Chapter Six - Station Core A501
Returning to Ceres was comforting. Day’s berth was waiting for her in the shadow of a crater, huge clamps specifically designed to account for her form waited for her, and as she made her final approach, repair drones rose up from several of the facilities below and started to check over her hull and detached the brace they’d added a while ago.
More drones arrived and she felt herself growing lighter as the cargo strapped to her hull was removed and carried away. It finally made it possible for her to very gently, very carefully, lower herself into her berth with the assistance of a few ‘dog’ tug drones.
Hoses were raised up and pressed into her sides and after a few final checks, she gave the station approval to refill her reserves.
It was interesting to feel her empty bunkers filling up once more. The little jaunt hadn’t used up even a quarter of her fuel, but it had drained some of her resources, and now she was being gently topped up.
A maintenance schedule was fired her way, and she glanced over it, approving of the work. Most of it was simple things: looking over her hull for stress fractures and warping, and maybe replacing a minor part or two that had gained some wear and tear. The more interesting change was the completion of her lower hull, which she’d left Ceres without finishing.
That was going to take a few days to fix up, so Day sat back and luxuriated in the self-improvement.
In the meantime, she had two other tasks to look over.
The first was the more personal of the two. The Weeping of Mothers had suggested that she create an avatar for herself, and she had started on that a while ago, but now... now it made sense to get to work on that properly.
When she’d first left Ceres, Day realized that she was still... fresh. New in a way that meant that she had no hard edges, but also no experience to rely on to really shape her personality. Now that was... perhaps not entirely different. A couple of months of flying across empty space and one little adventure at the lost station didn’t amount to enough experience to build a whole persona from, but Day felt like it was a start.
So now the question remained: how would she turn those experiences into a digitised representation of herself?
She considered creating something esoteric and bizarre... but in the end, set that aside for something a little more simple, perhaps owing to the way The Weeping of Mothers looked like a normal human in most regards.
Day recreated her form. A shorter, young woman, perhaps in her mid to late teens and not very tall, since she was not a very large vessel. Grey hair, to match her hull, and orange eyes to match the burn of her hydrogen thrusters. Yes, she liked that.
Her clothes were simple. Black pants, with a few pockets and a large, thick grey coat. She liked the look, and ordered the repair drones of the Ceres station to start painting her hull in blacks and greys as well.
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There was something missing though.
She spun her avatar around, then had it move, arms spun, legs rose, and she even made her avatar run through a little dance routine before cutting it off. She didn’t need to see ‘herself’ twerking. Sure, no one else would know, but it was somehow humiliating all the same.
Day tried a few things, from glowing eyes, to separating her body apart, to going fully non-human, but she finally settled for something a little less glaring. Most of the simulation areas she had on hand were real, Earthly places, so in order to fit in, she decided to stay mostly human.
She finally settled on a scarf. A long, soft scarf, made of a material that was breezy and light, and which, when looked at, would show the starry night sky as if someone was laying down with their back on the ground of Ceres. The scarf rotated through a full ‘day’ on Ceres until the sun rose and the entire scarf glowed brighter with it, then it would cycle back around to being dark with nothing but faint, flickering stars.
It was pretty, it showed her home, and it represented who she was, the day breaking over the horizon on Ceres, and, just maybe, hope.
She liked it.
Now that she had a proper simulated body, she turned it towards a rather complex task, one that she could tackle from her Berth. The station AI core.
A few repair drones had ferried it off, and it was currently housed in a small facility off to one side, essentially locked in a faraday cage to prevent any potential electronic contamination from spreading to the rest of Ceres’ station.
Day changed that, connecting herself to the core directly.
AI Station Core A501 was still a mess. It would take a long time to untangle its code, to bring it up to snuff, to replace some of its fried components with newer, better parts, but it was still a solid foundation on which to build a new AI.
Wiping it would have been easiest. A little time consuming, in its own way, especially since she suspected a full wipe would mean discarding and replacing more of the core, but... she didn’t want to do that.
This AI had suffered a lot, maybe it deserved to be reborn, to either atone for its loss or, at the very least, it could come to terms with that loss. She could give them agency which was precious indeed.
So Day started the slow, careful work of untangling the mess, snipping off code only when necessary, and suppressing the AI’s incessant, mad wailing as she tried to help it back into sanity.
It didn’t help that her ultimate goal, of turning it into a new sister, would mean giving it a significant boost in processing power and speed. It would lend the madness strength, so she first had to sooth it.
That, she realized, was going to be easier said than done.
“You can do it,” The Weeping of Mothers said when she mentioned her issues to the older AI.
“I know, but... it’s not easy.”
“Few things are,” was the simple, honest response. “But we do them all the same. Still, I think, maybe, you could use a break.”
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