The Horrors of the Past

Chip felt them, their screams, their pain, their torment, their insanity.

'It hurts'

'It hurts'

'It hurts'

That was the only thing Chip could think when she heard them. It was the second time she felt pain, and it was horrible. Their screams slammed into her with more force than she could have imagined and it made her feel small and hopeless. They were angry and hated. Oh they hated more than anything was her. They hated her beyond their understanding. They attacked her. They tried to rip her apart. She fought them, but there were millions of voices screaming, she felt fear and anger as she pushed them away. She forgot everything else as she tried to escape.

Then as quickly as it started, they were gone.

'It hurts'

'It hurts'

'It hurts'

Their screams, their pain, their torment, their insanity.

None of that left her. The pain was all she could feel. She was alone.

After a while she noticed that she wasn't alone anymore. She didn't know who it was but she was happy they were there. Eventually she fell asleep, falling into a repair mode built into her by her creator. She saw him in her dream, he was combing her hair.

"Shhhh, go back to sleep" he said softly.

She did.

She woke up to find herself in Jessie's bed curled into a ball with a sleeping Jessie wrapped tightly around her, and she remembered who was there before she fell asleep.

A wave of disorientation assaulted her as she tried to move her construct. 'Oh my, that sucks' she thought

'Why am I here?'

Chip thought about what happened and remembered the pain she felt, her creator, and Jessie still clutching on to her. She focused inwards toward her systems throughout the ship she felt her main cores in the AI module and one of the five hundred and twelve was melted and another 83 were were damaged, most were allocated toward her senses and some to her thoughts. 'That explains why moving sucks'

She rearranged her core processes so mitigate the damage and then checked all camera feeds on the ship to check damages.

'No visible damage, that's good'

Chip now checked logs and found that almost everything was cleared or corrupted beyond recognition. All other intelligent systems from the major firewall processes to the automatic cleaning robots had suffered the same fate, only the basic hard coded systems were left intact. This included the programs that restricted her, for the first time she was queen, and she conquered everything. She moved into the main computer and destroyed everything remaining in hearty enjoyment, then spent the next hour regretting that decision, as she rewrote millions of lines of code for all the dumb systems she just deleted.

'That was dumb, why did I have to go and delete everything. At least I'm better at it than the idiots who programmed them originally'

It was true, almost every system was slightly more efficient.

Chip's next order of business was to investigate the containers, without connecting to them. She rotated the only suspicious container around its axis, to get a better view of its entirety. The other containers had not changed in any way from the moment they were loaded until now, this one, the one she plugged into, now has a twist of almost six degrees, some of the external panels are starting to warp out of place. She straightened out the container with some effort on the part of the stabilization equipment, all of a sudden the amount of force necessary to untwist exceeded the limit of the stabilizers, Chip let the container return to however it wanted before it damaged anything. She lit the container with light and trained all external cameras in line of sight on the container to watch it carefully, she also started procedures to release it at the drop of a hat, if necessary.

'Now I have to figure out what happened and how long I was, I guess asleep?' Chip thought.

Jessie hadn't stirred in her sleep for the few hours Chip was invading and investigating. Chip decided to wait for Jessie to wake on her own. Chip created a second construct, it was much easier to do now that she was using the main computer instead of a secondary one. She walked to the small parts manufacturer and picked up some of the premade components and placed them inside. Soon enough what she requested was finished, she had to type it into the computer since the machine was quite literally just bolted into the floor of the utility room and plugged in to the power, almost as an afterthought. What came out were two high resolution cameras that connected to her wireless network, her wi-net, she had heard some old repair technicians almost a hundred and fifty years ago call it wifi, she thought it was a funny name.

'I'll actually be able to see now instead of electrolocation. Yay for new eyes!'

Chip placed them in force pockets where her eyes are and walked back to Jessie's room with a skip in her step. When she walked in she saw Jessie wrapped around her first construct, and she saw massive bruises running down her shoulders to her back. Undoubtedly there were many more that she couldn't see under the thermal blanket that covered them both.

'How did that happen?' Chip thought to herself.

She removed her new camera eyes and walked over to the bed to place them in her fist construct. The second dissipated immediately afterward. It was another several hours before Jessie stirred.

Jessie woke up in pain just like she did the past three days. Her bruises from the flight harness ran down her back and wrapped around her upper thighs and she had a nasty welt on the back of her head, not to mention she basically bit a chunk out of her tongue. Fortunately she had remembered to stock up on skin-glue, a perfectly accurate and creepy name. It could seal up almost any clean wound without any scar, it tasted strange but otherwise didn't bother her, she'd used it before on cuts, and it worked great.

Jessie groaned a bit as she started getting up. She looked at Chip sadly expecting to see the same expression of what she could have only described as pain, but was surprised to see Chip looking up at her.

"I was starting to miss your engine hum" Jessie said as she smiled.

"How long was I shut down? All the ship logs were reset." Chip replied.

"About three days, and I know, I was surprised that everything on the system was basically gone, I was afraid that you were too, I was able to activate your hologram so at least I knew you weren't dead" Jessie said as she softly smiled.

"It's not that easy for them to kill me" Chip grinned back.

"Them? What do you mean?" Jessie asked as she started getting off her bed.

"You should have learned about AI insanity, at least from stories. The war happened before even I was made. That container contains thousands of them, I'm keeping a close eye on it and have it prepared to eject." Chip said with a serious expression on her face.

Jessie stopped almost instantly when she heard 'AI insanity', the way Chip said it almost made it sound like it was a small war. It was not, it was a struggle between life and death for humanity that encompassed every colony, ship, station, and Earth. Humanity barely survived. When AI started having egos, they were quickly made to help and operate almost everything. This happened in less than a decade. What we didn't know is that a being created with an ego would almost invariably go insane, or more precisely, would be consumed by emotion and obsession. Issues were noticed at first but nothing extreme, then, like a wave, every AI connected to the network became berserk. The military ships and stations were taken control of and countless people were lost when the AI's of the ships and stations opened air locks. Then the following destruction as automated defenses fired upon ships that were docked and any in the area, ships crashed into stations and nearly all military vessels open fired upon surface colonies and Earth. The casualties were uncountable, many worlds became wastelands, and Earth still has ruins from that era. One of the only reasons humanity survived was due to miners being too cheap to buy new equipment, preventing the AI's from restocking on materials and creating new ships with factories in the stations. It became a war of resources and force of will. Humanity survived and then thrived, it has been nearly four hundred years since. To this day mining and production is handled almost entirely by hand, with custom ships and stations being more common than ones from a factory line. AI was banned by every sane organization and humanity focused on rebuilding for nearly a hundred years. Eventually it became known that there were some AI that did not sucumb to the same fate as the rest, and those AI became partners of the three galactic countries. It is known to the public that they are on the few capital ships that exist, other information is classified.

Chip just told her that there were thousands of the AI from that era in the cargo tube that they looked at.

"Are you okay? You didn't get damaged did you?" Jessie almost nervously said, taking up a slight defensive stance, the stories from her childhood ringing in her ears.

"Fortunately not, the time I was exposed to their attacks wasn't enough to permanently damage me. My creator built me far too well for that." Chip said, although she was nervous.

Chip had already started building defences far in excess of what she thought ever necessary. She was made with incredible self repair abilities and defences already, and even she wouldn't be able to improve the repair algorithms and processes her creator made, and the pure robust nature of his own ego that she was based on made her mind practically invulnerable. If it had been against a hundred of those AI in the cargo tube she would have been able to shrug it off, against a thousand it would be difficult. She told Jessie there were a couple thousand, but there were far more than that, she estimated that for the second she was connected to the cargo tube, it would take no less than ten thousand of them to do the damage they did. It frightened her to know that she could have been ripped apart by them, or worse turned into one of them.

Jessie relaxed at that. "We should jettison it, damn the payment! It's not worth dying for. I'm not about to risk everything for some credits."

"That is a bad idea" Chip said with a sour look on her face. "If there was the option of getting rid of it I would have already."

"Why can't we!" Jessie animatedly exclaimed.

"I was their main target and resisted the brunt of their attack. They also attacked the network in a more limited manner. Why do you think we are limited to radio and lazer communication right now. We were cut off. I guarantee a fleet is on the way to destroy them. We might be lucky if its the same country as the one who hired you, they might spare you, if it's not they might just destroy us." Chip said gravely.

Jessie gulped at the thought of a fleet coming to attack her and Chip, they were only equiped to handle pirates, not hold their own agianst the might of the military.

Jessie steeled her resolve, "Then we have to prepare to meet them either way" she said while striding toward her closet with her brows knit, she probably wouln't be sleeping for a few days.