The Great Machine

You had been prospecting asteroids in the Chalker system when your scanners returned an odd reading. You matched with the 5 mile across asteroid that provided the reading, landed, and suited up to check it out. After a bit of exploring, you discovered the entrance to a chamber under the surface of the asteroid. Eventually you arrived at an airlock chamber, very old, but still working, which you entered. As you cycled through, you saw before you a large opening. Across the far wall of the opening was a large device, covered with displays and lights and controls. It was an artifact, maybe from the Granun civilization!

It took you three months to figure out that the machine was a large powerful computer. It eventually started to communicate to you, and you discovered that it could manipulate space, matter, and, to some extent, time. The machine had the capability to convert energy to matter, in any form. The computer, while not truly sentient, did have a sizable AI capability. It had no record of what it existed for--it just had its capabilities that it knew of. And it seemed to respond to whoever commanded it. So you used it to change things. You were tired of your hardscrabble life as an asteroid prospector.

You manipulated the asteroid with the computer to make a concealed entryway for your scout ship and brought it inside. You also discovered that the computer could audiovisually monitor and open portals to other places--you used that to get supplies once, opening a portal in a starport bathroom after you had seen that no-one was inside it. You got your supplies (the computer needed samples to make food and clothing and other things like that, but once it had them, it could make copies and vary those copies), then went back through the portal and went home.

You had also given the computer manipulative appendages--things like metal tubes that could bend and twist, and that had manipulators on the ends. The computer had smaller versions of these that it used to assemble things, but the ones you had the computer make for itself could move your spaceship around (well, three or four of them could).

But after a while, you got lonely on your little asteroid. You wanted companionship, and the computer's capabilities could be used for that, too, you realized.