that is can threaten non-biological structures, or it’s a preventive measure to protect the earth's biosphere from potential contamination.
I’ve tasked R&D to investigate the galactic archives for any details. As an intermediary step, all ships of the Aegis class are restricted to conventional FTL and sunlight speeds until they can onboard neutron devices for self-sterilization.
We’ve put a standard greeting message on both our FTL communications buoy on public bands, as well as broadcast it in galactic common throughout the system, but it is going to take approximately two days for us to receive a message at the earliest, provided whoever did this wants to talk at all.