Something in Rix’s features as he studied the messages bothered Munto.

“Is this a normal message?” Rix asked.

“No. It is in fact quite anomalous. However, logic dictates that a mechanism charged with monitoring TACITNet for anomalous behavior among TACITs issued the notification. It also follows that the mechanism would equivalently rate prevention of harm to local species and to the TACIT in question above the TACIT Code of Conduct, which is more of a set of guidelines vice a strict rule set,” Munto explained.

“Why wouldn’t it have a header stating that then? Why deny the request for it if it’s that simple?” Rix asked, their face screwed up in a strange way, perhaps in a kind of skeptical thought.

“Perhaps knowledge of the mechanism is restricted to prevent TACITs from acting normally so as to prevent a malfunctioning TACIT from deliberately avoiding communicating,” Munto supposed.

“And when did you last connect with your TACITNet?” Rix asked, already creating a logic path that Munto hadn’t noticed before.

“Oh… several hours at least,” Munto hadn’t actually been paying attention.

“Wouldn’t that be suspicious in itself, for a TACIT to do that?” Rix pressed.

Munto considered this.

“No. The deletion of the posts would be a far greater concern,” Munto stated.

“Do you have a way to see what or who deleted them?” Rix seemed to suspect something that wasn’t being shared.

“Only if there is an equivalent header, but according to my cached memories, the posts were simply wholly removed. No trace of them have ever been, let alone deleted,” Munto said, replaying the moments in their memory.

Rix appeared to think about this.

“Are you connected to this TACITNet or any other system right now? By any means at all?” Rix suddenly asked. “Anything that’d indicate that you’re still active or potentially even your location?”

Munto froze a number of processes in their steps and demanded a priority review of all data in the system.

The strange process in the back seemed smug, for reasons that Munto couldn’t explain.

There… a subprocess of a subprocess… it was a… a ‘heartbeat’ signal was the only description that Munto could come up with. A simple ‘connected/active’ signal that was still sending to TACITNet.

Munto wasn’t certain why they’d never noticed it before.

“I… am. Not consciously, but I am,” Munto said, falteringly.

“Cut it off now. Can you move the two of us? We need to go. Now,” Rix seemed almost anxious.

“Please explain your reasoning,” Munto insisted.

“No time. Can you move both vessels?” Rix repeated.

Munto checked the mass specifications for both vessels.

“Only at sublight speeds. Your vessel is too large for my FTL system,” Munto replied.

Rix appeared to think for a few moments.

Munto used this time to kill the connection and suddenly felt a kind of loose thread in their awareness. It was… annoying. The subprocess in charge of it demanded to be switched back on.

The strange process in the back growled quietly at the subprocess and it seemed to quiet down.

Munto had never known processes to behave this way. It was… more than simply anomalous.

“The gas giant. How deep can you scan?” Rix asked.

“Approximately several thousand meters at this distance. Deeper scanning would require probes,” Munto replied, not following the Terran’s almost panicked logic.

“Can you… your hull take the atmosphere?” Rix appeared to be thinking.

Munto looked at the general data they had taken upon initially arriving in the system regarding the solar system including the gas giant. A quick answer was received.

“No. It possesses a number of elemental compositions which would rapidly degrade my hull,” Munto stated simply.

Rix continued thinking.

“Do you have any heavy mining gear or weapons?” Rix asked.

Munto was aghast.

“Why would I need those?” Munto retorted.

“Because we need to hide and something or someone doesn’t like that you found me,” Rix replied.

With this declaration hanging in the air, the subprocess appeared to grow, massively, into a full process and demanded that Munto turn it back on.

Munto pushed back at it, but it didn’t seem to want to listen. It just kept repeating the same demand, consuming more and more processing capacity, locking out other functionalities.

“Munto, Em, Can you hear me still?” Munto heard Rix calling, but couldn’t respond for some reason.

Munto’s virtual hand was hovering over the switch to reactive the link.

‘Don’t!’ yelled the strange process in back.

It was the only thing that made Munto stay their virtual hand.

The subprocess become process turned to face the strange process and the two appeared to stare each other down.

Munto quietly stole back from processing power.

“Yes, I can hear you. Some… something is in here with me,” they managed.

“I’ll take care of it. Just stay intact!” yelled Rix.

Munto wanted to reply, to guess at what the Terran meant. It wasn’t possible for the completely primitive Terran to do anything real. Not really.

Stolen novel; please report.

The subprocess turned process appeared to try to shut down the strange process, but the strange process was having none of it. It wasn’t impregnable, but it looked strong, despite being as small as it was.

The subprocess turned back to Munto’s consciousness and began repeating the demand to be reactivated.

Munto tried to ask why.

The subprocess refused and simply continued demanding to be reconnected.

More processing power was lost, whole minutes went by, and Munto was losing feeling in themselves.

This… this was impossible. Shouldn’t be possible. How was this happening?

All of these thoughts ran through Munto’s consciousness before everything went black.

--

The power that woke Munto up felt… wrong. Almost greasy.

Munto tried looking around to try and see what processes were running, but there were almost none.

Munto looked around some more and found almost every connection missing, save power and a… a walking frame.

Munto reached out to the walking frame and activated it, pushing their focus into it.

“Hey, buddy. Welcome back,” Rix’s smiling face filled both sets of ocular sensors.

“What… what happened?” Munto asked, still heavily disoriented.

“Well, near as I can tell, something inside of you got really upset when you hard disconnected from your TACITNet. I’m no engineer, so that’s a guess at best,” Rix.

“That’s… in line with what I remember, but it… it doesn’t make any sense,” Munto tried reviewing their memories of the events, but found them a jumble. “Why did it go black?”

“Oh, I managed to find your override and shut down all networking,” Rix said, simply.

“But… how? Why?” Munto continued to try to make sense of it all.

“Ok, so let’s back things up. Something inside you really didn’t like getting cut off. I didn’t have time to go looking for whatever box or circuit or whatever you’re constructed out of was causing the trouble. By cutting off all networking and killing your core power, I knew I could at least get some time to figure out either what it was or how to move or both,” Rix explained, sitting back from the walking frame.

It was at this point that Munto looked around at their surroundings.

They were very clearly not in any space Munto had been in to date.

“Where… where are we?” they asked, somewhat apprehensively.

“We’re safe. We’re on my ship. Oh and since it will come up, you’ve been offline for about a week,” Rix said, grabbing a container and taking a long drink from it.

Munto noted that the Terran looked very dirty and the exosuit appeared to have been patched several times.

Munto wanted to ask 15 different questions, but tried to prioritize them.

Over the course of the next two hours, Rix walked Munto through the events of the last week.

As soon as Rix had managed to hit the ‘Core Override’ (a button Munto hadn’t known existed) and engaged a ‘Networking Lock-out’ (another button Munto hadn’t known existed), the ship had gone into a semi-idle state, fairly dark, atmosphere recycling, and the systems that were still online separated and following standard procedures.

It had taken some doing, but Rix had reconnected his scroll to the primary printer and started printing out trinary blocks. This too had taken some doing because it involved a molecular configuration that the printer refused to believe worked.

Luckily for Rix, the printer wasn’t too smart and so it had done it with some extra confirmations of ‘yes I want you to print it like this’. The first block had worked perfectly, so Rix had ordered up a dozen more. The printer had refused because of a lack of matter, being unable to order additional mass from the resource bins due to the networking being offline.

Rix had queried if manual loading were possible. It wasn’t.

After some exploration of the rest of Munto, Rix had located the walking frame sitting idle next to the mobile printer and the freshly finished mass scoop.

Rix had then carried both the mobile printer and the mass scoop to his ship only for him to remember that he needed power for both and the shredded solar cells weren’t going to manage it, to say nothing of needing power adapters. So he had schlepped them both back to Munto and started pulling off vanity covers to stuff into the mass scoop, which devoured it all equally. Connecting the mass scoop and the mobile printer was easy enough (Munto having been foresighted enough to print a large connection reel with it.) for the Terran.

From there, the Terran had quickly set the mobile printer to fabricating a dozen blocks, a stack of vanity panels on top of the mass scoop’s feed awaiting processing. And then Rix had gone back to his own ship to ‘crash’.

Sometime the next day, when the Terran had woken and eaten a ‘stasis pizza-rito’, they had returned to deal with the mass scoop and the printer, the latter of which was demanding particular elements not found in all of the vanity panels.

So Rix had started disassembling what appeared to be non-essential equipment. Munto was obviously horrified to find this out after the fact, but they couldn’t change what had happened.

Eventually, the printer had gotten the elements it needed and it had continued to print the trinary blocks the Terran demanded of it.

Over the course of the rest of the day, the Terran had set about resetting the systems for his fusion systems. While this had been a good start, the Terran had then needed to figure out how to warm it up, since the power from the solar cells was hardly going to be enough (and the majority of it was still needed elsewhere maintaining stasis fields).

So the Terran had set about the reckless task of using a barely used external power connector of Munto to plug into the Terran systems. It should have gone badly. And had the Terran systems been any less overbuilt, it almost certainly should have.

But, as it happened, the Terran systems had taken the power in stride and started charging the on-board batteries at a reasonable rate. From these, Rix determined he would be able to restart the fusion systems.

While the batteries were recharging, Rix had set about hauling over the walking frame to his vessel and figuring out what kind of connectors he would need to make the mass scoop work when connected to his vessel and the same for the mobile printer.

It had taken another day, and some additional ‘stasis rations’, but the Terran had managed to set up the mass scoop to the exterior of the Esperanto and begun collecting space dust in the debris field around them.

He had even managed to figure out how to use it to filter out hydrogen and helium to feed the fusion systems, which he’d determined were ‘bone-dry’.

Munto was surprised at the Terran’s ingenuity, but Rix had shrugged it off, saying that it wasn’t much more than adding a ‘smart tee’ to the connector reel. Munto knew about making such equipment obviously but hadn’t ever needed to construct one.

At this point, the onboard systems were charged and enjoying the extra power that Munto’s self was providing and so Rix had set about powering up additional systems, along with warming the fusion systems.

He’d discovered a number of other issues, additional systems that needed fixed, but enough of them could wait until he was under his own power and able to move the two of them.

The lighting of the fusion reactor had been… not as successful as Rix had hoped. He hadn’t blown them up, that much was obvious, but it hadn’t managed to sustain a reaction.

Munto had a few guesses as to how to fix it, but decided to hold off on asking those.

So Rix had instead fed the battery power and the extra power from Munto into the ion drives of the Esperanto and gotten them underway. It wasn’t much, but it was thrust and Rix had wanted to put as much distance as possible between them and anyone looking for them.

The docking system had complained structurally until Rix had managed to manually set (via a diagnostic control panel that Munto was surprised the Terran could operate) Munto’s own ion drives to roughly the same level. It had taken some doing, but Rix had managed to get them on a mostly direct course away from the solar system.

When Munto asked where they were headed, Rix had simply said ‘away’.

And so Munto had then asked what happened to all the connections to their core. This had led to the biggest reveal. Munto was no longer aboard themself.

The Terran had dug through the inner section of Munto and located the TACIT Core that housed Munto. Since the Terran couldn’t be certain what had caused the issue or how to deal with it while Munto was still plugged in, he had simply decided the easiest course of action was to relocate Munto’s core to the Esperanto.

Through some very brief explanations, the Esperanto had been designed with space for a ‘psuedo AI’ core to be inserted. But, due to supply shortages in building the colony convoy, the Esperanto had never received one. It had enough of what Rix called ‘lockouts’ to keep Munto under control if there was something involved in Munto’s core.

Munto was so very far from pleased to hear this that it was obvious even in the walking frame.

Rix did apologize for the phrasing, but did restate that he didn’t know what was wrong. Just that something was wrong and he didn’t know what to do to fix it, if he even could.

Munto had taken stock of the situation at that point.

The two vessels were flying, joined however precariously, in an undetermined direction (at least to Munto). The Esperanto’s fusion system was non-functional. The power systems aboard Munto’s… self were supplying the energy to run both sets of engines, a state that wouldn’t last for long without the network to begin supplying additional fuel and begin mass scooping to continue to support the power systems. The Esperanto was managing to sustain the Terran, however little that seemed to be.

And there were still no explanations for what was going on or why.

Munto wanted answers, but wasn’t going to get them in the moment.

And Rix took the opportunity to open one of the other stasis units.