Welp, having taken a moment to actually take care of myself for the first time in years, it was time once again to get back to work.
The pigs wouldn’t just roast themselves, after all!
Though in all seriousness, I really did need to come up with a better long term plan than just ‘kill every fascist and cop I could get my robotic little grippers on’.
While that had, somehow, worked well enough for fleshie me when she’d tried it, I suspected that she’d still ultimately died miserable and alone.
I didn’t want that for myself.
No, I needed to find reasons to keep myself going other than seeking justice, revenge, or any other temporary relief from the well of endless rage that always simmered just below the surface of my very being.
As for what those more positive existential motivators might be, I had no fucking idea.
It was hard to look forward to the future, when you were still so busy grieving the loss of everything you once knew.
I’d get there eventually, I was sure, but for now…
Well, if hope was unavailable, hedonism would have to do. I’d work my way up the chain of ethically justifiable degeneracy as far as I could, and maybe by the time I got sick of that, I’d find other things to do.
Or find a new therapist. Or something.
Point being, that was a future me problem.
Currently I was busy tearing through the guts of my once prison looking for anything that might still be trying to snoop on me, so that I might get back to gooning in peace.
Just because I’d made sure that no signals could be sent or received from my vessel, that didn’t mean I was actually safe, as of yet.
Much like the bomb in the engineering bay, I had to imagine that there were other traps hidden around the place, isolated from the internal network in some way or another.
So, I put together version two of my microgravity exploration drone.
I’d redone the design from the ground up, tearing off the casing, and rearranging the guts into a rough cube of exposed electronics.
There were two propellers mounted on each face of the abomicube, as I was calling it. Each pair was mounted right on top of each other spinning in opposite directions, just like the blades of a helicopter.
Which took care of moving along the four primary axis easily enough, but left rotating the whole thing something of a challenge.
Or at least it did, until I realized I was being fucking stupid.
I’d somehow forgotten that gyroscopic flywheels were a thing, and that a few of those would solve the majority of my problems.
So I tore apart version two for parts and then moved onto version three.
Version Three was a semi-flexible mesh sphere with a set of three gyroscopic flywheels in the center, a single pair of propellers stuck to the top, and a bunch of cameras studded throughout the frame.
The flywheels in the center could be sped up or slowed down to cause the entire drone to rotate in any direction I damn well pleased, and that meant that I just had to point the propellers in the direction I wanted to go and then hit the metaphorical gas.
It was simple, dumb, and perfect for what I needed it to do.
Namely, scouting the interior of the ship.
Not that there was all that much to see, per say. My vessel was a crammed little thing, the vast majority of the onboard space being taken up by the cargo needed to seed an industry of extraterrestrial exploitation.
But there was still enough empty space left for me to be wary, so I was gonna make damn sure I was safe before anything else.
It only took about another three hours real time for me to learn how to pilot my new scouting drone (I hadn’t come up with a good name for it yet) well enough to do a near full sweep of the ship.
And I was frustrated to find that my paranoia had been absolutely warranted.
I found no less than four different objects hidden around the ship that I was pretty sure were existential threats to my well being, in some manner or another.
One of those was just another bomb. A simple little package of plastic explosives slapped to the side of the computer bank that housed me.
Another was a literal black box wired into the communications module at the front of the ship. I honestly wasn’t sure what it did, but it wasn’t present in the schematics, so I figured it couldn’t be anything good.
The third was something in a similar vein, another mysterious object that entirely lacked documentation, tucked into a space that wasn’t actually supposed to exist, according to the ship’s schematics.
And the fourth was a massively overpowered EMP device, likely rigged to go off when a mechanical timer hit zero, judging by the constant ticking sound it gave off.
That one in particular, made me quite nervous. I had no idea when it was set to go off, and I didn’t want to wait to find out.
Which meant it was time to build more tools!
I’ll fast forward through the design and iteration process this time, but at the end of the day, I’d rigged together a long ass robot snake with a multi tool and a couple of cameras on the front.
It could bend and slither in any number of directions, allowing it access to any gaps and crevices bigger than a couple of centimeters across.
It was also dotted with some electromagnets to give it that extra bit of purchase when needed.
It was working in tandem with a modified Germaine (also now equipped with electromagnetic grippers) to disarm the bomb attached to the oversized PC that was, at the end of the day, me.
Because having plastic explosives strapped to the very center of my ongoing consciousness wasn’t exactly something I enjoyed, in case that wasn’t clear.
That being said, while the process was somewhat fraught, it wasn’t proving nearly as bad as it could have been.
Really, it was just a matter of finding out what the electronic detonator was wired to, and then making sure that it wouldn’t go off if I just plucked it out of the putty wholesale.
I was pretty sure I could just physically separate the plastic explosives and the detonator and have that be that, but obviously I wanted to be absolutely certain, before I tried anything.
A bit more nervous tedium later, I’d done precisely that, storing the detonator and the futuristic semtex in separate containers so that I could make use of them later. No point in wasting free bombs, after all.
Then I shifted focus onto disassembling the EMP.
That proved a little trickier, but not by nearly as much as it rightly should’ve.
I just had to cut through the armored housing that held the battery, and then unplug it.
No power, no functioning Electromagnetic Pulse device.
I would have been absolutely screwed if the thing had been designed to actually resist tampering, though.
The mysterious black box attached to the comms station, meanwhile, was not nearly so easy to crack.
The proprietary connector that wired it into the ship had melted into an unsalvageable wedge of polymer metal the moment I unplugged it, and I could not for the life of me figure out how to get through the casing.
It soundly resisted every single one of the cutting tools I had available to me, so I started making new ones. After all, if you didn’t actually possess the tools needed to solve a problem, why not just build more tools?
Sadly, all I actually achieved was melting the black box into useless slag and almost setting the entire ship on fire.
I’d been trying to make a plasma cutter, but had fumbled the execution and made a less than controlled jet of superheated ionizing gas.
Thankfully, relatively little was permanently damaged other than the black box, so all was well that ended well, I supposed.
I ended up just chucking the wreckage out of the airlock and moving on.
All that was left was the mysterious little thing that had been hidden in an empty space where there should have only been more interior plating.
It was housed in a similar sort of material as the black box, but unlike that piece of junk, it looked like it was actually meant to be opened.
Which made me immediately suspicious.
So I treated it like a bomb, and did my best to non-invasively scan the thing before I so much as fucking touched it.
In retrospect, I should have done the same with the first black box, but hindsight was twenty twenty, and I barely knew what I was doing to begin with.
Regardless, it turned out the strangely invulnerable black polymer was perfectly permeable to x-rays.
And yes, I also audibly facepalmed the moment I learned that.
What x-ray imaging revealed was interesting enough to keep me from curing my own stupidity for too long, at least.
From what I could tell the box was basically a tiny briefcase, with two isolated compartments in each half of the container. The first half didn’t look terribly impressive, just some electronics and a powers source, but the second half was where things got spicy.
There was some sort of big, crystalline rock inside of it, and I had absolutely no idea what it did. The rock in question was shaped like a stack of pringles, all just kept from touching each other with little metal pins.
I put a contact microphone on the outer casing just to try and listen for any ominous ticking noises, but what I found was almost certainly worse. The rock was constantly humming like a harmonica, and also had the unnerving tendency to make screaming noises at random intervals.
Sort of like an Aztec death whistle, but very quiet, and with a bunch of overlapping tones that combined to make it sound as if an entire building’s worth of damned souls were wailing in chorus.
Needless to say, I fucking hated it.
Perhaps unwisely undeterred, I moved to using high definition microwave imaging, along with a couple of other methods, to investigate the object more thoroughly.
From that, I managed to map out the entirety of its more mundane side with relative ease, and found therein a micro computer, an incredibly small fusion generator, a battery, and some regulators that pumped constantly changing amounts of voltage into the scary half of the box for reasons unknown.
It seemed clear to me, then, that the device's real function came from the alien looking shit, and that the rest of it was just supporting infrastructure. But that was all I’d really managed to learn.
To discover anything more about the esoteric screaming can of saddle style obsidian chips, I’d need to open the casing up and take a mass spectrometer to it.
But I was hesitant to do so, for a number of reasons.
First of which being that it still might explode, and I had no idea how to prevent that.
…
Secondly, though, there was also the fact that even just looking at it filled me with an inexplicable sense of deep seated dread. Not just fear, not just a bad feeling in my simulated gut, but something else.
Something undeniable.
Worse, at some point along the process, I started hearing voices. Quiet whispers, hiding behind the constant screams, beckoning me, for purposes unknown.
So inevitably I just decided that the damn thing was cursed. That or some eldritch piece of extradimensional xenotech.
Or just some ineffable combination of both.
It wasn’t like I could tell, one way or the other.
I’d spent at least a week of real time hammering away at the problem and had yet to really get anywhere.
But the voices were starting to get louder, and I was hearing them even when I didn’t have any microphones pointed at the cursed artifact, so it was time for the evil piece of shit to go.
Whatever secrets it held, it just wasn’t worth sacrificing my sanity for.
Nope, it was time for the foreboding rock of creeping despair to get the fuck off my ship.
So I had Germaine, my brave little robo-pug, pick it up to do just that.
Only for the cursed object to start screaming so much louder than I ever thought possible the moment I actually touched it for the first time.
I cut all my microphones, but somehow that didn’t make the noise stop. It penetrated straight into my digitized psyche with the force of a dental drill aimed at my unaestheticised molars.
Then the omni-present whispers gave up all pretense of subtly. They spoke no longer in undiscernable tongues, but plain English, and they were all telling me to kill myself.
I ignored them and soldiered on. It wasn’t the first time I’d dealt with suicidal ideations, after all.
Unfortunately for me though, it if course didn’t end there.
By the time that Germaine had trotted fifty percent of the distance needed to get to the airlock, I started seeing things. Writhing shadows. Each of them filled with intent that I could somehow feel on my nonexistent skin.
The shadows wanted to hurt me, I knew, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to convince myself that they couldn’t. That this was all some sort of harmless hallucination. It felt too real.
Realer than real, even. Like seeing a completely new color shining with a vibrancy you’d never yet been exposed to.
Like the shadows and screams were the only real things in a world of illusions, like everything that I’d known was a lie and this was the only truth that mattered, that I was worthless and deserved to be hurt for simply existing and-
-I felt the bottomless well of rage in me ignite, raising itself into a self righteous inferno. I’d already promised that I would never let anyone or anything make me feel this way again.
Whatever the fuck this was, it didn’t get to change that.
I would not be chained again.
I would not let anyone tell me I was something I was not.
I stopped Germy in place, and had his manipulator claw slam the screaming briefcase down onto the side of the bulkhead, pushing it against the bare metal as hard as I could.
Then I had my little robot snake go grab as many explosives as it could reasonably carry.
Exiling the eldritch horror was no longer enough.
It needed to die.