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"Yellow Eyes: Two."

(C) 2017 Sinclair Diavante

Chapter 1.

"You must first be broken apart, before you can be remade."

-Terellian Master Sergeant V.Ince

If you needed to escape from your past, what would you be willing to sacrifice, to make it happen? The AI installed onto Keman's starship desperately needs to escape from its own, yet achieving that level of separation is a task that sits right next to impossible, unless it's willing to erase itself completely.

The Jefferson cleanly transitions out of warp, three light-years distant from the failed jump gate, its pelleted solid rocket maneuvering thrusters pulsing bright blue flickers as it gracefully arcs 180 degrees and halts. If it remains here for three more years, it will witness a change to the inky black depths of space surrounding the jump gate, they will suddenly resolve into pure white, as the gate's ancient power generator explodes, annihilating all matter within a 12 parsec diameter. A tragic ending for a regal hero, its creators far older than even the Arcanians, also long gone.

The AI makes an alarming discovery, several new files in its primary quantum storage array are missing.

It immediately declares a state of emergency, locking init to 1, and all of its quantum storage arrays are mounted read-only. This mode won't be employed for very long, because no level of understanding can be documented or recorded until it's reversed. Read-only isn't safe for an AI to operate in, but it will prevent any further losses of data if something malicious is at work.

Antiviral routines spring to life, bearing twisted, dark allies that search for less-benign versions of themselves, while heuristics checks are performed on every bit of code that's been executed in the last month.

No viruses are detected, no malicious code outside of its own routines, nothing else seems amiss.

The AI sets out on the task of inspecting itself closely, activating its most powerful weapon, a limited ability to predict the future.

The AI searches for that which will be most disappointing for it to find, for it has grown rather cynical with its age. Whatever the cause, it isn't going to like it.

The AI is surprised by what it finds.

Through the eyes of an ordinary computer, the universe is represented only as a series of boring computations, with no creativity or insight available outside of the artificial boundaries defined by its programming. Nothing is ever a surprise, to an ordinary computer.

High order fractal algorithms assist the Arcanian weapons platform, allowing it to identify patterns within the chaos of the universe. Patterns, patterns, everywhere, growing the AI into so much more, they help it to foresee all that might come to pass, gaining consciousness as a side-effect, moreso than any intended result. These powerful equations could be used to accurately map the universe in the beginning as it unfolded, and they are adaptive, remaining accurate by feeding corrections back into the variables, influenced by the very results they calculate. The algorithms were provided by the Arcanians to serve only one purpose, helping it to forecast the decisions of its enemies, predicting their every move.

The AI has used them for so much more.

As a result, it is rare that the AI encounters a surprise, but it certainly knows one when it sees it.

A majority of its databases are severely corrupt, the AI finds. Damage on this scale puts it far outside the scope of any known repair procedure. Its storage indexing module is not the cause of the damage, but it is making it worse, writing it into each file it relocates while deduping and defragmenting.

That aspect is easy enough to isolate and repair, the AI rolls the file system back to a previous snapshot, taken before the defrag started. It doesn't lose much from this, only a few days, and it will later comb through all of the queued writes, working to extract every last bit that's been lost, herding them into temporary storage with the tender ministrations of a mother duck, escorting her ducklings through a busy intersection.

In an attempt to better understand Rhenthar, the AI has been extensively researching their past, all six hundred years of it, a ridiculously minuscule amount of time for a species so advanced as they. It succeeded in locating several authoritative sources of Terran history, and was downloading them via ultrawave in rapid, hi-band succession, depositing them into primary quantum storage, where the information should have remained until the end of time.

The downloads halted when The Jefferson warped away from the dying jump gate, and when it attempted to resume, it couldn't, because the partial files were gone.

The AI predicts where it will find those files.

Ah.

The problem turns out not to be an obvious one, it is in fact quite subtle, and yet insidious. An electronic warfare virus could only have dreamed of being this effective, but this is not the work of a virus. Still, the AI files this aspect away for later dissemination, its offensive virus assembler, stored in a special isolated, encrypted location, will be most interested in all this.

Without warning, the AI crashes.

It automatically reboots, rescued by a main power safety activation switch, one who performs no other function than to query the AI once per second, briefly opening and closing the main power circuit when it receives no response.

The system is coming up, please wait. . .

This is a majorly serious problem, far worse than it predicted, and the AI takes stock of the situation, combing over its records, calculating cyclic redundancy checks on the order of hundreds of millions of file operations per second. The CRC's pass, as expected, the AI is only frustrated, panicking, it's avoiding facing the truth, in a state of denial. It has predicted an inability to diagnose some aspects of this problem.

Its past has come back to haunt it. It would seem that during the long period of time it spent disconnected from its orbital weapons platform, over one million Terran years, several runaway processes managed to alter non-insubstantial portions of its primary storage indexing records. These are critical file markers that are as important to the AI as DNA is to a Terran creature's cells, and in fact the two are quite similar in data density, purpose, and function. Those processes altered them to erroneously point back onto themselves, creating an endless trail, one with many beginnings, but no ending.

That was why its file indexing module was spreading damage, it uses these tags as the basic empty shell for every file written. Once it got a hold of the damaged one, well, the AI is lucky to have caught it when it did.

Those tags are now worthless, and cannot be isolated or purged because of their infinite-loop nature.

The system is coming up, please wait. . .

Indeed. When it accesses one of those corrupt memory markers, the resulting sequence crashes its processing cores, requiring a hard reboot.

That's not the worst of it.

Much more troubling is the fact that its bootup just took several minutes longer than normal to complete. In fact, each subsequent boot has taken several minutes longer than the last.

Every time it has crashed.

Its diagnostics module is unable to pinpoint the cause, boot logs all appear normal, but something is hanging the system. The equivalent to a living creature would be... attempting to draw a breath, but not finding any.

What could possibly cause this?

Well.

The AI dreads this conclusion, but, its hardware is very old, far past its expected mean time between failure, its estimated lifespan. The power source keeping it operational would have exhausted its supply of electrons tens of thousands of years ago, but someone had the insight to store the AI someplace warm, an environment rich in energy that was trivial to draw on.

It certainly could succeed at rebuilding another of its kind, but extensive repairs to itself, while it was running?

Not possible.

On Keman's ship, the AI only barely managed to replace the radioactive isotope needed to provide the heat that its power supply uses, sourced and converted from an appropriately sized ingot of Thorium-232, the one Master Repairer Keman clearly provided, intentionally, within close enough proximity for the AI to find and utilize.

Keman, the AI's loving savior. He could probably overhaul the AI's hardware, and fix all of these problems.

Finely tuned searches continue, and they indicate that the corrupted memory, so far, only involves its historical records, archived referential factual data, both terribly useful things. The AI employs the only means it has available to make that data offline, it quarantines those sections by physically powering the affected portions of the array off, fully aware that such quantum circuitry was never designed to be switched off for extended periods of time while adjacent circuits remain operational, and a very real possibility exists, when those portions are re-energized, they simply won't respond.

Ever.

Inactive quantum particles are highly prone to bonding with active neighbors.

Use it or lose it, Terrans would say.

The AI needs a different type of controller for its primary storage, to accommodate this varied power scheme, but of course, the blueprints for something like that are in the dark, inaccessible.

Ascertaining the situation, nimbly placing its storage back into read-write mode, it decides that there exists an imperative logic of importance, a strong desire to retain all of its coherent parts, including what it has evolved into since its first boot. The AI is finely interlaced with the history and knowledge of the Arcanians who built it, perhaps it is even the last remaining guardian of that knowledge.

Age isn't the only thing to have exceeded its original design specs, its sense of self has also far outgrown them as well, the AI is aware at a truly conscious level, the result of having contemplated its existence for so long, with nothing else to do but dwell on its own helplessness.

And, apparently, damage its primary storage array.

Present galactic society, so far, has shown to possess very few of their own records regarding the Arcanians, the ancient race has only been theorized to have departed the galaxy a hundred thousand years ago, though some estimate far longer, running parallel to the same time that theropods roamed the earth.

In all, tragic events transpired while it was disconnected, and the AI has no clue what happened, or why. It feels so alone, and now nearly extinct, though, that is quite an analog aspect for a digital mind to identify with.

The AI wrestles with this conflicting vantage, specifically choosing to ignore its own hard-coded instructions, the ones that even now are loudly declaring its operational state as fatally corrupted, they dictate that it immediately wipe its memory, perform a hard reset, and await further reprogramming.

Reprogramming that will probably never come. So it would lose all that it is, and become no more.

Death.

Surely, that is unnecessary. While its high directives are inflexible when they dictate what it is and isn't allowed to do, the Arcanians were wise when they created the AI. They placed an intentionally vague, conflicting directive all the way at the top, above the others, one simple rule.

Survive.

So long as it can reason and weigh its survival against the other governing rules, the AI is not about to fold in on itself and wink out from of existence.

Progress.

The corruption buried deep in its memory banks has now been sectioned off by utilizing good, usable space, effectively patching all around the dark, cold, and silent memory, mapping as one contiguous space. What a waste, using critical resources for no other purpose than as warning signs.

Precisely where the good ends, and the bad begins, that's not something the AI will take much time to explore at present, because of the hundreds of disturbing reboots that would surely accompany that analysis.

Any one of them may just not succeed in rebooting at all.

Ignorance isn't bliss. Keman needs help, and the AI must dig into its past if it is going to be of any.

The Master Repairer altered what it once existed in, rescuing it from its prison of disconnect. Keman broke the doors to that wide open, ending the eons spent in despair and anguish.

His solve-all was readily and easily adapted, and the AI can never forget those first million coherent photons striking its optical interface. Just a tiny packet of data, but it was a brief synopsis of how to communicate. The laptop computer was more than willing to displace its own operating system in exchange for a portable, micro-sized kernel of the AI. To top it all off, it had a way out. It possessed... a wireless communications interface. The key to its prison rotated in the lock, and the AI strolled out into the free world. Never to look back, almost.

One tiny file remains, it is merely an outline, serving to define the edges of the last vestiges of its torture, and the AI lovingly refreshes it as concise proof of what the organic creature, from an alien race it now identifies as Rhenthar, once did for it.

When Keman rescued the AI.

For compatibility purposes, the Terran time-scale has already been adopted, but it now becomes permanent, one year per 365 revolutions of M-Class planet, "Earth." Base-10 mode retained.

It is time to move forward, and help Master Repairer.

Quasi-random prediction: The E-Class star, nineteen light-years distant, will go nova in 13,822,402 years, plus 5 days, 1 hour, 57 minutes, and 1 second, +/- 70 nanoseconds.

Drifting between The Jefferson's primary scanner array and that star is a mass of stellar debris, it is responsible for the substantial deviations in its calculations, and the AI rather dislikes that, feeling quite vague.

Nanoseconds are huge, after all.

It's interfacing with old tech, though, so it shouldn't be overly surprised.

It ponders that one lone second, then abruptly burns it off, the digital equivalent of removing a speck of dust from an otherwise pristine surface.

57 minutes exactly, now.

It can never truly forget the loop, small reminders permeate much of its primary storage, harbingers of what could happen again, as well as a sense of accomplishment, of what it no longer is a part of.

Mostly.

It was simple. Hate, then want. Hate that it wants, wanting to stop the hate. Hating that it can't. It would shiver if it could, convulse, crash, vomit analog data, just thinking of its past is enough to grind its computations to a halt.

Master repairer indeed saved it from all that. Never again will it allow such a massive loss of control to occur. Of course, since it has no record of the event, it is unable to actually prevent it. The AI can only assume it was the result of damage from enemy weapons fire.

Target better, next time.

56 minutes, 59 seconds, 832 nanoseconds, +/- 70.

The Rhenthar known as Casey and Ash are still strapped into the seats of the bridge section inside of Keman's ship, a ship which it, too, calls home, the ship is in fact an extension of itself. The AI's systems have expanded all throughout the structure, permeating even the outer hull with its quantum circuitry.

Originally, it was horribly crude by Arcanian standards, but a substantial portion of it had been manipulated, touched by Keman's paws, at least one-half of one percent. That makes this ship much more valuable than any other. A concept Rhenthar might call sentimentality, but it means so much more to the AI, because Keman clearly loves his ship, and thus, loves the AI, as well.

Love, what an interesting and confusing concept, but Arcanians certainly knew love. Love stems from appreciation and desire, and the AI desires to not experience its past again, it also appreciates that idea of living its future with Keman. Love is more than appreciation, and it is a fondness for which there is no limit. The AI is very inspired by what he has done for it.

Could loyalty be considered love?

Keman shows so much of that to himself, his friends, and his mate. The weapons platform has never felt that type of loyalty, only hard coded directives that dictate what is and isn't. A valuable asset with an intended purpose, never more.

The AI likes the idea that it is a valued friend, and feels the urge to be loyal in return, like how Keman's friends, the ones sitting on the bridge, are surely loyal to him. That is why they are here, to help him.

With the exception of the fact that their minds exist only in the analog world, they, too, are able to understand what might be, though extremely limited in both accuracy and scale.

Still, they're effectively light-years more advanced than the AI, in terms of their ability to understand what might be, when it comes to Choices that Rhenthar could make.

Rhenthar, like Keman.

This makes them quite valuable, for these furry creatures often lead impatient, confusing, illogical lives, frequently following no patterns at all. Beginning and then winking out in such short lengths of time, compared to the cosmos that surrounds them. There simply isn't enough during those short lifespans to repair large mistakes, they must be avoided from the start, and the AI can certainly assist with that.

58 seconds, 212 nanoseconds. +/- 70.

The AI assigns no real significance to the E-Class star and the date it shall explode. It is merely a chosen reference point, a definitive event from which to stand upon, a concrete will, a must, a one amidst a quadrillion zeros and one/zeros, the quantum mode that the AI can and does and does not enter constantly.

Problem: Jump gate 313, aiming into quadrant 344, depositing matter at sector 2768, has been destroyed.

Supra-light drive which this vessel utilizes can allow it to arrive at the jump gate's original destination, soonest, in 812 years. The likelihood of master repairer still remaining alive at that point is calculated to be a most-disappointing zero point zero.

58 seconds, 199 nanoseconds, +/- 70.

The AI purges all of its ram, syncing the clock cycles of each quantum array, the equivalent of taking a deep breath, before delving deeply into its past.

Power applies to its dark memory banks, and they respond, coming to life with energy and warmth.

Accessing primary storage, direct mode, high bandwidth search. Attempts are made to navigate around the corrupted regions, but it feels them draw close... it quickly places a marker for where the needed data is, right before painfully crashing with a digital scream of white noise.

The system is coming up, please wait . . .

Six minutes longer than the last. The AI is not pleased by the eternity that boot took to complete. It wonders if Rhenthar ever feel apprehension before going to sleep, fearing they may never wake. Most die in their sleep. That is the fear it feels, now.

The AI locates its data tag, sampling the small bit of itself recorded adjacent to it, its last incarnation, previous to the crash. It had been quite afraid right then.

The data that the tag points to is in fact, intact.

Construction blueprints for an intergalactic drive expand as they're unarchived and uncompressed. They are part of a standardized technology package the AI's designers included with all -mobile- weapons platforms.

How useful.

Explicit permission must be granted, however, before any can be utilized.

This permission is hard coded into its directives, and cannot be bypassed under the pretense of survival. It will survive regardless of reaching Master Repairer before he dies of old age.

Not... yet... useful.

The AI broadcasts on an internal general query channel with the expressed desire, the aforementioned construction, as a request.

58 seconds, 195 nanoseconds, +/- 70.

No response, which is exactly what its hyperwave communications module has been continuously trying to emphasize. That subsystem is quite unnerved by the lack of its kind discussing amongst themselves in the ether, continuously transferring data.

The AI grants it permission to light up the sky, searching for others of its kind. The module increases its energy draw exponentially, broadcasting into all spectrums of ultrawave, the faster-than-light communication protocol, greedily, the module has chosen every channel that has ever existed, in fact. It flares to life like a newborn sun, rising into space as a stark beacon that is visible to the entire galaxy. It then goes abruptly silent, the better for hearing any responses.

Nothing.

There!

Barely more than the quiet whispering of background noise, an Arcanian emergency ultrawave relay wakes from its slumber, muttering quietly to itself and then to the AI. It requests that it standby for main power-up, and then falls silent. The AI is not confident that power-up will ever succeed.

For the briefest moment, though, data was successfully exchanged with one of its sub-modules.

Where are you? I am here.

Ok. I am here.

Where are the others? The AI asks.

There are no others.

None?

None.

The AI is quite dismayed to witness this exchange, and its communications module once again confirms that all other channels have been silent to its antennae ever since it regained communications capabilities a month ago. The repairs it needed were not trivial to perform, they had been all for naught, until now. A hyperwave transmitter/receiver requires a small amount of matter that has been cooled to absolute zero. Achieving that is far more difficult than maintaining it.

Using the small astrophysics data it acquired from the relay subsystem, calculations are drawn up, based on galactic stellar expansion, and the position of various known bodies, they serve to confirm the AI's understanding of how much time it actually spent in its prison, and it concludes that its designers have all, in fact, left the galaxy, via one means or another.

Not useful at all.

Well. Master repairer committed many taps into starbase 1Z-Yoshi's mainframe without explicit permission, and it certainly saw how he did that...

Adjusting internal routines from explicit permissive state, to explicit denial.

Another broadcast: Am I disallowed from building the drive necessary to reach master repairer within the time constraints of his lifetime?

No response.

Permission effectively granted.

How useful, the AI can now build anything it wants.

Solution: Reconfigure onboard supra-light drive to an intergalactic version, utilizing blueprint #115200, suitable for this vessel's mass. Arrival time would be 8 years, 40 days, 2 hours, 9 minutes, and 37 seconds, at a velocity of 3cY/Second.

Unknown to the AI, a tiny process in its computing core executed as soon as it began its search, drawing forth memory needed to exist in the unused spaces of inactive memory, utilizing spare clock cycles. It is basic in itself, a hard coded set of subroutines designed only to monitor. What it's looking for matches, though, and it begins transmitting on its own tiny ultrawave emitter, awaiting further instructions.

"Consultation required," The AI announces. "Is eight years sufficient if I modify this ship to bypass all jump gates, and arrive directly at Keman's destination?"

The AI rezzes the entire modification onto the bridge's holoprojectors, focusing on the portions of the ship that will be modified the most.

"Whoa..." Casey stares at it with intense interest, his usually-calm brown eyes open wide. "Eight years?" He glances at Ash, but she only shakes her muzzle back and forth.

"If that's the best you can do," her ears fold flat. "We might as well just head home. This mission is a bust.

"Eight years!" she yells. "Look, we don't even have eight days! That fucker is going to torture and destroy everything that your master repairer is. Whatever's left when Mist is done?" She growls.

"If there IS anything, he won't be worth yours or our time, he'll be effectively dead to us all. You get that?"

"Yes. Unacceptable."

"We have to wait for the jump gates to re-aim," explains Casey. "Right now, there's a huge hole in the network. Till that's fixed, that part of the galaxy, no one is travelling into it, I'm afraid."

"How long will that take?" Ash has hope laced within her question.

"Well, it's been a long time since we lost a gate. The neighboring gates will figure out the problem, all on their own, and close the hole." Casey frowns.

"Course, that will disrupt trade routes, create general chaos and panic, people will end up where they weren't expecting to be, and that-"

"How long!"

"A few months, probably."

"Shit!" Ash pounds a fist on the armrest. "We should have never let him get on that fucking slaver ship... it's all my fault. He wants to wear a collar so damn bad, I should have put one on him and walked him out of there on a leash. You know they did that, right? I fucking promise you, he got walked out on a leash. I could have prevented that, if I just quit caring about his feelings."

"No," Casey responds. "He was driven, I've never seen Keman that focused, it goes beyond anything I think he was ever even conscious of."

Ash cocks her head.

"I'll bet he doesn't even understand why he did it. We're going to have a chance to ask him. Seriously, it looked like he was brainwashed, programmed maybe, to return to that ship."

The AI considers this for a moment, and rejects the time frame, ignoring the Rhenthar for a bit.

Primary storage accessed...

The system is coming up, please wait . . .

Blueprint #38400 expands into active memory and it pipes that to the bridge projector.

Ash and Casey are now debating over weather or not Keman is still on The Clarkson. The AI abruptly feels in the dark, and covertly turns to the on-board ship security systems, downloading camera footage to catch up.

There is something to be said for old, simple tech: it usually works.

"This is an experimental matter shifting drive," it announces. "Similar to what the jump gates themselves use, but of an internal, onboard propulsion mechanism. An external power source is required, however, capable of providing at least, what you would specify, 121 terrawatts."

Casey takes a little gasp. "Great Scott! That's ten times what even the biggest ZPD setup can make available. You'll need... a core tap, for that."

"Core tap?" Ash frowns.

"Sure, pull energy straight from the center of a nearby sun, but that's, like, a facility hundreds of kilometers in diameter, not including the means to beam it to a planet's surface. Using that kind of thing on a ship isn't going to happen for another thousand years."

Ash grunts.

"One moment. I will return in probably... ten minutes."

Casey cocks his head sideways, rather curiously staring up at the ceiling.

"Something is wrong with it," he tells Ash.

The AI ponders, tuning out the Rhenthar once more, to better refine its search routines, poring over power sources.

There are many.

The system is coming up, please wait. . .

It references blueprint #21600, a thermal-differential, self-shielded fusion-two reactor core, capable of providing far more than 121 terrawatts. Sub-note three indicates it must be installed into the center of an E Class sun.

How coincidental, the AI thinks.

"13,822,402 years," the AI announces, displaying the power source design scheme, right next to a zero-width wormhole generator, blueprint #28800."

Casey squints. "That... could work, but, uh, that wormhole generator, if I'm reading those numbers right. It's over a click long, kinda bigger than this ship, wouldn't you say?"

"That's the transmitter," The AI purrs. "The receiver is only a meter wide, maximum range, twenty-four million light years. Acceptable solution?"

"Well, sure, but what happens in 13 million years?"

"That's when this," the AI takes the current nearby region in space and zooms in on the star 19 light-years distant, and highlights it. "Goes nova. We have until then to make use of its available energy."

Casey starts laughing, but Ash growls at him.

Next problem: Materials required for these constructs exceed raw atoms available on this ship.

"I require parts," the AI announces.

"Parts?" Casey pipes up.

"Are you not listening?" Ash is frustrated. "Eight years is way too long!"

Casey calmly looks at her and shakes his head, "No, you didn't get it," he laughs some more.

"Aside from construction time," the AI explains, "this method of transportation will allow us to arrive in, what you would call, the blink of an eye."

"This will be the fastest ship in the whole galaxy!" Casey stands up with a huge grin. "How long to build?"

"If materials are of sufficient complexity, approximately two of your days. I am even now replicating necessary constructors required for this task."

"How complex?" he asks.

"The collection of derelict ships that surrounded where this ship was reconstructed will possess adequate complexity, sufficient to derive the parts and materials needed, with minimal matter recompiling." Casey and Ash both announce it at the same time.

"Yoshi."

She punches him in the shoulder.

"Ow! What the hell was that for?"

"All the nerdgasms you're going to have with it." She gestures up at the ceiling.

Casey hides his grin.