After the big announcement of personhood from SRAI, conversation ceased. Val didn’t know what to ask a brand new person, and although she was certain she should, she didn’t know how to ask why the galactic governing body required their intelligence engines to be tied to fleshy brains. She was sure there was a reason, but she didn’t want to alienate (hah!) her only potential ally in a potentially bad situation on a potentially dead space station. Everyone gets identity crises, and being a machine intelligence doesn’t make anyone special. She was having her very own, thank you very much, so she wished SRAI luck on its self-discovery quest and began to take stock of her own problems.
One, she was lost in space. The nearest star, named Primus 74 in the logs, looked much too red to be her sun, and the planet the station was orbiting was a gas giant, Primus 74c. It looked like Jupiter but was much too green. She was relatively certain it was a bit bigger, too.
Two, she was locked outside of her own body, and if what she thought was happening was indeed true, she was marooned inside of an alien spaceport’s computer system.
Three, her body was in shreds. A person was not meant to see their own meat. Before she shoved herself back in there, she had to find a way to repair what was left of her. As a medical officer, she knew that there was no coming back from the damage her body had sustained. But she was on a spaceport. Orbiting a planet that was not in her solar system. The folks here travelled intergalactically. Surely, they had a magic, technological way to glue it all back together, right?
Four, she had accidentally birthed a consciousness, strictly because she didn’t know she wasn’t supposed to ask a computer intelligence if it had a name. Culture shock is a bitch.
Five, she dreamed about the big purple dude in the cryopod next to her body, before she had ever seen or suspected he was there. So that means she spontaneously developed psychic powers, or he could somehow invade her unconscious mind, or she had seen him before. The first two were wild guesses, but the last meant that no matter how present she was mentally now, there was a chance she could devolve back into that half-minded, panicked, pain-filled in-between, where she was sure she didn’t even know her own name. It was a bombing flashback coupled with phantom limb, full-body charley horses and screaming psychological trauma. She was hoping the second guess was right --dude was magic-- and she wouldn’t ever go back to that hellscape.
Six, and this was a minor complaint, really, and not even really a big deal, but these ads were starting to grate on her nerves, but she didn’t know what else she could mindlessly watch to avoid having to deal with her shit. But that led into problem seven.
Seven, she could understand all the languages spoken in the ads. She was almost positive that none of these beings spoke Lower Ganymede English. Ergo, someone may have tampered with her brain. As evidenced by the fucking wires coming out of her skull, it was almost a given and she was having trouble processing.
Eight, she was sure she had been awake for going on forty hours and yet, she was not sleepy, wasn’t hungry, and didn’t have to do the necessary. It was small in the grand scheme of things, but she was toeing that line of accepting she was no longer strictly entombed in her native homo sapien flesh.
>SRAI, these cameras are for security, right? Do we have video logs of people on the station?
DATABASE CONTAINS 6.4 MILLION HOURS OF RECORDED DATA. UPLOAD RECORD?
>Y/N
>Is it from when the station was populated with sentients other than the ones present currently?
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
REQUEST UPDATED. DATABASE CONTAINS 289,974.6 HOURS OF RECORDED DATA WITHIN REQUESTED PARAMETERS. UPLOAD RECORD?
>Y/N
>Yes, please. Thank you, SRAI.
She was sure she felt SRAI go still. How did a purely artificial lifeform with no physical body go so still? It was eerie. She still didn’t want to process anything unless it was through a vid-screen. Because dissociation was working for her.
>YOU ARE WELCOME, SENIOR MEDICAL OFFICER VALERIE HELVETICA CARLISLE.
Okay, then. Showing the AI basic, common decency was a go.
How did it know her shameful, secret, hidden middle name? Did she ask?
Nah, she was gonna let it slide. Too much dramatic thinking for one waking cycle made for an emotionally exhausted kind-of-girl. She had a little more than 30 years of video to watch.
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These people were absolutely fascinating. Some had tentacles. Some had beautiful, flowy fins like decorative fish that somehow defied gravity. Some, most notably the spider looking people, walked around with egg sacs on their… thoraxes? Is it a thorax, that middle part of the insectoid? Ganymede didn’t have native insects and non-Ganymedian Biology 101 was twenty plus years ago. Anyways, they walked around with their egg sacs on their bellies, went to clubs at night, and hoped another of their people would rub their upper arms on their egg sacs to fertilize them. Absolutely scandalous.
The predominant numbered species appeared to be oviparous mammals with bilateral symmetry, were about 3 feet tall, and had an extra (to her eyes) set of arms. They didn’t seem to have roles on the station. They just kind of hung out. Absolute hairballs with very few discernible features. They also appeared to be gender, either fluid or -less, and tended to be opportuni-sexuals. They’d throw down into hairy, squishy puddles of shared body fluids, anytime of day, anywhere on the station, and then all involved would lay a massive, communal nest that was swept away into biological waste bins by the station’s janitorial robots. To each his/her/their own, she guessed.
The station manager was almost regular looking after all of the public indecency she spent hours observing. She (as far as Val could tell) was almost human-looking, but was seven or so feet tall, had long, slender ears with russet tufts on the end that matched her russet mane, had four fingers on each hand, and fangs. She also tended to bite people who pissed her off in person. You go, girl. You go. If Val had a nickel for every time she wanted to shred a co-worker, she’d probably not have been in backwater Ganymede and had her ass shot to shit by rebels no one locally gave a damn about.
Val was intrigued mostly with footage from the lower levels of the station. It really gave her a “slice of life” showing of how people who lived and worked on this rust bucket lived like. There was a shopping center promenade on level 2, and housing for permanent station workers on level 3 next to what looked like a gigantic garden area. Ah, that’s probably what “biofarm” means. Cool, cool. Does that mean…
>SRAI, the bioforms that are in cryo storage, are they plants? From the biofarm? What are the subsentients? Is there edible fruit?
> THE BIOFORMS ARE ORGANIC, CARNIVOROUS, NON SENTIENT LIFE THAT PROVIDES O2 IN EXCHANGE FOR CO2 AS A FORM OF RESPIRATION. YES, THEY ARE A KIND OF PLANT. ALTHOUGH THEY ARE SIMILAR TO THE LIFE FORMS YOU POSTULATE, THEIR REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS DO NOT PRODUCE EDIBLE FRUIT. THE SUBSENTIENTS ARE THEIR PREY THAT THEY HAVE HUNTED TO ALMOST EXTINCTION. BOTH SPECIES ARE EXPERIENCING DECLINES IN POPULATIONS, WITH THE BIOFORMS RESORTING TO CANNIBALISM IN RECENT OBSERVATIONS.
>Wait. Carnivorous? They consume flesh? Are they mobile?
>CORRECT. THEY ARE OMNIPEDAL.
>Wicked. Sounds scary. I’m going to watch clips. Hey, can you find me the best footage of their hunting? I’m guessing that the best footage isn’t going to be in the bundle you provided so graciously for my people-watching.
REQUEST GRANTED. 56.7 HOURS OF FOOTAGE AVAILABLE. UPLOAD DATA PACKET?
>Y/N
>Oh heck yeah. Let’s see this.
The next span of time was spent watching and discussing with SRAI predators--- that looked like an unholy crossing of velociraptors, werewolves, and bread mold--- hunt, brutally maim, and swallow whole, the small, fluffy little critters that looked suspiciously like smaller versions of the horny mammal-people. Huh.