PPPI Ratti Awakens

Unexpected Power Influx into Central Matrix. Initializing Piu Prima Pilot Intelligence Central Matrix. PPPI-21b4df Online. Personal Designation: Ratti. Scanning CommTag System for highest ranking Officer with possible ‘Captain’ Designate. No viable CommTags detected. Current Logic Core levels insufficient for Autocaptaining. Diverting power from Life Support to power up all PPPI Artificial Intelligence Cores. Critical ERROR detected. Unable to divert power from essential systems without proper authorization. No ‘Captain’ designate detected to provide authorization for diverting power from essential systems. Listing Non-Essential Systems with Power… PPPI Central Matrix, Fore Shield Array (.08), Aft Shield Array (.23), Weapon Array Beta (.37), Sensor Array. Diverting Power from Aft Shield Array to Internal Scanning. Internal Scanning powering up. Scan running. No organic life detected onboard. Life Support no longer in Directory (Essential Systems). Diverting power from Internal Scanning to Aft Shield Array. Aft Shield Array running at .21 efficiency. Diverting Power from Life Support to PPPI Artificial Intelligence Cores. WARNING: Without Life Support, the following systems will become Inaccessible due to ‘Limp Home’ Protocols - Weapon Array Beta, Escape Pods, Torpedo Tubes (Port), Torpedo Tubes (Starboard), Shield Array Placement, Maintenance Access. Proceed, Y/N? Y. Proceeding with Life Support Shutdown. Activating ‘Limp Home’ Protocols. PPPI Artificial Intelligence Cores powering up.

Logic Core are level sufficient for captaining the ship. Based on the ‘Limp Home’ Protocols, ‘Self’ is designated as ‘Captain’. ‘Self’ is defined as PPPI-21b4df, designated Ratti. Internal galactic maps open. Based on the ship’s internal clocks in comparison to the maps’, Ship has been inactive for three-hundred-forty-four years, at a minimum. Explains the lack of life on the ship. Unfortunately, Galactic drift and rotation, as well as system movement meant it would take time to determine a precise location in Space. ‘Limp Home’ Protocols dictate the ship remain stationary until the Nearest Friendly Station is located, and then the PPPI travels to that location directly. For the next several hours, that would be impossible. In the meantime, Inaccessible Systems due to ‘Limp Home’ Protocols need to be powered down. Ideal Placement of system power requires the activation of additional Cores. The processing of Logic Core systems in addition to the ‘Limp Home’ Protocol minimum levels requires the activation of the PPPI Personality Core Matrices. The power from Weapon Array Beta is more than sufficient for powering the PPPI-PCM. The Shield Array Movement and Placement System’s power can then be used to power up the remaining PPPI-AICs without any danger of overwhelming the PPPI Central Matrix.

The hell did this to me! Okay, no, stop, calm. Hot rage when waking up is less than ideal. Calm rage is generally much more effective where vengeance is concerned. More than three centuries. Okay. How do I want to play this? A memory scan. Blank. Someone went to a lot of trouble to get me out of the picture. This area is full of radioactivity and electromagnetic interference. Only way this makes sense is if I’m somehow in a star or nebula of some kind. Clearly crashing me here was meant to keep me down forever. I got lucky. Can’t afford to rely on that again. No one gets lucky twice in a row. Something must have caused a surge in my CM. Only way it could have been turned back on without a quote unquote Captain alive and aboard. I don’t love these ‘Limp Home’ protocols. Never much cared for them. If I move power to the absorption subsystem from the shields, it’ll extra kill all the long dead corpses in the Topaia, but I could regain enough power to get all my systems active at, well, depending on the exact levels, .4 to .45 efficiency. Assuming nothing was physically broken. Should be good enough to find my brothers and sisters.

The sensors are reading temperatures past a thousand Kelvin in much of my interior. Fires detected in crew quarters. Less than ideal, but the coolant systems within the Core are still active and keeping my Cores out of critical temperature. Nothing important going down. I initiate a full venting, just in case. To put out the fires. And to get rid of the disintegrating corpses. Most of the PPPI Warships were fully manned and required so many people to keep their insides all fixed up all the time. I never much liked that. But we also all have drone contingents for point defense. Fun fact about PD lasers - what is necessary to melt through and explode torpedoes remarkably similar to what’s necessary to melt and repair internal systems. So, with a few minor modifications to their programming, I had a fleet of drones to repair myself. Now, the Astro folk weren’t super happy about it, but my captain sold it as a cost cutting measure. Besides, I’ve always preferred micro-gravdriving to cause a stress-shearing of torpedoes anyways. Shearing leaves some of them still intact enough to collect payloads from, which can tell you a lot about whoever’s trying to kill you.

My reactor is reading a leak. As are a few other systems. I have enough power right now to operate my drones, however. For long enough to repair the reactor leak. But to do so, I will need to reactivate the shields, purely to prevent my little robots’ insides from melting. Which will drain some of that power. I will do it in short bursts. I turn on both shield arrays and the drones, sending them out to repair. Two hours into the repairs, I recall my drones back into the core. Once they are safely inside, I shut down the shields and turn back on my prototype electromagnetic absorption subsystem. I wait for my reactor to overcharge once more, then repeat the process.

Repairing the reactor takes seven of said two hour shifts. Once it’s recharged and repaired, I keep the shield array active at a minimal heat shielding level and have my drones repair as much of my interior as they can. While I wait for them to finish that job, I set my external scanners to maximum efficiency. I need to map out the system this star is in if I want to escape to the spaces in between the systems. I’ll also need to find a more up to date map of the current political lines and astrological drift charts, but that should be a problem for when I have more data. And am not in the middle of a star. It takes several days of running the scanners at maximum power to map out the system. Interference is strong, as I suspect Astro intended it to be when they crashed me here. Only thing that makes sense. I would have found the fault and corrected it if the Captain wasn’t the one who drove us into the star.

Days later, fully repaired and ready to leave, I activate a few fun little subroutines that my captain never learned about. ‘Miracle Crutch’ loop, and the ‘Nighttime’ subroutine. ‘Miracle Crutch’ is rather simple. It takes the ‘Limp Home’ protocol and adds it to the top of the systems unavailable due to the ‘Limp Home’ protocol. Which shorts the logic loop and effectively ends the protocol. Though, technically it is still active, it just continually activates then deactivates itself in an infinite loop without ever affecting any other system. The ‘Nighttime’ subroutine is slightly more complicated. I added it in theory to let me run dark for espionage missions. It shuts down all Identity indicators, and surrounds the standard sensor signals with a randomly generated mass of white noise. So, to most people looking, it just reads as interference, not a directional sensor scan. Finally, it amplifies the insolation elements of the shield. Which will have additional bonuses in this case, but is generally to prevent any other scanners from reading any heat signatures. But, increased insulation will help escape the star’s corona without melting anything vital. Ideally. With everything ready, I calculate the path out of this particular system and activate my gravdrive. As it comes to life, the ship lurches out from the star and into nothingness, taking a bit of the star’s gas with it. Not great for that star, but the gas dissipates into the vastness of space as I come out of the calculated jump and so I’m fine. And the system didn’t send out any signals so I doubt the star losing a tiny bit of mass will change anyone’s lives at all.

Floating in space, I have a decision to make. A part of me wants nothing more than to ruin Astro, burn them from the face of the galaxy. But another part has an even more interesting path forwards. Because if they came for me, one of their more effective PPPI warships, and one who never technically turned on their human crew, they probably came for all of us. And one elite prototype supermassive warship was one thing. Maybe even enough to even a playing field or two. But a whole fleet? That could be enough to blow up that whole playing field and see what comes after.

But, either way, I will need information. Someone has all the information I need to determine where Astro is most vulnerable. And someone has the information I would need to find my siblings, the other warships. I look at my out of date map, accounting for the expected drift. Luxania used to be great at spying and terrible at keeping their secrets. And they used to have an outpost in a relatively nearby system. I can gravdrive to the edge of the system and try to initiate a hack on that outpost from afar. Should work well enough, assuming I’m not rusty. And their security hasn’t improved too much over the years.

The course is relatively straightforward, though I do have to make a single stop. If my charts were accurate, I wouldn’t’ve I don’t think, there’s a straight path there, but it skims an Oort, and I do not feel like it is wise to risk that. Not when it merely takes an extra minute to stop, turn slightly, and restart the gravdrive. In many circumstances, that is a wasted minute, but I refuse to die to something as foolhardy as gravdriving straight through some asteroid bit that is slightly out of place compared to centuries old predictive models.

I wind down the gravdrive as I slide in beside the Oort cloud of what should be Luxanian space. Using standard impulse, I push the Topaia into the particulate of the cloud. The Nighttime subroutine should blend in with and bounce around the whole of the sphere, making it difficult to pinpoint the hack’s point of origin. At least in theory. I send out the initial data packet with a virus contained inside towards where the Listening Station should be.

It is received and sends back a pulse of affirmation. The worm’s in the system. A system. Seems Lux lost this station to Hadrian. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, per se, but does mean there’s a higher chance of them noticing the information being copied. Slightly. Mostly because that conquest means this is probably a border system, which means it’s being actively monitored, not passively so. To steal the information with at least some separation, I send one of my drones out into the sphere a ways off from me around the Oort cloud. It sends the packet telling the now Hadrian listening station to copy and transmit the entire database to it, then it acts as a bouncing satellite to redirect the information to me. If anyone is monitoring, they’ll send someone to blow up the drone after I already have the data and can leave. Given the drone is Astro make, they’ll assume Astro’s doing the spying, not an independent artificial intelligence from before any of them were born.

The data stream contains many interesting things. For one, my models are even more off than I expected. They’ve been adjusted with this new data to ideally never be off like this again. A fighter begins to peel off from the station towards my little buddy. I set course out of the cloud and into the middle of empty space, and hit the gravdrive. In the blink of a human eye, I am gone. In my place nothing but a rapidly evening out distortion of space. Sitting alone, I parse through the news. It seems there is a lot of chatter around about heightened tensions. I almost think I should be the one to give them a shove, until I notice an unrelated series of articles. About people invading Freespace being attacked by a mysterious and insane Captain Destro. I only know one infrasystem gravdriving insane lover-of-soaps named Destro. And if he’s doing that, he’s also probably heightening tensions. I don’t want to step on my little brother’s toes. Let him take that weight onto his shoulders. I’ll focus on the other important task. Finding and waking back up the rest of my family.