Obviously some things had happened since ART had pulled my copy. And ART was right, it couldn’t risk a comm contact, even to get intel. If the Targets managed to deliver the threat to kill ART’s crew, it would put them in control of the situation and we had to avoid that any way we could. I said, I’m not actually a human baby, ART, I remember the fucking directive—I helped write it.

You’re not making this any easier, ART said.

You can either have an existential crisis or get your crew back, ART, pick one.

ART said, Prepare for deployment.

This was tricky, since once I arrived via comm I’d have to hack into the explorer’s feed. If the explorer was using a filter with properties we hadn’t accounted for, or if it used the brief contact to deliver another viral attack to ART, we could be in trouble.

I was expecting to feel something, like a sense of motion, or to see light streaking by. That’s what would have happened on a show. (I need to get this over with fast. I don’t know how long I can stay me without access to my longterm storage.) But there was nothing.

Then abruptly my existence was all comm code. The suddenness of it shocked me, then I realized this was it, I needed to get moving.

I was still disoriented, and having a moment where I wondered if hey, maybe all the humans were right for once and this was a terrible idea. But then I recognized a code string and snapped out of it. I was onboard the explorer, in the comm system’s receiving buffer. Right before the contact was cut, I pulled over my files from ART’s partition. Now I needed some safe temporary storage.

I used the protocols and proprietary code I’d pulled off the supply transport to put together headers for a test message packet, the kind a comm system would send internally to make sure all the connections were active. To the security system, it looked like a locally generated message, and I used it to slip me and my files through the filters.

I could have forced my way in like the Palisade killware had forced its way aboard the company gunship but then they’d know I was here. (There were a lot of ways for killware to slip through a system’s defenses, but if ART was certain targetControlSystem’s initial attack hadn’t come through the comm … How had it come aboard?)

Now that I was in I hit the SecSystem first. Something, presumably targetControlSystem, had wiped it down to the barely functional level, all its archived video and audio deleted. Think of it like finding yourself in a deserted transit ring, giant echoing embarkation halls and a mall with places for hostels and shops and offices but all of it empty. (Or not, I was software so it really didn’t look like that at all.) I disguised myself as one of SecSystem’s maintenance processes and made a partition for my files. I fortified it, and that made me feel a little more secure. If I did start forgetting who I was, I could come back here to remember.