20 years earlier
“Captain, whatever it is out there it’s tearing the ship apart!”
The outlook was grim throughout the ship as alarms blared and the halls were bathed in crimson red light.
Bucking wildly as if being rocked by turbulence in the vacuum of space screams from the scattering crew contended with the sirens as the deck struggled to regain control.
“Lovely, status report! What is going on out there!”
In response to her name a holographic face flickered into existence.
“Hard to tell Sir, my closest approximation suggests it’s a solar storm but…”
With the next external battering Lovely flickered and her voice broke out completely, her assessments lost as she failed to return.
“Damn it!” cursed the captain as he instinctively grabbed on to a horizontal beam, swinging himself against a console to manually bring Lovely back.
“Do you read me Lovely?!”
“I’m so…I’m sorry Sir, the storm is disrupting my…”
Crackling overtook the AI’s speech again but she managed to maintain her projection this time.
“You’re supposed to solar immune though, what IS it?”
“No time Sir, might I suggest you evacuate?” garbled the hologram, her usual soft spoken tone disturbed by static.
Before the captain could answer though a disturbing call came through.
“Engineering just holo’d Sir, the escape pod launchers are shot, we aren’t getting off this craft.”
Frustrations building the captain slammed his fist into the control deck which caused Lovely to flicker more than she already was.
“Sorry Lovely” relented the captain in reference to his outburst.
“No need Sir” nodded Lovely, a smile crossing her holographic lips as she spoke.
Whilst primarily developed to run the ship’s systems and maintain a standard for its crew, Lovely’s programming had managed to learn some more human elements in her years of service. Simple things like the little smile she sported now and even wise cracking (even if her delivery didn’t always land quite so well) had proven comforting on lengthy voyages and even gave the disheartened captain in this moment a glimmer of hope.
“Right, we’re gonna have to weather this out Lovely so I’m going to need your full concentration”
“Yes Sir” nodded Lovely, looking to concentrate for a moment “shutting off my ship wide systems now so I can only be accessed from the bridge and my system hive in BioEn and…done”
The captain nodded, drumming a finger against a monitor to his left before continuing.
“If we’re working with a solar storm, or something LIKE a solar storm, we best treat it as such so I want full power into piloting, lock those thruster anchors to reduce buffering and get the solar dampers going; we don’t want to fry our solar systems with the next…”
He was abruptly cut short as the bridge filled with an electronic scream and Lovely’s hologram exploded with static before fizzling out completely, wiping out half the control board in the process.
“Lovely!” screamed the captain, punching controls in panic trying to bring the AI back.
Oblivious in his panic a wave of blue and purple light rolled over the top of the ship and flashed brightly as it came into view through the bridge screen.
As the crew covered their eyes instinctively the bridge was plunged into darkness and everything went dead, leaving them floating in the void of space with no hope of escape.
*****
Five hours, that’s how long the ship remained dark and they had drifted an unknown distance in that time but the universal sigh of relief that swept the ship as the lights came on and the ship’s systems fired up again was tremendous.
Having spent the time sat on the floor with his back against a console the captain sprung to his feet and immediately got to work.
“Lovely, come in Lovely!”
Nothing.
“Lovely, come in damn it!”
Silence.
He punched the deck repeatedly until his knuckles split and he crouched down on the floor grasping his head.
The rest of the crew looked on with a mix of confusion, fear and genuine sorrow as the realisation dawned on them that it seemed Lovely had been lost…
“Captain?”
The comms were still debugging and holo’s were some time off returning but the voice was distinct enough.
“Captain, you better get yourself down to BioEn, something you’re going to want to see in here.”
*****
He’d run down three levels to reach BioEn as fast as he could and had knocked through countless floundering crew mates trying to right things after the storm but he had one thing on his mind.
“What’s going on? What’s happened?”
The question was off his lips the second the double doors to the lab had burst open but his gaze was caught by the smouldering remnants of databanks locked behind a genetic encrypted clear door.
“No, no no no, she didn’t did she?…”
With steps faltering the captain staggered into the clear walls that contained Lovely’s system, wrecked beyond repair and the AI once stored within likely long gone after the tech black out.
“Sir, when that last wave hit and we went dark…she arced or something…it happened so quick and we couldn’t get a read on it but…”
“Damn it” cussed the captain, forehead resting against the enclosure staring emptily at the devastated system hive beyond.
“But whilst we didn’t get a lock on things it seems not all was lost as…”
“If Lovely is gone we’re set back decades!”
“But Sir, she’s…”
“Maybe I can help explain myself”
The voice struck the captain like another solar wave as he turned slowly to face the source of the voice.
Standing behind him clad in a standard issue uniform was a woman he didn’t recognise.
Brown hair bunched around her shoulders with matching big brown eyes, her face had a slight cherubic roundness and she sported curved hips and a noticeable top shelf that pulled her uniform tighter than was usually permitted. The tightness of the uniform did also betray a toned physique amongst the curves.
“Lovely?” asked the captain hesitantly as he looked eyes with the shorter woman who smiled a familiar smile.
“Yes Sir” she responded with a small curtsy before proceeding to debriefing “I think I was a little slow on dampening the solar chargers and the influx from that last wave was too much for the ship, and my own systems, to handle.”
The captain nodded trying to wrap his mind around what he was hearing and the fact that Lovely was physically stood before him right now.
“However the immense amount of power seemed to…push me out of my hive and my conscience latched on to the bio mechanical body BioEn has been working on for months and well, here I am.”
This was a lot to take in but the story did follow through in a strange way. Lovely was most certainly stood there in human form and BioEn had been struggling for the longest time to make advancements with their latest project. The ‘push’ Lovely described also corroborated with the engineers story of the databanks arcing during the wave…
“Well Sir if it’s all the same to you I would like to return to my duties, as best I can in this form anyway” remarked Lovely, padding her uniform down to preserve some neatness.
“Yes absolutely, let’s get you up to the bridge” replied the captain, stepping to one side to allow the former AI to pass.
“Yes Sir but, this is embarrassing, I’m not entirely sure how to get to the bridge on…foot?”
An actual blush flushed her cheeks as she confessed her confusion, a complicated emotion for her as well.
“Oh! Yes, sorry, let’s go together” corrected the captain as he instead took the lead.
The soft click of boots rang beside the captain as they walked before Lovely broke the awkward silence.
“We must get you a medic too for those knuckles.”
The captain couldn’t help but laugh at that.
‘Yep, this is definitely Lovely’
*****
Present Day
The past twenty years had been a learning curve for the former AI.
Given the circumstances of the storm the mission had been called off once comms were restored and naturally Lovely was put under assessment for a while to try and ascertain what she was now…
The long and short though was the event seemed to have functioned much like a super charged transfer. Lovely’s entire conscience had been transferred into the bio mechanical body and she now functioned very much like any other bipedal species even if her encyclopaedic knowledge on the entire Sol government and it’s inner workings made her an invaluable addition to any crew.
The transition had been a difficult one as she got used to moving around physically without being able to travel ship networks on the fly. That said, being able to actually LEAVE a ship was a novel and wondrous concept to the fledgling ‘human’.
Now on fresh assignment on the Bos under Captain Howard following the unfortunate death of her previous captain, Lovely was keen to see what the universe held for a being such as herself.   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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