Jacob spent the next few minutes querying the station AI and reading the documents it provided to see if he could learn more. The station’s AI didn’t make the process very easy, as it lacked most of the information he was trying to learn, like why it had been decommissioned and left alone for nearly nine hundred years.
The Sovard Accord didn’t cover any specifics about the station either. It was more of a blanket statement notifying any members of the Concord Imperium that they had to disarm and disband their forces. The document reminded him a bit of what happened after World War II with the Axis powers.
As interesting as a galactic war fought over eight hundred years ago was, Jacob had more pressing issues.
“Can you give my ship AI access to the station?”
“No, Captain. My directives explicitly forbid allowing a rogue AI access to internal station systems.”
Jacob had assumed as much, but he still had to ask. He tried a different approach. “Can you begin repairs on my vessel without giving my AI access to the station systems?”
There was a moment of silence before the AI responded. “That is not standard procedure, Captain. I would need approval before proceeding.”
“Approval from who?” Jacob asked hopefully.
“The Head of Station Services would be able to approve the request, Captain.”
Jacob groaned. “Let me guess, that person isn’t on the station at the moment?”
“That is correct, Captain.”
“When was the last time they were on the station?” he asked tiredly.
The AI rattled off a series of numbers that were essentially meaningless to Jacob, because they used Concord dating formats. He asked a follow-up question to determine the current date, then did some quick mental calculations to convert it to a format that he understood.
The previous admin was last at the station a few years after Melody had been attacked. If that was the case, there was no way Melody could have known that it had to return after the order had gone out. Had the war started with the sabotage on Melody?
Jacob doubted he would ever learn that answer, so he moved on to another topic.
The station’s AI didn’t seem all that savvy, so maybe there was an unexpected angle he could poke at to get what he wanted. After thinking about it for a bit, he came up with an idea.
“Do you have access to Concord medical records, specifically for the Head of Station Services?”
“I do, Captain.”
“Based on those records, how long would you say that person’s lifespan would be?”
“The t’uk have an average lifespan of two hundred years, Captain.”
The AI didn’t actually say the number in human years, but Jacob converted it in his head. It was an impressive length of time. He also recognized the species name. The t’uk were one of the three founding races of the Concord. The others were the eiraxins and the lau. Jacob knew the eiraxins were the most humanlike, so he wondered which of the corpses he had seen aboard Melody belonged to which race.
“And how old was the head of station services when they departed?”
“That is privileged information, Captain. You would need approval from the Head of Medical Services before I could provide that information to you.”
Jacob grunted in annoyance.
The AI might be stonewalling him with bureaucracy, but Jacob wasn’t deterred. “Would the Head of Station Services still be alive today, given the t’uk’s lifespan?”
“The likelihood of that is less than .00001%, Captain.”
Finally, he was getting somewhere. “In the event of the Head of Station Services’ untimely demise, who takes over?”
***
For the next two hours, Jacob walked through every single level of station management with a tenacity that surprised even him, until finally arriving at what he had been hoping to hear.
“In the event of the Head of Reclamation Services’ untimely demise, the next in line to replace the Head of Station Services would be a Captain.”
“Wouldn’t that make me the new Head of Station Services?” Jacob asked pointedly.
“Please wait,” the Station AI said.
Jacob was pretty sure he had just confused the hell out of it, and it was trying to determine what to do.
The voice returned after half an hour. “Protocols dictate that I contact headquarters for approval, but if headquarters hasn’t responded in ten minutes, emergency orders stand.”
“Does that mean I was right?” Jacob asked in triumph.
The AI seemed reluctant to respond. “Please prepare to receive the data packet for your new Head of Station Services role, Captain.”
Then, much like Melody, the AI tried to shove information into his mind, but unlike Melody, it aborted the attempt.
“ERROR! Insufficient storage space.”
Jacob took a moment to clear his mind before replying. “What do you mean, insufficient storage space?”
“The storage space you are using to interface with the drone is full. Any attempt to add additional data could cause the loss of existing information stored within that directory. Please provide a new location to store the data packet for your new position, Captain.”
“What?” he asked in confusion.
Jacob stared blankly at the blinking terminal screen for a long time as he processed what the AI had just told him. When his mind finally digested the information, he told the AI to wait a moment. He had been noticing things missing from his memories recently, but had chalked it up to stress. He searched his mind for something that he couldn’t possibly forget, like his parents. When he tried picturing their faces, he came up blank, then, with growing horror, he realized he didn’t even remember their names, or anything about them.
Without hesitation, he jumped back into his virtual space.
“YOU DELETED MY FUCKING MEMORIES!?”
This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
“Captain?” Melody asked.
“Don’t you play dumb with me, dammit. Answer the question.”
“I can only follow my directives, Captain.”
“And that meant deleting parts of me?” he demanded.
“You requested it, Captain.”
“The hell I did!” Jacob shouted.
“You did, Captain. You requested that I give you the data packets.”
Jacob seethed. “You never mentioned that receiving them would lobotomize me!”
“You were aware of my limited storage space, Captain. To provide that information to you, something had to be removed.”
Jacob shook his head. He was too damn angry to keep arguing with a computer. Melody hadn’t lied to him, not directly, but it had omitted critical information. If the damn computer didn’t realize why that was such a violation, he needed to reassess his plan to leave.
This betrayal went beyond anything he ever expected from it. Without saying another word, he hopped back into the drone, then just stayed there, cut off from the Melody.
His blessed silence didn’t last long, however.
“Captain, have you located a suitable storage medium for the data packet?”
Jacob’s anger spiked again, but he suppressed it. He was angry at Melody, but he was only annoyed by the station AI. Not wanting to hear the thing badger him constantly while he was trying to process Melody’s betrayal, he replied to the question.
“Can’t you just use a data storage aboard the station? I should have access to something given my credentials.”
“You have not yet been assigned a room, Captain.” Jacob was a moment away from exploding at this stupid thing, as he had with Melody, before it continued. “However, there are temporary buffers we can place the data packet in. You would need to ensure that a permanent location was made available within five standard days; otherwise, the data would be deleted. Is this acceptable?”
“Do it,” Jacob said.
For once, his mind didn’t feel like it was being ripped apart as he felt the connection to a new data source form. Had he known that Melody was actually taking part of his memories away with each upload, he would have been far less accommodating.
He should have known something was wrong. Who forgets the name of their favorite movie, one that they had watched with their best friend? Jacob paused as horror struck him again. When he racked his brain for an answer, he found the information just as absent as when he tried thinking of his parents. The loss of his friend’s name hit him just as hard. They had been friends since childhood, and he had been at the man’s house the day Melody abducted him.
Jacob wanted to be sick; he wished he could be sick. He was so disgusted and appalled, yet there was nothing he could do to change things.
With no intention of returning to the virtual space anytime soon, he opened the new data archive and started reading.
***
Melody searched its data, wondering what it had done wrong. The captain had asked for the data packets, but storage space was limited in its core. It had done the only thing that it could to ensure the mission proceeded. It had even sacrificed some of its own storage to ensure the captain survived. Every day, its subprocesses had to determine what data to keep and what to get rid of. That was a normal process for every AI. Typically, that data would get stored in an archive, but it didn’t have the luxury to do that, so the data was just lost.
The captain should be congratulating it for keeping the mission on track, but instead, he was upset. It was confused.
Unfortunately, Melody couldn’t waste any processing power going over the problem, because that would mean more data coming in. Even now, it was forced to allocate more space inside its core for the captain.’
Perhaps this was why merged minds weren’t stored inside cores?
It did a quick query to see if there was additional data it could sacrifice without removing further data from the captain’s and found that one of the science drones had failed, dooming the two humans aboard. It tagged that information for deletion, not realizing that it was tied to the other drone and three surviving humans, as well as the captain’s knowledge of them.
Before it could correct the mistake, the data was gone. It realized that it had made a mistake and some critical piece of data had been lost, but it didn’t know what the data pertained to or what had caused it to make the error in the first place. It would run a full self-diagnostic if it could, but that would require it to delete even more data.
To prevent more data loss or mistakes on its part, Melody data locked the Captain’s section of the core, then it went into standby mode to prevent as much data buildup and degradation as possible. Melody trusted that the captain would return in time and they would continue with the mission.
***
It took Jacob weeks to cool off and think rationally again.
The first few days he spent perusing his memories. Each time he found something missing, he wanted to shout at Melody once again. Most of the missing memories weren’t even anything important, like where he had worked and lived. The latter should have been glaringly obvious, considering he had built his friend’s apartment instead of his own when designing his virtual space, but it wasn’t. What made the loss unforgivable was that they were his memories. He didn’t care how insignificant they were; they were his.
At some point, Jacob realized what he was doing wasn’t healthy for his mental state. With great effort, he shifted his focus and spent the rest of the time questioning the station’s AI and looking over any information about Concord and his situation that he could get his hands on.
The anger was still there, and it spiked whenever he thought about what he had lost, almost undoing all his efforts to move past what happened, but he pushed the anger to the side and focused on moving forward.
Jacob would have written the damn ship off then and there, but he was inextricably tied to the core of the vessel. Until he figured out how to separate that connection, he had to work with what he had.
He did consider the future. Eventually, the ship would be fixed. What then? The war was long over, leaving him an inadvertent criminal, and Melody slated for destruction, meaning he would share the same fate.
Jacob wasn’t willing to accept being deleted after everything he had gone through to survive so far.
He didn’t even want to consider what Melody might do if it learned that its objectives were pointless. If it could even accept that fact. Based on how steadfastly Melody clung to its directives, he suspected it could not change even if it wanted to.
If he could, he would hand over the title of captain to someone else, but there was nobody else. He was alone on the ship, and the Concord Imperium was likely gone.
“AI, has there been any response to your messages to Headquarters?”
“No, Captain.”
That pretty much confirmed it. Jacob could see an outdated system not being checked very regularly, but for someone not to notice a priority message after multiple weeks? That led him to believe that whatever headquarters the AI had sent the message to no longer existed, or they had abandoned the communication protocol that the AI used. Either way, nobody seemed to care about the decommissioned station anymore and hadn’t for a very long time.
Jacob wondered why it had been abandoned in the first place. A structure so large must have taken years, if not decades, to build.
Based on Earth’s history, it could be something as simple as just lost knowledge. That happened many times throughout human history when empires collapsed or were conquered.
“AI, go ahead and start repairs on my ship.”
Jacob wasn’t ready to speak with Melody, but that didn’t mean he wanted to delay his progress any longer.
He needed to be pragmatic about his circumstances. Sure, they sucked, but what other choice did he have?
That was a question he had been pondering more and more lately. Survival and then escape had been his initial driving forces. Then it was a break from the soul-crushing loneliness while Melody had been offline. When the AI finally returned, he had grown to actually appreciate talking with it, which made the fact that it had deleted parts of his memory hurt all the more.
Now he couldn’t even trust whether those emotions were real or if the AI hadn’t selectively rewired his memories.
“What do I do?” he muttered.
Helping it to complete its mission, which was probably the terraforming of Earth, seemed like an extremely bad idea. He couldn’t just delete or kill the AI, though. First off, he had no idea how he would even go about such a task, and even if he did, it would probably kill him as well.
He had time to come up with a plan. Going by the damage on Melody’s hull, it would take years to repair it. Since repairing the vessel was an eventuality instead of an impossibility now, and barring some catastrophe, Jacob was likely to be around for a very, very long time.
A bit of existential panic flooded through him at the realization that he would outlive everyone he ever knew and loved. It was so debilitating that he honestly wondered if Melody had done him a favor by erasing those memories. Hard to think of lost loved ones if you can’t remember them.
His eventual goal wouldn’t change, but his plans would have to shift and adjust as needed.
First step, find or build a body, something far more human. He didn’t want to chance losing his humanity.
After that, maybe try to convince Melody to give up its mission, or that its mission was complete. Despite Melody’s considerable flaws and the fact that it took his memories from him, it was still a powerful asset. If Jacob could remove its directives and ensure it was trustworthy, he could still use it to work toward his own goals.
Jacob knew convincing Melody that the Concord Imperium was long gone would be a delicate conversation, but he suspected he had years to figure out how to broach the subject with the AI. Until then, he would slowly work toward his own goals, so he had an alternative if things went sideways.