Pandoras Box at 100 Times the Speed of Light

Jessie entered in all the data necessary for space travel in the modern era and hit go. Now, it was Chip's turn to show off. Chip was waiting for this moment for what seemed like an eternity as she watched Jessie getting ready for real travel. Chip started the antimatter matter reactor and instantly she groaned softly as her real body, that of an interstellar spaceship groaned from the influx of energy buildup as the super-capacitors filled for initial compression. The noise caught Jessie off guard a bit as she raised an eyebrow, not expecting something so routine to elicit a reaction. Chip glowed brighter as the power increased and the antimatter reactor spun up. Once the capacitors were filled she flashed. Then all at once one hundred gigawatts* of power exploded into the alcubierre drive compressing space and accelerating them to one hundred times the speed of light in a little over 4 milliseconds. She breathed out like she had been holding her breath and smiled in euphoria at the feeling of the raw power that came with the initial compression as the glow faded from her back to normal as everything stabilized once again.

'I love that feeling' Chip thought every time they went into faster than light (FTL).

"What was that?" Jessie sarcastically commented, breaking Chip's moment in residual euphoria.

"You really don't know anything about AI do you?" Chip snarkily replied.

"Of course I do! I don't know everything but I know that AI most certainly don't react to initial compression in any way." Jessie said as she crossed her arms while turning her chair to face Chip directly, who was still sitting on the free space of her right console.

"Of course they do, you should know that they wouldn't be responsive during that time. So of course they react to it, duh" She said as she smiled, assured in her victory.

Jessie, however, had plans to use this opportunity to get under her skin.

"Then why did it look like this" and she groaned a bit making it obviously more sexualized than it looked on Chip. In her opinion it looked like Chip experienced pleasure like that of a deep massage, very pleasurable but not sexual in any way. She could tell though that Chip wanted it to be seen as something more noble than that though. So she teased her.

"ah, bu.., NO! It was not!" Chip said looking flustered.

Chip was almost mortified that she looked like that and immediately checked the footage of herself. 'I did not look like that! I'll move that footage of her doing that to a folder for later though, I'm sure I can use it later'.

Jessie chuckled at the flustered Chip and returned to a more serious tone.

"What's the travel time to our next stop?" She asked.

Chip automatically displayed the countdown clock on the main window as usual when Jessie asked, but realized a fraction of a second later that she was asking her directly, not as a blanket command.

"Eighteen days, seventeen hours, five minutes, and sixteen seconds" She said as she smiled happily. 'It feels good to be actually talked to' it was something that usually only occasionally happened, mostly by her owners randomly and engineers who believed every machine was as alive as them. Jessie tended to talk to her as if she was, but almost always issued commands when it came to actually work. This time though she was talking to her, still as a command, but to her, not at her.

"We have plenty of time to kill then" Jessie said

She sighed automatically in anticipation of the boredom that came with space flight. She looked over at Chip who simply nodded and hopped off her place on the console and walked into the corridor and quickly turning left into Jessie's room.

Jessie smiled half in anticipation for her days ahead with her partner of now just over six years. She had bought Chip when she was twenty three having worked tirelessly for over a year mining silver in the asteroid belt. No one wanted the job because it required almost no other human interaction because the asteroid was a secret and the company wanted to keep it that way. They paid a premium for it as well. Chip is an old ship, one with outdated technology and is slow, a new ship can easily reach twice the speed Chip can. But, being able to haul class eight equipment made it worth while. When she was new Chip would have been one of the fastest cargo ships money could buy, as well as having the ability to move top of the line equipment. Now there are some class nine ships although extremely rare because almost nothing besides quantum entangled matrix computers which even the larger corporations have difficulty building, she's seen requests float into the system to move those to planet scale military bases, and only one for each at that.

Chip sat in one of the storage docs for years at her home station, she had eyed the black ship since she wanted to be a captain of her own ship.

'It feels weird knowing that she is alive though, I wonder what she's up to' Jessie heard the shower water turn on and chuckled a bit at how Chip acted. 'She is both like a little kid and an adult' Jessie thought.

She looked at the timer on the front window and remembered her surprise in how Chip could navigate unaided. A ship as old as Chip would normally require almost constant adjustments and corrections when traveling the stars. Probably the only reason what made her as cheap as she was, especially with only two rooms for quarters, and that her previous owner died while on the station. The fact that she acted like a brand new ship, or even better when she was new, was probably a secret passed from captain to captain. Jessie got up and headed after Chip, smiling.

"Things are going to be a lot more interesting from now on" Jessie said to herself as she entered her room.

Chip hurried out of the bridge with the express purpose of disposing the evidence that was contained within her, as she arrived at the bathroom she turned the shower on in order to drown out the sound of the toilet, which she planned to use. She kept an eye out with the camera in the hallway while she dumped the random food mush into the toilet, sighing in relief when it was done. Now she could relax some and again explore the feeling of water as she stuck her hand under the spray. She stepped under the shower again and realized that she absolutely did not like having the wet shirt on, the dry shirt was okay, but not wet. Just then Jessie walked in.

"Couldn't even wait five minutes to make a shower scene huh" Jessie said sarcastically and with a wink.

"No! I simply wanted to feel what wet fabric felt like." she lied as she puffed up her cheeks.

"uh-huh" Jessie sounded. "How is it?"

"I hate it" Chip replied still standing in the shower with the soaked shirt on.

"Then take it off and throw it in the cleaner, I'll pick out a new one."

Jessie didn't put as much effort into choosing as she did the first time, assuming that it will be replaced soon enough anyways. She pulled a black T-shirt from her selection and hung it on a hook in the bathroom.

'If she doesn't voluntarily put it on then I'll just make her when she comes out'

It was just before normal lunch time and she needed to reorganize the kitchen, she knew the cleaning robots did their best, but they could never organize the actual stuff. Sure enough when she entered it was spotless except for the random containers cleaned and set about randomly. It only took Jessie a few minutes to organize the kitchen back to what she was used to, then she walked over to the storage closet across the hall and collected ingredients to make a couple portions of hash for a brunch at lunch time. She chopped vegetables and some wrapped and squeezed some tofu while she started cooking down the veggies. In a few minutes she unwrapped the tofu and diced it and fried it. Once everything was done she mixed it together and served it on two plates, giving herself a majority since she actually needed food and Chip did not. Jessie went back to her room to find Chip looking through her stuff.

"What are you doing?!"

"Looking, obviously" Chip replied.

"I can see that, but you could have at the very least asked!"

"Then can I look at your stuff?" She replied with a sidelong grin while continuing to rummage.

"NO, besides I made lunch, so come on" Jessie said as she walked over to Chip and lifted her up and threw her over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

Chip squeaked at the sudden motion of being picked up, but went along with it out of anticipation of food. She looked through the camera in the kitchen to see a couple plates of food on the table, a bit surprised at having a plate at a table, it would be the first time. When Jessie finally sat her at the table she immediately reached to grab the food with her hands.

"no no no, I can't be having you eat with your hands, use the fork" Jessie said

'I'm still not super great at the having hands like this thing' Chip thought but attempted to comply. She gripped the fork in a fist.

'This will do for now, I'll figure it out in a day or so once my coordination is better.' she thought.

Jessie thought the way Chip held her fork and started trying the food was adorable, but she could tell that at every passing moment she was getting better at it.

"Why were you looking through my stuff?" Jessie asked thinking why would she ever need to, it's not like she can't see inside the ship, there are cameras. It did make her a little embarrassed that Chip has seen her naked more times than she could count, but at the same time she wasn't even sure what would make Chip feel attracted to someone, or something for that matter.

"I've never seen inside your room before" Chip replied while smiling from the hash.

It was true, there were no cameras in the rooms for privacy and Jessie hadn't taken a video in her room before, always opting to use the bridge when she made video calls, she was simply curious.

"Really? I would have figured since you could see in the rooms there was a camera or something."

"No cameras in the rooms, but I can see with this body using electrolocation" Chip said, then mumbled "can't see color with it though".

After they finished lunch Chip spent the next few hours touching different things, while Jessie spent a lot of her time guarding her stuff from being explored.

"I want to know what's in number four" Chip said to Jessie.

"What for? It's not like it matters." Jessie replied.

"I'm gonna go no matter what, do you wanna come or what?" Chip said while smiling mischievously.

Jessie sighed.

"Fine"

Jessie suited up into a standard mk.3 space suit and tethered herself to the inside of the airlock, on the other hand Chip removed her shirt and placed it inside so that it wouldn't become damaged. In zero gravity she easily has free movement within three thousand feet of the construct projector installed in the head of the ship. Chip lip synced with her voice coming from the speakers within Jessie's helmet.

"Why did you want to see what was in number four specifically?" Jessie asked.

"It acted differently than the others so I want to know what's inside, open the panel already"

"I am" Jessie said as she was removing one of the panels to the military science container.

Where normally there would be opening controls or viewing screens for the internals of the container was only a high speed connector for electronic interfacing.

"That's odd, there should be more than that here" Jessie said getting slightly unnerved from the container.

"Plug in and let me look" Chip said

"You sure about that?"

"Well duh, it isn't that easy to hack me, my creator was a genius after all" Chip replied

"I guess, I don't like it though"

"I'll send a video of you walking around naked to your home station if you don't" Chip said as she grinned

Jessie sighed "Fine fine, I guess it is just science stuff"

She plugged in the connector and immediately, everything, went, wrong.

Chip's construct fell apart instantly and they fell out of FTL unprepared flinging Jessie away from Chip only to be violently stopped by the safety line biting her tongue in the process. Jessie started to panic while in pain and quickly pulled herself back to the airlock and closing it. Luckily the systems were still working as she pulled the suit off while spitting blood as it started to fill her mouth. She rushed to the bridge to check damage breaking out into a sweat as adrenaline pumped into her system. She quickly checked all systems in a practiced and fluid manner, praising her past self for emergency training and regular drills her teachers forced her to learn and get into a habit of. It appeared every system was operating normally besides the warnings going off for the unplanned FTL exit.

"Chip! Chip! What happened!" Jessie screamed at the cameras

Not seeing any response she looked at the hologram system and saw that she could activate the construct system. She turned it on and Chip's construct appeared on the floor curled into a tight ball with her hands over her ears.