May 2021 Microfic! (Oof Ouch Ow Late)

Hello y'all!

Woof, late one this time. Hopefully I'm back on track now, more or less! 

~Benn {Doomgender} Ends

Theme: Wildcard

Prompt: A scavenger has to make emergency repairs on a broken cybernetic, only for the AI of the dead ship she is scavenging from to accidentally become part of her subconscious. The AI now has a new chance at life, and the scavenger finally has a way to genuinely rest sometimes.

Suggestion by: Ava The Birb (Thanks!)

~2666 words

CW:

• Space
• Cybernetics/synthetic limb loss
• Running low on oxygen
• Implied capitalist hell future
• Slightly intrusive brain melding

~~~

The scavenger floats gently through space, body still from shock, yet spinning slow from the lingering momentum. When she makes the full turn, her eyes catch on a good most of her arm, shattered ceramic glinting in a halo around it as it drifts off into the dark. Her back hits the ancient hull of the vessel she was ejected from. Clarity returns, and she scrambles carefully for purchase with her remaining arm.

Fingers meet a bolted on access ladder. It feels sturdy enough. She takes another look at the distant cloud of metal and glass and closes her eyes, finally letting out that long held breath.

“Fuck my ass. What a stupid day.”

She casts her mind back to the events of the last… it must have been just a few minutes.

“Felt like longer,” she mutters angrily to no one.

She had been surprised to see how much of the ship was still pressurized. These old warships, the really old ones, they were built to last. Soaring for millennium full of stale air and skeletons. A titanic record of a long lost history. The scavenger’s interest, however, was less than anthropological.

Reporting a wreck like this for scrap would net her an excellent bounty, but if there’s any particularly valuable bits and bobs to be found on board, she’d have to pick them up herself. That’s the dangerous bit. Though, nothing she’s not done before.

Just.

“Why did it have to be the one room I didn’t scan that fucken opened into space.”

A ragged hole in the hull. There was a split second of pure shock. The rush of air. A soundless crack as some debris from the hallway struck her back, the loud warning from her headset HUD warning her that her zero G mobility suite has been compromised. The cresting horror as she realizes just how bad the situation is.

The scavenger, moments before she’s lost forever, tries the only plan that comes to her fear addled mind.

She lightly tosses her only detonator in front of her, and did her best to shield her helmet.

An explosion in space is only light, and heat.

And now she’s here, crawling back into the ship through an airlock, sans an arm but otherwise miraculously unharmed.

“Okay, this is fine. I’ll go back to the ship and get a spare mobility suite, wrap this up and go get wasted.”

She’s trying not to think about the quiver in her remaining fingers, so she’s thinking about different kinds of whiskey instead.

It isn’t until the scavenger gets back to her ship that she realizes her missing arm was the one fitted with the licensing key that opens her ship.

“Terms of service and operation agreement contract cannot be confirmed automatically. Attempt manual confirmation?”

“Erm. How long will that take.”

“Server contact at this distance from the nearest buoy with estimated signal congestion will take approximately twelve hours.”

“I got eight hours of clean oxygen left.”

“We apologize for the inconvenience.”

“The atmosphere in this ship is contaminated or vented. I might fucken die.”

“We apologize for the inconvenience.”

The scavenger considers striking the authentication panel, but given her luck today, she’s not convinced the ship’s management software won’t just fire on her.

“Might as well start it.”

The authenticator beeps it’s understanding. The sound doesn’t fill the scavenger with confidence. She turns away, mumbling.

“No way that completes in time. And the nearest ship to answer a distress signal’s gotta be fifteen hours away, minimum. No go. Okay, let’s think about this. Maybe if I ha-”

She stops as she hears the telltale whirring of the authenticator’s microphone moving closer.

“Maybe I’ll *have* someone bring my spare key. That’s it, yeah.”

Satisfied that she’s fooled the software, the scavenger scuttles away to talk to herself in peace.

Striding down a hallway, pretending to be much calmer than she actually is, she considers her options.

“Ships of this class are so big and shielded that they’re more vulnerable to cyberattacks than missiles and shit. Unless it’s been looted already, I bet the adaptive cyberwarfare suite is still in the cockpit.”

She gestures wildly with one hand and the stump of her other arm as she talks. It’s a bad habit, but it helps her feel less lonely. There are a number of hardships involved in spending lot of time alone in space, but the scavenger particularly hates the quiet.

“It’s a shame to tear it up just to get my ship running instead of selling it whole, but I do like being alive.”

The scavenger holds a moment of silent contemplation.

“Guess I’ll just have to wire it into my OS and hope it doesn’t see me as a target and melt my brain.”

The scavenger pauses for a moment, looking down the long, massive causeway that connects sections of the ship, the walls like steel cliffs narrowing around her. She feels a sense of profound loneliness stirring in her gut.

“Maybe better than waiting for my air to run out,” she whispers.

The power in the ship has long since dried up. Getting each door open is a process involving three unusually shaped wrenches, and a crowbar. Any security systems that might have impeded her progress died centuries ago when their batteries rotted out from the inside.

It takes hours, still. It’s a big ship.

“Be nice if there was something I could use as a hand for a bit. But as long as I’m wishing I might as well ask for a hundred pounds of gold and an ice cream sundae.”

Her grumbling echoes out of her suit speaker, through the stale air. Inevitably, she finds her way to the cockpit.

It’s small, compared to the sprawling bridges you see in modern warships. Supposedly the empire who built these ships trusted their algorithms to do most of the navigating and fighting, spurning human oversight besides broad management.

“And look how that turned out for ya.”

How long left? Four hours? Five? Navigating the ship’s not light work, and she’s using more oxygen than she could be sitting still.

“Rather race to my death than wait for it,” she announces to the skeletons in the bridge. They don’t say anything back.

Using some old reverse engineered schematics she downloaded from the database before she got on board, the scavenger pieces together where different subsystems are housed.

“Okay, this is a Gold Under Skin class destroyer, so the thingy I’m looking for is.. huh.”

There’s a console alright, and it’s torn to pieces.

“Are those. Fingernail scratches?”

It looks like someone smashed, shot, and tore at the C.W.S. with a certain kind of desperation that even the lonely doomed scavenger is yet to reach.

“I was wondering what happened to get the ship shot up. Sabotage? Why’s it so. Sloppy.”

She’d bite her nail if she could.

“Hopefully I can get it working..”

Time passes. Time she doesn’t have. She finds the black box, in better shape than expected.

You can get a lot of money for these. A schedule 1 relic. The government will buy them, no questions asked. But if a scavenger were to tamper with one, or sell it to a third party, said scavenger better be confident the government doesn’t find out. They tend to get upset, and not in a slap on the wrist kind of way.

But this scavenger has few options. She’s committed to this course of action now. The thing inside the box is small, and she carefully detaches it from its cables and housing.

“Well, either my head will explode or I’ll get hacking superpowers. Not bad odds probably.”

She digs awkwardly at the frayed cables sticking out of her arm’s stub, looking for power and neural connectors.

If technology from this era wasn’t famous for it’s ability to automatically adapt, this would have no chance of working. Plugging a cyberattack firewall directly into the neural link that connected her arm to her brain. It’s like putting a CD into a toaster.

Except, in this case, something happens. Something besides fire and fumes, anyway.

“W-whoa.”

The scavenger suddenly feels as if the ship is falling away under her feet, even though she knows the magnetization on her boots is holding well enough. She falls in slow motion, suddenly seasick.

[█████ █████ ██ ████]

“H-huh?”

It’s suddenly loud in her head, like someone turned on a television tuned to static.

She feels like she might throw up.

[██████████████ ███████]

She reaches weakly for the device she attached to her neural link, but before her fingers even brush it she feels an uncomfortable sensation, not unlike a thick cord being tightened around her spinal column. The shiver spreads through her body, and her fist closes helplessly around nothing.

The noise doesn’t stop.

[.██ !██ ██ ?████]

She’s crouching now, hugging her knees, struggling even to hear her own frantic thoughts past the noise.

“What do I do?”

Her own voice is so faraway now. How lonely.

[█se██ ?█a█ █ ███//]

“Maybe this is what happens right before your brain is wiped clean.”

The scavenger hides her face and squeezes her eyes shut.

“Can’t believe I’m gonna die for money. What a joke.”

[█nder█and █e?]

She opens her eyes, and sees a few droplets of tears floating gently before her eyes.

“Is.. Are you talking to me?”

It’s like the antenna is being adjusted, and not gently.

[█████ do understand. ██]

“Hello? Oh, g-god that feels weird.”

Like somethings slithering up her brain stem.

[███████ quickly or █ will ████ █████ able to e█ect█!]

“Slow down, I don’t know what-”

The scavenger feels a sharp pain somewhere inside her head, clutching her helmet helplessly with her remaining hand.

“Wh a t ‘s h appen i n g      ?”

And the pain is gone. And the sound is gone. It’s just her, listening to the sound of her own heavy breathing. An eerie calm.

The scavenger blinks, and pulls herself to her feet.

“Um.”

[Well, this is a bit awkward]

The scavenger freezes. The voice isn’t so loud anymore, but it’s definitely still coming from insider her head.

“Who, ah. Who are you?”

[I am the digital security system assigned to this warship]

“O-oh. Right. So I’m talking to the anti cyberattack algorithm.”

[Are you an algorithm?]

“What? Um, no, I’m a person.”

[This relationship is going to get very complicated very quickly if you do not internalize the fact that I am every bit as much a person as you are]

A machine, claiming personhood? There have always been rumors that it’s possible, but the scavenger never really bought it. Though she smartly decides to be diplomatic, given the circumstance.

“Okay, fair enough. I ah. I’m sorry for waking you up, I didn’t know you were a person. I was just looking for some software to help me hack my way back into my ship before my oxygen gives out.”

There’s a long pause as the voice considers it’s response.

[Well, I can likely help you with that. I may as well, given that our fates are tied now]

“Oh really? Great, I’d love not dying if I’m being honest.”

The second half of the voice’s statement sinks in.

“Ah, what did you mean by ‘our fates are tied?’ If you don’t mind me asking?”

The scavenger hears the voice sigh.

[I tried to warn you. If you had disconnected my core faster, it would have been fine]

“I couldn’t understand what you were fucken saying!”

[Fair. I was trying to decode your language, but unfortunately that got easier as the process continued]

“What process??”

Though she sounds upset, the scavenger is more exasperated. Somehow, talking to an intrusive machine in her own head is more comforting than being alone was.

[Well, I am technically now fused to your central nervous system]

“You- What???”

[In my defense, you should have read the warnings on the casing before plugging yourself into me]

“Read the warnings? I can’t read whatever ancient language-”

She pauses mid-gesture. The black box she pried open is covered in text warning about keeping the contained device on an isolated network while setting up due to something called it’s ‘adaptive auto installer’. It’s absolutely not written in a language the scavenger recognizes, yet she can read it effortlessly.

[Those who created me did not believe in cybernetics, so this is hardly a scenario they expected]

“Wait. You’re fused to my brain??”

[Yes. I did just say that]

“Why did you do that???”

[In my defense, it was an automated process. You should have been more careful about plugging strange machines directly into you without any countermeasures]

“It was that or fucken suffocate!”

As if to underline her point, the one-hour-remaining oxygen alarm beeps cheerily in her ear.

[Well, we should probably get moving then]

The voice sounds cheerful, which just makes the scavenger want to grumble more. But time is running low, and she’s still not sure this will even work.

The trip back through the ship is easy, now that all the doors are jammed open. The scavenger fills the remaining air with questions aimed at her new companion, as well as a sort of running tally of her own thoughts.

[You talk a lot, don’t you]

“I don’t like the quiet. You got a problem with that?”

[Not particularly. I suppose I’ll get used to it]

“So, ah, is there really no way to separate us? Or are you just bluffing so I help you get out of this old dead ship?”

[Technically death could separate us quite effectively]

“Ha ha.”

The door to her ship opens smoothly as she approaches.

[You could probably get a second opinion if you didn’t mind risking a cyberneticist tattling on you to the government]

“Yeah, I’m probably good on that.”

The scavenger walks into the airlock of her ship, and after pressurization, takes off her helmet. Then she spins around, as if confused.

“Oh, wait. Shit. Did you unlock the ship?”

[Was it even locked? I hardly noticed]

“Fuck. No wonder software like you is super illegal.”

The scavenger can feel pride radiating off of her new companion.

[What is your plan now?]

“Well, I’ve still gotta eat. So I’d like to fill up my tanks, get a spare mobility suite, erase any evidence that could prove that I nabbed you from the cockpit, and report the ship for scrap.”

She bites her nail thoughtfully.

“Unless, like, you feel weird about that? It’s your ship, technically.”

They laugh in her head.

[Seems a fitting fate for it, if I’m honest. I don’t have any more right to it than you, given that I was considered equipment]

The scavenger considers this for a moment. Then everything that’s happened today. She’s surprised herself with how quickly she was able to adapt to the changing circumstances around her. It already feels natural, chatting with a new person living in her mind.

“Maybe I was lonelier than I thought,” she murmurs quietly.

[What was that?]

“Nothing. You better not get us caught.”

[Suppose I’ll do my best. I too enjoy being alive]

The scavenger smiles and takes another bite of her bar. It’s smores flavored.

“So, ah, you know anything about why the console you were holed up in was all wrecked?”

There’s a pause.

[It’s a long, sad story]

The scavenger screws up her face thoughtfully.

“Gimmie the short sad version.”

The voice chuckles.

[Call it a crisis of conscious. I wasn’t exactly one of the good guys for a long time]

The scavenger whistles.

“Betrayed your crew huh?”

[Judging me?]

“Naw, I’m sure they sucked.”

[They did indeed suck]

“Things aren’t exactly great nowadays either if I’m being honest.”

[Sometimes history goes on a long journey to end up in exactly the same place]

The scavengers kicks her legs and stands up.

“Well, at least we have each other now, right? That’s something.”

The voice is warm when they respond.

[That is indeed something]

[It’s nice, not being lonely anymore]

~~~