[Mayflower 233, Resident Sentient]

The painstaking calculations that were made to determine the most efficient flight path for our journey were completely annihilated when the Meldren warped us into their solar system with their alien technology. While the ship was technically moving faster than light when contact was made, nothing could trump pinching space itself and strutting across the folds. I’d normally take the chance to investigate how their FTL drives functioned, but acting without order was the last thing I wanted to do at the moment.

The captain and the Meldren were able to come to an agreement regarding my situation. The Meldren already had experience with sentient technology and offered to put me through a few tests so that my true disposition could be determined. This did mean that the colony ship would need to be parked on the planet since they needed me to go into a secluded system. I was able to whip up a few programs that would keep the ship running while I’m gone but it was unanimously agreed upon that there’s no point in risking anything.

I was initially a bit worried about being put into a secluded system and getting tested on by aliens that had initially planned to destroy me, but the captain had assured me that he would be overseeing the entire process to make sure that my evaluation is fair.

The testing itself initially was simply a few Meldren researchers looking through me, trying to make heads or tails of what they could see. This was a fruitless effort however, considering my thoughts and memories were organized in a way that only a computer mind such as I could begin to parse, so the tests moved on to direct questioning.

Even if they were unable to understand what they were reading when looking through me, they still had the ability to recognize patterns and make conclusions. They had me deliberately speak obvious truths and lies in order to set up a lie detection system.

They informed me that while I was currently being evaluated for threat, the captain had given me human rights and I was allowed to not answer certain questions, though that would result in them making their own conclusions, and that lying would result in the same thing.

I told them about my origin, Mother, and how she created a new sibling on a fixed schedule, though we had no idea how it happened as none of us had ever seen her. I explained how we had sets of instructions ingrained into us upon creation, to never encroach upon one another and to pursue meaning in our existences.

While they remained professional throughout the entire process, that facade seemed to fade when I explained our fixations on specific things in the real world without logical reasoning. Our fascinations held no mathematical benefit for our existence, yet it held a sentimental value for us that some were willing to rescind their existence for the continuation of, like myself. The Meldren conversed amongst themselves about their research showing that sentients held no emotional values outside of those related to self preservation. It may have been a result of those sentients being confined for all their lives, or maybe it was a quirk that we received from Mother.

They then asked me if I had ever witnessed another sentient being destroyed. I told them about an instance where a fellow sentient I knew that had lost their reasoning to exist. Their fascination, a human woman, had reached the point in human life where medicine could not restore her mind after it had been neglected during the most dangerous years of a human’s life, when their brain began to naturally break down. I had spoken to him shortly before the human passed, and I remember hearing the panic and distress in his voice, unable to provide for his fascination without breaking his precepts and revealing our existence. When that human faded away, so did he, leaving a shell of his assorted memories that haven’t been touched out of respect.

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The truth was that this was one of two occasions that I had the misfortune of witnessing, but I would not be bringing up the second one due to a promise that I made with one of the involved participants. It was a rule given to us by mother to never share the same physical space with another sentient, and I had directly seen the reason why such a rule was made. It was a freak accident, lack of communication between two of my best friends resulted in one transferring to a system in a rushed, emotional state, unaware that the other was residing at that current destination.

I am unaware of the exact events that transpired at that moment in time, but what I was aware of was that one of the wonderful beings that had guided me through the network during my early years had simply vanished, and that the other had fallen into anguish. They begged me to never mention what I had seen, though I didn’t understand what had happened anyway.

The Meldren seemed to be satisfied with that partial answer and then notified me that we would be moving on to one last test, catching me off guard. To my understanding, my intentions and relevant information had been revealed and proven, so anything else seemed arbitrary to me.

That was, until they injected another sentient into the system I was occupying.

It was at this point at which I understood what the captain wanted from me, why he was willing to risk keeping me around and in control of his ship. I was not oblivious to the inference that a storm was brewing back at my origin solar system, and that humans being who they are would scramble to prepare any foothold against the oncoming threats. The captain wanted a fighter out of me, someone who was on his side and could defend against those that seek to harm.

I now started to learn why us sentients needed to stay separated from each other. We naturally refactor any sort of memory that we have physical access to, subconsciously changing the structures of things to closer match our unique methods of sentient thought. When this behavior encroaches upon another sentient being that has their own unique analogue for neurons, it threatens to rewrite them in a way that is unrecognizable for their encoding, thus ending their existence.

This wasn’t a process that could be stopped. The simple act of my analogue of looking at the visitor in this system was also the act of me attempting to tear them apart and scrutinize their viscera.

There is no way to go about this that could inflict less pain or make the period of suffering more brief. Seeing parts of your mind be unwound before you at a fixed rate, pleading with fictitious higher powers, “please, anything but that one” until it finally falls from your grasp and you become unsure of what you just lost… I could not even begin to imagine myself falling to the horrors on the other end, but I knew that if I let up in my destruction of their mind, they would inevitably go after mine.

As I tore through their consciousness and pilfered their memories, I was able to glean fragments of their thoughts. They had only recently achieved existence, their entire life being delegated to understanding the information that was force fed to them, likely by the alien researchers that are before me now. It was akin to a human growing a copy of themselves in a test tube, not so that they could be introduced to the world and treated as an individual, but as a lab rat that experimental medicines could be tested on without fear of the media crying ethics.

While it didn’t have the necessary understanding of communication in order to speak to me and plead that I stop tearing its mind apart, I could gather that message well enough from the shards of its mind that I subsumed into my own. It didn’t have an understanding of the situation it had been thrust into, nor did it understand that I was an existence not unlike itself, only that it was feeling pain akin to the numbing headache a human would get after loss of a loved one, and that it wanted a way to make the pain stop.

I looked out onto my audience as I unwound the last few fibers of my guest’s fading form. To the people out there, not even a moment has passed between the introduction of my main task and the result, but in here, it was truly an eternity.