"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles." - Sun Tzu, The Art of War.
Ross 183 - Date: 2785 GST +3?
Perspective "Thomas Cabot"
After the inferred and RADAR scans returned, I sent out some logistics probes to gather basic samples of the refined metal in the debris field. After figuring out the metals' material composition, I plan to rendezvous with one of the large husks that Commsys has identified and scavenge any advanced components. I set the tasks for the logistics probes and sent them off. While waiting for the probes to finish their work, I pulled up the bits of corrupted data that Mainsys could salvage and Oh boy, is it rough. It took 3 years just for this little bit of data, can't wait to fix the damn mainframe. The data that Mainsys salvaged was a shipping manifest of all things. The manifest is dated 2785 GST, which doesn't help given that this is a couple of kilobytes out of the Exabytes that are still corrupted, but it is certainly a start when deciphering what happened to the USM-VNP-5. The manifest calls for 600 gigatons of refined tungsten carbide, 300 gigaliters of pure hydrogen gas, and 100 megatons of graphene tubing going from Epsilon Erandi to the Sol system under the United Systems of Man as the 'vendor' and the Humanist Council of Earth as the customer. The most important thing is that the 'sales personality' is Thomas Cabot, me. While that gives good evidence that I was still around Sol at the time, I am certainly not anywhere close to Sol now, especially when I compare the current star maps that Commsys is making with the 2599 ones I have. It does confirm that something big was happening. No one needs 600 gigatons of tungsten carbide unless they are undertaking massive amounts of construction, especially from outside the solar system that has no chance of human habitation like Epsilon Erandi; the HCE was notoriously hand-fisted with any funding that wasn't in habitable star systems. Regardless, it stresses me at the hypothetical that there was another war, and with the sentiment of AI after the last war, I don't find my chances of finding significant support for an Artifical Personality like myself...
After having a small crisis about the possible shit storm, I might be getting myself and my 'crew' into; Commsys requests a meeting with me. I finally got the VR working while I was frame-jacked so that I could at least pretend to have a conversation with real people; not to say they're not 'real,' but they aren't real 'people,' either way, it is helping my dwindling sanity at least. It was a long drive, given I could only wait while the automated systems did their job. I can't always have it on due to the amount of processing power it takes up, but it's worth it so I can have a body again. Porting from my system space to the VR of a rustic HMS Man-of-War captain's quarters. Sitting at my desk in naval officer fatigues from the 1700s with an avatar I modeled after Edward Teach, I accept the meeting request from Commsys.
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"Captain, there is a- What is this?" Commsys walks in, looking confused about the environment I picked; she hasn't picked an avatar yet, and it's not like I will pick one for her, so she continues with the basic stick figure.
"Hm?" I say, twirling my blackbeard.
"Nevermind," she continues. "I have figured out what caused the latest system corruption." She pulls up an image of a USM-VNP-5 processor and a neutrino. "The corruption was caused by a wave of neutrinos interacting with the ship's hardware. Luckily, I was able to utilize the system logs that Mainsys created from the incident and triangulate the location of the neutrino burst." She pulls up a stellar map of ROSS 183 with a point highlighted with yellow on the outer edge of the 'debris donut.'
"What do you think caused this burst?" I ask inquisitively.
"Neutrinos are natural stellar phenomena, but to produce this magnitude of neutrinos, an artificial construct must have released them. I can not say as to the purpose, but nonetheless, it does affect the processing systems of the USM-VNP-5." She concludes her small presentation.
"Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Is there anything else I should be updated on?" I ask slouching slightly in my padded chair.
"No, Sir" she finishes.
"I want you to find any hardware in orbit that intersects with that point and detail any suspiciousness in a log. You're dismissed." Commsys leaves the VR session, and I close the program and return to my system space. Well, there is at least something in ROSS 183. I can only hope for the best, but hoping is never a good strategy when dealing with a possible conflict, so I send out orders to the logistic probes to grab as much scrap as possible and tote it back, more the merrier; I also message Manufactoringsys to start making a roadmap to creating some basic industrial base, and I mean basic because of the amount of stuff thats going to have to be done by just utilizing the repair drones to melt and reshape scrap into basic metallergic furnaces and go on from there. Man, thats going to take forever... I considered messaging Commsys to cease broadcasting the distress call, but if there is something going on with the UOD*, I don't want to give away the fact that we know something.
ROSS 183 - Galatic Date 12'67
Perspective Tlx Al'durr
Getting a solid 4 hours of sleep after the all-nighter I pulled, I get dressed in my officer's fatigues. Stupid zipper. Taping the uniform shut, I make my way to communications to see if the ship AI has processed any of the data from yesterday. Walking onto the bridge, Cap'n seems to be arguing with Captain Vera again, so I lumber on by and sit down in my comms seat. Sitting down, I enabled the interface and saw that the AI had partially decrypted it; I immediately opened up a precursor and First Age language program and ran the decrypted parts into it so that we could know whose ship it was. Stretching the sleep out of my back, I hear a ding and look at the interface as my face goes white...