>>5561213As you gather your wits and clamp sternly down on your command link, Eyes-of-Night taps furiously at her device - attempting to learn more.
“REDACTED, REDACTED, logs outright missing! Someone worked very hard to make sure no one can figure out who’s code this is or where its owner has been sleeping for the past 300 years!” The exasperated owl seems personally offended by the doctored documents.
“Wait, here’s something- WHAT!” She cries, stomping a booted talon on the ground and stabbing at her screen in anger. Her holo-screen goes completely blank for a moment then flickers back to life revealing a blank page. “Something just erased this report right in front of me! How DARE-”
You quietly ignore the Science Officer’s tirade, satisfied that she is absorbed enough for you to escape from her clutches. You have a hunch about who, or rather what, is currently messing with her device and you plan to capitalise on the mutual distraction. Opening your link to the ship wider again comes easier this time, perhaps your short time practising is already paying dividends - though you hope it’s for another reason.
You immediately feel a sense of relieved satisfaction swell through the connection, of a fear proven baseless, a worry unfounded. It seems at least something… someone? Got what they were looking for.
You focus on your need to help your crew aboard the boarding craft and temper that desire into a single minded purpose. You mentally wield that lance of thought with a purpose and charge through the connection, prepared for a clash.
It never comes. Instead you find yourself back in the ship’s digital control room, your brain interpreting the strange inputs and outputs as buttons, dials and lights. You can feel the presence of an entity nearby, the same relief from before now mixing with curiosity, hope and need? Maybe that was greed. You’re still getting the hang of this.
It seems your theory was right, some aspect or safety feature of the AI system is preventing your access to this other intelligence and the ship’s remote monitoring and control system. But with the AI system so degraded to the point that it can no longer split its attention very well, it can be distracted to allow you access. At least you hope that’s the case.
You withdraw your connection before the iron will of the ‘guardian’ AI can return and catch you red handed, simply authorising an encrypted connection between your comm and the currently open channel on your HUD.
With too much time wasted, you take your still needle like focus and turn towards the vision devouring mouth of the boarding craft. You hope to anchor yourself to the focussed emotion and let it keep at least the numbness from your limbs as you pierce through the veil of emptiness before you.
