Jim rubbed his forehead. "All right. How do we do that?"
"We use an amp based system to modify the brain chemistry of the individuals that make up the whole. Merged though they are, each brain is still functional, like a cell in an organism. You and your team will use the Neural interface to go in, find whatever the problem is and eliminate it."
"What's the ship's name? Also, what sort of paradoxes are we talking about?""
"Name is unimportant. Or more specifically I don't know, I wasn't told. Ghostships don't usually have names though, just numerical designations. As per the paradox, I guess you could call it less a paradox and more a sense of cognitive dissonance. It's stopped responding because it's thinking about it, continuously looping through it's own memories and trying to find an answer for itself. It's not a paradox like in computing so much as an internal conflict. It's having an internal debate and we don't want it to end up deciding that omnicide is the best solution. These things were made as last ditch Weapons of mass destruction remember, killing is all they really know."
Tall order.
"So we're up against some sort of super-intelligence, or rather super-will, that might erode our selves over time. How much time approximately do we have once connected?"
"Erosion is not the issue. The issue is detection. If it were to turn it's full attention to you, or to this ship, there would be no recourse. We would all simply die. We've isolated where we need to send you, to the memories in question, the key is to get in, stay hidden and find which one or ones are causing the problem. At that point we delete them. Done right the thing will simply go right back to what it was doing, forgetting the problem all together."
Milno sighs. Intelligent people from up above and their rather stupid decisions.
"If you said it happens to the old ones sometimes, it means that it happened before. What were the results of those cases?"
"It only happened one other time that I am aware of. That time the Ghostship decided that it's memories of the time after the Altered war were pointless. It promptly erased them up to the point where it was given it's final mission and then began scorching worlds that it had burnt long ago. It eventually stopped when it reached one that was actually occupied, saw there were no altered and started sending very confused messages to a dozen different planets, asking where it should go next.
We don't think it would be dangerous, at least not to humanity, but it's simply got far too much power to gamble on it's pacifism. Not to mention the public reaction seeing something as mythical as these things are reduced to that."
"Anything else?"