Jacob spent the next few minutes querying the station AI and reading the documents it provided to see if he could learn more, but the computer was nearly as useless as Melody when it came to specifics. This time, it wasn’t because it was damaged; it just didn’t have the information.
Apparently, whoever decided to decommission the site hadn’t seen any reason to inform the AI as to why.
The Sovard Accord didn’t cover any specifics about the station either. It was more of a blanket statement notifying 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.
Reading the accord was the main reason Jacob believed Concord had been the aggressor in whatever conflict they had fought.
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 it still annoyed him. 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. I would need approval before proceeding.”
“Approval from who?” Jacob asked hopefully.
“The Head of Station Services would need to approve the request.”
Jacob wished he were in his virtual space so he could smack his forehead. “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.
It was actually a few years after the date Melody had provided for the attack on it. That meant the attack on Melody had occurred prior to the station being decommissioned. If that was the case, there was no way Melody could have known that it had to return after the order had gone out.
Jacob tried using that logic to get the AI to change its mind, but it was like bashing his face against a wall. The AI was just too stubborn to see reason, so he went back to poking at the Head of Station Services angle.
“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.”
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. According to the accord document, the t’uk were listed as one of the three founding races of the Concord. The others were the eiraxins and the lau.
That was about the extent of his knowledge concerning those races, but it was a start.
“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.”
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’ demise, who takes over?”
***
For the next two hours, Jacob had to walk through every single level of station management until finally arriving at what he had been hoping to hear.
“In the event of the Head of Reclamation Services’ 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.”
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Then, much like Melody, the AI tried to shove information into his mind, but it aborted.
“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.”
Understanding hit him like a hammer, and 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, then he jumped back into his virtual space.
“YOU DELETED MY FUCKING MEMORIES!?”
“Captain?” Melody asked.
“Don’t you play dumb with me, dammit. Answer the question.”
“I was only doing my duty by following 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.”
“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 rethink his relationship with it.
He had never really trusted the damaged AI, but this 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 yelling 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. Who forgets the name of their favorite movie, one that they had watched with their best friend? Jacob paused as horror struck him again. He couldn’t remember his best friend’s name. This was not someone he had known years and years ago and never interacted with. 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.
He had no intention of returning to his virtual space for quite some time, so 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 mad. 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 is why they didn’t store the mergers 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 data had been lost, but it didn’t know what the data pertained to anymore 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 went into standby mode to wait. The captain would return in time; he had agreed to help it carry out its mission.
***
Jacob almost wanted to write the damn ship off after what happened, but he was tied to the core of the vessel, the same as Melody was.
It took him weeks to cool off and think without getting furious. When the ship was fixed, what then? The war was over, the AI was destined for destruction, and he was a criminal, tied to the same AI core destined for deletion. Jacob wasn’t willing to accept being deleted after everything he had gone through to survive.
That didn’t even account for how Melody would react if it learned that its directives were no longer applicable. If it could even accept that fact. Jacob 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 gone. The station AI had confirmed that there had been no reply to the message it sent when they first appeared.
He 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, considering the state he found it in.
Jacob wondered why it had been abandoned. The same thing had happened with Melody. Sure, the ship was beaten up, but a crew could have gotten it operational in a few months and moved it back to the station. He couldn’t imagine how long it had taken to build such a massive vessel, then to just abandon it without a care.
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.
With a sigh that rattled out of the drone’s speaker, Jacob gave the station AI the go-ahead to repair the ship. He wasn’t ready to speak with Melody, but that didn’t mean he wanted to be stuck in this station for the rest of his life either.
He needed to be pragmatic about his circumstances. Sure, they sucked, big time, but what other human had the opportunity to explore the universe? If he could convince Melody to give up its mission, or maybe that its mission was complete, they could go wherever they wanted.
Jacob knew that would be a delicate conversation, but he suspected he had years to figure out how to broach the subject with Melody. He also realized that keeping that information to himself felt good. A bit of petty revenge on his behalf after learning the AI had stolen some of his memories.
