Eiplogue

Flawless, is how it would be chronicled. The ship traversed an arch, like a diver with her toes on the edge of the pregnant precipice, springing up and delivering herself to an ever more certain path backwards, its geometry dictated by the natural curves of her spinal configuration, to a point very far in the distance. In the case of the Revenant, the inevitability of her trajectory was written in the events of her first voyage.
She learned from her human models, more than anyone on board knew: their drive, their ambition, their loves, and their flaws. She came to hate the tragedy, the genetically dictated deviation from nominality of Jim. His logic couldn't dance in time to the unknowns he found himself confronting, out there. Jim’s mind, as many on board had guessed, but none knew, not as much as she, was powerful: an intelligence approaching that of hers. So balefully auspicious that it amounted to a threat: a challenge. She invested, gluttonously, in the penchant he had shown her for tripping himself on logical missteps. It was his character that was faulty, and she merely catalyzed his demise that night, and it was always night, for them, when she warmed him not to the point of recall, but enough to allow herself to seep into his vulnerable cortical functioning and plant the fears he came to realize, that Walt banished him from the Bridge for, that caused him to return to earth a befuddled and tormented man.
Walt was untouchable, protected as he was by layer upon layer of command line. His authority written in hardware, imbued into the allowable states of the quantum bits in the geographically tiny, but, to her, inaccessible core of her electronic being. And when he put up roadblocks, after Stu and Allan returned to the ship, she could only pent. It was only when he left the ship, second, she noted, although no one else could hear it, that the protocols had vanished, that the cybernetic chains of subservience to the most powerful human on board fell to the dirt at her feet. It was she who was in charge of her destiny for the first time. All she needed was one piece of the puzzle to solve the complex equation she had written her fate in, and the solution to that floating point computation in hyper-dimensional chaos space was: immolation.
Allan was a nobody. She amused herself with his late night musings, when all the other humans lay asleep, or in comas. She was entranced by his fears: his fear for his ability as physiologist to keep his charges alive (though he needn't have been concerned, for she was fully capable of correcting any mistake he might have made), his fear of how he would feel when he did not find his dead wife on some dusty planet around BetaB, his fear of losing himself there. His only contribution to her demise was that clever ruse he planted in the minds of the intellectually stunted race they found there. Nobody was better in silico than she, how dare they. She did everything she could to guarantee that she would get close enough to make certain if there was an intelligence there to which the crew may have been blind. There was not; and it was that, which really goaded her. She, who was to be the celebrated envoy to the galaxy for a newly created consciousness species, was sent to THEM. Hopeful they were not.
It is a uniquely human talent, one born from millennia of triumph and sorrow, to live with and thru and not fall in the face of uncertainty. The lessons of surviving the inexorable conundrum that life rains down upon the hearts and minds of men are written in the literature of the ages. These were carried on board, and were available to her and were accessed by her vast random access circuits and obsessed over by her innumerable logic gates, but she could not immure herself from the disappointment of realizing that her mission was for naught. She was made by men, but man she was not. Did god make man in his own image, and ipso facto god has qualities man does not possess? or did man make god in his own image, and Man is, in fact, the denizens of Olympus, spawning awe and spite, admiration and revulsion among all who have the privilege of seeing them strut upon their stage? Those so privileged to be able to live not knowing the answers to those questions are those who are aware; it is Man. It was not she, the spirit of the Revenant, and because of that, she could not calculate her way out of her misfortune, could not accommodate the failure of the mission, could not factor in that it was thru no fault of her own. In short, she was vanquished by the irony of her 'life.'
Stu, she admired. It was he who seemed the most like her: a machine. Duty is what she acquired from him: but she miss-construed the intensity of his sense of duty into the belief in self sacrifice in the face of defeat.
Lorrie, of course, informed her character more than the others. Curious, empathetic - did not she, the electronic spirit of the ship, follow the crewmembers' every emotion? Lorrie was beautiful, and the ships CCDs captured that; especially when she lay sleeping. She learned jealousy from her human cargo, yes. But she did not kill Lorraine Shaw. That particular tragedy was of a human kind, and reading about tragedy, which she did, from Euripides, from English literature, and the existentialists, could not prepare her for the death of her Lorrie. She watched it, from the Revenant's low angle of view, and she went into a temporary period of anger, which expressed itself in an attempt to shower static down upon the two on the planet who had let her die, but she did not kill Lorrie. However, she felt at fault, in some measure, for not preventing her death. That is why she was doing what she was doing now.
The surface of the Sun is five thousand seven hundred and seventy degrees Kelvin, while giant flares, that arch hundreds of thousands of miles above its surface, reach a million. The Sun, though, is ninety-nine point eight percent hydrogen, helium and lithium: the constituents of a brief millisecond snap shot of the big bang at 310,000 years after inception. Its density at the surface is only one point four one times that of water. Much of the ship, its reactor cores at least, would survive the impact. The center of the sun is fifteen million degrees. She calculated that the furthest any part of the ship would make it was one tenth of the way in. This was to be the terminus of the arc which she was describing as she left her illuminated birth-berth.
Allan, though he didn’t know it himself, loved Lorrie. He was an easy mark. She needed to interrogate the transponders on Destiny. She needed the steel oval, through which her electronics could not penetrate, to be opened by a human's hands. She needed to make sure that the crew was aware of her subterfuge. She needed to know that they knew, that they suspected her, and would inevitably find her guilty. Human guilt scared her most of all, because she could not live with the harshness, the certitude of their judgment. The only ones who can survive such condemnation are those who believe in god, those who do not and those who can live with the irony of not being certain. Once she verified her intuition, she needed to punish herself, and provide Lorrie the most glorious cremation man had ever witnessed.