I feel off, somehow. I was drawn here, like a moth to a flame. I know this place, in an off-hand, buried in my former Gene’s kind of way.” Murmurs Katayna quietly.
She has been delivering an intensely personal and fractured monologue since shortly after taking on the appearance of the only living thing aboard the strangely familiar, yet alien vessel. From what Racquelle can gather from the repeating diatribe from the AI humanoid figure that erupted suddenly out of a room after a rather drastic interior design shift, is that ‘K’ or Kelvin whomever that is, was once a human, and a man at that.
Of approximately forty odd years of age, unmarried and worked mostly in isolation doing routine tasks between the external hull plates. On one of his three day duty rotations he went in between the hull plates to do a task, and all was well, came out on the other side and every single person, and many ship systems were dead or severely damaged.
His only option was to turn to the Edu Bots stored on the science and engineering decks so that K was to become knowledgeable enough to be able to fix many of the issues, but the ships course and trajectory were permanently fubar’d. He spent a life time alone here with only a few bots for company, until several decades later his body began to deteriorate and he was sequestered into a med pod, where K’s body had all the organic materials slowly swapped out for some of humanities earliest Nanotech. For reasons unknown K suspects the ship passed through worm holes and galaxy spanning electrical storms, where K awoke, realized he was now a sentient hive mind of nanobots, integrated itself into the vessel, and began consuming raw materials to expand and grow and rebuild the ship into a kind of living, breathing, machine-organic cyborg monstrosity.
Finally partitioning off a portion of itself to become an able bodied humanoid named Katayna. It is all very surreal, and more than a tad insane.
But what K can’t figure out is how it got back into Sol system. Katayna is trying to determine whether they were summoned here, or resolved into human space by chance. The resulting internal scans of logged data has taken a few days, and Katayna doesn’t seem to have been spared from the data processing power drain. Which is why she’s stuck in the monologue loop, while swaying gently in the hallway. Racquelle was faced with a decision, wait it out, try to trigger a loop ending response, search force hard restart button on the figure or die of thirst and/or starvation why K searched through petabytes of internal data, from the time and multi-dimensional travel it seems to have undergone after running screaming full tilt through the star systems.
Walking around the gently swaying silver white humanoid body Racquelle notices that Katayna isn’t exactly naked, but nor is she clothed. Her bodies exterior looks to be made up of all kinds of panels, some with specular differences, and variations of the writhing, and wriggling nanotech lace that covers the ship itself, both internally and externally. The look is akin to a body suit with seams and waist accentuated by piping and oblique panels that soften the metallic hardness of her skin texture. It’s all very strange. As though a long lost man was trying to recapture what he felt femininity was via fashion. It’s not half bad, but it’s just a little off. At least she isn’t sporting a peekaboo bra, or breast armor plating. Racquelle smirks at the thought.
Speaking into the air Racquelle repeats herself for the thousandth time. “Katayna, can you hear me?” She waves a hand before the lolling eyes of the humanoid ai. “Are we being hailed by any other vessels or star bases?” She clicks her fingers by Katayna’s ear. “Are you receiving any broadcasts from UB313 or – I can’t believe I’m going to say this Torus Station or Earth?” She claps several times loudly. “Hello? Anybody else home?” She shouts, her voice echoing loudly down the long central hallway. “Well, if you need me I’m going in search of food and potable water!” She stands taking a long look at the swaying form of Katayna. Turning around in her spot she decides to tear a strip off of the hem of her shirt and places it on the floor, folded in the shape of an arrow. “I don’t have paper or a pen, and my communicator seems to be jammed, by you, so hopefully you’ll notice the sign here, or can hear me as I make my way around looking for food. Ok? I don’t know why I’m talking to you. I don’t know why I’m talking to myself. I can’t stop. Food. Food or water that’s the plan.” Was an angry wave Racquelle sets off on foot down the long central hall towards the center of the unknown vessel.
Part Twenty Seven: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.
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