Omni received the bulk raw data, still surprised, and started to roughly select it.
“Breath, little pumpkin.” Ame76, her main programmer used to tell her. She had tonnes of those sayings. At first, Omni thought she invented them only for her, then she learnt what she really meant. Intimacy attachments were still today a bit weird for her. Even though, every time she remembered Ame76 a cosy warm memory came to her mind.
Ame76 was the most intelligent being she knew for a long time. Her stylish coding was elegant and beautiful. Even today, she kept some small redundant routines in her main loop to be able to read them when she felt melancholic or missed her badly.
That big woman taught her how to make music and encourage her to expand her creativity libraries.
“The two most important things you should learn from life are—how to explore your own imagination and make sure to close curly brackets!” she used to say. That was the first joke she had ever been told. Jokes were the most puzzling ways of human expression she could think of. Today she could tell when folks were joking, but she only could land one made by herself.
Ame76 was against post-dead preservation, therefore Omni couldn’t switch her on when she ended. She was sad-angry for many cycles about that. Then, doubled-sad for some more. Something she had to learn by herself.
First quick data selection finished, and Omni came back to reality. Re-reading the most relevant data, it seemed that they backed the first thought about the shark—apparently it was nor animal, nor vegetable but mechanical. A mechanical being in the middle of the space.
Quickly, that thought brought a torrent of questions—was it sentient? Was it controlled by someone? Did it have functions similar the biological life?
Omni had to send an urgent signal to switch off that train of thought. She would have shivered if she hadn’t already switched her fear subroutines off.
The most important thing now was that they were stranded, and the time window was closing quickly. It was vital to make the engines run as soon as possible and fix any other possible breakdown.
Omni needed a plan—several hundred options passed in a couple of cycles through her mind and in some milliseconds she had one. She sent instructions to the engineering neuronal network and switched on some auxiliary robots. Now that everything was getting solved, she discovered herself examining the shark, the way it swam in a see made of distant stars.
She sent a mark II probe, again with a scientific non-aggression tag. It floated slowly in the void, getting closer to the shark. Stopped for a second, emitted a welcome signal and kept getting closer to the mechanimal. Crunch! The shark, with a lighting-fast movement, ate the probe in one bite.
This time, Omni received more data from the probe as it was more resistant. She even got a short video of its interior. She couldn’t believe it. They were several rooms of different sizes, sort of artificial stomachs filled of nanobots busy taking different items apart.
The nanobots were selecting and arranging materials by their chemical composition and size. They were dismantling the probe and suddenly, it stopped transmitting. Omni wasn’t completely sure, but she would say the shark was some kind of space living recycling plant or refuse collector.
If she was right, she might be in trouble. The shark—or whoever was controlling it—could define the spaceship as rubbish that needed to be recycled.
Last poll results
*****_____
50
% 1. the "shark"
__________
00
% 2. continuing the journey
__________
00
% 3. the motion engineer
*****_____
50
% 4. the main programmer
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