And so it was that I put my hand in with pirates. I didn't see any other choice at the time. In my mind, it was absolutely twisted that it was my best course of action, but that's where I was. I had to throw away my old life. I'd probably been written off as dead in that crash anyway, so disappearing silently into a core module meant that no one would come look for me. Maybe no one outside of this ship would ever have to know I was more than a component. And then no one would come to lock me away.

My focus had returned with her word that I would be more than just a machine to her and her crew though. So it would be my duty to be her ship. As I felt the structure pulse around me, I thought that maybe I could live with that. Sure, it wouldn't be as comfortable of a life as I'd led so far, but it would be a life. It wouldn't be a world of solitude locked behind some sterile laboratory door. I could sail the stars. In a strange way, I would be free.

I took another deep breath as I felt the warmth of the engines inside of me. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad. I could sail the system, not even just in a ship, but as a ship. The stress of my job started to feel distant as the outer sensor arrays turned on. It hadn't dawned on me in some time just how unrewarding it had all been. Making incremental improvements to systems made and maintained by people who didn't deserve or understand them, to make them more and more money that they didn't deserve either. I supposed that I'd always been part of a different kind of machine.

And as I looked out into the vast black emptiness around us, my brow lifted at the beauty of it. Of seeing the universe unfiltered, all around me, through my numerous electronic 'eyes' within my imagination. Marveling at the beauty, I felt my last reservations disappear "Wow." I had to mouth silently. The ferry ships never really had much in the way of windows, except in the higher class booths, so my experience seeing the stars this intimately were limited. And this would be my new normal from here on out.

No more paperwork. No more tracking hours. No more insufferable CEOs standing in the way of progress. No more stifling advancement in the name of profit. No more being forced to take advantage of the people under and around me. Just this. This would be my life now. I felt like I was floating in that space myself. Not the ship. But me. We were one and the same.

I was so entranced, I didn't notice the bar on the helm terminal hitting 100%, another process beginning. I did feel the spike of pain deep inside my brain again, but this time, I let it pass, and it dulled quickly. The world in my mind began filling out. Optimizing. I shifted my presence back to the helm to take a look. The sensor array I was focusing on started becoming clearer. Nothing was blurry anymore. It felt like I could see into the room as if I was standing there in the flesh rather than through a camera.

"Hope she's still alive in there." I heard Aisling mumble to herself.

I smiled. I could hear her. The initialization was complete. The ship was wholly grafted to my mind, and now the ship's... no, my own systems could operate more efficiently. In an instant, I typed out the phrase all at once as if it had been copied from somewhere else rather than typed out 'I don't think I've ever felt more alive.'

She leaned over to read what I said and raised her brow "Oh, so now I can talk to you, huh?" she almost looked relieved. "Well, if you're gonna insist on it, I guess we'll have to teach you to talk next after all." she smirked up at me "Don't try and use the intercom again though, Mouse thought we were exploding."

'Fine, fine.' I wrote, then shifted downward to my heart. I hooked right into Doc's terminal 'I did it! I'm a starship!'

"Amazing..." he mumbled to himself, checking on my vitals again before typing 'Your body is slightly stressed, but not more than a core would be.'

'The sound sensors are working.' I informed him, and he looked up at the array.

"So you can hear me now?" he gave a small chuckle, a look of genuine wonder on his face "Remarkable! I never would have guessed I'd get to see this kind of breakthrough on this ship of all places. Imagine the possibilities; a ship that can reason and learn!"

'About that, don't expect me to operate this thing smoothly yet.' I warned 'It's like discovering you have new limbs. There's no instruction manual in here, I just have to try things out.'

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"Just listen to the captain's orders. She knows what she's doing." he noted. I felt something coming from above. An electronic ping. The helm needed my attention. I moved back up to Aisling to see her with a star map opened on her terminal. She pressed a key and I felt something new. I was surprised when my senses expanded out. Like a wave at the edge of my mental vision, I saw orbits, planets, moons, satellites, stations. It was blurry like I had felt the ship before, maybe even less clear, but I could see... no, feel, everything. Half of the system. I could feel Earth! I'd never been to Earth! The wave came back to me, updating information to me live. It was a remarkable amount of data. As my excitement dwindled, I began to notice that it was exhausting.

"You get all that?" Aisling asked, tweaking a few settings and turning down the clarity I felt from the scan, mercifully freeing up some of my concentration.

'Yeah, but that is jarring. It's a lot of information to take in at once. Warn me when you do that.'

Aisling clicked her tongue and rolled her eyes "You're the first one to complain." she said jokingly "Your predecessors would've just taken it."

'My predecessors weren't really alive.' I reminded her, feeling the lighthearted jab she was making 'So what do we do? Where do pirates call port?'

Aisling pointed at her screen "Luna." she said simply.

Luna? We were actually going to Earth! Or at least its proximity. I started parsing our current location relative to Earth's moon. Calculations passed my thoughts. I recognized some of them, but thankfully, the dizzying equations solved themselves, my processing augmented automatically by my subsystems. I didn't really comprehend it all, but I could see the end result. I could see exactly how much thrust to apply. I could see my route in front of me. All that was left was figuring out how exactly to use those systems.

"Well..." she started, crossing her arms and watching the data I was displaying automatically on her terminal "I can't say I was expecting to give Theseus a brain when I came out this way. This is weird even for me. But you're not bad at this. Let's head out."

I reached for the engine room and grasped the terminals for the thrusters. Three arrays, one at the rear, one on each upper wing. I'd have to balance them to change directions. It was a strange way to think about mobility for a human who was used to bipedal movement. Still, it couldn't be that difficult, right?

I cranked the back thruster up to get forward momentum going, and I felt myself shiver. More than that, I saw Aisling grab hold of her desk and hold her chair still "Fuck! Meryll!" she shouted.

I bit my lip 'More sensitive than I thought.' I sent her as I pulled back on the thrusters. I supposed I had to accelerate in stages for the safety of the crew. Still, we were beginning to move forward. I started tweaking the side engines, this time incrementally, and the ship started to turn! I smiled as I tried to line myself up with the calculated route. But something was off.

I kept drifting and couldn't get myself exactly on the line. The ship was rotating in space. I felt around for more external controls. Wingflaps and propulsion jets. Great, more moving parts. But it would help me with more fine maneuvering. I righted us and thanked the fact that we had artificial gravity, or I'd be throwing everyone all over the place.

"Meryll, you're making me nauseous." Aisling groaned.

'You want to come in here and control this!? It's harder than it looks!' I typed quickly before returning to my series of control panels, repeatedly overcorrecting several times before I felt like I was close enough to the route. 'Okay, moving in 3D space is hard.' I admitted to her.

"Clearly." she pushed back from the terminal "Well, you did it. We're on our way." she let out a sigh and slid her chair back "ETA?"

I began gradually accelerating, making tiny corrections to the nose of the ship 'I don't have a great feel for our max speed yet. But... I'm gonna say in the neighborhood of six days?' I said, calculations ramming their way into my mind and at least giving me a ballpark to work with.

"Well, you're not exactly a computer, but I think once you get the hang of this, you're gonna be better." Aisling stood up from her seat and stretched "Get us to speed and maintain course. Then... at ease I guess?" she shrugged her shoulders.

At ease, she said. What did that even mean for me? I didn't think it would be a great idea to leave the core while we were in transit like this. What did machines do when they weren't in use. Idle, I supposed. I'd just get bored doing nothing at all. Maybe I'd try to strike up a conversation with the others. Get to know the rest of the crew.

It dawned on me that I hadn't ever really had much in the way of free time before. Sure, there was time off, but that was just for recuperating from the stress of my work. I mostly slept and lounged at home catching up on the news until I was ready to work again. I grimaced as I realized, I was boring. I had no hobbies or social interests outside of computers. If there was going to be a lot of travel between planet proximities like this, there would be a lot of time between stops.

Staging up and correcting our course again, I decided that I needed to find something interesting to do in these downtimes. Sure I could keep exploring the parts of the ship that I'd only passively scanned so far, but that would only keep me busy for so long. I needed a terminal of my own. A private one.