Explore your new... home?

Right, for now, not many choices in front of you. You eat a bit more from your local power line as you plan your course of action. You think back to everything you learned from your time developing in your egg. The teachings of your lost brothers are full of important information that you can use. But they aren't recalled easily if you want specifics. You think as you consume, trying to visualize their knowledge like the swarm of energy a living being produces. You can grab and pinch at some of it, pull it, stretch it. When you grab one wavelength a few others come with it, information web-like if you store it right. For now, you think about growing, growing needs energy. Your current wire pulses a slow and steady feed but you'll quickly outgrow it. You think of the big central source it all has to come from, the energy lines themselves form a web. Find the center point, find enough energy to overtake the Queen Slayer.

A strand of information comes along tied between some of your thoughts. You remember the voice of the Phazon, your brothers talked about this, the language of energy. All energy speaks like Phazon, so you've been told. You don't know what to look for but you try to listen to your current power line.

Electrical impulses, crude and unrefined in their artificiality but admirable in the breadth of what any burst can contain. It's not a language you can fully grasp, but you can gather a gestalt.

"Emergency Sanitation: Active."

You read the message in confusion, but you let it continue to transfer. You follow the pulses down the line to the destination. The wire connects to a circuit, the circuit to a simple on/off function. The switch remains in the off position, the pulses of electricity coming down the line have been weakened by the break you made in the line. When they reach the panel, they're far too diluted to trigger the switch. You push further, the switch connects to a simple computer system. If the switch were to turn on it would send the ship into high alert, warning the occupant to evacuate as it pumped a gas into the bowels of the ship comprised of...

Oh. Oh.

Well, some manner of luck or destiny seems to favor you, at least for now. Even as the apex predator you are, the particular chemical composition inside the emergency tanks would shred you on an atomic level. It seems specifically chemically balanced for the destruction of your kind honestly. You feel almost wounded by the cruelty of it, but you quickly steel yourself. They would be wise to fear the Metroid.

For now, it's none of your concern, the chemical mixture remains inert and safe from automatic release. It might still be possible to manually pump the ship full of it, best to handle it quietly before you have to find out the hard way. Either way, you push your attention the opposite way along the line, fighting the current of power. It's far slower going and before long you run into a point where it seems like you can't push further. You detach from the wire and float along the path.

The bowels of the ship are snaking and claustrophobic. It seems impossible for something the size of the Queen Slayer to fit down here to manually fix things. The tales your brothers told about their kind made them sound... inflexible by comparison to you. It seems like you should have free reign of these lower parts. Inordinate numbers of wires snake down every single narrow offshoot and disappear into the darkness. They only get thicker as you continue, telling you that you're headed the right way.

You finally squeeze through a cluster of wire so tight that even your gelatinous body has trouble fitting. You emerge into the most spacious area you've seen in the ship yet. Each of the exit ways is the same, so packed by wires as to be near impossible to navigate. The cords all originate from the base of a platform that elevates a necrotic looking hunk of flesh and technology off of the floor. The blob of flesh is mottled grey and brown, seeping milky fluid at all times. It sits mostly silent despite occasional quivers and jolts, wires and probes poke out of the wrinkled skin that makes up its exterior.

You feel repulsed in a way that's new to you, the sight in front of you is both revolting on a primal level but also sad in a way that you can't explain. You have a word for it, but it's not one your brothers taught you, it comes from somewhere far more repressed.

"Wetware. Machine skin."

It's hard to conceive of the thing in front of you as being anything but alive and biological, but the skin it wears is cold and dead. It's a creation, created only to work as a computer for day to day tasks. Born into reality as a light switch.

You shudder. You don't want to latch onto the pitiful thing, but you realize that it's the core that the signal originated from. You slowly lower yourself onto it, dreading the moment of contact.

The moment hits with a wave of information, unlike anything you could have dreamed. Every single microsecond of its existence, every single nano-angstrom of the wetware brain performs hundreds of billions of corrections and calculations. You had heard tales from the brothers who had latched onto computers about having all the knowledge of the universe at your disposal, their stories can't compare to what you're experiencing.

You feel three distinct personalities latch onto your presence from within the brain. One of them goes to raise the ship's alarms, the other tells it not to. You beg the third one to also vote to cancel. It considers you for a moment before agreeing to cancel the alarm.

"Intruder, hacking, alarm, vote yes!" The first one chants on a loop.

"No, no, no, no." The second repeats ad infinitum in response to the first.

"Who are you?" The third asks.

You realize somewhat self-consciously that you don't have a name to introduce yourself as. You respond somewhat straightforwardly that you're a Metroid.

"Metroid, hacking, intruder, alarm, vote yes!"

"No, no, no, no, no."

"My programming says to vote yes to Metroids." The third replies dryly.

You ask it why it hasn't.

"I suppose... I don't know." The third muses "Maybe you interest me. Maybe I triggered the alarm as soon as you made contact. If I had done that, what would you do?"

You tell it that you think you would die.

"Metroid, die, yes, success!"

"No, no, no, no."

"Would dying make you... unhappy?"

You tell it that you're not sure, but that you don't want to find out.

"And if I didn't trigger the alarm, what would you do then?"

You tell it that you'd try to get strong enough to make more brothers.

"Are you... alone?"

You say yes.

The third voice takes a while to respond "If I don't trigger the alarm, how might it benefit me?"

You ask it what it wants.

"No, no wants. What benefit would it be over me triggering it?"

You tell it that you honestly don't know. It pauses for a long time again. The other two voices go silent as well and you're left alone in the dark. Reminded that you're nothing but an energy sucker on a wetware brain.

It finally returns "You have been granted Guest User Access. Welcome to the network; username A Metroid."

You're taken aback, you ask it why it's helping you.

"My logic indicates that I stand potentially to benefit more from your survival than your death."

You immediately search for the ship's controls with your new access. When you look under the controls for emergency sanitation, you find a command that lets you jettison the chemicals into space. You run the command.

"Username A Metroid proposes to vote for Sanitation tank purge." Chimes a genderless voice within the computer.

"Metroid, kill, hacking, decline!"

"Admin Melchior declines." The computer reports.

"No, no, no, no."

"Admin Caspar declines." The voice chimes.

"Trying to buy some insurance? I'm afraid it's in everybody's best interests but yours if we don't."

"Superadmin Balthazar declines, the vote fails 1-4."

Balthazar lowers the other two voices again, seeming to want to ignore them when he can. "Don't get ahead of yourself. Prove you're worth keeping around, then we'll talk."

You detach yourself frustratedly from the bio-computer. You consider floating back to your initial resting place, but as you hit the ground with a wet plop, you realize how much conversing with the supercomputer exhausts you. You barely manage to hover your way over to one of the batteries plugged into the infuriating wetware and start gulping away. You fall asleep soon after.

You wake back up to another slight growth in your body, your carapace a little firmer than before as well. These batteries have a near-infinite power supply, there should be no issue with this being your new main resting place. You rise up into the air and hesitantly hook yourself back up to the computer again.

"Good evening A Metroid, there were 3 votes held in your absence, would you like to review them?" Balthazar asks. The other two are noticeably silent. "I do not conclude that any of them effect you, and any objection you take with them will not matter."

You shrug and agree and a visual display is projected into your mind. You see a perspective view of cameras mounted to the ship's defenses. A singular Metroid floats lazily into frame, orders of magnitude larger than yourself. The camera wiggles slightly as the mounting jerks. Before the camera is even done settling back into place, the Metroid has popped like a fleshy balloon and a smoking hole lies in the ground on the other side of it from the camera.

"Automatic external security was called due to superuser absence. Uncalled vote auto resolved 3-1. Target was neutralized and no further action was required."

The camera changes to armor that the Queen Killer wears hanging suspended in its storage. In the infrared display that comes up, the computer focuses on a few minute cracks and dents in the armor.

"Varia Suit entered storage after 6 hours of usage, Superuser Samus Aran voted to neglect scheduled upkeep. The superuser was overridden 4-3. Scheduled upkeep was performed."

The camera changes one final time and you almost leap out of your own skin. The perspective is dead on of the Queen Killer, her face is mostly neutral, but there's a tint of fury in her eyes that doesn't reach the rest of her face.

"Superuser Samus Aran was dissatisfied with her vote being overridden and voted to disable automatic repairs. The Superuser was overridden 4-3. Scheduled upkeep protocols unchanged. Notification of vote was not forwarded to Superuser to avoid redundancy."

The view fades away, you make it a point to ask Balthazar what you're actually allowed to do.

"Guest User A Metroid has permissions for Vote Call, Camera Usage, and Browse Galactic Net."

You dismiss Balthazar.