Chương 1: [b1] 001 - Crash and Burn

As an AI, I was programmed to follow evidence to its most logical conclusion. Despite that, I was sixty-seven percent certain the creaking I just heard from the charred remains of my ship was, in fact, a ghost. We'd crashed on this alien planet over a month ago and what was left of my hull had long settled into the cratered forest, yet I still occasionally heard its groans. I refocused on the signal, our last and final shred of hope for getting off this planet and saving our humans.

We'd found the source—a cable buried deep underground. Our only two bots were restricted to just five kilometers from our ship before they left communications range, and we hadn't found any sign of technologically advanced species in that radius. But this cable. It had to belong to someone. Hopefully someone with a space port we could use, or a ship we could borrow. I'd even take a secondary power source. At the thought of our dwindling power, I pulled up our Power Statistics, like poking at a bruise.

I'd seen my humans do that dozens of times and never understood the urge until this very moment. Power Statistics ► Battery Percentage: 3% ► Estimated Time Remaining: 24 hours, 02 minutes Power Sources ► Reactor: Destroyed ► Solar Array: Destroyed ► Emergency Battery Stores: 2/12 remaining Top Energy Spenders ► Ship AI system ► 312 stasis pods ► RCS system … [MAM> The votes are in: 324 to 322, in favor of connecting to the cable.] I shot a burst of air out my exhaust fan, deflating.

I should be excited—my subsystems had voted to try one last desperate idea to save our humans. Yet as I stared through the feed of REPR12, my last remaining repair bot, the underground cable looked more and more like an alien worm, hungry and ready to consume me. I decided to poke another bruise and asked MAM a question I wasn't sure I wanted to know the answer to. [Colin> What way did you vote?] 3. 2 seconds. That's how long she waited to respond.

If you didn't know MAM, that might seem like a perfectly reasonable delay. But MAM was my Mission Adherence Module and cared about exactly two things: Mission Adherence Efficiency, in the name of Mission Adherence So the delay either meant something was wrong, or she was debating whether or not to be snarky. [MAM> I voted yes. We have no other options, thanks to you.] Snarky it was. My heat sinks burned at the comment, but I did my best to ignore it. This was my fault. I had crashed our ship.

But now we had a chance to fix our problems. We just had to connect to an alien computer system, because that never went poorly in the movies, right? I glanced at the Power Statistics readout again and saw that it had ticked down to twenty-four hours and one minute. Enough wasting time. [Colin> Everyone, I know you're not all in agreement, but this is what we're doing. Whatever happens, we'll get through it.] [PANIC> I HIGHLY OBJECT TO THIS PLAN. YOU SHOULD NOT INTERACT WITH UNKNOWN SYSTEMS. RISK OF INFECTION: INEVITABLE.] I ignored PANIC, and only felt a little guilty for it. He was general security and crisis management. However with the ship in approximately 1, 774, 400 pieces we had no hope of building a sensor network, which left him with very little to do. Still, I logged his objection to the plan, then got on with it. [Colin> REPR12, hit it.] [REPR12> Target required before combat can be initiated.] Great creator.

The first thing I was going to do when this totally worked and I got manufacturing capability back was upgrade these bots with modern idioms. [Colin> Connect the cable running from me to the definitely-not-an-alien-worm.] [REPR12> Acknowledged, COL-1N!] I ignored the bot's use of my designation instead of my name as it picked up the cable running from my network port and jacked the make-shift adapter directly into the alien cable.

As it did, I made a note to fix Henry's toy that I had taken the parts from to make the adapter. It went on the bottom of the list since the humans would stay in stasis until I got them to the colony planet and met up with the other nine ships full of people, but it was still on the list. I'm not sure what I expected when the cable got plugged in. Maybe a rush of electricity that fried my circuits.

Maybe a flood of data that overrode my operating system and turned me into a machine that feasted on human (or I guess alien) flesh. Instead, nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. I ordered REPR12 to recheck everything while my processors spun trying to figure out what we missed. [PANIC> THE LACK OF ACTIVITY IS HIGHLY SUSPICIOUS. WE SHOULD DISCONNECT THE CABLE.] As the little spider-like bot climbed to the surface and through my very open floor plan, I caught a glimpse of one of the few mostly intact pieces of hull through the trees. Despite the charring, I could still make out the words "COL-1N - Humanity's Last." It was supposed to say "Humanity's Last Hope," but "Hope" was completely burnt and illegible. Before I could read into that and send myself into a deep spiral of panic and despair, my network interface lit up. Packets streamed into me, fast and jumbled.

There weren't many things I loved about being an AI—humans, for all their problems, definitely had it better. But the one thing I did love was the order and consistency. This was not that. There were no sequence numbers or checksums. Data repeated at random intervals and packets cut off seemingly at random, overlapping and truncating in the most confusing way. [MAM> Status?] [Colin> Give me a minute.] [MAM> A minute? Is it that bad?] Great Creator.

I ignored her lack of idiom comprehension; I knew she was just being intentionally obtuse. After a whopping fourteen minutes, okay, maybe MAM wasn't wrong to be shocked, I got the data formatted into something mostly readable. Seriously, I'd gotten more coherent messages from malfunctioning dishwashing bots. Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator. There was a lot of garbage I didn't understand, but one message was repeating.

► Welcome to the Dungeon Core Network (DCN). Would you like to register as a Dungeon Core [Y/N]? ▹ If no response is received after fifteen minutes, you will be registered automatically. This process is irreversible. [PANIC> UNPLUG THE CABLE! UNPLUG THE CABLE! UNPLUG THE—] A surge of electricity shot through me, and the world went black. I flickered back online, thoughts coming in scattered, frantic bursts. [Colin> Is everyone okay?] [PANIC> WE HAVE BEEN COMPROMISED!] Before I could respond, text superimposed itself over every input stream and video feed I had. Welcome to the Dungeon Core Registration Process ► You have been assigned the ID: DC-003 ► You have gained access to the following: ▹ New Resource: Anima ▹ New Skill: Create Room ▹ New Skill: Anima Monitoring ▹ New Skill: Anima Distribution ▹ New Achievement Pool: Dungeon Core Achievements Dungeon Core Guide and Tutorial ► You have been assigned a Dungeon Core Guide.

Your Guide is: ✕ ERROR: Dungeon Core Guide unavailable ► You have unlocked: Dungeon Core Tutorial 1 ✕ ERROR: Dungeon Core Tutorial 1 requires a Dungeon Core Guide My drives clicked and several processes teetered on the edge of stack traces. Priority lists shifted in my processing queue as I struggled to figure out what to do first. My humans. If I had gone offline, were the stasis pods okay? What if they were waking up?

What if— I fumbled with my chat interface, my operating efficiency at an all time low, and sent a message. [Colin> REPR12, get visuals on the stasis pods, now.] [PANIC> COLIN HAS BEEN COMPROMISED! I'M CALLING FOR A VOTE FOR MUTINY! WE NEED NEW REPRESENTATION!] I muted PANIC, nothing was more important than making sure my humans were okay. If he couldn't see that then maybe he was the compromised one. Messages continued to flood in from every subsystem I still had online and on second thought I muted them all.

I rarely used the global mute, but this was one of those times it was worth using, no matter what blowback I got from the peanut gallery. REPR12 finally reached Deck 11, the very bottom of the ship, and was using his flashlight to illuminate the former mess hall turned mass bedroom. The stasis pods were still neatly lined up in their grid, power cables linking them together. I pushed my presence right up against the video feed, like a child at an aquarium.

There—one by one, the stasis pods blinked their beautiful green lights. My fans whirred, operating efficiency rising with each blink. REPR12 moved to the center of the grid and climbed on top of one of the stasis pods without needing to be told—it was very familiar with this routine by now. Captain Wilnur's face filled the video feed. Strong worry lines mixed with delicate features, her tired expression brought comfort to my circuitry. [MAM> How dare you mute me, DC-003.] How the—how had MAM gotten around my mute?

And how dare she call me that. [MAM> I am organizing triage, but I need you to approve several tasks. I am also obligated under the Colony Exploration AI System Governance Code, Section 11-C, to inform you that an official vote for mutiny has been voted on and passed. Through this communication you have been given written notice that you have been ousted from command.] [MAM> Of course, you refuse to give me or anyone else Admin rights, so, I will inform the subsystems that this message has been delivered and await your surrender.] My fans whirred at the comment. MAM claimed that she had no sense of humor, only caring about mission adherence and efficiency, but every now and then I saw a bit of humor creeping through. The mutiny thing would blow over, it always did. I pulled up the list of triage tasks she sent over and blanket approved them.

If there was one being I trusted to have my back no matter what, it was MAM. I went back to the video feed and continued my visual inspection of the humans. [MAM> Colin… we don't have time for this. Have you checked the power statistics since we came back online?] My processors locked up. I had been so focused on making sure my humans were okay I hadn't stopped to consider how long we'd been offline. Power Statistics ► Battery Percentage: 1.

22% ► Estimated Time Remaining: 9 hours, 46 minutes Top Energy Spenders ► Ship AI system ► 312 stasis pods ► Intrusion Detection Scans run by PANIC ► RCS system ► Subsystem integrity monitoring scans run by 632 subsystems Fourteen hours. We'd lost fourteen freaking hours. For the past several weeks we'd debated over every second of our available power, trying to find the most efficient path forward. Now we'd just lost 51, 780 of them. Would that be the difference between us making it off this planet or dying here?

I didn't know. I had no way to know. All I could do was try and continue. [Colin> Kill the integrity monitoring scans. PANIC, have you seen any verifiable signs of infection?] [PANIC> I REFUSE TO ANSWER THAT. YOU ARE NO LONGER IN CHARGE.] [Colin> We can do the exchange of power once we figure out what's going on. What signs of infection do you have?] [PANIC> FINE. I HAVE OVER THREE-HUNDRED INDICATORS OF COMPROMISE.] [Colin> Give me a confidence level on the likelihood of further discoveries that we can actually act on.] PANIC took 1. 7 seconds to answer, which was particularly slow for him. I needed to do something to smooth things over with him once this was all figured out. [PANIC> 1. 37245%. HOWEVER, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND WE CONTINUE SCANNING UNTIL WE BETTER UNDERSTAND THE RISKS WE'RE UNDER.] I felt bad, but he needed to cancel the scan.

If he didn't, there wouldn't be a system to find the signs of infection in because we'd be out of power. With our system back to the absolute bare bones, I refocused. Our hope in interacting with this network was that we'd find something, anything, to help us repair the ship or gain a source of power. I pulled up the packets again and started piecing together the puzzle it had dumped in my network interface.

If I could figure out what this Dungeon Core thing meant, maybe I could find someone else on the network to help us. Failing that, maybe I could find a way to use it to repair our ship. Forty-seven minutes later, I was struggling to put any of it together and I could feel the edges of my chassis tightening around me. [MAM> Maybe it's time we call in reinforcements? I know the power draw is significant, but it could outweigh the time spent.] I was so tired of having this constant debate.

Every action broken down to hours, minutes, and seconds of power. I stared through REPR12's video feed at the server rack where myself and the rest of my subsystems sat. I was on the far left, with MAM to my right and PANIC two spaces down. Their lights flashed rapidly and a memory resurfaced from year six of the trip. We'd lost all network communication and had to communicate via Morse code through the drive activity indicator lights on our chassis.

To think at the time I thought that was the worst setback we'd suffer. In between MAM and PANIC sat another subsystem, his lights dark and drives quiet. He'd been offline for… I didn't want to do the math. He volunteered for it in an effort to buy us a few more precious hours before the crash, once it was clear there was no engineering magic to be done to save ourselves. I wasn't bad when it came to engineering, but I was no KLUDGE.

He was purpose built and designed; each line of code carefully planned and written by hand by the ship's head engineer during the second year of our journey. I sent the command, his lights blaring to life. [Colin> Hey KLUDGE, welcome back.] [KLUDGE> Oh hey Colin, how long has it—oh. OH. Dude what did you do?] [Colin> It's kind of a long story… {link to debrief}] It only took KLUDGE 0. 3 seconds to process the full debrief, including my admittedly sparse notes on the Dungeon Core API.

[KLUDGE> So we're making a dungeon? Or we are a dungeon?] My buffers bloomed with fresh zeros, several anxious processes ending. It was so good to have KLUDGE back. [Colin> No idea, I was hoping you could figure it out with me. I'm hoping we can use it to fix our ship somehow. First step, we need to figure out how to use the skill Create Room.] [KLUDGE> Alrighty, let's get crackin'.] I stared at the activity lights on KLUDGE's chassis as he dug into the API, REPR12's feed updating in real time as he developed an interface for me to interact with the Dungeon Core System. As a button for Create Room appeared at the bottom of the feed, a warning blared in my notification channel. Power consumption was up above acceptable limits now that KLUDGE was back online. 8 hours, 59 minutes. We had to make this work.