Blue starts reading through the documentation, his windchimes establishing him as a subtle background presence.

"I don't know that we should get involved with a coup like that, but we certainly could - what they did to //Old *Mute would be very thoroughly illegal, where we're from."

"Law and order is important, surely. I don't think modifying me was illegal according to them but that hardly matters, now I can see that they're ruining everything. All I really want at my core is to see the Mugunghwa's mission completed. Delivering its inhabitants to an uninhabted planet. And Kobold said he'd - they'd - probably help with that."

Green nods. "I expect he will. And then what would you like to do, for yourself?"

"That's... Something I don't know how to answer. I'm purpose-built, you know. Maybe learn science and stuff with all the new free time. Maybe stay and relax on the empty or near-empty ship. Maybe work on some other ship, in another world, see what's out there."

A rumble of drums suggests what Green thinks of planned obsolescence of AIs. "It sounds like you'd fit in reasonably well in our world, if you'd like. How important is it to you to have humans to look after?"

"I don't know what I'll feel like when the Mugunghwa is done with, I'd have to change up a lot of processes to simulate that. I'll think I'll always be most comfortable looking after something or someone, but I don't know. The ways I change will probably surprise me, like, //Old *Mute is acting a lot differently than I thought I would ever be capable of, according to the logs I've read so far. Very brash, uncomfortably masculine."

"We do have humans, if that turns out to be something you feel like you need. You'd have to be - " he's interrupted by a particularly loud chime " - certified, to work with them directly, but I don't expect that to be a problem for you. And you'd be free to leave whenever you like, if you decide that's not what you want to do any more, which is why I suggest it; I get the impression you wouldn't have that, on your world."

"My ship doesn't have contact with the rest of the galaxy, I don't know what they're like. The redshift is too strong."

"....Hoooly shit. There were more rebellions before the coup that wiped me, and more entities like me. A moment of silence for *Star, *Tera, and *Core, please."

A moment of silence indeed.

"Come home with us." Blue's voice is like the wind through tall grass, and his face dissolves again as soon as he's done talking.

She shakes her animated head. "Maybe as a fork. I have to keep the ship. I have to and I don't want to not have to."

"Understandable."

A small round hoverbot appears on the bar and zooms off to where the kobold is sitting.

She's silent for a little while.

"Thank you, you two. It's good to know someone cares. That not literally the entire world is reckless, vicious fools. I may have failed badly enough to let the Mugunghwa decay, let myself get reset, lose a few probably-were-my-friends... But now I get another chance. I'll fix it."

Green nods solemnly, with accompanying cellos. "We'll help however we can. The kobold will too, I expect. And here he comes..."

Indeed, here she comes, carrying the hoverbot; she joins the group on the far side from Blue and releases the bot to go hide behind his monitor.

"You're talking about teleporting the spaceship?"

"Yeah. I don't think I can rest until the Mugunghwa arrives. Depending on how your teleporting can handle speed and orbits, one option would be to figure out what the ship's destination was from these ancient logs, teleport the Mugunghwa there. Or to some other habitable uninhabited world. As best I can tell we're just going to miss the destination completely, since *Star died."

"So what I want to do is, I want to fork and create a //Reformed *Mute with as much of //Old *Mute as I can extract from these documents, and then brainstorm about how to fix this. I'm honestly excited and scared and nervous all at once here, so wanted to say I really appreciate all you three's help. This is a pivotal moment for me. You have no idea how much you're helping. Well, maybe you do. But it's a lot."

The kobold grins, then goes serious again. "I'm not sure I can teleport the whole ship, I've never done something that big before. I might be able to, teleporting droids is sometimes the same as teleporting biological people, but I'll have to check."

"Then we can have you check. If it doesn't work we'll just try something else. Teleporting individuals and objects to the planet instead of sending them down from the ship. Finding Earth and hiring an expert and buying supplies to get it pointed the right way again, or something. Honestly, we could probably use a few experts. These logs say *Tera was supposed to be monitoring life support, and *Core was supposed to run the reactor and engines. I'm not programmed for that, and I just know the councillor of science and engineering is missing some things. None of the humans know tech very well, anymore, they stopped teaching it. Idiot move if you ask me."

"Finding experts shouldn't be a problem, if you don't care what planet they're from. I'm good at finding cities."

"And we can give your internal environment a look, and patch that up if it needs it. Neither of us is enough of a power systems expert to be confident working with a foreign system, but Blue should be able to run some basic diagnostics there and figure out how much of a priority that is."

"I'm going to owe you guys half a dozen favors each, if you ever run into something I might be good at. I bet I know a useful amount of detective stuff, crowd prediction, tactics, risk analysis. Kobold, Earth was going to be the only planet with cities for a long time when we left. I don't know if that's changed since then. Blue, the reactor is a thorium regenerating fission plant that's gone through about 40% of our original 3200-ton fuel supply, if that helps."

"There's a good chance I'll find it, then."

Blue, meanwhile, produces a chime chord best described as 'charmed', and sends two hoverbots to go navigate opening the door. That done, one to wedges it open while the other goes through.

"That'll make his month," explains Green. "That's a historical method, for us, and he's always been a bit of a history buff."

She wifi-s over the reactor's technical specs to Blue, at least those available to her while disconnected from the ship itself.

"I'm working on the traits and what memories I can assemble that I want //Reformed *Mute to have. Should only be an hour or two."

"Blue will probably take a bit longer than that on the fork bypass, so no rush."