Shallow Space

Deep Space (#2)

Captain's log: Our second galactic day has passed, which means I've been away from home for three and a half years. Happy 34th birthday, Delyla.

Being in space and doing what I do, I miss home. I miss our bickering and how much you've shown me, and how you pushed me to become a pilot. Some things are meant to be, and some aren't. You always said that to me when things turned bad, and it took me a long time to accept that. Today, I saved a Tiritan child that was almost sold off as an exotic pet. We caught their ship off-route and forced them to show us their cargo. A lot of endangered plants and animals got back to their homes that day.

"Captain Celia!" Shiro entered the Captain's quarters with an exoframe.

Celia cleared her throat. "Yes, Shiro?"

"Are you free right now? You're needed in the communications chamber." Shiro started to roll backward out of the room.

"Sure, what's up?" Celia asked.

"Important," Shiro replied, hurrying away. As much of a cold, hard machine he was, this was too blunt even for him.

"If Shiro comes with us in an exoframe, it must be something big." Celia got up from her bed and threw the tablet away. She hurried towards the chamber.

"What's up, Zero?" Celia asked. Zero was the only technician who could repair the ship with duct tape and glue.

"Communications. I can't maintain this. Something on board is jamming all our communications." Zero grabbed a screwdriver. "I have high hopes that I can dampen it and get one, maybe two, transmissions through, but no matter what, we have to stop somewhere and repair this."

"What's your suggestion, Zero?" Celia asked.

"I see three options. DeB-2, an uninhabited planet where I can scrounge up resources. Alternatively, Celeste Station on Kepler-72 Century will repair it, but they are known as pricey arseholes. Or we could try to beat the odds and get to a human-maintained station."

"That's all, Zero. You may leave now," Celia said, her voice tinged with concern. This caught Zero off guard.

"But I think-" he said, looking at her.

"I said thank you, Zero. You can leave now," she said with an elevated voice. This wasn't his call. It was hers.

Celia sat in the communication console terminal's main seat. She looked tired. She tapped on the screen and told Shiro through the screen that this had to be known on the ship. Then she continued cautiously calculating the risks. Kepler-72 wasn't too far away, but HR wouldn't be so thrilled. As she sat there in silence, a loud alarm sounded.

"S.H.I.R.O. Unit System Fault. Fault. Fault. FAULT." The synthesized voice became more mechanical and glitched.

"What's wrong, Shiro?" Celia asked.

"S.H.I.R.O. CRITICAL ERROR. COMMUNICATION."

Zero dashed into the room. That last sentence wasn't coming from the Shiro exoframe. It was coming from the ship. Every single speaker in the entire ship heard that SHIRO was damaged. It turned out to be something greater. Even Evelynn, the janitor, showed up. Some ship personnel didn't even know that a janitor was on board.

Lieutenant Shepard and Brian directly sat next to Captain Celia. Even Superintendent Senna showed up for this occasion. She rarely emerged from her pad.

Captain Celia took a deep breath and faced her crew. "I declare this emergency meeting," she said in a firm voice. "S.H.I.R.O. never acted like this before. This is an urgent matter."

Lieutenant Shepard leaned forward in his seat. "What's the problem, Captain?"

Zero, the ship's engineer, stood up and walked to the center of the room. "Okay, I dismantled the Exoframe and looked at it. It's not a hardware issue. We may have a virus on our hand."

"A computer virus? Attacking a ship's AI? Is that even possible?" Brian asked, his brow furrowed in concern.

Shepard and Zero nodded in unison. "There are a few AI viruses. I'm surprised this only shut down S.H.I.R.O. and didn't kill us yet," Shepard said.

Zero frowned. "Well, technically, we can't really do anything now. Guns are offline, so is the shield. At least the emergency O2 and gravity processors are still working." He paused, then raised his eyebrows as if he had an idea.

Evelynn, the ship's medic, spoke up. "Can you put the ship down like this?"

"We can land this, right, Captain?" Shepard asked, looking at Celia.

"It won't be easy, since most of the control panel was handled by S.H.I.R.O.," Celia replied, her expression troubled. "But it's not impossible. We can always send out a transmission." She hesitated, then looked at the big screen on the other side of the comms room. "Assuming we have a way to transmit it."

"Zero, can you work your magic on the captain's control panel?" Senna, the ship's superintendent, asked. "If you can set it to manual, the four of us can land the ship."

"That system was built with S.H.I.R.O. in mind. I don't know. Maybe we could run code snippets," Zero said, grabbing a laptop and starting to tap around. "The most I could do is get us to crashland."

"What are the chances of all of us surviving?" Shepard asked, his voice tense.

Senna slowly started clapping, a wry smile on her face. "About a 75% chance that we all survive. Not bad, rookie. I was right about you. Now, if I may, I will be in my pod." With that, she stood up and walked off.

"Is that the best you could do? Crashland us?" Shepard shouted angrily.

"It's not something I would recommend, but it's the best we can do right now. Alright?" Zero exclaimed apologetically. He sighed and smirked. "You can always ask S.H.I.N.O. for a better idea."

Celia's log read: "We crashlanded. Our AI has been acting weird for a while, and now it has shut down because of a virus. We don't know when we can leave this godforsaken planet. One can only hope. Some things are ment to happen. And some are not ment to be..."