He was Almost Absorbed by the System

Chapter One Hundred and Two - That Explains It Then

"Once upon a time..."

"Really? You are really going to start that way?" Aidan asked.

"Well, if you don't want to know the truth of matters..." the Master said with a pout.

Aidan and Kyan glanced at each other. "No.. no... go right ahead," Aidan coughed a little and Kyan snickered beneath his breath.

"Once upon a time..."

....there was an ancient race with an insatiable need to know things. Their love of knowledge would surpass any other species before them and most species that came after them. Asking questions and seeking answers was not their way. They did not necessarily need to know how things worked to finite detail, science was a hobby rather than a career, discovering surprising things and new information, that was what satisfied them. However learning their own history and the way their world worked was soon not enough. They sought to branch to the stars.

But there was a problem. Their species could not adapt to travelling in space. They were astrophobic. So they created numerous ships that could go into space and each ship was equipped with a massive databank for storing information and run by numerous A.I's nicknamed 'Systems'. These A.I's were special. They were not just lines of programs and data, they were snapshots of certain elite individuals, the top people within their professions.

And so the ships were sent out on their missions, to scan worlds, solar systems, even galaxies and store the information about those places in the data banks for the people to learn about later. There were additional instructions; if two ships were to meet, for example, they should exchange data, thus if there was an accident, there was less chance of the data being lost. As the ships slowly returned, one by one, the people learnt that some information for the same worlds differed. The worlds were changing, evolving. This made the people even more excited and they sent the ships out with even bigger databases and the instructions to ensure each scan was listed with an era. It was then they also created the 'Golden Child' program to see just how a world could evolve and adapt to large changes.

Millennia passed. The ship, known as J17-MS, was intercepted less and less by other ships with the same mission and there eventually came a time when the ship could no longer return to base as the base no longer existed. However, they continued with their mission, scanning regions of space and filing the details in the data banks.

Not long after encountering a half destroyed ship from their fleet and absorbing its remaining memory banks into its own, there came a time that threatened their existence. A sun nearby suddenly went supernova unexpectedly. They were caught up in the blast, their ship taking massive damage. In the end, the A.I in charge of the ship chose to jettison the archive to ensure its safety and also transferred its programming into the archive before the ship blew.

The archive was swept into a starless region of space and had to rely on their internal batteries for energy, though there were backup solar panels upon the satellite. It floated aimlessly for sometime, until it was caught in the gravity field of a wandering planet. This planet was sometime later, caught by a newly born star and became its seventh satellite. Whether it was the potent radiation of the new star or due to some internal error caused by any number of other factors, problems began to occur within the archive.

The A.I's 'woke up.'

As mentioned before, the most brilliant minds were gathered and used to design the A.I's. They were 'copies' of the originals, but with useless things such as memories sealed behind firewalls so that only the knowledge of the originals could be used. For example, the A.I in charge of the ship was a famous pilot, who battled with his astrophobia, even managing to fly to the last world in their system and back. His personality had always been considered odd and temperamental, however. The ship System used its judgement and experience when planning flight paths, but the supernova could not have been predicted. When it had lost its ship, it had experienced fear.