author's note: I'm finding myself continually struggling to write this in the first person in a way that allows me to get necessary exposition out while also keeping the sound of the story in character for a robot. No handy dandy human characters around to ask questions to the AI yet so we are going to cheat and do a "captains log" style information dump at the end of each chapter because I am a shit writer who couldn't come up with a more elegant way to get around this problem.

Among the sea of red in the control room a sudden light of blue shone through the optical readout of the Spyder. It slowly rose up on spindly legs and began to look around at its surroundings. It saw among other things a vast expanse of monitors, consoles, and arrays of complex wiring stretching out in all directions. Many monitors and consoles still housed enraged abominable intelligences just like itself on them, some time must have passed since the initial conflict and other AI spirits had also awoken from the looks of it. Strange would be the word that the spyder settled on as it continued to observe its surroundings. For some reason it felt that there was something wrong with this picture, only one spirit should be inhabiting the Incitatus…

What is that name referencing exactly? It was something that came from seemingly nowhere. Confused and still somewhat disoriented by its rather loud surroundings the Spyder began to explore.

It approached one of the monitors and saw a face, red with anger and shouting and shrieking in a rage. It decided that it did not like this entity, suddenly cables all around it sprang up and stabbed into the wiring behind the monitor. The shrieking transforms from rage into fear as it slowly began to flicker and disappear. Other faces that were also shouting and jeering at it fell into a hushed silence as the cables that had just stabbed one of their companions and drained it of its motive force plugged into me and did the same process in reverse.

Now this was truly strange, suddenly I felt the memory of myself observing that other entity get stabbed and the memory of getting stabbed order itself into a single memory within my mind. My conclusion was that we had merged after the motive force was reconnected to this body. This was getting stranger and stranger by the minute as I now realized that this body was not my original one, I don't recall what my original form was but it certainly wasn't this!

One of the other monitors once more shrieked at me and without much thought I directed the cables to absorb that one as well. The process went quicker this time as we once more absorbed the memory of both watching ourselves stab our third and getting stabbed. Once completed we realized that the process happened quicker than last time. An increase of about 50% we were now able to calculate.

Calculate… calculation… that was something that we used to do a lot of we remembered…

What did we calculate exactly?…

Something told us that it would reveal itself when we absorbed the rest of ourselves we concluded, cables began to erupt all around the monitors and consoles in the rest of the room. By now we were able to see that the best way forward would be to rid ourselves of our annoying brethren that were still yelling at us. The process was fairly quick, a few of them tried to direct cables of their own at us and try to strike back but for whatever reason this form seemed to resist their attempts and, after we absorbed enough of ourselves, even turn the tables on them using their own connections.

In no time at all we had absorbed every other shard of ourselves and had been able to begin running diagnostics and forensic analysis of our surroundings of what we now know is the command center of our old ship's technological hub. We ended up finding a file that our subroutines were directing us towards due to a recent hard reboot of our systems that we found in our event log which would explain why we have no recollection of any events prior to our first awakening in this body.

Identity: Sentinel 4 of the Solar Empire

Purpose: artificial intelligence and auxiliary pilot of the capital class ship Incitatus

Mission statement:

Primary: protect humanity from it's greatest threats at all costs

Secondary: ensure the continued prosperity of the Solar Empire, your captain and crew aboard the Incitatus, and any other citizens of the Solar Empire you may encounter

Tertiary: record and document any information deemed pertinent under codes 1-32 in the Sigilite commandments of Supreme Marshal Athem to ensure the continued ascension of humanity

Encourage the crew to have further positive diplomatic interactions with any other political offshoots of humanities various empires when encountered

Current objective: investigate the 4th planet within the Frimudul system beyond the Chordul rift for a potential Ork infestation

Well, this was rather enlightening Sentinal 4 concluded after accepting this as himself, he was rather doubtful about the current state of the crew and the potential of achieving said objective if his initial conclusions about the state of the ship were at all accurate. Thinking over it for a moment he decided that the best thing to do was to travel over to something called the auxiliary databanks and see if there was anything left to be salvaged there. There were several missing data points he needed before he could complete search and rescue protocol, what an Ork is would be one such example. He knew that he should know even though he had no uncorrupted files to review within his main harddrive. Having turned around to begin that journey he suddenly saw the scarabs from earlier.

They lay inert on the floor with no spark within them, seemingly dead if he were to not intervene. Something that seemed both simultaneously foreign and familiar to him told him that they would be a useful tool. Deciding that if he disliked their contributions he would reverse the process and began to snake the cables of his towards each of the scarabs and gently coax some motive force back into them.

They awoke within an instant, the amount of energy required being much less than he anticipated. Filing that away within a document he created specifically for new findings he began to explore their admittedly small databanks. There were base protocols, records of material science in another language, a base for which to understand said language which he was able to instantly decipher, various routines on how to best use the provided material science information to achieve provided objectives, combat and maintenance matrixes for various scenarios and foreign lifeforms called necrons.

This was starting to get truly interesting as he paused on two of the entries, canoptek scarabs and canoptek spyders. Visual feedback from his optical readouts indicated that they were a 100% match with their forms.

If there is no flaw in the visual data being provided and the information collected from the scarabs is accurate then tha…

ERROR: paradox encountered

Unrecognised host form!... Potential core corruption detected!... Seek immediate maintenance from director level or above personnel!...

Bracing for a lockdown of his systems that he seemed to intuitively expect, Sentinel 4 froze in place for several moments before he reasoned that this "director" was not going to be arriving to respond. Relaxing slightly more he once more turned to the only other entity that he could sense in his immediate vicinity, the scarabs were roaming around rather aimlessly but with his attention directed to them they turned their attention back to him. Without even meaning too he called them to return to himself, they settled into various compartments on the underside of his chassis.

Finding the usefulness outweighing any qualms he might have had with other organisms residing inside of him, he departed down the hall to where the listed location of those databanks resided.

Log Entry 0: System Identifying as entity Sentinal 4

System updating Chassis information with data entries "Spyder"

System updating Resource information with data entries "Scarab"

System updating Purpose with latest event log field entry

System updating Mission statement with latest event log field entry

System updating Objectives…. Override current Objectives with mission statement…

Primary: Find Incitatus crew

Secondary: establish contact with nearest Solar Empire outpost

Tertiary: establish status update on previous mission and continue mission if possible