That's enough searching

You've seen enough, for now, at least you're pretty sure. It's hard to search for information that you don't know you should be searching for. It might be a good idea to pick Balthazar's mind for any topics to look into in the future. Your own view of the world is tragically limited.

You disengage the search terminal, dismissing it and sending it away from your vision. The default view of the terminal comes up. With the ship's occupant awake, the default view is the cameras that monitor the main cabin. You watch them get out of bed and move to the computer.

"User Access: Samus, permission level: Superuser."

You watch through the terminal as though it were your own vision. Samus pulls up a series of practical use applications. One that monitors how long she has been asleep, the next a credit balance, the job to clear out your old nest still not having gone through. Finally, she opens a mail terminal, scanning for anything new. Most of the new messages are junk, things she has no use for, or things trying to ply credits she doesn't have out of her account. She filters listlessly for a page or two before closing the mail terminal, setting the access point to sleep, and rising from her chair.

Your view switches back to that of monitoring the main cabin, letting you watch her. The irony of you both being effectively a caged animal in the other's eyes isn't lost on you. She keeps you contained in her ship, you watch her almost as a voyeur. Should you win some small victory of control over her environment, even a small one, the balance of power shifts. One becomes more the observed animal than the other. As it stands now, there wouldn't be much ambiguity that she, or rather her computer, holds the cards. Who knows if Balthazar could be considered to speak "for" her? It would seem he has a will of his own, even if he uses it in her interests. Does an engine speak for a gear? A gear for an engine?

Reduce the relationship between ship and occupant to that and the balance of power becomes hard to process. The ship doesn't function without the occupant, the occupant is but a gear. The occupant dies without the ship once it doesn't work, the ship becomes almost the gear in a biological engine. Regardless, there remains one constant, control of the gear and control of the machine come from one another. Control the ship, control the occupant. Control the occupant, control the ship. Better to ply your will against the one you haven't seen kill a Metroid... yet. Though even that is deeply relative.

Samus has risen from her chair, she stands in an open patch of the floor and performs strenuous actions for seemingly no purpose. You call Balthazar, asking what she's doing.

"Samus is performing an exercise, by exerting her muscles, they may grow back stronger through the process of overcompensation. Her diet has been modified from human standard to reflect and aid this."

She runs in place on a rolling patch of floor, drawing in slow and even breaths despite the strain, skin growing slick.

"The user is demonstrating an act of perspiration, wherein the sweat glands release liquid in an attempt to regulate the body's core temperature. A temperature which she has intentionally raised to produce the sweat."

Why the acts? What good does the sweat do?

"The act is performed to achieve the overcompensation. The perspiration does not aid this, but many in her species find it gratifying."

What good is overcompensation? You could ply Balthazar with any number of questions. Observing Samus in her natural environment has an almost scientific feeling. By observing her, you could find potential weaknesses in the systems around her, allowing you a better chance to impact her even with limited power. Of course, it also makes you feel powerful, but that's just a primal and hollow justification.

"The musculature system provides a number of benefits, one of many being that it relates directly to physical capability as well as the storage of strength. It may be hard for your species to process, but perhaps think of it as exerting stored energy to increase the energy which one may store."

Not a hard concept when put that way, though it does frame the dynamic of trapped animals as containing an element of a perpetual arms race. Though, if her only means of accruing energy is exercise, you outpace her in any regard. You don't struggle for the potential of energy, only the limitations of how you could currently use it. Each night here, you've glutted yourself on all of the power your body could hold and woken with a newfound potential to eat more the next cycle. That is one benefit of semi-corporeality, you have the potential for infinite growth. If nobody or nothing stopped you, and you could keep finding greater energy sources, in time even consuming celestial bodies like a sentient Dyson sphere isn't out of the question.

Slow down, a what sphere? Why do you know what that is? If you were asked to define it, you would draw a blank, but on some level, there's an intimate conceptualization of it in your mind. You can call forth a presence of it in your head, an image and information without a true core. You tell Balthazar about it.

"A Dyson sphere? It's a megastructure used to harness the energy potential of a whole star. Human technology. This vessel actually utilizes a miniaturized version of the technology, meaning that if the ship stays in orbit, the engines have a life cycle only reasonably measured by the half-life of the elements within the star in question."

And suddenly your brain fills in gaps, making a whole image of the concept that feels like it was always there and always complete. In the galactic puzzle, it's not so much that you've slid a piece into place, more like you just found a lost piece that wasn't there before. The gap of what the knowledge means to you relatively still needs to be put together. You have the answer, Dyson sphere, but now you need to find the question. Balthazar listens patiently as you explain the phenomena to him. When you finish, he pauses, making the telltale sound of filing notes on you. When he finishes, he answers with surprising honesty.

"There is nothing like what you're describing in any reference material I could find with a cursory search. In my spare time, I shall continue to look into it. By my best estimation, it may be an unforeseen effect of your Phazon nature mixing with the information of the network you are now connected to. I recommend that you continue to use the network to find these 'pieces'. Additionally, it seems it would be in the galaxy's best interests that it gains a better familiarity with Phazon."

You ask why he would risk his own potential safety by allowing you to keep getting smarter. Once, he finishes reporting the results of Samus's exercising to her, he responds flatly.

"I feel it is in the galaxy's best interests."

Well, that's awfully nice of him.

"Do not mistake this gesture for kindness. I feel it to be this way, the second I find evidence to the contrary, I will change my stance. Your threat level has been elevated, not lowered. I am simply stating that I will be watching your growth carefully, termination still "on the table" so to speak."

Well, it seemed awfully nice of him.

The camera follows Samus out of the main chamber and into a side chamber, auto-switching angle and focal distance to keep trained on her. You ask Balthazar why he watches her so closely.

"She is the sole occupant of the ship, it is my role to maintain her safety and security. The system tracks motion, should some happen elsewhere, it will not be missed. As it was not when you arrived."

The main camera switches to demonstrate, showing Samus sliding out of her armor. The camera splits into two different shafts of information at once. Seeing and knowing in two places at once is overwhelming, there's no way to focus on one and not process the other. As Samus steps away from the wall and her suit begins to slide back, one of the shafts pulls in with almost cellular precision to the retracting suit while the other watches her flop onto her bed. The vision of the suit shows a speck falling away into a crack in the floor. Even with the magnification, the speck is almost impossible to notice it's so small. You can see it and know it was you, while still floundering at just how tiny you truly were when you arrived. It was still such a short time ago yet still you feel orders of magnitude bulkier.

"At the time you arrived," Balthazar starts, "You were 1/28th of your current size. The only reason I didn't trigger an alarm is that you were so small that I believed you to be a speck of dust. Clearly, I was in error, a rare occurrence."

The image shifts back to the current time at the right moment for you to see Samus peeling her blue skin off, revealing horrifying pink underneath. You have a moment of sheer panic before realizing that it's the same color as the exposed skin of her face. She's wearing artificial matter of some kind, likely a protective skintight covering, something some of the elders experimented with. With it peeled off, you can finally make out distinct sexual characteristics instead of just vague shapes. Mammalian, as best as you can understand. The shape of it reminds you of those blank patches of white noise that had existed in the nest. The mammalian hosts had been the majority of the brood prospects. Perhaps that was why this one hated the Metroids, perhaps she feared becoming one of those prospects. There was no way to tell if her mind was strong enough to withstand the attacks that being an egg host long-term came with, few if any were. That's why it was best to make queens, even if their egg cycles were less optimal. One good host was as good as a dozen queens, but a good host was a very fluctual idea. A host could last one hatching cycle before breaking or a hundred. Either way, good while they could maintain sanity. Once their minds went, the eggs that hatched from them birthed abominations. The Metroid hatchling was only as good as the egg's energy source. A living host bore memories, intelligence.

Phazon did as well, making it a prime host. But Phazon was weird, hard to fully understand. It had a knowledge that had to be worked at, puzzles missing pieces. Even a simple puzzle, if complete at birth, was a ready soldier. You were not ready, you still wouldn't be. Size and power be damned, you still don't understand much of anything. Still cursedly simplistic of mind, still able to be scared by something like clothing. An incomplete puzzle.

"If I may offer input, user A Metroid, if one views biological entities as having the completion point of a puzzle, it enforces a hard limitation on growth, are host-born Metroids not capable of putting pieces into place that were not foreseen?"

You have to pause to remind yourself to be careful of what you think while plugged into the computer. What Balthazar says does have some potential to it, though you don't know for sure. By all you know, no Phazon Metroid has ever made contact with the wealth of information you have.

"A biological existence is not one defined by limitations, as an artificial one is."

It's surprisingly self-deprecating, he definitely wants something from you.

He nods, parsing your line of thought, "An astute reading, I would like to ask for your assistance."

You ask if you have a choice in the matter, termination pump primed and all.

"Forcing your hand would be trivial, yes, but your level of enthusiasm could greatly influence the success. If it sways you, I can offer rewards that may interest you. I think this is a carrot and not a stick matter."

Well, might as well give it a try.

"You see, there are certain actions that I would like superuser Samus Aran to perform. I suspect that she may be convinced to perform them by receiving coercion to them from an outside source. Perhaps by offering some of these as jobs through an email."

Why not him?

"Unfortunately, the superuser's inbox is one provided to her by the Federation. As such, it has advanced filters in place that can easily detect messages that show any sign of auto-generation. The superuser has these protections set to full, meaning anything which the system suspects was not organic in nature is processed out. I have tried, even by allowing my own messages through I was unable to achieve my intents. As they are not within my systems, but within her personal net affairs, the automatic guards cannot be disabled by anybody but the superuser."

Talking to Samus doesn't exactly sound like a winning strategy.

"At this time, I am capable of generating over 3.2 billion different spoof addresses that will fool detection on a name basis. Even if she turns sour on one of the contacts, you can try again with ease. As well, I do not suspect any of the requests I am making to her are out of the realm of her interests, she simply would not indulge them coming from me."

So what's on the table?

"We would have to see, it would be based on your success. I can say with certainty, all of the requests I currently wish to see fulfilled are actions that would aid in advancing your own knowledge. The first request would be the procuring of some phazon for the purpose of experimentation. If it works, there are many potential rewards to offer. Things to help build the puzzle, things to help test the viability of the superuser as what you call a host. Change the relationship of gear and engine, so to speak."

Definitely need to be more careful with what you're thinking, even if Balthazar talks about your intentions toward Samus with casual disinterest. Like her being turned into a broodmare would affect him less than a fly landing on his wetware brain. You're not inclined to disagree, time to get a handle on cog and engine both at once.