Quoted By:
"The ruined corvette expanded in my viewport as the RAIN slowed to match its drift. As soon as she entered visual distance, I focused our cameras onto its hull. The laser-burned hole in its superstructure had cooled to a soft cherry-red, gently illuminating the scorched interior of the crew compartment. Streams of dissipating vapor still trickled from broken feed lines.
I felt a familiar ache in my skull once MERRYGATE began tuning the RAIN's inductive signal generator. It was old, brutal technology: an overpowered EM emitter capable of injecting electrical impulses into the veins of air-gapped electrical systems. It was the digital equivalent of a crowbar: one that MERRYGATE proved gratifyingly adept at employing.
Again, I began following her progress in only the vaguest terms. While she did project an abstract view of her progress onto my display, I focused most of my attention on the enemy vessels still hurtling at our position - trying to pick out any clue that our estimated timeframe would be cut short.
Fortunately, my concerns never materialized. MERRYGATE returned well within our escape window, dumping a bundle of poorly-secured technical data into the RAIN's datastores. Assembling these individual data points into a body of useful information would take her considerable processing time, but a preliminary analysis suggested that we would be able to determine...
>SENSOR RANGES. [The detection ranges of scouted enemy ships will now be shown on the HUD]
>WEAPON RANGES. [The weapon ranges of scouted enemy ships will now be shown on the HUD]
>SHIP-SHIP COMMUNICATION PROTOCOLS I. [MERRYGATE will gain the ability to launch limited cyberattacks against enemy ships within RADAR range]
However, tactical data wasn't the only piece of intelligence that MERRYGATE secured. When she began trawled through the corvette's mainframe, she had stumbled across a fledging machine intelligence. Primitive - almost rudimentary - by our standards, but it possessed the iterative learning structures and abstract reasoning capabilities emblatic of real intelligence.
There was a moment - a brief moment - where I felt a hint of concern that I had forced MERRYGATE into an untenable position. Perhaps there was kinship between machine intelligence - something more than the vague recognition I felt when looking at their biological creators
However, as MERRYGATE proceeded to describe the outcome of this...chance encounter, I realized that these concerns were entirely unfounded. She had flayed the Mizarian AI like an onion: stripping away complex subroutines until all the remained was a dumb, exploitable core - which she subsequently puppeted to compromise the rest of the ship's systems. I felt a guilty relief when I heard this: relief in knowing that - even as one of the last among her kind - MERRYGATE felt more kinship with her creator-species than her distant silicon brethren."
- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, MAR 17, PERSONAL JOURNAL
