It’s her. We’re close this time. We slipped to Huyto on good intel that she would be here. We came up with a flight log with a handwritten addition for one extra passenger paying standard credit directly to a personal account. Linear space travel, no wonder it’s been so long since the last time she was detected. I spend more time in cold stasis now more than ever. Nevertheless, here I am, yet another day of life, courtesy of my link to the sword relic. Not that I have any choice in the matter, as going on two thousand waking years in this body, life is getting old. I am sworn to Sequel, and Sequel was essentially handed the equivalent of damnation from The Government when I was just turning 200, ages and ages ago. I technically hold a subcommand position, a position many would kill for even if it was in this once great corp; however, my only directive for my last waking millennia has been the capture and destruction of the weaponized AI that was the reason for Sequel’s damnation.

Since the damnation of Sequel, Sequel is unable to take on new pledges. We were forcibly privatized, taken off all trading markets, barred from using any government resource, including government issued technology or currency. Yet at the time of the government ruling, Sequel was one of the greats. We had whole micro-economies, subsystems worth of planets and we were the leader in biological and quantum AI technology. Unfortunately, it could be said that we flew too close to the sun when that very technology escaped. The Government took away many of the methods with which anyone can be expected to trade, grow, and communicate with the rest of the universe. Thankfully, they left us with the ability to use the very slip space technology we created and pioneered, though many speculate that was only to aid in our only directive: to retrieve and decommission the only finished product of the program to escape. That is the only path to redemption that was given, and thus far, we have not been successful. The entire idea that we must find and capture a single being, while still adhering to government guidelines for general life protection, is completely unrealistic. We are unable to simply annihilate a planet we suspect she may be on if there is life on it, which makes the task close to impossible.

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This time, we might get her. We know the planet she’s on; we know she hasn’t left yet, and we can tag any ships that enter orbit coming from the surface.

‘Command, place a delta level travel bar on Huyto, no one leaves unless they are God himself. We will find her this time, deploy three trace and capture ground teams.’ I see the travel bar go live across the Huyto nets. The ground teams are spiraling down to the surface, traveling towards the three different fusion lift platforms on the ocean planet. Then, much to my dismay, one of the fusion lifts entirely disappears, leaving a gaping crater, a good sixth of the planet gone.

‘We have detected a planet-side slip signature sir. We will have to report this to central.’ The commander is correct, we will have to report this incident back to central Sequel. Another failed capture and casualty of the directive. I’ll be giving another lecture to the board about how it is not feasible to capture the product of Quantum Artificial Intelligence Augmented Biology or QAIAB, given the strict guidelines, regardless of the fact that she was stripped of her relic. We have a sector; we can determine the sector of the travel destination from the slip signature. I am not going back into stasis for a while.