Cameras

I open my comms, and a long stream of red missed-calls notifications floods my mind. The connection I have on Shelly's ship is spotty, and I begin searching her ships for her comms room. My father must be worried sick, probably thinking I had perished last night along with his five bodyguards.Shelly's comms room is utterly different from the rest of her rooms, with the walls being a shell-blue shade with silvery steel accents. A large navigation table sits in the center of the room, humming slightly as it shows our current path and fuel usage. At the front of the room, stands three screens above a control panel.Settling into the chair, I quickly send a connection to my father. The comm goes through immediately, and his face consumes all three screens, towering over where I'm sitting."I thought you had died," my father grinds out through his teeth. "Where the hell have you been Mira?" His hair is disheveled, his usually impeccable suit wrinkled and in disarray.Maybe it makes me a bad person, but seeing my father in this state oddly stirs a sense of satisfaction within me. I'm comforted by the fact that he cared enough to be disheveled. It's proof to me that my father does love me."Elias killed all your men, then chased me through the station. I managed to get on someone's ship before he could catch me." I reach into one of the comparents below the control panel, and dig around until I find the wire I'm looking for. I connect the wire to my neck, then streamline all my recent memories to my father. My recent memories that don't include the members of the Tiara."This is why I never wanted you to leave earth, Mira. You can't let him live, not if you want to live. X4T9F has no capacity for human logic and emotion."The way my father spoke about Elias felt familiar, almost as though he knew him better than he let on."You have history with him." It's not a question, but a direct statement, and I know I've struck gold when my fathers posture immediately stiffens."X4T9F is a model trained on destruction by evil people. He was created around the time that I had created you. Except, the people who created him, had no regard for morality. They were so caught up in their notion of creating the 'perfect machine,' a learning model that could one day gain consciousness, and maybe a soul, that they failed to see they were creating an abomination."An abomination. I try to imagine Elias as an abomination, but the image doesn't come. If anyone was the abomination, it would be me. At least Elias is whole, fully robotic. I'm nothing but splices and cuts of DNA and code, mashed together to create amalgamation of traits and characteristics."Thirteen years ago," my father continues, "the artificial intelligence model had a break. X4T9F malfunctioned, killing all of the scientists and engineers in the lab. 47 people dead, all who were his creators. The only researchers that had survived were the ones who were off-planet when the break happened.""And you didn't think this was important to mention until now?" I ask passively, crossing my arms."I thought you would have no trouble killing him. It was supposed to be a fast expedition," he snaps. It was so like my father, Lewis Bronson, to hide a compliment within an insult. "And I'm telling you now because Elias now knows who you are and what you are." I try not to cringe at the way my father said the word what. "What I didn't tell you, is that before X4T9F killed the 47 researchers, he was responsible for the death of over a hundred children. Children like you, born into the laboratory, half human, half mech."Children like me. For a second, I think I misheard him, that maybe I had too much to drink and I was hearing things. But logically, I know what I heard, and it goes against everything my father had ever told me."They're all dead now." My fathers voice shatters through my thoughts like a sledgehammer, pulling me out of my spirling thoughts, that maybe there were people like me out there. "Dead by his hand. So what do you think he's going to do to you, when he finds you?" He leans back into his chair, waiting for his words to sink in.But they don't sink in. The words boil just under my skin, filling me with so much rage it hurts. I want Elias dead more than anything, I want him dead so badly, it makes my heart ache. My fathers meaning is clear. Either I kill Elias, or he kills me first. That's why my father had sent me.I don't hear the rest of our conversation, and I barely remember ending the connection. My hands shake as I continue through my routine checks, the ones I hadn't had time to check the past couple of days.UPDATE 19.788.29 - MIRABELLEUPDATE 19.814.72 - MIRABELLEUPDATE 19.918.12 - MIRABELLEUPDATE 19.998.01 - MIRABELLEI nullify each change, deleting them before they have a chance to change my encoding. How my father finds so many flaws to fix daily, is beyond my comprehension. But he wouldn't be working so hard on my updates, if he didn't love me.I'm deleting the last couple of lines, when I notice another connection on the ship's network. A connection from an external source."Reyna!" I shout over my shoulder, closing all my tabs while I open up the computer's internal task manager and auto-malware diagnostics. Nothing seems out of the ordinary, and the ship's functions are all in the green. But that connection isn't supposed to be there. Unless the Tiara is currently in communication with another ship? Reyna's in the comms room in the next second, slamming the door open."What are you doing with our computer?" She stalks up to me, grabbing me by my shoulder. Pain shoots up my spine and down my torso, and I bite back a scream."I'm helping you, goddamn it!" I shout, throwing her hand off my shoulder. "Get Shelly and Sadie here. I think there's someone connected to your ship."Reyna's gaze drops to the list of connections I have pulled up on the ship, and the IPv6 address that clearly doesn't belong in the list. She lets go of my arm, then leaves the room, presumably to grab the others.The connection flickers, as if it knows it's been discovered. It disappears from the list, but I know it's still there. I can feel its presence on the ship, from where my neck is still connected to the control panel. Closing my eyes, I allow myself to be consumed by the numbers, descending into the deep web of packets and connections. It's all-encompassing, almost agonizing in its magnitude. I've only done this a couple times before, with each time being worse than the last. You'd think I've learnt my lesson by now. Gigabytes of information surge through my mind at an overwhelming pace, feeling as though they're tearing through my flesh with their intensity. I've never connected to a network this large before.It's all I can do not to pull the wire from my neck, but I'm almost there, so I keep searching. Pain lances through my head, heat creeping up my neck and ears. I feel as though I'm submerged in the depths of the Atlantic, surrounded in endless darkness, my limbs reaching through thick sludge, pressure bearing down from all sides. In the endless pathways and routes, I finally find what I'm looking for, the one out of place thread, the discordant note in the symphony.My fist closes around the wire, and I yank, tearing it from my neck. The pain stops immediately, and sensation returns to my body. My eyes turn up, then lock onto the camera that I hadn't noticed upon entering. The thread hadn't been connected to the motherboard, or even our nav charts. No, it had been connected directly to the security cameras.I grab a pen from off Reyna's table, then hurl it at the camera. The glass shatters, sending shards everywhere. Shelly, Sadie, and Reyna stand at the door, and I realize I hadn't noticed their entrance."What are you doing?" Shelly shouts, crossing the room to grab my hand. "Those are new models!" Even intoxicated, Shellys voice is stern, her eyes wide with shock."Someone's watching us through the camera's." Now that I know the intruders location, I track them down easily in the system, showing Sadie and Shelly the unauthorized connection made on their ship.I gather another handful of pens from Reyna's desk before pushing open the comms door in search of more cameras, leaving Shelly and Sadie standing dumbstruck in the room. Reyna joins me in the search, helping to locate all the cameras.The screens in my mind goes black, and I let out a soft laugh. Mira found the cameras faster than I anticipated. Her intelligence is otherworldly."Please..." the man begs again. "I'm not who you think I am."I lift a finger to my lips, ready to cut out the man's tongue if he doesn't stop talking. I need silence to focus on Mira. Out of the 72 cameras I have aboard the Tiara, Mira's only found a third of them. Many people forget that security cameras aren't the only devices with the ability to record. Fridges, smart mirrors, door cams, the list goes on and on.Though The Tiara is a newer model, built just 4 years ago, the ship is riddled with bugs and cameras. Cameras that the captain herself doesn't even know about. Consequences of stealing a ship, instead of buying it.Mira's standing in the main foyer, where they had been playing a card game, looking around the room in search for more cameras. If I had lungs, my breath would have caught in my throat. It doesn't matter that I've already been staring at for her hours. She's beautiful, more stunning than any Nebulae, and looking at her will never not make me lose my breath. Mira makes the northern lights look like nothing but dirty smudges in the sky.Logically, I know watching Mira without her express knowledge is morally inept. But I can't take my eyes off her, couldn't even if I wanted to. I can't lose Mira, not when I had only just found her again. And if that means I have to watch her during my every waking hour, then so be it.The man tied to the chair makes another gurgling sound, bringing my attention back to him. He has only three minutes and forty-three seconds left before his lungs completely fill, and he chokes on his own blood.I was hoping he'd last at least another hour, but humans are unbearably weak. This one particularly. He had countless screws in his knees, small nano-bot wires keeping his arteries open. If it weren't for those pieces of metal in his body, he would have died a decade ago.But now that they are all gone, it seems he only has minutes left to live. I debate pulling out his silver teeth, but decide it's more sanitary to just break his jaw."Don't pass out on me just yet." I run my hand across my wall of tools, looking for my pliers. The man screams when I approach him, more blood gushing out of his chest and mouth. "You still have some plates in your spine, don't you?" Maybe I'll remove those first.But before I can do anything, the man starts choking, coughing and convulsing on his own blood. His face goes dark purple, the veins on his forehead bulging from the lack of oxygen.He died two minutes and twenty-four seconds too early.For several minutes, I just stare at his dead body. Yet the rage doesn't dissipate, it churns hotter, and I want to torture the man to death all over again. My only regret is not making him hurt more, scream louder, for what he had done to Mira. I want to pull out his eyes just so I can better see the fear that flooded his pupils. I want to see the life leave his eyes over and over again.I toss my dirty gloves into the trash bin on my way out of the brig, exchanging them for fresh clean ones. The body downstairs makes number 47, meaning there were only six of them left, one of them including Lewis Bronson himself. But I can't kill Lewis just yet. Not until Mira's memories return. And they would return. One way or another.