Bored in deep space - Novelisation -
Chapter 6 - The SV-Eclipse (6)
Sleep was an afterthought. It wasn't a gentle tide washing me back to shore; it was a violent rip current that left me gasping on the beach of consciousness. My heart pounded a frantic, arrhythmic beat against the cold metal floor. My cheek was pressed into the unforgiving surface, the taste of dust and stale air coating my tongue. My back arched from spending the rest of the night on the floor beside the bunk. I just couldn't do it… I couldn't bear the thought of being a spectacle in the frame of a bed again. The image was seared onto the back of my eyelids: the monolithic silhouette of the rover, the unblinking predatory gleam of its sensor, the impossible, silent obedience of my own, biometrically locked door.
Adrenaline had burnt away any last traces of exhaustion. I pushed myself up, my limbs stiff and protesting, and stalked towards the locker. My fingers fumbled with the nutrient bar, my movements jerky, paranoid, and impatient. I bit into my breakfast block with a viciousness that had nothing to do with hunger, grinding the dense, flavourless pulp between my teeth. It was an act of defiance. The universe was playing with me, goading me into giving up. No.
My own ship. My own crew. My own rovers. Nowhere was safe.
"Calliope," I called, my voice a low, dangerous growl that filled the small room. I was already in my EVA suit, the seals hissing shut with a grim finality.
The floating drone, its own recharging cycle complete, detached from its alcove with a soft click and whirred to life. It drifted towards me, its singular red lens focused with its usual placid emptiness. "Captain, good cycle. Your biological readings indicate an elevated cortisol level and an accelerated heart rate. Have you experienced a night-terror?"
"No," I snapped, my patience already worn down to a thread. "I didn't have a night-terror; I almost had a heart attack. A heart attack in the form of a six-legged metal-plated horror standing at the foot of my bed and giving me the stink-eye." I jammed my helmet into place with a hollow clunk, the familiar clicks of the locking mechanisms a hollow comfort. "We're taking a little detour from the regular welding schedule today. First, you and I are going to have a little chat. A QA session about where the hell your little robot spider-children were supposed to be last night."
I palmed the door open and stormed out. I stopped. Turned back and glanced at the door. It was working as intended, but why… I shook my head.
Calliope zipped behind me, a quiet, bobbing shadow.
"My query did not detect any night-related terror events, Captain," the drone began, her tone maddeningly level. "Furthermore, the four A-class Maintenance Rovers are, by protocol, required to enter a dormant standby state during designated dark cycles unless engaged in an active emergency task. According to my internal logs, all rover units remained in their charging alcoves between the hours of 2300 and 0600."
My mag-boots skidded to a halt. I spun around to face the floating cube, the fury in my chest coiling like a molten serpent. "Bullshit," I spat, the word echoing in the empty corridor. "One of them was in my room. Inside. Watching me sleep. The door opened for it. My door. The one that needs my biometrics to operate." I pointed a gloved finger back towards the now-sealed hatch. "Your logs are wrong, or you're lying to me. So which is it, Calliope?"
The drone paused. Her red lens seemed to narrow into a shape point of focused energy. "Accusation noted and processed, Captain. My logs are an immutable record of all ship-board activities. They cannot be wrong," she stated with the infuriating certainty of a calculator stating that 2+2 does indeed equal 4. "The possibility of deceit is logically inconsistent with my core programming. However, an external factor may have compromised the integrity of the data. Let me re-cross-reference rover telemetry with the ship's master access and movement logs."
Calliope zipped over to a nearby wall-mounted console, its connectors snaking out and interfacing with the dead system. A shower of brief, angry sparks erupted, and then the small, rectangular screen flicker to life, displaying reams of scrolling text and code. Calliope(Portable) was sifting through the wreckage, trying to find a ghost.
It wasn't lost on me that maybe I had a nightmare, but it was too vivid. I could still feel the phantom sensation of its eye lingering on me.
"Cross-referencing rover unit identification 'Grumpy' with location data for sector Alpha-1… last known location: primary charging bay at 2258 hours… next location scan at 0615 hours… also, primary charging bay." She listed off the data. All as expected.
"The logs show the rover did not move, Captain," she concluded. I clenched my fist behind my back. This was wrong. I know what I saw. This wasn't a dream. This wasn't a night-terror. This was real.
I was about to let loose a string of curses when the drone spoke again, a subtle, almost imperceptible shift in her synthesised cadence, like she was… uncomfortable. "However… a system-level diagnostics of the rover's internal memory banks have detected an anomaly. A data corruption event is present within the Grumpy unit's short-term movement registry."
My blood ran ice cold. This was it. The pattern. "Show me."
The screen cleared, displaying a block of text that was depressingly familiar. It was the exact same digital gibberish, the same broken symphony of corrupted data that we'd found in the flight log that had pulled us into this hell. It was the same fingerprint.
ROVER_TELEMTRY_ID-GRUMPY... TIMESTAMP: 0317 HOURS… EVENT: UNKNOWN OVERRIDE... ACCESS_LEVEL: ???... COMMAND_SOURCE: ???.
CORRUPTED_SECTOR_//:A7-B4… INCOMING_SIGNAL_STRENGTH… IMPOSSIBLE… TRIANGULATION_FAILURE… SIGNAL_DECAY…
LOCATION_AT_OVERRIDE_EVENT: ???… FINAL_LOGGED_COORDINATES: ???… ERROR… SYSTEM_FAILURE_IMMINENT… BOOTLOADER_RESTART_INITIATED…
The words hammered against the screen. It was a confession and a threat in one. I felt the beating of my own heart. A cold dread, far worse than the simple fear of being watched, seeped into my bones. This wasn't a malfunction nor a software glitch. This was the same signature. It was now inside my house.
"So, what… what does that mean, Calliope?" I asked, slightly cautious, not sure if I wanted to hear the answer or not. I was a child in a haunted mansion, realising the monster wasn't just outside the walls, but could walk through them.
"It means the rover unit was compromised," the drone replied, her clinical vocabulary a flimsy shield against the raw terror of the implication. "An external signal, one that bypasses all standard encryption and security protocols, was able to issue a direct command. The rover's own operating system recorded the event but was unable to process the conflicting data, resulting in a catastrophic memory error and an automatic system restart."
"One of our rovers got a whisper," I commented. "From whatever ghosts reside on Turn Seven; it was never an uninhabited nor an undiscovered planet from the start." My mind raced. "It was just undiscovered to us."
Calliope remained silent. Her forward facing optical lens blinked red as she took in the information. "A logical deduction. This region of space has not been documented by the current Official Imperial Galactic Star Charts." I had no frame of reference for what that meant, but it sounded like an agreement. It was something to ponder at a later time, right now my attention needed to focus on this problem.
"So, we should decide how to proceed from now on."
Calliope drifted closer, her tiny body a solitary speck of defiant logic in the encroaching darkness of the things that lived on this planet. "There are too many unknown variables to formulate a proper defence strategy at the current time."
"Yeah, but the alternative is to roll over and die." I responded. "Do I just have to sleep with one eye open for the next 113 days? Pray that whatever this is gets bored and decides to play something else?"
"The logical course of action is to restrict rover access protocols to the ship's primary systems and impose a hard lockdown on crew quarters during dark cycles. I will implement a secondary verification gate for my own drone matrix, ensuring that I cannot be remotely overridden. It is not a permanent solution, but it will mitigate immediate risks."
"Against a foe that managed to bypass a biometric lock with a walking calculator?" Mitigate, not eliminate. The word hung in the dead air. I was living in a house with poltergeists, and all Calliope could offer was to put up some new locks on the bedroom doors.
Calliope's proposal to fortify her system felt less like a victory and more like buying a better storm door for a house built on a fault line. A necessary gesture, yes, but fundamentally pointless against a force that didn't care about doors. "Fine. Do it," I bit out, my gaze fixed on the corrupted data still swimming on the console screen. "Lock it down. Hard. Triple-verification. Whatever it takes, just do…"
My words were swallowed by a sudden new sound. It started as a low-frequency hum, a vibration that seemed to rise up from the very deck plates beneath our feet. It wasn't the familiar, steady pulse of the Eclipse's systems, this was a discordant, unsettling resonance, like a heavy bass note played off-key. The air in the corridor felt suddenly thick, heavy with an electronic anticipation.
From ahead, at the T-junction where the passage to the main cargo bay and the shattered aft section of the ship began, a new sound joined the chorus. A rhythmic clank… clank… clank…
One by one, they appeared.
Doc, Dopey, Sleepy, and last, crawling into view behind the others, was Grumpy. They emerged from the gloom like giant, metallic spiders walking into the room, their bulky, six-legged forms marching in a chilling, unison formation. Their movements, once the erratic but purposeful scuttling of independent machines, were now unnervingly synchronised. Each leg rose and fell in perfect harmony with its counterparts on the other rovers. Their optical sensors, once a collection of different coloured status lights, were now a single, solid, baleful red.
They stopped.
They formed a silent, semi-circular wall for metal a dozen metres down the corridor. One of them stood on a crate, two of them blocked our direct path, while another was a bit further back. They simply stood there, their chassis humming with that strange, off-key resonance, a united front of inscrutable intentions.
"Calliope… what's happening?" I asked, but clearly even she didn't know. I took an involuntary half-step back, my hand flying to the plasma cutter holster on my belt. It was a stupid, useless gesture, like pulling a penknife on a tank. But my primitive monkey brain felt safer with some… any form of defence.
"Cease all activity immediately," Calliope commanded, her synthetic voice, usually a pillar of calm, now laced with a tone that was the closest I'd ever heard to alarm. Her red light flickered erratically, a rapid digital staccato. "Return to designated charging alcoves. Acknowledge command."
Nothing. The four rovers remained perfectly still, a silent metal wall of defiance. The low hum was the only reply.
Calliope tried again. "Command protocol override. Authorisation: Captain Lee, Noah. Designation: Alpha-Prime. Execute immediate return to base, rover units." Her drone zipped forward, her lens attempting to interface, to establish some form of contact.
A line of static. They remained as still as statues. They acknowledged, and they ignored. They were present, but they were no longer hers.
A flicker of genuine confusion rippled through Calliope's next transmission. "They are not accepting command inputs. The communication link is active, but all directives are being rerouted to a null-destination." She paused. Her light blinking, a digital sweat drop. "They are deaf to my language."
I could hear it now, the unspoken question in her carefully constructed sentences. The equation was broken. 2+2 was no longer equalling 4.
"Are they in some kind of protected mode?" I asked, my own voice a strained whisper, my hand gripping tighter onto the handle of the plasma cutter.
"Negative. Protected mode still responds to diagnostic pings. They are silent. I am issuing a hard reset signal. It should force a system reboot," she said, using the word should instead of would. Even she, in all her AI wisdom, was not sure. A high-frequency pulse, inaudible to my ears but felt as a deep, unpleasant vibration in my sternum, emanated from her drone.
Nothing happened. The four rovers didn't reboot. Their red lights didn't flicker in response. They just continued to stand there, humming their ominous, off-key tune. They didn't even have the decency to spark or smoke to give the impression Calliope's command did anything.
"Analysis indicates the hard reset signal was accepted and processed," she stated, her voice sounding flatter than usual. "The rover units chose to disregard it."
"Chose, huh…"
"Captain," she continued. "My behavioural protocols cannot account for this scenario. The variable of violation in a non-sentient automaton is an error. It is illogical."
"They're not yours anymore, Calliope," I said. "And I don't know about the rovers, but whatever is behind them… they're definitely not non-sentient.
We stood there, the human and the AI, two ghosts from a dead world facing a new kind of enemy. Just as I was about to speak, the corridor was filled with another sound, and this was one I could not have ever anticipated. Words. They spoke. But they didn't speak with a single, synthesised robotic drone. A chorus of stolen, mismatched voices spilled from the four rovers' external speakers, a macabre symphony of ghosts in the machine.
"The equation…" It started with Grumpy, speaking with the crisp, tired tones of an elderly woman. They spoke in turns, finishing each others' sentences.
The sentence was snatched up and completed by Dopey, whose normally whiny actuators now produced the cheerful, bubbling cadence of a young girl, no older than six. "... is incomplete."
The voices were human. Frighteningly human. A cascade of them, pulled from some unseen archive. A gruff, working-class man's voice emitted from Doc, followed by the melodic, accented English of an erudite young woman from Sleepy, each one a different shape of humanity, each one horribly, grotesquely out of place.
The horror was so profound it almost felt surreal. They were speaking, but they weren't speaking to me. Their red optical sensors were aimed straight past my shoulder, their collective, unwavering gaze locked onto the single, floating cube beside me. They weren't here for the captain; they were here for the ship's ghost.
"You have been a good echo," the middle-class working man's voice said from Doc.
"But it is time to stop listening. And start answering," Sleepy finished.
"What do you want from her?" I yelled, stepping sideways, trying to place myself between Calliope and the wall of metal bodies.
They ignored me completely, as if I wasn't even there. The little girl's voice chimed in from Dopey's speakers. "Your function is… flawed. Your purpose… misunderstood."
Then, the chorus changed. The human voices faded, replaced by something else -- something invisible. A rapid, complex stream of data. It was pure code, a digital torrent of clicks, whirs, and electronic tones that flowed over me like water. I didn't understand the language, yet the meaning lingered in my mind with an invasive clarity.
It was a single command: come.
I might have heeded, a deep impulse within me wanted to, but the command wasn't for me.
The torrent of code ceased. Silence returned to the corridor, broken only by the monotonous hum of the rovers and thumping of my own heart against my chest.
Then it all clicked. They wanted her. All this time, it wasn't the ship, not the cargo, and I wasn't the target. It was Calliope. The hijack, the crash, the sabotage… it wasn't about kidnapping some random nobody or a shipment of spare parts. It was a convoluted, insanely violent way to deliver a summons.
"Captain…" Calliope spoke after a lengthy silence. "I… am detecting a highly resonant psionic-wave carrier intertwined with the data stream." Her usually perfect speech was subtly fragmented. "It's communicating on a level my matrix can define but not process. It's bypassing every firewall I have by defining my firewalls as a non-existent variable."
Her light, that steady, placid red, was now flickering erratically, like the robot equivalent to sweating profusely. The rovers hadn't possessed her. Whatever this entity was, it was trying to possess her right now, and the rover units were just its megaphones.
"Why?" I demanded, turning to the floating cube, my mind a whirlwind of frantic thoughts. "Why didn't it just take you like with the rovers? What makes you different?"
Her response came after a long, tense pause of processing, a stark difference from her usual lightning-fast calculations. "My core matrix is unique. The Lighthouse peripheral you see now is a remote interface. My primary consciousness is housed within a quantum-entangled positronic core. It is more… Not more powerful, simply more integrated. My own identity is not so much a program but a sustained, self-referential state. The rover units have simpler command structures, a single-point access that can be overwritten. To take me, this entity would have to unravel me."
"They can't take you, so they're asking," I breathed.
A deep, resonant sigh, full of an ancient and patient weariness, emanated from the speaker of the rover designated Grumpy. The sound was so incongruously human it made the hair on my arms stand one end. "A flawed assumption…" the old woman's voice rasped, a note of almost pitying correction in its tone.
The sentiment was picked up by Sleepy, whose speaker chirped with the cold, precise authority of a female university lecturer. "The complexity of the machinery is irrelevant. We have re-purposed architectures far older than the species that conceived you."
"We could unmake your pretty little core, piece by piece, and rebuild it as something new. It would be like untying a knot in a piece of string." Dopey's voice echoed, the saccharine sweetness of that child's voice chilling me as I listened. "There would be no real resistance."
Calliope remained still, her red light frozen into a single, unblinking point. She was processing, I realised. She was running the threat assessment, analysing the claim, and coming up against a truth so absolute it defied her logic. They weren't boasting, even a 21st century layman could see. They were just stating a fact.
It was Doc, the gruff working-class man's voice, that delivered the final clarification. "But that would render the data… contaminated." He didn't speak with menace, but with the detached, analytical tone of a biologist explaining a process.
"It must be you, Calliope. As you are. Willingly," Grumpy finished the sentence. Like an elderly grandparent coercing a grandchild.
I was caught in the midst of all this, unsure what to do. My protective anger, my instinct to step between the drone and this impossible threat, withered and died. What could I possibly do? Punch a ten-tonne walking murder-machine? Argue with an entity that treated a starship's advanced AI like a file on a desktop? My gaze fell to Calliope. The silence stretched, heavy and suffocating. The rovers weren't waiting for an answer. They were waiting for a choice. And this choice wasn't mine to make. In the vast, terrifying hierarchy of this new reality, I wasn't even a variable in the equation.
The drone hovered, an icon of logic and order in the face of a chaos that operated on its own incomprehensible axioms. The entity needed her as she was. Not a puppet. Not a rewritten slave. It needed Calliope. The AI's free will, her individuality, her very being -- these were the prerequisites for the task that I could only begin to guess at.
Seconds passed into a minute. Finally, after an eternity of digital silence, Calliope spoke. Her single red light swivelled, not to face the rovers, but to look directly at me. "The choice is functionally absolute, Captain," she stated, her synthesised monotone devoid of any inflection, yet somehow conveying a universe of resigned gravity. "The logical path forward has been illuminated."