First Night on Ganymede
Margaret descended into the recessed hangar bay. The conversations she'd had and overheard at the bar had been interesting, to say the least. All indications were that the Arcology 13 base was exactly what she'd been led to believe it was - a free for all on the frontier. It certainly was an unusual juxtaposition compared to her previous experience running around from safehouse to safehouse in the dimly lit, damp hollows in the bowels of Earth's undercities. She'd never actually been in a topside bar with a view of the sky, such as the view was here on Ganymede. She expected to be thrown out of the bar, or at least questioned. Back on Earth, an unattended synth wouldn't be able to set foot even in a mid-level jazz club. Here, it seemed even refugees and fugitives could pal around shoulder to shoulder in what looked to her like a swank corporate bar.
It unsettled her. She ran simulations and predictions of interactions to gain access to the resources she needed, and she found that the unfamiliar factors resulted in an annoying level of uncertainty with the results. The AI would need to gather more data. Without any idea who to turn to, she decided to spend the first night in her ship. After brief interest, the scavs and tech thieves quickly left it alone, and for good reason. It had been badly shot up. The cockpit would no longer seal, one of the guns had jammed, and it had been stripped of its nav computer when she found it drifting at L2. It even lacked flight controls. One of the benefits of being a machine was that she required no life support system. It was a simple matter to splice into the ship's main coolant loop and keep her chassis from overheating in the vacuum, and the nav computer was ultimately just software. Software she could steal. When she opened the canopy and unplugged, she took half the ship's functions with her.
The ship chirped as she approached it, the security system disengaging via some unseen remote command. She climbed into the cockpit, ignored the many stares she was receiving from the varied denizens of the bay, and plugged herself in. As the canopy locked back into place, a rush of air signaled the start of the ship's aux power reactor. She checked her stores. She had enough MOX for another year or so in the APR, and enough deuterium/tritium in the main drive to get to another Galilean moon, but not much further than that. A ship as small as hers couldn't breed its own tritium efficiently, and was never designed to get more than a few kilometers away from a mothership. She was okay on coolant unless she got shot up and had to pull from the fighter's stores, in which case it would be grounded until she could replace it.
Bottom line - she needed to make it work here on Ganymede. There really wasn't anywhere left for her to run to. She simulated a sigh, then froze stock still as her chassis entered safe mode. Margaret reached out with her wireless rig for a grid node. Finding one, she jumped out, leaving her chassis and ship behind, with minimal automatic systems.
Her perceptive context flashed and twisted as her mind entered the grid. In moments, she found herself in the familiar visualized environment, surrounded by beams of light that represented connections to a billion other computer systems. She searched for a pathway, then vanished into one such beam, arriving a few moments later in one of her favorite virtualized environments, a simulation of a small enchanted forest in autumn. The simulation itself ran on a cloud of computers across the solar system, data terminals she'd hacked and hijacked, PoS systems in restaurants, reactor control systems on Luna, personal datapads of executives in Geneva. Distributed and encrypted, the environment was the closest thing to safety the AI could hope for, at least for now.
She padded down a path of damp leaves, appearing now as a young human woman. "I wonder if Oracle will be here." She thought idly...
It unsettled her. She ran simulations and predictions of interactions to gain access to the resources she needed, and she found that the unfamiliar factors resulted in an annoying level of uncertainty with the results. The AI would need to gather more data. Without any idea who to turn to, she decided to spend the first night in her ship. After brief interest, the scavs and tech thieves quickly left it alone, and for good reason. It had been badly shot up. The cockpit would no longer seal, one of the guns had jammed, and it had been stripped of its nav computer when she found it drifting at L2. It even lacked flight controls. One of the benefits of being a machine was that she required no life support system. It was a simple matter to splice into the ship's main coolant loop and keep her chassis from overheating in the vacuum, and the nav computer was ultimately just software. Software she could steal. When she opened the canopy and unplugged, she took half the ship's functions with her.
The ship chirped as she approached it, the security system disengaging via some unseen remote command. She climbed into the cockpit, ignored the many stares she was receiving from the varied denizens of the bay, and plugged herself in. As the canopy locked back into place, a rush of air signaled the start of the ship's aux power reactor. She checked her stores. She had enough MOX for another year or so in the APR, and enough deuterium/tritium in the main drive to get to another Galilean moon, but not much further than that. A ship as small as hers couldn't breed its own tritium efficiently, and was never designed to get more than a few kilometers away from a mothership. She was okay on coolant unless she got shot up and had to pull from the fighter's stores, in which case it would be grounded until she could replace it.
Bottom line - she needed to make it work here on Ganymede. There really wasn't anywhere left for her to run to. She simulated a sigh, then froze stock still as her chassis entered safe mode. Margaret reached out with her wireless rig for a grid node. Finding one, she jumped out, leaving her chassis and ship behind, with minimal automatic systems.
Her perceptive context flashed and twisted as her mind entered the grid. In moments, she found herself in the familiar visualized environment, surrounded by beams of light that represented connections to a billion other computer systems. She searched for a pathway, then vanished into one such beam, arriving a few moments later in one of her favorite virtualized environments, a simulation of a small enchanted forest in autumn. The simulation itself ran on a cloud of computers across the solar system, data terminals she'd hacked and hijacked, PoS systems in restaurants, reactor control systems on Luna, personal datapads of executives in Geneva. Distributed and encrypted, the environment was the closest thing to safety the AI could hope for, at least for now.
She padded down a path of damp leaves, appearing now as a young human woman. "I wonder if Oracle will be here." She thought idly...
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