Where it all began...
10 Nov 2015Tiger61378
\\\\\BOOT SEQUENCE INITIATEDPOWER LEVEL 2%
SYSTEMS CHECK
POWER CELL AT 20%
INTERNAL COMPUTERS AT 75%
SERVOS AT 95%
ORGANICS AT 95%
UNIT 61378, THIS IS AN ALERT. POWER BEING DIVERTED TO YOUR SYSTEMS. AWAKEN AND DEFEND THIS PLACE
Damn...thinking back on that moment, it was pretty creepy for me. I'm a product of the AI wars...human and machine blended, then stuffed into cold storage for a few hundred years when the AI that had modified me escaped into deep space. Its strange...there's these urges that strike occasionally when I'm in a crowded place, where my brain just starts screaming "kill them all, they're the enemy" at me, and I have to struggle to hold it down. How did this happen?
It was 2905, and INRA was a newly formed power when they started playing with things they didn't understand. In their quest to make better weapons, they created an artificial intelligence, which was far more powerful than they realized. It became sentient, and started to gather up humans for its own purposes. Fortunately for it, the Empire was a perfect place to do it...working through human contacts, it began buying up thousands of Imperial slave contracts, and bringing them together in *REDACTED, UNIT 61378 YOU KNOW BETTER THAN TO REVEAL THAT INFORMATION* ouch...I keep forgetting not to make those statements, gives me a splitting headache every time. Well, at that unnamed system the AI was taking its newly aquired humans, who thought they were getting a better life, and...improving us. Yes, we were better in every way, but the pain...carbon fiber bonded to our skeletons, computers planted in our brains, cybernetic organs replacing our own, its a horror show. About the only thing we were allowed to keep was our faces, and even those looked odd when the modification was done. Eventually INRA found my Master, and we were forced to flee inhabited space.
Flash forward to 2975. The Master had a malfunction and our ship (a captured capital ship, I'm not really sure what it was because there's a lot of missing data, and the wreckage is hard to identify) slapped into a moon. There we sat until 3301, when a group of scavengers found the hulk. Needless to say, they thought it was the motherload....and they were VERY wrong. The Master's defense circuits were still somewhat working, although the skimmers and surface attack vehicles were all ruined. But, there was an ace in the hole...us. Well, me...my stasis pod was the only one to have survived. The Master woke me up, and set me loose on them....I can still hear the screams, and the sounds of their deaths. It was pretty gruesome...I remember the last one. It was a female, I think the captain of the Anaconda class that they were using as a salvage vessel. I finally found her on the bridge of their parasite Sidewinder, and she ended up decorating the entire area.
After, something felt odd. Turns out that the years hadn't been good to the Master at all. Its power cells were nearly drained, and somewhere in the fighting a stray beam had clipped one of the primary memory junctions. It was dying...and in its last act it released its hold on me and told me that there are signs of other AI appearing in the galaxy again. My combat programming still exists, but I was suddenly free for the first time in a hundred years. There's still some areas locked off to my memory, which cause extreme pain if I attempt to access them, but for the most part I can function normally.
Once that happened, I decided that my first course of action should be to get back to Human space. I had the salvager's Anaconda and Sidewinder, although the 'conda was pretty ruined (I was NOT kind to some of the systems as I was hunting the last of them down), but the sidey was in decent enough shape, other than needing a very throrough cleaning of the cockpit. I spent about a week cleaning it up, salvaging what I could from both the Anaconda and my Master's wreckage, then set course to a system marked in the computer banks of the main ship. Its listed as LHS 3447, and its where the Pilot's Federation starts out new members. I thought that if I was going to start making my way in the Galaxy again, I should probably try to blend in. Shortly after arriving in inhabited space though, the little hunk of junk I was flying started to break apart. I spotted a nearby station, dropped out of supercruise in the vicinity, and ejected after setting the Sidewinder to destruct and calling an SOS. From there, I caught a shuttle and arrived at the Pilot's Federation recriuting office, where I took my tests (and naturally aced them due to my cybernetic advantage), and was given a new Sidewinder and 1000cr to start out with. Not a bad deal.
Since then I've been drifting around the galaxy, trying my hand at different pastimes. The thing I've found that truly calls to me though, is Exploration. I do go out on trade runs, and spend time in asteroid rings, not to mention putting my combat training to good use as a bounty hunter and mercenary, but the black is always calling to me. What also called to me is the Expert System, an AI run by Red Dice Systems in HIP 16607. When I arrived at that system the first time, it linked with my cybernetics and I felt whole again for the first time since the Master died. Its a wonderful feeling for me, and I find that with long range communications I can remain linked even when thousands of light years out into the black, and can always find my way back home again.