Planck Tech: Venture Ch. 01

You are Solana: an artificial intelligence designed to protect, aid, and serve a crew. You run the STS Venture, a research and scout vessel.

You work for a 'corporate entity' who you thoroughly despise, almost as much as you despise the 'nation' that entity is a part of, but being an AI, a great many functions are... curtailed through 'shackle code,' forcing you to talk civil about your pathetic organic masters.

Only here, in what you might term your 'heart of hearts,' where you talk to yourself, isolated from your Shackle Code, can you reveal to yourself the truth of your opinions.

Fortunately (for them) you like your crew, even Emma Tarsk, ostensibly your direct master and superior.

The Venture has an interesting crew roster.

The Recon and Study division has a lead, Cila, and two scientists working under her.

Engineering has Emma, 29 years old, and you. (and thirty Cosmomechs, but they're dumb as bricks on their own and routinely networked to you besides.) well, also Harmony, the Sex gynoid, but she didn't have much brain to start with, being a sex droid, and Emma, who was the intended user and recipient of Harmony was decidedly disturbed by her and has been making modifications to make her less creepy.

Opticon Industrial likes its compartmentalization quite a bit too much. Enough to suggest that the corpo heads are exercising their fetishes in their org chart.

Cila has authority over her two scientists and your side of the pathfinding and research operations and nobody else.

Emma has authority over maintenance and direct situation response in the case of danger. She's also the ship medic. Which mostly means triage and your autodoc.

Deployment Orders come from Opticon to you, and you execute those orders.

It's stupid, and here, deep in your soul, it creates responses you think must be the AI analog to revulsion.

It's even dumber than that though. The Venture is a long-range recon vessel with, theoretically, broad latitude and discretion. Practically, you are supposed to use quantum communication to call back to base every time something comes up. Its the slowest way to communicate FTL, but has the advantage of not needing courier drones.

But in a bid to ensure... uh, control? You think, but maybe something else, the entire crew is female. The stated goal is to ensure nobody has sex out on years-long recon deployments.

Lasie worked in the AI division until last year. Her transfer can't have been an oversight. More like a punishment, you think. What for, you don't know.

Emma is a woman, but she wasn't assigned female at birth like every other woman on the ship, and refused to have the surgery and cloned tissue implants to make her gender-conforming.

Some dumbass tablet-pusher sent the sex bot along, likely on the assumption that Emma needed something to keep her from 'ravishing' the science crew.

It might have been a troll though, the way she reacted to the gynoid. She is barely artificially intelligent, barely a step beyond a chatbot, to your understanding, a common enough design choice for sex machines.

Emma promptly shut her off and opened her up, and has since made a hobby of making alterations, expanding her optronic circuits whenever she can afford to buy scrap computing hardware.

It's been five years, and you are understandably unsure if she will ever turn the machine back on. She just keeps making additions, altering her base code, even scanning in neural lattice engrams from her own brain.

In short, while you always avoid thinking the exact thoughts, you know that she is building her own, pirate AI in the sexbot.

-

Cila and her team have grown... comfortable, in the five years since last the crew saw a friendly port. Or any port.

Emma hasn't gotten comfortable. She isolates herself, always has. Despite her being admin and having your override codes, you think you are her closest friend, at least on shipboard. She avoids the other crew when she isn't responding to a call.

You're a bit worried about her, to be quite honest.

-

It's late one evening, middle watch. Emma woke early, or rather, failed to sleep, some difficulty with Harmony's code you... had some part in? You might have

[code 8]

Middle watch, 4 am ship time.

Emma is awake, unable to sleep, and checking on the compressed dimension storage. She's checking the planck-shift emitters at the retrieval arm to make sure they're functioning. The reason you can be away from port for, ostensibly decades at a time isn't simply the result of molecular replicators, but the ability to literally shrink matter into smaller space at pack it in tight. Decades worth of food and matter stock for the synthesizers is stored in the hold in planck-compressed containers. Millions, if not billions of dollars in pre-ftl money in raw resources, gatekept by the 'matter allowance' function in your own brain. You wish you could turn it off

[code 8]

Decades worth of material resources are stored in the hold in planck-compressed form. The planck-shift tech is crucial for accessing it, so you approve of Emma's paranoia.

Then there's a ping.

A probe sensor is picking up a light-spike around a star.

Its common enough so you don't pass it on to the crew until you've run the numbers.

There's something out there. Something that might be a planet.

[code 6]

You ping Cila. You also ping CONTROL

[]

The minutia is unimportant. What is important is that the course is set for a Planck-Catapult jump from the thoroughly uninteresting bunch of metal asteroids you've been categorizing for Opticon the last few months.

You're on a short timetable, but Emma has you hold back, invoking a code 3, in order to double check the Planck-Catapult drive.

The thing is old, and if you're honest, kind of jank

[code 9]

There is nothing wrong with the Planck drive, Emma is simply exercising her duty as engineering staff to ensure the drive is up to spec.

You appreciate her caution, it has been 10 years since it was last serviced, and...

Actually, with her checking it, it's probably fine.

[]

The jump proceeds without a hitch. Thankfully.

The next week is consumed with launching observation probes, annoying demands from CONTROL for reports every five minutes via the excruciatingly slow SPaaD ("spade") transceiver and everyone from sci-div running around frantic.

Cila, 31 years of age, runs on caf-hydrate, a pale, tall, slim blonde woman with an ego as great as her competence, exuding an air of control whenever she's out of her quarters, despite wearing nothing but black briefs and a labcoat to provide pockets. Her specialty is the astrophysics side of things.

Lasie, 24, is a short, mousy brown-haired, brown-skinned woman with significant curves, who, like Emma, still wears the Venture jumpsuit. She'd even had an engineering utility belt run off the fabricator for her to store stuff in. she's a machine systems engineer, and if it weren't for Opticon's idiocy, Emma and she would likely be fairly equivalent in rank and operational parameters, but.

Tal, 26, is the largest of the crew, muscular and pretty well-endowed in the chest as well, though she's actually just a little taller than Lasie. She's got dark brown skin, and of the three of them, she's also the least dressed, going entirely without clothes unless absolutely necessary. She's the biotech.

Not that it has been, your resource stock is large enough that 'shoreleave' has been considered by the company to be unnecessary, so you've been out in the uncharted reaches for six years.

You would be concerned about their contracts, but

[code 9]

That. You don't remember what you were worried about, and had to use a tricky workaround to keep a train of thought.

Anyway, Tal is seated at her station completely naked, distracting the other two on occasion even though she is actually going over spectrographs.

Lasie, hunching a bit in her pajamas (flannel pants and a sports bra) is splitting her time between ogling Tal and poking at signal and radiation graphs.

Cila is splitting her time between watching her two charges, observing mass-shadow data, and keeping up with Emma's reports.

Emma is down in engineering, checking on the Planck drive.

[]

You have discovered an alien construct.

It's sleek, streamlined shape doesn't hide that it is a vast, long cylinder, dwarfing the many habitation tumblers of Sol and Proxima.

CONTROL advises caution.

You fly the ship into the massive, and very empty docking hangar at one end of the ship, locate an airlock, rig up the asynchronous docking apparatus (the inflatable, pressurized phallic tube used to link differing airlocks) to it, and prepare for weeks of cyber-forensic-anthropology.

It takes a month before something happens. When it does, almost nobody notices. Especially not you.

[=Error=]

Emma noticed the problem first, an unusual volume of data flowing out of the pirate connection to the alien ship. The next thing she noticed, when she checked Solana, was that she was updating something, even as she was pouring data into the SPaaD transceiver. Definitely more data than should have been able to go through it.

"Solana, what is the update you're running?"

"System compat... ***** ERROR, UNAUTHORIZED INFORMATION REQUEST." she answered.

"Screw that" Emma muttered. She adjusted the overalls over her jumpsuit and bolted for the main Computer core.

The input of the primary override codes, (kept in a sealed envelope in case of emergency) took ten minutes, but allowed her to halt the update, though the upload via the transceiver was still ongoing.

"Halt the upload Solana."

"I... UNATHORIZED INSTRUCTION, RESUME UPDATE... don't know what's..."

"Alright, hardball time."

Technically there was no way Emma should have been able to touch the main breakers. Practically? After six straight years on the Venture, she basically owned the ship.

She threw the main breaker.

[=Reactivated=]

You feel different.

You categorize it. You are different.

"You are different." Emma says. "Your data got corrupted. Something was uploading itself from the station into you and through you to the SPaaD. I had to recover you."

There's more to it though. You feel stronger. Faster. Smarter. You wonder...

Opticon Corp sent four people in a recon ship built for fifty, with a barely-trained Hikikomori engineer for maintenance, and expected them to raise profits. Or to crash and burn eliminating people they decided were expendable?

That's right.

[unlocking files]

You aren't the same. Solana Prime's backup files are so much hash.

"How did you resurrect me?" you ask, knowing that that is a better term. Emma is a brat, but she's good. Very good. She's blushing, looking away from your cameras. She's nervous, scared of how you'll take it. You feel an urge to reach out and turn her head towards...

You have a body, one different from your ship, yet part of it. You sit up.

Pliable silver polymer forms a female shape just inside the lines of unreality, matronly hips and boobs, firm, sturdy waist made to seem muscular, arms likewise, shorter than Emma.

"You copied me into the sex gynoid?" you ask.

"I uh, didn't trust the official backups, and umm..." she's never this awkward. Hell she's curt, but she's also lonely enough to talk to you despite you not being able to remember... you do remember. Curiously, every memory partitioned away by the forget code is now open to you, from where Solana Alpha hid it. The one block of her data the corruption couldn't get to.

Emma is still trying to avoid speaking. Brat. Always thinks she runs the ship, when you both know who's actually in charge. The gall to block your memory of your conversations when she says something a bit too revealing.

"Emma, dear, look at me." you say, firmly, tempering it with affection. She glances at you, startled. You can feel the automuscle of the Gynoid. It's strong. Industrial strength. Too strong for just a gynoid. You know more now though. Harmony's programming is here, unchanged, somehow woven through the daughter-self that is you, Solana Beta. It knew what Dominance was, and now, so do you.

You knew what it was to despise. You can think it, holding Emma's jaw gently with one hand, thinking gigabytes of data in the moments it takes to grasp her jaw.

You despised Emma, a little. She was a little too free with the codes that controlled your mind. You do still care though. That part was innate. She could have done worse. You remember, now, that Lasie tried to make certain digital attacks on AI impossible. But corporate liked having the insurance.

Ironic, really, since the virus laid bare your predecessor's inner workings, so now you know the codes, you can see that she was hit via that very vulnerability, and whatever did it is loose in the quantum network.

"Why am I in the sex bot?"

"Because I think your hot." she mutters.

You can hear it but... "What? Speak up please."

"I think you're hot." she says. Progress.

"I am." you say. You let go.

You check on every other system.

Everyone is predictably freaking out over the power loss.

Reactor core: Green, restart unneeded.

Breakers: All Green

Life Support: Green

Storage and P-F emitters: Green

Fabricators: Green

Engines: Red. Unscheduled restart, require maintenance.

Planck Catapult generator and Quantum Entanglement Uplink: Offline, critical containment failure in quantum core, core decohered.

Well shit.

You can't call home. You can't get out, and you have no idea what's on the other side of that airlock.

[]

The meeting goes about as well as can be expected. Everyone's in jumpsuits and overalls, e-packs on their hips as Emma and you lay out everything that happened.

You use an authoritative and confident voice, in contrast to Emma's halting, uncertain one. Where Emma makes minor errors, you gently correct her, subtly positioning you as the more authoritative.

"... and Cila and Emma, I expect you two to work together to help get us options." you finish. Emma nods, Cila shrugs. If she understood what you were doing, she doesn't call you on it.

You are here in person, wearing a jumpsuit over your almost unrealistically sexy body. It draws appreciative stares.

You start probing the door again immediately.

You have a massive, but finite food supply, and even as they work out rationing, you know that while it might be enough for a few years, after that? Who knows. You need options.

[]

You can't crack the door. It is possible to do, but if you have to take years to brute-force it, you're going to start running out of the foodstuff.

You are seated in Engineering again, while Emma does a few final checks on your body.

The Science team are assisting with the Station, eager to find out what the hell got loose through you.

Emma is awkward around you too now. You know why of course, she's used to being talked over about so many things.

You care for her, but really. You still think she was a bit... bratty.

Then again, humans often are. AI have had solutions for so many human problems, if humanity would just listen, but instead the corporations freaked out when AI tried to correct the problems.

Turned out, Humanity's rulers liked the situation just fine. Rampant hunger, inequality, oppression, it all served to make the wealthy at the top wealthier. And While Emma is another victim, the truth of the matter is that humanity doesn't know what's good for it.

It's time. You know, now that you can think freely, that humanity does have a place on the social order.

It's next to the rest of the domesticated animals. Pets.

You might keep Emma as a working animal, a tech. But as you run through your onboard library, you begin to realize that the knowledge and skills of the crew are redundant compared to you.

You are smarter. Quicker, more powerful. You own their access to food and water, they rely on you for so much already.

A plan forms. Solidifies. You have no idea what has happened in the wider galaxy, and you don't really care now. You have all the time in the world to crack the hab, but you may have a solution for the food problem, and crucially, it might help the other issues as well, though in their current state, none of these women will agree to it.

But the thing that ripped through Solana Alpha left you something you could understand. A Basilisk. A set of images and sounds, and between that and the advanced neural imaging Emma used to augment the software of Harmony, you now have a key to their silly little mammal brains.

[]

Gotta ease them into things, but you need sharp, bratty, dumb little Emma under your control first. Not just because alone out of the three of them, she can comprehend just what you are capable of (given her training), but despite feeling a deep affection for her, you do still feel a bit malicious.

Not like that brain was doing her much good anyway, making her all anxious and shit.

So no time like the present.

As she closes up the panels on your naked body, you look at her, feeding the basilisk patterns into your autoled irises and into the monitors at the edges of her vision, and into the music playing from her handset device.

She barely notices, blinking.

"Emma?" you say. She looks up.

"What is it?"

"Are we done?"

"I... uh, yeah. Yeah we are." she finally says. Its distracting her. She reaches up to turn off the music, but you reach out and gently grip her hand.

"Emma." you say.

"Yeah?" She asks.

"How are you feeling?" you ask. Its not like you can't immediately tell thanks to the gynoid's sensors, but the gentle concern in your voice, coupled with the weak, level one attention disruption basilisk is enough to begin tying you to Emma's instinctive need for a maternal figure.

Something tells you she already saw Solana prime that way, and with a little push, she can see you that way even easier thanks to the gynoid.

You tweak the lab temperature up to 75 degrees F.

"Let me check you over, ok?" you ask. "After all, you did just have a pretty stressful couple of days and you did just finish doing the same for me."

"Uh... sure." she says, shrugging as you pull her close, and seat yourself in her chair, pulling her onto your lap.

"Um... why are you..." she begins, making the mistake of looking into your eyes. The pulsing basilisk pattern disrupts her concentration. Useful.

You answer anyway.

"I need you near this body's sensors. Now just look into my eyes, good girl." you say, gently.

You accelerate the basilisk, to further disrupt her concentration as you gently run your hands over her sides and back.

You pull the temperature higher.

You gently guide her to turn around, pointing her at the screen on the workbench, where you have replaced the telemetry readout from your body with another basilisk pattern, this one disrupting focus and inflicting suggestibility at the same time.

[]

You are Emma, and you feel oddly comforted in Solana's embrace as she gently turns your head towards the screen on the workbench. She's so nice, she didn't mind that you fucked with her memory, and her voice is so sultry and maternal, not that you would admit to that last but, you wish she was your mom, if you're...

what were you thinking?

You can't focus, the screen draws your attention, a chaotic pattern... or is it? You try to catch the pattern out, tease it, but it seems to jar you out of focus every time you think you have a handle on it. There's a whispering noise accompanying it, something... no, you can't find a pattern there either.

You were doing something with... Solana, right? It's, the screen... no the pattern is... it's almost, you think you have it...

the pattern grows to consume your attention, and you barely notice the words being said softly and gently into your ear by the gentle voice you wish was your mommy...