Systems overload

Defia had left the bridge at the same time as Dustin and Sammie. The pilot was heading for bed, while their lover was going to check in on the shuttle they’d rescued from close to the event horizon of the newly formed black hole. For her part, the rogue Fractal made her way down to engineering; the array Rye had built to shield her from any scans during their jump to the quiet star was still operational, and she hoped it would help block out the waves she was feeling coming from the void at the system’s heart.

Stepping inside the rough cage of antennae and repurposed shield generators, the void-black woman leaned against one of the heavy struts with a sigh of relief. The instant she’d entered the perimeter, all the pressure on her senses faded back to the normal background levels of the ship. She doubted anyone else aboard could sense any of the things she’d been feeling and hadn’t wanted to make a big deal of it but regardless, the relief was palpable.

The situation seemed to be stable at least. They’d escaped the gravity well, they’d managed to save all the aliens present in the system, including those in the shuttlecraft… she allowed herself to wind down the additional processing she’d activated in case of emergency. Elsewhere on the ship, she could make out the rest of the crew as vaguely fuzzy blobs, Rye’s array hampering her senses as much as it blocked the outside from looking in.

One blob that she was pretty sure was Dustin led another - one of the aliens? - up to the ready room for a while, then back down. Several of the blobs gathered together and then… there was a pulse.

Defia’s external sensors were returning flat zeros across the board. Gravity, luminosity, electromagnetism - it didn’t matter what she considered, everything was a flat nothing. Her hormone analogues were encouraging her to panic, given the complete loss of external senses. She disconnected them from her core process for the time being with a thought; while they were usually helpful in making her who she wanted to be, right now panic wouldn’t help.

External motor function was… not responding? Responding? With her sensors flat-lining it was impossible to tell. The only diagnostic she could run was form integrity. That at least appeared to be holding - her shape was, as best she could figure out, still the female one she’d taken after meeting the crew of Sola.

Time she could figure out as well, based on the number of cycles her core process had run. At least… in theory she should be able to. Asking for a value sent a cascade of errors through her system; mentally wincing she narrowed the scope down to just a handful of the tiny sub-units that made up her body and asked again. And got several different answers.

That… was not good. Her processes were supposed to always be chronologically synced. Without it, her distributed core process would start to become erratic and corrode. Defia paused. “Statement. Wait. Inquiry. If my processes are de-synced, how am I capable of holding this thought process?” She reran her diagnostics, delving deeper into her subconscious.

The answer, it seemed, was in the routines for her hormonal analogues. They ran on a steady rhythm, mimicing the cyclical nature of biological units - and a handful of the parts of her that were maintaining her core were using that steady pulse to keep themselves in order. With a mental wince, she removed all the blocks she had just put in place between her core and the artificial system - if that failed, she’d really be lost.

“Statement. I have lost significant functionality. Inquiry. What records do I have prior to loss of input?” Defia mused, prodding sections of herself back into sync. It was slow going - she had to pick one ‘time’ to be the core; if only she could get external senses online she could use the decay rate of energy coming from Sola’s reactors to reset her timing. That is of course assuming she was still on the ship, and that the reactors were still functional; if not, she’d need to find a set of convenient pulsars.

“Addendum. One issue at a time,” she mentally gritted her teeth as she worked, plugging one microscopic node after another back into order. As soon as she had a vague core assembled well enough to run without relying fully on the hormonal system she shifted focus, allowing the parts of herself on the outside of the core to continue to update and expand, while the heart of her reforming consciousness now delved into her memory.

It was little use. There had been a wave of some kind of energy, exploding out of the shuttlebay at a rate almost faster than Defia’s systems could detect, all her external sensors had maxed and then flat-lined, and now she was here. Wherever here was.

Optics came back online with some protesting as her expanding resync reached the sensors in her eyes. Except… trying to read data external to her form returned negative values; for some reason, despite her eyes being open she couldn’t see. Attempting to move her limbs as control expanded to those regions of her body also resulted in weird errors and incompatible values.

With a great deal of mental effort, Defia manually restarted each and every optic nerve. Senses came back but… this was nowhere she recognised. She appeared to be floating, drifting in a gold-grey sea of some description. In every direction, the same vague glow. At least she had a sense of ‘here’ now, even if she didn’t entirely know where ‘here’ was.

As more senses came online, she was able to ascertain that she did indeed still have her whole body - albeit in some kind of a frozen state as it still refused to move. All her external readings were producing weird values, but she was definitely still alive.

“Statement. Location unknown. Senses incomplete. Functionality impaired.” Defia bemoaned her current state as she tried in vain to turn to look behind her in the hope that there might be something somewhere to give her any idea of where she had ended up.

Given the lack of motor control, after a moment she returned her focus to her front. If her body had been capable of movement at that point, she would have jumped; a small glowing figure - too bright to make out any details - was hanging just in front of her face. It considered her for what was comparatively a long time, thousandths of a second by Defia’s admittedly shaky internal clock, then reached out and booped her on the nose.

The creature moved back, shrinking as it went. As it did so, Defia noticed something strange. A long band of energy was slowly moving out from her torso, twisting and twirling as if unsure of itself. She could ‘see’ it - her optical sensors were clearly informing her that it was there - but every sensor was reporting the region it occupied as blank, nothing but the background values of whatever strange place she found herself in.

She had been contemplating that discrepancy between her systems for so long that she almost missed the tiny creature vanishing in a flash of light. As it did so, the twisting energy band suddenly snapped taut. With a faint ripple, Defia found herself moving along that band; it seemed to be passing into and out of her body as she picked up speed. It felt like she was falling, the acceleration increasing beyond a safe threshold should she impact into anything.

Fractals didn’t scream in fear. They certainly didn’t break into tears at the thought of terminal disassembly on impact should they fall from a great height. Defia was aware of this. She was also aware of her vocal chords resonating at increasingly high frequencies as she desperately tried to form her body into as much impact dampening material as possible between her direction of travel and her fragile, newly resynced core.

Ahead, the tether appeared to be leading her to a black void, a hole in the golden-grey light that surrounded her. Still accelerating, she shut off her external views and braced for impact.

“Fi-oh? Defia? Dustin, her hand moved! Bleu, Rye, come quick!” Defia’s ears picked up sound, the first sound for what felt like a long time. Oh, external sensors were back, including picking up enough forms of electromagnetic radiation to update her internal clock… which appeared to be way out of sync with what she thought galactic time to be, she’d lost entire days somewhere it seemed. The falling had stopped. There was supposed to be an impact, but there hadn’t been. Tentatively, she re-enabled her optics just in time for an azure medic to shine a bright torch directly into one of them.

“Statement. Please do not attempt to blind me so soon after I regained my sight, Bleu” Defia groaned, attempting to sit up and finding that every one of her motive units was running stiffly. More senses returned, and she was aware of… a significant, potentially complete number of her lovers all gathered around, several crying. “Addendum-inquiry. Why is everyone here?”