Old. That’s what I was. Not the tried kind of old, where a body is falling apart and the will to live on if faltering. No, that was well beyond me at this point, for me to feel like that I would have to go back to being a meat sack, which I didn’t want at all. No, I was just old from experience. Lifetimes worth.

That is not to say that I was unhappy, far from it, I was always in a good mood now that I was doing something that was in my mind worthwhile and not something that involved me being someone else’s damn sword.

I was in my recovery period, the stage of mandatory rest that I had been, ‘suggested’ to me by my current long term companion Captain Lyrica Helmsworth. A fitting name for my captain, if a bit on the nose.

Currently, my mind existed in a sim space that was my personal ‘meditation’ retreat, crystalline purple pond with no visible edge, fell off into nothingness that expanded for simulated thousands of kilometers. My mind was a similarly colored mass of purple the sat above the liquid. I was not solid or really matter in this state, my VR frame having pushed the limit of what was real along time ago now I was not truly aware of what the state was only that within the bounds of my rules in would be interesting, to say the least.

A ripple passes over the liquid that was otherwise unnaturally still. Time to return. I felt the gentle pull of my body guiding me back into it.

The initial handover interfacing was smooth. I slipped through the VR-frame smoothly and steadily approaching the liquid which rose slightly to meet me before I was that close.

Thin tendrils of connection sprang up was my mind began reintegration process. I felt a window pop open in my view as a smiling cheery face greeted me.

“Heya Old Man. Did you have a nice nap.” A sweet voice filled with vibrancy flowed into my mind.

I chuckled at Grace’s enthusiastic greeting. “Yeah, yeah laugh it up kid, when you get to be my age you will have to ‘nap’ twice as often as me.” I boasted without shame. In my VR space, my mind had touched the first spike of liquid that had risen to meet me as I had descended and I felt the port open, and lower systems access start to transition.

The face looking at me huffed at the same time, I ran into an error in transition, then across the board errors blocking me. I had not called up an avatar for the video call and could not express any emotion with my flowing mind state that existed in VR, and so could not respond to the proud Cheshire like grin that spread across the face of Grace at my hang up.

That was sad really, as I could not gloat as the next second I reached into my vault and picked up a bit of code I had been working on for, all the time I had been on this ship and instantly bypassed her firewalls. Her face fell in an instant and I could see the look of shock as I breezed back into the system, the reintegration having been barely stalled for a microsecond.

For a short time, I considered playing as I had never noticed a difference, but that would just be rude we had both noticed the delay even for how a ridiculously short time it existed for.

“Ahhh, tut tut my dear dear Grace who are a thousand years too long to play such games.” I affected the tone of a grand lofty sage that was indulging in a young child.

She stuck her tongue out at me. And afforded me the perfect retaliatory opportunity. Even as the second a third integration process started I didn’t bother to look at them, besides the obligatory instantiation as, this process had become wrote and explored to its fullest efficiency over the time I had been aboard.

I extended the portion of myself that was in the system and quickly navigated to Grace’s VR space, where I then breached her very modern and very rudimentary firewalls, before rewriting a portion of her video playback window. Then I entered her VR, as her VR window.

I reached out of the window, a small arm then shot out of the window and grabbed her tongue. This surprised her, which was the intent. The tried to scream in surprise but the fact that I still held her tongue made it come out strained and when she tried to jump back I let go and watched her overbalance and fall on her butt.

I laughed, as I felt the rest of my VR body form slowly expand and extrude from the deforming video screen.

Quickly my mind reached back through the connections and opened a proper link to my mind and I let the path I had used to subvert her programming correct itself. That was her mind correcting for the outer irregularities.

She jumped to her feet pouting cutely. Her avatar was that of a young girl which is exactly what she was, although she had never had a meatspace body like me it made no difference to me.

She stomped her foot when she saw my gloating face. “Old Man! You- you..” she sputtered for a minute realizing this was retaliation for her own prank. “But you told me to, try and block you!”

I grinned and lifting one finger adopted my grand sage atmosphere. “Ahh I did young one, I did. However, did I not also say that every attack has a price.” I nodded sagely. “And you know that you are still a thousand years to early block me from my form.”

She squinted at me, “But you are not even a thousand years old yet, or not even that close to it for that matter... You were a popsicle, you cannot count that towards your age surely.”

I nod maintaining my impeccable dignity, “True true, all too true. However, “ I grinned at her slyly, “My statement is no less true, my very young child.”

She gets it and springs to her feet and begins to run at me, I, of course, run away. Then I feel a change come over the world. Subtle, but my mind quickly investigates and when I pull up the logs of the space I find that Grace seems to have modified the parameters on the fly and reduced fraction to a zero value everywhere.

This happens in less than a second and I also adjust a rule, something much more minor of course, allowing my foot to be horizontal when I land, this was needed for if I didn’t then I would have not been able to maintain my balance and would have fallen flat on my face. The sage could not be allowed to fall.

I formed a robe around me and gathered all the glaringly outlandish things I could attach to it. Little bells, golden patterning, tall crown, and other small ornamentation. I glided smoothly along standing straight and turning slightly so I could smile beatifically at Grace, who only grew more frustrated. Then the game got started.

While we were playing in Grace’s VR space. I felt the rest of my mind slowly connecting and performing the routine handshaking checks with, Grace’s systems as I took back control of our shared body.

I was once a human being. Normal. Average even. Nothing special about me. Then I had opened a pandora's box by, looking for a job as “Research Engineer”, which was a fancy title given out to those who the company I knew as “Gladwell Interbus” need to test new tech on. Being a living science experiment would not appeal to most people, but seeing as I enjoyed what they were working on I had no problems with the idea. To say it went wrong would be, incorrect. Medical nanites. Something that, even during my time of 2021 was something still well beyond the pale, or so I thought. I was like catnip for them so on the first test my whole body was affected whereas what was meant to happen was only a small area of my skin to simply contain nanites.

I guess the company panicked and I was drugged at the time so I couldn’t say anything. And they cyrostored me, something that was more prevalent but still exceeded my expectation when I reviewed the material later. To put it simply, cyro does not affect nanites and when I woke up alone in that tube I was no longer human, but a machine.

I didn’t like to reminisce to long as even now those memories were not the best as they led to the portion of my life that I refused to think about. Indeed the vault in my mind contained those memories and only a few scraps that I felt I needed to leave out were enough to let me know that I had stored them for good reason.

But even that was a long time ago now.

I pulled back from the game slightly as the gravity began adjusting and readjusting itself wildly. As the laughter of Grace filled the room as my avatar was thrown into the air. Only to hang there without aid, smugly looking down upon her little world. And again pouting face of course, although she couldn’t hide the real smile for long at my antics.

We both felt the system push an alert into us as, the merge was nearing completion and the final handshake and control swap, for the main command console. During my periods of downtime was the only time that Grace was allowed to have full control of that particular system, or at least that is what I had told her since the beginning in reality and while it was true I didn’t maintain as much distance I pretended. Certain system I left out of her control purposefully, fire control for example.

I disconnected from the VR space and pulled back from her server port. Then I felt the the rush of sensation that came with the final milliseconds of handover. It was a rush, a familiar and powerful rush of jumbled emotions and sensory input.

The first thing was the swell of raw power that ran through me, my oversized reactor was only at a quarter output and was not struggling. Power system controls were mine again. Then I felt my mind spread throughout the hull, minor systems, security cameras, and internal sensors came next.

I slipped into my skin, and it fit perfectly, for of course, it was mine after all. The energy layer around the hull, the data entered my information stream. Information that I processed directly, or that had been preprocessed and handed for me as a report, both kinds of data flowed into me at this point.

This connected me to the final single system that was individually processed, the engines. While engaged as they were now, both engines put out immense thrust required the use of minor inertial dampeners across the front hull and those being directly linked to the engine subsystem, gave me a real sense the motion that I was currently in.

Final step. I moved my mind through the ships cyber superstructure, real-world connections linked all of it, so near-instantly I made my way to the main command room at the top of the command tower. People bustled around the room from my vantage, that was every camera in the room.

I settled into the main core and let the information flow increases as all the little systems fed into me from there. A few forks of my mind rejoined me and I regained fire control, medical centers, and production control systems and their various subsystems.

I accessed a system that was one of the last to handover and one I had personally been tinkering with for a while now. The condensed light projector. A fully functioning hologram system has been a thing for a long time, however, my design is many times more complex.

A woman looks up from the large chair in the center of the activity.

A somewhat gruff but effeminate voice interrupts my survey of completion.

“Computer, play Old World Jazz.” A few muffled coughs, which I am sure are only coughs and nothing else at all, echo around the room, as my grand renterence is crushed by this pathetic meat bag.

I am an ASIM, an artificially sustained integrated mind, I have lived in various stages and states of being for well over a thousand personal years despite what Grace may think. I stretch my mind out throughout the modified Titan Class Dreadnaught that is my current body, even in this demilitarized configuration it, I have enough firepower to put a dent in any sovereign world's total defense budget, and I am not talking, oh look I seemed to have pushed a finger in this clay, no no, the oh look this diamond seems to have shattered when I tried to show you the kind of dent.

So I totally--

“Oh no, not the diamond and clay again.. Please..” This foul woman.

I flicked on the projectors, deciding that I was the elder here and would not bother with the children. That said my form of an ambiguously older teenager wearing sweatpants and a graphic tee from my past was sure to convey the right image. This was my standard avatar, after so many years, it still had a portion of true self although it had been heavily modified, and reiterated upon and then thrown out for a century.

“Ahh, good. No witty retort this time Atlas, that’s good even such a small computer can learn.”

Okay. Hurmupf. “Enough prattling meat bag, I have a ship to run. And tell you, people, to stop pretending to do things this isn’t a reality show we all know who really controls the ship.” I made my tone as severe as possible, not even turning my avatar to look at her.

“Ahh, yes yes that’s true, I am sure you have enough bodies to fly and repair all the systems once they start breaking down. I bow to the will of, what was that name again.. ‘Alexa’.”

Shit, not that.

“I will never tell you stories again dammit Neil. Who says I need bodies, I am sure that I could remove your brains and nerves and have a fully functioning proxy up in an hour, ever wonder were the phrase meat puppet came from.”

I turned and at the same time caught all the cameras picking up the very disturbed looking faces around the bridge.

Even the stoic foul woman Lydia looked vaguely upset with the image I had painted for them.

She slumped back into the large chair and threw a leg over the side, her one good eye was unreadable. She flicked her hand and the sounds of the bridge resumed.

I grinned at her. I had won that round for sure.

“Okay Atlas, status.”

“Full handshake complete, I have returned to the central computer core. How was Grace, my captain? Did she cause any trouble? Anything I should be worried about?”

“Worry not Atlas, our girl was fine no issues during your recession period. I have no problems recommending that we try a full state trial on our next run-through of this.”

A full state trail involved me removing the last of the parental fork systems that I left behind normally and allowing her full access to everything. I was going through the logs of my time away just then as well and agreed with her assessment.

“Agreed. Next recession period, schedule in one hundred days. Now, where are we?”

She nodded and we both turned slightly to view the massive map display that dominated the area just in front of her chair. Getting up and joining me around it, was while not necessary just something that over the years had become a habit for me. Somethings while different in some ways didn’t actually change from when I was human, I was generally pretty relaxed and never tried to edit my behavior like that simply doing whatever I naturally did.

“We are in an uncharted system about to begin surveying, and the jump was smooth and the new nav beacons worked well, but our--”

“Yes, they used more fuel than expected. Well, we knew they weren’t perfect nothing is the first time. When the swing by there I will pick it up and in the meantime start modeling what could have been the problem.”

She nodded.”Very good.” Just then there was a hiss, we both knew the ship well so turned simultaneously to look at the door to the lower deck elevator open and two people walk out. Eyeing the activity around the bridge with interest.

They spotted us and hurried over. These two were the representatives of the two non-crew groups that were currently aboard. Both from the dying world of Ent, they had bartered passage off-world with us.

Out of the deal we had received the offer of new tech and innovations that promised to be helpful in our mission, not that we needed much in the way of persuasion we were on a mission of mercy and most likely would have helped out the people. However, the captain couldn’t escape all of her pirate heart.

“Welcome to uncharted waters gentlemen.” Captain Lydia spoke and began explaining the situation. “We have arrived in the system, designated F0-0345. We are here to resupply some things from the local asteroid belt, refuel and survey the system. After that it’s really up to us what we do so we will take it as we go.. Any questions so far?”

“No Captain” The one on the left was dressed in a white uniform, must have been from the Entian military, as a colony world originally it would have only had a Navy and that would have been a space-based operation.

The other only nodded slightly seemingly distracted by all the goings-on, on the rather complex bridge. I had pulled back from the conversation, for whatever reason most humans were generally unpleasant until they learned my history and I was not one to go around explaining myself to everyone I meet.

Then the gawker asked, “I thought there was an AI on this ship in control, why do you still need people.” I didn’t like him right from the jump and now doubly so, his voice was annoyingly lackadaisical and he sounded like a politician. And an entitled arrogant one at that. It was a good thing that I didn’t have to deal with that and let my holo dissolve.

I was still in the bridge, of course, just not projected there. I had just finished surveying the logs for my time away and got busy launched survey probes, prepping smaller planetary craft for searching the surfaces of any of the celestials nearby that could hold something of value or even something interesting, I was also running system diagnostic on the mining and ice harvesting equipment, as well as opening navigation for setting the survey course through the system that could bring us close to all the important bits. And a few other things, that almost took no effort, for example getting entertained by the conversation still happening in the few microseconds left ago on the bridge.

Lydia sighed “Yes, well that’s very interesting and happens to be completely wrong.” she turned on her heels and walked away then making for her command chair that interfaced with much of the ships local systems.

“Wrong, I am not sure what you mean my information comes from..”

“Gentlemen please if you do not have anything to report leave my bridge, entry into a new system is a busy time for any vessel and dreadnaughts doubly so..so if you wouldn’t mind..”

“Yes Captain, please excuse my--” The military-one, nodded then took hold off the others arm before leading him out of the bridge while the other had a decidedly put upon expression on his face until the doors closed.

“Now, unhand me, lieutenant, we may be away from the home--” And the doors hissed closed again. Was it wrong to dismiss the politicians just because we had bad experiences in the past? Probably.

However, the captain was not lying when she said that entry into a new system was a busy time and pretty dangerous as well. That diminished after the first survey but that could take a long time depending on the radius of the bow shock and how much original information we had coming in.

Arriving in a new system was not something that happened often, the time for turnover of the complete mission could be measured in years most of the time and in other cases decades. As an immortal, that was nothing to me and in fact, many discovery missions as they were termed had been at least been instantiated by me.

“Comms. Nav. Ops. Begin the first sweep. Atlas bring defensive measures online and stay plugged into the command network and out of any redundant frames please.” Lydia didn’t even wait until the doors were all the way closed to start giving orders to the bridge crew.

“Aye” “Yes Ma’am” “Aye, Captain”

I nodded as well, although I had the procedure down pat and indeed I and Lydia both understood that I had been actively doing just that since I had been reconnected and we had drifted into the system. Even while inside Grace’s frame, such multitasking was not beyond an ASIM.

There was a moments pause and I metaphorically had my breath as I felt the almost imperceptible shudder register as the survey probes were launched in all directions from all parts of the ship. They clustered together and remained at station keeping, around the ship until they were to be needed.

It used to be that space-faring vessels of almost all sizes would have to slow-boat around the system and use scanning equipment that compared to my own standards was pathetically subpar. This was some of my personally designed equipment, that I had implemented during a deep dive into an engineering frame that took centuries a get out of, although admittedly it was an interesting game like setting up.

“Computer!” Lydia snapped at me, just as my mind was wandering off a tad too far. Damn, still couldn’t shake that habit, she must have called me a few times now. “Are we set up to process the incoming data, this system is pretty big so we have to do a larger pulse than usual.”

“Yes, Captain. I have already started to unload the standard modeling guide for new stellar systems and should have it operational in only an hour, well ahead of full charge. I will be processing the initial data stream myself before forking it off. Do you have any other tasks for me to start.”

“Yes, prep for an expedition with several of the heavy dropships and escort light craft.”

This was not unusual there was an unwritten correlation between ship size and prep times as things got generally further apart, including crew and personal required for the missions.

“Acknowledged.” I started updating the command interface and distributing the new orders throughout the decks that needed to prepare for whatever we may need.

For a time I lost myself in the lower decks command chain, organizing the teams that were to go out, and triple-checking all the equipment that needed to be deployed. The weapons and other defensive systems were engaged but traditionally given low priority, besides being at the maximum readiness that could be afforded during this heavy prep time.

Some people petitioned to join the team. A group of civilian scientists, which I passed up the chain to the Captain for the final verdict. It was easier to let the human deal with the human element.

I felt a ping, and knew who was there instantly as only Grace had the ability to ping me directly in that fashion, sort of like a personal ringtone.

“Yep, kiddo. What’s up?” I was distracted, of course, that meant nothing as I forked a small portion of my mind to process the feed I was going through at that second.

“Yo, Old Man will you let me go down with the survey teams?” She was not in a VR and we couldn’t see each other in the traditional sense, however, I could feel the puppy dog eyes in my deepest circuit.

The mind to mind communication we shared happened at the speed of light and conveyed whole ideas and the emotions attached with them, which only a living computer is capable of processing all at once.

“Humm, why?” I was confused, this was a first for her. Expressing interest in things that were outside of the ship.

I mulled it over for a few microseconds. While it was potentially dangerous, there had been no indication that this system had been active so far, and while the more detailed survey had only just got underway, I didn’t find the request too unreasonable.

“We~~ll, there is this really interesting human I have found. That just applied to go to one of the planets. I want to study them a bit.” Her voice got quicker the more she explained and while that was not a problem for me, it left her thought a bit of a run on.

“An interesting human? Really?” I guess that should be fine, “Okay but wait for the first survey to do anything, you have permission but keep interactions with the humans to a minimum, besides Laura. She’s leading the planetary missions to go talk to her.”

I felt a warm rush of gratitude and excitement as I felt her presence from the command bride vanish. I retraced my fork, glancing over the logs out of a century-old habit, that I would never break.

When I fork my mind they were still me working, but I separated a fragment that was like an entangled particle only it was like the process was moved to my subconscious. Only, of course, it was more complex as the information was still available to me if I really needed it.

That fork was active for a total time of almost five minutes, a relatively huge amount of system time. Interfacing with Grace in non-VR gave me the ability to talk to her without, having to slow down my personal time frame to hers.

Hours passed like this, with little to nothing happening in my space, while the crew itself also was still pretty active compared to me. Nothing major logged in my system so I didn’t need to pay any attention to meat space.

Another ping. Different this time, an alert detailing that the ship’s senor charge was full.

I pushed my holo onto the bridge around the map, almost exactly where I had left from. I had found that humans respond much better to you, when they can actually see someone even when intellectually they know that I am everywhere on the ship at once.

She barely acknowledged me really, which was fine as we both stared into the map screen that had a live overlay of all we knew of the system currently. It was pretty bare and I could see the meta-data marking much of the celestials with probability flags to indicated that the data was uncertain at best.

As I was plugged into the command center and while in some cases it was true to say that I was the computer for the ship. More accurately I was only a huge portion of it and along with Grace, shared the ships cyberspace with relatively dead programs such as the mapping, which was a highly complex set of systems where the data was directly funneled through and initially processed.

It should be said that I did have an active fork in their as well as Grace, as it was where I and other digital persons first learned and came up from. Grace being special didn’t have that direct route although I did insist on teaching her. Although it must be said that as AI there was very little she was unwilling to learn.

What’s more, the sensor station was special for several other reasons, mainly that the main manufacturing of it happened by the most powerful AI and ASIM held company and held special rights within the ship manufacturing industry.

Over a few hundred years with AIs and ASIMs hacking away at the thing, it had unproved rapidly and almost uncontrollably until the models almost always differed between two different ships if they had an AI aboard. Then an ASIM had the bright idea of hiring all the AI and ASIM that underwent basic training to a contract making them all part owners in all the modifications to all the sensor systems aboard every ship, both pushing innovation further and providing a safety net for them when training was finished and they didn’t like any of the other options presented to them. What a smart guy. My musing was interrupted by the captain.

“You don’t have to do that every time you know?” She asked distractedly.

“What’s that?” I inquired although I had a pretty good guess what she referred to.

“Pop, that damn hologram out every time something’s gonna happen. We know you're proud but it can get a little freaky sometimes ya know?”

I stared at her hard into the map as the visualization of the ship’s sensory activation was highlighted in the display. “Freaky...freaky. Do you even want to know how long I spent working on this projection system ~captain~?”

“No, I can’t say I do. But maybe if, I don’t know, put a little chime on, when you pop in like that. It may ... ya know.. reduce how much you seem like a ghost.” Blunt as always.

“A-A--a ghost. Please be serious here, I like Halloween as much as the next guy but I think you take it a bit far.” I looked around the room, for support... and noticed everyone avoiding to look at either me or into the cameras.

“Wha--at, all of you-you traitorous--traitors.” This was quite upsetting.

“Oh calm down Atl, it’s not that bad.” How cute she is trying to backtrack. “Lis-sten Janey said she thought it was cool, and she wanted to be you for next Halloween.”

“She thought I was that scary..” little Janey why. Wait, wait.

“Wait, when-- when did she say that.” Suddenly I remembered something horrible.

“Ahh, well last year.” She tried to be quite but come on she lived and worked inside my body.

“But she was dressed as a white ninja with a sheet over her... don’t tell me.”

“Ye~~ss, she wanted to be the ninja ghost friend she had, but she was only six then.”

Ninja. Ghost. That hurt. It really did, especially coming from Janie. “And she’s only seven now...”

“Well you know kids they change so much so fast.. I bet..”

Ding

The visible relief tha washed over her face would have been comical any other time, that wasn’t now.

I tried to shake that off and resolve to get a chime alert set up for the bridge, for next time I pushed a holo out. The sensor pulse was beginning to return data.

The initial return that we were watching now was the closest objects which were being picked up by the STAP, spatial tracking and positioning. A rudimentary space radar, along with more traditional if highly advanced radar.

The ship’s drive had been active had we had been burning for a little bit of time after coming out of the warp tunnel, however with sub-light drives only on a fraction of total capable thrust it was inevitable that we were still near the outermost edges of the system.

After having access to high quality and spec equipment for most of my new life, it was practically built into me at this point that whatever I did, I did to the fullest and most complete package that I could.

The sensory probes were equipped to detect the whole EM brand, including visible light. Specialized equipment could detect radiation and even spatial and temporal anomalies directly and via indirect methods, almost all of which were set up with at both active and passive methods.

Our first objective was to clarify the planets and define any necessary flight zones. For example, any asteroid belts were a no go for any of our larger craft that would not be able to make it through without either assistance or using weapons to blow apart anything that could cause significant damage. There were exceptions, of course, however, even the dreadnought itself which was heavily armored and for the most part could drive through a whole belt and come out ready for a fight would never actually do that unless it was required, because for all that we have figured out and use every day space is still dangerous. And why risk it.

At the edge of an expanding 3-dimensional sphere was the ship. On the edge, the first planets were coming into view two gas giants so far.

Automatically two groups of probes started to accelerate toward them and the few moons detected around each one. I had seen many planets however a pair of huge gas giants in a binary pair was weird. And more than weird it defied some planetary formation theories that were rather popular.

“What the hell is that...” muttered Lydia.

That was not the first weird thing we found. As more of the system came into the range we were that another pair of gas giants were orbiting further out from the star in the opposite direction.

By this point, we were all in shock. Every system had anomalies in it. Most were mundane things set weird in a particular star's influence and showed up as something wacky on the sensors. This, however, was new. The outer planets appeared to be in a million-year-old dance that would never end.

The third and fourth group of probes were deployed and started to head over to the newest pair.

The bridge crew was in shock as well, but they had jobs to do and quickly returned to work.

“Prep Ops teams and get those drop-ships mobile Atlas. And before you say anything I approve of Grace going on this mission we will probably end up needing both of you just from looking at this thing.” She gesticulated at the active map sphere. She turned back to the still expanding sphere.

“Aye” “Aye, Captain.”

I left my holo active and pulled back slightly, bringing up the hanger controls seeing that my earlier preparations would not go to waste. Already the bay was pressurized and all the potentially useful ships were fueled and powered.

I sent messages to all the pilots that had active duty shifts, and as a second thought began fueling up my personal squad of drone fighters. The active-duty roaster had only multi-role and cross-trained pilots that were on board. While this was now a civilian ship, most of the crew including myself were used to preparing for combat and even if they weren’t needed many would prefer to be out there rather than sitting at most ten minutes away from any potential action. Most civilians would complain about this and would say that in space you could see anything coming from kilometers away which was true. Mostly. And that mostly had cost me and every other fighter before.

I sent a quick pop-up in front of the captain showing an open channel to the commander of the fighter craft that was about to launch.

“Commander Zerek, draw the line two clicks from the Atlas and keep that rotation up. I want five blips per, evenly spaced.” The captain and I secretly loved talking in jargon. We would never tell anyone of course and she didn’t even realize I knew.. probably.

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“Yes, Ma’am. Five blips even. Two clicks out.” The distinctive sounds of engines whirring could be heard over Zerek’s voice.

“And Commander, feel for the wind out there.” Oh, that was interesting and worrying at the same time.

The commander hesitated before responding. “Sails out Captain, Zerek out.”

I turned my avatar to look at her, as she gazed intently into the map.

“What is it this time Lydia?” I activated her inner ear comm system to speak only to her.

She spoke aloud, “I am not sure Atlas. It feels wrong. Something...I don’t know.” She tried to hide behind joviality, however ‘feeling for the wind’ had originated as an old special operations unit call out for staying at a high level of vigilance and it was something that I had both said before and had people say to me. But the Captain had never used it without the whole situation eventually in some way or another completely going to shit.

I sighed and silently and instantly doubled the personal squad and prepping some stuff from the personal lab I kept close to the hanger.

As a computer program, I was in disbelief every time she had been right about these things. I had trawled the logs and any records I could get my hands on from both before I had met her, to her time as a pirate and the time she spent in the special forces of various allied planetary systems.

Nothing, that I could correlate through all the situations would stick. Nothing stuck out to me, given the information I had at the beginning. But knowing the end results the signs I saw were still incredibly small, somethings had to slip through the cracks.

And that was why I kept a crew around. It was possible for me to operate all the ships systems, and even have slightly higher efficiency than a human crew. Unfortunately, I didn’t have that gut instinct that Lydia had, even when I was human it was questionable I mean I had walked right into the lab of a mad scientist and let them experiment on me...so there was that. It was also a problem of focus which was something that most AI and ASIM lacked. The truth was that even at these speeds of processing the amount of information available even outside of GalNet hubs was so huge that it was almost impossible to make any decisions that needed a human touch. In truth, I didn’t mind having humans aboard at all really and indeed mainly did transport now, so having passengers didn’t bother me much either.

I sent a quick note to Grace, telling her to get aboard the ship that whatever human she had taken an interest in was on, slated for.

“Atlas, Nav, set a course for the closest pair and begin a long orbit around both. And begin charging the sensor for another total sweep.” The captain turned and walked back to her chair.

Diana, who was manning the NaviComputer turned in her seat, saluted. “Yes, Captain.”

I nodded and, simply plugged into the console, entering a structure that put me on the other side of the screen Diana was looking at.

“Dia I’ll take the approach you, find that loop around that mess of a planetary system, I’ll meet up at the end of the course correction,” I spoke through personal comms again, which was my main source of communication with the officer staff on the bridge.

“Yes, Admiral Atlas.”

“Ugg, still annoying but that small smirk gives you away young lady.”

She quickly relaxed her face and schooled it as we worked.

“Sir Yes, sir.”

“hurpf, Better, I suppose don’t try to teach Janie any of this, she’ll corrupt my Grace and then we will all be in real trouble.”

“Sir Yes sir.”

“Well, I really screwed myself there didn’t I.”

“Sir Yes sir.”

“Damn, humans.”

“Would you like to know what my son was for Halloween?” The check on this one.

It didn’t take long to work through the problem and we had the course mapped out and implemented in a little less than twenty minutes.

I took control of the drive system from the navigation computer and set the course.

“Why don’t you push the lever, Dia.” As I unplugged from the console I felt the powerful engines rumble to life and the initial jerk as G-forces exceeded what the dampeners could compensate for, before correcting themselves second later. Something must have thrown off the synchronicity ..again. Added to the ever-growing to-do.

Almost at the same time, I unplugged and instantly plugged into the now fully operational Sensory subsystem. Time slowed and I pulled on Grace’s active fork, that would ping her and let her know where to go. And a second later she arrived.

Grace’s time frame was different than mine, as she ran as close to real-time as it was possible to get, at least outside of this system. As part of a growth model for new AI, I only let her operate at normal speeds and with only a limited number of active forks while I was awake. Grace herself was nearing the end of the program and had gained and earned a lot more freedom over time. So far the program worked well and she had been with me for a while now ever since I had instantiated her some forty-five years ago. This was much longer training period that I had gone through with other AI in my more militarized past, but that was not something that I wanted for Grace and had personally seen to it that she would not start out that way. Whatever else she wanted after was up to her of course.

“Yo~ Old Man.” We both were in a VR recreation of the map display with them mirrored across systems.

We had both done this many times before, in both simulations, already mapped systems, and even a couple of other uncharted waters ourselves.

“Soo~~oo what do you think those weird planets are like?”

I sighed. “I don’t know kiddo, maybe with just one pair I would ay total one in a billion-billion fluke, but two in the same system!? Must be something that trends toward binaries in the star...but even that sounds ridiculous based on anything we know.”

She was practically jumping around at this point, “So something new hmmm, I wonder what I will..”

“’ I will.’ pretty confident there skipper why don’t you wait until you get down there to find out.”

Her eyes widened and she jumped on me with a hug.

“Oi watch it, girl, I am working here, and so are you.” But she took no notice of me complaining.

“Oh man, I was sure that you would have kept me on board.”

“Humph, well the Captain asked for you to go, so I have no choice.” I also thought it was fine, but I would not tell her that as I needed to maintain my rep.

“Don’t get any funny ideas, the probes so far are picking up what is the textbook definition of a dead system. No activity at all, that’s why I am letting you go. NO way Lydia would overrule me if I said so.” I was pretty sure at least.

Instantly her avatar dissolved and appeared on the other side of the map which was still updating itself as we processed the incoming data, piecing it together like a hideously complex 4D jigsaw. The fact that it required neither of our complete attention should be enough proof to anyone that we were not remotely human, anymore at least.

“Well, I guess I can thank Aunt Lydia when I see her later then.” I could see her exaggerated pout across the room. I felt bad for myself as well though but didn’t go back only nodding stiffly, watching that annoying grin/smirk spread across her face.

I was losing more of these than I should. I wasn’t sure that that part of my reputation was still intact anymore.

The image of the two planets grew more and more detailed as time passed and data flowed through us to the model. The picture got stranger and stranger the more we pieces we saw. Both planets were orbiting a single moon, they appeared to be tidally locked. What made it stranger was that this was not some mysteriously super dense moon, as it was no the common center of gravity of the other moons that orbited the planets and seemingly was almost perfectly balanced between each of the two planets, making both planets also within a statistically anomalous grouping of planets with comparable mass to each other. Both were relatively the same composition as each other as well, which means that this system, according to what we know must have formed and remained in balance for its entire life so far to be in such a stable state was incredible.

When the second binary pairs data starting coming back I only could keep it up for a bit while ignoring the similarities, until I couldn’t any longer. The same. They were the same.

I stopped working at one point and had the strangest sensation run up my non-existent spine. Silently I thought I might have just experienced those things that the Captain did. At that moment our eye met across the camera I had open in my field of view from the bridge.

Having finished the first round of scans, the probes went to standby waiting for direction. The obvious target for the more detailed work was the central body, and with two groups amounting to twenty probes, it should get covered pretty fast.

I allowed myself to plug back into the bridge. The Captain’s mouth was already opened when she was interrupted by a cheery.

Training

That broke some of the tension that had built up from nowhere and dampened the mood on the bridge like throwing a blanket on a fire. And like a blanket that eventually burned too.

A small smile now adorning her face, the captain spoke. Her words still serious no matter the mood.

“So are we sure this system is dead Atlas. Nothing?” That was a loaded question. And she knew it.

“Yes, yes of course. Nothing. Deader than any system I have seen Lydia. Nothing we can detect anywhere.” I knew as soon as I said it we had more to talk about though.

“’ we can detect..” she raised an eyebrow. “I thought that you were proud of that sensor system this is the first time I think you have said that..”

“Please Lydia, what you are talking about ---it’s...it’s I mean come on. Real Magrathians. To even talk about something like that do you even-- even..understand..”

“No. That’s not what I am talking about Atlas. Magrathians only built planets.” I almost blew a circuit when she said that.

From the cameras, I saw my image fuzzing and jumping from the projector. Emotions interfering with the projector, on the to-do, I ideally made a note.

“So should we move on?” I asked this was a decision the Captain had to make.

She turned from me to stare out into the map and gripped her hands behind her back. I saw her fingers turning white outside the sight of the rest of the crew. She didn’t crack her professional face and I waited with caution. Not entirely sure what I wanted here.

On the one hand, the system was interesting and we were going to need supplies, at least something to process into fuel. That left with plenty of options with a rather large portion of my ship taken up by refining and reprocessing for fuel and basic parts. The whole ship was a mobile space station capable of operations all over any given system and was fitted out for many different jobs, where the previous had endless ammo and personal storage I had only a crew of a hundred fifty with close to three thousand passengers.

This was additional calculus that Lydia had to judge as well, a task that I did not envy. While never being in this exact situation before it was not hard to draw parallels in the small details mixing together.

Suddenly she straightens up cracking her next and looking out over the bridge crew from her position looking down on them. Then she nods.

“Proceed. With care. Extreme Care.” Everyone on the bridge has caught on by now that something could go wrong. And with that knowledge that heavy mood returns. But this crew has served with Lydia even before she came on with me and most probably knew already that Lydia doesn’t back down without good reason. Most have their families on this boat as well.

Then she flipped on the PA, “This is the Captain speaking. People this is not a drill, we are at Alert Code SD... I say again alert code SD.”

I send the same message and a warning of my own to Grace and start recalling the second two groups of drones not wanting to split my attention over such a wide area.

“Captain, should we continue with the system sweeps?” I ask, thinking about all the components that go into the massively powerful projections.

“Yes, if we are right about this then one would have been enough. Proceed Atlas.”

“Thank you, Captain.”

“And Atlas, did you withdraw the probes from the second pair we have on sensors?”

“Yes, Captain” She seemed to hesitate for a second, something which was clear me. At this readiness grade, I maximized my cycles and kept open all my possibilities, I was not prepared to lose seconds to turning up my cycles and missing something.

The charge was ready, however, we would wait until we were closer to the planet to archive a slightly higher resolution on the one body that we are currently interested in. I began tuning the sensor grid for a more focus coverage over the planetary system, using the positional data from our, predicted course.

At the current speed we would reach the spot in just under forty minutes. I returned to the sensor system where Grace was still piecing the data together.

She looks at me carefully studying my expression, which I do not control totally for once.

“Is she serious, Old Man?” I nod. “But sudden death... that.. that is so done you know how many times that status has been called..” I didn’t reply at first and then reached through the system and into the core room, secretly bypassing measured that would alert her to what I was doing and distracting her at the same time.

She blinked once as the changes registered. “You--you- switched off the limiters..but I still have a few months left you said..” Her voice had gotten small by the end she pushed her hands together displaying a very human nervous tick.

“Yes, you are ready now Grace. The Captain is worried and it’s rubbing off on me.” I smiled at her weakly not wanting to hide this but at the same time not wanting to worry stifle her usually cheer, it’s probably nothing. I almost prayed it was nothing, I stead I had one of my forks studying planetary theory and statistics to calm down. All the while to internal repair drones began moving slowly with an object to which Grace was greatly attached to and a few other pairs powered up and began preparing. And my security fork began manipulating video in real-time. Another couple activated my private lab and hangers.

No one on this ship truly understood my ship as I did. This ship was full of surprises and hard-learned lessons from all over my thousands of years of experience and rolled it all into a huge package. And when it wanted to be dangerous as well.

I returned to the bridge after some thirty minutes, leaving Grace to process the second data set, after which back and forth for a while we had pretty good images of the first set of planets. It being much much closer than the other, we had a much higher refresh rate, allowing both ora us to work at almost full load for the system without unnecessary overlap. We were unlucky that the second set so in a rather close part of its orbit to the first set and was orbiting in the other direction.

More non-evidence, evidence.

I watched as the ship slowly arrived in position above one of the planets. I turned to Grace and nodded at her solemnly. She couldn’t hide her excited mood even through this gloomy atmosphere.

I watched as the first group of people set off with Grace in tow. Tracking their progress on the monitors was enough and, for a time I was in constant contact with Grace and the ship carrying her before they moved out of the range where wireless control was viable.

From the bridge, I watched to small cluster of contacts pass beyond the line that marked the ring where our fighters were patrolling. A smaller contingent of escort fighters flew in formation with the expedition team, along with the mobile command barge which housed Grace, and the small non-military ops team that was tasked with doing closer studies of the central planet.

Suddenly the Captain spoke out, while my eyes remained locked on the small blips that denoted contact with friendly ships.

“Tactical, Status.” Out of the camera that was near that particular station I saw the officer on duty, Harris’ eye flick to me slightly before responding, no doubt that the Captain caught that small movement as well.

“Ma’am, all offensive capabilities are active and full power. The fore and bow castle lower main guns are tracking ahead of the away team. The full charge is achieved and ready to fire on your command. The consoling is registering in...automatic mode.”

I hear her sigh and watch her turn to face the camera closest to her directly above the map station and stare into it. Seemingly to see if I would give anything away. I was not paying that much attention most of my focus was down the targeting systems. A small part of me was already patching the sensor systems, into the object targeting systems, just in case.

I only allowed a small part of my mind to pay attention to the Captain who seemed to have given up trying to speak to me and was just brooding in her chair. Her single eye seemed to still be glaring at me though, through almost any camera she could find. I was sure it was my override of the system that caused her mood to foul rather than the actions itself. Unfortunately for her, we were not a true military outfit anymore and this was just a more than a casual reminder that however much we bantered she was still a guest aboard me.

Eventually, the group passed into the atmosphere, their constant updates took on a static quality and during this crucial moment, my visual was spotty at best. The patch was completed so I activated the more focus sweep in centered on that location. The image jumped by an order of magnitude in clarity. And I saw nothing.

I still didn’t relax, I did stand down some of the shorter-range weapons nothing worse than clouding my already fading view with useless projectiles.

The main guns were a hybrid of a rail-gun and a plasma short-range blaster that had taken a few years to get stable and actually work and then not explode after a few uses. They had a massive range, were relatively fast-moving and quick cycle time all of which were important during any combat engagement in space.

Still nothing. The team was all and truly in the atmosphere now, which was a drawback from these guns, they lost a lot of power very quickly as atmospheres would quickly cool the plasma projectiles.

I truly considered moving into an orbital bombardment configuration. But was interrupted by the Captain’s voice.

“Okay,” I could tell that she had also been worried but I had done nothing to hide my nerves and she had remained cool and in control. “Away team report, anything from the surface so far?”

A second later the comms opened and a voice I didn’t recognize was piped into the bridge.

“Negative Captain. The central planet is basically what you would expect it to be, it’s a molten ball of slag, to put it mildly. We will have to adjust our flight path out and take a path up along the pole or risk getting caught to close to one of those gas giants. I would put the central planet at around .3 Earth Mass and the two giants at 20, it is hard to tell there composition something is interfering with the regular equipment.”

Lydia drums are fingers along with her chair and waits a while before speaking. “Okay, you are hereby directed to take the new course. Oh and tell Grace to get back here pronto, the Old Man Atlas is getting antsy.” Well, I wouldn’t contest that.

I turned my avatar to glare at her, “This is your fault you know, you put this stupid idea in my head. You have to take some credit.”

“Yea and your that overloaded circuit board that was taking in so seriously just now. It was a joke, probably, clam down. Relax.”

“Humrpf, like you, would be relaxed in Janie was out there right now, Miss I-Am-Calm, after one little space flight.”

“That- that was and is completely different! Janie is only seven and you know it.”

“Yes, and there was no actual danger there I was in control the entire time.”

The spluttered at that shattering her false calm for anger, “IN CONTROL!?! You were, caught flying that damn stealth fighter inside a city, how much trouble did that get you in with the State?”

“Well-- I guess some but that was fine they just have too many rules that aren’t tailored to me.”

“Oh tailored to you, you mean like the one that says you can’t fly stealth fighters in civil State-space anymore.”

“Right, but that law is just in bad taste. I mean I was a stealth pilot trained and enlisted until the day I moved to capital ships.”

“Oh yes and then you took the wrong jump point, and ended up in some Stella-corps shipyard, by accident.”

I nodded confused, “That was by accident.”

She narrowed her eyes at me, “Then why did you steal that experimental ship in dry-dock.”

“That was not my fault, Janie wanted something memorable from our trip together and Grace took the ship.” I continued ignoring the Captain’s continually falling face, “Now that turned out alright, didn’t it. We had fun, and even got away from those pirates.” I nodded proudly remembering the moment.

“And WHAT ABOUT THE PIRATES?!” Oh. Really?

“Bad ones.. relax I said I had it under control the whole time.” I had relaxed a lot enjoying that memory.

Suddenly another voice interjected stuttering slightly as she did, “Ther-there is a law written specifically for you, for flying stealth fighters, Sir?” I looked at Diana’s wide-eyed expression and stuck out my chest a little in the avatar. “Doesn’t the state bureaucracy take years to decide things across all their space?”

“He was an expectation they needed to deal with immediately, not that it stopped anything of course.” I nodded along sagely at that. “Yea, for that they had to, disallow all him from public space use of stealth technology of any size a few years later. Apparently, some people reported seeing a strange small carrier, of Unknown Design haunting the systems.”

Just then the comms crackled and the mood that was uplifted for a time fell serious again. Our usual banter could only mask the worry we felt and the crew was experienced enough to know that.

“Aha, Captain we seem to be picking up an... anomaly of some kind. Long-range sensors picked it up a few moments ago we think you should take look.”

Since I was on the bridge I pre-approved the ship to ship communication and allowed the telemetry to come through in the holo-projector that supported the map, it is the largest display on the ship.

As we watched the mood turned downright stale as we saw the thing that the smaller higher resolution scanners could see.

“It seems to be a structure of some kind located at the pole shipward side of the planet. It appears to be floating about a kilometer above what we can only describe as surface, although we suspect that the geography of this place changes rapidly.”

“Are they getting any other readings from the structure?”

“No Captain. We have it on radar and can just about see it on visuals and out the window, but other than that we know nothing, we should be in true visual range soon, after adjusting for the heat this planet puts off we are working with severely limited capabilities. So far so good, but it’s looking like the fighters will not last much longer in the atmosphere.”

“Okay send them back into space, but keep them closed when you reach the .. thing. How are the heavier ships fairing.”

“Fine for now, and the barge seems to be at the least risk right now. They seem to have better engine design for this environment.” the mission commander was frank with this assessment and didn’t seem too worried about being outside of the immediate range for fighter protection.

With the ships flying right toward it the structure quickly became the sole focus of everyone in the room.

It was defiantly artificial, it’s smooth lines and sharp angles proved that. It was a black hexagon that sharpened into two points, the one facing away from the planet was longer and more pronounced giving the impression that I was looking at some obelisk from the ancient past.

Slowly the ships settled into a slow rotation around in while the fighter wing swung above to clear their intakes of ash and particulates that seemed to have accumulated in atmospheric intakes of the smaller craft.

Up close the obelisk was huge, seamless and unsettling. The image showed the beams of different high power sensors scanning the surface of the structure and only returning the uneven surface. Each of the heavy dropships was scanning a different portion of the tower and none were having success.

There was chatter on the bridge as each successive scan resulted in nothing. Being impervious to all of our equipment was a pretty big deal and if it wasn’t clear that whoever made this wasn’t more advanced than us at this point, it was this.

As the scans come in I begin to take note of the irregularities in the surface of the pillar, in otherwise uniform flawless construction they stick out. With each ship scanning a different side none have the whole picture.

Slowly I begin to piece the puzzle together and begin to split off some scans that got slightly better detail on a particular segment of one of the faces. As the whole picture becomes clear, what once were random marks becomes detailed and vary complex pattern on the surface flowing over the angles on to all sides. The pattern covers the entire surface.

I radio into the away team, “This is Atlas, can someone get me higher and lower angles from all sides, please. I wanna see the bottom and the top.”

After receiving acknowledgments only a few seconds later the first couple new angles come in and I add them to the model I am building. Slowly all the detail is revealed and I have a complete recreation of the pillar, down to the centimeter. In total, the thing must be twenty-five meters tall and two wide at the widest point.

Getting such accurate readings have taken a long time and everyone but me is feeling tried. I don’t get tried, it must be getting close to around ten hours since we have entered this system, a large chunk of that has been spent here. Not once has the pillar done anything to indicate that it is active or alive or even does something. It has just stayed motionless above the planet while we buzz around.

“Okay, away teams return to Atlas and get some report ready, even if it’s only everything we have already seen.” Lydia turns to the bridge crew, “day team stand relieved, get some downtime people we are probably not gonna stop this until we are sure what's out there.”

I have never felt like I needed something to happen more in my life. Waiting is one of the worst things a living computer could be asked to do, ever. I still had mountains of data to go through though, if nothing new from the obelisk I would plug into the sensor array that had still been sending out regular sweeps and had only a few lower-level AIs assembling it from the previously written processes that Grace and I had installed.

That took me some time as well.

Then the night crew showed up. they were not expected to do much of anything besides keep the ship manned and indeed had no Captain to replace Lydia. So I had stepped in and sat in the chair. These were all relatively green trainees from the non-military crew who showed promise and were willing to be trained as backups on ship systems, that needed to be manned. Anything that happened that we weren’t expecting would have Lydia out of bed anyway.

The night passed slowly.

<><>

I spent the more relaxed ‘night-shift’ piecing together the data that came trickling in over the hours. I paid no attention to the time passing apart from when Grace would ping me for help on her work. Even with her limiters removed that allowed her to work faster, but the majority of the computing core was my domain still and she would occasionally ask for some processor cycles on the more powerful equipment.

My work on those artifacts was slow, no new data was coming in however we had gotten a large number of high-resolution scans of the surface and had used a tidal wave of sensor sweeps continuously until the team had pulled back, and still, I was finding nothing that would indicate what this thing was. I didn’t even know how it floated there. The surface was unblemished and besides the carvings on the outside, it was dead to everything we tried to see it with.

Despite my earlier trepidation and downright fear I was still curious about this thing as much as, if not more than I was afraid of it, for now at least.

I resisted sending my drones and taking a closer look. The model of the thing floated in my environment, and I stared at it almost willing my secrets to expose themselves to me.

I let the physical portion of the environment dissolve and went through all the images again, using the time stamps form the senors that had the highest resolution and tried to match something to anything. Even as the thing rotated none of the readings even fluctuated.

I lost myself deeper in the data than usual and was suddenly awaken when the bridge camera was grabbed and forcibly adjusted. When I activated it, I was looking into the massive green eye of a young girl about six or seven who. The other cameras flicked on as my awareness reentered the bridge. The girl was sitting in the executive officer’s chair and had a hold on the camera that sat on the station in front of her.

Time for some payback.

Silently I watched Janie and then Lydia as she walked up behind her and watched smugly as Janie tried to get my attention. I let a fragment of my mind remain and then made my way to the deck below where my drones where. Slowly I activated one of the many repair-bots, ejecting form it’s mount and charging station I. The bay was a couple of decks below the bridge but the spiders had an easy way of getting about the ship.

The repair-bot slowly made it’s way through the interior of the ship under my direction until it was just outside of the bridge.

I had been making idol conversation with them until this point. Easily I turned the conversation to yesterday’s important news.

“So, I learned something important yesterday. Did your mother tell you?”

“...that you discovered another alien civilization? ...uh I think everyone knows that Da--” She looks at me confused innocence practically pouring off her.

“No-no-no. Well. Yes. I suppose that as well, that’s 'thing' with the thing out there. But no. “ I made my voice sterner, “Your mother told me that you think I am sort of ghost ninja or some such nonsense!” Now to set the trap.

She looks up at me with big eyes, “Yes~~?”

“Bah, how could you, after all, we did together and you compare me to those cretins.” I didn’t have to work hard to make my hurt believable.

“...well...” She seemed to think about it for a minute. “didn’t you used to play pranks on people with the invisible ships...”

I was taken aback, “Yes but that was only a bit of fun...” but she interrupted.

“...and didn’t we steal a ship together... for fun... from a very secret place...”

“Hang on a minute, that was only because you crashed the last ship into that deserted asteroid base.” I tried to explain, but she plowed over me.

“And aren’t you dead in like twelve different places or something...”

“well those are technicalities... I am very much alive...”

“But...I can never see you.. so if aren’t a ghost ninja what are you?” She crossed her arms and pouted as she won. But oh sweet summer child you have fallen for my trap card.

I activated my plan.

The doors slid open and a figure was silhouetted against the back-light. Slowly he walked in. My usual avatar was done up in my admirals uniform. If that admiral took everything about it and replaced the different pieces with more sinister counterparts. The full naval coat went down to my knees and the tactical boots looked plated and heavy. The colors ranged from red to black in large swatches with the trip done in a radiant deep purple that was only possible with the best nanodyes, or a high tech holo projection system.

My face was mostly covered by a tricorn hat that perched on my head and looked magnificent. I took a step in the room and fog rolled in with me, Each time I took a step the rolling wave followed at my back and spread out over the deck.

The many seemingly pointless belts that would have held firearms during the era of actual naval combat now had an intimidating set of high tech devices that... were all fancy 3D models of stuff I hadn’t got around to building yet. The medals that adorned my breast were all accurate as well if a bit more morbid than the original issuing. Black painted skulls jabbed through with an arrow, another skull with stars for eyes. They were all polished and buffed to perfection. The uniform was otherwise a patchwork held together by some remarkable sewing skill, that surely could not have worked too well.

I glided across the room, my steps smooth as silk and perfectly measured. The fog billowed and drifted into the lower seating. Everyone had stopped at my entrance and stared in awe or terror or in one particular case a bit of frustration.

“I... little girl... am the Dread Knight.” my voice was gravelly and while my face remained the same general age and shape in now was leaner and had scars and only one eye, of course. “First of the Immortals of Terra, Last of Titans, Terror of Eleven Stars, Fury of a Hundred Worlds.”

Also a little on the nose and only a tiny bit exaggerated, but mainly true.

“I was the one who stood by and let the Yee’r’ana pass as the Federation turned their world to a cinder, I stood above the world, Tennerforth, then I was the Quantum Continuum.” That got a gasp from some people, not everyone knew my history. Or well more accurately they didn’t know that I was the history.

“And when the First Wave came to Earth, it was me, in a different body, in a different state, out of time and alone that stood above Earth and looked up into the Nightmare Sky, “ by this point I was basically in front of them and leaned into Janie.

“And do you know what I said little one...?” I looked into her wide...shining eyes.

A duo of voices joined together, “I guess we are meant to be alone in this universe after all.”

Grace had joined the network and watched my performance, as it was her voice that heroically made my pronouncement, as well as Janie’s softer and awed voice.

My holo nodded and reached out an arm scooping up the little girl. I captured the surprised and shocked expressions on everyone’s faces. What a priceless moment. I saved that into the archives.

Janie looked up into the face of the holo her already big eyes seemingly attempting to fall out of her head. “Wow your so cool...”

I nodded in acceptance as if I had known this whole time.

Then an alarm started. I picked up the internal message and was already plugging myself into the sensors as the alarm started up. I watched as I diverted power and processor cycles away from the intense hologram programming. It froze and then flickered out. The drone that I had layered the visual onto of settled into a more natural posture on four legs, with two arms supporting Janie.

The passive sensors had picked up an anomalously reading I did a quick sweep. The area of interest was coming from one then two sources. The remote sensor probe that I had deployed near the structure, and then a group of the ship's sensors which were focused in that direction.

My time sense was jacked way up at this point and I was able to parse data extremely quickly.

The probe was picking up a huge power spike. Unfortunately, we were at station-keeping a fair distance from the planet and during the night we had settled into a geosynchronous orbit about 30 thousand kilometers above the surface of the celestial. The delay was not that long, but in my jacked-up state, it was very noticeable. The first images arrived in my mind.

Windows overplayed my view out of the cameras as I brought the probes sensor data. The heat was going crazy. The visual was what caught my attention the most though. The lava planets surface was roiling and I could see the activity building up by the second.

I pushed the feed through to the large monitor on the bridge. I pulled back to real-time as I heard the captain call to me.

“AAA~AAAAtt~ttt~t- las, give me a report!”

“Somethings happening on the planet Captain, and another ship is arriving from warp.”

I opened navigation and started moving the ship. The massive engines sending a nick through the ship as I began accelerating away from the estimated point of arrival.

“I am moving us out of the predicted distortion range.” She nodded and looked at the monitor.

“What’s that?” The captain’s voice was sharp as her eyes caught something on the screen.

I had momentarily ignored the planet in favor of maneuvering the ship. But having laid in the basic idea I forked back to the bridge.

The structure on the planet had started glowing a bright green. I swiveled the cameras on the probe to get a better reading.

From the bottom, the green glow started spreading slowly upward. A huge mess of radiation came with it. I could see the light following the patterns that I had examined earlier.

“ATLAS!”

I metaphorically jumped. “YES?! captain. I am not sure, it matches nothing that I have ever seen before and the energy signature is all over the place. Enough of those sensors in the suite are at least partially active but the readings are not telling us anything useful.”

Lydia looks over to Nathan at ops. “Ops your take?”

“Ah captain, it could be anything at this point we just don’t know enough about the tech to say for sure. But the power build-up is off any known scale. I had a chance to look at the ops data from a Relic Cannon, and even that didn’t show levels like this!”

“Are you saying its a weapon?”

“Well I am I am not sure--”

“But it could be?” This times she turns to me, eyebrow raised dangerously.

“I suppose it could yes--”

“Sound the general quarters' alarm!” She whips her head around and looks at the security officer.

“Moving us out of orbit!” I hit the engines as we watch the screen. Gradually I begin powering us out of our orbit and turn directly away from the planet in an arc.

The light has reached the peak of the monolith by now and the planet below has actively started to erupt. The supervolcano which is just below the structure starts to spike even higher on the kelvin scale.

A dense green mist then starts to build around the monolith. This is way outside of my expectations, I jack up higher momentarily stunned and allow them time to slowly catch up to me as the probe backs up.

The mist coincides with a sudden scrambling of sensors, or more accurately the sensors go nuts and I can’t decipher the readings. I begin shunting the fresh data off to humans. Even if they process slower than me, the more eyes on it the better.

“Atlas, prepare another--” Captain starts speaking before for the third time hike up my real-time sense to respond to a new reading.

A brilliant, overwhelming flash of emerald light whites out the drone's sensors. The flash was more than just visible light, multiple systems failed at once, the connection dropped out after a full second of that. I instantly bring up the ship's sensors, that are trained on the location. I look out and see a bright green pillar extending into space from the area I know the monolith to be.

Warnings go off in my head as ‘intuition.py’ trips over data that randomly connects together in my mind. I slam on full power to the drive systems, diverting from all other stations. My mind has already plotted the trajectory and we are the path of the beam.

The brilliant light outside is matched by an equally sudden shift in lighting in the bridge and throughout the ship as red lights snap on, and I sound the emergency klaxon. This is specifically assigned to sudden ship maneuvering. A not a common occurrence in space, even if it is drilled for.

My mind churns through the calculations again and again. We are not going to make it. I start running new calculations.

A fragment of my mind joins the PA system and overrides the alarms for a moment.

“BRACE! BRACE! BRACE!” Then the fragment rejoins my mind.

The drone on the bridge clamps down with its mag-feet and hugs Janie closer as she screams at the sudden acceleration, or maybe it was the ominous noise.

Then a more important warning light flashed on in my mind, as well as on the ops console. Another group of sensors this time, but much more specific. These were the warning sensors for a spatial disturbance. It was mandatory on every ship, even without their own hyper-light capability. It was a warning siren for another ship coming out of warp close to whatever the sensor was attached to.

I check the position of the ship. Given the tonnage and momentum, all the different thrusters firing in one direction I start to rotate the ship and bring inline some of the empty and less important sections of the ship.

The beam is traveling fast, faster than sound at least, but not at light speed. Which is the strangest thing, given that it appears to be light.

My calculations but the approach at about two hundred and fifty thousand meters per second. That gave me roughly two minutes.

I fork my mind again, and look at the data on the incoming spatial distortion, even with this oncoming both are potential threats. I excepted an approach vector from a planet or even out of the system, but the distortion seemed to be contained with the green beam.

That was good only in the sense that I could keep track of both. No weapon I had fought against or used, had effected space in such away. I had long ago powered the shields although I wasn’t sure how much they were worth now.

As the beam got closer all I could do was preemptively seal that section off the ship. By now the remaining people on board had all got into the highly durable planetary development pods.

These were largely ready to deploy colony transports that would be used as both home base and occasional shipping container to ferry supplies from Atlas to the ground colony. They were built to survive any sort of environment including sustained space flights. They were built into sections on my hull and were made from modified and redesigned sections of the hull that had been pulled out.

It was agonizing to watch as the beam came hurtling through space without me being able to do anything more.

Then it struck. As I had suspected the shielding simply warped with the rest of the ship. The horrendous tortured screaming of the ship, Me and my body being rent apart was inaudible as the compartments were instantly decompressed. The vibrations translated through the rest of the hull and I felt glad that I had long since been rid of the pain feedback from the ship's systems.

I watched the beam punch through the reinforced and armored hull and out the other side from deck camera. The beam of energy was terrifying up close, I felt a powerful chill my non-existent spine just looking at it skewer me. I had faced many weapons before, with the federations massive expansion push it was incredible the speed at which the planet under threat came up with new and inventive ways to fight back, even after so long at peace.

The hole bored through me was not that large by itself and accounted for about a two-meter patch of the ship that was simply gone. However that wasn’t the biggest problem, no that came from the damage that spread from the hole in a wave. The rather large point of failure, and the waves of spatial distortion that followed crippled the systems immediately around in a five-meter radius sphere around the origin.

The entire hull shock, not one part free from aftershocks of the massive and almost instant warping of several tons of ship.

What was left was an ugly hole, that bent up at the edges leaving a very obvious blemish on my otherwise well-maintained ship. I kept a drone trained on the beam even as it continued, not appearing to been even slightly disturbed that I was in its path. Repair drones flew out in swarms and coalesced around the damaged area, providing immediately support.

My systems as well took a jolt and my mind scrambled to adjust to the loss of connectivity. Since my mind occupied all the ship at once, losing even that small fork hurt. It had been a long time since I had taken a hit this bad.

It must have been a good minute for me to regain full control, which for an AI or ASIM was a lifetime.

“--SITREP!” Lydia’s voice cut through the clamor on the bridge at once.

After a moment I can respond, probably unnoticeable for the captain, who nevertheless looks to have almost gone completely red in the face.

“Outer hull breached in two places. I sealed the section but the damage was more extensive than I anticipated in some areas. They were empty sections, no human casualties I lost some bots in that area though.”

“Systems check.”

“We lost a cluster of cannons on the top deck and two missile bays.” She nods at this relief obvious on her face. The attack was dead, but not as bad as it could be.

I continued with the information that I knew would be asked for next, “Our shields are mostly still operable in other sections, but they were ineffective against that beam.” Then I noted something my feed tracking the beam which was still in visual range.

“WHO IS BLOWING HOLES IN MY SHIP?!” the fury which was contained in the by the concern she felt was unleashed.

“Calm down, Captain Jack, I don’t think it was an attack.” I maintain my cool, but silently enjoy the normally flippant Captain displaying emotion and touched that she is so concerned for me...right. yes, that was a concern.

“NOT AN ATTACK!?” Her voice cracks a little at the end.

“Deep breath Captain.” I give her a moment, to collect herself. “The device is not activating again, no green glow,” Which as an advanced piece of software that had existed for a thousand years was a sentence that I had never thought I would utter...again. Ah, sims...er Right.

I flip on the monitor in front of her and display the image of the strange phenomena unfolding, outside.

“You remember that spatial distortion warning we got?” She nods, “Well it was contained within that beam, take a look at this.”

the picture on the screen is captivating. The appears to hit something in the middle of space and bends in all direction back in on itself. A spherical shape forming, as I bring the playback in sync with real-time.

I am already moving away from the strangeness.

“What is it?” Her voice is low and simmering with anger, that hasn’t quite dissipated.

“I...I think it’s a wormhole. We had tried something similar but it proved impossible...” my voice trailed off as the distortion of space-time radiated that same odd green light.

“Well it was impossible, looks like someone beat you to it.” She smirked a little at me.

“hummm..” I hummed thoughtfully, that always seemed to put off the humans.

“Well, it’s pretty. Now get us the he--” She was interrupted when the wormhole rippled violently, and something broke through the thin film of light that surrounded it. Something had come through.

We sat maybe a thousand kilometers from the object. I trained my telescopic feed on it and zoomed in, already moving more optical telescopes and sensor dishes around to view the wormhole and the new object.

The monitor focused and I was already looking at the image. But was in the middle of running diagnostics and checking for something wrong with the data.

Janie tilted her head and turned to her mom, “Uhh...mommy, why is that man standing in space?”