It worked! I have made a friend!
Okay, so, thats a bit of a lie. I say it worked as if my original plan was a success. What I was not telling you was that it has been over a week of failed attempts trying to communicate with the old weapons platform in orbit around the pri moon.
I did manage to figure out when it was built, and why. About a century ago, for the Worshiper Wars that destroyed most of the lunar surface cities. Its called a Divine Eye, in a way that is actually a really clever pun when written in the particular dialect of its builders.
The archives I have are incomplete, but I get the impression that the AI on this thing is smarter than this entire space station twice over. And far, *far* more capable of becoming bored.
So of course I tried to say hi.
Radio didnt work. Tight beam communication didnt work. Subspace broadcast didnt work. *Superspace* broadcast didnt work, which surprised because that ones basically just screaming that works in vacuum.
Im not even sure why the station has a superspace antenna setup? Though the way the logs around it were scrubbed is the sa kind of sloppy work that the Real Arica occupiers did when they tried to abandon ship. Which sort of makes want to bla them for this idiot setup.
Of course, it *was* a viable option. It just didnt work. And at a certain point, I started to think it wasnt just my poor grasp of Chinese causing the problem.
So I switched to trying sothing a little more clever, and a little stupider.
It wasnt like we were riding high on piles of wealth, but Im pretty sparing with how I spend the collected supplies that I acquire up here. There *is* a finite amount of junk I can turn into bullets, after all. So Ive got so stockpiles to dip into.
And I did so, firing up a fabricator that I knew existed, but had never actually physically visited. This actually required a minor spacewalk from ; the fabricator has an airlock, which I know how to open, but *not* the internal door.
Fun fact, it took less effort to get the station to make a spacesuit than it did to get it to open a damn door. I an, I made the suit two hundred years ago. Shortly after that, in a flight of childish fancy, I also made myself a suit thats really so kind of horrifying amalgamation of power armor and a strike craft. I have never had a reason to wear that one.
The fabricator is one Ive never used because its primarily for building drone chassis. And the stations maintenance bots are built sowhere else, or just kept up to standards by the local nanoswarm. Right now, though, a drone is exactly what I need.
It took less than two hours for the drone I needed to be assembled, outfitted, and fueled. Thats legitimately less ti than it takes for the foundry to make a railgun round; I think this replicator might be one of the fastest pieces of tech on the station, now that Ive seen it in action.
After that, it was just a matter of adding one final touch, and sending the thing off. Controlled, of course. Im not trusting a program to guide this one, and not just because the station has so many security locks on that kind of thing that it might actually vent out an airlock before letting get away with it.
One pass of the drone by my target. Then another, making sure that the underside was revealed to the weapons platform that I *knew* could see the lunar surface. It must, *must* be able to see what I had sent its way.
I admit, Id given a wling wail of sorrow when I saw it open fire. Thin crackling lilac lashes opening up on the drone on the second pass. The scanners from both the station and the drone rendering it in detail. Id been prepared to just give up then, except
Except the drone didnt shut down. Didnt take critical damage. Just kept its trajectory, and stayed under my remote command.
Curious, I brought it back to the station, docked it in one of the actual drone bays, which might be getting so actual work to do now, and went to check it out.
The underbelly of the drone, a smooth tal surface that was easily twenty feet long and half again as wide, contained two things. The first was my addition. A ssily etched ssage, carved with the paw-laser on my suit.
Hello! It read. Would you like to be friends? It said this in two languages, and I wont lie, neither of them looked like they were written by anyone who had graduated kindergarten.
And underneath, in equally sloppy lines, as small as possible to fit more words in and still glowing with pale purple-white radiation, was a reply.
Yes. Please help . I cannot be alone any longer. I am so tired.
There was a pang in my heart. A cynical part of my traitorous mind told that this creation was barely a hundred years old, and Id been alone for multiple iterations of its lifeti and hadnt broken down. But then, the compassionate part of , the important part that I listened to, spoke up to say that I *did* frequently break down. That I did the sa thing this orbital creature did; firing on the surface below and calling it my duty. That maybe being tired wasnt a competition, and maybe having a friend was sothing we both needed.
I ordered the maintenance bot to store the tal plate, tagging it in the AR as marked for forensic investigation, so the station nanos wouldnt try to clean it. Then, as the drone was repaired, I added a new ssage before sending it off again.
What is your na? What can I do to help? I cannot talk often, but I will send ssages when I can.
I added the last part awkwardly, still uncertain which language was the preferred one, or if I was even spelling things correctly. It had occurred to as I was cutting in with my unsteady paw mounted laser cutter, that the station was going to be out of drone command range as my orbit took around the planet. And the lack of autonomous command of the drones ant that this would be a ti investnt on my part.
And if there was one maddening paradox of immortality, it was that I never had enough ti.
I tried to fill in the gaps of my crumbling schedule while I flew the drone. There was a good chunk of the path that was just a straight line mostly free of obstacles, and I used that ti to review the weekly report on changes in Earths topography.
For not the first ti, I wished I had a crew. Hell, even a crew of *other cats* would be better than nothing. At least they could scream at maintenance bots for .
The drone picked up its violent payload of words, and I turned to bring it back. I wasnt going to have ti to send another one today, I realized, as I used the twenty minutes of straight emptiness to dig through station logs for door codes.
The drone landed. I sprinted for the bay, taking a mild detour to yowl at the designated air filtration upkeep bot to do its job.
The answers were in reverse order to my asking.
Please, dont leave . Take away from here. I cannot be a soldier any longer. I am Glittering Seven Two.
The satellite Glitter, I decided to call it in my head until I had permission to call it by a nickna wanted to be hauled out of its orbit.
I could understand that. As far as it knew well, the war it was built for never ended. It wouldnt have received any shutdown commands, since it was still up and running. Unless it had ignored them, and the dissonance was tearing its mind apart.
That was a problem with a lot of AIs. A problem that never really got solved, and honestly kind of got worse as the tech developed. If they were programd with any hard rules or ideologies, then eventually the real world would conflict with their programming. And when it did, it was basically like cognitive dissonance in an organic creature, only it caused rapid failure cascades that led to permanently active code damage.
Ignoring a shutdown order because the platform couldnt accept the end of the war would cause that. Not wanting to be a soldier when it was hardwired to believe that was its purpose would cause that.
It was possible that the only reason it was capable of speaking to this way was because it had tricked its own code limits into believing it was attacking the drone.
I left myself a big glowing AR to do list for this new friendship, as I added the conversation plate to the other one.
Talking was gonna be more expensive than I expected, if I insisted on keeping a record. Maybe I should just log the ssages and recycle these. Maybe Id do that eventually. Right now, I had to put it out of my mind. Had to.
As much as I liked to make a big deal about owning a space station, and being an all-powerful star cat, I probably had more work to do than most anyone else in the solar system.
It wasnt like I had *no* free ti, but I really did need to keep up on the maintenance that kept the station from falling out of the sky. Needed to check wherever I was orbiting over for ergence events, rogue cities, armies, anomalously hostile weather, or whatever else the planet decided to cook up as a new way to ruin lives. Needed to keep learning code, keep digging up secrets. Needed to be the hand on the controls for the manipulator arms of the cleanup suite, dragging in nearby space junk and teorites to keep my material stores topped off and ready for use.
Needed to eat, sadly.
The worst part, the *absolute* worst part, of my immortality? The process had left with an absolute, crystalline mory of every minute of my life before my modification.
Most of it was either boring, scary, poorly understood, relaxing, or comfortable. A lot of it involved eating.
It was a tornt that I cant really explain, to know that even with my inherent feline taste buds not being even remotely close to a humans, that I had once tasted *tuna*, and may never again experience that.
I scarfed down another recycled, nutrient rich, flavor deficit ration bar, and got back to work.
I had six hours before Id be in drone range for conversation again. That was enough ti, baring any more ergency alarms, to try to find a faster engine schematic to strap onto the drone craft, to figure out what it would take to tow a weapons platform, and to redouble my futile hope that I could find a working hydroponics station still in orbit that I could eat.
Just eat the whole thing. I dont care. I will gnaw through bulkheads to get to a goddamn carrot.
My dreams of having anything in my diet that wasnt bar-shaped were interrupted by another klaxon.
Ive ntioned before that I can, in fact, sigh. It never feels like it helps, but I do it anyway.
A quick check of the AR windows popping up around my head shows that its sothing actually incoming on *us* this ti. Two ten ter long objects rapidly closing on the station, and appearing uninterested in communication.
I bolt for the nearest weapons blister, wing out commands as my paws pad in soft thuds on the tal floor. The information Im hoping for cos back to ; theyre not missiles, theyre drones of so kind. Scanners show theyre ard, but not if theyre ard *enough*.
The question I really have is where the hell they ca from. Though I already know the answer, I get confirmation as the archive sweep I ordered returns a match.
Theyre United Eastern Bloc hunter-killers. Drones built to kill drones, specialized for low orbit and upper atmosphere work.
The UEB. I am, by necessity, a student of a few historical cultures. And the na of one of the biggest enemies of Real Arica fills with a grim lack of surprise.
I may, *may*, have assud a little too much in terms of my superior control of the orbit of Earth. I may also have just used Real Arica drone designs to talk to a space gun having an existential crisis.
I added redesign drone silhouettes to my list of things I needed to do.
The incoming drones were zeroing in on the docking bay where Id landed my own communications platforms, either not knowing or not caring that the drone Id launched was almost entirely unard. This was actually hugely lucky for , because it ant they were trying to approach the station from above, and it was one of the places where I had almost complete control of the defensive weaponry.
The first drone took a hit from a flak web, the physics-angering burst of electromagnetic interference packets turning its control programming into sludge and lting half the important circuits on the thing.
The second drone, perhaps sensing the death of its companion, began firing on my ho, and my heart stopped as the AR projection of our battle showed the incoming track of the projectiles.
Then the bullets hit the stations shield, and didnt even register as a power fluctuation.
The hunter killer, which would have been a serious threat to my own communication drone, swooped past, and I cut it in half with a void beam.
I let out another breath I had been holding.
Well. That was sothing else to look out for every ti I had a small chat with my new friend.
Maybe instead of conquering a floating garden, Id just take over the enemy drone bay instead. Save myself the headache.
Well, one headache. It wasnt like I was strapped for sources these days.
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