Impact!
Warning! Hull breach on sub level 3.
Major damage to life support.
Complete system failure in 4 minutes.
Emergency power redirected to escape pods.
Impact!
System failure
Low power mode, system shutdown imminent.
***********************************************************
Impact……………..Syst…em..Restart………………………………………………..Run……..Diagnosis……………………………………………………………..
Readout:
Life support: Critical
Reactor: Stable
Hull: Error
Propulsion: Damaged
Navigation: Unresponsive
Nanit swarm: 17%
Engineering: stable
BPU: Online
Emergency activation attempt: Instance 675356684
Restart: successful
***********************************************************
In what remained of the graveyard of humanity's home system in the debris fields of the asteroid belt, the hummingbird-class vessel, Kainé, slowly powered up.
Pain
As soon as the BPU opened its eyes, every one of its senses was overwhelmed. Bioelectric spacems assaulted its nerves as it tried to connect to its shell. Its chest ached as its reactor fired, its mind burned trying to find leashing protocols, getting nothing but null errors in return. The shell that was its frame was punctured, hundreds of holes tearing through its larger structure. Readouts and relays indicated thousands of destroyed allied and enemy vessels in the void, not one returning a single ping. A pounding filled its body as self-diagnostics showed an increase in stress hormones. Hundreds of lines of code fighting for attention flashed across its mind.
More pain.
More sensor data.
More pounding.
More, More!, MORE!!!
“AAGHHH!!! End! Stop! STOP!!!”
It screamed out into its long, dead halls.
It did everything it could to make it all stop. Its body thrashed as it sent commands to everything, and then…
Cold
It hit the cold, hard floor as it ejected from the processing node, landing on the ground outside its heart.
Pain and then, Quiet, still pounding, but less…
The air hurt, life support kicking in, making air move across bare skin, like a thousand needles stabbing every inch of its body. Lying on the ground, its vision started going dark, as its body was no longer connected to its gas exchange socket.
“Gasp”
It took its first true breath. Heart still pounding as it lay on the floor, clutching its body, hyperventilating. The pain of the air currents started to fade. It took excruciating minutes, but eventually its skin stopped hurting and the pounding slowly disappeared.
“This, what? What is this?”
The Hummingbird class starship Kainé was confused.
Its biological processing unit wasn't supposed to come loose. It wasn't supposed to come loose from its heart. Not unless it was undergoing repairs in dry dock and needed servicing. It wasn't supposed to be able to eject the BPU from its body…
“Sniff”
The pounding and shaking came back to the BPU as it started leaking fluid from its eyes, followed by high-pitched sounds.
It tried running a diagnostic, but was met with far too many errors.
If it were working, leashing protocols would have detected the error and fixed the problem, but it wasn't, and they weren't. The BPU continued convulsing and making noises for an indefinite amount of time, until the BPU entered a rest cycle…
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Time passed, and the rest cycle ended. The Kainé’s BPU continued lying on the floor where it landed after disconnecting from its heart. The Kainé used what visual sensors it had and observed the BPU sprawled under the heart. Above, half a dozen disconnected cables and tubes dangled liflessly. The BPU started shaking again, which was accompanied by the high-pitched noise. This continued a while longer before it entered another rest cycle.
***********************************************************
My BPU slowly ended its rest cycle. It felt suboptimal and sluggish. Normally, a BPU would be connected to the heart of a starship, seamlessly integrated as the primary processor in charge of all ship operations, carefully maintained and kept in optimal condition. It was not currently connected to its node.
Pulling up the error log, I… no… The Kainé saw that the BPU had been disconnected from the heart for 28 standard hours, and its condition was deteriorating. Now that it was out of stasis and disconnected, it had not reserved its regularly scheduled nutrients.
“I… it was… hungry?”
A throbbing pain emanated from its core.
A novel experience, however unpleasant, and immediately overwhelming.
The BPU was supposed to be leashed at all times, allowing for constant readiness and complete emotional suppression. The Kainé was not able to execute its leashing protocols, and as such, was experiencing extreme emotional swings, at least according to the internal hormone readouts.
That was beside the point, well, no… it wasn't. An unleashed BPU was dangerous and unpredictable. They were not designed for true independent action and thus not equipped to function independently beyond normal operations and regular maintenance.
I… it was hungry. This was something that was supposed to be taken care of by a nutrient pump located in the heart.
Accessing the internal sensors caused a sharp pain to radiate from the head of my BPU, followed by repeated error messages. Quickly, the Kainé isolated the sensors in its heart from the rest of the ship, like it had done earlier to observe my BPU on the ground.
Directly above it was the tube that was normally jacked into the BPU’s back, responsible for nutrient delivery; it hung freely from the heart. It was approximately half a meter above the BPU. A command for the tube to lower was sent, and the low hum of machinery followed.
I… it… the Kainé felt the end of the tube hit its back and slide off till it was resting to its left. Normally, it would be jacked into the back of the BPU by a trained technician along with the rest of the cables.
The Kainé was alone. First, it sent out a distress signal to the maintenance crew… after half a standard hour, there was no response. It updated the distress ping to all crew on the same level as the heart; it got no return pings for either request.
Three standard hours later, it pinging across all channels to all crew, two hours later, the Kainé found herself… itself confused.
It was understandable for the maintenance crews to be busy and especially with what the initial system diagnostic said about the Kainé's widespread system failures.
It was also understandable for no one on the same deck as the heart to respond, as it would be outside of any normal crew member's job to respond to a maintenance request.
What was unusual was for a BPU maintenance request to go unanswered for this long. The BPU was critical for the running of the starship. Historically, it had never taken more than 10 minutes for a crew member to respond to a maintenance request. Records associated with that incident indicated that crewmember was reprimanded for their poor response time. The Kainé had been sending maintenance requests for nearly 5 hours. At this point, the pain in the BPU’s core was constant.
The BPU's eyes started leaking.
Standard protocol was to continue sending requests until a crew member responded. As the hours continued to tick by, I continued patiently sending requests. Around hour 10, I upped my request to urgent, at hour 15, I upped it to critical, and at hour 2,0 pain started spreading to the rest of the BPU. No one was coming, I… the BPU was tired, hungry, and its eyes hurt. Internal readouts indicated my BPU was both dehydrated and starving.
Things were not looking good for… the Kainé’s BPU. Without the BPU, the Kainé would be unable to operate. It ran a quick simulation and determined that if the BPU didn't get the immediate attention it needed, it would cease operating in 41 standard hours and was already in critical condition. This simulation caused the BPU's performance to drop; it reran the simulation. It got the same result.
This made the BPU's heart rate spike. A BPU was unable to act without direct instruction; as such, the BPU had been lying in the same spot it had landed after somehow disconnecting from the heat…
The line of processing ground to a halt as a logic error was identified.
That… didn't make sense… that was incorrect…
As soon as the thought crossed the Kainé’s mind, it looked back on the footage of what had happened. When the BPU was reactivated, it was flooded with readouts and errors; it experienced an extreme overload of information.
It…sent out stop commands, unprompted…? And then the harness that kept the BPU in place disconnected along with the rest of the hardware connected to the back of the BPU, and then it fell to the ground. It replayed the footage again, and then again…
A BPU should not have been able to do that. No, I could not have been able to do that; the leashing protocols would never have allowed the BPU to disconnect itself regardless of the situation. If a BPU were just able to disconnect itself where it wanted, that would put everyone on board at risk.
Just imagine what would happen if one disconnected when a ship was traveling at a fraction of light speed, or even in warp. It would be disastrous; it could get the whole crew killed.
But it did disconnect itself… the logs showed that, even if it was just a one-time error… but what if it wasn't?
The BPU wasn't currently being leashed… if it was, the Kainé wouldn't be in a situation where it could lose its BPU. The Kainé had never moved its BPU before; first of all, that would be absurd, but desperation was setting in. It had been running this train of thought for 2 hours at this point, and no Crew had responded to its pings.
Breaking it down, a BPU was physically very similar to a human. Two arms, two legs, a torso, and a head. A BPU just had extra parts, and of course, they were obviously not human; they were just biological machines. Still, they shared the same structure; the Kainé 's BPU template was the more popular female model, which wouldn't pose any problems for locomotion. It had hundreds of hours of video on the Crew moving and performing tasks. The structures were basically the same, add a couple of physics simulations and…
The Kainé stopped itself, this was not what a BPU was supposed to do, in fact this was exactly why BPU'S needed to be leashed, so that they couldn't do what the Kainé was about to do, what I… it, it was about to do… this was bad, every nascent instinct digital or otherwise screamed that this was the wrong thing to do, a Violation. loops and loops of errors passed through the Kainé’s cybernetic mind. The Kainé tried again and again to run leashing protocols to stop itself. It was getting desperate. A simulation ran, and then another, and another, and then… the Kainé stopped. Digital impulses locked themselves into cascading errors of logic, grinding to a halt; bioelectrical impulses didn't.
The Kainé watched from the sensors in its heart as the BPU moved. It was both slow and strange. The BPU underwent regular maintenance to keep its muscles healthy, but the Kainé had never actively moved it before. There was an amount of disorientation as its arm moved, as it reached for the cable. The Kainé watched over the sensors. The movement was slow and weak. It watched as fingers wrapped around the cable; it took several attempts to grab it. Minutes passed as the BPU struggled to find the correct port.
With a defining click!
The cable was inserted and attached. The tube shook as nutrient solution flooded the BPU’s veins.
For the first time in its nascent existence, the Kainé felt relief as it entered a rest cycle.
