Tech Scavengers [Humorous, Action-Packed Space Opera]

Negasi wanted nothing more than to run screaming to the airlock and get the hell back to the Antikythera. But the key rule of tactics was to never leave an enemy behind you.

And any unknown entity that lies to you is an enemy until proven otherwise.

He switched his headlamp back on. The others did too. Might as well. No doubt the Imperium AI knew they were there.

"Now what?" Jeridan whispered.

"What's wrong?" Helen asked, whispering as well.

"It's powered up. The light wasn't this strong before."

"Oh."

Now she looked worried too. For some reason, that made Negasi feel better. He'd been assuming that she would take the side of anything cybernetic. Fear was a human emotion, and he felt glad that she could feel it. That made her more human.

Half-human. Remember the Cyborg Rebellion. Remember that cyborg assassin that ran wild through the station orbiting Omicron Scorpius.

She may want to survive the invasion of the Rimscourge, but that doesn't mean you can trust her.

That realization made him slump a little and get a heavy feeling in his chest. He began to think of why and dismissed that train of thought.

Focus. There's a threat right in front of you.

"Nothing we can do except walk right into the lion's den," Negasi said.

"What's a lion?" Helen asked.

"Old Earth predator. Plenty of Amhara tales about them my grandparents used to tell."

"I take it you're not supposed to walk into their den."

"Nope. Get behind Jeridan and me."

Negasi took a deep breath and moved forward, his rifle leveled. Jeridan walked by his side.

"Don't shoot it," Helen said.

"I've never shot at a sentient being that hasn't come at me first," Negasi said.

Except for a few preemptive strikes.

They got to the doorway and paused, Negasi's skin crawling.

Three screens were now lit up with the same coruscating blue line they had seen before.

Negasi licked his lips, looked around for any threats, and took a step into the room.

All three screens formed pixelated faces. Negasi jumped a little.

"Power required urgently. Three hours, twenty-four minutes, and seventeen seconds remaining at current usage rate."

It was 4.75 hours when they last spoke with it. They hadn't been gone that long.

"Why have you increased your power consumption?" Negasi asked.

"Invalid query."

It's a very cacking valid query if you want me to trust you.

Helen put her face a few centimeters from one of the screens and smiled.

"Hello. How are you feeling?"

"Power required urgently. I sense corrupted files. More files will corrupt if power reduced to zero."

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Helen stroked the face on the screen lightly with her fingertips. Negasi tensed. It couldn't zap her or anything, could it?

"Don't worry. We'll take care of you. What's your name?"

"Invalid query."

"It's powered down to the bare minimum," Negasi said. "It's running on lower RAM than an autocar that's lost its net connection."

"Poor thing," Helen said, stroking the screen. "You must be so scared."

"An AI doesn't feel emotion," Jeridan said.

They're not supposed to lie, either.

"Don't worry," Helen told the face of blue pixels. "We'll save you."

"And how do we do that?" Jeridan asked.

"I was thinking of giving it a bit more juice to extend its running time," Negasi replied. "But seeing as how it's already powered up and won't tell us why, I'm not so sure that's a good idea."

Jeridan nodded. "Agreed. But we got to do something. We wouldn't leave MIRI in a state like this."

"Hell, no."

Helen turned away from the screen, leaving her hand on it as if to reassure the AI.

"You really care about her, don't you?"

"Well, yeah," Negasi said. "I mean, an AI is more than a computer. It was human once. MIRI was a woman with a fatal disease and she opted to become an AI. It takes a lot of courage to do that."

Very, very few people took the AI route. First, you had to be terminally ill to even be considered. No one who believed in an afterlife would do it, and even most atheists shied away. Transforming into a computer with potential immortality at the sacrifice of your body and emotions was one hell of an ask. You also had to be dying on one of the few worlds with high enough tech to actually perform the operation and pass a whole battery of psychological tests.

"She's a part of the crew," Jeridan said.

Helen smiled. "Like me."

"Well … yeah. Just don't forget that all of you are on probation," Negasi said.

"We got told too many lies and put into too many bad situations without warning," Jeridan said.

"And yet the two of you are still here."

"We don't want the galaxy to burn, and we don't want this AI to die. Let's concentrate on stopping both of those things from happening." Negasi said.

Jeridan studied the three screens, all with identical faces staring blankly at them.

"Why would it increase its power output like this?" he asked.

"It wouldn't answer when we asked, and now it's not answering at all."

"She's listening, though," Helen said.

Negasi turned to her. "She?"

"Yes, it's a she."

"How can you tell?"

"A woman knows."

Negasi set down his tool satchel and began taking out his kit. Jeridan did the same.

"All right. Let's isolate it from the rest of the systems. Once we've done that, we can give it more power without having to worry about it activating any secondary functions we don't want activated."

"I don't think we need to do that," Helen said.

It might realize we're a bunch of imposters and try to destroy us.

"I do," Negasi grumbled.

"I do too," Jeridan agreed.

"It's only a temporary measure," Negasi said in a more conciliary tone. "We're not going to maroon it here."

"How are we going to transport it?" Helen asked.

"One problem at a time."

They began opening up panels beneath the terminal keyboards, revealing a labyrinth of wires and complex circuitry.

"Damn, this is worse than I thought. Helen, can you make sense of this?"

She pulled out a scanner and ran it across the open interior. "It's going to take time but I think so."

"Take the time you need."

"Power required urgently. Catastrophic shutoff immanent."

"What happened to the 3.4 hours?" Jeridan asked.

The AI didn't reply.

Is it screwing with us?

"I don't think we have time to cut it off from the rest of the station," Helen said.

"Let's stick with the plan," Negasi said.

"All right," Helen said. "Let me finish the analysis."

The cyborg took a few minutes carefully scanning every centimeter of circuitry while Negasi and Jeridan fidgeted. The AI repeated its warning of immanent catastrophic shutoff. A minute later, two of the three terminals reverted to the wavering lines, leaving only the original terminal with a face.

Negasi took that as a bad sign.

He resisted the urge to tell Helen to hurry up. You never rushed someone performing an important job.

Plus she was distracted enough already. She kept checking on the screens, looking more and more worried each time.

At last, she stood.

"All right. Negasi, go to that far left panel. I'm sending your tablet the instructions. Jeridan. Go to the far right. I'm sending you instructions too. I'll work on the center one here."

Negasi hurried over and checked his tablet. There was a step-by-step guide that looked straightforward enough, even though there were more than a hundred steps.

He got to work, isolating circuits and cutting wires he could reattach later. He worked with speed and care, not wanting to wreck any irreplaceable Imperium tech. There was still so much on the station to recover. This AI, though, was the grand prize of them all, an actual individual from the Imperium era.

He couldn't even come close to estimating how important that would be.

Negasi kept working. When he was about a quarter of the way through, a change in the blue light coming from the screens made him look up.

The two flanking screens had gone black. The central one had changed from the face to the coruscating line.

Negasi got back to work, forcing himself not to hurry. He didn't dare make a mistake.

He had only gone through another half a dozen steps when movement made him turn.

Helen had stood up and jacked into the main terminal.

"No!"

Suddenly, Helen's body went rigid and her silvery eyes glowed with a bluish light.