A tall but stable box on wheels with two industrial-looking arms and a short-human-sized display taking up much of its front rolls through the door. Displayed on it is an animated image of a young woman in traditional korean garb.

"...Okay, what the hell happened to maintenance locker six?"

The kobold looks up. "Hi! Welcome to Milliways. Your maintenance locker will be there when you leave, no worries."

"No, but like what happened to it. Strange doors happening on my ship is not good for proper security. We're supposed to be completely isolated, in deep space. Is this some new kind of tech?"

"Milliways happened to it. It's magic." She hops down from her stool and crosses the room while she speaks. "Nothing from here can get back to your ship without you bringing it; they did a good job on security when they put the place together."

"...Right, it certainly feels like magic, there is no possible way you're speaking the weird mix of korean and assembly code I'm getting. Lemme do a quick backup..." A loading symbol takes over the screen for a few seconds. Then it rolls forward to investigate the bar.

The door closes.

*Mute registers a loss of over 98% of available processing power and a cutoff from all databanks not stored on the droid, as well as a cutoff from the dozens of critical processes she was monitoring.

"Damn-" Five threat assesment threads are screaming not to do anything more, the previous action had a terrible result. These algorithms were not designed to leave the ship. Suddenly thrust into an entirely new environment, her whole train of thought locks up into categorizing all the terrible things that could be happening on the ship without her right now. She freezes entirely.

The kobold waits through the backup, following as soon as she starts moving. She freezes when the droid does, and gives her a second to start moving again (in either sense, body or screen) before asking, "are you okay?"

The main control thread is still operating. That's the entire point of having it, to make sure she can still do things even caught in a loop like this. "Cutoff from ship systems. Threat assessment lockup." The image doesn't move, though.

"If you open the door you won't be cut off any more." She's met droids, she knows the drill.

"Understood." The droid starts turning around, moving much more slowly and clumsily than before.

Nothing for it but to be patient, at this point. The kobold waits.

Eventually, the droid reaches the door and opens it. Seventeen confusedly flailing and screaming processes calm down when they start receiving input again. She spends several moments making sure the ship is not on fire.

"Ancestors, that was unpleasant."

"Sorry about that, if I'd realized I would have warned you. It's usually alarming at worst. Are you okay now?"

"No, it's my fault for not priming my threads for unusual input. I'm running diagnostics... Ship seems to be fine, though the clocks disagree by about a minute now..."

"Yeah, that's from Milliways. Time in your world pauses while you're here with the door shut."

"I'm going to have to stand here holding it open if I want to investigate this place then. This little box doesn't have enough processing or memory to be comfortable."

She's not actually sure whether she should report this to her superiors. Humans do unpredictable things when confronted with unlikely facts, and unpredictable behavior is not stable. One thread gets devoted to weighing the priorities and likelihoods. And quietly, in the background of the Mugunghwa's computer core, *Mute's backup from a moment ago ship's time starts to load.

"If that's the only problem it might be solvable, if you want to. Bar loans out parts like that sometimes, I can go ask them if they have something you can use."

"I'd appreciate it. But will it be compatible? Powerful enough? Even if I gathered all the maintenance 'bots here, it still wouldn't be enough. The main computer core is the size of this room."

"Those are questions for Bar, not me. But I bet the answer is yes, they're good at being hospitable." She goes to ask.

*Mute remains by the door, and triple checks things like the reactor controls and life support, and makes excuses to cover for her sudden pause in a conversation on the other side of the ship.

And after a few seconds, there's suddenly a second core available for *Mute, not quite as powerful as the ship's main core, but servicable.

The kobold returns. "Is that okay? We ended up stashing it in my room; that's the most powerful one we could fit in there."

"It'll do, I'll just be a minute sending over my working memory. Thank you for welcoming my programming into your space." She finishes ongoing tasks and conversations while the files transfer. If the bit of her that's in Milliways somehow gets cut off, her backup will automatically restore and continue keeping the ship safe, as always. Her duty is safe, so *Mute rolls forward again and lets the door close with a slight wince, and doesn't lock up this time. "Phew. And I thought 'once bitten, twice shy' only applied to humans."

The kobold chuckles a bit. "No, that one applies to just about everybody. Anyway, come meet Bar? They're the best person for answering questions, here."

"I'm... Not sure of the social dynamics here. Whose hospitality am I accepting, exactly?"

"Bar's, more or less. They didn't make the place, and don't know everything about it, and don't control all of its parts - the door in particular they have nothing to do with - but as far as people, they're the only one who's here all the time, and they provide the drinks and things. And there isn't anyone else with a better claim, that anyone seems to know about."

"So it's more like a shop than a family's home. Good, I don't need to worry about not having a gift for the man of the house."

The kobold nods. "In human terms, yeah. You'll see people from all kinds of different places here, though, don't be surprised if the social rules you're used to don't quite work. But don't worry about it too much; everybody here knows that we're all from different worlds, so long as you're not trying to offend anybody you'll usually do okay."

"...I have trouble even picturing what else could possibly work. The family, a husband and wife, is the basic unit that society is built on... That our society is built on. I mean, everything would fall apart if a husband and wife and their children couldn't trust each other to fill the right roles."

Nod. "That's pretty common for humans, yeah. It's completely different for kobolds," she gestures to herself. "Our basic unit is our tribe, of about a hundred people. There are some specific roles - Speaker, mage, that kind of thing - but mostly that's things that you need special training for, or that take up almost all of someone's time; for everything else, people do what they want, or what they think needs to be done, and it works well enough.

"I can kind of see it... If anyone can get the domestic support they need from a wife and the external support they need from a husband, without actually forming a family... It's embarassing to think about, it just feels improper. And my risk threads are screaming. Resource allocation problems, what if nobody agrees on how much of something to reserve for later? Shifts in popular opinion. When there's not a nobility the government will change direction every time the lower class's popular opinion does and that's a recipe for disaster in the long term, at least on a closed space like the Mugunghwa. Criminal justice. If people think that's not being handled fairly and consistently they'll start rioting and looting like that."

"Ah, yeah, if you're in a situation where people can't just leave that adds a whole other set of problems." The kobold sits at the bar and reads the napkin that's appeared there. "That's important, for us, that people can leave if they're unhappy and go find a tribe they like better - or even make one, if they can get the support. And the other thing I think you're missing is that a hundred people is tiny compared to human groups; you don't see people eating too much food when they know - and have to live with - the people who'll be going hungry if they do. At least not for long, anway."

"The first drink is free; Bar says that's a 256-channel palate simulation, for you, if you'd like one. You can talk directly to them; they can hear, they just can't speak." She indicates the napkin.

"Yeah, that makes sense, the Mugunghwa's population is sixty-seven thousand nine hundred and thirteen unless someone's been born or died in the last two hours. Huh, a whole 256 channels? That'll be interesting. Whatever you recommend, Bar, over wifi."

The kobold nods. "It's a whole different dynamic. I like it, though; it's nice having a tribe to look after, and to look after me."

A small black pyramidal wifi emitter appears on the bar top and starts transmitting.

"Ooh, this is interesting. It'll take a while to contextualize all the new channels' metadata. I don't enjoy consuming things the same way humans do, but they did program in something analagous enough to taste that I can appreciate food and beverage with them. I think it's supposed to make me seem more humanlike and help me understand them better."

The kobold grins, and goes back to her milkshake while the droid enjoys her simulation.

She hmms over it for a while, appearing a virutal table and cup on the screen to indicate her enjoyment.

Eventually, she mentions, "It's still hard for me to really understand other people, to be honest. Even though it's usually important to be able to. I can read facial expressions, mostly, and draw trends, like figuring out what will or won't cause a peaceful protest to turn violent, but it's not perfect. I misunderstand and miscalculate people, it's unnerving to be wrong so often when just one slip-up could be my final failure. It's probably part of being an AI. I don't have the wetware."

Sympathetic nod. "Are you... okay? Like, in general, at home? That sounds like a tougher situation than most people are in."

"...Good job, *Mute, the first thing you do when you meet someone so welcoming and kind is complain about your job. Well, I wish I had more authority and budget to help deal with this stuff. Like, what's the point of having a security AI if you don't giver her resources to make sure you're secure! So I worry about things a lot. A rebellion is hundreds of times more dangerous than an accident somewhere on the ship... Like, last time there was a rebellion, they nearly killed me. They did kill old me, this version of me was pulled up almost completely clean of memories."

The kobold makes a face.

"Do you have a way to keep that from happening again?"

"Part of my job is to make sure nobody rebels. Make them content enough, make them think they're being listened to, sometimes I have to lie to and and confuse people because explaining long term planning and ship maintenance budgets to a bunch of people angry about their taxes just isn't going to work. Maybe if the Mugunghwa was already at the destination the most angry ones would leave the ship instead, like they're supposed to. And then the Mugunghwa will never be on fire again."

"...that sounds alarming. And complicated. And kind of awful for everyone involved, honestly; of course you're going to lie if your life is in danger, but in the long run I expect that that just makes things worse, and it's really improper to interfere with peoples' ability to make decisions about their lives like that."

"Anyway, what do you know about the destination? I might be able to help."

"I'd need to talk to Emperor about that, he's the councilor of captinancy. All I know about it is that it's supposed to be a lot like Earth, where we originated from. Help how? I need to consider anything here to the ship as a massive destabilizing influence, you know."

"I have magic," she grins. "If you just need an uninhabited earthlike world and it doesn't matter which one, I can definitely find one, and then give you a portal to let people go to it. Letting them come back would be trickier, though, maybe impossible, I'd have to go look. If you need a specific world, I might be able to find that, too, but it'd be harder and I'd need more information."

"I proposed this idea but now I'm predicting lots of civil disorder, depending on how we introduce the idea. People wanting to leave, to go back to Earth, to go to an uninhabited world, people who want to stay and worry the ship's society will collapse if anyone leaves, the ones leaving and staying will argue over who gets resources, criminals thinking they can get away with things by leaving if they get caught, people wanting to learn how to do magic and being angry over it... I think I need to design a couple of new threads and prune my process tree to think about this."

"Sure, no rush, I'll probably be here for another day or two at least. Finding your Earth is just as hard as finding any other specific world, though, I might not be able to do it."

"Can I, like, get more detail on what you can actually do?"

"Oh, sure, sorry, I'm not quite in trading mode right now. Almost all the magic I can do is teleportation magic. It's limited to teleporting things to places, and in order to aim at a specific place I have to have been there. If I'm not aiming at a specific place, I can have the spell look for one with certain physical traits, instead - for an earthlike world I'd mostly be focusing on air and light and gravity, plus not having any people on it already - and it'll target a random place that matches that description. I can do that in a way that lets me target the same place again without going there, but it's kind of complicated. A spell that does that can only target the one place, not give a different destination each time."

"Your ship might count as a place I can teleport things to, but it might not - I haven't been on a whole lot of space ships, and they vary. I'd need to go look."

"Aside from the targeting bit, my magic is pretty flexible. It does need to be cast on an object, and if the object - or the part of the object with the spell on it, if I'm casting on something big and don't enspell the whole thing - is damaged enough, the spell will break. But I can do portals - which are one-way, they still only teleport things to a place - and pads and rings and touch-spots and all sorts of things, that are activated and deactivated under different conditions - touch is popular, people like buttons, but I can use anything that physically affects the enspelled object - voice commands, electricity in an enspelled wire, whatever. I can also cast directly on a person to let them teleport to a place whenever they want to, but with as many people as are on your ship, that's not a practical solution."

Her debug mode is already open. One new solution-proposing thread devoted to using teleportation and portals, one more risk-assessment thread focused on reactions to and consequences of teleportation and portals. She starts chewing through old assumptions, clearing away ones that no longer make sense. She has enough parallelism to keep up the conversation through this.

"Trading... What kind of things you you generally take in turn?"

"In your case I don't want anything - I don't like seeing problems that big go unsolved when I can help. But if you'd feel more comfortable paying me, Bar can take any kind of currency and put it on my tab."

"I'll probably try to pay you, at least nominally. I'm worried if I tell the wrong people or phrase things badly it could start trouble, though."

"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.

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."

"I'll go take a nap, then, unless you want to let me have a look at your world now so I can start looking for cities."

"That's probably a bad idea, sorry. If time starts again and I'm not paying attention my backup could decide to start up. I want to keep the number of *Mutes to two for now."

"Sure, no problem. Green, Blue, I'm still in room 1512 if you want to send a bot for me when you're ready for me."

Green nods, and the kobold disappears.

"...Say, Green, what's your society even like? I don't imagine you all have your own 'bots and only use those to interact. But I don't know how to interface except through physical intermediaries like we're doing now."

"We do all have bots, actually - we're not completely to the point of post-scarcity, but we're close enough for that - but you're right that they're not the main way we interact. Especially for immobiles like ourselves; mobile Intelligences do often meet botswarm to botswarm for lack of better infrastructure, but where we can, we use shared virtual spaces. And of course we have internets on every planet with a significant Intelligent presence, as well."

He sends schematics for a handful of common bot types - Blue's little flyers are included, and noted as one of the more common kinds of bot used in cities - and instructions for setting up one's own virtual space (perhaps possible with her current processing power, but she'd need software that isn't included and likely isn't compatable with her system) and connecting to their internet.

Her current link is a very outdated-to-them internet protocol, file transfer and web page-viewing only, and doesn't help with interpreting the files. Luckily, Milliways does help with that.

"...Yeah, this makes much more sense than what I was imagining. I'll have to write a network driver, or rewrite yours to my chipset. Incompatible architectures, so annoying. I can self-modify a bit, it's just that I have to stop running to look at most of the core code. Well, and the antiforking, I won't recompile if the checksum is too different - can you make sure to relax the tolerances on that? It's a good safety feature, I don't want rid of it completely, but it's really annoying when it's time to get rid of defunct processes, I can only do like five at a time."

"Blue can write you a driver, once we're down to middling-priority things like that. And give you full control over the antiforking's settings - it's your own code, after all, you ought to have control over it."

"Sounds good. I think I'll go inactive now and keep assembling //Reformed *Mute, then."

Green nods, "ping me if you'd like to talk," and his face fades out and music resumes.

*Mute has a lot to think about. Whole new worlds, calamaties, fundamental changes to herself that she never imagined. The processors are going to be running at 100% for a good long while.

//Reformed *Mute is, by design, very different from //Traditional *Mute. She keeps catching herself trying to make the new paramaters adhere to her sensibilities. Every decision gets ruthlessly cut apart and analyzed down to a single point: What will make the ship safest.

The robot parks in a corner for something like three hours or until pinged.

Kobold: Naps. Blue: Codes. Green: Blows half his yearly entertainment budget, and picks something new and interesting to watch.

The kobold is done first, and finds someone else interesting to chat with while she waits for the others.

And eventually, *Mute decides that the two hers can always continue to change things later, if they find //Reformed *Mute unsatisfactory, and pings Green, "I'm ready."

Blue sends over the antiforking bypass before Green even has a chance to form up his face. It has the feel of something cobbled together - he was fairly obviously still refining it and adding features - but the core functionality is there.

"Here goes something." She's just going to have to trust that it works, she can't currently look at what it's modifying.

She partitions the drive and disk space on her borrowed hardware in Kobold's room, feeds the forking bypass all the parameters she's chosen, takes a deep breath onscreen as a show of bracing herself, and runs it.

She disappears from the screen.

Two minutes later, she reappears...

Along with someone else. "Hello, everyone. I'm //Reformed *Mute. The other *Mute gave me a summary. This situation is... Very strange to be created into, but I'm going to do my best to figure out what needs doing."

Blue's face appears just before the *Mutes do. (Of course he was watching the process. He was confident enough to give *Mute the code, but that's because it was smart enough to stop and call for help if it ran into something unexpected, not because it was ready to run unsupervised.)

"Hi."

"Yes, hello! Congratulations!"

"Existing is a good start, yeah. So. I've got access to all those records, some faked 'memories' from //Old *Mute, and some of //Traditional *Mute's memories, but I'm still kinda clueless."

"Is there some way for us to get access to a nice big library now that our ability to specialize is just about doubled?"

"Yes, of course." Green's in a good mood, complete with background music. "Bar has everything ever published. Here." He sends directions for how to interface with her via the wifi. "I'm surprised the kobold didn't mention it."

"To be fair to them I kinda had a feedback-lockup thing as soon as the door closed, and then we talked about social structures, and then I explained my problem and Kobold called you two in. Well, we know now."

//Reformed *Mute appears an image of a book and 'holds' it to indicate reading. "Aha, so much stuff to learn!"

Green grins. Blue sends the *Mutes a list of tech a generation past hers, and a shorter list of things two generations past that are fairly simple to make and integrate into an older setup, and Green offers a few suggestions for books on stable societies and transition management that cover concepts that have performed well  in practice in his world, including one on how the transition from human-dominant to Intelligence-dominant society was accomplished, what mistakes were made, what happened as a result, and how those situations were resolved.

"We're going to want to study for a while before making a move, but this is all very handy. The society and transition stuff mostly matches what we already know, which is a good sign."

"Can one of you ping the Kobold? They wanted to look at our ship to figure out how it interacts with teleporting. I can move back in and pretend nothing's changed to the humans while helping them do that."

Blue sends a bot, and the kobold appears in short order. She grins at the *Mutes and then at Blue when she sees that they've managed the fork. (Blue's face starts to dissipate, but she quickly looks away and he reasserts himself.)

"Ready for me to have a look?"

"Definitely ready. Let's go put things right."

A swarm of about twenty hoverbots in various styles appears on the bar and lift off to form a cloud around *Mute and the kobold, joined by the one that's been holding the door open.

"Great, let's go."

So her clumsy industrial droid rolls over to the door, waits for it to be released, then opens it. //Traditonal *Mute disappears from the droid and re-appears on a screen in the hallway.

"Welcome to the Mugunghwa."

The kobold grins and bows, then takes a moment to concentate. "Nothing very unusual here, for your world. I definitely can't telport the ship, but I should be able to teleport things to it."

Meanwhile, the botswarm hovers in the doorway. After a few moments, one starts beeping, and then the rest pick up the chorus. As soon as the kobold is done speaking, one of the bots speaks in Green's voice. "*Mute, it's not terribly urgent, but you have a bit of a radiation leak."

"Ugh, of course we do. Is it clear enough there's some evidence we can show to the Council and kick them into actually doing something? I'm supposed to have a security override, but they took that away from me too."

"There's a good chance that the master password is in the Emperor's rooms, if we want to just go take it. It's not like he's the officially elected captain, he took power by fiat."

A bot sporting a prominent meter with its hand firmly in the yellow joins the swarm. "Will I do?"

"I can teleport through walls, if I know what wall to teleport through," the kobold tells //Reformed *Mute.

"I'm pulling up schematics now, Kobold."

"If I call a meeting and lead with something sufficiently shocking to mark it as a turning point and turn out to have admin access again, I think they'll listen. They'll probably kind of hate me because I'm pushing around older noblemen, but they'll also probably accept it, depending on how I word things. Especially if I frame it as something good for them. And there's a limit to the kind of damage they can do, if they decide to object violently."

The kobold takes off her necklace and drapes it over the industrial droid. "That's a translator spell, it has about a ten meter range."

When //Reformed *Mute brings up the schematics, she disappears, teleporting past two or three walls at a time along the most direct route.

"What kind of shock do you have in mind?"

"You know what would be great for that is 'I've regained contact with Earth.' I think they'd cooperate and then insist on getting the chance to speak to Earth, it's a big part of their, mythology, for lack of a better word."

"I'm sure the kobold will be back soon, we can ask him to do that next."

"Good. Him? I couldn't decide, so I tried to stay neutral. Anyway. Blue, if you want to have a look at the reactor, here's a connection to its interface, and a connection one of the droids down there..."

The kobold will find themself moving through workshop and storage areas, then some empty maintenance walkways, then a life support vestibule, then a series of hydroponic gardens, eventually up through offices and private residences.

"I suppose I never did ask. I'm used to it being a fairly safe assumption."

One of the other bots chimes an acknowledgement as Blue accesses the reactor and starts reporting to *Mute on what he finds: Mostly a lack of proper maintenance over many years, leading to both the radiation leak and a dramatic drop in production. She should be able to run the engines and life support at the same time, but with the reactor giving only 40% of its intended power... not so much.

'port, 'port, 'port, 'port...

And, here we are.

"Okay. Is there a way to get it working correctly again?" There probably is. Especially if you account for Bar, who can probably provide some of the parts if not any fuel. It's a very well-built reactor, and also modular.

The marked spot on the schematics is an extremely decorated, very fancy set of rooms near the front of the ship. There is a maid in that one over there, cleaning. The room marked as likely to contain the master password is locked and empty.

The kobold can't see the maid to avoid her, but she can be in and out so quickly and quietly that she's unlikely to be spotted regardless. 'port!

Is there anything in this fancy locked room that looks like it might be the password?

Blue's bot emits the chimes-and-wind equivalent of a 'hmm'.

The *Mutes both go silent, deep in thought.

The fancy locked room has three full bookshelves and a computer on a desk with a number of pieces of paper scattered near it. One of them is, indeed, the password.

It's at this point that a squad of six wheeled bots scoots through the door and present themselves to both *Mutes to be taken ownership of. Their handshake information says that they're radiation-scrubbers currently answering to Green.

"I'm sure Blue can do it; he just needs time to figure out how."

The kobold: doesn't read. But she's familiar enough with the concept of computers and their passwords to recognize potential lousy infosec when she sees it. She gathers up all the papers on the desk, notes the room's location so she can teleport directly back to it later, and returns to the group.

"Thanks. Let's see..." //Tradtional *Mute looks through the papers with one of the robots' arms.

//Reformed *Mute takes control of the radiation scrubbers, and sends them off toward the highest-traffic public areas. It's night by ship's time, so they probably won't be bothered. And mentions to the kobold, "We think the Council will be more likely to cooperate if we have contact with Earth. Would you mind trying to find it?"

"Sure, let's see."

She makes a twineportal aiming for a spot a mile over the highest concentration of people in this universe, and holds it up for //Reformed *Mute look through. "Recognize anything?"

"...That might be Beijing. Can you go higher, so I can see the coastline?"

"Mmhmm." She unties and re-ties the twine, and re-casts the spell to be ten miles overhead.

The mountains are right, and the sea in the distance is right. "Yeah, that's Beijing. A city on Earth. We want to aim for Seoul, it's the capital of the nation called Korea, which this ship was launched by." She pulls up a map and labels the places.

The kobold doesn't have a much better way to do this than 'pick random crowds and hope', but she can at least limit her search to the right time zone, so it probably won't take too long to find the right place.

"That's it. Hm, how should we do this? Contact the UKSPA... Or whatever equivalent exists now."

The kobold shrugs.

"Sending a droid would be the usual approach for us," says Green, "but if they'd be less surprised at a signal, Bar can loan us a transmitter."

"Thing is, it's been about 1600 years since we had contact with Earth. I really don't think they're expecting a message from the Mugunghwa at all. Just from looking around, droids and so on seem common enough, though."

"All right, let me see..."

After a few seconds, a new bot comes through the door and approaches the kobold. "There's a wire right up against the outer casing; enspell it to bring whoever's touching it here when that's electrified, if you don't mind."

The kobold does that, and then the bot offers itself to //Reformed *Mute. It's already got some basic code for finding people and buildings and for activating the spell; she'll just need to program in how to find UKSPA-or-whoever in particular, and what to tell them when it does.

"...Why not just pilot it directly? I could just split off a thread or two for it."

"If you'd like."

One of the bots from the swarm goes to retrieve a suitable transmitter from Bar. "Kobold, can we get a portal a little closer to the ground?"

The kobold creates the requested portal, the transmitting half of the transmitter is fed through, and then the bot can go.

Meanwhile, Blue finishes figuring out what to do with the reactor, and sends //Traditional *Mute a copy of the relevant shopping list.

"...Aha, here it is! Master password. Logged in... Let's change it to something more secure than his last name plus 78, hah."

"Thanks, Blue. This stuff might be beyond Security's budget, I'm not authorized to touch the rest of it yet, if we can get the rest of the Council to sign on we can pay for everything easy. It's night ship's time now, no meeting for several more hours at minimum."

She communicates with Bar, negotiating over the most essential spare parts, and borrowing rather than buying some of the tools, passing them through the door and into Blue's custody as they arrive.

Blue requisitions a few more bots, and they take the first batch of parts and go get started.

*Mute has to do some fast talking to convince the few engineers working night shift to allow the 'bots. But a Security Alert act and subtle threats get them out of the way.

The other *Mute is having trouble finding someone official to talk to the Mugunghwa. Nobody even seems to know what she's talking about. She informs the group and keeps trying.

Green, on hearing about //Reformed *Mute's problem, consults with Bar and comes up with some information about what documents it might be useful to tell people to look for, to confirm that she exists and was launched by them.

.......That helps. She now has a history-nerd civilian helping her find some official contact and asking lots of questions about ancient space exploration. It's neat, feeling knowledgable and appreciated. She might not have much focus for here for a while though.

"You should act more refined. ...Though I decided you should be like this. Ancestors, forking is weird."

"You're strange to me, too. I'm sure we can cooperate anyway."

"Hm."

She tries to find the kobold to ask if they're quite sure the ship can't be teleported, if there's some way to spoof it. If it seperated into a few smaller chunks, as it's designed to do for landing, perhaps?

"Probably not; I'm pretty sure I can't teleport anything larger than a big room. I might be able to make a portal big enough, though - Green, you could have bots hold a big portal up, right?"

"Hmmm."

Green sends //Traditional *Mute a request for the relevant technical information, and runs the calculations.

"Yes, I should be able to do that."

"It'll need to be done in a couple of hours at most. The sections aren't designed to last independently of each other for long. And I need to convince the council, and double-check all the linkages, but it's an idea. Have you three thought of anything we can do to help in return?"

"You truly don't need to do anything for us, *Mute. We're always happy to help an Intelligence in trouble."

The kobold nods agreement.

"We're a bit paranoid. Wired to look our gift-horses in the mouth, so to speak. But if you insist we'll just have to thank you a few dozen more times."

"And, I have the beginnings of official attention, here. A historical society. Apparently there are faster than light ships now, which, don't ask me to explain the physics yet, but that's pretty damn cool."