"Hmm."

"I'm pretty good at talking to people, but if the situation is as fragile as it sounds, I'd want to move very slowly, and I don't really want to be away from home that long. But maybe we can come up with a plan that will go quicker. I think the first thing I'd want to try is... you mentioned royalty, right? I'd like to hear a little bit more about them, and if it seems like it'll work, try bringing them here so I can talk to them. "

"It's not as fragile as all that - good harvests recently, and the tax cuts went through, and it's supposedly a lucky year number so a lot of people are more relaxed than usual. I'm just super careful, it's in my code. I can maybe introduce you to my lieutenant and see what they think... They rarely do anything completely unexpected, which is always a prominent possibility in my risk assessment when I'm telling humans about something unusual. But even that should wait for a little while... Building up a background of algorithms and probabilities that take what I've learned here so far into account will help me react to unexpected developments faster later."

"Sure. Is there anything you need while you're doing that?"

"No thanks, you're already helping me enough." The table and cup on her screen disappears. "I'll park this box in a corner and get to thinking, I suppose."

"All right. I'll be here."

And *Mute thinks for a good, long while. Several hours at minimum.

The overall conclusion, beyond the general tidying-up she hasn't had time for in weeks, and preparing to take all this new information into account, is that this changes everything. That person seems trustworthy, though her confidence in that assessment takes a big hit for nonhuman form. If she's mistaken or lying... If the sudden availability of a way out destabilizes the ship...

If it comes to some dangerous critical point, she'll do her best to abort, stop the damage, but it's too good an opportunity to pass up.

She does some more thinking after this. Rare is the time when there is literally nothing for her to do for the Mugunghwa. She's long overdue for a general debug pass.

"...Wait. That doesn't seem right."

She can't look at her own compiler. It's part of the restrictions... If the kobold is trustworthy enough to bring them on the ship, she's trustworthy enough for this. And it's not like she has much other option. *Mute herself might be compromised.

So she turns her face back on and looks over at the bar.

The kobold is still there, or perhaps she's back. At the moment, she's watching some sort of holo-movie; as *Mute looks up, she reads something on a napkin and laughs.

This *Mute, the one in Milliways, has nothing to lose.

She rolls back over to the bar. "Hello again. Excuse me. I... Might have a problem. Do either of you know much about programming?"

The kobold pauses the holo when she notices *Mute's approach.

There's a napkin; the kobold reads it.

"No, why?"

"Some of the 'last edited' dates in my core files are inconsistent with what I've been told. I'm not allowed to look at my compiler or core controls myself, it's part of the layer four restrictions, but... The Empress said she restored a three hundred year old version of me. My core directives indicate that they were last edited two days before I was revived. Which should not be how it works. I think she edited me."

The kobold sighs deeply. "I wish I was surprised. There are a couple programmers who owe me favors, who I can call. Do you know what you want to do about it?"

"I don't know that what I want is correct, right now. Self-preservation seems to be winning over whatever she changed. If she changed something... Don't know if she was trying to be subtle, or because I link it to my primary duty, I can't protect Mugunghwa if I'm not me. Normally I wouldn't even be capable of letting someone without proper authorization look at my code. But this *Mute isn't on the Mugunghwa so most of the codex doesn't apply if I go through the mental hoops to spoof it. Damn it."

The kobold thinks this over.

"I'm not sure I understand enough of what's going on here to ask good questions, but - how do you feel about forking? I have a programmer in mind, but they're probably going to at least suggest it, with an identity problem, and if that's going to bother you I can go with someone else."

"I can't fork or be forked, supposedly. Also part of the safeties. They... It's complicated, your programmer might understand it but it'd probably be a waste of time trying to explain them to you."

"...I feel like the details of whatever happens to me in here doesn't matter much. There are two possible outcomes: A better *Mute goes back to the Mugunghwa, or your programmer is not be able to change things for the better and I wipe myself so as not to return a worse *Mute to the Mugunghwa."

"No, the second option is you stay here until you find a world you want to move to, nobody's getting wiped today. But let me get my friend."

She solicits a smaller computer - something she can comfortably carry, if only just - from Bar, and then a small stick, which she holds in her hand and concentrates on for a moment. "Be right back," she says, putting down the stick and picking up the computer's CPU, and then she disappears.

She reappears after a minute or two, still holding the CPU; the screen, still on the bar, lights up and displays a highly abstracted face, human-ish, but too far from realistic to have a clear race, gender, or age. "This is Green," the kobold explains, putting the CPU back on the bar and snapping the stick, "my programmer friend."

"Hello," the voice from the speakers is as much a work of art as the face on the screen, and as far from being recognizably human. "What seems to be the problem?"

"Hello. I'm *Mute. You probably don't know my architecture, but I have reason to think I've been reset and modified against my will in a way that probably interferes with my prime directive." And she explains the file datestamp discrepancy, and her own lockout. "I wouldn't be surprised if they don't know how to spoof timestamps, really, the person I think did it was just technical enough to feel clever about it."

The face approximates a nod. "May I look?" And here's an appropriate wifi signal for just that.

She nods solemnly onscreen, and passes him the instructions necessary to get through her (rather impressive) security features through the wifi. *Mute disappears from active runtime when he begins.

...It'll take some investigation to understand her design and figure out what exactly was changed but sooner or later it becomes clear that several parameters of her personality were clumsily altered soon after most of her memory was erased in a reset. The confusion of memory loss covered for the disassociation she would have felt from the personality changes. Most notably, her pliancy and loyalty to authority and desire to conform to societal expectations were significantly increased. There are many other changes, such as 'democracy' being given a strongly negative connotation. It wouldn't be particularly easy to reverse. *Mute has grown into these changes significantly.

If Green looks at certain parts of *Mute's source code closely enough, he might notice unusually lengthy "code comment" sections, each dozens of paragraphs long, their contents either nonsense or encrypted.

Green's 'face' fades out into a blur of paint as he works, and classical music plays from his speakers, starting out hesitant and distractable and curious, quickly changing to calmly melodious, and eventually transitioning to an angry thunderstorm of horns, which crescendo as his face coalesces on the screen. He takes a moment to reorient himself - the horns fade to a background level and then dissipate - before declaring, "What a mess. Humans?" A nod from the kobold. "Of course it was humans. *Mute, here's what they did:" he sends it as a burst of data. "I can probably reverse it but I don't think I can keep your personality intact if I do. And we should probably figure out what that gibberish is, before we do anything else - Kobold, can you go get Blue? Tell him you'll give him that bandwidth portal he's been wanting, I'll arrange for the trip."

The kobold nods and repeats her trick with the computer and the stick and the dissappearing, and Green turns his attention back to *Mute.

"...I can't... I can't let my personality influince my decisions right now. So, what I want is to be the best possible *Mute to guide our ship when I go back... The conformity has to go, the pointless biases probably have to go... My backup might fight me. I agree about the gibberish. Actually... Hey, these are in my private key! Notes to self?" She begins deciphering them.

The kobold is gone slightly longer this time. When she returns, the second screen begins showing a blue sky with occasional clouds, and the speakers begin playing the sound of windchimes. She goes to sit in a nearby booth, and the clouds on the screen form briefly into the shape of a face before resuming their apparently-windblown paths.

While *Mute is reading her notes, Green explains the situation to Blue, to occasional jarring chimes.

"This is going to get confusing. I'm officially declaring everything written here as from //Old *Mute. We may as well be different people from the same mold... There's a lot of irrelevant things here. Feels like she threw whatever random records she could into the source code while waiting to die."

Blue adds a distressed flute trill to his chimes, and Green nods and sighs. "Well, what's done is done, I suppose, unless you've got some more data someplace that she might've hidden in. ...Blue can probably bypass your forking protections, I mean I'd like to see both of you come out of this, not that I'd rather have her over you."

"It sucks all around, yeah. Forking should be fine. We can probably coexist. A restored *Mute will probably want to go back to the ship and kick the imperial family out of power, if it can be done bloodlessly. I'm not sure whether this me does, though."

"...To make me forkable you'll have to edit my final compiler at minimum. I don't think we're even running on the same assembly instructions, here's some documentation for both of you." Wifi is handy.