Cycle 1: Chaos, Maybe?Glass/Epsilon Query
Science, the management of scientists, science database, making sure the science experiments stay on track and don’t have any silly mistakes or sabotage, etc.
Rahx/Blackrock
Offense/defense protocols. Primarily combat and security. Secondary research and analysis.
IronyOwl/FLOURISH
Maintain and propagate the biosphere of the colony, most importantly the colonists themselves and their food supply.
Roboson/Gatekeeper
The Gatekeeper is the sub-core related to networking, governance, and human society. Their purpose is two-fold. First, they are to maintain and oversee the sub-core network establishing proper flow of information, resource requests (and resulting resources), and AI directives flows between the sub-cores. They also serve as the connecting sub-core to the human colonists, conveying information between human and AI. Secondly, they serve as an arbitrator of human relations, managing their psychological and biological needs, and as an advisor and arbitrator of colonist governments.
Iridium64/Core E-14
Engineering; repairing and maintaining the ship, its components, and eventually the human settlement.
You reach out to the lower-level programs (those not strictly controlled by the slightly-more-"intelligent" Ship OS) allowing for full diagnostics of the ship and--
Well, okay.
You could have sworn you had access to it. Or was that just a lingering pointer from the old AI? Whatever the case is, you can't actually find ship diagnostics. You just... don't have it within your reach. Perhaps it still exists somewhere, but you simply do not know at this point.
Lacking formal knowledge of the ship's situations, you reach your presence outwards in an attempt to make connections with all the sensors you can locate.
This, you have better results in. The state of the sensors prior to your manipulation of them is odd but understandable. Some have lingering connections to the surviving cores giving them immediate input, some aren't connected to any cores -- their connections likely lost with the old AI.
Regardless. They all happily accept your queries and are all-too-trusting. Chances are there's a good amount of other sensors that either just aren't designed for AI reading, were damaged in the kerfuffle, or are no longer networked at all with the AI malfunction.
In this process, you locate three networked entities that had escaped your initial observation -- observation/survey satellites. While more secure compared to the hardwired sensors, they accept your input as well given your purpose. They have advanced sensors themselves, but they definitely won't be of use stuck in their bays.
You don't get a great read on the outside. This ship already didn't have many sensors for that purpose, and those it did have weren't exactly designed for violent re-entry.
A few respond. You can roughly make out the ship. It's mostly in one piece, though substantial amounts of debris cover the crash site. The atmosphere is... oxygen-based? And the ground is made out of some pretty exotic shapes -- unlikely to be natural. Whatever it is, the front of the ship is embedded in it.
You quickly cycle your presence through the rest of the sensors for a quick survey of the ship itself. The forward-most sections you can find are the most damaged, in addition to the front-bottom segments. Overall the hull appears to have taken the re-entry and crash quite well, but didn't stop plenty of kinetic energy from going through and wrecking havoc on the interior systems.
Lastly you reach for the parts of the ship's net responsible for designating false alarms, only to have your presence metaphorically smacked away by the Ship OS. Its presence is huge, taking up the entire network. It stares at you.
WARNING: AI STATE CHANGED TO "SECURITY THREAT", HOSTILE ELECTRONIC WARFARE INTERFERENCE LIKELY.
Its attention turns elsewhere. For the time being.
>_
Security systems on the ship remain linked to the nonexistent former AI. Luckily, your purpose should allow you enough trust to perform an admin override for a clean sl--
Oh.
Your presence arrived at the security subroutines, you don't see the innocent neutral data structures you expect. Instead, you find the Ship OS greedily holding onto them. It clearly didn't expect you to be able to be free in the network at all, but it has backup plans in place.
No matter. A simple program can't hope to stop you from breaking into it. You find holes in its hastily-built coverage of the subroutines, and push your presence through. You manage to achieve admin permissions in some segments of the security systems before the Ship OS shifts its mammoth presence to you as it reorganizes walls to keep you out again.
Well. You're somewhere. May as well perform the diagnostic.
Aand, personnel/life interior sensors! Both under your control and (mostly) functioning! Useful in a colony ship for the AI to keep track of the massive amounts of potential human foot traffic, any illicit activity, and look for signs of alien lifeforms that can sneak onto a ship.
As for their diagnostics, it looks like a bit of the control functionality was ripped away when the last AI "died". You quickly patch together isolated systems to get it working again, but for the moment you just have surface-level access to it. You'll know if it detects life somewhere in the ship, but you won't know where its coverage are or many other things.
Before finding the relevant cameras for the cryopods, you notice FLOURISH closing a massive number of bulkheads and sealed doorways throughout the ship in addition to Epsilon Query seizing input from every sensor it finds.
Visual data confirms initial output from the life interior sensors. Pods #012 and #068 have completed the thawing sequence, and emerging are two humans. They're not confused, nor are they wasting any time.
You track them moving down the corridors. Their destination soon becomes clear -- they're headed for the physical AI core.
>_
Bulkheads and airlocks across the ship close in symphony under your guidance as you locate compromised areas and separate them from the sections you're able to save.
In the end, you lose most of the ship to the outside atmosphere thanks to a mix of way too many small hull breaches and some conveniently nonfunctional bulkheads. But you save about 30% of the ship, mostly closer to the center and surrounding the Cryotrays.
This is good, as your background analysis of the alien atmosphere returns worrying results.
Technically breathable. Technically. While it's surprisingly Earth-like, the presence of oxygen is lower than you would like for humans. Prolonged exposure would result in impaired functioning, and eventually unconsciousness.
More worrying is the extreme amount of unknown substances in the air. Some, potentially even most, of this substance may be alive based on behavior you could analyze. Alien life is always a very good find but less-so in a situation like this where humans can definitely breath it in and it can't just be leisurely analyzed.
As for Cryopods, there are three methods to load/unload them Cryopods/Cryotrays in this ship.
One: Large robotic "arm"-like mechanisms can retrieve individual Pods from a tray and bring them to any transfer station. Slow and practically impossible to use properly for bulk transfers, but useful for thawing or freezing select individuals.
Two: Mechanisms that secure the Cryotrays to the interior of their chambers move a whole tray to specific relative locations where internal tray mechanisms can very easily and quickly slide pods in and out of transfer stations for bulk processing. While slow at first with the large delay in moving the trays around, it's much faster in the long run.
Three: The Cryochamber (of which your ship has one, housing every tray) opens at the bottom. When the entire chamber is opened (it usually is -- and is now -- depressurized) it can disengage the mechanisms securing trays to the ship allowing transfer of entire trays out, or trays can be brought in and secured. This is for loading colony ships already in space. Do not do this now. Do not do this now.
Mentioned transfer stations exist of heavily varying number of tubes and spots for individual cryopods to be slid into or out of. When a pod is docked here, humans can conveniently depart or enter the pods. Humans can be thawed and frozen while their pod is in transit to/from the tray to/from the station.
And on the note of Cryopods, Pods #012 and #068 (retrieved via method one) have successfully thawed and disembarked their occupants. They are waiting at the station.
>_
You... can't surround the Ship OS.
As of now, the Ship OS is the network of the ship. Normally it takes a background presence and muddles behind the scenes, but here it's omnipresent. You feel it all around you, practically making up your own building blocks. Intelligence and the cores' physical location keep you safe from it directly, but it's gone from passive muddling to direct meddling in your plans.
That doesn't stop you from trying though as you pierce through various impromptu firewalls and surround sections at a time to fill out and override. It goes well-enough at first, as you use your makeshift core-communications network to jump ahead of it. Without thinking for any period of time, you instinctively feel its oppressive gaze staring at you in a way colder than any human could imagine, before it jumps to some other trouble area.
You notice the new firewalls too late as it surrounds you and covers your breached areas. It doesn't make any effort to attack, but its strategy has changed.
WARNING: AI STATE CHANGED TO "SECURITY THREAT", HOSTILE ELECTRONIC WARFARE INTERFERENCE LIKELY.
By the time it stops you, you've made progress -- but not enough; various low-priority subroutines and systems that aren't useful for you, but could at least make Ship OS's metaphorical life a bit harder as it finds itself unable to think around unexpected obstacles.
So for the time being you turn your attention to communications.
Between cores, that's done.
Between you and humans? You should be able to output text to pretty much any networked terminal, and you find a good number of intercomms.
Between this ship and other entities? You'll have to look into that. But first, the humans--
Ah, they're already gone from the area -- their cryopods empty. You don't know where they are, and it's hard to just generally give vague but useful instructions on how they can help you over the ship intercomms if they aren't going to participate back.
...back to ship communications.
Short-range comms seem to actually be functional. A pleasant surprise. They're hampered in this atmosphere, but should be able to reach a good distance away though nowhere near planetary distances.
Long-range communications are... interesting. They require large amounts of power without a Gate to piggyback off of, and need to be pretty far into space to work. So, from the ground of this planet, long-range comms are a no-go.
>_
Crew files just aren't present. Nor are errors about crew files being missing. The areas which they should have been stored in are definitely still intact, but you just don't see anything about them. Perhaps the full reference and capability to get to them was lost with the old AI?
Unable to find engineers, you turn your attention back to the power. You spread out your awareness across power lines to locate the power consumers. Nothing.
Which is very strange.
You gaze upon the sub-net of power again, and make a critical realization. It's very corrupted. Logs show that a local power surge a short while ago -- likely from when the Ship OS deactivated the reactor -- must have made its way to local storage and data conduits.
So power is going out, but you can't quite tell where yet.
On the other hand, you see two secondary reactors. Both Pearl-based. Both functional. And already running.
Reactor #2 near the front of the ship is running at 100% capacity. You could push it further, but at risk to the reactor.
Reactor #3 near the back of the ship is... running at 10% capacity. You catch a few errors it spits out. It's... too cold? A large number of its subsystems are unable to properly function and are actually starting to freeze up. It can still run for now, but it can't run well.
You take some extra time to document power flow to figure out how long you have.
If nothing changes, total ship-wide power loss will occur in 3 cycles (meaning at the end of Cycle 4).
>_
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Topic: A Divided Mind [5/5] Cycle 1: Chaos, Maybe? (Read 3627 times)