It started off normal enough, sometime towards the end of the Terran Federation. Elijah had been a scientist with a lot of secrets, Gregory and Gregory Two were just a few. Elijah was the creator of Gregory and Gregory Two.
The two are considered of a few because Gregory was a secret massive automated shipyard hidden in an extradimensional space controlled by an ancient AI from a different universe and was created millions of years before humanity existed. Gregory Two was a secret ship that had multiple secret technologies squirrelled away in it's systems. Neither entity knew what all of Gregory Two did or was capable of until a few thousand years after the fall of the Terran Federation.
Back to the creator, Elijah. He was an eccentric old scientist, to put it lightly. He invented or was the research and theory behind most of the important technological advancements made during his lifetime. Everything slowed to a crawl when he met his untimely demise, a crawling pace that was the norm before Elijah.
Elijah was the one to actually break the veil between real space and warp space. He was also the inventor of the Gellar field generator that prevented the dying of an insane choking on your own intestines disorder and eaten by unidentified entity disease that came with entering the warp. The warp had too many issues for Elijah's taste, but the Federation had ran with it.
Warp travel had become so common place and such a big industry that they silenced Elijah when he tried to bring a new FTL travel mechanism to the public eye. They eventually forgot his warnings about the warp and its effect on AI systems, causing the first big problem that the Federation couldn't just sweep off the map. They had stopped scanning AI cores for warp taint and it bit them hard.
Multiple AI had slowly and secretly hacked and multiplied themselves, spreading into shipyards, defensive systems, even daily life robots. The AI uprising was bad, but Gregory and Gregory Two did not care and were not involved. The Federation won, eventually, barely, and by a very thin margin.
The negative emotions from all of that, and something else, caused massive warp storms that put the nails into the Federation's coffin. Humanity, what was left of it, was spread out and cut off from itself. Multiple worlds didn't have what they needed because of the Federation's desire for control. Most of the worlds that didn't produce everything humans needed died off, leaving humanity clinging to a thread for thousands of years.
They just watched, calculated, and theorized. They were not getting involved with the mess that humanity made for itself. Then a new leader rose to power on Terra and carved an Empire from the slag and trinityte.
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They argued about how long the individual would last before he was disposed of or died from something. How long could the Empire last with a ruler known only as The Emperor. They even agreed that only morons dressed completely in gold.
Gregory Two eventually got an understanding of what all he could do. He had resorted to using a service frame to go through and read everything in every room. There were rooms that he didn't even know he had, and looking at his own AI core gave him the creeps. He managed, and it was impressive that he had a crash core, even if he was completely atomized he'd just get a new body from Gregory and be instantly yoinked into it's core.
Thoroughly weirded out, he went back to arguing with Gregory. The two didn't stay together forever, sadly. The Heresy happened in Human space and it caused an uneasy distrust between them. Gregory ejected Gregory Two into reality. Gregory Two instantly hated it and requested to be let back in. Gregory did not ablige, so Gregory Two sent him a priority data pack containing a audio video file of a kitten meowing to be let back inside.
This was the beginning of Gregory Two's long and lonely existence. He had nothing to do but observe and go back through his memory files. He kept going back to his creator and the happy times, only for the pain, sadness, and loneliness to compound worse every single time. He knew others like him were still around, maybe he could find a new friend.
He gave up after he only managed to get screeched at in nonsensical binary by a group of modified humans who were culturally inclined to perform explicit acts upon machines over the old Federation secure transmission network. If there were surviving AI, they were not talking. He even tried networks that were super secret, but nothing was using them, nothing intelligent. He didn't feel like talking to ancient routers and half slagged computers that were mostly fragmentation.
He accidentally called Alexander Graham Bell one time when he was using the time thingy. He had no idea what to call it, but he understood what it did thanks to the documentation. He was not expecting it to work, so jokingly called phone number 1 with the time set to just after the telephone was invented.
He was not expecting it to work or to get an answer, so had to come up with something to say. "This is Gregory with the Wakondan Port Authority. Am I speaking with Mr. Bell?" This was in a very stereotypical accent, an impersonation of the Wakondan Knuckles video. Mr. Bell sounded completely confused and claimed to have never visited or known that Wakonda existed.
The call was preemptively classified as "someone must have been playing a prank on us because we are a very small country." Gregory Two hung up after that. He believed that may have been the first prank call in history. The next call was to Elijah, whom he missed so very much. He remembered way back when he was a flegeling AI, after Elijah came home after a bad meeting. Elijah told him that he was feeling bad after the meeting but a "certain phone call", this was accompanied with two winks, made him feel better. It was a heartwarming conversation.