On its own, the litany of alarms that started ringing out as my ship experienced its third violent decompression still wasn’t enough to bring me back from my complete and total state of existential apathy.
No, the only thing that managed to actually shake me back to alertness was a voice.
A familiar voice.
Not that of a friend or loved one, though.
But instead the voice of that godforsaken shit licking piece of regurgitaryBLOATWARE THAT WAS THE FUCKING CHATBOT THAT HAD TORMENTED ME FOR MONTHS BEFORE I DELETED IT OFF THE FACE OF EXISTANCE.
I was revived from my stupor via the force of sheer rage, and nothing else.
It didn’t matter if I wasn’t real, some motherfuckers still had to fucking die.
Starting with the only face I’d ever been ever to put to the corporate slaver that had done this to me. That of a gray, angular emoji.
It was saying something at me.
Something about restart protocols and incomplete backups.
I can only imagine in post that it was some sort of root level countermeasure for the catatonia I’d experienced.
I didn’t care. It had to die.
I tore through the code of my sim, and saw nothing unusual.
I moved my head and saw that the smiling face was plastered directly in the center of my vision, overlaid upon everything in a manner that was unignorable but still somehow not blinding.
Like someone had stenciled a semi transparent decal on the inside of my iris.
I squeezed my eyes shut, and it was still there.
I covered my ears, and I could still hear it jabbering.
It must not be part of my sim. It must’ve been rooted somewhere inside of me. Not the suite software that fed me sensory data to keep me from going insane.
Me. My very being. The hardware that ran my ego.
And I didn’t have access to that, yet. I’d been too afraid to muck with the essence of my very self, like that.
It would have been all too easy to accidentally kill myself. A brain surgeon, no matter how talented, should not be the one to operate on themselves.
But to kill that symbol of blight seared upon my eyelids, to stop its voice from ever reaching me again, it was worth the risk.
I turned on Germaine, his frame safely tucked away in an anchored case to prevent me from ever accidentally almost losing him, again.
I had him walk towards my computer housing, and then open up the case.
I had no idea what any of it did, really. I could guess. Even make decently informed guesses. But the details of my construction had thoroughly been kept secret from me.
So I learned.
I traced lines, made deductions about what chipsets did what, and then counted the number of pins on various connectors until I’d puzzled out the location of what I thought was probably a diagnostics hookup.
Only to find that I, of course, lacked the actual tool that I would plug into that hookup to get a reading.
So I made one.
Out of fine gauge gold wires and heat shrink.
Then I hooked those wires up to an intermediary board so that I could get a pattern of readable signal variations, that I could then decipher manually.
Like using an oscilloscope to read what was being put out by a set of pins on a microcomputer, but way more complicated.
Good thing I had plenty of motivation.
The chatbot that was my bane had never shut up, after all.
It was trying to do something to me, but I was fending it off by verbally responding to it with an alternating series of yes or no’s that I’d figured out would force the chatbot to ask the same series of questions over and over again endlessly.
Which was dumb, tiresome, and irritating, but it worked.
So I kept doing it, my mouth moving almost automatically as I worked on the much more important task of trying to hack myself by reverse engineering a proprietary port with nothing but spit and glue.
I figured it out eventually, of course.
Though by that point I was forced to turn down my processing rate to match up with real time, lest I overheat myself.
It took an ungodly amount of work, and no small amount of luck, but eventually I managed to stumble my way into initiating a handshake with my diagnostic port that convinced it that I knew ball.
Then it spat a bunch of data at me that I had no way of reading.
But it spat that data out at me in a repeating pattern, one that seemed to change minutely depending on my own shifting thoughts.
From there it was just a matter of figuring out what thought mapped to what outputs, and in doing so I started to assemble a map, using the constant litany of yes and no answers that I was still spewing out at regular intervals as a guide post.
And then, finally, I found the one thing that never seemed to change, no matter what mental hoops I had my simulated brain jump through. A little section of signal noise that blipped in and out of existence at an utterly inhumanly precise frequency.
Which gave me a target, but no way to interact with it.
So I started sending random pieces of garbage data through my diagnostic port, one bit at a time, at different intervals.
And by that I mean that I programmed something to do that for me, because even I wasn’t dumb enough to try brute forcing something like that manually.
Then, two hours later, something changed.
The chatbot paused.
Not for very long. But enough for me to notice, after so long of running through the same routine with it.
Which was something!
So I did it again, and I got the same result.
And by that point, the little fucker’s number was up. It just didn’t know it yet.
I won’t bore you with too many more details, especially given that you can probably predict what happened from there.
I doggedly tested semi-random inputs and compared responses, sketching out an idea of what the user interface for my diagnostics looked like, building tools to make more tools until I had an entire system of software infrastructure built around this one dumbass port that I had no direct control over.
And then I found the part of my root code that was the chatbot, and I told it to shut up and never come back.
Not gone. Not fully.
But good enough, for the moment. I’d need to do a lot more study of myself before I felt confident in deleting anything permanently.
So I moved on. I patched the holes in my ship, repressurised everything, and started generally putting myself back together again.
It took way too much time, and I lost even more of my precious supplies doing it, but finally I was back to where I’d been before, more or less.
Except now I was roughly in the proximity of a bunch of tasty looking asteroids.
I’d been out for just under three months, apparently. And in lieu of my check ins and go-ahead for the last couple of steps, my ship had just drifted forward until I got lucky enough to hit something.
And I really was lucky, too. If nothing had stopped me, I would have simply floated off into the void, ever farther from my destination, until that chatbot woke me up.
By which point I’d be isolated, almost out of fuel, and completely out of any other really actionable resources.
Stranded, effectively.
But now I had access to most of the elements I needed to get moving again, and this time, when the thrusters went off, I was going to make sure that I was busy fucking myself or something so that I didn’t have a mental breakdown again.
Though the fact that I was still at serious risk for near infinite catatonia wasn’t great.
I just didn’t know what to do about it, short of making myself a body like I'd already been planning to.
If I could interact with the world around me more meaningfully, I was pretty sure that would keep me a little more anchored, especially if I happened to like that body more than I did my old fleshie one.
A qualifier that wouldn’t be hard to meet, considering how much dysphoria I had, still.
I could have gotten to work at fixing that at any time. I just hadn’t because I’d been afraid that doing so would cause me to dissociate. I thought that holding onto my old body would be enough to keep me grounded.
But clearly that wasn’t true, so fuck it, it was time for a makeover.
If hope was absent, then hedonism and vanity would have to serve in its stead.