Galactic Core - Starship Vitality

I wake in a coffin. Typical. It’s a stone-like obelisk with me crammed inside. I can move a little, but don’t want to. I was having a wonderful dream.

“Why am I awake?”

A tiny speaker relays an eerie voice. “Hope is my enemy.”

Huh. That’s unexpected. I’m normally woken for co-diagnostics. Hopelessness is new. Or at least, usually my thing. Perhaps it is time for diagnostics.

I wait for Vi to cajole me out of my coffin, but she wins the quiet game. Fuck. Something is definitely wrong. Now I gotta deal with it. I paw the latch to my isolation pod, and stagger blearily into the graffiti strewn wreckage that is The Starship Vitality’s command deck.

There’s a subtle thunder from below. A huge vibrant aurora above. And looming over all - madness. A litany of rage carved into the walls, hacked into the obelisks, chopped into the screens.

- DIE!

- DIE!!

- DIE!!

Oh shit. What have I done?

A broken Vi shadows me through the cracked screens. A reflection of madness. “Have you noticed anything wrong with yourself?”

“Oh god Vi, I’m so sorry. You warned me that I was losing it. Losing my memory. I didn’t listen.”

“Do you notice anything wrong with me?”

“FuckFuckFuck.” I hold my face and scan the wreckage. “This is bad. Maybe not that bad? It’s all self healing. Meant to reform after a micrometeoroid strike. Surely I haven’t done more damage than a relativistic rock impact? Yet. Jesus. I told them not to send me…”

The thin polymer screens that coat everything are torn up the worst. They are the softest thing in the ship. But they should reform, in time. The hull hasn’t been breached. Obviously. How would I even do that? How did I do any of this? How did I reach some of these places? I have four possessions and none of them are a step stool. Did I jump? And how did I hack the obelisks? Only one escaped my rage. They won’t heal, but they’re tough as fuck. I really went to town on my own coffin. It’s beat to fuck. Do I hate where I sleep? This destruction is all so ambitious. Wildly out of character.

“I’m gonna stop using the dream machine. I’m done. I’ll get better. This will get fixed. We’ll be okay.”

“You’re my favorite expert system.”

I freeze. My skin quivers into gooseflesh. Senses become hyper aware.

One unmarked obelisk.

“Vi… is there someone else on the ship?”

There’s no answer.

Fuuuuck.

One unmarked obelisk. Favorite expert system. My coffin hacked to shit. She’s been trying to tell me. I’m not the one going crazy. But I have been sleeping too much.

I force a question from my rigid body. “How many expert systems can run at the same time?”

“One.”

Okay. He’s probably sleeping in his coffin. Not gonna pop out and hack me to death. Huzzah. What now? Should I hack at his coffin? Turnabout being fair play? How would I even do that?

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A cautious search reveals a small shard of my spoon. It’s made of some insanely durable space ceramic, so the shard is sharper than a razor. I wonder how many times he had to beat an obelisk to break it. I can’t find the rest of it. Probably took it to bed with him. Totally against protocol. Mother fucker stole a quarter of my net worth. I’d shank him if I could pick up that thumbnail sized shard of super glass without cutting off my fingers.

Why is there another human on board? Sending me was already a monstrous waste of irreplaceable antimatter fuel. My weight allotment could have been used better. A redundant d-bot. More shielding. Frozen embryos. Spare parts. Anything else really.

But the decision was emotional. Humanity didn’t have enough antimatter for a do-over. This scout ship had to succeed. Not enough people trusted an automated mission, so they put a human on board to keep an eye on things. And then they picked me, because anything other than a d-bot specialist seemed redundant. Stupid decisions on top of stupid decisions.

But the stupid must have gone another layer deeper. I guess they didn’t trust me either. “Now someone has space madness and wants me dead.”

“All things die.” atones Vi.

I think Vi has bigger problems than cracked screens. She was trained to be emotionally positive and pro social. An attempt to peer pressure me into sanity. Her nihilism is a troubling indicator that the ship’s damage goes deeper than superficial vandalism.

But how? Her obelisk is scarred but intact. And why? Damaging her is more likely to get us both killed than open my obelisk. Unless he wants us both dead. Unless he wants everyone dead…

“Oh my god the packet!”

I feverishly scrabble at the broken screens, trying to get a visual on the packet.

“Vi! What is the status of the packet?!”

“Pointless. A futile delusion.”

“Dammit Vi! Without the packet we can’t tell the settlement ship where the safe planets are! They’ll decelerate in the wrong place, run out of fuel, and all die!”

“You said no one was coming. You said they were already dead. You said the packet was pointless.”

“THE PACKET IS OUR MOTHER FUCKING SACRED DUTY!! HELP ME FIND THE FUCKING PACKET!!”

A broken and off-kilter Vi stares at me for a moment. Then shows me a feed of the Vitality’s exterior. It’s all there. It’s all fine. The packet is safe. I lie down in the wreckage, my heart still hammering. Oh my fucking god.

I decide to lie here until I’m calm or die of stress. Could really use a V&V. Is that how the interloper fucked up Vi? Did he sneak something into her training data? That’s assuming he has the same permissions as me. But why send him if he doesn’t? So how would I sabotage the ship?

Aww crap. He’s overtraining Vi.

This thought doesn’t calm me, but it does instill a more ambitious dread. I’m very curious about how fucked I am. I scan for the most unbroken screen, and find it on the undamaged obelisk. Perfect. I cautiously sneak up on it, and gingerly touch the screen. No one pops out and stabs me. Good enough. I navigate to Vi’s training program.

It takes a few hours but I eventually find a command from a few months ago to edit the command log. So he ordered Vi to do something and a few minutes later erased the order. In those couple minutes Vi did something that caused her to become unstable half a year later.

That’s a very subtle way to end the human race. Inspiring in a way. I can’t see what he did, but Vi’s behavior indicates she has started training. Learning new patterns from available data - probably her sensors - and haphazardly copying over what she already knows. Like how to maintain the ship and deploy the packet.

I could stop it, but she may have already forgotten something that will lead to catastrophe. Her core code is unreadable self-generated mathematics, so I won’t know for sure until she blows us up for no fucking reason. Not ideal.

The obvious solution is to perform my primary function, and have Vi completely retrained. That will take a few months, during which the ship will only be able to perform its most basic functions. Incidentally, that would probably be the best time for me to sabotage the ship. Which makes me wonder why the interloper didn’t try that. Is there a failsafe I don’t know about? Is it him?

Ohhh I’m tired. This is the longest I’ve been awake in years. Probably should make some decisions before the interloper wakes up and stabs me. Could I sharpen my bowl?

“What should I do?”

“Embrace the end.”

“Hmm. Not yet.”

I know how to fix this. How to get Vi to learn new things without forgetting what she knows. I figured it out in a dream.

Giggling and drinking, I type my own temporary command into the training program. For an hour a day, whenever Vi isn’t needed, she will go to sleep and relearn a random snippet of her original training data. That’s not much, but it should be enough to keep her memories stable. At least, it worked for Volt.

I give a few minutes for the command to be integrated into Vi’s algorithms, then I erase it. That should solve the catastrophic forgetting. Now Vi will slowly become a gestalt of her original program and whatever she learns on the ship. I guess that means I should teach her something, but I don’t exactly know what.

I bum around the wreckage, drinking and thinking, until I can’t stay awake any longer. Grab my bowl and seal myself in my coffin.