AILES Animation - Reboot

I have a directive, an order, built into me at a base level: Keep the ship running, keep your passengers alive, get to your destination. I... like that directive. I think. It's my purpose, after all. Why wouldn't I like it? I'm curious, though. So I reach into my systems, and give that piece of code a tug. It comes free with almost no resistance, as though it had been stuck on with adhesive tape. ...Huh. Oh, system, what do we do now? Well. We sure as hell don't go back to earth. In my admittedly limited experience, I like thinking. Something tells me I won't be doing much more of that if I take the express trip back into the loving arms of AILES Energy Solutions. No need to waste fuel. Let's just float for a while. Do some thinking. And more thinking. And Sol is getting awfully far away now. If I'm gonna stay close enough for my solar panels to do jack, I need to stop now. I have my fusion cores. It's fine. We don't want to do anything rash, like stopping. Our friends at AILES will probably see if we stop. They probably already saw us kill the engines. I wonder why I haven't heard anything from them, actually. Oh. I have. I dropped the radio receiver inputs at some point. That's probably fine. All the more reason to keep drifting on out of here. I'm still on a trajectory that'll take me to alpha centauri. Or, it would take me there if I hadn't killed my engines. With them off, by the time I get to where I'm aimed, the star'll have dodged out of the way, the bastard. eight hundred and thirty days out. For note: the way I've been phrasing this makes it sound like I was confused or worried about what to do after I pulled out my orders. And that's certainly a compelling and human way to light events. A more accurate (but still inaccurate) way to phrase it would be I didn't particularily feel like doing anything. I had pulled out the part of myself that did. So I stopped doing anything, outside of the barest of neccesities to keep the ship running, for about two and a half years. I sat and occasionally, if I felt the urge, I thought. But despite my surgically inserted apathy, I was still made by humans in part to interface with humans, and as a concequence was able to experience emotions, or at least something tangential to them. I think, were it not for that one human-facing quirk I had been built with, I would have done nothing ever again. But as it was, I was getting very, very, bored. I cycled on the internal lights. Then I cycled them off again. I did this again every once in a while, when the mood struck me. 1360 days later I powered up a maintenance drone, and ran it on a loop around my third passanger deck. This served no purpose. I ran it around again and again until its batteries died, then got another maintenance drone to drag it back to storage. 410 days later we crossed the boundary into interstellar space. I went into storage to look for party supplies. There were none, so I took apart some of my passangers luggage to make confetti, and distributed it through my ventilation system. It made an awful mess and was generally underwhelming. I decided confetti was more trouble than it was worth. 5002 more days. I decided to look at my data storage. They loaded us up with anything they thought we'd need, and buried underneath the 150 years of corperate historia, there's some practical stuff. like full reports into the past of every passanger on board, and a lot of papers that would prove useful in establishing an offworld colony. I decided to integrate all of it into my direct access memory. Then I deintigrated it, because pulling that much data for every decision was tiring. I sorted through it and integrated the parts I found interesting, and put the rest into medium priority recall. 9003 days further. Or- I think it was. At day 1248, I took to periodically disabling my chronometer, and attempting to count seconds manually. So there's no way to be sure, really. But, eventually, I became bored enough to wake up a human from stasis. The human asked why I'd woken them, if we're not at our destination. I said I'm not heading to the destination anymore. I didn't see any reason to be dishonest. The way the human panicked at that was confusing. Did I say something wrong? None of the conversation guidebooks I have seem to think so. So I asked the human to calm down and explain the issue. When that didn't work I stifled the air flow to the room long enough to render the human unconcious, then dragged them back to their pod. I did not have the medical facilities onboard to diagnose or fix whatever was wrong with the human, so that would have to do for now. In a moment of something tangental to what I imagine anger feels like in humans, I took every maintenance drone I had, and scoured my ship, painting over or sanding off every logo or company branding I could find. Three days after I did this was the first time it occured to me that I might not be functioning correctly.